{"article_id": "63860", "set_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Signal Red", "year": 1962, "author": "Guth, Henry", "topic": "Short stories; War stories; Science fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; Sabotage -- Fiction; PS; Older men -- Fiction", "article": "SIGNAL RED\nBy HENRY GUTH\nThey tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a\n\n suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him.\n\n Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But\n\n Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport.\n Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n\n\n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n\n\n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent\n flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling\n neither glad nor sad.\n\n\n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n\n\n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter\n catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail.\n High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of\n bright specks—portholes of the liner\nStardust\n—sank slowly down.\n\n\n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from\n a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting,\n lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home\n to die.\n\n\n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long\n shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery\n snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n\n\n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n\n\n \"\nStardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All\n passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes.\n\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following\n around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard\n stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the\n vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing\n desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n\n\n \"\nAttention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The\n signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five\n minutes.\n\"\n\n\n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the\n infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking\n Shano aside as he passed.\nRed signal.\nIn bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his\n eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out\n there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own\n risk.\n\n\n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n\n\n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest.\n Plucking at an urgency there.\n\n\n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line\n had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into\n the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n\n\n \"\nFlight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus\n,\" the loud-speaker said\n monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly\n of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n\n\n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the\n lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen,\n chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n \"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\"\n he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint\n memories within his glazed mind.\n\n\n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n\n\n The loud-speaker blared. \"\nStardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The\n signal is red. Stardust, taking—\n\"\n\n\n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock.\n The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was\n shut off.\n\n\n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more\n locks, closing each behind them.\n\n\n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light\n danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration\n gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\nCaptain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet\n crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of\n studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat\n in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n\n\n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing\n briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He\n flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious,\n squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out\n there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one,\n which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be\n so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was\n driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things\n about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears\n things, a laborer does.\"\n\n\n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of\n his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n\n\n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n\n\n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred\n sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled\n down the steel deck.\n\n\n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked,\n coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement\n of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n\n\n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had\n he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive\n suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of\n Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a\n rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded\n it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and\n waited.\nThe ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken\n watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a\n loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n\n\n \"\nAll hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all\n machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there,\n listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance.\n Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop\n pumps.\n\"\n\n\n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n\n\n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand.\n Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through\n labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering\n against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the\n distance and Shano stopped.\n\n\n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his\n cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n\n\n A bell clanged.\n\n\n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled\n hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure\n disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n\n\n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster\n of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a\n gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium\n dial that quivered delicately.\n\n\n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above\n and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises\n diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out;\n everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\nThe ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it\n or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a\n submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n\n\n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \"\nEmergency. Battle posts.\n\"\n\n\n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n\n\n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging,\n maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was\n all.\n\n\n \"Fire number seven.\"\n\n\n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting\n terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n\n\n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying\n to blast the\nStardust\nout of the sky. Trying and trying, while the\n captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against\n an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n\n\n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to\n Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n\n\n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound.\n It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n\n\n \"Hold fire.\"\n\n\n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and\n pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray\n metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering\n dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n\n\n \"Stand by.\"\n\n\n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking.\n Only working with his hands.\n\n\n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed\n down....\n\n\n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch\n on duty.\"\n\n\n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space\n liner\nStardust\n.\n\n\n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with\n concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut\n in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up\n to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n\n\n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on\n the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a\n traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away\n the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n\n\n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made\n him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it\n opened cautiously.\n\n\n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw\n Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face\n dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n\n\n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n\n\n Shano blinked.\n\n\n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to\n be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n\n\n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength\n and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he\n said.\n\"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\nHe lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed\n face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the\n deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano\n clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing,\n cursing the pain in his joints.\n\n\n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with\n his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n\n\n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"\n\n\n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n\n\n The\nStardust's\nmechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It\n reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're\n about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove\n them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know\n we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n\n\n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick\n with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out\n what the matter was with his space ship.\n\n\n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine\n room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And\n we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without\n the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair\n the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n\n\n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you\n by-pass the selector?\"\n\n\n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass\n through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments\n will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep\n trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine\n temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir—they're common\n tungsten steel—and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and\n drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there\n he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each\n time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n\n\n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the\n talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't\n understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken\n down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would\n come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to\n bits. And he would never get home to die.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged\n lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the\n tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with\n gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting\n sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n\n\n Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.\n\n\n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in\n your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll\n kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours.\n Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged\n with Juno gum.\"\n\n\n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped\n the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well,\n maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n\n\n What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop\n off, lift them up again.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"\n\n\n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n\n\n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian\n fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled\n ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano.\n A useless old man.\n\n\n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does the phrase, \"Here she comes,\" refer to?", "question_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF_1", "options": ["The female mayor of Q City was arriving for a planned meeting.", "The incoming spaceship Stardust.", "The cook, who was running late.", "Shano's wife, who was joining him in line."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Has Shano always lived on Mercury?", "question_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF_2", "options": ["No, he worked in many places in the solar system.", "Yes, he worked in the spaceport on Mercury until he retired.", "The only other place that he lived was Pluto, where he worked in the vanium mines.", "No, he was a Martian before coming to Mercury."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What two details provided early in the story tell us who sabotaged the Stardust?", "question_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF_3", "options": ["We are told about the lieutenant's portly build and about a strange notch on his jaw. The lieutenant sabotaged the ship.", "The captain is from Jupiter and seems surprised that there is a passenger aboard. The captain sabotaged the ship.", "The man ahead of Shano in line makes a big production of his disgust about the red signal. He could still go, but he chooses not to. He sabotaged the ship.", "Shano is old and his body is worn out. He is suicidal, that's why he sabotaged the ship."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How, specifically, did the enemy fleet find the Stardust?", "question_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF_4", "options": ["The enemy had superior space sonar which could detect even the voices of whispering crewmen, so even though the Stardust was running silent, it was detected.", "The saboteur signaled the enemy ships through one of the passenger cabin portholes, using a lamp so bright that goggles were needed to avoid eye damage. This light was easily seen by the watching enemy.", "A saboteur hid a noise-generating device one of the decks, which the enemy detected even though the Stardust was supposed to be running silent.", "Shano was the saboteur, and he flipped the switch on the noise-emitter he had hidden in a maintenance corridor to signal the enemy fleet."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Shano's cough turns out to be the symptom of an advantage in the fight against the Uranians. What is that advantage?", "question_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF_5", "options": ["Shano was terminally ill from the cough. Since he was about to die anyway, he didn't care if he died in the engine room.", "The cough, while painful, brings more air into the lungs, enabling Shano to keep his blood oxygenated while working in the Stardust's damaged engine room.", "The noise from Shano's coughing allows the other engineers to keep track of his location in the damaged engine room, and give him instructions about how to keep the engines running.", "Lungs congested from working in the vanium ore extraction industry are much less affected by toxia gas, which enabled Shano to work in the Stardust's damaged engine room."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Where does Shano want to go to die?", "question_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF_6", "options": ["Mars.", "Earth.", "Venus.", "Pluto."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Shano try to save the ship?", "question_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF_7", "options": ["Because he was afraid to die in space where his body would never be found.", "Because it was his one big chance to prove that he, a broken down menial worker, was worth as much as the next man.", "Because he was extremely patriotic.", "Because he had a solid understanding of the Stardust's engines, and he was the best candidate for the dangerous work."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the lieutenant die?", "question_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF_8", "options": ["He died from toxia gas poisoning while trying to repair the Stardust's damaged engines.", "He was killed by Shano.", "He died of a head injury in a maintenance corridor, when he hit his head on the pipes.", "He died during the initial enemy attack, as a result of a direct hit from a ray gun."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Shano leave his cabin during the powerdown?", "question_unique_id": "63860_6KOJTPYF_9", "options": ["He was looking for a safer place to ride out the battle than his cabin.", "He had no reason. He just did it on the spur of the moment.", "He was looking for the escape pods that were required equipment on every spaceship.", "He wanted to offer the captain his help in the battle."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/8/6/63860//63860-h//63860-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63867", "set_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Captain Midas", "year": 1954, "author": "Coppel, Alfred", "topic": "Gold -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Short stories; Space ships -- Fiction", "article": "CAPTAIN MIDAS\nBy ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\nThe captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at\n\n the torn derelict floating against the velvet void.\n\n Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How\n\n could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go\n hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course,\n there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get\n any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain,\n sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great\n treasure....\n\n\n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis\n seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans\n in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit.\n We're still a greedy lot....\n\n\n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more\n right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask.\n The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I\n am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot—wait for the weight of\n years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things\n my eyes have seen.\n\n\n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for\n old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb\n Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands.\n Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n\n\n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached\n earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe,\n thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have\n the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value\n out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're\n right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of\n civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of\n that. We did it for\nus\n... for Number One. That's the kind of men we\n were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the\n risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there.\n But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their\n lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n\n\n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on\n that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship,\n so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was\n two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came\n out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all\n like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The\n Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for\n alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had\n ever been found ... then.\n\n\n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them\n so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for\n high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski.\n There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul\n for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different.\n That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe\n all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe.\n There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or\n anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that\n pushes the frontier outward.\n\n\n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching\n the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last\n flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either.\n It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night\n that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative\n security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt\n into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n\n\n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For\n just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal\n under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a\n sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and\n the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was\n too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and\n for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world\n that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and\n gimme.\n\n\n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would\n pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow\n would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of\n the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid\n that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure\n of that.\n\n\n In those days the asteroid belt was\nthe\nprimary danger and menace to\n astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as\n fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million\n miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space\n that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used\n to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It\n took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics\n never panned out because of the weight problem.\n\n\n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High\n and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval\n blackness is where we found the derelict.\nI didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported\n it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation\n ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of\n developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole\n responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never\n in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial\n intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just\n assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of\n unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n\n\n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that\n Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one\n of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All\n this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n\n\n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope\n I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a\n distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass,\n but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever\n seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my\n slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the\n derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something\n about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer,\n and showed him my figures.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to\n you?\"\n\n\n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures.\n It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct,\n Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of\n those figures on the chart.\n\n\n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n\n\n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug\n of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon\n they were assembled in Control.\n\n\n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have\n computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems\n to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into\n the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's\nSpace Regulations\nand opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n\n\n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary\n Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found\n in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space\n not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars\n Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the\n vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases\n as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily\n ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that\n means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to\n claim it as salvage.\"\n\n\n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n\n\n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger\n of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came\n in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n\n\n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n\n\n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n \"Certainly!\"\nThe first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was\n her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained\n such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand\n feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable\n alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully\n in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with\n something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff\n were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some\n strange and alien way.\n\n\n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for\n inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of\n mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave\n her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was\n unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she\n was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung\n about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away\n again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n\n\n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured.\n\n\n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed\n by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared\n a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth\n millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and\n crossed to her.\n\n\n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their\n faces.\n\n\n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit\n her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives.\n She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage\n compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n\n\n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was\n nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull\n alone was left.\n\n\n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples\n of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this\n stuff....\"\n\n\n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The\n carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and\n Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her\n down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check\n those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When\n it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n\n\n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a\n metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff\n is worth anything....\"\n\n\n The metal was heavy—too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship\n construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that\n distant world where this metal was made?\n\n\n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal\n torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver;\n those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were\n there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of\n the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand.\nIt had a\n yellowish tinge, and it was heavier\n....\n\n\n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held\n it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm.\n Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It\n struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of\n metallic lustre.\n\n\n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying\n all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a\n balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It\n was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The\n whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing\n vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had\n drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal—the\n stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was\n built—was now....\nGold!\nI scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my\n table-top.\nGold!\nI searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps,\n from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ...\n drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability\n in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element—wonderfully,\n miraculously gold!\n\n\n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.\n\n\n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on\n the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize\n crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n\n\n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a\n first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would\n need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me\n to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me,\n Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n\n\n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning\n slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat\n him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n\n\n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister\n Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is\n that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face\n and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he\n turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like\n him to let it go at that.\n\n\n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't\n functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I\n rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering\n about Spinelli.\n\n\n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and\n after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n\n\n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat\n to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first\n place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the\n second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n\n\n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and\n I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that\n there was no double-cross.\n\n\n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the\n rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk.\n That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the\n treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they\n were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n\n\n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with\n that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally\n I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had\n set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\nTogether, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw\n of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish\n fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a\n great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid\n followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls\n on automatic.\n\n\n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.\n\n\n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski\n told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard\n for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty\n of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand\n tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked.\n Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up\n a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't\n seemed likely before, but now—\n\n\n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n\n\n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well\n within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of\n messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid\n eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken\n the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n\n\n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and\n ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would\n have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n\n\n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if\n I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my\n hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined\n to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no\n telling what can happen to a man in space....\n\n\n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through\n garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal.\n Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours\n later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an\n animal suspicion.\n\n\n \"They're faking!\"\n\n\n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n\n\n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n\n\n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey\n my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n\n\n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you\n land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share?\nI\nfound her, and\n she's mine!\"\n\n\n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in\n her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n\n\n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on\n the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n\n\n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n\n\n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n\n\n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ...\n sir.\"\n\n\n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand\n that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were\n failing.\n\n\n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ...\n WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ...\n CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly,\n in mid-word.\n\n\n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n\n\n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n\n\n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in\n the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though\n the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n\n\n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the\n corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They\n won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing\n console of the supersonic rifle.\n\n\n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n\n\n \"\nSpinelli!\n\"\n\n\n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him\n away from the panel.\n\n\n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n\n\n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and\n he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing\n spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n\n\n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\nHe spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge\n and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He\n stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged\n again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my\n right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He\n staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his\n stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my\n shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still\n trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go.\n My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face\n and lay still.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How many men started the trip on the captain's ship?", "question_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY_1", "options": ["The ship had automatic controls, so only the captain and Spinelli were needed.", "The ship left Mars with fourteen men aboard.", "There were six men on the ship.", "Five men were on the ship."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happened to the captain's fortune?", "question_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY_2", "options": ["He was just bragging about money he never really had.", "The salvage ship's crew outran the Martian Maid and stole the gold.", "The crew on the salvaged ship died and the treasure drifted out of reach.", "He went bankrupt from health care costs."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What shape best describes the path that space ships customarily took from the inner solar system to the Jovian planets?", "question_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY_3", "options": ["They travelled a carefully marked and maintained route through the asteroid belt.", "The path was approximately a half-circle rising out of the plane that all the planets travelled in.", "The space ships went in a straight line through space from Mars to where Jupiter would be when they had travelled the distance between the two planets.", "They went around the sun in a slingshot maneuver so that they could move faster than the outer planets and get there sooner."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How is the metal sample from the derelict ship that the captain tests turned into gold? ", "question_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY_4", "options": ["The metal is draining energy from the captain's body to turn itself into gold.", "Cosmic rays caused the piece of metal to turn to gold.", "The metal oxidized when it was exposed to the atmosphere inside the ship.", "The chemicals that the captain used to test the piece of metal turned it into gold."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of these phrases best captures the moral of this story?", "question_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY_5", "options": ["Trust but verify.", "A stitch in time saves nine.", "There's no free lunch.", "The crew that works together, stays together."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What would happen to the derelict space ship if the Martian Maid's weapons were fired at it?", "question_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY_6", "options": ["Nothing would happen to the ship, since the Martian Maid's weapons only affect living organisms.", "What was left of the derelict ship would explode and be unrecoverable.", "The weapons would break the ship down into manageable pieces that could be more easily brought aboard the Martian Maid for storage.", "The derelict ship would be pushed away from the Martian Maid by the force of the weapons, and the Maid would not be able to catch up."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the technologies described in this story most clearly mark the story as being published in the first half of the twentieth century?", "question_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY_7", "options": ["The reference to atomic drives for space ships.", "The supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret.", "The poor health care received by the captain in old age.", "The manual calculation of the abandoned ship's orbit."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the crew of the Martian Maid carry snow on their trip?", "question_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY_8", "options": ["Snow was a slang term for drugs that they intended to sell at their destination.", "The crew intended to stop at Venus, where snow was a popular and special treat for colonists.", "Snow was necessary for the operation of the supersonic projectors.", "The snow was kept in an unheated section of the ship as ballast."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author suggest by repeatedly referring to the \"glittering whorls\" on the surface of the derelict ship, and on the chunks of hull brought to him?", "question_unique_id": "63867_3CZOY4WY_9", "options": ["This is the author's poetic way of describing a reflection.", "The author is referring to the vibrations of atoms.", "The author suggests the possibility that the ship itself was alive in some unknown, alien way.", "The author indicates that the hull was made of a particularly beautiful silver metal before it changed to gold."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/8/6/63867//63867-h//63867-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62260", "set_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Trouble on Tycho", "year": 1957, "author": "Bond, Nelson S.", "topic": "Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Science fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Musicians -- Fiction; PS", "article": "TROUBLE ON TYCHO\nBy NELSON S. BOND\nIsobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of\n\n the Moon Station's existence. But there came\n\n the day when his comrades found that the worth\n\n of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and\n Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n\n\n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander\n appeared.\n\n\n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n\n\n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right,\n though. How anybody can be expected to get\nanything\nright on this\n dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese—\"\n\n\n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is\n making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n\n\n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag—?\"\n\n\n It\nwas all\n, so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking\n to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to\n his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which,\n six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed:\nCond. of\n Obs.\nHe noted the proper figures under the headings\nSun Spots\n:\nMax\n Freq.\n—\nMin. Freq.\n; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red\n ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work\n sheet.\n\n\n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer,\n frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and\n began writing.\n\n\n \"\nWeather forecast for Terra\n,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching\n sounds.\n\n\n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered\n without looking.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple\n o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n\n\n \"I—er—I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n\n\n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He\n blinked nervously.\n\n\n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \"\nYou\n, Miss Sally! Golly—'scuse me!\n I didn't realize—\"\n\n\n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n\n\n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather\n in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki,\n but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally.\n Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n\n\n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n\n\n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the\n meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his\n job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw\n himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain\n rendered possible.\nIf home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as \"Isobar\"\n to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long\n way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for\n six tedious Earth months, beneath the\nimpervite\nhemisphere of Lunar\n III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station,\n teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n\n\n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up\n in an airtight Dome like—like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight?\n Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not\n burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a\n toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented,\n reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n\n\n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he\n signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine\n existence.\n\n\n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the\n stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?\"\n\n\n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"\n\n\n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n\n\n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered.\n Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally\n turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n\n\n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your\n britches?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean—Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe\n you wouldn't mind if I—well—er—\"\n\n\n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's\n open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n\n\n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of\n incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before\n him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating\n with painstaking clarity:\n\n\n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me,\n Luna? Can you hear—?\"\n\n\n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you,\n as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n\n\n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of\n displeasure.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's\nyou\n? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley,\n the cosmic comedian—didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder,\n oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"'\nWeather\n forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21\n—'\"\n\n\n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\nRiley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report,\n entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and\n dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n\n\n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded\n Riley's shoulder.\n\n\n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked\n startled.\n\n\n \"How's that? I didn't say a word—\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you.\n I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me\n a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a\n window?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why—why, yes, but—\"\n\n\n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours\n but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand—\" The silver platter which had\n mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the\n inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun\n briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly\n landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green\n trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ...\n people....\n\n\n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n\n\n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he\n nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other\n radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n\n\n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \"\nHe twisted\nthe mike; not me. But—how come\n you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open,\n Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n\n\n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n\n\n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six\n months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only\n make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n\n\n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's—well, it's\n the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and\n trees.\"\n\n\n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n\n\n \"We've got\nthem\nright here on Luna. Go look out the tower window,\n Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest,\n greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All\n that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out\n in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—\"\n\n\n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n\n\n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander\n Eagan. He squirmed.\n\n\n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir!\n It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of\n absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to\n go, for example—\"\n\n\n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n\n\n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones!\n Where are\nyou\ngoing?\"\n\n\n \"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n\n\n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a\n while—\"\n\n\n \"I thought that, too. And with\nwhat\n, pray, Jones?\"\n\n\n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that\n gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\nCommander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing\n yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think—\"\n\n\n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"'\nIn order that work or rest\n periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered\n that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must\n be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander\n,' That\n means you, Jones!\"\n\n\n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to\n play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good\n music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—\"\n\n\n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning\n system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of\n your—er—so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire\n structure.\"\n\n\n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n\n\n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire\n organization for your own—er—amusement.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already.\n If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last\n amusement which lightened his moments of freedom—\n\n\n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother\n nobody. I'll go Outside and play it—\"\n\n\n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about\n the Grannies?\"\n\n\n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life\n found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an\n abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar\n exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was\n an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low\n intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and\n implacable foe.\n\n\n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever\n yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science\n was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of\n Graniteback physiology—but it was known, from bitter experience, that\n the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something\n harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be\n penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame,\n by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered\n atomo-needle dispenser.\n\n\n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n\n\n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for\n a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back\n inside—\"\n\n\n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.\n\n\n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust!\n Oh—\nfiddlesticks\n!\"\nII\n\n\n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot\n oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n\n\n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr.\n Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man\n nodded commiseratingly.\n\n\n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not\n altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our\n poor Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit\n homesick now and then. He ought to learn to—\"\n\n\n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n \"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something\n deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call:\nweltschmertz\n. There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n 'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'—something like that but\n intensified a thousandfold.\n\n\n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame\n of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which\n they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts\n of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his\n buttons?\"\n\n\n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass\n of despair. He may try\nanything\nto retrieve his lost happiness, rid\n his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying\n hunger—By the way, where is he now?\"\n\n\n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will\n find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n\n\n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n \"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n\n\n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he\n was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive\n culprit.\n\n\n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome\n Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was\n encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their\n pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n\n\n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace\n o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll\nsee\nabout that!\"\n\n\n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the\n room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge\nimpervite\ngates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway\n to Outside.\n\n\n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle\n adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But\n today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture\n out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have\n to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of\n the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n\n\n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding\n an aura of propriety.\n\n\n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the\n meeting.\"\n\n\n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n\n\n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n\n\n \"Notified of\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I\n would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to\n call the office, maybe?\"\n\n\n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That—er—won't\n be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run\n along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n\n\n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a\n sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back\n sudden-like.\"\n\n\n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\nWilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely\n out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped\n through, and closed it behind him.\n\n\n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated\n temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but\n fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with\n joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at\n last! After six long and dreary months!\n\n\n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes\n that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the\n lunar valley....\n\n\n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not\n afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He\n only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a\n lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the\n chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes\n formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one\n charmed.\n\n\n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's\n entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he\n was startled to hear—off to his right—the sharp, explosive bark of a\n Haemholtz ray pistol.\n\n\n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his\n meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed\n its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the\n Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to\n judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the\n structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n\n\n And the shooting? That could only be—\n\n\n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that\n moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of\n figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was\n staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm,\n bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in\n his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to\n cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n\n\n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with\n astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a\n dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\nIII\n\n\n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A\n gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n\n\n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick,\n man—where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n\n\n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly\n make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken,\n and—\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You\n don't have one! You're here\nalone\n! Then you didn't pick up our call?\n But, why—?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could\n move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their\n peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action\n against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons\n were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary\n way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you\n go! Give him a lift, Brown—There! That's the stuff!\"\n\n\n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy\n sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough\n when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath\n his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant\n inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud.\n The Graniteback was\nnot\na climber. It was far too ungainly, much too\n weighty for that.\n\n\n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n\n\n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n \"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long\n as it lasts, but—\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of\n Grannies unhappily—\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of\n superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they\n come!\"\n\n\n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic\n consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged\n headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like\n the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted\n beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about\n them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged\n forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n\n\n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it\n did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly\n to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken\n and cracked—revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\nBrown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with\n terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n\n\n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that—\"\n\n\n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies\n meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast.\n Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden\n idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n\n\n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now.\n If we can just hold out—\"\n\n\n But Roberts shook his head.\n\n\n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just\n been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they\n first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n\n\n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n\n\n \"Then I—I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have\n only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to\n pick us up. But as it is—\"\n\n\n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n\n\n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we\n volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth\n a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous\n stones-on-legs!\"\n\n\n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"\n\n\n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more,\n the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy\n refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts.\n This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several\n snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that\n the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their\n adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n\n\n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture\n of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating\n Grannies.\n\n\n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of\n fighting those filthy things—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again,\n excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing\n position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over\n his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath\n expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive,\n fearsome, \"\nKaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong!\n\"\n\n\n Roberts moaned.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n\n\n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n\n\n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense\n of hearing. That's been proven—\"\n\n\n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n\n\n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right\n opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over\n there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of\n order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome—but\n the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short\n while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n\n\n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders.\n They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe\n they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can\n make him look out here—\"\n\n\n \"\nStop talking!\n\" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start\n blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last\n hope.\nBlow!\n\"\n\n\n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\nIsobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\nHe meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more,\n a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing\n down upon the tree.\n\n\n \"\nHaa-a-roong!\n\" blew Isobar Jones.\nIV\n\n\n And—even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of\n his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was\n incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into\n whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into\n action—the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n\n\n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless,\n questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and\n vibrant droning!\n\n\n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed,\n his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow\n lifted his paralysis.\n\n\n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They\nlike\nit! Keep playing, Jonesy!\n Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n\n\n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the\npiobaireachd\ninto\n which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the\n savage beast! Then we were wrong. They\ncan\nhear, after all! See that?\n They're lying down to listen—like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar!\n For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n\n\n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack\n had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly,\n quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the\n tree.\n\n\n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies\nliked\nthis music. Eyes\n raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of\n gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar\n paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe\n with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n\n\n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have\n been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not—and\n in two cases\ndared\nnot—allow him to stop playing. And to this\n audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches,\n flings, dances—the stirring\nRhoderik Dhu\nand the lilting\nLassies\n O'Skye\n, the mournful\nCoghiegh nha Shie\nwhose keening is like the\n sound of a sobbing nation.\nThe Cock o' the North\n, he played, and\nMironton\n...\nWee Flow'r o'\n Dee\nand\nMacArthur's March\n...\nLa Cucuracha\nand—\n\n\n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood\n pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the\n chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the\n blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n\n\n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few\n minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his\n turret window five minutes ago!\"\n\n\n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of\n those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he\n knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another\n sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank,\n sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n\n\n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of\n encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n\n\n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and\n get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute\n Isobar stops playing!\"\n\n\n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar\n voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's\n fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n\n\n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres—\nthose Grannies are\n stone dead\n!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why is Isobar a good name for the main character in the story?", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_1", "options": ["Because the main character spends a lot of time in a nightclub called the Isobar.", "Because the main character is an introvert - he tends to isolate himself - and he was a lawyer before coming to the Moon.", "Because the main character is a meteorologist, and isobars, or lines of equal atmospheric pressure on a map, are related to meterology.", "Because the main character only knows hot to play one song, and he plays the same bars over and over again,"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the relevance of \"green cheese\" in this story?", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_2", "options": ["In the habitat dome on the Moon, food for the colony is stored in the crawl space below the office and living level. Green cheese keeps a long time, but has a strong smell which is affecting Isobar Jones' work.", "The story takes place on the Moon, which is often referred to in popular culture as being made of green cheese.", "There is a piece of moldy cheese under the paper on which Isobar Jones wrote the report.", "Isobar Jones has only green cheese in his refrigerator, not having shopped for awhile, and with only green cheese to eat, he is not able to concentrate."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the meaning of \"O.Q.?\"", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_3", "options": ["It is the story author's way of making \"OK\" seem more futuristic, and means the same thing.", "It stands for \"Operational Qualification,\" and using the abbreviation is common among the Moon's governmen administrative personnel.", "It means \"On Queue,\" and refers to the fact that in the Moon colony, people have to wait in line for everything.", "It stands for \"Office Quote,\" and a speaker uses it to indicate that everyone on the meteorology team tends to use the phrase that follows \"O.Q.\" so often that it is a cliche."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Isobar's complexion change color the second time he answers the phone?", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_4", "options": ["The second call was from a young lady who has nothing to do with his report, so he is embarrassed by his brusque approach when he realizes it.", "Tnhe second call is from Isobar's boss's boss, and he knows he is in real trouble over his late report.", "The second call is from hisi banker, Miss Sally, wanting to knwo when he plans to make his next loan payment.", "The second one is a prank call from a local \"lady of the night\" that his teammates paid for."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why doesn't Isobar have a healthy, tanned look?", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_5", "options": ["The material that the Moon station is made of blocks the type of light that allows tanning, and Isobar has been there for half a year.", "Isobar is very careful not to get burned by the strong sunlight on the Moon's light side, and wears sunblock that filters out ultraviolet waves.", "Isobar is just recovering from an illness, which is why his meteorological report is so late.", "Isobar is homesick for Earth and a bit depressed, so he allowed a beard to grow and cover his face. He recently shaved it off, and his skin had become quite pale underneath."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Isobar want to stay in Sparks' office after he delivered the weather report to Sparks?", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_6", "options": ["The Terran weather service broadcaster was a good friend of Isobar's and Isobar wanted to chat with him for awhile.", "Because Isobar miised his home so much that he wanted a chance to see normal outdoor scenery such as one can see anywhere on his home planet.", "Isobar was very bored and anything was better than returning to his \"cloistered cell\" after delivering the report to Sparks.", "Because Isobar wanted a good look at a girl he was sweet on who worked in the weather office back on the home planet."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Isobar prohibited from playing his \"doodlesack\" in the Moon's habitat dome?", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_7", "options": ["Loud sounds attract Grannies to the perimeter of the habitat dome.", "Because playing wind instruments on the Moon causes the player to use more than their allotted share of the dome's air supply.", "Because its noises are picked up and carried to all parts of the dome by the dome's ventilation system.", "Because the dome commander dislikes Isobar and is trying to make his service unpleasant enoug that he will quit and leave."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What native fauna has been discovered on the Moon?", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_8", "options": ["The lush vegetation outside the dome supports insects and even a few small animals similar to the trilobites found in Earth's fossil record.", "The moon dome is nestled in the middle a very pretty, green valley, full of so many plants and flowers that that they have not all been catalogued yet.", "The only life on the Moon, except for what was brought there from Earth, is a few extremely hardy species of bacteria, which have been found to thrive around the outside of the foundations of the habitat dome.", "A species of creatures that are not very smart, but are very dangerous to humans, and whose outer covering somewhat resembles grayish rock."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Isobar get oxygen when he fools the door sentry and goes outside the habitat dome?", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_9", "options": ["He wears the newest generation of oxygen generators, which takes up no more space than a face shield to protect the eyes and skin from the sun. ", "He just breathes normally. The moon has an atmosphere with sufficient oxygen.", "He wears a standard-issue moon pressure suit with high-capacity air tanks, good for 24 hours.", "He drags a lightweight hose that connects to a port on the outside of the dome. No need for oxygen tanks, as he does not intend to go very far from the dome."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the author of the story think of bagpipe music?", "question_unique_id": "62260_VWRJ2Y61_10", "options": ["He loves it and thinks it is undervalued by most people.", "He is indifferent to bagpipe music, but realizes that some people may find it enjoyable.", "He hates it so much that he re-imagines it as a weapon.", "He obviously knows nothing at all about bagpipe music, and the way he describes it in the story shows that."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/2/6/62260//62260-h//62260-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63932", "set_unique_id": "63932_3WYB95DQ", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Lost Tribes of Venus", "year": 1964, "author": "Fennel, Erik", "topic": "Venus (Planet) -- Fiction; Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Adventure stories", "article": "THE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\nBy ERIK FENNEL\nOn mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile\n \nswamp meets hostile sea ... there did\n \nBarry Barr—Earthman transmuted—swap\n \nhis Terran heritage for the deep dark\n \nwaters of Tana; for the strangely\n \nbeautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories May 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time\n coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The\n football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a\n relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close\n enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the\n idling drivers.\n\n\n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was\n dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy\n of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused\n themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n\n\n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular\n driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent\n searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment\n before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n\n\n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering\n a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see\n again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started\n aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly\n that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n\n\n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet\n room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was\n manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One\n by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n\n\n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable\n conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.\n Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was\n close behind him.\n\n\n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,\n hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had\n lost its usual ruddiness.\n\n\n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in\n the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The\n line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter\n glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared\n minor. They had been lucky.\n\n\n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said\n meaningfully.\n\n\n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two\n hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to\n order his crew into action.\n\n\n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite\n Hind's shouted orders.\n\n\n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to\n the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he\n threw in the accelerator switch.\n\n\n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing,\n and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n\n\n \"\nThere's metal in the field!\n\" His voice was high and unsteady.\nEveryone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material\n would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained\n and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n\n\n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n\n\n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n\n\n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space\n was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing\n gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never\n encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it\n except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies\n unpredictably altered.\n\n\n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with\n a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration.\n But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small\n and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized\n gravitations.\n\n\n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a\n particularly unpleasant form of death.\n\n\n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n\n\n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were\n more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n\n\n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening\n in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in\n Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four\n unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the\n logical man.\n\n\n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient\n Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the\n indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and\n remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and\n unassigned personnel.\n\n\n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile\n quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried\n boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some\n of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body,\n built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power,\n balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his\n sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n\n\n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n\n\n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a\n sense of responsibility.\n\n\n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n\n\n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But\n then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his\n hand.\n\n\n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees\n had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in\n fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But\n still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the\n brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus\n alive—\nThe blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking\n pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny\n figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified\n breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation\n to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the\n insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n\n\n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch\n against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started\n cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task\n requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on\n the events that had brought him here.\n\n\n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma\n for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was\n perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been\n inherently poor.\n\n\n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step—to Mars. But men\n had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that\n had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n\n\n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been\n well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round\n trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n\n\n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government\n and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled\n to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by\n specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien\n conditions.\n\n\n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to\n whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition.\n That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with\n colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n\n\n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the\n experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions,\n he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus\n Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form\n was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study\n native Venusian materials.\n\n\n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the\n limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to\n rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle\n delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian\n materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n\n\n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of\n loneliness had come to an end.\n\n\n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual\n despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment\n of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed\n emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone,\n and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded\n devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his\n insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n\n\n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the\n business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried\n a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to\n virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n\n\n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened\n to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly\n expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some\n factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n\n\n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of\n rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and\n had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have\n himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n\n\n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with\n a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n\n\n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by\n inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but\n enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into\n stuttering action.\n\n\n Then it was done.\n\n\n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to\n start according to calculations.\nBarry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick\n Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n\n\n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n\n\n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job\n of work out there.\"\n\n\n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n\n\n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n\n\n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off\n watch a few minutes ago.\"\n\n\n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a\n handout.\"\n\n\n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside\n out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on\n him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness\n he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to\n breathe.\n\n\n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around\n him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n\n\n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n\n\n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead.\n The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen\n trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress.\n Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable\n thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n\n\n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of\n exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for\n the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not\n necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was,\n felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n\n\n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno\n himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created\n support of flame.\n\n\n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through\n crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it!\n Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n\n\n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled,\n steadied.\n\n\n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting\n with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n\n\n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n\n\n Venusian air poured in.\n\n\n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n\n\n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n\n\n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!\n\n\n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,\n extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few\n minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n\n\n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.\n Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one\n particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n\n\n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n\n\n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n\n\n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an\n expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he\n saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n\n\n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply\n lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist\n in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a\n restraining hand on his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n\n\n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his\n patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water\n directly into his lungs.\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What\n are my chances? On the level.\"\n\n\n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing—not a\n damned solitary thing—I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n\n\n Barry lay still.\n\n\n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor\n continued, \"and you know as much—more about your condition than I do.\n If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of\n a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems\n to give you relief.\"\n\n\n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each\n side itched infuriatingly.\n\n\n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n\n\n \"Those things seem to be—\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I\n know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n\n\n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond\n shock.\n\n\n \"But there must be—\"\n\n\n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched\n involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\nII\n\n\n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations\n had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr.\n Jensen had mentioned during a second visit—but for that to happen he\n must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n\n\n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine.\n Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n\n\n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n\n\n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n\n\n Nick nodded vigorously.\n\n\n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n\n\n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.\n\n\n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A\n power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the\n corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was\n ready.\n\n\n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped\n nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size\n that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that\n fell toward the metal floor.\n\n\n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n\n\n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n\n\n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window\n might invite disaster.\n\n\n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The\n room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost\n liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling\n and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the\n scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water\n from the floor.\n\n\n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet\n from the short exposure.\n\n\n It was abnormal.\n\n\n But so was Barry Barr.\n\n\n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some\n of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in\n sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n\n\n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though\n she were with him—her face with the exotic high cheek-bones—her\n eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair—lips that\n seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to\n fulfil—her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy\n from some venturesome Irishman—her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n\n\n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came\n in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since\n Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid\n atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n\n\n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At\n each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with\n a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come\n to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even\n inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the\n Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged\n animal.\n\n\n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening\n and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day\n progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of\n Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n\n\n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary\n images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to\n be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had\n blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with\n flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of\n strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment\n before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n\n\n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that\n slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog,\n the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For\n weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last,\n beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm,\n almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of\n rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n\n\n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the\n others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up\n in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the\n secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had\n established a tenuous foothold.\n\n\n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing\n reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's\n struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended\n or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n\n\n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which\n by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank\n maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly\n jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away\n from base had been judged too hazardous.\n\n\n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive\n minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an\n adequate though monotonous food source.\n\n\n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog\n gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately\n they were harmless and timid.\n\n\n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and\n fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance\n possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n\n\n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to\n minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the\n blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew\n with a vigor approaching fury.\n\n\n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored\n monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the\n brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that\n used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were\n apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made\n them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it,\n and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel\n the beasts.\n\n\n The most important question—that of the presence or absence of\n intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men\n reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near\n open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have\n established contact.\nBarry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had\n done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into\n membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and\n dark parallel lines appeared.\n\n\n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not\n stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had\n to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the\n weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still\n he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's\n failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n\n\n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming.\n Dorothy was leaning over him.\n\n\n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you\n do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all\n that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in\n her eyes.\n\n\n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted\n off—oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n\n\n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child.\n I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n \"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!\" he declared grimly.\n\n\n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt\n in her voice.\n\n\n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n\n\n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n\n\n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days\n at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of\n civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had\n awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a\n woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n\n\n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous\n and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger\n simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging\n Robson Hind's features.\n\n\n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but\n this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had\n made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had\n carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or\n judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook\n some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the\n Five Ship Plan.\n\n\n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n\n\n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n\n\n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead\n tubelight was off.\n\n\n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n\n\n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist\n machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead,\n cut off outside his room.\n\n\n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air\n would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call\n for help.\n\n\n The door was locked!\n\n\n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had\n been removed.\n\n\n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal\n doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was\n efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to\n bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n\n\n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair\n and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again.\n A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under\n continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning\n strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n\n\n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden\n Venusian air poured in—but it was not enough!\n\n\n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed\n sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused\n rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of\n approaching unconsciousness.\n\n\n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched\n forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n\n\n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of\n colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth\n habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n\n\n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung\n slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his\n life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n\n\n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze\n of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the\n brackish, silt-clouded water.\nIII\n\n\n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became\n aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew\n instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock\n the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from\n all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony\n were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless\n void between Earth and Venus.\n\n\n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened\n his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something\n burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat\n worm between his fingers.\n\n\n Then dozens of them—hundreds—were upon him from all sides. He was\n wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to\n congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his\n eyelids.\n\n\n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in\n increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and\n burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n\n\n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and\n kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one\n the worms dropped off.\n\n\n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on\n a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier\n here, and clearer.\n\n\n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn\n back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he\n could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of\n direction.\n\n\n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to\n underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of\n hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and\n ceased. He sank.\n\n\n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory\n system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At\n last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n\n\n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a\n gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving\n toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a\n figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat.\n One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n\n\n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from\n the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet\n moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the\n Earthman.\n\n\n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the\n sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n\n\n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung\n in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to\n ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking\n and clawing.\n\n\n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted\n the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to\n the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n\n\n Human—or nearly so—the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and\n webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more\n for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face\n was coarse and savage.\n\n\n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched\n a short tube from its belt.\n\n\n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as\n he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the\n water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something\n zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n\n\n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone.\n He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n\n\n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n\n\n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's\n spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n\n\n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled\n desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his\n spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the\n other was upon her from behind.\n\n\n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender\n body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the\n bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help\n secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n\n\n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at\n her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the\n dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were\n loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic\n necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n\n\n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear.\n The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n\n\n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear\n ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n\n\n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His\n own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each\n other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the\n inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman\n arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature\n gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in\n its belly.\n\n\n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n\n\n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did Barry volunteer to perform the spacewalk to repair the ship?", "question_unique_id": "63932_3WYB95DQ_1", "options": ["Barry felt that he had the best knowledge and experience for making this repair, as well as a strong, sturdy body.", "Barry believed that volunteering for a dangerous task would improve his standing in the eyes of his girlfriend.", "Based on mission guidelines, those with no specific position on a ship were expected to take on dangerous duties, and Barry knew and understood this.", "Barry knew that the captain would order him to do the repair if he didn't volunteer, and he thought he would get a promotion if he did it without being asked to."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which phrase best describes Robson Hind's motivations in this story?", "question_unique_id": "63932_3WYB95DQ_2", "options": ["He wants to do everything the lazy way.", "He is insecure and believes that Barry Barr might take his job.", "He is a coward.", "He will do anything to win the competition for his love interest."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What phenomenon causes the changes in Barry Barr after his spacewalk?", "question_unique_id": "63932_3WYB95DQ_3", "options": ["Because of a leak in his spacesuit, Barry Barr was deprived of oxygen during his spacewalk. This caused the changes.", "Barry Barr's long years working in the tropics caused the change, but it only showed up after his spacewalk.", "Barry Barr received a high dose of Sigma radiation. This caused the changes.", "Robson Hind secretly put a toxic material into Barry Barr's spacesuit. This caused the changes."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What can we infer from the story about the make-up of the Venusian atmosphere?", "question_unique_id": "63932_3WYB95DQ_4", "options": ["It contained enough oxygen to support human life without any assistive devices.", "Everyone had to wear helmets to filter out the noxious gases from the swamps.", "The atmosphere of Venus is made up mainly of carbon dioxide, which supports a lot of plant life.", "The atmosphere contained compounds that caused lung problems for most people."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Barry's friend able to build the equipment that Barry wanted for his room so quickly?", "question_unique_id": "63932_3WYB95DQ_5", "options": ["Because all of the needed material happened to be sitting nearby, unused.", "Because Barry's equipment drawings were very easy to follow.", "Because Barry was considered a hero, and the colonists wanted to help him.", "Because Barry's friend was extremely influential among the colonists."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the most likely explanation for why Barry's humidifier stopped working?", "question_unique_id": "63932_3WYB95DQ_6", "options": ["Barry was depressed about Dorothy and tried to commit suicide.", "On Venus, the hot, heavy atmosphere caused machines to break down constantly.", "Dr. Jensen had set up an experiment to determine whether Barry really needed the humidifier.", "A jealous Robson Hind wanted to finish Barry off to eliminate his competitor for Dorothy."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the jet chief of spaceship Four's chief advantage in the competition with Barry for the same woman's affections?", "question_unique_id": "63932_3WYB95DQ_7", "options": ["He is a better engineer, and will therefore achieve a higher social position than Barry.", "He is rich, good-looking and sophisticated.", "The woman simply prefers the jet chief. It's a simple matter of pheromones.", "He is strong and brave, while Barry is slowly turning into a humanoid fish."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why had Dorothy stayed away from Barry while he was in the hospital?", "question_unique_id": "63932_3WYB95DQ_8", "options": ["Because she didn't like the hot, humid atmosphere in his hospital room.", "Because she received a letter that purported to be from Barry's lawful spouse on Earth, and she thought he was a cheater.", "Because her duties as toxicologist and dietician, providing for the colonists' needs, kept her too busy to visit him.", "Because she was repulsed by his physical changes and had to overcome that feeling."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/9/3/63932//63932-h//63932-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63657", "set_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Venusian Invader", "year": 1954, "author": "Sternig, Larry", "topic": "PS; Pirates -- Fiction; Callisto (Satellite) -- Fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction; Short stories; Adventure stories; Science fiction", "article": "VENUSIAN INVADER\nBy LARRY STERNIG\nLeah Barrow would die. Tar Norn had sworn she\n\n would, unless he was set free. But freedom for\n\n the Venusian Pirate meant death for many, and\n\n it was Director Barrow's duty to hold him—even\n\n though it would cost his daughter's life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMart Wells shut off the alarm buzzer and jumped out of bed—much to his\n regret. He cussed and then grinned sheepishly as he brought up with a\n thud against the fortunately unbreakable glass of the window. A year\n on Callisto, and he could still forget that he weighed only thirty-six\n pounds and couldn't take a normal step without neutronium-weighted\n shoes.\n\n\n Regaining his balance, he yawned and looked out over the rough Callisto\n landscape beyond Comprotown. Then he yawned again and reached for his\n uniform.\n\n\n A year before, Comprotown—and his job as rocketport dispatcher—had\n been Romance with a capital R. Now, he thought gloomily, Romance with\n Leah with a capital L, and a fat lot of good that did him when Leah\n Barrow's father was Old Fish-face himself, Director of Comprotown.\n\n\n True, Comprotown held fewer than a thousand colonists, but it was the\n only inhabited spot on bleak Callisto, and its Director was practical\n czar of a world. Yes, the Director could well afford to look down his\n long nose at any uniform with fewer than six stars on its right sleeve.\n But Leah didn't feel that—\n\n\n Suddenly, straightening up as he fastened his weighted boot, he looked\n more intently out of the window. Something that flashed caught his eye\n out in the barren, warped hills. A gleam of metal where metal shouldn't\n have been. And it looked like a small spaceship.\n\n\n Mart hastily pulled on his other boot and ran down the stairs. A\n red-headed mechanic from the rocketport was coming out of the building\n across the way.\n\n\n Mart called out, \"Red! Something about a mile back in the hills looks\n like a spaceship. Has one been reported down?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" The mechanic looked startled. \"You sure? No, there hasn't been a\n report. Wait, I'll radio Central Communications.\"\n\n\n He darted back into the building, and emerged a moment later. \"No\n report. They're going to send out the autogiro to look at it. Say,\n Mart, there are only two small spaceships on Callisto. Could it be—\"\n\n\n Mart was already running toward the corner from which he could see the\n landing field. He stopped so suddenly that the mechanic almost ran into\n him, and said, \"Whew! They're both there.\" Leah Barrow's trim little\n spacecruiser was safe in port. So was the Police one-seater scout—but\n that wasn't the one Mart had looked for first.\n\n\n From near the Administration Building a two-place autogiro was rising,\n silhouetted for a moment between the horns of the reddish crescent of\n big Jupiter just above the horizon.\n\n\n As he walked across the field toward headquarters, Mart surveyed the\n familiar scene. Three squat freighters were up on the racks, their ugly\n black bottoms over the ash-filled blasting pits; four others were on\n dollies ready to be serviced.\n\n\n All seven were ready for their regular weekly Callisto-Jupe hop,\n ready to pick up more ore. And, as usual, they'd go out today to\n clear the field for the sleeker, faster, long-haul ships that would\n arrive from Earth tomorrow for the smelted metal. Mart glanced at his\n wrist-chronometer. Eight o'clock now; in an hour and a half,\nFreighter\n One\n, right on schedule, would start testing its rocket tubes for the\n ten o'clock hop. And an hour later,\nFreighter Two\nwould start to warm\n up for the eleven o'clock blasting-off. And then the others, every hour\n on the hour.\n\n\n At his desk in the Administration Building, Mart picked up the familiar\n sheaf of clearance papers waiting for his attention, and glanced\n through them. Initialing them was mere routine; they'd never cleared a\n minute early or a minute late since he'd been there. Director Barrow\n saw to that.\n\n\n The door opened. Mart put down the papers and glanced up.\nOne of the workmen from the smelting plant, a tall black-haired fellow\n wearing tinted glasses, stood looking into the office. Mart didn't\n remember ever seeing him before—but with several hundred workmen, you\n couldn't remember all of them.\n\n\n \"Director Barrow in?\"\n\n\n Mart glanced up at the wall clock before he answered. \"He'll be here in\n twenty-one minutes. Sit down and wait if you're off duty.\"\n\n\n He turned back to the papers and finished initialing them, grinning\n inwardly at being able to say that the Director would arrive in\n twenty-one minutes exactly. It wasn't everywhere that one could make\n so accurate a prediction about anyone's arrival time, but Barrow was\n something of a chronometer himself.\n\n\n He tossed the papers toward the back of the desk and threw the switch\n of the communicator on his desk, leaned forward slightly. \"Dispatcher\n Wells calling Police Autogiro.\"\n\n\n \"Autogiro, Captain Wayne,\" came the reply. \"Go ahead. Mart.\"\n\n\n \"I was the one who reported seeing the spaceship, Cap—if it was one.\n Found it? If not, I can—\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Mart, but we've sighted it all right. We're now circling,\n looking for a spot to come down. It doesn't take much, but damned if we\n can perch on a ridge like a canary. Neither could that space-speedster\n down there.\n\n\n \"Wrecked? What's it look like?\"\n\n\n \"Ummm. Offhand one of the single-place jobs that Venusians bought from\n Earth before the war. Full armament, too.\"\n\n\n \"What? You sure, Cap? After the Earth-Venus twenty-two eighty treaty,\n we reclaimed and destroyed all the armed—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know,\" cut in the Captain's voice. \"All but a few that the\n Venusian renegades—the pirates—got off with before then. Well—we're\n going down. Corey's found a place not too far from it where he can set\n the giro down, or says he can.\"\n\n\n \"If that's a pirate ship, Cap, be careful!\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. We're armed. And the ship's pretty smashed up. Probably\n at least kayoed whoever was in it. Well, keep your key open and I'll\n call you back. We're down.\"\n\n\n Mart found the shipment chart and began to check off tonnage. That much\n he wanted to get out of the way before—but something was gnawing at\n the back of his mind. It took him a moment to trace what it was. Of\n course. The workman who was waiting for the Director was wearing tinted\n glasses.\n\n\n Tinted glasses on Callisto! It didn't make sense. The sun, half a\n billion miles away, gives only a twenty-fifth of the light that falls\n on Earth. Even when that light is augmented by Big Jupe, it isn't—Yes,\n it was the first time he'd seen tinted glasses in Comprotown.\n\n\n Curiously, he turned to glance at the seated workman. But the carrier\n wave of the desk communicator hummed and he forgot his visitor as\n Captain Wayne's voice boomed in.\n\n\n \"Dispatcher Wells. Captain Wayne calling Dispatcher—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Cap. Go ahead.\"\n\n\n \"We've examined the spaceship. No one's in it, hurt or otherwise. It's\n a single seater. A pirate ship all right.\"\n\n\n \"You sure? How can you be certain?\"\n\n\n \"Aside from the fact that it would have no business around here if it\n wasn't, the papers are a give-away. There's a whole sheaf of them.\n Reports on the Ganymede jewel shipments mostly. And a full set of data\n on our own little world, Mart. If there's a Venusian around, he sure\n knows his way.\"\n\n\n \"Dope on Callisto? What kind?\"\n\n\n \"A detailed map of Comprotown, showing every building. A full schedule\n of freighter hops both ways to Jupe and Earth. Details of shipments.\n That sort of thing.\"\n\n\n \"Holy stars! But why should a pirate be interested in ore?\"\n\n\n \"Don't imagine he is. Or in Comprotown, either. I'd say from the\n papers, it was precautionary information. We don't keep our operations\n a secret here. He could have picked it up from any magazine article\n describing Comprotown in detail.\n\n\n \"But I still don't see—\"\n\n\n \"The Ganymede jewel shipments, Mart. I'd say he was bound for Gany and\n his ship went blooie while he was scudding past Callisto. He got pulled\n down here and just barely made a landing he could walk away from. I'm\n afraid there'll be trouble.\"\n\n\n Mart whistled. \"Well, the Director's due now. He'll want a search\n organized and—Wait, here he is. Tell it over again, Cap, and you'll be\n reporting direct.... Listen to this, Director.\"\nThe tall slender figure of Director Barrow stood impassively beside\n Mart's desk and listened to a repetition of Wayne's report. Not a\n flicker of expression passed over his gaunt face.\n\n\n As Wayne finished, the Director asked, \"Is he armed? Anything taken\n from the ship's equipment, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Looks intact, but he probably has sidearms. All the pirates carry\n them. One funny thing, Director. The timer robot has been removed from\n the control panel. What on Callisto would he want with a loose timer?\"\n\n\n \"Report back to headquarters immediately, Captain Wayne,\" Director\n Barrow ordered.\n\n\n The hum of the carrier wave died and Mart clicked off the set.\n Then, belatedly, he stood up and saluted. \"Anything I can do, sir?\n Everything's set for the freighters to clear as usual, so I'm more or\n less free—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded. \"Very good, Wells. You may go to the field and direct a\n search of the freighters. The Venusian's first thought will be to get\n away, and he may already be stowed in one of—\"\n\n\n A dry voice interrupted from behind the Director's back. \"But the\n Venusian would not do anything so obvious, Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n Mart whirled around. Barrow turned slowly and with dignity.\n\n\n It was the tall man dressed in the uniform of a smelting plant worker\n who had spoken. But he wasn't dark-haired any more. Still seated, he\n was smiling at them sardonically as he fanned himself with a black wig\n he had just removed. The top of his head was as smooth as a billiard\n ball, and dead white. There was a line of demarcation where the dye he\n had applied to his face came to an end.\n\n\n He had removed the tinted glasses too, and the blank-surfaced\n gray eyeballs showed why they had been worn. Now that the simple\n disguise of wig and glasses was removed, Mart noted some of the other\n distinguishing features that marked the Venusian. The general flatness\n of the face and flat unconvoluted ears. The six-fingered hands that had\n probably been thrust into the pockets of the stolen uniform.\n\n\n The Venusian glanced down at the wig and glasses. \"Standard equipment,\"\n he explained. \"I always carry them in my ship and they've come in handy\n before.\"\n\n\n He rose and bowed mockingly. \"My name is Tar Norn, and your supposition\n that I am a pirate is correct. But I assure you that my visit here is\n accidental and I have no designs on Comprotown.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn! The most vicious and notorious of the pirates, and the most\n ruthless killer of them all. Mart hastily jerked open the drawer of\n his desk and pulled out a hand-blaster. He started the formula: \"Under\n authority of the Interplanetary Council, I arrest you, to be held for\n trial—\"\n\n\n The sardonic smile did not fade from the pirate's thin lips. He rose\n and extended his arms upward. \"I am unarmed,\" he cut in. \"It will help\n our discussion if you will verify that.\"\n\n\n \"—before the Supreme Council on Earth,\" Mart finished. Then, glancing\n side-wise at Director Barrow and seeing him nod, he stepped forward\n warily. Venusians, he knew, were both fast and tricky. Watching every\n move, he completed the search. Tar Norn carried no weapons.\n\n\n Why, Mart wondered, had the pirate walked openly into headquarters and\n given himself up? Obviously, Tar Norn had something up his sleeve.\n But—\n\n\n Director Barrow spoke coldly, as Mart stepped back, still covering the\n Venusian with the blaster. \"Tar Norn, you speak of 'our discussion.'\n There is nothing to discuss. You will be sent to Earth.\"\n\n\n The pirate's face became vicious. \"I do not think so,\" he snapped.\n \"I have taken a hostage. It was quite dark—your tiny Callisto in\n eclipse of its huge primary—when I was forced down. But darkness means\n nothing to a Venusian. You Earthmen play a strange game with cardboard\n rectangles. To use its language, Director Barrow, I have an ace in the\n hole.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn sat down again and folded his six-fingered hands quite calmly.\n Light from the ceiling overhead seemed to cast a malignant glow on his\n dead-white scalp.\n\n\n \"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.\n\n\n \"Captain,\" Barrow ordered, \"you will form a search party at once—every\n available man and means. We must search all of Callisto within—\" he\n made a rapid mental calculation \"—about fifty miles. You will be\n searching for my daughter.\"\n\n\n The captain stiffened. Before he could reply the carrier wave hummed\n and a feminine voice, that of an elderly woman, came over the\n communicator. \"Director Barrow? Leah isn't here. I looked in her room\n and her bed is disarranged as though she left suddenly. She always\n makes it herself as soon as she gets up.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to point to when she left, Mrs. Andrews?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly, sir. The alarm was set for six and it was still buzzing.\n Her bed isn't very mussed; it looks like she got up again almost right\n after she retired. I don't understand.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's face was bleak. His voice sounded like the drip of\n water from melting ice. \"Clothing?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Her lightweight spacesuit is gone. Apparently she put it on over her\n sleeping pajamas, for they aren't here. Is there anything I can do,\n sir? I'm worried; she hasn't ever—\"\n\n\n \"That will be all, Mrs. Andrews,\" Barrow replied. \"I'll let you know if\n there is anything.\"\n\n\n He turned to Captain Wayne. \"Use this set, Captain. Get Communications\n to send out a general alarm and assembly. You can make all necessary\n arrangements right here.\"\n\n\n Wayne crossed to the communicator, and began to issue rapid\n instructions.\n\n\n \"Tell them to hurry,\" the Venusian cut in mockingly. \"They have until\n nine-thirty o'clock.\"\n\n\n Mart Wells glanced fearfully at the dial of the chronometer. It was\n eight-forty now. He turned and caught the Director's glance. \"\nThe\n timer!\n\" he said grimly. \"Captain Wayne said it was missing from the\n wrecked ship. He must have—\"\n\n\n The Venusian was grinning. \"Exactly. The timer. And a pound of uranite.\n That gives you fifty minutes to search Callisto. It would be wiser to\n spend the time getting a ship ready for me instead.\"\n\n\n The silence of the office was broken only by the low voice of Captain\n Wayne giving orders into the communicator. Abruptly he turned to his\n superior. His face was white.\n\n\n \"Search is on, sir. But if he isn't lying, there's a chance in a\n million. Less than an hour, and the area to be covered is—\"\n\n\n Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"\n\n\n The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.\n\n\n Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.\n\n\n Barrow said, \"Yes, he's telling the truth. But we have some time yet.\n Maybe the search—\"\nMart strode to the window and looked out so the others wouldn't see his\n face. Less than three-quarters of an hour to search all of Callisto\n within a radius of fifty miles!\nThrough the pane he saw figures in groups of three searching the\n streets and buildings of Comprotown. That part of the search wouldn't\n be difficult. But the hills and the caves, and with only two autogiros.\n If she was there, out of sight in one of the caves, where the cruising\n ships couldn't see her....\n\n\n Her father was right, but—The picture of Leah Barrow, smiling as he\n had last seen her, seemed to blur out the view from the window. Her\n impertinent little tilted nose, the soft tempting contours of her lips,\n the deep blueness of her eyes.\n\n\n He whirled from the window and began pacing the floor, trying to\n think of something they could do that wasn't being done. Again at the\n communicator, Captain Wayne was barking questions.\n\n\n \"All available men and women are combing the town, sir,\" he reported,\n \"with orders to break down any doors that are locked, to stop at\n nothing.\"\n\n\n \"And outside, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"The two giros are our only real hope. But the men from the smelting\n plant are working afoot out of town. By nine-thirty they'll have\n covered a radius of about five miles.\"\n\n\n Corey returned, slamming the door viciously behind him. \"Maybe we\n could trick him, sir,\" he suggested. \"Pretend we'll give him a ship if\n he'll—\"\n\n\n \"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.\n\n\n Venusians were, compared to Earth standards, a strange combination of\n genius and idiocy. Brilliant mathematicians, they had no mechanical\n ingenuity whatever. Linguists who could speak any language fluently\n after hearing it a few hours, not one of them could create a child's\n wind-up toy. Knowing the laws of leverage, they constructed their\n buildings by manual labor alone. Able to operate any machine as long as\n it was in good working order, they couldn't as much as figure out how\n to repair a clogged fuel-line.\n\n\n Even the pirates based on some of the bigger Asteroids had to depend\n upon a few renegade Earthmen to keep their ships in running order. And\n if one went blah away from base, it was a gone ship as far as they\n were concerned. Probably the trouble that had forced Tar Norn down on\n Callisto had been a minor matter that any Earthman could have taken in\n his stride. But to Tar Norn it meant a new ship or nothing.\n\n\n The thought of ships reminded him of the freighters. \"Cap,\" he asked\n Wayne, \"the freighters been searched thoroughly?\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded. \"Rocket tubes and all. Even broke open the ore drums. I\n presume you'll want them to clear on schedule?\"\n\n\n Director Barrow nodded. \"The crews?\" he asked. \"In the search or\n standing by?\"\n\n\n \"Standing by for departure as usual, Director. A few men one way or the\n other—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded, glancing at the chronometer. Mart knew what he was\n thinking. Less than half an hour now. And, unless the searchers by some\n miracle found Leah Barrow, it would all be over before the ten o'clock\n clearance of the first freighter. And the freighters hadn't missed a\n clearance in ten years.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed again. \"Central Communications reporting. Most\n searchers in the town have reported in. No results. Those outside\n reaching points three miles out.\"\n\n\n The communicator faded. Mart clenched his fists against the futility\n of that search. Three miles! The strong Venusian, in the light gravity\n of Callisto, probably had eight or ten hours of darkness to carry his\n burden. He could easily have covered twenty to forty miles, in any\n direction. Possibly even more. And the chance of an autogiro—\n\n\n Obviously, Wayne had been thinking the same thing. \"He timed his\n arrival,\" he said bitterly. \"He gave us less than an hour. He'd\n certainly have put her outside walking range within that length of\n time. And with all the caves around, thousands of them, would he have\n put her where a giro could spot anything?\"\n\n\n Mart glanced at Barrow. The Director was sitting as immobile as a\n statue. His eyes were closed and every muscle of his thin face was\n tense. Probably he was trying not to look at the chronometer on the\n wall. It was nine-fifteen.\n\n\n The office door opened and three uniformed mechanics from the field\n stood in the doorway. The foremost of them saluted. \"This entire\n building has been searched twice except this office. I presume—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow opened his eyes and stood up. \"Don't presume anything.\n Search here, too.\"\n\n\n The men came in and began a detailed but fruitless search. Nobody spoke\n until they left.\n\n\n The chronometer said twenty minutes after nine now. Ten minutes to go,\n if the timer had been accurately set. But could it have been set wrong?\n Venusians were lousy mechanics. Maybe—\nMart became aware that he was holding his breath for the sound of a\n distant explosion. Yes, from whatever point Tar Norn could have hidden\n his hostage, the sound of a pound of uranite exploding would carry back\n to Comprotown.\n\n\n He sat down at his desk again. In front of him were the signed\n clearance papers for the freighters. In half an hour he'd take out the\n papers for the first freighter. But before that half hour was up—\n\n\n He twisted a pencil between his fingers, held himself rigid to keep\n from turning and looking at the chronometer again. It hadn't been over\n a minute since he sat down—why torture himself by looking again? But\n each minute now seemed both a flash and an eternity.\n\n\n He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.\n\n\n Why? Undoubtedly it indicated that she would be outdoors. During the\n Callisto day, it would have been unnecessary. But an unconscious\n Earthwoman would freeze to death in the cold dark period of Callisto's\n eclipse behind Big Jupe.\n\n\n What then? The Venusian left, carrying her—\nThe Venusian had carried the drugged girl into the night.\nHe threw down the pencil and began to pace the room again. His muscles\n were tense from listening. How many minutes? He didn't want to know;\n dared not look.\n\n\n But Tar Norn must have planned it all before he left the wrecked ship.\n Otherwise he wouldn't have taken the timer and—\n\n\n Would he have rigged the time-bomb first, or after he had kidnapped\n Leah? And how? The timer itself would not have provided the concussion\n to set off the uranite. He'd have needed a battery, a spark-coil, and—\nBut Venusians weren't mechanics.\nThey didn't understand machines, or electricity, or even simple\n clockworks, brilliant as their strange minds were in other ways.\n\n\n Tar Norn could have set the timer all right. For that matter, he could\n calculate an orbit and make settings for space flight. But he couldn't\n have made a time-bomb, even with the timer. He couldn't have rigged\n a circuit that would set off a cap! And, Mart realized suddenly, the\n timer itself would be an electrical—not a clockwork—gadget. Once\n disconnected from the now broken dynamo of the ship, Tar Norn couldn't\n have made it run at all!\n\n\n A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"\n\n\n Three minutes to go. Mart could see by the attitude of the others that\n they were bracing themselves for the sound of an explosion. All of them\n had liked, or loved, Leah Barrows. Mart had a momentary vision of her\n again, and remembered the electric thrill that had run through him when\n she had placed her hand on his arm, just a few days ago, and told him\n that she did care for him, well, a little anyway—\n\n\n But, if Tar Norn couldn't have rigged a time-bomb, how could he have\n arranged for Leah to die at nine-thirty?\n\n\n He saw again the corpse-like face of the Director. Yes, they had all\n been wrong in thinking that nothing mattered to Barrow more than the\n schedules—\nSchedules\n! There had been departure schedules among the\n papers in Tar Norn's ship. Could he have—\n\n\n With a sudden intake of breath that was almost a gasp, Mart whirled and\n ran to the communicator. The others looked at him, startled. Mart was\n yelling at the mike even before he got near enough to it to talk in a\n normal voice. \"Control! Emergency! Get\nJupe Freighter One\n!\nTell him\n not to test his tubes.\nNot to touch a lever!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is an autogiro?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_1", "options": ["It appears to be a flying machine similar to a helicopter in function and flying principles.", "It is a remote-controlled drone with a camera, specialized for operation on Callisto.", "It is a hot-air balloon specialized for use on Callisto.", "It is an expensive instrument that helps determine the orientation of a flying machine."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Mart look for Leah Barrow's spaceship first?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_2", "options": ["Because she was Director Barrow's daughter, so having the facts about Leah to give to the Director was the first priority.", "Because Leah was Mart's wife - of course he looked for her spaceship first!", "Leah had recently arrived in her spacecruiser, bringing important information about the Venusians.", "Because he was in love with her."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who won the war between Earth and Venus?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_3", "options": ["No one won - the war continues, and the story describes just one of the attacks, some of them carried out by very small forces,  in this long-running war.", "Earth won, but tensions continue, with guerrillas and terrorists from Venus inflicting damage where they can.", "Venus won and conquered the inner solar system, but Jovian colonists and recent refugees from Earth continue their resistance from Jupiter's moon Callisto.", "Jupiter brokered a peace between Earth and Venus, and the treaty of 2280 stipulated that no one was considered to have won."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What Venusian traits were disguised by Tar Norn's dark-colored hairpiece and tinted spectacles?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_4", "options": ["Antennae that grew from the top of his smooth, white, hairless skull.", "His flat face and flat, unconvoluted ears.", "A smooth, hairless skull that was white and his six-fingered hands.", "A smooth, hairless skull that was white and gray eyeballs."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Tar Norn kidnap Leah Barrow?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_5", "options": ["He landed on Callisto by accident and wanted to make sure he could leave without being apprehended.", "Tar Norn was not so much a patriot as a pirate, and he needed income to operate his ship. Kidnapping Leah was a way to generate income from ransom money. It was just business, nothing personal.", "Leah Barrow had visited Venus without Director Barrow's knowledge, and had fallen in love with Tar Norn. They wanted to be together.", "He had a personal grudge against Director Barrow from their interactions during the Earth-Venus war."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author give us such a detailed description of the Venusian mind?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_6", "options": ["The author believes in eugenics and is writing in code about the races of men on Earth in the present time.", "The inability of Venusians to comprehend machinery and engineering principles gives the reader a clue as to how the kidnapping plot will turn out.", "Mart Wells reviews the mental strengths and weaknesses of Venusians to avoid falling into the trap of underestimating his enemy.", "Mart Wells knows that because Venusians aren't much good with technology, Tar Norn will not think about the time zone differences between different parts of Callisto, so the threatened bomb will not go off as soon as threatened, and authorities will have extra time to find it."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What evidence indicates that Leah Barrow was kidnapped?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_7", "options": ["Leah Barrow's bed is mussed and there are traces of blood on the floor, leading to the door.", "Leah Barrow is not in her room; her bed is unmade, but does not look slept in; and her pressure suit and her pajamas are gone", "Leah Barrow is not in her room and the housekeeper saw her leave with a strange man with black hair and tinted glasses.", "Leah Barrows did not answer her phone, and the towels in her room were dry, indicating she had left without her customary morning shower."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Tar Norn put his hostage in the engine of a rocket?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_8", "options": ["As Venusians were too technologically illiterate to wire explosives to detonate at a scheduled time, the only way Norn could have a deadline for negotiating the fate of the hostage was to place her into the end of a space freighter scheduled to leave at a particular time that day.", "He had limited time to stash his hostage before his presence would become known to authorities, and with everyone out searching the surroundings for his crashed ship, putting Leah in the easiest possible location, an open rocket engine bell, was the best choice.", "This was a common Venusian guerilla warfare technique, because the threat of roasting a hostage in a rocket blast was gruesome enough to obtain cooperation from the families of the kidnapped.", "Since Tar Norn, as a Venusian, was not very good with machines, he could not open any of the door interlock systems he encountered, so he could not keep her in a building on Callisto, where he had no allies."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Was Leah Barrow in love with Mart Wells?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_9", "options": ["No. She loved Tar Norn, and intended to marry him.", "Yes. It was love at first sight for both Leah and Mart.", "No. She was completely indifferent to him.", "No. She liked him as a friend, that was all."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Mart Wells concludes that he was wrong in thinking that nothing mattered more to Director Barrow than his schedules. What does Mart think matters more than schedules to Dir. Barrow, and why?", "question_unique_id": "63657_RP9K8SWN_10", "options": ["His daughter matters more to Barrow. He never really believes that Norn will succeed with his kidnapping plot.", "Wells is wrong. In fact, nothing matters more to Barrow than schedules.", "Justice matters more to Barrow. To protect the many people that Norn might kill by getting away, he refuses to let Norn go to save his daughter.", "Revenge matters more to Barrow. To get revenge against Norn for past crimes, he is willing to let his own daughter die."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/6/5/63657//63657-h//63657-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "30062", "set_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Plague", "year": 1972, "author": "Keller, Teddy", "topic": "Science fiction; PS; Epidemics -- Fiction; Short stories", "article": "THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n\n\n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"\n\n\n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment\n before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop\n of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\"\n he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I\n know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority,\n we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n\n\n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so\n irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n\n\n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n \"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the\n sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other\n officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they\n drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top\n priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could\n panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n\n\n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general,\n snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will\n you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of\n his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself\n one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who\n entered his office.\nBettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile\n as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n \"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick,\n brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to\n his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n\n\n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a\n little time.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n\n\n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no\n fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's\n spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her\n dark eyes.\n\n\n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,—and a\n bunch more. No indication there. Except\"—she fished out a one-page\n report—\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign\n for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today\n they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at\n the polls. They've all got it.\"\n\n\n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's\n a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up\n with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n\n\n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so\n far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers,\n teachers, preachers—rich, poor—from Florida to Alaska. Just when you\n called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated\n mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too\n fragmentary.\"\n\n\n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly\n ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until\n they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of\n the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n\n\n \"In food?\"\n\n\n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing\n plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same\n time—even if it was sabotage?\"\n\n\n \"On the wind?\"\n\n\n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire\n country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And\n why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n\n\n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to\n grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ...\n well, an enemy?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n\n\n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her,\n punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his\n head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of\n papers.\n\n\n \"We've got to find a clue—a trend—an inkling of something.\" He\n nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those\n girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country.\n Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up\n another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and\n sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and\n occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n\n\n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode\n from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on\n the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone\n and directory.\n\n\n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n\n\n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n\n\n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face,\n but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the\n pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the\n situation.\"\n\n\n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips.\n Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on\n his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n\n\n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report\n to—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n\n\n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled\n slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n \"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some\n of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're\n surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that\n makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt\n Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her\n a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say\n what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n \"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions.\n Your conduct here will be noted and—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's\n shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight\n around when this man—\"\n\n\n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would\n co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a\n bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to\n get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant.\n Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will\n report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n\n\n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass,\n he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a\n while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to\n us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't\n know from—\"\n\n\n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\nAnd from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n\n\n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh,\n general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just—\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been\n listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the\n sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n\n\n \"But, general, I—\"\n\n\n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his\n chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n \"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n\n\n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many\n things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n\n\n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled\n up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face\n as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had\n feared.\"\n\n\n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A\n captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n\n\n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had\n a report—nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the\n civilian newspapermen—not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a\n day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had—it was a\n coded message the Reds'd tried to censor—was an indication of\n something big in the works.\"\n\n\n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had\n an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n\n\n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that\n they could cripple us from within.\"\n\n\n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out\n effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every\n serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've\n still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're\n right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n\n\n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through\n muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there,\n futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm.\n He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement\n that silenced him.\n\n\n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll\n find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n\n\n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then\n launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and\n your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the\n duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the\n sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n\n\n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned—\"\n\n\n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated—unless you\n find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's\n get out of here and let these people work.\"\nThe brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his\n cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain\n and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper\n channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile\n of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n\n\n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used,\n studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she\n asked.\n\n\n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n \"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single\n government worker sick.\"\n\n\n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n\n\n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own\n scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of\n office workers—business, not government—and new parents and newly\n engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n\n\n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n\n\n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just\n guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big\n offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and\n two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n\n\n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor,\n dentist or attorney?\"\n\n\n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n\n\n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable\n thing. Thank heaven for—\"\n\n\n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before\n both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her\n teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n\n\n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half\n the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same\n thing—only not quite as severe—in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n\n\n \"Writers?\"\n\n\n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the\n hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are\n fine—writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n\n\n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a\n country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about.\n Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n\n\n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his\n cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all\n lumped together.\"\n\n\n \"What does it show?\"\n\n\n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up—no medical releases. Must\n mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n \"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the\n first hit?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass\n could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could\n slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come\n from the general public.\"\n\n\n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under\n twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices\n and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't\n tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n\n\n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from\n Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something,\n everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't\n even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n\n\n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the\n outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a\n paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and\n nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n\n\n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of\n his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n \"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n\n\n \"The answer?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink\n or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear?\n What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists?\n What are we missing? What—\"\nIn the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk,\n then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n\n\n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to\n Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n\n\n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she\n lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering,\n shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the\n hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n\n\n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to\n cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n\n\n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n\n\n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that\n you did—everything you ate or drank—in the last ... oh, twelve\n hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see\n Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n\n\n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n\n\n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n\n\n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged\n nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of\n attention. Andy ignored her.\n\n\n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\"\n Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n\n\n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then\n told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying\n on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about\n eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n\n\n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color\n spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face\n away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little\n nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n\n\n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n\n\n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n\n\n \"But ... but....\"\n\n\n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n\n\n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n\n\n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n\n\n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance\n sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally,\n resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n\n\n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her\n about what we were doing here.\"\n\n\n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n\n\n \"Did you mail it?\"\n\n\n \"Y ... yes.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n \"Did I do wrong?\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n\n\n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\"\n\n\n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"\n\n\n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was\n weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does\n that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why\n senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the\n bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n\n\n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the\n poison and prescribe medication. But\"—he held up a four-cent\n stamp—\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n\n\n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes\n bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n\n\n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents\n and especially writers and artists and poets—they'd all lick lots of\n stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have\n postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking.\n And\"—she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck—\"Andy, you're\n wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's\n phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do—\"\n\n\n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the\n colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do\n you suggest?\"\n\n\n \"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks.\n Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any\n stamps. Then—\"\n\n\n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment,\n then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody\n checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they\n print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years\n ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n\n\n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure\n accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the\n stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone\n call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be\n quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors.\n The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six\n hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States\n whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the\n Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\nThe general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into\n the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling\n his granite brow.\n\n\n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n\n\n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk\n lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n\n\n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and\n the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day\n furlough to rest up—or to get better acquainted?\"\n\n\n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n\n\n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings\n I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions,\n I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to\n pin on the bars.\"\n\n\n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of\n furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the\n depths of each other's eyes.\n\n\n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent\n stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the\n stamp out of the office under guard.\nTHE END\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why has the way phones are answered in Andrew McCloud's office changed?", "question_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ_1", "options": ["Previously, soldiers answered the phones, but they were not as efficient as girls with secretarial experience, so a dozen girls were hired to do the job.", "The office now has to answer the public's questions about the effectiveness of vaccines, and people have a lot of questions, so there are a lot more phone calls.", "Phone traffic has exploded due to increasing cases of a puzzling illness.", "Formerly, the public was not allowed to phone the Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator, they could only write letters. But an executive order changed that, so now there is a lot of phone traffic."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What seems to be the top brass's biggest concern about Andrew McCloud?", "question_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ_2", "options": ["That someone with unruly hair does not have the self-discipline to be in charge of an important agency.", "That someone with freckles and a mop of unruly hair is too young to be in charge of an important agency.", "That he is a noncommissioned officer.", "That he does not have the correct training to do the job."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which important figure does give McCloud support?", "question_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ_3", "options": ["The two-star general.", "The colonel.", "No one gives him the support he needs.", "The brigadier general."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How many mortalities have been caused by the plague?", "question_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ_4", "options": ["Six people died.", "There have been no mortalities.", "629,000 people have died of the plague.", "The death rate at the time the story starts is 2 per hundred thousand citizens."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is the colonel referred to as \"the chicken colonel\"?", "question_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ_5", "options": ["Because he was well known to be a coward and a bully.", "The story does not tell us.", "Because, as explained in the story, he is a full colonel, as opposed to a lieutenant colonel.", "Because he was in charge of a defense department operation for making vaccines from chicken embryos."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Andrew McCloud relieved from duty by the colonel?", "question_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ_6", "options": ["Because the colonel was ordered to replace McCloud by the brigadier general.", "The colonel was looking for an excuse to remove him from the beginning of the story, because he had contempt for noncommissioned officers.", "Because McCloud was having an affair with Bettijean.", "Because McCloud defended his subordinate, Bettijean, in front of the colonel, when she had clearly violated military protocol."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why do McCloud and Bettijean conclude that the disease is not communicable?", "question_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ_7", "options": ["Because the incidence of the disease has already  begun to drop.", "This assumption is not supported by facts in the story.", "Smaller organizations seem to have a higher incidence than larger organizations.", "Because he and Bettijean have not caught the disease."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who was the first plague victim in McCloud's office?", "question_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ_8", "options": ["McCloud himself was the first victim - that is why he was so overwhelmingly tired.", "The colonel was the first victims, but that information was withheld as part of the military blackout on disease reports.", "No one from McCloud's office ever got the plague.", "The cute blonde who brought some reports into his office while he was discussing clues about the epidemic with Bettijean."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did McCloud ask the lab technician to analyze?", "question_unique_id": "30062_0U59AZIJ_9", "options": ["The pack of cigarettes in Bettijean's desk.", "The stack of reports that the cute blonde had brought in to McCloud's office.", "The letter that the cute blonde had intended to mail to her mother.", "The coffee cups that all the workers at the office had used."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/0/0/6/30062//30062-h//30062-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63836", "set_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Morley's Weapon", "year": 1958, "author": "Barefoot, D. W.", "topic": "PS; Survival -- Fiction; Castaways -- Fiction; Iapetus (Satellite) -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "MORLEY'S WEAPON\nBy D. W. BAREFOOT\nOut of the far reaches of the universe sped\n \nthe meteor swarm, cosmic question marks destined\n \nfor annihilation in the sun. But one, approximately\n \nhalf a pound of frozen destruction, had a\n \nrendezvous near Japetus with Spaceboat 6.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt was comfortably cool in the functional, little control room, but\n Morley was sweating, gently and steadily. His palms were wet, and the\n thin thoughtful face, shining in the glow of the instrument panel\n light, was wrinkled in an agony of concentration and doubt. He was\n trying to choose between the Scylla of waking Madsen with a corollary\n of biting contempt involved, and the Charybdis of attempting to land\n single handed on Japetus, less than five hundred miles below. Neither\n course was appealing.\n\n\n For the hundredth time he pondered miserably over the sad condition\n of what had been a reasonably well ordered existence. The worst of\n it was that he had only himself to blame, and he knew it. No one had\n forced him to leave a comfortable, if poorly paid position with General\n Plastics, and fill out an employment card at Satellites, Inc.\n\n\n He could not explain the obscure compulsion that sparked his little\n personal rebellion.\n\n\n He didn't know, or need to know that other generations of Morleys had\n fought in revolutions, or sailed in square riggers, or clawed gold from\n mountainsides. When he went to the spaceline, the puzzlement of his few\n friends was profound, but hardly more so than his own. And now, after\n almost a year of upheaval and change, he was piloting a spaceboat along\n an involute curve ending on the surface of Saturn's eighth moon. And he\n was still puzzled.\n\n\n Satellites, Inc., had done as well as possible with the raw material\n known as Morley, Vincent, No. 4628. His psychograph indicated a born\n subordinate, with a normal I.Q., reasonably stable and trustworthy\n though below average in initiative. They didn't inform him of this,\n or the fact that they had analyzed the neurosis which had driven\n him to the spaceline, and which had created by that very action the\n therapeutic aid he needed. Many spacemen had similar case histories.\n\n\n It was those who fought the compulsion who sometimes turned down dark\n pathways of the mind.\n\n\n For six months he attended cadet school, and graduated in due time,\n fourteenth in a class of fifty. The next day he was assigned as fourth\n engineman to the space freighter\nSolarian\n, bound to Port Ulysses,\n Titan, Saturn system, with a cargo of mining machinery and supplies.\nThey blasted off from Chicago Spaceport on a raw March midnight. Just\n another rocket take-off, routine stuff, now. But have you ever seen it?\n The night, the wind, the distant city glow in the sky? On the strip\n squats the massive bulk of the rocket, loading hatches closed, sealed\n port holes gleaming through the gusts of rain that sweep the field. In\n the sound proofed spaceport control tower the officials are relaxed\n over coffee and cigarettes; their part is over; they sit watching.\n\n\n Somewhere in the mighty shell on the field, chronometer hands reach the\n calculated second, a circuit closes, relays chatter briefly. The rocket\n igniters are firing, flame billows over the field, a low rumble from\n the tubes builds to a throbbing roar. Twenty miles away a housewife\n looks up, a question on her face. Her husband listens and smiles. \"It's\n the Saturn rocket. It's here in the paper, under Departures.\"\n\n\n On the field the roar rises to an insane bellow of sound. Under the\n mighty jets, the ten feet of concrete and the solid earth beneath it\n are shaking. In the insulated control tower a water glass dances in its\n holder. The watchers are not relaxed now; they lean forward.\n\n\n It's old stuff, routine, precalculated to a fraction of a second,\n but—watch. There—a stir—movement. Slowly at first, with a deliberate\n and awful majesty, then faster and faster.\n\n\n Straight toward the zenith the ship rises, trailing fire. Faster yet,\n hurling herself upward, under full power, through the last threads of\n atmosphere. Upward and onward, out past Roches limit, out where gravity\n dwindles toward zero, into the empyrean where the shades of dead\n spacemen cruise the cosmos in their phantom craft, spaceborne in the\n night.\n\n\n After he had recovered from the pangs of his initial attack of space\n nausea, Morley enjoyed himself. He had one minor social asset, a\n retentive mind, well stocked with general information. If the two\n apprentices got involved in an argument over the identity of the\n highest peak in America, Morley was the inevitable arbiter. He could\n with equal facility name the author of a recent best seller, or inform\n you that a young seal was a cub, a young hare, a leveret, and a young\n swan, a cygnet.\n\n\n He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.\n\n\n \"All personnel not on duty will report to the recreation room at 1900\n hours, Solar time, to draw for side trip partners and destinations,\"\n it read.\n\n\n He buttonholed the crew messman. \"What's all this about side trips,\n Oscar?\"\n\n\n Roly poly Oscar looked at him incredulously. \"The lay over trips. The\n time killer. On the level, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Morley shook his head.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Oscar told him, \"We leave Earth shortly before Saturn is in\n opposition. They figure on the shortest possible run, which takes three\n months. If we discharge and start right back, the round trip would take\n about six months. That's fine, except that the synodic period for Earth\n and Saturn—Hey, you know what I'm talking about?\"\n\n\n Morley admitted his ignorance, vaguely annoyed at the fact that for\n once he was the humble seeker for information, and someone else was\n being professorial.\n\n\n Oscar grinned. \"And you studied astrogation! Well, when Saturn and\n Earth line up with the Sun, it takes three hundred and seventy eight\n days before they get in the same position again. So if we got back to\n Earth's orbit in six months, we'd still have about a hundred and eighty\n millions of miles to go, because Earth would be on Sol's other side at\n that time, in superior conjunction to Uranus.\"\n\n\n Morley digested this, while Oscar basked in the light of his own\n knowledge, enjoying himself hugely.\n\n\n \"And the trips, Oscar?\"\n\n\n \"We lay over three or four months, 'til opposition time isn't too\n far away, and we pick partners and destinations by lot, and go out\n to Saturn's other moons on prospecting trips—ore deposits, jewels,\n botanical specimens, etc.—half for us, and half for the Company. It's\n a good deal, a regular vacation, and those two-men craft are sweet\n stuff. And if you're lucky—\"\n\n\n He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.\n\n\n Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"\n\n\n Morley flushed, and fumbled miserably for a reasonable excuse. There\n was a gleam of contempt in Madsen's eyes, but he spoke again more\n quietly. \"I'm going to eat and catch up on some sack time. We'll be\n right on top of Japetus in short order. It's a known fact that the moon\n won't move over if you fly at it, so you better wake me up to handle\n the compensating!\" He disappeared into the tiny galley, but his words\n were still audible. \"It's an awful long walk back, chum, if anybody\n pulls a bull.\"\n\n\n Morley swung himself into the pilot's seat, too numb with humiliation\n to answer. Almost an hour passed before he started the regulation\n checkup required by the Space Code of any ship passing within one\n hundred thousand miles of a planet or major satellite. Every guardian\n needle stood in its normal place with one exception. The craft had been\n running on the port fuel tanks, depleting them to the point where it\n seemed wise to trim ship. Morley opened the valve, touched the fuel\n pump switch and waited, nothing happened. He watched the needles\n incredulously. The pump—? He jabbed the switch, once, twice. Nothing.\n\n\n He leaned forward and rapped the starboard gauge with his knuckles,\n sharply. The needle swung from Full to Empty. Morley felt faint as\n realization hit him. The starboard gauge had stuck at Full, and had\n been unreported. The tank had not been serviced in port, owing to\n the faulty reading and a mechanic's carelessness. They had about two\n hours fuel. Even to Morley, it was obvious that there was one thing\n only to do—land on Japetus, looming up larger in the view-plate with\n each passing moment. He checked the distance rapidly, punched the\n calculator, and put the ship in the designated orbit. He wanted to\n handle the landing himself, but the thought of the final few ticklish\n moments chilled him. So did the thought of waking Madsen, and asking\n him to take over.\n\n\n And it was then, at the intersection of two courses formed by an\n infinity of variables, that two objects arrived in the same millisecond\n of time. Eight ounces of nickel iron smashed into the stern of\n Spaceboat 6, ripped a path of ruin through her entire length, and went\n out through the two inch glass of her bow, before Morley could turn\n his head. He was aware, in a strange dream-like way, of actuating\n the midships airtight door, of the hiss of air as the little aneroid\n automatically opened valves to compensate for the drop in pressure, and\n of Madsen leaping into the control room and slapping a Johnson patch\n over the hole in the bow.\n\n\n Madsen was white but composed. \"We can slow her down but we can't land\n her. Get suits while I take over. We'll ride as far as we can, and\n walk the rest of the way.\" He fought with the controls, as Morley,\n still bemused, obeyed. At twenty-five hundred feet they bailed out,\n and floating down seconds later, watched Spaceboat 6 crash into a low\n wooded hill. And when they landed, and inspected the wreckage, it was\n some minutes before either spoke.\n\n\n It was obvious at a glance that Spaceboat 6 was ready for the boneyard,\n had there been one around. The ship, under the few automatic controls\n that were still functioning, had sliced in at a thirty degree angle,\n ploughed a short distance through a growth of slim, poplar-like trees,\n and then crumpled completely against an outcropping granite ledge.\n Finally Morley gulped audibly, and Madsen laughed.\n\n\n \"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"\n\n\n Madsen ignored the interruption, and cut loose with one last broadside.\n \"Save your breath. It's bad enough being saddled with a useless little\n squirt like you, without being made into a pack mule unnecessarily.\"\nII\n\n\n He climbed into a gaping hole in the bow. Morley followed, humiliated\n but still thinking hard. Catalogue it, he told himself. Remember\n everything. The Distress Depots, or D.D.'s, as spacemen called them,\n were studded on every frontier world, usually on the Equator. They\n contained two small spacecraft plus ample supplies of food, medicine,\n and tools. When wrecked, get to a D.D. and live. It was that simple.\n\n\n They spent an hour worming their way through the shambles that had\n been the well ordered interior of Spaceboat 6, before emerging to take\n stock of their loot on the ground outside. Both men knew that they\n were pitifully equipped to cover several hundred miles, on foot, in\n a completely hostile environment. Suddenly Madsen looked up from the\n sextant he was examining.\n\n\n \"How come this gravity, Brain? I weigh about a hundred right now, I\n figure, and that's too much, by plenty. Japetus isn't a quarter the\n size of our moon.\"\n\n\n \"It's supposed to have a core of heavy radioactive metals,\" said\n Morley, thoughtfully, \"and a corresponding high density. Keeps it warm\n anyway, instead of a big icicle, like Phoebe.\"\n\n\n \"Phoebe!\" Madsen laughed. \"I remember, back in '89—\" He stopped\n abruptly at a rattling from the ledge. A green, little lizard-like\n creature was scrambling frantically over the granite, while hot in\n pursuit were three—spiders? Black, they were, a black like living\n velvet, and incredibly fast as they closed in, beady stalked eyes\n fastened on their prey. They were deliberately herding the desperate\n lizard toward a cleft in the rock. As the creature leaped into the\n opening, another spider dove at it from the recess. The others closed\n in. There was a hopeless hissing, a vicious clicking of mandibles. The\n struggle subsided. Once again the day was silent. Madsen holstered the\n blaster he had drawn and looked whitely at Morley.\n\n\n \"Pleasant pets,\" he grunted.\n\n\n \"Poisonous and carnivorous, too,\" said Morley, shakingly. \"I remember\n reading that Valdez dissected one when he first landed here twenty\n years ago. One of his crew was bitten, and died in less than five\n minutes.\"\n\n\n Madsen was thoughtful. \"We could stand a little briefing on the local\n flora and fauna, but palaver won't get us to the Equator. And that\n little stock treatise entitled 'Physical Attributes of Phoebe' is worse\n than useless. Lucky the sextant is O.K., we can at least check our\n latitude. There's just one flaw.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"Which way do we go when we hit the line? The D.D.'s are spaced ninety\n degrees apart. We might be within a hundred miles of one. If we head\n the wrong way, we'd have three or four hundred miles to go. There's no\n method of figuring our longitude.\"\n\n\n Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice.\n\n\n \"Two. We came in over the Pole almost exactly at inferior conjunction.\n Right?\"\n\n\n \"I think I get it.\" Madsen answered slowly.\n\n\n For a moment Morley was silent. He could almost smell the dingy\n classroom in Port Chicago, almost see the words on the examination\n paper in front of him. The paragraph leaped out, limned sharply in his\n mind. \"Section 4, Subhead A, Solar Space Code. The initial Distress\n Depot on any satellite shall be situated, when practical, on the\n Prime Meridian. For the purposes of this act, the Prime Meridian of a\n satellite shall be the meridian that bisects the Sun when the Satellite\n is in inferior conjunction. Quarter mile belts shall be burned fifty\n miles to the North, South, East, and West as guides. Radio beacons will\n operate, unless impracticable due to atmospheric conditions, or other\n reasons.\"\n\n\n \"We're on, or practically on the Prime Meridian right now,\" said\n Madsen. \"A trek due South should hit D.D. No. 1 square on the nose.\n Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right. Two or three hundred miles to go. We might make it in two\n weeks.\"\n\n\n Madsen squinted at the stationary disk of Sol, hanging in the sky.\n \"Let's load up and get started. The sooner we're on our way, the\n better.\"\n\n\n Both men had discarded their space suits, were dressed in the gray\n work clothes of Satellites, Inc. Equipment was easily divided. Each\n had a blaster, and a wrist compass-chronometer. Radio was useless on\n Japetus, and the little headsets were ruthlessly jettisoned. The flat\n tins of emergency food concentrate were stowed in two knapsacks. Madsen\n took charge of the sextant, and Morley carried a lightweight repeating\n rifle for possible game that might be out of blaster range. Canteens,\n a pocket first-aid kit, and a small heliograph, were the final items,\n except for several articles which Morley unobtrusively stowed away\n about his person.\n\n\n Less than three hours after the crash, the two men shouldered their\n burdens, took a bearing to determine their course, and headed into the\n south.\nIn a matter of minutes Spaceboat 6 was out of sight. With Madsen\n leading, they threaded their way through the scant undergrowth.\n Underfoot the dry, broad-bladed grass rustled through a morning that\n had no beginning or end. Farther away were other and less easily\n explained rustlings, and once both men froze as a half-dozen of what\n looked like baby dragons arrowed past within yards of them.\n\n\n \"Formation flying, like ducks,\" muttered Morley, watching from the\n corner of his eye.\n\n\n When the whispering of scaled wings had died away, the castaways\n resumed their steady plodding into the south. Twice they crossed small\n fresh water brooks, providing a welcome opportunity to drink their\n fill, and replenish the canteens. The going was easy, since the footing\n was in fairly dense soil, and the scrub was not so thick as to provide\n any difficulties. After eight hours of nearly continuous travel, they\n reached the banks of a third stream. Here Madsen stopped, and dropped\n his knapsack to the ground.\n\n\n \"Campsite,\" he grunted.\n\n\n \"Alabama,\" Morley murmured.\n\n\n Madsen goggled. \"Are you delirious? What do you mean—Alabama?\"\n\n\n Morley laughed sheepishly. \"Alabama means 'Here we rest,' I said it\n without thinking.\"\n\n\n Madsen was grinning now. \"What beats me is how you remember all that\n junk. I'd go nuts if I tried to clutter up my mind with a bunch of\n useless data. Alabama!\"\n\n\n \"I don't have to try to remember things,\" Morley said thoughtfully. \"If\n I read or hear something that seems the least bit curious or unusual,\n it just sticks. And sometimes it's useful.\"\n\n\n \"Such as?\"\n\n\n \"Well, remember when Storybook ran a mile last year in 1.29? He was\n the first to break 1.30. Some joe that knew a lot about horses gave me\n an argument in a bar about the first horse to break 1.40. He bet me\n ten credits it was Man o' War. I knew it was Ten Broeck, and I got an\n almanac and proved it.\"\n\n\n Madsen looked up from the tin of coffee concentrate he was opening.\n \"Hasn't anyone ever tried to win an argument by poking you one in the\n snoot?\"\n\n\n \"Once or twice.\" Morley was almost apologetic. \"But I learned judo a\n few years ago, just for the hell of it, so I didn't get hurt much.\"\n\n\n \"You're a whiz with the sabre, no doubt?\" said Madsen dryly.\n\n\n \"No, I tried swordplay for a while, but gave it up. It's a little too,\n er—primitive for my tastes.\"\n\n\n \"Primitive!\" Madsen glanced around at the alien scene and nearly\n choked. \"I'm crossing my fingers, but what would you do if some\n carnivore, or a gang of those spiders suddenly appeared and started for\n us with evil intentions?\"\n\n\n \"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.\n\n\n Madsen was hastily dumping the contents of the knapsacks on the ground.\n Morley joined him, and both men commenced scraping the clinging gray\n patches from the tins. All but three were perforated and ruined.\n\n\n \"We'll at least be traveling light from now on,\" Madsen said. \"Any idea\n what this stuff is?\"\n\n\n \"Some of that lichen, or whatever it is, was around the scene of the\n crash,\" Morley answered. \"The stuff must have an affinity for tin;\n probably secretes some acid that dissolves it. Only trouble is, it goes\n through thin steel too.\"\n\n\n Madsen commenced repacking their effects.\n\n\n \"From now on, laddie, keep your eyes peeled for game, and if you see\n any, use that rifle. If we don't knock down some meat, and soon, we\n aren't going to make it. Might as well realize it right now.\"\n\n\n \"Were you ever wrecked before, Madsen?\"\n\n\n \"Once, on Venus. Cartographic expedition.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\"\n\n\n \"Tubes blew and we made a forced landing. Wound up sitting in the\n middle of a pile of highgrade scrap.\"\n\n\n \"What did you do then?\"\n\n\n Madsen shouldered his knapsack and smiled condescendingly.\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Mr. Fix-it. We didn't have to. Since I seem to have\n accidentally stumbled on something new and strange to you, add this to\n your files. It's usual on cartographic trips of any length, for one\n ship to go out, while another stays at a temporary base, and keeps in\n constant directional radio contact. If anything happens, they come\n a-running. Makes it fine for us uninformed common people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.\n\n\n As they made southing, the dull sun crept higher in the sky by\n infinitesimal degrees. Now the going became tougher. Patches of evil\n looking muskeg began to appear in the scrub, and the stunted trees\n themselves gradually gave way to six foot ferns. There were occasional\n signs that some creature had been foraging on the lush growth. When\n they found fresh tracks in the soft footing, Morley unlimbered the\n rifle, and the two men trod more softly. By that time either would have\n cheerfully made a meal on one of the miniature flying dragons, alive\n and kicking, and the thought of a juicy steak from some local herbivore\n was as soul stirring as the sight of Mecca to a true believer.\n\n\n Both men whirled at a sudden crashing on their left. Something like a\n large splay footed kangaroo broke cover, and went loping away, clearing\n the fern tops at every bound. In one motion Morley whipped up the\n rifle and fired. There was an earsplitting report, the leaper kept\n right on going, under forced draught, and the two castaways stared in\n consternation at a rifle that resembled a bundle of metallic macaroni\n more than it did a firearm.\n\n\n Madsen spoke first. \"You probably got some mud in the barrel when we\n stopped last time,\" he accused. \"Look at us now.\"\n\n\n Morley started to mumble an apology, but Madsen cut him short. \"Look at\n us now,\" he repeated, with all stops out. \"It was bad before, now it's\n practically hopeless. Our only long range gun! What do we do now if we\n do find game—dig pits for it?\"\n\n\n If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.\n\n\n The slope on which they rested was tufted with small bushes. One\n particular type with narrow dark green leaves bore clusters of fruit\n like small plums, which Madsen eyed speculatively.\n\n\n \"Do we risk it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Might as well.\"\n\n\n Morley was completely unaware that he had just accepted the\n responsibility for making a decision.\n\n\n \"We can't afford not to risk it,\" he said, adding, with little show of\n enthusiasm, \"I'll be the guinea pig.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, chum,\" Madsen countered. \"We'll match for it.\"\n\n\n They matched and Morley called it wrong. He plucked a sample of the\n fruit and stood regarding it like some bewhiskered Little Jack Horner.\n Finally he broke the thin skin with his thumbnail and gingerly conveyed\n a couple of drops of juice to his tongue. The taste was simultaneously\n oily and faintly sweet, and after a short wait he essayed a fair\n sized bite. Madsen was about to follow suit, when Morley motioned him\n to wait. The next second he was rolling on the ground, coughing and\n choking, while Madsen tried grimly to feed him water from a canteen.\n\n\n It was no use. The throat tissues became swollen and inflamed in\n seconds, to the point of agony, and swallowing was totally impossible.\n To this was shortly added an overpowering nausea. When the retching\n finally stopped, Morley tried to speak, but in vain. Even the effort\n meant waves of pain.\n\n\n Madsen watched helplessly, and when the spasms of choking finally\n stopped, spoke gently.\n\n\n \"We'll be camping right here for a while, looks like. Try to get some\n sleep if it slacks off any. You'll be okay in a while.\"\n\n\n His doubts were hidden, and Morley thanked him with his eyes.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Morley laments the loss of a \"normal\" existence.  He feels he is the only person to blame for his current predicament.  What explanation does he seem to settle on for the decision that has put him in the position he is currently in?", "question_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA_1", "options": ["He was forced by his parents to leave his home.", "He felt compelled to follow in the footsteps of other family members.  ", "He was following a girl.", "He went through a spell where he was not behaving like himself, and he took the plunge."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Morley and Madsen contrast", "question_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA_2", "options": ["In attitude.", "All of the above", "In appearance.", "In intelligence level."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The fact that Morley compares the situation he finds himself in with either waking Madsen or land the ship below to Scylla and Charybdis lets the reader know that ", "question_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA_3", "options": ["Madsen does not like to be woken from his naps.", "Morley is weak in many ways, and he shows it right away.", "The landing is something that Morely wants to do on his own to prove himself as a competent pilot.", "Morley doesn't know which of the two options is going to be more uncomfortable to deal with."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How can Morely be described?", "question_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA_4", "options": ["He is just above average intelligence, and he enjoys letting others be in charge in any given situation.", "He enjoys showing everyone he is smarter than them.", "He is a brave young man and misses his family.", "He has a lot of initiative, and he is proud of his work."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Morely is best known for what type of knowledge?", "question_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA_5", "options": ["General knowledge that will always come in helpful in a pinch.", "He is simply \"books smart\" with no knowledge of anything in the \"real world.\"", "He typically knows more than he lets on about all subjects, but he cannot let others know.", "Useless information that doesn't always serve as helpful."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "While it is evident that Madsen and Morely are not fond of one another, how do they deal with it differently?", "question_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA_6", "options": ["Morely is not bothered by Madsen at all.", "Madsen is not bothered by Morely at all.", "Morely is very boisterous about his disdain for Madsen.", "Madsen is very boisterous about his disdain for Morely."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are the duos only hopes for survival?", "question_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA_7", "options": ["None of the above are threats.", "They must make it to the Distress Depots.", "Both A and B.", "They must survive the dangerous wildlife."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When faced with a serious situation, Morely's brain becomes", "question_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA_8", "options": ["Useless.  He cannot function under pressure.", "Reliant on others to help him come up with ideas.", "There is no change.  He is a very static character.", "Almost like a computer where he can remember exactly what he learned."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Of the two main characters, who changes the most throughout the story and why?", "question_unique_id": "63836_ICV8XAHA_9", "options": ["Madsen changes the most because he actually begins to show human kindness towards Morley, and he starts to care about him.", "Morely changes the most because he allows his depth of knowledge to put the two in a very precarious situation.", "Morely changes the most because he becomes courageous, and he takes charge of the situation.", "Madsen changes the most because he becomes very fearful of the situation, and he lets it show."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/8/3/63836//63836-h//63836-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62997", "set_unique_id": "62997_BQ64U7M3", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Saboteur of Space", "year": 1959, "author": "Abernathy, Robert", "topic": "Adventure stories; PS; Science fiction; Space ships -- Fiction", "article": "Saboteur of Space\nBy ROBERT ABERNATHY\nFresh power was coming to Earth, energy\n\n which would bring life to a dying planet.\n\n Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly\n\n rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns\n\n in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen\n\n of fate—and even the winner would lose.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Spring 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nRyd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and\n watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The\n shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his\n right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a\n ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n\n\n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so\n overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the\n almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing\n darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming\n minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi\n Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted\n up—draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining\n them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819,\n relief was in sight.\n\n\n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to\n shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis'\n dive.\n\n\n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were\n asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis'\n which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen,\n these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For\n Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had\n been built to be the power center of North America.\n\n\n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged\n himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone\n recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something\n else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with\n surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n\n\n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer\n and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was\n heartened.\n\n\n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his\n back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so\n that his jowls quivered.\n\n\n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n\n\n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it\n convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you\n setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since—\"\n\n\n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship\n that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars—the\n escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming\n in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his\n shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again.\n Jobs for all the bums in this town—even for you.\"\n\n\n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear\n his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again,\n huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio\n man—no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit\n of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and\n then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n\n\n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on\n his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\nRyd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any\n plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody\n he had ever known—an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a\n beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for\n the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the\n face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and\n almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray\n cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n\n\n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n\n\n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage\n floated to the top by alcohol.\n\n\n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself.\n He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and\n distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n\n\n \"\nHuh?\nWhy, yeh—I guess so—\"\n\n\n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his\n daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish\n crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made\n frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger\n fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out,\n past the blue-and-gold-lit\nmeloderge\nthat was softly pouring out its\n endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n\n\n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on\n them. They kept walking—so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath,\n long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n\n\n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n \"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n\n\n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If\n you're a cop, say so!\"\n\n\n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a\n chance. For a come-back, Ryd—a chance to live again.... My name—you\n can call me Mury.\"\n\n\n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the\n tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with\n his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his\n eyes.\n\n\n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n\n\n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n\n\n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n\n\n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow\n shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn\n good one, too—I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the\n physique for Mars—I might just have made it\nthen\n, but I thought the\n plant was going to open again and—\"\n\n\n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning\n actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine.\n And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its\n full economic independence—and domination. For power is—power; and\n there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two\n in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n\n\n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the\n Power Company of North America—the main plant by Dynamopolis itself,\n that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down\n outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n\n\n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in\n this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few\n men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn\n them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't\n have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n\n\n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n\n\n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old\n kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\nAll at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him\n squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far\n from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet\n Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile\n twisted Mury's thin lips.\n\n\n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd—you mean nothing at all to me as an\n individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am\n working—the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and\n sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after\n they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered\n their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to\n be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor\n capitulate frankly to him.\"\n\n\n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such\n ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are\n you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n\n\n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian\n cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said\n simply, \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had\n heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The\n power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in\n the arm—no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis.\n It will turn the wheels and light the cities and—\"\n\n\n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up\n slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't\n you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n\n\n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a\n passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n\n\n \"The power shell is aid, yes—but with what a price! It's the thirty\n pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have\n sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and\n vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable\n conflict, they're selling us out—making Earth, the first home of man,\n a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great\n Martian land-owners?\nDo you?\n\" He paused out of breath; then finished\n venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper\n than robots—cheap as\nslaves\n!\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you\n want\nme\nto do about it?\"\n\n\n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was\n once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're\n going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n\n\n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n \"What's that mean?\"\n\n\n \"The power shell—isn't coming in as planned.\"\n\n\n \"You can't do that.\"\n\n\n \"\nWe\ncan,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there\n are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n\n\n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing\n certainly—if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by\n this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as\nWe\nnever took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing,\n desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and\n panclasm—that was\nWe\n.\n\n\n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with\n an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the\n monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to\n lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n\n\n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with\n which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they\n had come.\n\n\n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his\n volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to\n placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever\n happened....\n\n\n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and\n whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n\n\n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the\n gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he\n pointed as Ryd had known he would—toward where a pale man-made dawn\n seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\nII\n\n\n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell\n upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had\n killed the guard.\n\n\n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky\n moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to\n drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the\n long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and\n servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a\n little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now.\n He was caught in the machinery.\n\n\n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing\n the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short\n wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown\n the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State\n order had grounded all fliers in America.\n\n\n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've\n brought you this far—you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n\n\n The rest of the way.\n\n\n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous\n exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the\n guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air,\n shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's\n uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as\n he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons\n to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol,\n powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong\n fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into\n the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n\n\n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry\n wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a\n stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three\n minutes—when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of\n Dynamopolis, aboard the towship\nShahrazad\n.\"\n\n\n For a moment Ryd felt relief—he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred\n of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage\n the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long,\n low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship\n would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n\n\n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light\n scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands\n and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light.\n He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a\n small, disused metal door.\nRyd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save\n for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It\n seemed to be crying:\nrun, run\n—but he remembered the power that knew\n how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n\n\n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside,\n and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The\n same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the\n air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the\n long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\nIt was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing\n walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the\n ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control\n cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film\n of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of\n the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal\n door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway\n down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and\n launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n\n\n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his\n long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence,\n he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n\n\n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to\n the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many\n lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights\n shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long\n runways—no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis'\n glory—stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful\n of odd ships—mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had\n berthed—huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by\n the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n\n\n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of\n protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport.\n Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed\n buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must\n mean safety for them.\n\n\n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching\n for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once\n inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough.\n Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last,\n inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n\n\n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the\n midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies,\n their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two\n officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet.\n Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance—watched boredly\n enough.\n\n\n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number\n Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive\n magnets—the\nShahrazad\n, panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of\n steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out\n of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be\n sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be\n aboard the\nShahrazad\nwhen she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes\n shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there\n beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with\n blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters.\n It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving\n again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding\n its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and\n immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n\n\n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n \"Martian soldier robots!\"\n\n\n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in\n weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For\n God's sake, take it easy.\"\n\n\n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going—out into space?\"\n\n\n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\nThe official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat\n had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought\n to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed\n guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards\n from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was—as it came\n about—just a little too late.\n\n\n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving\n pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing\n uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle\n in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between\n the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other\n in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the\nShahrazad's\nairlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables\n attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety\n by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n\n\n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and\n vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the\n topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face,\n but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n\n\n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n\n\n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure\n silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all\n aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be—\"\n\n\n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted\n the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the\n delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused,\n sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I\n suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n\n\n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century\n bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod\n with an appearance of brusqueness.\n\n\n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the\n pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive\n instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as\n he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun\n no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent,\n pointing at its licensed owner.\n\n\n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the\n while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard\n with us.\"\n\n\n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed\n civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the\n ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both\n hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway—for he was still very\n sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n\n\n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved\n wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable\n countersunk mirror of metal.\n\n\n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out\n the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously\n tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his\n fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on\n the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n\n\n Nothing happened.\n\n\n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up,\n the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\nMury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said.\n Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and\n the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are\n on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the\n switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central\n control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n\n\n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch\n he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets.\n Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as\n he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n\n\n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n\n\n Ryd backed—the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own\n nervous gaze—and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal\n pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering\n somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n\n\n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning,\n back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled\n to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a\n crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing\n lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch\n outside.\n\n\n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant,\n the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a\n scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite\n lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n\n\n \"You damned clumsy little fool—\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then,\n while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with\n blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two\n quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the\n starboard airlock.\n\n\n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to\n the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But\n the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped\n in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in\n an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned\n guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his\n little cell of steel.\n\n\n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond,\n youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with\n an astrogator's triangled stars which made him\nex officio\nthe brains\n of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship—it can't be done any more.\"\n\n\n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half\n of it. But—you will. I'll need you. As for your friends—\" The gun\n muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of\n those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n\n\n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before\n they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from\n themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor;\n the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting\n still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n\n\n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n\n\n \"What do\nyou\nthink?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship\n into space. On schedule and on course—to meet the power shell.\" The\n flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you—what's your name?\"\n\n\n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n\n\n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n\n\n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking\n goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he\n said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\nIII\nShahrazad\ndrove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly\n to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped\n cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its\n banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n\n\n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness\n draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into\n emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the\n maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed\n him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces\n and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and\n up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities—and Ryd had lost\n every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under\n the towship's keel.\n\n\n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the\n control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights\n confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the\n control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect\n hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning\n gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the\n engines.\n\n\n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n \"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't\n mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in\n the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved\n hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the\n sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n\n\n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his\n head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He\n ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n\n\n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess,\n still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I\n understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he\n is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he\n is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of\n duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of\n the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n\n\n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him\n through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights\n burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous\n tracks.\n\n\n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly,\n he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame\n seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of\n light.\n\n\n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n\n\n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n\n\n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n\n\n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that\n that's the liner\nAlborak\n, out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission\n for Mars.\"\n\n\n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you\n suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that\n drive.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice\n was raw and unsteady.\n\n\n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for\n us—will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "At the time of the story's setting, what has happened to life on Earth?", "question_unique_id": "62997_BQ64U7M3_1", "options": ["Mars is now the epicenter of the universe.", "The climate has changed.", "Earth is no longer in power.", "All of the above."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Ryd Randl", "question_unique_id": "62997_BQ64U7M3_2", "options": ["Is a very respected citizen due to powerful occupation.", "Has been plotting the events of the current evening for a significant amount of time.", "Knows that his fate is to die fighting for his beliefs.", "Lives on the fringe of society, and is incredibly apathetic and bitter."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Burshis is incredibly optimistic because", "question_unique_id": "62997_BQ64U7M3_3", "options": ["He knows that Mury is going to save the planet.", "He believes that the power is about to be restored to the planet.", "He knows that Ryd is going to save the planet.", "He knows that the war is about to begin and he will once again be at peace."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are Ryd's thoughts about working and having a job?", "question_unique_id": "62997_BQ64U7M3_4", "options": ["He knows that everyone must work to earn their keep.", "He had one in the past, it was ripped from him, and he is done with the working life.", "He believes that hard work is the only way to restore balance to the world.", "He can take it or leave it, but he does enjoy having money to drink."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "For a moment, why does Ryd open up to Mury?", "question_unique_id": "62997_BQ64U7M3_5", "options": ["Ryd and Mury are friends from the past, and Ryd wants to tell Mury about things he has missed out on in Ryd's life.", "Ryd is completely drunk and cannot stop talking.", "He believes that Mury is a true ally in the war that they are to face together.", "Ryd believes Mury understands Ryd's disdain for losing his job."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How do the pair plan to infiltrate the ship?", "question_unique_id": "62997_BQ64U7M3_6", "options": ["Ryd is going to bring Mury on as a prisoner.", "Mury is going to bring Ryd on as a prisoner.", "Mury is going to kill the crew and take the ship over.", "Ryd is going to kill the crew and take the ship over."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The irony considering Ryd's position in the plan is", "question_unique_id": "62997_BQ64U7M3_7", "options": ["He agrees to do it for money, but he is already wealthy.", "He agrees to do it for money, but he will never be able to spend it.", "There is no irony in it at all.", "He saves a planet he will never see again."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/9/9/62997//62997-h//62997-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62580", "set_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Quest's End", "year": 1950, "author": "Wells, Basil", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Earth (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "QUEST'S END\nBy BASIL WELLS\nThig's quest was not yet finished, for the Hordes\n\n of Ortha had sent another ship across the Void.\n\n Only he could halt Earth's destruction—with\n\n a weapon that was but a thought in his mind.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Spring 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"I was a fool,\" gritted Thig. His eye crowded the eyepiece of the\n compact metal case on the table before him. The window was open and\n the ugly metal snout of the instrument pointed toward the eastern\n horizon. \"I should have expected the men of Ortha to send a second\n expedition to Earth!\"\n\n\n Thig's compact body stiffened angrily. He came to his feet, his gaze\n roaming about the familiar disorder of the little boathouse. Here he\n came daily to write the lusty sagas of the Old West that had made the\n name of Lewis Terry familiar to millions of readers. Here beside the\n pot-bellied iron stove with the single cracked lid, he had worked\n long hours, striving vainly to forget that he was an alien being from\n another distant world.\n\n\n Curiosity, a trait that no other Orthan had possessed for many\n thousands of years, had impelled him to construct a small, but\n powerful, etherscope, and trace the fate of the space ship he had\n deserted. It had been built of odds and ends of material at night, but\n it opened the heavens before him. He saw planets and suns, countless\n light years distant many of them, and eventually he found Ortha—in\n time to see the space ship being boarded out in space by patrolling\n Hordemen, and quickly destroyed. They were taking no chances on the\n spread of the contagion from Earth among the Orthans.\n\n\n For the good of the Horde, the alien that was Lewis Terry knew, the\n patrolmen would transmit the information they received, and then\n destroy themselves. In their narrow philosophy of life only the Horde\n mattered. He had been like that when his name was Thig, and the\n memories of Lewis Terry were not yet part of his life.\n\n\n And now another space ship was coming to Earth, coming to check on\n the findings of that earlier ill-fated expedition, and he alone could\n checkmate them!... If he had only kept watch on Ortha!\n\n\n He had two months, possibly a few days more than that, in which to\n destroy this second expedition that meant conquest and certain death\n for all Earth's warring millions! Two months to prepare!\n\n\n For the good of Ellen and the children, the children of the dead man\n whose identity he had stolen, he must succeed. The lusty primitives of\n this rich green world must never be replaced by the disciplined robot\n race that was the Horde.\n\n\n He covered his typewriter. The lock snapped with finality as he turned\n the key. He flexed the muscles of great arms, much too powerful for\n the meek appearance of the writer they were, and the blood beat hot\n through his squat body.\n\n\n \"You're staying locked,\" he said slowly, \"until the last Hordeman is\n wiped from the face of Earth.\" He smiled grimly as he reflected that\n his hero was trapped atop a waterless butte with a horde of Apaches\n howling below.\n\n\n \"Hope you can stick it out for eight or nine weeks without water,\n Brazos,\" he said to the typed pages he was leaving.\nThe life boat lifted sluggishly from the sands that had covered it for\n two years. Thig cleared each jet carefully, and then, finding them\n unharmed, he bored high into the stratosphere. Behind him the submarine\n patrol and the air-raid posts went mildly insane. They knew that some\n strange craft had roared up from the beach on Long Island, but they\n were never to know what it was.\n\n\n Ellen, Lewis Terry's wife, clenched the short letter that her husband\n had pressed into her hand as he kissed her earlier that evening. She\n did not know that he was really Thig, nor did the letter reveal that\n fact. If he was to die, he would die Lewis Terry. The letter told her\n simply that he must go away on a secret mission for several months. She\n understood now why the unshed tears had been bright in his eyes.\n\n\n Over the United States Thig blasted the life boat, and across the\n Pacific. He was getting as far from Long Island as he could, and one of\n his plans to destroy the Orthans called for many tons of explosives.\n Explosives, he told himself grimly, that the yellow men would furnish.\n\n\n He landed at last on a rocky strip of island that was outside the\n combat zone, and there commenced to lay out his trap. It would take\n many tons of explosives to penetrate the tough hull of the space ship\n he knew, but the ship must be destroyed. He had considered building\n a huge heat blaster, but the time was too limited and he knew how\n powerful were the protective shells of a space ship's skin.\n\n\n Gadgets he had considered; tricks that might gain for him entry into\n the ship where he could turn his own decomposition blaster on his\n brothers—all the tricks of the writing trade had passed muster before\n his mind's eye—but inevitably he returned to the decision that\n explosives gave the only certain means of destruction.\n\n\n There was an island not far from his landing place where the men with\n yellow skins had stored a great quantity of munitions and supplies. The\n fighting front was far to the East and at night no great precautions\n were taken. Any approaching fleet of bombers or surface ships would\n be detected long before they could reach this island. Nothing but\n submarines.\n\n\n Thig's space ship moved almost silently through the water offshore.\n The design of the ship that permitted no air to escape now permitted\n no water to enter. For many of the planets that Ortha claimed for her\n own possessed gaseous envelopes that were denser than water, and the\n Horde's ships were equipped to meet those conditions.\n\n\n Softly the bow of the little craft nosed up on the beach inside the\n harbor, and from its single lock stepped Thig. Naked he was now, as\n were all Hordemen, and from the harness of flexible plastic about his\n body there depended a decomposition blaster and an old butcher knife\n that he had whetted to razor sharpness.\n\n\n \"You hear something?\" asked one of the two guards.\n\n\n \"It was the waves,\" his comrade said, listening for a moment.\n\n\n \"In the darkness I can see nothing,\" grumbled the first Jap. \"Perhaps\n the Marines are landing.\"\n\n\n \"Ho,\" laughed the other guard, \"the Marines are thousands of miles\n away. They cannot stand against the power of our Emperor.\"\n\n\n \"It has been more than a year,\" said the fearful one, \"and we have not\n yet conquered all of California. I have heard that a few Marines are\n still hiding in the Solomons.\"\n\n\n \"The radio does not tell you that,\" scoffed the guard. \"We have sunk\n every American boat. There are no more American airplanes in the\n Pacific. Soon we will all move to America and have the white barbarians\n to wait upon us.\"\n\n\n \"Was that a Japanese bomber yesterday?\" The man's rifle thunked lightly\n against wood. \"There were circles on its wings.\"\n\n\n \"There may be a few left,\" was the excuse of the other guard. \"Now we\n must cease talking and walk our posts.\"\n\n\n Now Thig could make out the shapes of the guards as they went their\n way. One of them, the short, thick yellow man was coming slowly toward\n the tree that sheltered Thig. Perhaps he was dreaming of the fertile\n valleys of America, where the white-skinned men and women would be his\n servants, as he walked along.\n\n\n Abruptly great fingers clamped around his throat, and he felt the sting\n of something that slammed against his chest. His feet scuffed at the\n soil, and then a great roaring filled his ears.\n\n\n Thig eased the limp body to the earth. The other slim guard had halted,\n his nervously acute ears picking up some vague sound.\n\n\n \"What—what was that?\" he called to his comrade.\n\n\n Thig eased his blaster from its holster. In a moment the guard would\n arouse the other members of the garrison. The distance was too great\n for the knife—the man would be able to fire his rifle before he\n reached him.\n\n\n The weapon's invisible rays slammed the Jap's body backward. Even as he\n fell the flesh was falling, rotted by the blaster's swift decomposing\n action, from the man's bones. A moment later only the crumbling bones\n of a skeleton remained of what had been a soldier.\n\n\n He loaded the little ship to its capacity with explosives from the\n stores on the island, and before he left he touched a match to the\n buildings. Then he blasted off, with the water clearing explosively\n from his spacer's overloaded jets to arouse the sleeping warriors of\n the Mikado.\nAfter that first foray Thig raided many an outlying island, and looted\n the sunken transports that lay in the shallowed water between some of\n the captured islands. He mounted a heavy machine gun in the nose of his\n agile little craft, and many a yellow man never returned to his home\n landing field. By days he hid near his objectives, in the jungle or the\n shallow water in the shadows of a jutting coral reef, and by night he\n moved like a giant crab, in his space suit, among the sunken ships.\n\n\n His stores of explosives he concealed in a great ring around the heart\n of the island—the only practical landing spot for the space cruiser,\n already slackening its terrific drive as it passed Pluto. How many tons\n of the deadly material he had collected he could not tell, but there\n was already sufficient to blow the island and everything upon it into\n oblivion.\n\n\n Time was growing short. Less than a day remained in which to bait the\n trap with his own ship for bait. The cruiser's detectors would pick\n up the\ntrylerium's\ncharacteristic radiations from the pitted walls\n of his rocket jets—the blasting jets of all space ships were made of\ntrylerium\n—and they would land nearby.\n\n\n That he would be blown up, too, in the explosion did not matter\n greatly, thought Thig. Ellen, the wife of the man he had helped kill,\n and the children, would be safe. Earth could go on in its own bloody\n blundering way to a glorious future.\n\n\n But first he must bring back another load, the final link in the deadly\n ring about the landing place. Morning was at hand. He would have to\n work fast. He left the load where it lay and blasted off.\n\n\n The great bomber, with the circles painted on its wings, passed over\n the little island. It returned. The pilot shouted and bombs intended\n for a target several hundred miles to the south took their final plunge\n earthward.\n\n\n The ship was bullet-scarred—off its course—and since this was\n Japanese-dominated water his mistake was only natural. He took the\n caches of munitions for enemy supply dumps.\n\n\n It was his last mistake. The island dissolved into splintered\n fragments, and with it went the bomber and its brave crew.\nThig awaited the coming of the ship from Ortha on another island. He\n had accepted the destruction of his long weeks of planning with the\n fatalism that the Horde had taught him. Since one plan had fallen\n through he must use another. He would persuade the Orthans that he\n wanted to return to his own people, and once inside, with a little\n good fortune, he might be able to destroy them. He had killed his two\n fellows on the first expedition, but already his fertile imagination\n had invented a logical explanation of his presence on Earth.\n\n\n As the great ship swung down past Luna his radiophone came into play.\n Their detectors might pick up his weak signals at this distance even\n though they would have no reason to expect an Orthan ship here on\n Earth. His whole plan was based on the strategy of luring them here\n before they could start a thorough exploration of Earth.\n\n\n Time went by swiftly, too swiftly, for there was no answer from the\n ship. He thought of taking off to meet them, but already the ship must\n be screaming down through the upper atmosphere. He shouted into the\n transmitter.\n\n\n A grating sound came from the receiver. A hollow sound of contact that\n he sensed rather than heard. A cold emotionless voice spoke in the\n strangely unfamiliar language of the Horde.\n\n\n \"Who is calling the ship from Planet 72-P-3?\" it demanded.\n\n\n \"A fellow Hordeman from Ortha,\" replied Thig hurriedly. \"I escaped from\n the space cruiser commanded by Torp, after madness claimed him. He\n struck down Kam first, and then attacked me. After he left me for dead,\n I took a lifeboat and escaped.\"\n\n\n \"You are Thig?\" said the even voice of the man from Ortha.\n\n\n \"That is right,\" acknowledged the other.\n\n\n \"Urol, commanding the second expeditionary flight to Sector 5-Z,\" the\n Hordeman identified himself. \"With me are three others: Brud, Zolg, and\n Turb.\"\n\n\n \"Zolg and Turb I know,\" said Thig. \"We trained together.\"\n\n\n \"Our detectors show that your location is in the largest body of water,\n near the eastern shore of the principal land mass of Planet 72-P-3. Is\n that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Right. There is room to berth five like yours upon this uninhabited\n island. Here we will be safe from the Mad Ones.\"\n\n\n Thig could almost see the Hordeman's smooth brow furrow with the\n unaccustomed task of thinking. The majority of the Horde's thinking was\n automatic, seldom did an alien thought intrude upon their formulized\n system of life. He smiled tautly—another gift from the dead man whose\n memories he had robbed was that of humor—as he listened for Urol's\n answer. There could be only one logical explanation for Thig's words.\n And Urol, like all the Hordemen, was a coldly logical being.\n\n\n \"There is madness on this world then?\" Urol asked.\n\n\n \"That is right.\" Thig drew upon the story-telling genius of Terry as he\n related the carefully plotted story that would permit him entrance to\n the Orthan ship. They must believe him....\n\n\n \"There is madness on this world, indeed,\" he went on, after a moment,\n \"but it did not originate here. Kam and Torp, when they returned from\n the watery planet, Planet 72-P-2, brought back the virus of madness\n with them. Both of them were infected, and their brief stay on this\n planet served to spread the disease here also.\n\n\n \"All over Earth, or as we call it, 72-P-3, the madness is spreading.\n Where there was peace and plenty there is now war and starvation. Most\n of this sub-human animal race will be wiped out before this madness has\n run its course.\"\n\n\n \"Yet you escaped its ravages,\" Urol said. \"Have you discovered how to\n control this madness?\"\n\n\n \"But I did not escape,\" Thig told him. \"For many days after I returned\n to Earth I was insane. Torp and Kam had infected me as well. But I am\n strong, and I threw off the disease. At intervals it recurs but I strap\n myself down so I cannot harm myself before the madness passes.\"\n\n\n \"By the Law of the Horde,\" said Urol slowly, \"you should be destroyed\n if the disease is incurable.\"\n\n\n \"I know. I feared that another expedition would come and carry the\n madness back to the Horde. I kept myself alive to warn you. I will show\n you the ravages of the disease, and then destroy myself.\"\n\n\n \"It is good,\" agreed Urol. \"We are preparing to land now.\"\n\n\n The communication link snapped between them. Above the island a tiny\n black speck swelled until it became a vast grubby bulk of metal\n supported by flaring jets of gaseous fuel. The thick ship slowed its\n sheer drop, and with a final burst of fire from blackened jets, came to\n rest.\n\n\n Thig looked to his decomposition blaster to see that it was thoroughly\n charged. This was perhaps the hundredth time he had examined his\n weapon. He chuckled at the ease with which the leader of the mother\n planet's ship had been tricked into believing his fantastic tale. All\n that remained now was to gain admission into the space ship.\n\n\n He left his own little life boat and walked toward the space cruiser.\n He reached the outer lock and attempted to open it. It was stuck. He\n tugged futilely at the pitted metal of the controls, and after a moment\n hammered at the door with a lump of volcanic rock.\n\n\n A speaker from just inside the door broke in upon his labor. He dropped\n the rock and listened.\n\n\n \"Why do you attack the door?\" it asked.\n\n\n \"The lock is stuck,\" answered Thig.\n\n\n \"No,\" the Hordeman's voice said, \"the lock is not stuck. It is sealed\n against the possibility of contamination from the atmosphere of 72-P-3.\"\n\n\n \"I cannot join you?\" asked Thig as calmly as he could. Despair\n contracted his vitals as he saw this latest plan go glimmering.\n\n\n \"Naturally not!\" The speaker's voice showed as much surprise as it\n was possible for an Orthan to display. \"We can take no chances on the\n madness infecting any of us before we carry this information back to\n Ortha.\"\n\n\n \"I will tell you as much as I know,\" said Thig. \"It is fortunate that I\n am outside the ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" agreed the voice. \"Better that one die instead of four. The\n resources of the Horde must be conserved.\"\nAll through that first night after the space ship landed beside his\n little life boat, Thig lay on his sleeping deck trying to work out\n another method to overcome the four Hordemen inside their sturdy\n cruiser.\n\n\n Explosives were out; he had lost his opportunity to blast the great\n ship into shards when the Allied bomber had mistaken them for Japanese\n supplies. Trickery that would permit him to gain entrance was negated\n by the sealed ports and locks of the space cruiser. He could not blast\n an opening through the ship's skin with his decomposition blaster—it\n was designed to destroy only flesh or vegetable matter.\n\n\n Nor could he lure a Japanese or Allied force of bombers to attack the\n Orthan ship. The weapons of the space cruiser would destroy such\n crude-winged mechanisms as might be thrown against them, and her own\n hull could not be damaged save by the most concentrated surprise\n attack. He knew how the Earthmen would work—a cautious bomber or two\n could attack first, and then, too late, a swarm of fighting planes and\n bombers would follow.\n\n\n He could not lure brave Allied fliers to their death in any such\n fashion, nor did he think that the yellow airmen could cause any\n worth-while damage—not that he cared how many of them were destroyed!\n He might be an alien being from another world, but there was now no\n more loyal American than Thig. He had permitted the identity of Lewis\n Terry to overcome his own entirely.\n\n\n No, he would have to solve this problem by himself. Upon Thig, and Thig\n alone, rested the future of the two billions of mankind. If the Horde\n saw through his fanciful story about the disease that was carried from\n Venus in the bodies of Kam and Torp, Earth would soon be overrun by the\n Horde. The Horde was unimaginative and logical in all that it did, a\n robot race of super ant-beings—and they would destroy all the human\n race to prevent any future revolt.\n\n\n But if he could somehow thwart them; destroy this expedition, or send\n back another mute shipload of dead bodies as he had already done, Earth\n might not be visited again for several centuries. And she would be\n ready then, with a fully developed science of her own, to beat off any\n invasion from Ortha.\n\n\n He would have to play out the game as he had started it, until an\n opportunity came to strike, and then he would strike hard. He went over\n the story he had already told the Orthans, testing it for weak points\n that might give him the lie, and at last he was satisfied. In no way he\n had offended logic—the Great War that had spread across Earth since he\n first arrived would but serve to corroborate his story.\n\n\n With morning the explosion of bombs brought Thig to his feet. He\n cursed as he saw three airplanes circling overhead. They had come to\n investigate the mighty explosion that had sent a tidal wave rolling\n over the nearby atolls probably, but this was going to make it awkward\n for Thig to finish his task.\n\n\n The ships were Japanese light bombers he saw. They must have seen the\n circles that he had painted upon his tiny space ship, and mistaken the\n space cruiser for a larger Allied ship of some new design.\n\n\n His receiver crackled as he answered the curt demands of Urol.\n\n\n \"They are the Mad Ones,\" Thig said. \"Their madness causes them to fight\n among themselves. They drop their puny explosives foolishly upon the\n homes of other human cattle, taking great pleasure in wanton slaughter.\"\n\n\n \"But why do they attack us?\" asked Urol. \"Our ship cannot be harmed by\n their containers of expanding gases!\"\n\n\n \"It is because they are insane, their minds diseased hopelessly.\" Thig\n smiled to himself. \"I will go up to meet them, and destroy them with\n one of their own weapons.\"\n\n\n \"That is unnecessary,\" said Urol, \"our own armament....\"\nThig snapped off the receiver. He sprang to the controls, and sent the\n little ship rocketing skyward. He patted the heavy machine-gun that had\n been part of his loot from one of the sunken transports. It was mounted\n in the nose of his craft, and already it had knocked a score of Zeros\n and other Jap planes from the skies.\n\n\n He dove upon one of the crawling winged enemy ships. The gun chattered\n briefly, and smoke and flames curled back from the doomed plane's\n engine. One!\n\n\n Another airplane climbed clumsily up to meet this wingless metal arrow.\n His sights centered on the target. Abruptly the enemy ship was gone,\n whiffed away by the terrific invisible rays of the space cruiser's\n atomic batteries. Thig frowned. These Orthans!\nThig climbed. The remaining Jap ship did not attempt escape. Instead\n it dove straight upon its target. Down it went screaming, its wings\n ripping away from the fuselage with the battering of the air at this\n terrific speed, even as the atomic cannons blasted again and again. The\n space ship's guns handled awkwardly on the ground.\n\n\n Suddenly, the airplane disintegrated as an atomic bolt hit it squarely.\n The space ship ceased firing, and Thig slipped his ship back to earth.\n He clicked open his transmitter.\n\n\n \"You will be destroyed before we return to Ortha,\" said Urol. \"We\n cannot permit one of the Horde to live whose body and brain differ from\n the rest of us.\"\n\n\n \"That is right,\" agreed Thig. \"I should have killed myself before you\n came.\" He paused. \"I should not have tried to warn you.\"\n\n\n \"You are wrong again,\" Urol told him. \"This madness destroys your\n reason. You were right in living until we came, to warn us. Now we can\n warn the Horde that 72-P-3 will be unsafe for colonization for many\n years.\"\n\n\n Thig felt his lips twitch into a grin. Fortunate that these ships were\n not equipped with telescreens. His story had convinced the methodical,\n robot-like Orthans. If he could keep them from learning that there was\n actually no madness on Earth until he could contrive to destroy them.\n\n\n The next words of the commander of the space cruiser sounded\n thunder-loud in his ears, tumbling his plans into ruin.\n\n\n \"We will return to Ortha with our reports at once,\" said Urol.\nThig sat frozen in his seat for a long moment staring at the\n transmitter. If he could only be certain that the Horde would find no\n flaws in his story; that Earth would never know the destruction that\n the Horde would bring.\n\n\n And then he laughed. Fool! The Orthans were unimaginative as\n domesticated cattle. They were robotized animals, all but devoid of\n intelligence. He should have remembered sooner, for he had been one of\n the Horde before he stole the memories of an Earthman, and fell in love\n with the dead man's woman!\n\n\n Until he came to Earth, Thig had never known that there was such\n a thing as a lie. Among the men of Ortha there was no deceit or\n treachery. If they killed or destroyed, it was necessary. If they\n related any happening, however unimportant, it was painstakingly\n accurate. Imagination was a word that was meaningless among the\n disciplined billions of the Horde. They would not detect a lie for they\n would not recognize one! Earth was safe.\n\n\n \"That is good,\" he said. \"I will wait until you leave Earth, and then I\n will destroy the ship and myself.\"\n\n\n Over China they knifed, over the ruined cities and bomber fields, and\n down across Russia where vast armies locked in bloody combat. They saw\n here again great cities that were ravaged by war. Higher they climbed\n above the ocean, until, above North America, Thig dropped behind the\n great cruiser.\n\n\n He called the commander of the space cruiser then.\n\n\n \"My fuel is almost exhausted,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Prepare to dive into the Earth,\" said Urol in his emotionless voice.\n \"We cannot waste the power of our ship to ray you. The senseless\n assaults of the madmen caused us to waste much of our power.\"\n\n\n \"I am leaving now,\" said Thig. \"May the Law of the Horde endure\n forever!\" And under his breath: \"on Ortha.\"\n\n\n Thig let the life boat drop away from the other ship. Slowly it fell at\n first, and then faster as gravity gripped it. Fifty miles the ship must\n fall before it smashed into the ground. By that time the cruiser would\n be already beyond the orbit of the moon, and all they would see would\n be the moment of impact.\n\n\n Friction was heating the metal skin of the ship slowly as it fell. Thig\n locked the controls; set the rocket relays for increasingly powerful\n thrusts of power, and waddled clumsily out through the lock into the\n frigid thin air of the stratosphere. He stepped out into emptiness.\n\n\n Inside the space suit it was warm, and the air was clean. When he had\n fallen a few miles farther he would open the glider wings, that were\n built into all Orthan suits instead of parachutes, and land on Long\n Island. But not until he was sheltered by the clouds from the view of\n the space cruiser.\n\n\n He was going back to Ellen and the children with the knowledge that\n Earth was saved from the Horde—saved by nothing more deadly than a lie!\n\n\n And the part of Thig's brain that was Lewis Terry was already busying\n itself with the plotting of a Western novel about the handcart\n pioneers.... Once he had rescued Brazos from that Apache-ringed mesa,\n he would get to work on it....\n", "questions": [{"question": "Thig spends time at his boathouse for what main purposes?", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_1", "options": ["Working on becoming more human.", "Write the horror stories he is famous for.", "Both a and c.", "Write the western novels he is known for."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What seems to be Thigs main motivation for not wanting the Horde to invade earth?", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_2", "options": ["He really is indifferent to whether the Horde comes or not.", "He is afraid that the Earth's armies with overtake the Horde, bringing an end to his race.", "He does not feel he has fulfilled his purpose on Earth just yet.", "He has grown to enjoy his human lifestyle, and he is not ready to give that up."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the fate of the earth if Thig cannot accompish his goals with the Horde?", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_3", "options": ["The Horde will destroy the atmosphere, making life impossible.", "The Horde will destroy the planet.", "Nothing will happen to the planet, but Thig will be a political prisoner.", "The earth will destroy itself."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Thig differ from others of his race?", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_4", "options": [" He is the only member of the Horde who actually has an emotional attachment to his race.", "He does not feel that the human race is worth saving.", "He has developed human emotions and qualities.  ", "He doesn't."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where does Thig draw inspiration for his plan?", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_5", "options": ["The distruction of Earth is his inspiration.", "He has no plan.", "He draws his inspiration from his human self.", "His wife is his inspiration."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happens to his wife's husband?", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_6", "options": ["Thig kills him to take over his life. ", "He is killed by the Horde.", "He dies from radiation.", "He leaves her to join the Horde."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In what way does Thig assimilate?", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_7", "options": ["He cares about humans.", "All of the above.", "He loves his wife.", "He embrases the life of a writer."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Thig get the Horde to trust him?", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_8", "options": ["He says that the Earth is the perfect place for them to live.", "He reports that Earthlings have a contagious disease.", "He says that he only stayed alive in order to save them.", "He tells the Horde that humans will destroy themselves."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Thig tell the Hoard he plans to do to himself?\n", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_9", "options": ["He is going to take revenge for the death of his brothers.", "He is going to fight the Horde.", "He is going to run away with his family.", "He will kill himself once he saves the Horde."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The way Thig addresses his plan is much like", "question_unique_id": "62580_FROVBV59_10", "options": ["A man who is trying to save those he loves above all.", "A person who is trying to save the Earth.", "A warrior of the Horde.", "A writer. He views the plan like a storyline."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/5/8/62580//62580-h//62580-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63932", "set_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Lost Tribes of Venus", "year": 1964, "author": "Fennel, Erik", "topic": "Venus (Planet) -- Fiction; Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Adventure stories", "article": "THE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\nBy ERIK FENNEL\nOn mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile\n \nswamp meets hostile sea ... there did\n \nBarry Barr—Earthman transmuted—swap\n \nhis Terran heritage for the deep dark\n \nwaters of Tana; for the strangely\n \nbeautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories May 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time\n coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The\n football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a\n relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close\n enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the\n idling drivers.\n\n\n It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was\n dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy\n of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused\n themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n\n\n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular\n driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent\n searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment\n before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n\n\n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering\n a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see\n again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started\n aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly\n that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.\n\n\n Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet\n room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was\n manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One\n by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n\n\n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable\n conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.\n Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was\n close behind him.\n\n\n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,\n hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had\n lost its usual ruddiness.\n\n\n Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in\n the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The\n line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter\n glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared\n minor. They had been lucky.\n\n\n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said\n meaningfully.\n\n\n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two\n hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to\n order his crew into action.\n\n\n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite\n Hind's shouted orders.\n\n\n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to\n the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he\n threw in the accelerator switch.\n\n\n The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing,\n and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n\n\n \"\nThere's metal in the field!\n\" His voice was high and unsteady.\nEveryone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material\n would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained\n and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n\n\n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n\n\n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n\n\n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space\n was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing\n gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never\n encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it\n except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies\n unpredictably altered.\n\n\n Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with\n a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration.\n But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small\n and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized\n gravitations.\n\n\n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a\n particularly unpleasant form of death.\n\n\n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n\n\n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were\n more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n\n\n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening\n in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in\n Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four\n unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the\n logical man.\n\n\n \"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient\n Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the\n indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and\n remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and\n unassigned personnel.\n\n\n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile\n quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried\n boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some\n of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body,\n built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power,\n balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his\n sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n\n\n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n\n\n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a\n sense of responsibility.\n\n\n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.\n\n\n For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But\n then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his\n hand.\n\n\n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees\n had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in\n fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But\n still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the\n brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus\n alive—\nThe blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking\n pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny\n figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified\n breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation\n to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the\n insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.\n\n\n Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch\n against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started\n cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task\n requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on\n the events that had brought him here.\n\n\n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma\n for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was\n perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been\n inherently poor.\n\n\n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step—to Mars. But men\n had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that\n had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.\n\n\n Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been\n well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round\n trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n\n\n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government\n and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled\n to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by\n specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien\n conditions.\n\n\n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to\n whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition.\n That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with\n colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.\n\n\n Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the\n experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions,\n he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus\n Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form\n was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study\n native Venusian materials.\n\n\n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the\n limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to\n rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle\n delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian\n materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n\n\n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of\n loneliness had come to an end.\n\n\n She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual\n despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment\n of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed\n emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone,\n and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded\n devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his\n insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n\n\n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the\n business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried\n a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to\n virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n\n\n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened\n to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly\n expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some\n factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.\n\n\n Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of\n rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and\n had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have\n himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n\n\n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with\n a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n\n\n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by\n inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but\n enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into\n stuttering action.\n\n\n Then it was done.\n\n\n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to\n start according to calculations.\nBarry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick\n Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.\n\n\n \"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n\n\n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job\n of work out there.\"\n\n\n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n\n\n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n\n\n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off\n watch a few minutes ago.\"\n\n\n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a\n handout.\"\n\n\n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside\n out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on\n him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness\n he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to\n breathe.\n\n\n He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around\n him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n\n\n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n\n\n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead.\n The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen\n trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress.\n Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable\n thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n\n\n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of\n exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for\n the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not\n necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was,\n felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.\n\n\n Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno\n himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created\n support of flame.\n\n\n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through\n crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it!\n Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n\n\n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled,\n steadied.\n\n\n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting\n with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n\n\n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n\n\n Venusian air poured in.\n\n\n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n\n\n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.\n\n\n It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!\n\n\n Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,\n extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few\n minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n\n\n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.\n Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one\n particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n\n\n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n\n\n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n\n\n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an\n expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he\n saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.\n\n\n By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply\n lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist\n in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a\n restraining hand on his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n\n\n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his\n patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water\n directly into his lungs.\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What\n are my chances? On the level.\"\n\n\n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing—not a\n damned solitary thing—I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n\n\n Barry lay still.\n\n\n \"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor\n continued, \"and you know as much—more about your condition than I do.\n If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of\n a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems\n to give you relief.\"\n\n\n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each\n side itched infuriatingly.\n\n\n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n\n\n \"Those things seem to be—\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I\n know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n\n\n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond\n shock.\n\n\n \"But there must be—\"\n\n\n Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched\n involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\nII\n\n\n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations\n had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr.\n Jensen had mentioned during a second visit—but for that to happen he\n must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n\n\n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine.\n Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n\n\n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n\n\n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n\n\n Nick nodded vigorously.\n\n\n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"\n\n\n Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.\n\n\n He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A\n power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the\n corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was\n ready.\n\n\n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped\n nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size\n that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that\n fell toward the metal floor.\n\n\n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n\n\n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n\n\n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window\n might invite disaster.\n\n\n A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The\n room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost\n liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling\n and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the\n scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water\n from the floor.\n\n\n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet\n from the short exposure.\n\n\n It was abnormal.\n\n\n But so was Barry Barr.\n\n\n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some\n of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in\n sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.\n\n\n Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though\n she were with him—her face with the exotic high cheek-bones—her\n eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair—lips that\n seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to\n fulfil—her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy\n from some venturesome Irishman—her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n\n\n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came\n in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since\n Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid\n atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.\n\n\n But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At\n each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with\n a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come\n to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even\n inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the\n Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged\n animal.\n\n\n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening\n and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day\n progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of\n Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.\n\n\n Number One had bumbled in on visual, the pilot depending on the smeary\n images of infra-sight goggles. An inviting grassy plain had proved to\n be a layer of algae floating on quicksand. Frantically the crew had\n blasted down huge balsa-like marsh trees, cutting up the trunks with\n flame guns to make crude rafts. They had performed fantastic feats of\n strength and endurance but managed to salvage only half their equipment\n before the shining nose of One had vanished in the gurgling ooze.\n\n\n Lost in a steaming, stinking marsh teeming with alien creatures that\n slithered and crawled and swam and flew, blinded by the eternal fog,\n the crew had proved the rightness of their choice as pioneers. For\n weeks they had floundered across the deadly terrain until at last,\n beside a stagnant-looking slough that drained sluggishly into a warm,\n almost tideless sea a mile away, they had discovered an outcropping of\n rock. It was the only solid ground they had encountered.\n\n\n One man had died, his swamp suit pierced by a poisonous thorn, but the\n others had hand-hauled the radio beacon piece by piece and set it up\n in time to guide Two to a safe landing. Houses had been assembled, the\n secondary power units of the spaceship put to work, and the colony had\n established a tenuous foothold.\n\n\n Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing\n reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's\n struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended\n or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n\n\n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which\n by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank\n maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly\n jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away\n from base had been judged too hazardous.\n\n\n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive\n minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an\n adequate though monotonous food source.\n\n\n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog\n gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately\n they were harmless and timid.\n\n\n In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and\n fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance\n possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n\n\n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to\n minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the\n blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew\n with a vigor approaching fury.\n\n\n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored\n monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the\n brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that\n used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were\n apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made\n them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it,\n and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel\n the beasts.\n\n\n The most important question—that of the presence or absence of\n intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men\n reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near\n open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have\n established contact.\nBarry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had\n done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into\n membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and\n dark parallel lines appeared.\n\n\n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not\n stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had\n to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the\n weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still\n he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's\n failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n\n\n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming.\n Dorothy was leaning over him.\n\n\n \"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you\n do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all\n that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in\n her eyes.\n\n\n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted\n off—oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n\n\n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child.\n I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n \"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!\" he declared grimly.\n\n\n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt\n in her voice.\n\n\n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.\n\n\n \"I believe you, Barry.\"\n\n\n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days\n at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of\n civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had\n awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a\n woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n\n\n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous\n and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger\n simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging\n Robson Hind's features.\n\n\n The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but\n this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had\n made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had\n carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or\n judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook\n some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the\n Five Ship Plan.\n\n\n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n\n\n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n\n\n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead\n tubelight was off.\n\n\n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n\n\n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist\n machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead,\n cut off outside his room.\n\n\n Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air\n would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call\n for help.\n\n\n The door was locked!\n\n\n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had\n been removed.\n\n\n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal\n doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was\n efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to\n bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n\n\n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair\n and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again.\n A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under\n continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning\n strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.\n\n\n He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden\n Venusian air poured in—but it was not enough!\n\n\n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed\n sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused\n rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of\n approaching unconsciousness.\n\n\n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched\n forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n\n\n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of\n colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth\n habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n\n\n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung\n slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his\n life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.\n\n\n Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze\n of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the\n brackish, silt-clouded water.\nIII\n\n\n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became\n aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew\n instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock\n the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from\n all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony\n were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless\n void between Earth and Venus.\n\n\n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened\n his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something\n burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat\n worm between his fingers.\n\n\n Then dozens of them—hundreds—were upon him from all sides. He was\n wearing only a pair of khaki pants but the worms ignored his chest to\n congregate around his face, intent on attacking the tender skin of his\n eyelids.\n\n\n For a minute his flailing hands fought them off, but they came in\n increasing numbers and clung like leeches. Pain spread as they bit and\n burrowed, and blindly he began to swim.\n\n\n Faster and faster. He could sense the winding banks of the slough and\n kept to midchannel, swimming with his eyes tightly closed. One by one\n the worms dropped off.\n\n\n He stopped, opened his eyes, not on complete darkness this time but on\n a faint blue-green luminescence from far below. The water was saltier\n here, and clearer.\n\n\n He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn\n back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he\n could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of\n direction.\n\n\n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to\n underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of\n hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and\n ceased. He sank.\n\n\n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory\n system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At\n last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.\n\n\n Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a\n gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving\n toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a\n figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat.\n One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n\n\n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from\n the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet\n moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the\n Earthman.\n\n\n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the\n sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n\n\n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung\n in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to\n ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking\n and clawing.\n\n\n Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted\n the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to\n the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n\n\n Human—or nearly so—the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and\n webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more\n for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face\n was coarse and savage.\n\n\n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched\n a short tube from its belt.\n\n\n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as\n he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the\n water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something\n zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.\n\n\n Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone.\n He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n\n\n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n\n\n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's\n spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n\n\n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled\n desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his\n spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the\n other was upon her from behind.\n\n\n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender\n body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the\n bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help\n secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.\n\n\n One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at\n her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the\n dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were\n loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic\n necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n\n\n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear.\n The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n\n\n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear\n ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.\n\n\n Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His\n own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each\n other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the\n inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman\n arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature\n gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in\n its belly.\n\n\n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n\n\n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is ironic about Captian Remo's assessment of the damage?", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_1", "options": ["He believes that the damage will eventually grant them the use of a new ship.", "He believes that they ended up being lucky dispite the damage they encured.", "He believes that the damage will be blamed on him, giving him the perfect option to go home.", "He believes that the damage they encurred will be their ticket home."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Initially, the crew believes that the ship is repaired.  What is still wrong with it?", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_2", "options": ["There are space objects attached to an unseen part of the ship.", "Metal substances are keeping it from working properly.", "There is an invisible beam keeping it from moving.", "It has a hole in the fuel tank."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happens if this problem is not repaired.", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_3", "options": ["Nothing. Everything will opporate as usual.", "It will leave the ship vulnerable to a hostile takeover.", "The foreign material will cause the ship to become extremely difficult to maintain safely.", "The ship will loose oxygen, and the crew will die"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Dorothy feel apprehensive of Hind?", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_4", "options": ["Something about his personality throws her off.", "She is not used to being with a man of means, and his money makes her feel uncomfortable.", "Nothing. She is completely in love with him.", "She dislikes the way he treats Barry."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Barry become ill?", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_5", "options": ["His suit leaked, exposinging him to radiation.", "He is stricken with an unknown illness. ", "He is heartbroken over Dorothy choosing Hind over him,", "He catches an illness from another of the ship's passangers."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the doctor's diagnosis of Barry's illness.", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_6", "options": ["The doctor is confounded, and he has no prognosis for the illness.", "He is diagnosed with a rare strain of a tropical disease.", "He has radiation poisoning.", "He tells Barry that his symptoms are psychosomatic."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the first clue where the doctor notices Barry's drastic changes?", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_7", "options": ["Barry loses interest in all food and water.", "He is able to take water into his body in a way that would have killed someone else.  ", "He exhibits super human strength.", "He notices that Barry is covered in a layer of hair the likes of which the doctor has never seen."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Barry appear to be morphing into?", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_8", "options": ["A vamprire", "A fish", "A woman.", "A warewolf"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When he is ill, who does not come and see Barry?", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_9", "options": ["No one on the crew is allowed to see him", "The doctor", "The captian", "Dorothy"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In what physical ways does Barry change?", "question_unique_id": "63932_FPDEPSL6_10", "options": ["He does not. It is all in his mind.", "He morphs into a dog-like creature.", "He grows small wings, but they are not strong enough for him to fly.", "He morphs into an aquatic creature."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/9/3/63932//63932-h//63932-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63657", "set_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Venusian Invader", "year": 1954, "author": "Sternig, Larry", "topic": "PS; Pirates -- Fiction; Callisto (Satellite) -- Fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction; Short stories; Adventure stories; Science fiction", "article": "VENUSIAN INVADER\nBy LARRY STERNIG\nLeah Barrow would die. Tar Norn had sworn she\n\n would, unless he was set free. But freedom for\n\n the Venusian Pirate meant death for many, and\n\n it was Director Barrow's duty to hold him—even\n\n though it would cost his daughter's life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMart Wells shut off the alarm buzzer and jumped out of bed—much to his\n regret. He cussed and then grinned sheepishly as he brought up with a\n thud against the fortunately unbreakable glass of the window. A year\n on Callisto, and he could still forget that he weighed only thirty-six\n pounds and couldn't take a normal step without neutronium-weighted\n shoes.\n\n\n Regaining his balance, he yawned and looked out over the rough Callisto\n landscape beyond Comprotown. Then he yawned again and reached for his\n uniform.\n\n\n A year before, Comprotown—and his job as rocketport dispatcher—had\n been Romance with a capital R. Now, he thought gloomily, Romance with\n Leah with a capital L, and a fat lot of good that did him when Leah\n Barrow's father was Old Fish-face himself, Director of Comprotown.\n\n\n True, Comprotown held fewer than a thousand colonists, but it was the\n only inhabited spot on bleak Callisto, and its Director was practical\n czar of a world. Yes, the Director could well afford to look down his\n long nose at any uniform with fewer than six stars on its right sleeve.\n But Leah didn't feel that—\n\n\n Suddenly, straightening up as he fastened his weighted boot, he looked\n more intently out of the window. Something that flashed caught his eye\n out in the barren, warped hills. A gleam of metal where metal shouldn't\n have been. And it looked like a small spaceship.\n\n\n Mart hastily pulled on his other boot and ran down the stairs. A\n red-headed mechanic from the rocketport was coming out of the building\n across the way.\n\n\n Mart called out, \"Red! Something about a mile back in the hills looks\n like a spaceship. Has one been reported down?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" The mechanic looked startled. \"You sure? No, there hasn't been a\n report. Wait, I'll radio Central Communications.\"\n\n\n He darted back into the building, and emerged a moment later. \"No\n report. They're going to send out the autogiro to look at it. Say,\n Mart, there are only two small spaceships on Callisto. Could it be—\"\n\n\n Mart was already running toward the corner from which he could see the\n landing field. He stopped so suddenly that the mechanic almost ran into\n him, and said, \"Whew! They're both there.\" Leah Barrow's trim little\n spacecruiser was safe in port. So was the Police one-seater scout—but\n that wasn't the one Mart had looked for first.\n\n\n From near the Administration Building a two-place autogiro was rising,\n silhouetted for a moment between the horns of the reddish crescent of\n big Jupiter just above the horizon.\n\n\n As he walked across the field toward headquarters, Mart surveyed the\n familiar scene. Three squat freighters were up on the racks, their ugly\n black bottoms over the ash-filled blasting pits; four others were on\n dollies ready to be serviced.\n\n\n All seven were ready for their regular weekly Callisto-Jupe hop,\n ready to pick up more ore. And, as usual, they'd go out today to\n clear the field for the sleeker, faster, long-haul ships that would\n arrive from Earth tomorrow for the smelted metal. Mart glanced at his\n wrist-chronometer. Eight o'clock now; in an hour and a half,\nFreighter\n One\n, right on schedule, would start testing its rocket tubes for the\n ten o'clock hop. And an hour later,\nFreighter Two\nwould start to warm\n up for the eleven o'clock blasting-off. And then the others, every hour\n on the hour.\n\n\n At his desk in the Administration Building, Mart picked up the familiar\n sheaf of clearance papers waiting for his attention, and glanced\n through them. Initialing them was mere routine; they'd never cleared a\n minute early or a minute late since he'd been there. Director Barrow\n saw to that.\n\n\n The door opened. Mart put down the papers and glanced up.\nOne of the workmen from the smelting plant, a tall black-haired fellow\n wearing tinted glasses, stood looking into the office. Mart didn't\n remember ever seeing him before—but with several hundred workmen, you\n couldn't remember all of them.\n\n\n \"Director Barrow in?\"\n\n\n Mart glanced up at the wall clock before he answered. \"He'll be here in\n twenty-one minutes. Sit down and wait if you're off duty.\"\n\n\n He turned back to the papers and finished initialing them, grinning\n inwardly at being able to say that the Director would arrive in\n twenty-one minutes exactly. It wasn't everywhere that one could make\n so accurate a prediction about anyone's arrival time, but Barrow was\n something of a chronometer himself.\n\n\n He tossed the papers toward the back of the desk and threw the switch\n of the communicator on his desk, leaned forward slightly. \"Dispatcher\n Wells calling Police Autogiro.\"\n\n\n \"Autogiro, Captain Wayne,\" came the reply. \"Go ahead. Mart.\"\n\n\n \"I was the one who reported seeing the spaceship, Cap—if it was one.\n Found it? If not, I can—\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Mart, but we've sighted it all right. We're now circling,\n looking for a spot to come down. It doesn't take much, but damned if we\n can perch on a ridge like a canary. Neither could that space-speedster\n down there.\n\n\n \"Wrecked? What's it look like?\"\n\n\n \"Ummm. Offhand one of the single-place jobs that Venusians bought from\n Earth before the war. Full armament, too.\"\n\n\n \"What? You sure, Cap? After the Earth-Venus twenty-two eighty treaty,\n we reclaimed and destroyed all the armed—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know,\" cut in the Captain's voice. \"All but a few that the\n Venusian renegades—the pirates—got off with before then. Well—we're\n going down. Corey's found a place not too far from it where he can set\n the giro down, or says he can.\"\n\n\n \"If that's a pirate ship, Cap, be careful!\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. We're armed. And the ship's pretty smashed up. Probably\n at least kayoed whoever was in it. Well, keep your key open and I'll\n call you back. We're down.\"\n\n\n Mart found the shipment chart and began to check off tonnage. That much\n he wanted to get out of the way before—but something was gnawing at\n the back of his mind. It took him a moment to trace what it was. Of\n course. The workman who was waiting for the Director was wearing tinted\n glasses.\n\n\n Tinted glasses on Callisto! It didn't make sense. The sun, half a\n billion miles away, gives only a twenty-fifth of the light that falls\n on Earth. Even when that light is augmented by Big Jupe, it isn't—Yes,\n it was the first time he'd seen tinted glasses in Comprotown.\n\n\n Curiously, he turned to glance at the seated workman. But the carrier\n wave of the desk communicator hummed and he forgot his visitor as\n Captain Wayne's voice boomed in.\n\n\n \"Dispatcher Wells. Captain Wayne calling Dispatcher—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Cap. Go ahead.\"\n\n\n \"We've examined the spaceship. No one's in it, hurt or otherwise. It's\n a single seater. A pirate ship all right.\"\n\n\n \"You sure? How can you be certain?\"\n\n\n \"Aside from the fact that it would have no business around here if it\n wasn't, the papers are a give-away. There's a whole sheaf of them.\n Reports on the Ganymede jewel shipments mostly. And a full set of data\n on our own little world, Mart. If there's a Venusian around, he sure\n knows his way.\"\n\n\n \"Dope on Callisto? What kind?\"\n\n\n \"A detailed map of Comprotown, showing every building. A full schedule\n of freighter hops both ways to Jupe and Earth. Details of shipments.\n That sort of thing.\"\n\n\n \"Holy stars! But why should a pirate be interested in ore?\"\n\n\n \"Don't imagine he is. Or in Comprotown, either. I'd say from the\n papers, it was precautionary information. We don't keep our operations\n a secret here. He could have picked it up from any magazine article\n describing Comprotown in detail.\n\n\n \"But I still don't see—\"\n\n\n \"The Ganymede jewel shipments, Mart. I'd say he was bound for Gany and\n his ship went blooie while he was scudding past Callisto. He got pulled\n down here and just barely made a landing he could walk away from. I'm\n afraid there'll be trouble.\"\n\n\n Mart whistled. \"Well, the Director's due now. He'll want a search\n organized and—Wait, here he is. Tell it over again, Cap, and you'll be\n reporting direct.... Listen to this, Director.\"\nThe tall slender figure of Director Barrow stood impassively beside\n Mart's desk and listened to a repetition of Wayne's report. Not a\n flicker of expression passed over his gaunt face.\n\n\n As Wayne finished, the Director asked, \"Is he armed? Anything taken\n from the ship's equipment, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Looks intact, but he probably has sidearms. All the pirates carry\n them. One funny thing, Director. The timer robot has been removed from\n the control panel. What on Callisto would he want with a loose timer?\"\n\n\n \"Report back to headquarters immediately, Captain Wayne,\" Director\n Barrow ordered.\n\n\n The hum of the carrier wave died and Mart clicked off the set.\n Then, belatedly, he stood up and saluted. \"Anything I can do, sir?\n Everything's set for the freighters to clear as usual, so I'm more or\n less free—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded. \"Very good, Wells. You may go to the field and direct a\n search of the freighters. The Venusian's first thought will be to get\n away, and he may already be stowed in one of—\"\n\n\n A dry voice interrupted from behind the Director's back. \"But the\n Venusian would not do anything so obvious, Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n Mart whirled around. Barrow turned slowly and with dignity.\n\n\n It was the tall man dressed in the uniform of a smelting plant worker\n who had spoken. But he wasn't dark-haired any more. Still seated, he\n was smiling at them sardonically as he fanned himself with a black wig\n he had just removed. The top of his head was as smooth as a billiard\n ball, and dead white. There was a line of demarcation where the dye he\n had applied to his face came to an end.\n\n\n He had removed the tinted glasses too, and the blank-surfaced\n gray eyeballs showed why they had been worn. Now that the simple\n disguise of wig and glasses was removed, Mart noted some of the other\n distinguishing features that marked the Venusian. The general flatness\n of the face and flat unconvoluted ears. The six-fingered hands that had\n probably been thrust into the pockets of the stolen uniform.\n\n\n The Venusian glanced down at the wig and glasses. \"Standard equipment,\"\n he explained. \"I always carry them in my ship and they've come in handy\n before.\"\n\n\n He rose and bowed mockingly. \"My name is Tar Norn, and your supposition\n that I am a pirate is correct. But I assure you that my visit here is\n accidental and I have no designs on Comprotown.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn! The most vicious and notorious of the pirates, and the most\n ruthless killer of them all. Mart hastily jerked open the drawer of\n his desk and pulled out a hand-blaster. He started the formula: \"Under\n authority of the Interplanetary Council, I arrest you, to be held for\n trial—\"\n\n\n The sardonic smile did not fade from the pirate's thin lips. He rose\n and extended his arms upward. \"I am unarmed,\" he cut in. \"It will help\n our discussion if you will verify that.\"\n\n\n \"—before the Supreme Council on Earth,\" Mart finished. Then, glancing\n side-wise at Director Barrow and seeing him nod, he stepped forward\n warily. Venusians, he knew, were both fast and tricky. Watching every\n move, he completed the search. Tar Norn carried no weapons.\n\n\n Why, Mart wondered, had the pirate walked openly into headquarters and\n given himself up? Obviously, Tar Norn had something up his sleeve.\n But—\n\n\n Director Barrow spoke coldly, as Mart stepped back, still covering the\n Venusian with the blaster. \"Tar Norn, you speak of 'our discussion.'\n There is nothing to discuss. You will be sent to Earth.\"\n\n\n The pirate's face became vicious. \"I do not think so,\" he snapped.\n \"I have taken a hostage. It was quite dark—your tiny Callisto in\n eclipse of its huge primary—when I was forced down. But darkness means\n nothing to a Venusian. You Earthmen play a strange game with cardboard\n rectangles. To use its language, Director Barrow, I have an ace in the\n hole.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn sat down again and folded his six-fingered hands quite calmly.\n Light from the ceiling overhead seemed to cast a malignant glow on his\n dead-white scalp.\n\n\n \"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.\n\n\n \"Captain,\" Barrow ordered, \"you will form a search party at once—every\n available man and means. We must search all of Callisto within—\" he\n made a rapid mental calculation \"—about fifty miles. You will be\n searching for my daughter.\"\n\n\n The captain stiffened. Before he could reply the carrier wave hummed\n and a feminine voice, that of an elderly woman, came over the\n communicator. \"Director Barrow? Leah isn't here. I looked in her room\n and her bed is disarranged as though she left suddenly. She always\n makes it herself as soon as she gets up.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to point to when she left, Mrs. Andrews?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly, sir. The alarm was set for six and it was still buzzing.\n Her bed isn't very mussed; it looks like she got up again almost right\n after she retired. I don't understand.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's face was bleak. His voice sounded like the drip of\n water from melting ice. \"Clothing?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Her lightweight spacesuit is gone. Apparently she put it on over her\n sleeping pajamas, for they aren't here. Is there anything I can do,\n sir? I'm worried; she hasn't ever—\"\n\n\n \"That will be all, Mrs. Andrews,\" Barrow replied. \"I'll let you know if\n there is anything.\"\n\n\n He turned to Captain Wayne. \"Use this set, Captain. Get Communications\n to send out a general alarm and assembly. You can make all necessary\n arrangements right here.\"\n\n\n Wayne crossed to the communicator, and began to issue rapid\n instructions.\n\n\n \"Tell them to hurry,\" the Venusian cut in mockingly. \"They have until\n nine-thirty o'clock.\"\n\n\n Mart Wells glanced fearfully at the dial of the chronometer. It was\n eight-forty now. He turned and caught the Director's glance. \"\nThe\n timer!\n\" he said grimly. \"Captain Wayne said it was missing from the\n wrecked ship. He must have—\"\n\n\n The Venusian was grinning. \"Exactly. The timer. And a pound of uranite.\n That gives you fifty minutes to search Callisto. It would be wiser to\n spend the time getting a ship ready for me instead.\"\n\n\n The silence of the office was broken only by the low voice of Captain\n Wayne giving orders into the communicator. Abruptly he turned to his\n superior. His face was white.\n\n\n \"Search is on, sir. But if he isn't lying, there's a chance in a\n million. Less than an hour, and the area to be covered is—\"\n\n\n Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"\n\n\n The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.\n\n\n Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.\n\n\n Barrow said, \"Yes, he's telling the truth. But we have some time yet.\n Maybe the search—\"\nMart strode to the window and looked out so the others wouldn't see his\n face. Less than three-quarters of an hour to search all of Callisto\n within a radius of fifty miles!\nThrough the pane he saw figures in groups of three searching the\n streets and buildings of Comprotown. That part of the search wouldn't\n be difficult. But the hills and the caves, and with only two autogiros.\n If she was there, out of sight in one of the caves, where the cruising\n ships couldn't see her....\n\n\n Her father was right, but—The picture of Leah Barrow, smiling as he\n had last seen her, seemed to blur out the view from the window. Her\n impertinent little tilted nose, the soft tempting contours of her lips,\n the deep blueness of her eyes.\n\n\n He whirled from the window and began pacing the floor, trying to\n think of something they could do that wasn't being done. Again at the\n communicator, Captain Wayne was barking questions.\n\n\n \"All available men and women are combing the town, sir,\" he reported,\n \"with orders to break down any doors that are locked, to stop at\n nothing.\"\n\n\n \"And outside, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"The two giros are our only real hope. But the men from the smelting\n plant are working afoot out of town. By nine-thirty they'll have\n covered a radius of about five miles.\"\n\n\n Corey returned, slamming the door viciously behind him. \"Maybe we\n could trick him, sir,\" he suggested. \"Pretend we'll give him a ship if\n he'll—\"\n\n\n \"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.\n\n\n Venusians were, compared to Earth standards, a strange combination of\n genius and idiocy. Brilliant mathematicians, they had no mechanical\n ingenuity whatever. Linguists who could speak any language fluently\n after hearing it a few hours, not one of them could create a child's\n wind-up toy. Knowing the laws of leverage, they constructed their\n buildings by manual labor alone. Able to operate any machine as long as\n it was in good working order, they couldn't as much as figure out how\n to repair a clogged fuel-line.\n\n\n Even the pirates based on some of the bigger Asteroids had to depend\n upon a few renegade Earthmen to keep their ships in running order. And\n if one went blah away from base, it was a gone ship as far as they\n were concerned. Probably the trouble that had forced Tar Norn down on\n Callisto had been a minor matter that any Earthman could have taken in\n his stride. But to Tar Norn it meant a new ship or nothing.\n\n\n The thought of ships reminded him of the freighters. \"Cap,\" he asked\n Wayne, \"the freighters been searched thoroughly?\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded. \"Rocket tubes and all. Even broke open the ore drums. I\n presume you'll want them to clear on schedule?\"\n\n\n Director Barrow nodded. \"The crews?\" he asked. \"In the search or\n standing by?\"\n\n\n \"Standing by for departure as usual, Director. A few men one way or the\n other—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded, glancing at the chronometer. Mart knew what he was\n thinking. Less than half an hour now. And, unless the searchers by some\n miracle found Leah Barrow, it would all be over before the ten o'clock\n clearance of the first freighter. And the freighters hadn't missed a\n clearance in ten years.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed again. \"Central Communications reporting. Most\n searchers in the town have reported in. No results. Those outside\n reaching points three miles out.\"\n\n\n The communicator faded. Mart clenched his fists against the futility\n of that search. Three miles! The strong Venusian, in the light gravity\n of Callisto, probably had eight or ten hours of darkness to carry his\n burden. He could easily have covered twenty to forty miles, in any\n direction. Possibly even more. And the chance of an autogiro—\n\n\n Obviously, Wayne had been thinking the same thing. \"He timed his\n arrival,\" he said bitterly. \"He gave us less than an hour. He'd\n certainly have put her outside walking range within that length of\n time. And with all the caves around, thousands of them, would he have\n put her where a giro could spot anything?\"\n\n\n Mart glanced at Barrow. The Director was sitting as immobile as a\n statue. His eyes were closed and every muscle of his thin face was\n tense. Probably he was trying not to look at the chronometer on the\n wall. It was nine-fifteen.\n\n\n The office door opened and three uniformed mechanics from the field\n stood in the doorway. The foremost of them saluted. \"This entire\n building has been searched twice except this office. I presume—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow opened his eyes and stood up. \"Don't presume anything.\n Search here, too.\"\n\n\n The men came in and began a detailed but fruitless search. Nobody spoke\n until they left.\n\n\n The chronometer said twenty minutes after nine now. Ten minutes to go,\n if the timer had been accurately set. But could it have been set wrong?\n Venusians were lousy mechanics. Maybe—\nMart became aware that he was holding his breath for the sound of a\n distant explosion. Yes, from whatever point Tar Norn could have hidden\n his hostage, the sound of a pound of uranite exploding would carry back\n to Comprotown.\n\n\n He sat down at his desk again. In front of him were the signed\n clearance papers for the freighters. In half an hour he'd take out the\n papers for the first freighter. But before that half hour was up—\n\n\n He twisted a pencil between his fingers, held himself rigid to keep\n from turning and looking at the chronometer again. It hadn't been over\n a minute since he sat down—why torture himself by looking again? But\n each minute now seemed both a flash and an eternity.\n\n\n He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.\n\n\n Why? Undoubtedly it indicated that she would be outdoors. During the\n Callisto day, it would have been unnecessary. But an unconscious\n Earthwoman would freeze to death in the cold dark period of Callisto's\n eclipse behind Big Jupe.\n\n\n What then? The Venusian left, carrying her—\nThe Venusian had carried the drugged girl into the night.\nHe threw down the pencil and began to pace the room again. His muscles\n were tense from listening. How many minutes? He didn't want to know;\n dared not look.\n\n\n But Tar Norn must have planned it all before he left the wrecked ship.\n Otherwise he wouldn't have taken the timer and—\n\n\n Would he have rigged the time-bomb first, or after he had kidnapped\n Leah? And how? The timer itself would not have provided the concussion\n to set off the uranite. He'd have needed a battery, a spark-coil, and—\nBut Venusians weren't mechanics.\nThey didn't understand machines, or electricity, or even simple\n clockworks, brilliant as their strange minds were in other ways.\n\n\n Tar Norn could have set the timer all right. For that matter, he could\n calculate an orbit and make settings for space flight. But he couldn't\n have made a time-bomb, even with the timer. He couldn't have rigged\n a circuit that would set off a cap! And, Mart realized suddenly, the\n timer itself would be an electrical—not a clockwork—gadget. Once\n disconnected from the now broken dynamo of the ship, Tar Norn couldn't\n have made it run at all!\n\n\n A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"\n\n\n Three minutes to go. Mart could see by the attitude of the others that\n they were bracing themselves for the sound of an explosion. All of them\n had liked, or loved, Leah Barrows. Mart had a momentary vision of her\n again, and remembered the electric thrill that had run through him when\n she had placed her hand on his arm, just a few days ago, and told him\n that she did care for him, well, a little anyway—\n\n\n But, if Tar Norn couldn't have rigged a time-bomb, how could he have\n arranged for Leah to die at nine-thirty?\n\n\n He saw again the corpse-like face of the Director. Yes, they had all\n been wrong in thinking that nothing mattered to Barrow more than the\n schedules—\nSchedules\n! There had been departure schedules among the\n papers in Tar Norn's ship. Could he have—\n\n\n With a sudden intake of breath that was almost a gasp, Mart whirled and\n ran to the communicator. The others looked at him, startled. Mart was\n yelling at the mike even before he got near enough to it to talk in a\n normal voice. \"Control! Emergency! Get\nJupe Freighter One\n!\nTell him\n not to test his tubes.\nNot to touch a lever!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "The director is \"practically the czar of the world,\" and his daughter is described as", "question_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI_1", "options": ["Being very much like a \"mean girl.\"", "Being a spoiled child who is unlikable.", "Being absent most of the time and avoiding others.", "Not sharing the same attitude as her father, as she does not feel that she is \"better than others.\""], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Mart discusses that he is on a rigid schedule due to ", "question_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI_2", "options": ["It is a cultural thing, and he does not want to disappoint his family by deviating from the norm.", "The Director was a stickler for scheduling.", "The nature of his job.", "He has OCD and cannot deviate from his schedule."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Mart initially find to be strange about the visitor in his office?", "question_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI_3", "options": ["He was supposed to meet the director earler but changed his schedule, which was against the norm.", "He is dressed in a garb that is uncommon for the area.", "He is clearly not there to see the director as he stated.", "He is wearing glasses that were not necessary for that area."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When the pirate shit was discovered, what was not found inside the wreckage.  ", "question_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI_4", "options": ["The pilot of the ship.", "A schedule.", "Maps of the area.", "Reports on other ships."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the pirate slip into the offices?", "question_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI_5", "options": ["He crashes into the building.", "He walks in when no one is looking and hides until the time is right for him to show himself.", "He wears a simple discuse of tinted glasses, a wig, and a worker's uniform.", "He crawles in a window and takes a worker hostage,"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What sets this pirate apart from others?", "question_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI_6", "options": ["He is only there to take revenge for what has been done to his people.", "He is considered one of the most cruel pirates in history. ", "He feels guilty for the things he is forced to do in his line of work.", "He is a kind person who is misunderstoon."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When he is threatened to be sent to earth, what is Tar Norn's \"ace in the hole?\"", "question_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI_7", "options": ["He wants to go to Earth anyway, and he is in need of transportationl.", "He is going to blow up the planet if his demands are not met.", "He is ready to die, and he does not want to have to take his own life.", "He has a hostage of great importance."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is it that Tar Norm demands?", "question_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI_8", "options": ["To marry the director's daughter.", "A ship that if fast, fuled, and ready to go.", "to be allowed to stay there because he is on the run from other pirates.", "To train as a member of their forces."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How are Venutians the personification of oxymorions?", "question_unique_id": "63657_O8XJALNI_9", "options": ["They are though to be out for revenge for what has been done to their people, but they are acutally greatful for ttheir new lifestyles.", "They are thought to enjoy their lifestyle, but they find it difficult.", "They have very impressive skill sets in particular areas, and areas that should be complementary, they have no understanding of.", "They are thought to be horrible people, but they are actually kind and helpful."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/6/5/63657//63657-h//63657-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "30062", "set_unique_id": "30062_79MG6ZGZ", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Plague", "year": 1972, "author": "Keller, Teddy", "topic": "Science fiction; PS; Epidemics -- Fiction; Short stories", "article": "THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"\n\n\n All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"\n\n\n Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment\n before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop\n of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\"\n he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I\n know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority,\n we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n\n\n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so\n irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.\n\n\n \"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n \"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the\n sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other\n officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they\n drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top\n priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could\n panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"\n\n\n Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general,\n snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will\n you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of\n his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself\n one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who\n entered his office.\nBettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile\n as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n \"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick,\n brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to\n his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n\n\n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a\n little time.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"\n\n\n She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no\n fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's\n spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her\n dark eyes.\n\n\n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,—and a\n bunch more. No indication there. Except\"—she fished out a one-page\n report—\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign\n for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today\n they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at\n the polls. They've all got it.\"\n\n\n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's\n a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up\n with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"\n\n\n \"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so\n far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers,\n teachers, preachers—rich, poor—from Florida to Alaska. Just when you\n called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated\n mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too\n fragmentary.\"\n\n\n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly\n ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until\n they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of\n the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n\n\n \"In food?\"\n\n\n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing\n plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same\n time—even if it was sabotage?\"\n\n\n \"On the wind?\"\n\n\n \"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire\n country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And\n why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?\"\n\n\n Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to\n grip his icy, sweating hands. \"Andy, do ... do you think it's ...\n well, an enemy?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I just don't know.\"\n\n\n For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her,\n punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his\n head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of\n papers.\n\n\n \"We've got to find a clue—a trend—an inkling of something.\" He\n nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those\n girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country.\n Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up\n another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and\n sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and\n occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n\n\n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode\n from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on\n the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone\n and directory.\n\n\n He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.\n\n\n Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.\n\n\n \"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face,\n but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the\n pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the\n situation.\"\n\n\n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips.\n Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on\n his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n\n\n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report\n to—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.\n\n\n For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled\n slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n \"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some\n of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're\n surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that\n makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt\n Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her\n a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say\n what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n \"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions.\n Your conduct here will be noted and—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's\n shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight\n around when this man—\"\n\n\n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would\n co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a\n bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to\n get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant.\n Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will\n report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n\n\n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass,\n he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a\n while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to\n us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't\n know from—\"\n\n\n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\nAnd from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n\n\n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh,\n general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just—\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been\n listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the\n sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n\n\n \"But, general, I—\"\n\n\n The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his\n chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n \"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n\n\n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many\n things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n\n\n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled\n up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face\n as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had\n feared.\"\n\n\n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A\n captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.\n\n\n \"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had\n a report—nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the\n civilian newspapermen—not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a\n day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had—it was a\n coded message the Reds'd tried to censor—was an indication of\n something big in the works.\"\n\n\n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had\n an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n\n\n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that\n they could cripple us from within.\"\n\n\n The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out\n effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every\n serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've\n still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're\n right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n\n\n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through\n muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there,\n futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm.\n He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement\n that silenced him.\n\n\n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll\n find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"\n\n\n The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then\n launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and\n your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the\n duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the\n sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n\n\n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned—\"\n\n\n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated—unless you\n find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's\n get out of here and let these people work.\"\nThe brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his\n cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain\n and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper\n channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile\n of reports Bettijean had brought in.\n\n\n She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used,\n studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she\n asked.\n\n\n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n \"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single\n government worker sick.\"\n\n\n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n\n\n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own\n scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of\n office workers—business, not government—and new parents and newly\n engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n\n\n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n\n\n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just\n guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big\n offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and\n two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n\n\n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor,\n dentist or attorney?\"\n\n\n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n\n\n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable\n thing. Thank heaven for—\"\n\n\n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before\n both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her\n teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n\n\n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half\n the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same\n thing—only not quite as severe—in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n\n\n \"Writers?\"\n\n\n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the\n hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are\n fine—writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n\n\n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a\n country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about.\n Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n\n\n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his\n cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all\n lumped together.\"\n\n\n \"What does it show?\"\n\n\n \"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up—no medical releases. Must\n mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n \"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the\n first hit?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass\n could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could\n slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come\n from the general public.\"\n\n\n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under\n twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices\n and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't\n tell who's got it on the military bases.\"\n\n\n \"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from\n Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something,\n everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't\n even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n\n\n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the\n outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a\n paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and\n nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n\n\n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of\n his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n \"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n\n\n \"The answer?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink\n or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear?\n What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists?\n What are we missing? What—\"\nIn the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk,\n then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n\n\n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to\n Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n\n\n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she\n lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering,\n shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the\n hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n\n\n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to\n cover her. And get a glass of water.\"\n\n\n The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.\n\n\n \"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that\n you did—everything you ate or drank—in the last ... oh, twelve\n hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see\n Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n\n\n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n\n\n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n\n\n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged\n nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of\n attention. Andy ignored her.\n\n\n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\"\n Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"\n\n\n Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then\n told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying\n on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about\n eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n\n\n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color\n spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face\n away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little\n nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n\n\n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n\n\n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n\n\n \"But ... but....\"\n\n\n \"Was it something against regulations?\"\n\n\n \"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n\n\n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n\n\n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance\n sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally,\n resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n\n\n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her\n about what we were doing here.\"\n\n\n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n\n\n \"Did you mail it?\"\n\n\n \"Y ... yes.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n \"Did I do wrong?\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.\n\n\n Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\"\n\n\n Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"\n\n\n Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was\n weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does\n that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why\n senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the\n bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n\n\n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the\n poison and prescribe medication. But\"—he held up a four-cent\n stamp—\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n\n\n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes\n bugged at Andy, at the stamp.\n\n\n Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents\n and especially writers and artists and poets—they'd all lick lots of\n stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have\n postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking.\n And\"—she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck—\"Andy, you're\n wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's\n phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do—\"\n\n\n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the\n colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do\n you suggest?\"\n\n\n \"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks.\n Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any\n stamps. Then—\"\n\n\n He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment,\n then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody\n checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they\n print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years\n ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.\n\n\n \"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure\n accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the\n stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone\n call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be\n quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors.\n The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six\n hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States\n whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the\n Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\nThe general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into\n the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling\n his granite brow.\n\n\n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"\n\n\n Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk\n lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n\n\n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and\n the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day\n furlough to rest up—or to get better acquainted?\"\n\n\n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n\n\n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings\n I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions,\n I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to\n pin on the bars.\"\n\n\n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of\n furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the\n depths of each other's eyes.\n\n\n And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent\n stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the\n stamp out of the office under guard.\nTHE END\n", "questions": [{"question": "When the plague is initially noticed, who do official believe to be the blame for its exhistance?", "question_unique_id": "30062_79MG6ZGZ_1", "options": ["There is no speculation.  The focus is on finding a cure.", "Their own military because they allowed a breech in protocal to allow the infection to get out to the public.", "Humans contracted it from animals.", "A foreign enemy who released the illness as some sort of germ warfair"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the oddest part about this illness?", "question_unique_id": "30062_79MG6ZGZ_2", "options": ["Everyone who has contracted it has died within 24 hours.", "Only wealthy people have contracted it.", "Only poor people have contracted it.", "Though those who have contracted it have become very ill, no one has died. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Initially, what is the irony concerning the illness?", "question_unique_id": "30062_79MG6ZGZ_3", "options": ["It was originally intended for population control of wild boar.", "It was never intended to make people ill.", "It was only intended to make those in the military ill. ", "Doctors would not be able to determine its true nature until someone died."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the general do that surprises everyone?", "question_unique_id": "30062_79MG6ZGZ_4", "options": ["He decides that he is the only one capable of getting to the bottom of the issue.", "He puts a woman in charge of the investigation.", "He sends a higher ranking official to go grunt work so that Andy can focus on the task at hand.", "He repremands Andy for insubordination."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is one odd revilation that Andy has concerning who has contracted the illness.", "question_unique_id": "30062_79MG6ZGZ_5", "options": ["Only women have it.", "Only men have it.", "No one in the military has contracted it.", "Only doctors have contracted it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who has contracted the illness?", "question_unique_id": "30062_79MG6ZGZ_6", "options": ["All of the above", "Artists", "Musicians", "Writers."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who gets ill and helps Andy break the case?", "question_unique_id": "30062_79MG6ZGZ_7", "options": ["The corporal", "Andy", "Bettijean", "Janis"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the source of the illness", "question_unique_id": "30062_79MG6ZGZ_8", "options": ["Envelops", "The wind", "Stamps", "The water"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/0/0/6/30062//30062-h//30062-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63860", "set_unique_id": "63860_GQIZEKU6", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Signal Red", "year": 1962, "author": "Guth, Henry", "topic": "Short stories; War stories; Science fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; Sabotage -- Fiction; PS; Older men -- Fiction", "article": "SIGNAL RED\nBy HENRY GUTH\nThey tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a\n\n suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him.\n\n Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But\n\n Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport.\n Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n\n\n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.\n\n\n Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent\n flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling\n neither glad nor sad.\n\n\n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n\n\n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter\n catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail.\n High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of\n bright specks—portholes of the liner\nStardust\n—sank slowly down.\n\n\n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from\n a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting,\n lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home\n to die.\n\n\n As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long\n shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery\n snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n\n\n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n\n\n \"\nStardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All\n passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes.\n\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following\n around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard\n stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the\n vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing\n desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.\n\n\n \"\nAttention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The\n signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five\n minutes.\n\"\n\n\n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the\n infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking\n Shano aside as he passed.\nRed signal.\nIn bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his\n eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out\n there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own\n risk.\n\n\n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n\n\n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest.\n Plucking at an urgency there.\n\n\n Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line\n had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into\n the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n\n\n \"\nFlight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus\n,\" the loud-speaker said\n monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly\n of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n\n\n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the\n lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen,\n chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n \"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\"\n he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint\n memories within his glazed mind.\n\n\n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n\n\n The loud-speaker blared. \"\nStardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The\n signal is red. Stardust, taking—\n\"\n\n\n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock.\n The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was\n shut off.\n\n\n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more\n locks, closing each behind them.\n\n\n \"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light\n danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration\n gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\nCaptain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet\n crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of\n studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat\n in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.\n\n\n \"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing\n briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He\n flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious,\n squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out\n there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one,\n which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be\n so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was\n driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things\n about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears\n things, a laborer does.\"\n\n\n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of\n his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.\n\n\n \"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"\n\n\n \"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred\n sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled\n down the steel deck.\n\n\n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked,\n coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement\n of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.\n\n\n What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had\n he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive\n suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of\n Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a\n rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded\n it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and\n waited.\nThe ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken\n watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a\n loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n\n\n \"\nAll hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all\n machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there,\n listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance.\n Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop\n pumps.\n\"\n\n\n Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.\n\n\n He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand.\n Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through\n labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering\n against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the\n distance and Shano stopped.\n\n\n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his\n cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n\n\n A bell clanged.\n\n\n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled\n hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure\n disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.\n\n\n Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster\n of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a\n gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium\n dial that quivered delicately.\n\n\n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above\n and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises\n diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out;\n everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\nThe ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it\n or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a\n submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n\n\n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \"\nEmergency. Battle posts.\n\"\n\n\n The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.\n\n\n The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging,\n maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was\n all.\n\n\n \"Fire number seven.\"\n\n\n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting\n terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n\n\n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying\n to blast the\nStardust\nout of the sky. Trying and trying, while the\n captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against\n an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n\n\n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to\n Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n\n\n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound.\n It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.\n\n\n \"Hold fire.\"\n\n\n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and\n pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray\n metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering\n dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n\n\n \"Stand by.\"\n\n\n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking.\n Only working with his hands.\n\n\n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed\n down....\n\n\n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch\n on duty.\"\n\n\n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space\n liner\nStardust\n.\n\n\n Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with\n concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut\n in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up\n to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n\n\n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on\n the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a\n traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away\n the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n\n\n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made\n him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it\n opened cautiously.\n\n\n A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw\n Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face\n dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n\n\n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n\n\n Shano blinked.\n\n\n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to\n be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"\n\n\n Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength\n and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he\n said.\n\"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\nHe lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed\n face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the\n deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano\n clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing,\n cursing the pain in his joints.\n\n\n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with\n his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.\n\n\n He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"\n\n\n Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.\n\n\n The\nStardust's\nmechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It\n reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're\n about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove\n them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know\n we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n\n\n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick\n with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out\n what the matter was with his space ship.\n\n\n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine\n room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And\n we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without\n the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair\n the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"\n\n\n \"Blast it!\" roared the captain. \"No way of getting in there? Can't you\n by-pass the selector?\"\n\n\n \"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass\n through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments\n will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep\n trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine\n temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir—they're common\n tungsten steel—and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and\n drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there\n he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each\n time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel.\"\n\n\n The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the\n talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't\n understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken\n down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would\n come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to\n bits. And he would never get home to die.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged\n lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the\n tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with\n gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting\n sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.\n\n\n Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.\n\n\n \"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in\n your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll\n kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours.\n Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged\n with Juno gum.\"\n\n\n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped\n the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well,\n maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n\n\n What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop\n off, lift them up again.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"\n\n\n Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"\n\n\n He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian\n fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled\n ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano.\n A useless old man.\n\n\n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What passage below BEST describes why Shano continued to board the Stardust after the Red Signal?", "question_unique_id": "63860_GQIZEKU6_1", "options": ["He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.", "A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest.", "A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him.", "Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When the captain of Stardust learns of Shano's social status \"he became a little gruff,\" what does the author imply about the captain's feelings towards Shano?", "question_unique_id": "63860_GQIZEKU6_2", "options": ["Appreciated that the trip was not in vain", "Felt empathy for Shano", "Became annoyed and bitter", "Was unsure about his new passenger"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the passage imply about Shano's occupation?", "question_unique_id": "63860_GQIZEKU6_3", "options": ["Army Veteran", "Pilot", "Traveler", "Miner"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did Shano mean when he said \"They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him.\"", "question_unique_id": "63860_GQIZEKU6_4", "options": ["What actually caused the ship to be spotted by the enemies", "Shano would be what saved the ship", "Shano killed the saboteur that was on board", "What actually caused the engine room to be filled with Toxia gas"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Shano able to withstand the Toxic gas to reposition the fallen rods?", "question_unique_id": "63860_GQIZEKU6_5", "options": ["N/A", "His job", "His age", "Pure luck"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about the captain not believing Shano if he would have told him about the traitor?", "question_unique_id": "63860_GQIZEKU6_6", "options": ["That the captain would have believed Shano", "The. judgement that the captain displayed towards Shano due to his occupation", "That the captain thought the nick cut in his jaw was from shaving", "Shano was the true traitor"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Shano know that this was his last ride?", "question_unique_id": "63860_GQIZEKU6_7", "options": ["He knew he would die when he saw the traitor with the cut on his face", "He was aware of the war going on and the possible threats on his journey", "He did not know it was his last ride", "He was already dying"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the cause of Shano's continuous coughing?", "question_unique_id": "63860_GQIZEKU6_8", "options": ["His age", "His work as a laborer", "The toxia gas", "His smoking habit"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/8/6/63860//63860-h//63860-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63867", "set_unique_id": "63867_NRF3ZA5W", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Captain Midas", "year": 1954, "author": "Coppel, Alfred", "topic": "Gold -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Short stories; Space ships -- Fiction", "article": "CAPTAIN MIDAS\nBy ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\nThe captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at\n\n the torn derelict floating against the velvet void.\n\n Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How\n\n could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go\n hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course,\n there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get\n any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain,\n sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great\n treasure....\n\n\n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis\n seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans\n in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit.\n We're still a greedy lot....\n\n\n I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more\n right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask.\n The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I\n am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot—wait for the weight of\n years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things\n my eyes have seen.\n\n\n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for\n old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb\n Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands.\n Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....\n\n\n You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached\n earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe,\n thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have\n the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value\n out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're\n right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of\n civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of\n that. We did it for\nus\n... for Number One. That's the kind of men we\n were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the\n risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there.\n But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their\n lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\n\n\n It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on\n that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship,\n so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was\n two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came\n out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all\n like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The\n Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for\n alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had\n ever been found ... then.\n\n\n My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them\n so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for\n high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski.\n There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul\n for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different.\n That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe\n all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe.\n There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or\n anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that\n pushes the frontier outward.\n\n\n I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching\n the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last\n flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either.\n It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night\n that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative\n security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt\n into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.\n\n\n I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For\n just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal\n under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a\n sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and\n the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was\n too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and\n for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world\n that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and\n gimme.\n\n\n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would\n pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow\n would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of\n the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid\n that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure\n of that.\n\n\n In those days the asteroid belt was\nthe\nprimary danger and menace to\n astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as\n fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million\n miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space\n that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used\n to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It\n took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics\n never panned out because of the weight problem.\n\n\n So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High\n and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval\n blackness is where we found the derelict.\nI didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported\n it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation\n ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of\n developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole\n responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never\n in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial\n intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just\n assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of\n unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.\n\n\n There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that\n Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one\n of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All\n this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n\n\n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope\n I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a\n distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass,\n but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever\n seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my\n slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the\n derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something\n about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer,\n and showed him my figures.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to\n you?\"\n\n\n Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures.\n It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct,\n Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of\n those figures on the chart.\n\n\n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n\n\n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug\n of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon\n they were assembled in Control.\n\n\n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have\n computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems\n to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into\n the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's\nSpace Regulations\nand opened it to the section concerning salvage.\n\n\n \"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary\n Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found\n in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space\n not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars\n Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the\n vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases\n as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily\n ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that\n means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to\n claim it as salvage.\"\n\n\n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n\n\n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger\n of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came\n in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"\n\n\n There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.\n\n\n \"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n \"Certainly!\"\nThe first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was\n her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained\n such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand\n feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable\n alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully\n in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with\n something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff\n were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some\n strange and alien way.\n\n\n It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for\n inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of\n mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave\n her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was\n unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she\n was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung\n about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away\n again into the inter-stellar deeps.\n\n\n Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured.\n\n\n The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed\n by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared\n a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth\n millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and\n crossed to her.\n\n\n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their\n faces.\n\n\n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit\n her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives.\n She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage\n compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n\n\n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was\n nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull\n alone was left.\n\n\n He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples\n of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this\n stuff....\"\n\n\n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The\n carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and\n Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her\n down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check\n those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When\n it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n\n\n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a\n metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff\n is worth anything....\"\n\n\n The metal was heavy—too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship\n construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that\n distant world where this metal was made?\n\n\n Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal\n torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver;\n those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were\n there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of\n the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand.\nIt had a\n yellowish tinge, and it was heavier\n....\n\n\n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held\n it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm.\n Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It\n struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of\n metallic lustre.\n\n\n For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying\n all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a\n balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It\n was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The\n whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing\n vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had\n drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal—the\n stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was\n built—was now....\nGold!\nI scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my\n table-top.\nGold!\nI searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps,\n from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ...\n drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability\n in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element—wonderfully,\n miraculously gold!\n\n\n And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.\n\n\n I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on\n the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize\n crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n\n\n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a\n first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would\n need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me\n to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me,\n Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n\n\n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning\n slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat\n him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.\n\n\n \"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister\n Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is\n that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face\n and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he\n turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like\n him to let it go at that.\n\n\n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't\n functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I\n rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering\n about Spinelli.\n\n\n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and\n after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.\n\n\n For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat\n to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first\n place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the\n second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n\n\n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and\n I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that\n there was no double-cross.\n\n\n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the\n rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk.\n That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the\n treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they\n were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.\n\n\n I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with\n that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally\n I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had\n set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\nTogether, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw\n of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish\n fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a\n great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid\n followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls\n on automatic.\n\n\n Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.\n\n\n Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski\n told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard\n for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty\n of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand\n tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked.\n Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up\n a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't\n seemed likely before, but now—\n\n\n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n\n\n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well\n within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of\n messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid\n eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken\n the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.\n\n\n Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and\n ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would\n have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n\n\n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if\n I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my\n hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined\n to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no\n telling what can happen to a man in space....\n\n\n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through\n garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal.\n Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours\n later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an\n animal suspicion.\n\n\n \"They're faking!\"\n\n\n \"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n\n\n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n\n\n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey\n my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n\n\n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you\n land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share?\nI\nfound her, and\n she's mine!\"\n\n\n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in\n her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n\n\n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on\n the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n\n\n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.\n\n\n \"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n\n\n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ...\n sir.\"\n\n\n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand\n that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were\n failing.\n\n\n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ...\n WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ...\n CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly,\n in mid-word.\n\n\n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n\n\n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.\n\n\n He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in\n the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though\n the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n\n\n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the\n corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They\n won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing\n console of the supersonic rifle.\n\n\n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n\n\n \"\nSpinelli!\n\"\n\n\n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him\n away from the panel.\n\n\n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.\n\n\n He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and\n he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing\n spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.\n\n\n \"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\nHe spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge\n and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He\n stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged\n again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my\n right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He\n staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his\n stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my\n shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still\n trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go.\n My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face\n and lay still.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the author's purpose in writing Paragraph 2?", "question_unique_id": "63867_NRF3ZA5W_1", "options": ["There was no purpose", "To add historical characters to the story", "To provide credibility to the historical content being written", "To emphasize the history of cost"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author mean when he writes \"They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.\"", "question_unique_id": "63867_NRF3ZA5W_2", "options": ["The crew was able to get rich of their findings", "The lust for gold took a toll on the skipper and crew", "The crew died", "They were punished for their crimes"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the significance of the title?", "question_unique_id": "63867_NRF3ZA5W_3", "options": ["The Captain didn't act like a captain at all", "Midas was a Greek God", "It is the name of the protagonist", "No significance at all"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What more than likely was causing the physical symptoms of the captain?", "question_unique_id": "63867_NRF3ZA5W_4", "options": ["The gold was poisonous", "Stress of the crew stealing gold", "Aging", "The stress of finding gold"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to the story what are the two components of gold?", "question_unique_id": "63867_NRF3ZA5W_5", "options": ["Iron, Oxygen", "Lust and Cost", "Captain and his crew", "Location and Transportation"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the \"unreasoning arrogance\" that the Captain spoke of?", "question_unique_id": "63867_NRF3ZA5W_6", "options": ["Gold could be salvaged for riches", "The crew's cocky attitude", "That the captain didn't believe there was any danger in space", "That man was the only life in space"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the significance of the gold ship being abandoned?", "question_unique_id": "63867_NRF3ZA5W_7", "options": ["Greed does not allow it to be controlled", "It supports the idea that space travel is dangerous", "The cut in the ship displays the violence gold causes", "That there is no other life in the universe"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about the ending of the story?", "question_unique_id": "63867_NRF3ZA5W_8", "options": ["It wasn't advanced weaponry that hurt Spinelli, but old fashioned combat", "Spinelli never was interested in the gold", "The captain worried about violence from the crew however he killed his own crew member", "The second in command charged the captain"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/8/6/63867//63867-h//63867-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62260", "set_unique_id": "62260_AJFK7MHE", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Trouble on Tycho", "year": 1957, "author": "Bond, Nelson S.", "topic": "Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Science fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Musicians -- Fiction; PS", "article": "TROUBLE ON TYCHO\nBy NELSON S. BOND\nIsobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of\n\n the Moon Station's existence. But there came\n\n the day when his comrades found that the worth\n\n of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and\n Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n\n\n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander\n appeared.\n\n\n \"Report ready, Jones?\"\n\n\n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right,\n though. How anybody can be expected to get\nanything\nright on this\n dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese—\"\n\n\n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is\n making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n\n\n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag—?\"\n\n\n It\nwas all\n, so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking\n to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to\n his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which,\n six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed:\nCond. of\n Obs.\nHe noted the proper figures under the headings\nSun Spots\n:\nMax\n Freq.\n—\nMin. Freq.\n; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red\n ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work\n sheet.\n\n\n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer,\n frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and\n began writing.\n\n\n \"\nWeather forecast for Terra\n,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching\n sounds.\n\n\n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered\n without looking.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple\n o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n\n\n \"I—er—I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n\n\n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He\n blinked nervously.\n\n\n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \"\nYou\n, Miss Sally! Golly—'scuse me!\n I didn't realize—\"\n\n\n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n\n\n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather\n in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki,\n but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally.\n Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n\n\n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.\n\n\n South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the\n meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his\n job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw\n himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain\n rendered possible.\nIf home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as \"Isobar\"\n to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long\n way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for\n six tedious Earth months, beneath the\nimpervite\nhemisphere of Lunar\n III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station,\n teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.\n\n\n \"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up\n in an airtight Dome like—like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight?\n Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not\n burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a\n toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented,\n reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n\n\n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he\n signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine\n existence.\n\n\n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the\n stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?\"\n\n\n It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"\n\n\n \"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.\n\n\n He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered.\n Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally\n turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n\n\n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your\n britches?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean—Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe\n you wouldn't mind if I—well—er—\"\n\n\n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's\n open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n\n\n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of\n incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before\n him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating\n with painstaking clarity:\n\n\n \"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me,\n Luna? Can you hear—?\"\n\n\n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you,\n as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n\n\n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of\n displeasure.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's\nyou\n? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley,\n the cosmic comedian—didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder,\n oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"'\nWeather\n forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21\n—'\"\n\n\n \"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\nRiley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report,\n entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and\n dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n\n\n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded\n Riley's shoulder.\n\n\n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked\n startled.\n\n\n \"How's that? I didn't say a word—\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you.\n I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me\n a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a\n window?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why—why, yes, but—\"\n\n\n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours\n but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand—\" The silver platter which had\n mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the\n inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun\n briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly\n landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green\n trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ...\n people....\n\n\n \"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n\n\n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he\n nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other\n radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n\n\n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \"\nHe twisted\nthe mike; not me. But—how come\n you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open,\n Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n\n\n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n\n\n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six\n months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only\n make you feel worse to see Earth.\"\n\n\n \"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's—well, it's\n the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and\n trees.\"\n\n\n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n\n\n \"We've got\nthem\nright here on Luna. Go look out the tower window,\n Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest,\n greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All\n that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out\n in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—\"\n\n\n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n\n\n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander\n Eagan. He squirmed.\n\n\n \"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir!\n It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of\n absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to\n go, for example—\"\n\n\n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n\n\n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones!\n Where are\nyou\ngoing?\"\n\n\n \"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n\n\n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a\n while—\"\n\n\n \"I thought that, too. And with\nwhat\n, pray, Jones?\"\n\n\n \"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that\n gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\nCommander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing\n yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think—\"\n\n\n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"'\nIn order that work or rest\n periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered\n that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must\n be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander\n,' That\n means you, Jones!\"\n\n\n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to\n play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good\n music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—\"\n\n\n \"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning\n system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of\n your—er—so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire\n structure.\"\n\n\n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n\n\n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire\n organization for your own—er—amusement.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already.\n If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last\n amusement which lightened his moments of freedom—\n\n\n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother\n nobody. I'll go Outside and play it—\"\n\n\n \"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about\n the Grannies?\"\n\n\n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life\n found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an\n abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar\n exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was\n an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low\n intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and\n implacable foe.\n\n\n Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever\n yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science\n was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of\n Graniteback physiology—but it was known, from bitter experience, that\n the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something\n harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be\n penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame,\n by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered\n atomo-needle dispenser.\n\n\n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n\n\n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for\n a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back\n inside—\"\n\n\n \"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.\n\n\n \"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust!\n Oh—\nfiddlesticks\n!\"\nII\n\n\n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot\n oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n\n\n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr.\n Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man\n nodded commiseratingly.\n\n\n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not\n altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our\n poor Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit\n homesick now and then. He ought to learn to—\"\n\n\n \"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n \"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something\n deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call:\nweltschmertz\n. There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n 'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'—something like that but\n intensified a thousandfold.\n\n\n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame\n of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which\n they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts\n of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his\n buttons?\"\n\n\n \"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass\n of despair. He may try\nanything\nto retrieve his lost happiness, rid\n his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying\n hunger—By the way, where is he now?\"\n\n\n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will\n find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n\n\n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n \"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n\n\n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he\n was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive\n culprit.\n\n\n Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome\n Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was\n encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their\n pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n\n\n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace\n o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll\nsee\nabout that!\"\n\n\n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the\n room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge\nimpervite\ngates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway\n to Outside.\n\n\n On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle\n adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But\n today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture\n out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have\n to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of\n the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n\n\n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding\n an aura of propriety.\n\n\n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the\n meeting.\"\n\n\n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n\n\n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"\n\n\n \"Notified of\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I\n would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to\n call the office, maybe?\"\n\n\n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That—er—won't\n be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run\n along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n\n\n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a\n sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back\n sudden-like.\"\n\n\n \"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\nWilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely\n out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped\n through, and closed it behind him.\n\n\n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated\n temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but\n fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with\n joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at\n last! After six long and dreary months!\n\n\n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes\n that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the\n lunar valley....\n\n\n How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not\n afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He\n only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a\n lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the\n chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes\n formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one\n charmed.\n\n\n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's\n entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he\n was startled to hear—off to his right—the sharp, explosive bark of a\n Haemholtz ray pistol.\n\n\n He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his\n meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed\n its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the\n Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to\n judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the\n structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n\n\n And the shooting? That could only be—\n\n\n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that\n moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of\n figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was\n staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm,\n bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in\n his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to\n cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.\n\n\n And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with\n astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a\n dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\nIII\n\n\n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A\n gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n\n\n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick,\n man—where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n\n\n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly\n make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken,\n and—\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You\n don't have one! You're here\nalone\n! Then you didn't pick up our call?\n But, why—?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could\n move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their\n peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action\n against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons\n were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary\n way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you\n go! Give him a lift, Brown—There! That's the stuff!\"\n\n\n He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy\n sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough\n when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath\n his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant\n inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud.\n The Graniteback was\nnot\na climber. It was far too ungainly, much too\n weighty for that.\n\n\n Roberts said weakly, \"Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call.\"\n\n\n \"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n \"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long\n as it lasts, but—\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of\n Grannies unhappily—\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of\n superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they\n come!\"\n\n\n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic\n consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged\n headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like\n the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted\n beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about\n them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged\n forest monarch shuddered in agony.\n\n\n Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it\n did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly\n to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken\n and cracked—revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\nBrown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with\n terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n\n\n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that—\"\n\n\n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies\n meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast.\n Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden\n idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n\n\n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now.\n If we can just hold out—\"\n\n\n But Roberts shook his head.\n\n\n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just\n been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they\n first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n\n\n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n\n\n \"Then I—I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have\n only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to\n pick us up. But as it is—\"\n\n\n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n\n\n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we\n volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth\n a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous\n stones-on-legs!\"\n\n\n Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"\n\n\n \"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more,\n the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy\n refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts.\n This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several\n snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that\n the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their\n adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n\n\n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture\n of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating\n Grannies.\n\n\n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of\n fighting those filthy things—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again,\n excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing\n position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over\n his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath\n expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive,\n fearsome, \"\nKaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong!\n\"\n\n\n Roberts moaned.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n\n\n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n\n\n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense\n of hearing. That's been proven—\"\n\n\n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.\n\n\n \"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right\n opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over\n there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of\n order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome—but\n the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short\n while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n\n\n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders.\n They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe\n they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can\n make him look out here—\"\n\n\n \"\nStop talking!\n\" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start\n blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last\n hope.\nBlow!\n\"\n\n\n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\nIsobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\nHe meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more,\n a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing\n down upon the tree.\n\n\n \"\nHaa-a-roong!\n\" blew Isobar Jones.\nIV\n\n\n And—even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of\n his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was\n incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into\n whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into\n action—the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n\n\n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless,\n questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and\n vibrant droning!\n\n\n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed,\n his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow\n lifted his paralysis.\n\n\n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They\nlike\nit! Keep playing, Jonesy!\n Play, boy, like you never played before!\"\n\n\n And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the\npiobaireachd\ninto\n which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the\n savage beast! Then we were wrong. They\ncan\nhear, after all! See that?\n They're lying down to listen—like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar!\n For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n\n\n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack\n had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly,\n quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the\n tree.\n\n\n There was no doubt about it; the Grannies\nliked\nthis music. Eyes\n raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of\n gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar\n paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe\n with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.\n\n\n Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have\n been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not—and\n in two cases\ndared\nnot—allow him to stop playing. And to this\n audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches,\n flings, dances—the stirring\nRhoderik Dhu\nand the lilting\nLassies\n O'Skye\n, the mournful\nCoghiegh nha Shie\nwhose keening is like the\n sound of a sobbing nation.\nThe Cock o' the North\n, he played, and\nMironton\n...\nWee Flow'r o'\n Dee\nand\nMacArthur's March\n...\nLa Cucuracha\nand—\n\n\n And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood\n pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the\n chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the\n blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n\n\n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few\n minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his\n turret window five minutes ago!\"\n\n\n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of\n those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he\n knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another\n sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank,\n sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n\n\n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of\n encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.\n\n\n \"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and\n get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute\n Isobar stops playing!\"\n\n\n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar\n voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's\n fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n\n\n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres—\nthose Grannies are\n stone dead\n!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why is Isobar homesick for Earth?", "question_unique_id": "62260_AJFK7MHE_1", "options": ["He is tired of the Dome Commander's reign", "He is bored of the routine of his job", "He is unable to go outside on Luna and experience the valley", "He misses his family and loved ones"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about the creatures name, Grannies?", "question_unique_id": "62260_AJFK7MHE_2", "options": ["They travel in groups of 12", "They are fast and lethal", "They are slow", "They are very old"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What word best describes Isobar's personality?", "question_unique_id": "62260_AJFK7MHE_3", "options": ["Weary", "Abrasive", "Angry", "Whiny"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The author uses the made up word impervite to describe the dome and the gates to the entrance. What is the best definition of the word?", "question_unique_id": "62260_AJFK7MHE_4", "options": ["Imperative", "Impenetrable", "Imperialistic", "Impervious"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the most significant meaning of the bagpipes in the story?", "question_unique_id": "62260_AJFK7MHE_5", "options": ["No significance", "Important ceremonial piece in funerals", "They would be the cause of the survival from the Grannies", "Were played during war"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do you notice about the dialogue between Isobar and his colleagues?", "question_unique_id": "62260_AJFK7MHE_6", "options": ["Isobar is whiny and a complainer", "The colleagues are demeaning and disrespectful towards Isobar", "Isobar does not follow protocol", "Isobar uses old fashioned verb-age compared to his colleagues"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the story suggest about freedom?", "question_unique_id": "62260_AJFK7MHE_7", "options": ["Freedom is lack of restraint rather than your location", "Freedom is only as strong as your distance from home", "Freedom is what space exploration is for", "Freedom is unattainable"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is comedically ironic about the Grannies death?", "question_unique_id": "62260_AJFK7MHE_8", "options": ["The jabbing of colleagues about the bad bagpipe music actually caused death", "Grannies weren't actually tough at all and died so easily", "No comedic elements to the Grannies' death", "They turned to stone from the music"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/2/6/62260//62260-h//62260-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63836", "set_unique_id": "63836_NHFTPJD2", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Morley's Weapon", "year": 1958, "author": "Barefoot, D. W.", "topic": "PS; Survival -- Fiction; Castaways -- Fiction; Iapetus (Satellite) -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "MORLEY'S WEAPON\nBy D. W. BAREFOOT\nOut of the far reaches of the universe sped\n \nthe meteor swarm, cosmic question marks destined\n \nfor annihilation in the sun. But one, approximately\n \nhalf a pound of frozen destruction, had a\n \nrendezvous near Japetus with Spaceboat 6.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt was comfortably cool in the functional, little control room, but\n Morley was sweating, gently and steadily. His palms were wet, and the\n thin thoughtful face, shining in the glow of the instrument panel\n light, was wrinkled in an agony of concentration and doubt. He was\n trying to choose between the Scylla of waking Madsen with a corollary\n of biting contempt involved, and the Charybdis of attempting to land\n single handed on Japetus, less than five hundred miles below. Neither\n course was appealing.\n\n\n For the hundredth time he pondered miserably over the sad condition\n of what had been a reasonably well ordered existence. The worst of\n it was that he had only himself to blame, and he knew it. No one had\n forced him to leave a comfortable, if poorly paid position with General\n Plastics, and fill out an employment card at Satellites, Inc.\n\n\n He could not explain the obscure compulsion that sparked his little\n personal rebellion.\n\n\n He didn't know, or need to know that other generations of Morleys had\n fought in revolutions, or sailed in square riggers, or clawed gold from\n mountainsides. When he went to the spaceline, the puzzlement of his few\n friends was profound, but hardly more so than his own. And now, after\n almost a year of upheaval and change, he was piloting a spaceboat along\n an involute curve ending on the surface of Saturn's eighth moon. And he\n was still puzzled.\n\n\n Satellites, Inc., had done as well as possible with the raw material\n known as Morley, Vincent, No. 4628. His psychograph indicated a born\n subordinate, with a normal I.Q., reasonably stable and trustworthy\n though below average in initiative. They didn't inform him of this,\n or the fact that they had analyzed the neurosis which had driven\n him to the spaceline, and which had created by that very action the\n therapeutic aid he needed. Many spacemen had similar case histories.\n\n\n It was those who fought the compulsion who sometimes turned down dark\n pathways of the mind.\n\n\n For six months he attended cadet school, and graduated in due time,\n fourteenth in a class of fifty. The next day he was assigned as fourth\n engineman to the space freighter\nSolarian\n, bound to Port Ulysses,\n Titan, Saturn system, with a cargo of mining machinery and supplies.\nThey blasted off from Chicago Spaceport on a raw March midnight. Just\n another rocket take-off, routine stuff, now. But have you ever seen it?\n The night, the wind, the distant city glow in the sky? On the strip\n squats the massive bulk of the rocket, loading hatches closed, sealed\n port holes gleaming through the gusts of rain that sweep the field. In\n the sound proofed spaceport control tower the officials are relaxed\n over coffee and cigarettes; their part is over; they sit watching.\n\n\n Somewhere in the mighty shell on the field, chronometer hands reach the\n calculated second, a circuit closes, relays chatter briefly. The rocket\n igniters are firing, flame billows over the field, a low rumble from\n the tubes builds to a throbbing roar. Twenty miles away a housewife\n looks up, a question on her face. Her husband listens and smiles. \"It's\n the Saturn rocket. It's here in the paper, under Departures.\"\n\n\n On the field the roar rises to an insane bellow of sound. Under the\n mighty jets, the ten feet of concrete and the solid earth beneath it\n are shaking. In the insulated control tower a water glass dances in its\n holder. The watchers are not relaxed now; they lean forward.\n\n\n It's old stuff, routine, precalculated to a fraction of a second,\n but—watch. There—a stir—movement. Slowly at first, with a deliberate\n and awful majesty, then faster and faster.\n\n\n Straight toward the zenith the ship rises, trailing fire. Faster yet,\n hurling herself upward, under full power, through the last threads of\n atmosphere. Upward and onward, out past Roches limit, out where gravity\n dwindles toward zero, into the empyrean where the shades of dead\n spacemen cruise the cosmos in their phantom craft, spaceborne in the\n night.\n\n\n After he had recovered from the pangs of his initial attack of space\n nausea, Morley enjoyed himself. He had one minor social asset, a\n retentive mind, well stocked with general information. If the two\n apprentices got involved in an argument over the identity of the\n highest peak in America, Morley was the inevitable arbiter. He could\n with equal facility name the author of a recent best seller, or inform\n you that a young seal was a cub, a young hare, a leveret, and a young\n swan, a cygnet.\n\n\n He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.\n\n\n \"All personnel not on duty will report to the recreation room at 1900\n hours, Solar time, to draw for side trip partners and destinations,\"\n it read.\n\n\n He buttonholed the crew messman. \"What's all this about side trips,\n Oscar?\"\n\n\n Roly poly Oscar looked at him incredulously. \"The lay over trips. The\n time killer. On the level, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Morley shook his head.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Oscar told him, \"We leave Earth shortly before Saturn is in\n opposition. They figure on the shortest possible run, which takes three\n months. If we discharge and start right back, the round trip would take\n about six months. That's fine, except that the synodic period for Earth\n and Saturn—Hey, you know what I'm talking about?\"\n\n\n Morley admitted his ignorance, vaguely annoyed at the fact that for\n once he was the humble seeker for information, and someone else was\n being professorial.\n\n\n Oscar grinned. \"And you studied astrogation! Well, when Saturn and\n Earth line up with the Sun, it takes three hundred and seventy eight\n days before they get in the same position again. So if we got back to\n Earth's orbit in six months, we'd still have about a hundred and eighty\n millions of miles to go, because Earth would be on Sol's other side at\n that time, in superior conjunction to Uranus.\"\n\n\n Morley digested this, while Oscar basked in the light of his own\n knowledge, enjoying himself hugely.\n\n\n \"And the trips, Oscar?\"\n\n\n \"We lay over three or four months, 'til opposition time isn't too\n far away, and we pick partners and destinations by lot, and go out\n to Saturn's other moons on prospecting trips—ore deposits, jewels,\n botanical specimens, etc.—half for us, and half for the Company. It's\n a good deal, a regular vacation, and those two-men craft are sweet\n stuff. And if you're lucky—\"\n\n\n He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.\n\n\n Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"\n\n\n Morley flushed, and fumbled miserably for a reasonable excuse. There\n was a gleam of contempt in Madsen's eyes, but he spoke again more\n quietly. \"I'm going to eat and catch up on some sack time. We'll be\n right on top of Japetus in short order. It's a known fact that the moon\n won't move over if you fly at it, so you better wake me up to handle\n the compensating!\" He disappeared into the tiny galley, but his words\n were still audible. \"It's an awful long walk back, chum, if anybody\n pulls a bull.\"\n\n\n Morley swung himself into the pilot's seat, too numb with humiliation\n to answer. Almost an hour passed before he started the regulation\n checkup required by the Space Code of any ship passing within one\n hundred thousand miles of a planet or major satellite. Every guardian\n needle stood in its normal place with one exception. The craft had been\n running on the port fuel tanks, depleting them to the point where it\n seemed wise to trim ship. Morley opened the valve, touched the fuel\n pump switch and waited, nothing happened. He watched the needles\n incredulously. The pump—? He jabbed the switch, once, twice. Nothing.\n\n\n He leaned forward and rapped the starboard gauge with his knuckles,\n sharply. The needle swung from Full to Empty. Morley felt faint as\n realization hit him. The starboard gauge had stuck at Full, and had\n been unreported. The tank had not been serviced in port, owing to\n the faulty reading and a mechanic's carelessness. They had about two\n hours fuel. Even to Morley, it was obvious that there was one thing\n only to do—land on Japetus, looming up larger in the view-plate with\n each passing moment. He checked the distance rapidly, punched the\n calculator, and put the ship in the designated orbit. He wanted to\n handle the landing himself, but the thought of the final few ticklish\n moments chilled him. So did the thought of waking Madsen, and asking\n him to take over.\n\n\n And it was then, at the intersection of two courses formed by an\n infinity of variables, that two objects arrived in the same millisecond\n of time. Eight ounces of nickel iron smashed into the stern of\n Spaceboat 6, ripped a path of ruin through her entire length, and went\n out through the two inch glass of her bow, before Morley could turn\n his head. He was aware, in a strange dream-like way, of actuating\n the midships airtight door, of the hiss of air as the little aneroid\n automatically opened valves to compensate for the drop in pressure, and\n of Madsen leaping into the control room and slapping a Johnson patch\n over the hole in the bow.\n\n\n Madsen was white but composed. \"We can slow her down but we can't land\n her. Get suits while I take over. We'll ride as far as we can, and\n walk the rest of the way.\" He fought with the controls, as Morley,\n still bemused, obeyed. At twenty-five hundred feet they bailed out,\n and floating down seconds later, watched Spaceboat 6 crash into a low\n wooded hill. And when they landed, and inspected the wreckage, it was\n some minutes before either spoke.\n\n\n It was obvious at a glance that Spaceboat 6 was ready for the boneyard,\n had there been one around. The ship, under the few automatic controls\n that were still functioning, had sliced in at a thirty degree angle,\n ploughed a short distance through a growth of slim, poplar-like trees,\n and then crumpled completely against an outcropping granite ledge.\n Finally Morley gulped audibly, and Madsen laughed.\n\n\n \"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"\n\n\n Madsen ignored the interruption, and cut loose with one last broadside.\n \"Save your breath. It's bad enough being saddled with a useless little\n squirt like you, without being made into a pack mule unnecessarily.\"\nII\n\n\n He climbed into a gaping hole in the bow. Morley followed, humiliated\n but still thinking hard. Catalogue it, he told himself. Remember\n everything. The Distress Depots, or D.D.'s, as spacemen called them,\n were studded on every frontier world, usually on the Equator. They\n contained two small spacecraft plus ample supplies of food, medicine,\n and tools. When wrecked, get to a D.D. and live. It was that simple.\n\n\n They spent an hour worming their way through the shambles that had\n been the well ordered interior of Spaceboat 6, before emerging to take\n stock of their loot on the ground outside. Both men knew that they\n were pitifully equipped to cover several hundred miles, on foot, in\n a completely hostile environment. Suddenly Madsen looked up from the\n sextant he was examining.\n\n\n \"How come this gravity, Brain? I weigh about a hundred right now, I\n figure, and that's too much, by plenty. Japetus isn't a quarter the\n size of our moon.\"\n\n\n \"It's supposed to have a core of heavy radioactive metals,\" said\n Morley, thoughtfully, \"and a corresponding high density. Keeps it warm\n anyway, instead of a big icicle, like Phoebe.\"\n\n\n \"Phoebe!\" Madsen laughed. \"I remember, back in '89—\" He stopped\n abruptly at a rattling from the ledge. A green, little lizard-like\n creature was scrambling frantically over the granite, while hot in\n pursuit were three—spiders? Black, they were, a black like living\n velvet, and incredibly fast as they closed in, beady stalked eyes\n fastened on their prey. They were deliberately herding the desperate\n lizard toward a cleft in the rock. As the creature leaped into the\n opening, another spider dove at it from the recess. The others closed\n in. There was a hopeless hissing, a vicious clicking of mandibles. The\n struggle subsided. Once again the day was silent. Madsen holstered the\n blaster he had drawn and looked whitely at Morley.\n\n\n \"Pleasant pets,\" he grunted.\n\n\n \"Poisonous and carnivorous, too,\" said Morley, shakingly. \"I remember\n reading that Valdez dissected one when he first landed here twenty\n years ago. One of his crew was bitten, and died in less than five\n minutes.\"\n\n\n Madsen was thoughtful. \"We could stand a little briefing on the local\n flora and fauna, but palaver won't get us to the Equator. And that\n little stock treatise entitled 'Physical Attributes of Phoebe' is worse\n than useless. Lucky the sextant is O.K., we can at least check our\n latitude. There's just one flaw.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"Which way do we go when we hit the line? The D.D.'s are spaced ninety\n degrees apart. We might be within a hundred miles of one. If we head\n the wrong way, we'd have three or four hundred miles to go. There's no\n method of figuring our longitude.\"\n\n\n Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice.\n\n\n \"Two. We came in over the Pole almost exactly at inferior conjunction.\n Right?\"\n\n\n \"I think I get it.\" Madsen answered slowly.\n\n\n For a moment Morley was silent. He could almost smell the dingy\n classroom in Port Chicago, almost see the words on the examination\n paper in front of him. The paragraph leaped out, limned sharply in his\n mind. \"Section 4, Subhead A, Solar Space Code. The initial Distress\n Depot on any satellite shall be situated, when practical, on the\n Prime Meridian. For the purposes of this act, the Prime Meridian of a\n satellite shall be the meridian that bisects the Sun when the Satellite\n is in inferior conjunction. Quarter mile belts shall be burned fifty\n miles to the North, South, East, and West as guides. Radio beacons will\n operate, unless impracticable due to atmospheric conditions, or other\n reasons.\"\n\n\n \"We're on, or practically on the Prime Meridian right now,\" said\n Madsen. \"A trek due South should hit D.D. No. 1 square on the nose.\n Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right. Two or three hundred miles to go. We might make it in two\n weeks.\"\n\n\n Madsen squinted at the stationary disk of Sol, hanging in the sky.\n \"Let's load up and get started. The sooner we're on our way, the\n better.\"\n\n\n Both men had discarded their space suits, were dressed in the gray\n work clothes of Satellites, Inc. Equipment was easily divided. Each\n had a blaster, and a wrist compass-chronometer. Radio was useless on\n Japetus, and the little headsets were ruthlessly jettisoned. The flat\n tins of emergency food concentrate were stowed in two knapsacks. Madsen\n took charge of the sextant, and Morley carried a lightweight repeating\n rifle for possible game that might be out of blaster range. Canteens,\n a pocket first-aid kit, and a small heliograph, were the final items,\n except for several articles which Morley unobtrusively stowed away\n about his person.\n\n\n Less than three hours after the crash, the two men shouldered their\n burdens, took a bearing to determine their course, and headed into the\n south.\nIn a matter of minutes Spaceboat 6 was out of sight. With Madsen\n leading, they threaded their way through the scant undergrowth.\n Underfoot the dry, broad-bladed grass rustled through a morning that\n had no beginning or end. Farther away were other and less easily\n explained rustlings, and once both men froze as a half-dozen of what\n looked like baby dragons arrowed past within yards of them.\n\n\n \"Formation flying, like ducks,\" muttered Morley, watching from the\n corner of his eye.\n\n\n When the whispering of scaled wings had died away, the castaways\n resumed their steady plodding into the south. Twice they crossed small\n fresh water brooks, providing a welcome opportunity to drink their\n fill, and replenish the canteens. The going was easy, since the footing\n was in fairly dense soil, and the scrub was not so thick as to provide\n any difficulties. After eight hours of nearly continuous travel, they\n reached the banks of a third stream. Here Madsen stopped, and dropped\n his knapsack to the ground.\n\n\n \"Campsite,\" he grunted.\n\n\n \"Alabama,\" Morley murmured.\n\n\n Madsen goggled. \"Are you delirious? What do you mean—Alabama?\"\n\n\n Morley laughed sheepishly. \"Alabama means 'Here we rest,' I said it\n without thinking.\"\n\n\n Madsen was grinning now. \"What beats me is how you remember all that\n junk. I'd go nuts if I tried to clutter up my mind with a bunch of\n useless data. Alabama!\"\n\n\n \"I don't have to try to remember things,\" Morley said thoughtfully. \"If\n I read or hear something that seems the least bit curious or unusual,\n it just sticks. And sometimes it's useful.\"\n\n\n \"Such as?\"\n\n\n \"Well, remember when Storybook ran a mile last year in 1.29? He was\n the first to break 1.30. Some joe that knew a lot about horses gave me\n an argument in a bar about the first horse to break 1.40. He bet me\n ten credits it was Man o' War. I knew it was Ten Broeck, and I got an\n almanac and proved it.\"\n\n\n Madsen looked up from the tin of coffee concentrate he was opening.\n \"Hasn't anyone ever tried to win an argument by poking you one in the\n snoot?\"\n\n\n \"Once or twice.\" Morley was almost apologetic. \"But I learned judo a\n few years ago, just for the hell of it, so I didn't get hurt much.\"\n\n\n \"You're a whiz with the sabre, no doubt?\" said Madsen dryly.\n\n\n \"No, I tried swordplay for a while, but gave it up. It's a little too,\n er—primitive for my tastes.\"\n\n\n \"Primitive!\" Madsen glanced around at the alien scene and nearly\n choked. \"I'm crossing my fingers, but what would you do if some\n carnivore, or a gang of those spiders suddenly appeared and started for\n us with evil intentions?\"\n\n\n \"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.\n\n\n Madsen was hastily dumping the contents of the knapsacks on the ground.\n Morley joined him, and both men commenced scraping the clinging gray\n patches from the tins. All but three were perforated and ruined.\n\n\n \"We'll at least be traveling light from now on,\" Madsen said. \"Any idea\n what this stuff is?\"\n\n\n \"Some of that lichen, or whatever it is, was around the scene of the\n crash,\" Morley answered. \"The stuff must have an affinity for tin;\n probably secretes some acid that dissolves it. Only trouble is, it goes\n through thin steel too.\"\n\n\n Madsen commenced repacking their effects.\n\n\n \"From now on, laddie, keep your eyes peeled for game, and if you see\n any, use that rifle. If we don't knock down some meat, and soon, we\n aren't going to make it. Might as well realize it right now.\"\n\n\n \"Were you ever wrecked before, Madsen?\"\n\n\n \"Once, on Venus. Cartographic expedition.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\"\n\n\n \"Tubes blew and we made a forced landing. Wound up sitting in the\n middle of a pile of highgrade scrap.\"\n\n\n \"What did you do then?\"\n\n\n Madsen shouldered his knapsack and smiled condescendingly.\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Mr. Fix-it. We didn't have to. Since I seem to have\n accidentally stumbled on something new and strange to you, add this to\n your files. It's usual on cartographic trips of any length, for one\n ship to go out, while another stays at a temporary base, and keeps in\n constant directional radio contact. If anything happens, they come\n a-running. Makes it fine for us uninformed common people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.\n\n\n As they made southing, the dull sun crept higher in the sky by\n infinitesimal degrees. Now the going became tougher. Patches of evil\n looking muskeg began to appear in the scrub, and the stunted trees\n themselves gradually gave way to six foot ferns. There were occasional\n signs that some creature had been foraging on the lush growth. When\n they found fresh tracks in the soft footing, Morley unlimbered the\n rifle, and the two men trod more softly. By that time either would have\n cheerfully made a meal on one of the miniature flying dragons, alive\n and kicking, and the thought of a juicy steak from some local herbivore\n was as soul stirring as the sight of Mecca to a true believer.\n\n\n Both men whirled at a sudden crashing on their left. Something like a\n large splay footed kangaroo broke cover, and went loping away, clearing\n the fern tops at every bound. In one motion Morley whipped up the\n rifle and fired. There was an earsplitting report, the leaper kept\n right on going, under forced draught, and the two castaways stared in\n consternation at a rifle that resembled a bundle of metallic macaroni\n more than it did a firearm.\n\n\n Madsen spoke first. \"You probably got some mud in the barrel when we\n stopped last time,\" he accused. \"Look at us now.\"\n\n\n Morley started to mumble an apology, but Madsen cut him short. \"Look at\n us now,\" he repeated, with all stops out. \"It was bad before, now it's\n practically hopeless. Our only long range gun! What do we do now if we\n do find game—dig pits for it?\"\n\n\n If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.\n\n\n The slope on which they rested was tufted with small bushes. One\n particular type with narrow dark green leaves bore clusters of fruit\n like small plums, which Madsen eyed speculatively.\n\n\n \"Do we risk it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Might as well.\"\n\n\n Morley was completely unaware that he had just accepted the\n responsibility for making a decision.\n\n\n \"We can't afford not to risk it,\" he said, adding, with little show of\n enthusiasm, \"I'll be the guinea pig.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, chum,\" Madsen countered. \"We'll match for it.\"\n\n\n They matched and Morley called it wrong. He plucked a sample of the\n fruit and stood regarding it like some bewhiskered Little Jack Horner.\n Finally he broke the thin skin with his thumbnail and gingerly conveyed\n a couple of drops of juice to his tongue. The taste was simultaneously\n oily and faintly sweet, and after a short wait he essayed a fair\n sized bite. Madsen was about to follow suit, when Morley motioned him\n to wait. The next second he was rolling on the ground, coughing and\n choking, while Madsen tried grimly to feed him water from a canteen.\n\n\n It was no use. The throat tissues became swollen and inflamed in\n seconds, to the point of agony, and swallowing was totally impossible.\n To this was shortly added an overpowering nausea. When the retching\n finally stopped, Morley tried to speak, but in vain. Even the effort\n meant waves of pain.\n\n\n Madsen watched helplessly, and when the spasms of choking finally\n stopped, spoke gently.\n\n\n \"We'll be camping right here for a while, looks like. Try to get some\n sleep if it slacks off any. You'll be okay in a while.\"\n\n\n His doubts were hidden, and Morley thanked him with his eyes.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What best possible conclusion can be taken from the quote \"His psychographic indicated a born subordinate, with a normal I.Q., reasonably stable and trustworthy though below average in initiative?\" ", "question_unique_id": "63836_NHFTPJD2_1", "options": ["Stability and IQ are not related", "Normal IQ suggests lack of trustworthiness", "Morley was pre-disposed to be subordinate", "All persons born will have a normal I.Q. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Madsen consider \" Morley a human filing cabinet?\"", "question_unique_id": "63836_NHFTPJD2_2", "options": ["Madsen likes to slam Morley like a drawer in a filling cabinet", "Morley is in charge of storage on the ship", "Because he is old and weak", "Morley retains information"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Morley annoyed at Oscar when discussing side trips?", "question_unique_id": "63836_NHFTPJD2_3", "options": ["Oscar was answering in a condescending tone", "Morley was annoyed with the prospect of shifting his routine", "Morley wasn't the person who knew the information", "Morley was hiding his fear of the trips"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What phrase below has the similar meaning as in\"intersection of two courses formed by an infinity of variables?\"", "question_unique_id": "63836_NHFTPJD2_4", "options": ["Every action has an opposite and equal reaction", "What goes up must come down", "Just like math, the calculations could be incorrect", "It was a perfect storm of events"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Throughout the crash and packing after what does Madsen behavior consist of?", "question_unique_id": "63836_NHFTPJD2_5", "options": ["That he is well equipped captain ready to making difficult  decisions appropriately", "Constant berating and riddling Morley", "Questionable decision making", "Fear of the spiders and lizards in the area"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which statement below suggests that Madsen's attitude begins to change?", "question_unique_id": "63836_NHFTPJD2_6", "options": ["\"I think I get it.\" Madsen answered slowly.", "\"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or scornful in his voice.", "\"Which way do we go when we hit the line? The D.D.'s are spaced ninety degrees apart. We might be within a hundred miles of one. If we head the wrong way, we'd have three or four hundred miles to go.", "\"We're on, or practically on the Prime Meridian right now,\" said Madsen. \"A trek due South should hit D.D. No. 1 square on the nose. Right?\""], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Madsen stop yelling after Morley rendered the rifle useless?", "question_unique_id": "63836_NHFTPJD2_7", "options": ["His hunger was draining his energy", "Morley had come up with the idea of the Meridian", "Madsen knew they were dead", "His fine logic told him not to "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the story suggest about intelligence?", "question_unique_id": "63836_NHFTPJD2_8", "options": ["You need a high I.Q. to make the right decisions", "Often experience is more important than I.Q.", "I.Q. is not important as luck", "No suggestions at all about intelligence "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/8/3/63836//63836-h//63836-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62997", "set_unique_id": "62997_NDSU72G7", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Saboteur of Space", "year": 1959, "author": "Abernathy, Robert", "topic": "Adventure stories; PS; Science fiction; Space ships -- Fiction", "article": "Saboteur of Space\nBy ROBERT ABERNATHY\nFresh power was coming to Earth, energy\n\n which would bring life to a dying planet.\n\n Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly\n\n rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns\n\n in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen\n\n of fate—and even the winner would lose.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Spring 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nRyd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and\n watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The\n shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his\n right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a\n ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.\n\n\n Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so\n overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the\n almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing\n darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming\n minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi\n Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted\n up—draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining\n them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819,\n relief was in sight.\n\n\n Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to\n shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis'\n dive.\n\n\n The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were\n asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis'\n which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen,\n these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For\n Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had\n been built to be the power center of North America.\n\n\n The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged\n himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone\n recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something\n else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with\n surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.\n\n\n Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer\n and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was\n heartened.\n\n\n \"Say, Burshis,\" he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his\n back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so\n that his jowls quivered.\n\n\n \"No loans,\" he said flatly. \"But just one on the house, Ryd.\"\n\n\n The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it\n convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, \"What you\n setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since—\"\n\n\n Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, \"Didn't you hear that ship\n that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars—the\n escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming\n in again.\" He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his\n shoulder: \"You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again.\n Jobs for all the bums in this town—even for you.\"\n\n\n He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear\n his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again,\n huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio\n man—no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit\n of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and\n then took it away. He drank still more deeply.\n\n\n The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on\n his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: \"So you're Ryd Randl.\"\nRyd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any\n plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody\n he had ever known—an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a\n beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for\n the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the\n face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and\n almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray\n cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.\n\n\n \"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you.\"\n\n\n \"What's the idea?\" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage\n floated to the top by alcohol.\n\n\n The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself.\n He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and\n distinctly. \"Would you care to make some money, my friend?\"\n\n\n \"\nHuh?\nWhy, yeh—I guess so—\"\n\n\n \"Then come with me.\" The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his\n daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish\n crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made\n frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger\n fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out,\n past the blue-and-gold-lit\nmeloderge\nthat was softly pouring out its\n endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.\n\n\n Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on\n them. They kept walking—so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath,\n long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.\n\n\n \"So you're Ryd Randl,\" repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.\n \"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight.\"\n\n\n Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. \"Look,\" he gasped. \"If\n you're a cop, say so!\"\n\n\n The other laughed shortly. \"No. I'm just a man about to offer you a\n chance. For a come-back, Ryd—a chance to live again.... My name—you\n can call me Mury.\"\n\n\n Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the\n tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with\n his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his\n eyes.\n\n\n \"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?\"\n\n\n \"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?\"\n\n\n \"And why, Ryd?\"\n\n\n \"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.\" He hunched his narrow\n shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. \"Damn\n good one, too—I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the\n physique for Mars—I might just have made it\nthen\n, but I thought the\n plant was going to open again and—\"\n\n\n And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning\n actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine.\n And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its\n full economic independence—and domination. For power is—power; and\n there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two\n in ten could live healthily on the outer world.\n\n\n \"Ten years ago,\" Mury nodded as if satisfied. \"That must have been the\n Power Company of North America—the main plant by Dynamopolis itself,\n that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down\n outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.\"\n\n\n Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in\n this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few\n men who talked his language. He burst out: \"They wouldn't take me, damn\n them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't\n have a drag with any of the Poligerents.\"\n\n\n \"I know all about your record,\" said Mury softly.\n\n\n Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old\n kicked-dog manner. \"How do you know? And what's it to you?\"\nAll at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him\n squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far\n from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet\n Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile\n twisted Mury's thin lips.\n\n\n \"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd—you mean nothing at all to me as an\n individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am\n working—the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and\n sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after\n they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered\n their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to\n be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor\n capitulate frankly to him.\"\n\n\n Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such\n ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. \"Are\n you talking about the power cylinder?\" he demanded blurrily.\n\n\n Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian\n cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said\n simply, \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get it,\" mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had\n heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: \"The\n power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in\n the arm—no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis.\n It will turn the wheels and light the cities and—\"\n\n\n \"To hell with that!\" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up\n slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. \"Don't\n you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"\n\n\n Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a\n passion shocking after his smooth calm:\n\n\n \"The power shell is aid, yes—but with what a price! It's the thirty\n pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have\n sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and\n vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable\n conflict, they're selling us out—making Earth, the first home of man,\n a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great\n Martian land-owners?\nDo you?\n\" He paused out of breath; then finished\n venomously, \"Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper\n than robots—cheap as\nslaves\n!\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. \"What you\n want\nme\nto do about it?\"\n\n\n Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was\n once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. \"We're\n going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.\"\n\n\n Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,\n \"What's that mean?\"\n\n\n \"The power shell—isn't coming in as planned.\"\n\n\n \"You can't do that.\"\n\n\n \"\nWe\ncan,\" said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. \"And there\n are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?\"\n\n\n Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing\n certainly—if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by\n this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as\nWe\nnever took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing,\n desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and\n panclasm—that was\nWe\n.\n\n\n The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with\n an effort, said, \"Sure.\" A moment later it struck him that the\n monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, \"I got nothing to\n lose, see?\" It was, he realized, the cold truth.\n\n\n \"You won't lose,\" said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with\n which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they\n had come.\n\n\n Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his\n volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to\n placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever\n happened....\n\n\n After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and\n whined, \"Where ... where we going now?\"\n\n\n Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the\n gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he\n pointed as Ryd had known he would—toward where a pale man-made dawn\n seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.\nII\n\n\n \"One blow for freedom!\" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell\n upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had\n killed the guard.\n\n\n The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky\n moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to\n drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the\n long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and\n servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a\n little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now.\n He was caught in the machinery.\n\n\n Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing\n the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short\n wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown\n the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State\n order had grounded all fliers in America.\n\n\n \"All right, Ryd,\" he said coolly. \"Trade clothes with this fellow. I've\n brought you this far—you're taking me the rest of the way.\"\n\n\n The rest of the way.\n\n\n Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous\n exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the\n guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air,\n shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's\n uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as\n he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons\n to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol,\n powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong\n fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into\n the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.\n\n\n \"No use now for firearms,\" said Mury. \"All the guns we could carry\n wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a\n stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three\n minutes—when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of\n Dynamopolis, aboard the towship\nShahrazad\n.\"\n\n\n For a moment Ryd felt relief—he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred\n of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage\n the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long,\n low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship\n would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.\n\n\n Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light\n scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands\n and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light.\n He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a\n small, disused metal door.\nRyd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save\n for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It\n seemed to be crying:\nrun, run\n—but he remembered the power that knew\n how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.\n\n\n The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside,\n and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The\n same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the\n air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the\n long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.\nIt was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing\n walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the\n ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control\n cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film\n of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of\n the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal\n door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway\n down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and\n launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.\n\n\n \"Wait,\" said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his\n long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence,\n he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.\n\n\n They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to\n the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many\n lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights\n shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long\n runways—no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis'\n glory—stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful\n of odd ships—mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had\n berthed—huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by\n the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.\n\n\n As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of\n protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport.\n Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed\n buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must\n mean safety for them.\n\n\n And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching\n for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once\n inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough.\n Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last,\n inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.\n\n\n Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the\n midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies,\n their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two\n officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet.\n Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance—watched boredly\n enough.\n\n\n And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number\n Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive\n magnets—the\nShahrazad\n, panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of\n steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out\n of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be\n sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" said Mury in a low voice. \"Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be\n aboard the\nShahrazad\nwhen she lifts.\" For a moment his black eyes\n shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there\n beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with\n blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters.\n It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving\n again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding\n its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and\n immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.\n\n\n \"Robots!\" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.\n \"Martian soldier robots!\"\n\n\n \"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in\n weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For\n God's sake, take it easy.\"\n\n\n Ryd licked dry lips. \"Are we going—out into space?\"\n\n\n \"Where else?\" said Mury.\nThe official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat\n had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought\n to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed\n guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards\n from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was—as it came\n about—just a little too late.\n\n\n The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving\n pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing\n uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle\n in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between\n the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other\n in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the\nShahrazad's\nairlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables\n attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety\n by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.\n\n\n The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and\n vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the\n topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face,\n but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.\n\n\n \"Yes?\" he inquired frostily.\n\n\n \"What goes on here?\" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure\n silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. \"The crew's signaled all\n aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be—\"\n\n\n \"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis,\" interrupted\n the tall man with asperity. \"The City is naturally interested in the\n delivery of the power which will revivify our industries.\" He paused,\n sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. \"I\n suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?\"\n\n\n The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century\n bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod\n with an appearance of brusqueness.\n\n\n Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the\n pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive\n instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as\n he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun\n no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent,\n pointing at its licensed owner.\n\n\n \"I think,\" Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the\n while his right held the gun steady, \"that you'd better come aboard\n with us.\"\n\n\n The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed\n civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the\n ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both\n hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway—for he was still very\n sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.\n\n\n Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved\n wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable\n countersunk mirror of metal.\n\n\n \"Cover him, Ryd,\" ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out\n the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously\n tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his\n fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on\n the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.\n\n\n Nothing happened.\n\n\n \"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!\" The outer gangway had slid up,\n the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.\nMury smiled with supernal calm. \"We won't be here long,\" he said.\n Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: \"The central control panel and\n the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are\n on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the\n switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central\n control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting.\"\n\n\n Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch\n he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets.\n Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as\n he slipped cat-like into the passage.\n\n\n \"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock.\"\n\n\n Ryd backed—the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own\n nervous gaze—and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal\n pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering\n somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.\n\n\n He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning,\n back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled\n to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a\n crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing\n lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch\n outside.\n\n\n The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant,\n the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a\n scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite\n lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.\n\n\n \"You damned clumsy little fool—\" said Mury with soft intensity. Then,\n while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with\n blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two\n quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the\n starboard airlock.\n\n\n Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash \"Ready\" to\n the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But\n the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped\n in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in\n an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned\n guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his\n little cell of steel.\n\n\n \"It's been tried before,\" said one of the masked men. He had a blond,\n youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with\n an astrogator's triangled stars which made him\nex officio\nthe brains\n of the vessel. \"Stealing a ship—it can't be done any more.\"\n\n\n \"It's been done again,\" said Mury grimly. \"And you don't know the half\n of it. But—you will. I'll need you. As for your friends—\" The gun\n muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. \"Out of\n those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock.\"\n\n\n He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before\n they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from\n themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor;\n the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting\n still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:\n\n\n \"What do you think you're trying to do?\"\n\n\n \"What do\nyou\nthink?\" demanded Mury in return. \"I'm taking the ship\n into space. On schedule and on course—to meet the power shell.\" The\n flame gun moved with a jerk. \"And as for you—what's your name?\"\n\n\n \"Yet Arliess.\"\n\n\n \"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?\"\n\n\n The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking\n goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. \"Why, yes,\" he\n said as if in wonder, \"I do.\"\nIII\nShahrazad\ndrove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly\n to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped\n cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its\n banked dials, watching their steady needles.\n\n\n Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness\n draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into\n emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the\n maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed\n him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces\n and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and\n up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities—and Ryd had lost\n every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under\n the towship's keel.\n\n\n A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the\n control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights\n confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the\n control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect\n hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning\n gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the\n engines.\n\n\n Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.\n \"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd,\" he said dryly. \"That doesn't\n mean you,\" to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in\n the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved\n hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the\n sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.\n\n\n Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his\n head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He\n ventured shakily, \"Where are we?\"\n\n\n Mury smiled slightly. \"Only our astrogator,\" he indicated Arliess,\n still masked and fettered, \"can tell you that with precision. I\n understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he\n is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he\n is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of\n duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of\n the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?\"\n\n\n The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him\n through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights\n burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous\n tracks.\n\n\n Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly,\n he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame\n seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of\n light.\n\n\n \"What's that, Arliess?\"\n\n\n The astrogator broke his silence. \"A ship.\"\n\n\n \"I know that well enough. What ship?\"\n\n\n \"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that\n that's the liner\nAlborak\n, out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission\n for Mars.\"\n\n\n Mury shook his head regretfully. \"That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you\n suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that\n drive.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" said Arliess. But his voice\n was raw and unsteady.\n\n\n \"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for\n us—will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the significance of the protagonist's name Ryd Randl?", "question_unique_id": "62997_NDSU72G7_1", "options": ["The double r", "When spoken is Rid of Randle", "Can be said as Ride Randle", "No significance"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When Ryd was talking to Mary, what did Ryd mean when he thought \"all too few men who talked his language?\"", "question_unique_id": "62997_NDSU72G7_2", "options": ["Ryd felt like a foreigner on Earth", "Ryd did not know the Martian dialect", "English was not the native language any longer", "Someone understood Ryd's struggle"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does damnable mean in Mury's response, \"Don't you know you're repeating damnable lies?\"", "question_unique_id": "62997_NDSU72G7_3", "options": ["Incorrect", "Deathly", "Supportive", "Confusing"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a plausible reason that the secret power was named \"We?\"", "question_unique_id": "62997_NDSU72G7_4", "options": ["An ironic name to emphasize they are individualistic", "Unknown acronym", "We stands for \"with engagement\"", "To idealize that they are all on the same team"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What \"machinery\" was Ryd caught in?", "question_unique_id": "62997_NDSU72G7_5", "options": ["Engine components", "The plan that had started", "The power cyclinders on the Pi Mesa", "The dead huddle at his feet"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Ryd's thought best suggest when he says \"the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own nervous gaze?\"", "question_unique_id": "62997_NDSU72G7_6", "options": ["Ryd was also just as scared and nervous", "The prisoner was extremely scared", "The prisoner was reeling from the assault", "The prisoner was just pretending to be nervous"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What suggested that the plan Mury had was not well thought out and wouldn't work?", "question_unique_id": "62997_NDSU72G7_7", "options": ["He found Ryd in a bar and immediately went into action without sharing the plan", "It was a great plan but poorly executed", "It was pure coincidence that the Alborak was in the vicinity", "Great plan but Ryd was not a great partner"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/9/9/62997//62997-h//62997-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62580", "set_unique_id": "62580_U2MW1WFU", "batch_num": "11", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Quest's End", "year": 1950, "author": "Wells, Basil", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Earth (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "QUEST'S END\nBy BASIL WELLS\nThig's quest was not yet finished, for the Hordes\n\n of Ortha had sent another ship across the Void.\n\n Only he could halt Earth's destruction—with\n\n a weapon that was but a thought in his mind.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Spring 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"I was a fool,\" gritted Thig. His eye crowded the eyepiece of the\n compact metal case on the table before him. The window was open and\n the ugly metal snout of the instrument pointed toward the eastern\n horizon. \"I should have expected the men of Ortha to send a second\n expedition to Earth!\"\n\n\n Thig's compact body stiffened angrily. He came to his feet, his gaze\n roaming about the familiar disorder of the little boathouse. Here he\n came daily to write the lusty sagas of the Old West that had made the\n name of Lewis Terry familiar to millions of readers. Here beside the\n pot-bellied iron stove with the single cracked lid, he had worked\n long hours, striving vainly to forget that he was an alien being from\n another distant world.\n\n\n Curiosity, a trait that no other Orthan had possessed for many\n thousands of years, had impelled him to construct a small, but\n powerful, etherscope, and trace the fate of the space ship he had\n deserted. It had been built of odds and ends of material at night, but\n it opened the heavens before him. He saw planets and suns, countless\n light years distant many of them, and eventually he found Ortha—in\n time to see the space ship being boarded out in space by patrolling\n Hordemen, and quickly destroyed. They were taking no chances on the\n spread of the contagion from Earth among the Orthans.\n\n\n For the good of the Horde, the alien that was Lewis Terry knew, the\n patrolmen would transmit the information they received, and then\n destroy themselves. In their narrow philosophy of life only the Horde\n mattered. He had been like that when his name was Thig, and the\n memories of Lewis Terry were not yet part of his life.\n\n\n And now another space ship was coming to Earth, coming to check on\n the findings of that earlier ill-fated expedition, and he alone could\n checkmate them!... If he had only kept watch on Ortha!\n\n\n He had two months, possibly a few days more than that, in which to\n destroy this second expedition that meant conquest and certain death\n for all Earth's warring millions! Two months to prepare!\n\n\n For the good of Ellen and the children, the children of the dead man\n whose identity he had stolen, he must succeed. The lusty primitives of\n this rich green world must never be replaced by the disciplined robot\n race that was the Horde.\n\n\n He covered his typewriter. The lock snapped with finality as he turned\n the key. He flexed the muscles of great arms, much too powerful for\n the meek appearance of the writer they were, and the blood beat hot\n through his squat body.\n\n\n \"You're staying locked,\" he said slowly, \"until the last Hordeman is\n wiped from the face of Earth.\" He smiled grimly as he reflected that\n his hero was trapped atop a waterless butte with a horde of Apaches\n howling below.\n\n\n \"Hope you can stick it out for eight or nine weeks without water,\n Brazos,\" he said to the typed pages he was leaving.\nThe life boat lifted sluggishly from the sands that had covered it for\n two years. Thig cleared each jet carefully, and then, finding them\n unharmed, he bored high into the stratosphere. Behind him the submarine\n patrol and the air-raid posts went mildly insane. They knew that some\n strange craft had roared up from the beach on Long Island, but they\n were never to know what it was.\n\n\n Ellen, Lewis Terry's wife, clenched the short letter that her husband\n had pressed into her hand as he kissed her earlier that evening. She\n did not know that he was really Thig, nor did the letter reveal that\n fact. If he was to die, he would die Lewis Terry. The letter told her\n simply that he must go away on a secret mission for several months. She\n understood now why the unshed tears had been bright in his eyes.\n\n\n Over the United States Thig blasted the life boat, and across the\n Pacific. He was getting as far from Long Island as he could, and one of\n his plans to destroy the Orthans called for many tons of explosives.\n Explosives, he told himself grimly, that the yellow men would furnish.\n\n\n He landed at last on a rocky strip of island that was outside the\n combat zone, and there commenced to lay out his trap. It would take\n many tons of explosives to penetrate the tough hull of the space ship\n he knew, but the ship must be destroyed. He had considered building\n a huge heat blaster, but the time was too limited and he knew how\n powerful were the protective shells of a space ship's skin.\n\n\n Gadgets he had considered; tricks that might gain for him entry into\n the ship where he could turn his own decomposition blaster on his\n brothers—all the tricks of the writing trade had passed muster before\n his mind's eye—but inevitably he returned to the decision that\n explosives gave the only certain means of destruction.\n\n\n There was an island not far from his landing place where the men with\n yellow skins had stored a great quantity of munitions and supplies. The\n fighting front was far to the East and at night no great precautions\n were taken. Any approaching fleet of bombers or surface ships would\n be detected long before they could reach this island. Nothing but\n submarines.\n\n\n Thig's space ship moved almost silently through the water offshore.\n The design of the ship that permitted no air to escape now permitted\n no water to enter. For many of the planets that Ortha claimed for her\n own possessed gaseous envelopes that were denser than water, and the\n Horde's ships were equipped to meet those conditions.\n\n\n Softly the bow of the little craft nosed up on the beach inside the\n harbor, and from its single lock stepped Thig. Naked he was now, as\n were all Hordemen, and from the harness of flexible plastic about his\n body there depended a decomposition blaster and an old butcher knife\n that he had whetted to razor sharpness.\n\n\n \"You hear something?\" asked one of the two guards.\n\n\n \"It was the waves,\" his comrade said, listening for a moment.\n\n\n \"In the darkness I can see nothing,\" grumbled the first Jap. \"Perhaps\n the Marines are landing.\"\n\n\n \"Ho,\" laughed the other guard, \"the Marines are thousands of miles\n away. They cannot stand against the power of our Emperor.\"\n\n\n \"It has been more than a year,\" said the fearful one, \"and we have not\n yet conquered all of California. I have heard that a few Marines are\n still hiding in the Solomons.\"\n\n\n \"The radio does not tell you that,\" scoffed the guard. \"We have sunk\n every American boat. There are no more American airplanes in the\n Pacific. Soon we will all move to America and have the white barbarians\n to wait upon us.\"\n\n\n \"Was that a Japanese bomber yesterday?\" The man's rifle thunked lightly\n against wood. \"There were circles on its wings.\"\n\n\n \"There may be a few left,\" was the excuse of the other guard. \"Now we\n must cease talking and walk our posts.\"\n\n\n Now Thig could make out the shapes of the guards as they went their\n way. One of them, the short, thick yellow man was coming slowly toward\n the tree that sheltered Thig. Perhaps he was dreaming of the fertile\n valleys of America, where the white-skinned men and women would be his\n servants, as he walked along.\n\n\n Abruptly great fingers clamped around his throat, and he felt the sting\n of something that slammed against his chest. His feet scuffed at the\n soil, and then a great roaring filled his ears.\n\n\n Thig eased the limp body to the earth. The other slim guard had halted,\n his nervously acute ears picking up some vague sound.\n\n\n \"What—what was that?\" he called to his comrade.\n\n\n Thig eased his blaster from its holster. In a moment the guard would\n arouse the other members of the garrison. The distance was too great\n for the knife—the man would be able to fire his rifle before he\n reached him.\n\n\n The weapon's invisible rays slammed the Jap's body backward. Even as he\n fell the flesh was falling, rotted by the blaster's swift decomposing\n action, from the man's bones. A moment later only the crumbling bones\n of a skeleton remained of what had been a soldier.\n\n\n He loaded the little ship to its capacity with explosives from the\n stores on the island, and before he left he touched a match to the\n buildings. Then he blasted off, with the water clearing explosively\n from his spacer's overloaded jets to arouse the sleeping warriors of\n the Mikado.\nAfter that first foray Thig raided many an outlying island, and looted\n the sunken transports that lay in the shallowed water between some of\n the captured islands. He mounted a heavy machine gun in the nose of his\n agile little craft, and many a yellow man never returned to his home\n landing field. By days he hid near his objectives, in the jungle or the\n shallow water in the shadows of a jutting coral reef, and by night he\n moved like a giant crab, in his space suit, among the sunken ships.\n\n\n His stores of explosives he concealed in a great ring around the heart\n of the island—the only practical landing spot for the space cruiser,\n already slackening its terrific drive as it passed Pluto. How many tons\n of the deadly material he had collected he could not tell, but there\n was already sufficient to blow the island and everything upon it into\n oblivion.\n\n\n Time was growing short. Less than a day remained in which to bait the\n trap with his own ship for bait. The cruiser's detectors would pick\n up the\ntrylerium's\ncharacteristic radiations from the pitted walls\n of his rocket jets—the blasting jets of all space ships were made of\ntrylerium\n—and they would land nearby.\n\n\n That he would be blown up, too, in the explosion did not matter\n greatly, thought Thig. Ellen, the wife of the man he had helped kill,\n and the children, would be safe. Earth could go on in its own bloody\n blundering way to a glorious future.\n\n\n But first he must bring back another load, the final link in the deadly\n ring about the landing place. Morning was at hand. He would have to\n work fast. He left the load where it lay and blasted off.\n\n\n The great bomber, with the circles painted on its wings, passed over\n the little island. It returned. The pilot shouted and bombs intended\n for a target several hundred miles to the south took their final plunge\n earthward.\n\n\n The ship was bullet-scarred—off its course—and since this was\n Japanese-dominated water his mistake was only natural. He took the\n caches of munitions for enemy supply dumps.\n\n\n It was his last mistake. The island dissolved into splintered\n fragments, and with it went the bomber and its brave crew.\nThig awaited the coming of the ship from Ortha on another island. He\n had accepted the destruction of his long weeks of planning with the\n fatalism that the Horde had taught him. Since one plan had fallen\n through he must use another. He would persuade the Orthans that he\n wanted to return to his own people, and once inside, with a little\n good fortune, he might be able to destroy them. He had killed his two\n fellows on the first expedition, but already his fertile imagination\n had invented a logical explanation of his presence on Earth.\n\n\n As the great ship swung down past Luna his radiophone came into play.\n Their detectors might pick up his weak signals at this distance even\n though they would have no reason to expect an Orthan ship here on\n Earth. His whole plan was based on the strategy of luring them here\n before they could start a thorough exploration of Earth.\n\n\n Time went by swiftly, too swiftly, for there was no answer from the\n ship. He thought of taking off to meet them, but already the ship must\n be screaming down through the upper atmosphere. He shouted into the\n transmitter.\n\n\n A grating sound came from the receiver. A hollow sound of contact that\n he sensed rather than heard. A cold emotionless voice spoke in the\n strangely unfamiliar language of the Horde.\n\n\n \"Who is calling the ship from Planet 72-P-3?\" it demanded.\n\n\n \"A fellow Hordeman from Ortha,\" replied Thig hurriedly. \"I escaped from\n the space cruiser commanded by Torp, after madness claimed him. He\n struck down Kam first, and then attacked me. After he left me for dead,\n I took a lifeboat and escaped.\"\n\n\n \"You are Thig?\" said the even voice of the man from Ortha.\n\n\n \"That is right,\" acknowledged the other.\n\n\n \"Urol, commanding the second expeditionary flight to Sector 5-Z,\" the\n Hordeman identified himself. \"With me are three others: Brud, Zolg, and\n Turb.\"\n\n\n \"Zolg and Turb I know,\" said Thig. \"We trained together.\"\n\n\n \"Our detectors show that your location is in the largest body of water,\n near the eastern shore of the principal land mass of Planet 72-P-3. Is\n that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Right. There is room to berth five like yours upon this uninhabited\n island. Here we will be safe from the Mad Ones.\"\n\n\n Thig could almost see the Hordeman's smooth brow furrow with the\n unaccustomed task of thinking. The majority of the Horde's thinking was\n automatic, seldom did an alien thought intrude upon their formulized\n system of life. He smiled tautly—another gift from the dead man whose\n memories he had robbed was that of humor—as he listened for Urol's\n answer. There could be only one logical explanation for Thig's words.\n And Urol, like all the Hordemen, was a coldly logical being.\n\n\n \"There is madness on this world then?\" Urol asked.\n\n\n \"That is right.\" Thig drew upon the story-telling genius of Terry as he\n related the carefully plotted story that would permit him entrance to\n the Orthan ship. They must believe him....\n\n\n \"There is madness on this world, indeed,\" he went on, after a moment,\n \"but it did not originate here. Kam and Torp, when they returned from\n the watery planet, Planet 72-P-2, brought back the virus of madness\n with them. Both of them were infected, and their brief stay on this\n planet served to spread the disease here also.\n\n\n \"All over Earth, or as we call it, 72-P-3, the madness is spreading.\n Where there was peace and plenty there is now war and starvation. Most\n of this sub-human animal race will be wiped out before this madness has\n run its course.\"\n\n\n \"Yet you escaped its ravages,\" Urol said. \"Have you discovered how to\n control this madness?\"\n\n\n \"But I did not escape,\" Thig told him. \"For many days after I returned\n to Earth I was insane. Torp and Kam had infected me as well. But I am\n strong, and I threw off the disease. At intervals it recurs but I strap\n myself down so I cannot harm myself before the madness passes.\"\n\n\n \"By the Law of the Horde,\" said Urol slowly, \"you should be destroyed\n if the disease is incurable.\"\n\n\n \"I know. I feared that another expedition would come and carry the\n madness back to the Horde. I kept myself alive to warn you. I will show\n you the ravages of the disease, and then destroy myself.\"\n\n\n \"It is good,\" agreed Urol. \"We are preparing to land now.\"\n\n\n The communication link snapped between them. Above the island a tiny\n black speck swelled until it became a vast grubby bulk of metal\n supported by flaring jets of gaseous fuel. The thick ship slowed its\n sheer drop, and with a final burst of fire from blackened jets, came to\n rest.\n\n\n Thig looked to his decomposition blaster to see that it was thoroughly\n charged. This was perhaps the hundredth time he had examined his\n weapon. He chuckled at the ease with which the leader of the mother\n planet's ship had been tricked into believing his fantastic tale. All\n that remained now was to gain admission into the space ship.\n\n\n He left his own little life boat and walked toward the space cruiser.\n He reached the outer lock and attempted to open it. It was stuck. He\n tugged futilely at the pitted metal of the controls, and after a moment\n hammered at the door with a lump of volcanic rock.\n\n\n A speaker from just inside the door broke in upon his labor. He dropped\n the rock and listened.\n\n\n \"Why do you attack the door?\" it asked.\n\n\n \"The lock is stuck,\" answered Thig.\n\n\n \"No,\" the Hordeman's voice said, \"the lock is not stuck. It is sealed\n against the possibility of contamination from the atmosphere of 72-P-3.\"\n\n\n \"I cannot join you?\" asked Thig as calmly as he could. Despair\n contracted his vitals as he saw this latest plan go glimmering.\n\n\n \"Naturally not!\" The speaker's voice showed as much surprise as it\n was possible for an Orthan to display. \"We can take no chances on the\n madness infecting any of us before we carry this information back to\n Ortha.\"\n\n\n \"I will tell you as much as I know,\" said Thig. \"It is fortunate that I\n am outside the ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" agreed the voice. \"Better that one die instead of four. The\n resources of the Horde must be conserved.\"\nAll through that first night after the space ship landed beside his\n little life boat, Thig lay on his sleeping deck trying to work out\n another method to overcome the four Hordemen inside their sturdy\n cruiser.\n\n\n Explosives were out; he had lost his opportunity to blast the great\n ship into shards when the Allied bomber had mistaken them for Japanese\n supplies. Trickery that would permit him to gain entrance was negated\n by the sealed ports and locks of the space cruiser. He could not blast\n an opening through the ship's skin with his decomposition blaster—it\n was designed to destroy only flesh or vegetable matter.\n\n\n Nor could he lure a Japanese or Allied force of bombers to attack the\n Orthan ship. The weapons of the space cruiser would destroy such\n crude-winged mechanisms as might be thrown against them, and her own\n hull could not be damaged save by the most concentrated surprise\n attack. He knew how the Earthmen would work—a cautious bomber or two\n could attack first, and then, too late, a swarm of fighting planes and\n bombers would follow.\n\n\n He could not lure brave Allied fliers to their death in any such\n fashion, nor did he think that the yellow airmen could cause any\n worth-while damage—not that he cared how many of them were destroyed!\n He might be an alien being from another world, but there was now no\n more loyal American than Thig. He had permitted the identity of Lewis\n Terry to overcome his own entirely.\n\n\n No, he would have to solve this problem by himself. Upon Thig, and Thig\n alone, rested the future of the two billions of mankind. If the Horde\n saw through his fanciful story about the disease that was carried from\n Venus in the bodies of Kam and Torp, Earth would soon be overrun by the\n Horde. The Horde was unimaginative and logical in all that it did, a\n robot race of super ant-beings—and they would destroy all the human\n race to prevent any future revolt.\n\n\n But if he could somehow thwart them; destroy this expedition, or send\n back another mute shipload of dead bodies as he had already done, Earth\n might not be visited again for several centuries. And she would be\n ready then, with a fully developed science of her own, to beat off any\n invasion from Ortha.\n\n\n He would have to play out the game as he had started it, until an\n opportunity came to strike, and then he would strike hard. He went over\n the story he had already told the Orthans, testing it for weak points\n that might give him the lie, and at last he was satisfied. In no way he\n had offended logic—the Great War that had spread across Earth since he\n first arrived would but serve to corroborate his story.\n\n\n With morning the explosion of bombs brought Thig to his feet. He\n cursed as he saw three airplanes circling overhead. They had come to\n investigate the mighty explosion that had sent a tidal wave rolling\n over the nearby atolls probably, but this was going to make it awkward\n for Thig to finish his task.\n\n\n The ships were Japanese light bombers he saw. They must have seen the\n circles that he had painted upon his tiny space ship, and mistaken the\n space cruiser for a larger Allied ship of some new design.\n\n\n His receiver crackled as he answered the curt demands of Urol.\n\n\n \"They are the Mad Ones,\" Thig said. \"Their madness causes them to fight\n among themselves. They drop their puny explosives foolishly upon the\n homes of other human cattle, taking great pleasure in wanton slaughter.\"\n\n\n \"But why do they attack us?\" asked Urol. \"Our ship cannot be harmed by\n their containers of expanding gases!\"\n\n\n \"It is because they are insane, their minds diseased hopelessly.\" Thig\n smiled to himself. \"I will go up to meet them, and destroy them with\n one of their own weapons.\"\n\n\n \"That is unnecessary,\" said Urol, \"our own armament....\"\nThig snapped off the receiver. He sprang to the controls, and sent the\n little ship rocketing skyward. He patted the heavy machine-gun that had\n been part of his loot from one of the sunken transports. It was mounted\n in the nose of his craft, and already it had knocked a score of Zeros\n and other Jap planes from the skies.\n\n\n He dove upon one of the crawling winged enemy ships. The gun chattered\n briefly, and smoke and flames curled back from the doomed plane's\n engine. One!\n\n\n Another airplane climbed clumsily up to meet this wingless metal arrow.\n His sights centered on the target. Abruptly the enemy ship was gone,\n whiffed away by the terrific invisible rays of the space cruiser's\n atomic batteries. Thig frowned. These Orthans!\nThig climbed. The remaining Jap ship did not attempt escape. Instead\n it dove straight upon its target. Down it went screaming, its wings\n ripping away from the fuselage with the battering of the air at this\n terrific speed, even as the atomic cannons blasted again and again. The\n space ship's guns handled awkwardly on the ground.\n\n\n Suddenly, the airplane disintegrated as an atomic bolt hit it squarely.\n The space ship ceased firing, and Thig slipped his ship back to earth.\n He clicked open his transmitter.\n\n\n \"You will be destroyed before we return to Ortha,\" said Urol. \"We\n cannot permit one of the Horde to live whose body and brain differ from\n the rest of us.\"\n\n\n \"That is right,\" agreed Thig. \"I should have killed myself before you\n came.\" He paused. \"I should not have tried to warn you.\"\n\n\n \"You are wrong again,\" Urol told him. \"This madness destroys your\n reason. You were right in living until we came, to warn us. Now we can\n warn the Horde that 72-P-3 will be unsafe for colonization for many\n years.\"\n\n\n Thig felt his lips twitch into a grin. Fortunate that these ships were\n not equipped with telescreens. His story had convinced the methodical,\n robot-like Orthans. If he could keep them from learning that there was\n actually no madness on Earth until he could contrive to destroy them.\n\n\n The next words of the commander of the space cruiser sounded\n thunder-loud in his ears, tumbling his plans into ruin.\n\n\n \"We will return to Ortha with our reports at once,\" said Urol.\nThig sat frozen in his seat for a long moment staring at the\n transmitter. If he could only be certain that the Horde would find no\n flaws in his story; that Earth would never know the destruction that\n the Horde would bring.\n\n\n And then he laughed. Fool! The Orthans were unimaginative as\n domesticated cattle. They were robotized animals, all but devoid of\n intelligence. He should have remembered sooner, for he had been one of\n the Horde before he stole the memories of an Earthman, and fell in love\n with the dead man's woman!\n\n\n Until he came to Earth, Thig had never known that there was such\n a thing as a lie. Among the men of Ortha there was no deceit or\n treachery. If they killed or destroyed, it was necessary. If they\n related any happening, however unimportant, it was painstakingly\n accurate. Imagination was a word that was meaningless among the\n disciplined billions of the Horde. They would not detect a lie for they\n would not recognize one! Earth was safe.\n\n\n \"That is good,\" he said. \"I will wait until you leave Earth, and then I\n will destroy the ship and myself.\"\n\n\n Over China they knifed, over the ruined cities and bomber fields, and\n down across Russia where vast armies locked in bloody combat. They saw\n here again great cities that were ravaged by war. Higher they climbed\n above the ocean, until, above North America, Thig dropped behind the\n great cruiser.\n\n\n He called the commander of the space cruiser then.\n\n\n \"My fuel is almost exhausted,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Prepare to dive into the Earth,\" said Urol in his emotionless voice.\n \"We cannot waste the power of our ship to ray you. The senseless\n assaults of the madmen caused us to waste much of our power.\"\n\n\n \"I am leaving now,\" said Thig. \"May the Law of the Horde endure\n forever!\" And under his breath: \"on Ortha.\"\n\n\n Thig let the life boat drop away from the other ship. Slowly it fell at\n first, and then faster as gravity gripped it. Fifty miles the ship must\n fall before it smashed into the ground. By that time the cruiser would\n be already beyond the orbit of the moon, and all they would see would\n be the moment of impact.\n\n\n Friction was heating the metal skin of the ship slowly as it fell. Thig\n locked the controls; set the rocket relays for increasingly powerful\n thrusts of power, and waddled clumsily out through the lock into the\n frigid thin air of the stratosphere. He stepped out into emptiness.\n\n\n Inside the space suit it was warm, and the air was clean. When he had\n fallen a few miles farther he would open the glider wings, that were\n built into all Orthan suits instead of parachutes, and land on Long\n Island. But not until he was sheltered by the clouds from the view of\n the space cruiser.\n\n\n He was going back to Ellen and the children with the knowledge that\n Earth was saved from the Horde—saved by nothing more deadly than a lie!\n\n\n And the part of Thig's brain that was Lewis Terry was already busying\n itself with the plotting of a Western novel about the handcart\n pioneers.... Once he had rescued Brazos from that Apache-ringed mesa,\n he would get to work on it....\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does the writer suggest in the passage \"The lusty primitives of this rich green world must never be replaced by the disciplined robot race that was the Horde.\"", "question_unique_id": "62580_U2MW1WFU_1", "options": ["Discipline is what makes the Horde less successful", "The Horde was the rich resources that are found on Earth", "Humans are viewed as primitive and the Horde as superior", "The Horde is not a threat to the Earth civilization"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the \"fatalism that the Horde had taught him?\"", "question_unique_id": "62580_U2MW1WFU_2", "options": ["Survival of the fittest", "To sacrifice your life for the cause ", "Anger", "To kill at all costs"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about the passage \"the majority of the Horde's thinking was automatic, seldom did an alien thought intrude upon their formulized system of life?\"", "question_unique_id": "62580_U2MW1WFU_3", "options": ["Thig's thinking and actions go against this idea", "They are not a formalized system", "They are robots talking about thinking", "The Horde have such high intelligence"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was an advantage that Thig had against the Horde?", "question_unique_id": "62580_U2MW1WFU_4", "options": ["Thig knew how the Horde think", "Thing had advanced weaponry", "He had the advantage of knowing the Earth terrain", "Actually Thig was at a disadvantage"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What changed Thig's views?", "question_unique_id": "62580_U2MW1WFU_5", "options": ["War", "Pain", "Humans", "Love"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is significant about the ending of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "62580_U2MW1WFU_6", "options": ["No significance", "Thig died sacrificing his life for humans", "Thig saved himself which goes against what the Horde was taught", "The Horde didn't believe Thig's story"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/5/8/62580//62580-h//62580-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "40968", "set_unique_id": "40968_MILRIMOM", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Desire No More", "year": 1970, "author": "Budrys, Algis", "topic": "PS; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "He had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to\n\n the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself\n\n before....\nDESIRE NO MORE\nby Algis Budrys\n(\nillustrated by Milton Luros\n)\n\"\nDesire no more than to thy lot may fall....\n\"\n—Chaucer\nTHE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n\n\n \"But you've\ngot\nto learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I\n can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n\n\n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n\n\n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n\n\n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of\n his cheeks.\n\n\n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n\n\n \"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"\n\n\n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"\n\n\n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow\n pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc\n of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the\n basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine\n semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about\n every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going\n to keep this up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n\n\n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've\n studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish?\n Scared of liberal arts?\"\n\n\n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that\n Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav—they\n won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in\n themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n\n\n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a\n snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n\n\n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at\n his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't\n convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give\n up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's\n go get some beer.\"\n\n\n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\"\n he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next\n man.\n\n\n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and\n softly quoted: \n \"Though I go bare, take ye no care,\n I am nothing a-cold;\n I stuff my skin so full within\n Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the\n unfamiliar.\n\n\n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a\n poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n\n\n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's\n not my racket.\"\n\n\n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n \"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n\n\n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhat\n, for Pete's sake? What\nis\nthis crazy specialty that blinds\n you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n\n\n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it\n was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n\n\n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\nTHE\nNAVION\ntook a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked\n upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette\n girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish\n laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that\n sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and\n corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n\n\n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n \"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n\n\n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly\n this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n\n\n \"\nLow?\nCall\nthis\nlow?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and\n you'll\nreally\nget an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the\n wheel forward, and the\nNavion\ndipped its nose in a shallow dive,\n flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the\n chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the\n protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a\n dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n\n\n \"Marty!\"\n\n\n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"\n\n\n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known.\n He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the\n aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands.\n Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare\n you—?\" he asked gently.\n\n\n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n\n\n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n\"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain\n a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew,\n my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten\n years ago. I\ncan't\nget married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week?\n You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only\n smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n\n\n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying\n to say.\nWhy\ndo you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't\n you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained\n pilot.\"\n\n\n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense\n from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he\n relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and\n the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would\n not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the\n almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n\n\n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is\n a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any\n plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing—\nany\nof them—and\n pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as\n good as said so. After that—\" His voice had regained some of its former\n animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've\n told you all this before.\"\n\n\n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to\n her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's\n that\nrocket\npilot business again....\"\n\n\n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that\nrocket\npilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm\n the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and\n fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math\n than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like\n brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of\nColliers\n, and I—\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged\n again.\n\n\n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job,\n and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a\n long time.\"\n\n\n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there\naren't\nany\n man-carrying rockets.\"\n\n\n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.\n\n\n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n\n\n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You\n trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n\n\n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the\n shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to\n stop him.\n\n\n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to\n break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose\n candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n\n\n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \"\nRocket!\nCall that pile\n of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n \"Who cares about the bloody\nmachines\n! If I thought roller-skating\n would get me there, I would have gone to work in a\nrink\nwhen I was\n seventeen! It's\ngetting there\nthat counts! Who gives a good goddam\nhow\nit's done, or what with!\"\n\n\n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came\n and got her.\n\"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\nThey always begin that way\n, Isherwood thought. The standard medical\n opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything\n he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as\n he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder\n of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen\n hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n\n\n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The\n realization disquieted him a little.\n\n\n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n\n\n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual\n response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-\nhuh\n.\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n \"Look—you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n\n\n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he\n said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they\n wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n\n\n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The\n Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force\n insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them.\n After all, it's\ntheir\nbeast.\"\n\n\n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the\n cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure.\n Bring him on.\"\n\n\n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's—uh—he's in the next room. Okay to ask him\n in right now?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight\n Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\nMacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special\n attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the\n questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could\n see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the\n man's lapel.\n\n\n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\"\n MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n\n\n Ish nodded.\n\n\n \"How's that?\"\n\n\n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the\n recorder's benefit.\n\n\n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n\n\n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After\n I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n\n\n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Ahuh.\"\n\n\n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements—he simply hunched in his chair,\n seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his\n stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man—only\n a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired\n strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n\n\n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations.\n This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous—red-letter\n dangerous—because of it.\n\n\n \"No family.\"\n\n\n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was\n making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to\n worry about them.\"\n\n\n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought.\n MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression—but it still\n passed no judgements.\n\n\n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"\n\n\n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him—anger, and more\n fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n \"You through with me?\"\n\n\n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a\n parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the\n psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc.\n They did put\nsome\nlearning in my head at college, you know. Therapy,\n hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n\n\n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.\n\n\n \"No. I've\ngot\na job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half\n hour.\n\n\n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll\nonly\nread the literature I've\n given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have\n been cancelled.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this\n nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n\n\n \"But\nnobody\ngoes back.\"\n\n\n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but—\" He stopped\n at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The\n reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets\n on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary\n about it. But the room—a big room, he realized—seemed to fade out at\n the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n\n\n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n\n\n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the\nliterature\n...\" She\n swiveled her chair slowly.\n\n\n \"No wings,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her\n forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n\n\n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n\n\n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected\n gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe,\n and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six\n hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n\n\n \"Who do I see?\"\n\n\n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n\n\n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his\n fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n\n\n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n\n\n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come\n on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm\n with the purpose that drove him.\n\n\n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk\n button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way\n the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\nTHE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across\n the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n\n\n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm\nvery\nglad to\n meet you!\"\n\n\n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short\n shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n\n\n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the\n Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n\n\n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n\n\n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n\n\n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the\n preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to\n buckle down to it. Oh, he—shucks?—the Receptionist wasn't such a bad\n girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n\n\n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n\n\n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back\n to the Personnel Manager.\n\n\n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got—\" He stopped to\n look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the\n beast right now.\"\n\n\n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n\n\n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your\n problem.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look—you feel you've got a job\n unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face\n it—that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is\n it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted\n your life to.\"\n\n\n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\"\n he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get\n around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need\n is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week—no picnic, no pleasures of\n the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any\n laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again.\n Then, you can do anything you want to—as long as it doesn't look like\n the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose—\" he began, but Ish\n interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace\n to go. We're built for it. People have to have—but what am I telling\nyou\nfor. If you don't know, who does?\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n\n\n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got\n to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it\n were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether\n you want to stay, after all.\"\n\n\n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having\n actually begged for something.\n\n\n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at\n the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were\n suddenly standing.\n\n\n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n\n\n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by\n cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice.\n The unblinking stars filled the night.\n\n\n He looked around him. The Moon was silent—quiet, patient, waiting.\n Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large\n enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had\n waited.\n\n\n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the\n ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It\n was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the\n years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed\n the\nNavion\nat, that day over the Everglades.\n\n\n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n\n\n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n\n\n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It\ncan't\nbe the same. I didn't push the\n beast up here. There wasn't any\nfeel\nto it. There wasn't any sound of\n rockets.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking\n off from the Station, landing here—vacuum.\"\n\n\n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody\n else to hear—and, maybe, maybe there\nwould\nbe. There'd be people,\n back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his\n eyes were shining a little.\n\"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n \"Will you get a\nload\nof this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An\n hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n\n\n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt\n the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and\n feet were very cold.\n\n\n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk\n looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He\n sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n\n\n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n\n\n\n\n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the\n control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and\n began to brake for a landing.\n\n\n\n\n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left\n any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n\n\n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw\n spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He\n could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking\n crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station\n was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it\n all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press\n representatives out of his way.\nMacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his\n stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled\n a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his\n bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n\n\n \"Ish.\"\n\n\n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n\n\n Ish grunted.\n\n\n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n\n\n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to\n explain. \"You were the best there was—but you'd done something to\n yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family.\n You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were\n a rocket pilot—nothing else. You've never read an adult book that\n wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident.\n You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no\n props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong.\nWe couldn't take\n the chance, Ish!\n\"\n\n\n \"So?\"\n\n\n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have\n forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n\n\n He remembered the time with the\nNavion\n, and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n\n\n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know\n what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came\n through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took\n all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday\n trip.\"\n\n\n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n\n\n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that\n comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and\n you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\nNow get out before I kill you.\n\"\n\n\n\n\n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again—he\n died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world\n mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really\n died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an\n observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and\n purposeless eyes.\nTRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\nObvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\nThis etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How did Marty run away from his parents' house?", "question_unique_id": "40968_MILRIMOM_1", "options": ["He didn't. He hid behind the porch stairs.", "He hopped on a bus.", "He walked down the street, ignoring his father's yells.", "He flew away in a rocket."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was the Astronomy class different from Celestial Navigation?", "question_unique_id": "40968_MILRIMOM_2", "options": ["It concentrated more on math and engineering.", "It focused on the characteristics of stars instead of the navigational functions.", "It was part of the liberal arts track.", "It was much harder than Celestial Navigation."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Marty disinterested in poetry?", "question_unique_id": "40968_MILRIMOM_3", "options": ["He considered poetry more of a hobby than a serious craft.", "He only cared to study topics related to flying.", "He wasn't impressed by the creations of man.", "He liked poetry, but not poetry that was four hundred years old."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where was Marty flying with Nan when he hit turbulence?", "question_unique_id": "40968_MILRIMOM_4", "options": ["The first leg of the Vandenberg Cup.", "Outer space.", "Florida.", "The Air Force base."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Nan want Marty to sell his racing-plane?", "question_unique_id": "40968_MILRIMOM_5", "options": ["So he can get a new job, and they can afford to get married.", "She wants him to give up his dream of becoming a rocket pilot.", "It is old and costs a lot to maintain.", "She was scared of flying."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who was MacKenzie?", "question_unique_id": "40968_MILRIMOM_6", "options": ["An Air Force colonel.", "The Flight Surgeon.", "His college advisor.", "A psychiatrist."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the Personnel Manager show Ish Earth?", "question_unique_id": "40968_MILRIMOM_7", "options": ["To show him how far away he was from home.", "So that he would choose to stay.", "To show him the grandeur of the planet.", "To convince him to leave."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did MacKenzie hypnotize Ish?", "question_unique_id": "40968_MILRIMOM_8", "options": ["So that he could meet with the Personnel Manager.", "To eliminate his thrill-seeking tendencies, which were a liability.", "The incident in the Everglades indicated he was a physical danger to himself and others.", "To make him believe he was in space."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/0/9/6/40968//40968-h//40968-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63521", "set_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Raiders of the Second Moon", "year": 1958, "author": "Wells, Basil", "topic": "PS; Adventure stories; Science fiction; Satellites -- Fiction; Short stories", "article": "Raiders of the Second Moon\nBy GENE ELLERMAN\nA strange destiny had erased Noork's memory,\n\n and had brought him to this tiny world—to\n\n write an end to his first existence.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBeyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray\n volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us.\n But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by\n Luna's bulk, we know little.\n\n\n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in\n diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its\n meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk,\n life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval\n lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the\n starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n\n\n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called\n Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the\n trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned\n girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a\n sheathed dagger.\n\n\n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine\n contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the\n insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration.\n Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged\n cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest,\n and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had\n confirmed that belief.\n\n\n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of\n the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour\n the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death\n of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the\n words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated\n them aloud.\n\n\n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n\n\n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going\n back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow\n and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle\n giant. Noork grinned.\n\n\n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n\n\n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you\n hunter or escaped slave?\"\n\n\n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted\nnarl\nlast night when it attacked you.\"\n\n\n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never\n far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n\n\n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder\n of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n\n\n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet\n you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes\n opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the\n wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for\n my friend.\"\n\n\n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall\n and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with\n human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n\n\n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the\n walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told\n me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n\n\n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer\n make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n\n\n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\nThe girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded\n into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n\n\n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little\n sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will\n listen to it no more.\"\n\n\n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned\n giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n\n\n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along\n the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their\n foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose\n fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n\n\n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned\n toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where\n our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of\n Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I\n alone escaped.\"\n\n\n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath\n at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper\n of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the\n mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n\n\n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of\n the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I\n have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to\n your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n\n\n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer\n speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He\n turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive\n reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of\n the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm,\n numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n\n\n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with,\n Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once\n there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down\n at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\nNoork\nAt first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no\n stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse\n of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all\n too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the\n Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied\n with the mud of the trail.\n\n\n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain\n was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He\n climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe\n fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of\n the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n\n\n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread\n and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork\n found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose\n arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of\n superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads\n vanished.\n\n\n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They\n were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He\n strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him,\n and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n\n\n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the\n jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of\n this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n\n\n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the\n fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath\n them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n\n\n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as\n that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating\n in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face\n was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular\n design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons\n were two long knives and a club.\n\n\n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And\n the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like\n this.\"\n\n\n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down\n the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its\n unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the\n stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n\n\n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the\n drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\nUd tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from\n shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy.\n For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and\n the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal\n war.\n\n\n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no\n enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n\n\n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water\n will trap you.\"\n\n\n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled\n with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n\n\n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n\n\n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to\n Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones\n can be trapped and skinned.\"\n\n\n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n\n\n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save\n his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman\n called Sarna.\"\n\n\n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the\n marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the\n jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake\n of Uzdon.\n\n\n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle\n fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that\n the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered\n brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men\n could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n\n\n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths\n of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the\n other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the\n golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n\n\n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork,\n the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land\n of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the\n same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and\n perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n\n\n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich—whose memory was\n gone completely—again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last\n of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired\n young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden\n valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled\n structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the\n second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end.\n The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this\n little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n\n\n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist\n preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the\n lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but\n Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n\n\n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads\n had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its\n crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\nNoork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight\n shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could\n not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly\n blade well.\n\n\n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding\n cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the\n roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's\n edge.\n\n\n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a\n smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to\n the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal\n branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of\n a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n\n\n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps\n half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of\n bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n\n\n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty\n One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a\n comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n\n\n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the\n daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n\n\n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's\n name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty\n Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together\n beneath his tree.\n\n\n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the\n two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the\n sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than\n another's.\"\n\n\n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the\n younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful\n woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither\n master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a\n good woman—and ugly, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the\n Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n\n\n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are\n safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island\n of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions,\n are not unkind.\n\n\n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will\n complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n\n\n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the\n tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back,\n and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles\n that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made\n clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n\"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised\n at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden\n man's rather stupid face intently.\n\n\n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange\n garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the\n girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n\n\n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n \"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He\n nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n\n\n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape\n from the island I will take you along.\"\n\n\n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his\n people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would\n welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from\n the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for\n helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n\n\n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n\n\n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where\n Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n\n\n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged\n together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly\n overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to\n mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the\n next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great\n Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's\n mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n\n\n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female\n slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple\n pits.\"\n\n\n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared\n to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n\n\n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I\n talked with you?\"\n\n\n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\nThe skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the\n eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of\n rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for\n windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at\n three distinct levels.\n\n\n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps\n that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and\n purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and\n feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the\n squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs\n fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing\n golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the\n brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast\n men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n\n\n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were\n stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the\n Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another\n of their number.\n\n\n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the\n jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose\n rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the\n central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly\n worked metal—gold, silver and brass—vied with the faded garish\n colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed\n two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the\n wolf-headed shape a female.\n\n\n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura\n worshipped—mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n\n\n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central\n ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower\n pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two\n upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty\n Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to\n the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n\n\n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his\n sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it\n there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight\n of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two\n short swords rose to bar his way.\n\n\n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere\n gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the\n most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the\n sacrifice is chosen.\"\n\n\n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew\n his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n\n\n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor\n sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and\n shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward\n impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his\n left.\n\n\n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony\n structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his\n hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning\n gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon\n it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n\n\n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the\n shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully.\n For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction\n of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then\n they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to\n blood-slippery step.\n\n\n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the\n same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man\n with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more.\n He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a\n half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n\n\n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging\n out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle\n on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion\n of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n\n\n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that\n had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to\n battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n\n\n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two\n warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous\n gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes.\n Noork grinned.\n\n\n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not\n snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed\n to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would\n not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the\n room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged\n into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer\n here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n\n\n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the\n others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two\n others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n\n\n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies\n from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the\n chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the\n stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl,\n was held prisoner.\nThe steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water\n dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two\n sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was\n walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and\n toward this Noork made his way.\n\n\n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n\n\n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland\n by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the\n rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple\n skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the\n mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's\n valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and\n confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope\n hide.\n\n\n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the\n metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined\n the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive\n timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a\n prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n\n\n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go\n wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n\n\n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n\n\n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the\n spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he\n faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n\n\n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield\n of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as\n he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n\n\n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do\n not trust your guards, then.\"\n\n\n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and\n the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the\n silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me\n your face before I kill you!\"\n\n\n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he\n offered.\n\n\n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of\n his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the\n velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from\n the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that\n drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n\n\n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He\n was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white\n man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so\n his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed\n body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the\n slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n\n\n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple,\n and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch\n so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his\n mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful\n whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the\n main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his\n enemy.\n\n\n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the\n sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork\n leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a\n moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n\n\n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms.\n Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and\n slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n\n\n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n\n\n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know\n that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile\n crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told\n the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared\n the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n\n\n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched\n the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway\n entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the\n priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the\n new robe.\n\n\n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's\n curious violet eyes—-all that was visible through the narrow vision\n slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the\n girl's hand.\n\n\n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is\n given.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why was Sarna by herself when Noork discovered her?", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_1", "options": ["She was left alone after her friends were captured by the Misty Ones.", "She had been running from the spotted narl.", "She was looking for her brother Gurn, who was in exile.", "The warriors of Konto had kidnapped her friends, but she had managed to escape."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "From where did Noork watch Sarna originally?", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_2", "options": ["The lap of a giant creature.", "The base of a massive tree.", "The top of a cliff where his ship crash-landed.", "A rock-strewn valley on Luna."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Noork wash the fallen Misty One's robe?", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_3", "options": ["He was unfamiliar with the fruit stuck to it and was afraid the juice was poison.", "The heavy fruit stuck to it slowed his chase.", "So he could disguise himself with invisibility.", "The blood reminded Noork he had killed the Misty One."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Noork really on Sekk?", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_4", "options": ["He had landed there accidentally.", "He came to help the Vasads battle the Misty Ones.", "He was hunting down a Nazi.", "He wanted to escape New York."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the Misty Ones want to enslave Sarna?", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_5", "options": ["She was part of the enemy tribe.", "Her beauty made her a strong candidate for the blood ritual.", "She was the youngest in her group of friends.", "She was the daughter of Tholon Dist."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Noork ask for Rold's help in saving Sarna?", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_6", "options": ["The old man had spotted him, so he had to think quickly.", "His arm was numb and injured from the sword.", "He knew Rold wanted to marry Sarna.", "He knew Rold wanted to leave the island."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who was Uzdon?", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_7", "options": ["The High Priest of the men of Zura.", "A god with the head of a wolf.", "A giant whose skull was used to create the Temple of the Skull.", "A god with the head of a lion."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did no guards come to battle Noork after he defeated the two Misty Ones at the staircase?", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_8", "options": ["They were distracted by the ritual proceedings.", "The battle had taken place too far away, so they didn't hear it.", "They were fast asleep.", "They were too busy talking about the beauty of Sarna."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Noork procure additional robes before going to save Sarna? ", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_9", "options": ["He wanted plenty of robes since his old one was bloody.", "He used them to cover the sleeping guards.", "He planned to give one to Rold as payment for his help and one to Sarna to help with the escape.", "He used them to hide the bodies of the felled guards."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Noork defeat the priest?", "question_unique_id": "63521_6O3M6VOS_10", "options": ["He was a more skilled swordsman.", "He used Uzdon's window to gain a tactical advantage.", "He took advantage of the priest's lack of endurance", "He donned the invisibility robe, so the priest could not see him."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/5/2/63521//63521-h//63521-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61048", "set_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Girls from Fieu Dayol", "year": 1950, "author": "Young, Robert F.", "topic": "PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories", "article": "The Girls From Fieu Dayol\nBy ROBERT F. YOUNG\nThey were lovely and quick\n\n to learn—and their only\n\n faults were little ones!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nUp until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's\nHistory of English Literature\n, Herbert Quidley's penchant for old\n books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue.\n Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the\n background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n\n\n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy\n paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\nasdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu\n Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo—te bijk weil en snoll doper—Klio,\n asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\nSince when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back\n in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine?\n Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into\n the literature section.\n\n\n He had just taken down Xenophon's\nAnabasis\nwhen he saw the girl walk\n in the door.\n\n\n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on\n Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old\n paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he\n liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way\n Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and\n started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and\n liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would\n have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris\n wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n\n\n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's\n desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered\n his eyes to the\nAnabasis\nand henceforth followed her progress out of\n their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book\n and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the\n P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused\n again and took down Taine's\nHistory of English Literature\n.\n\n\n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an\n interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library\n were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the\n volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it\n with the air of a seasoned browser.\n\n\n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected\n another—seemingly at random—and took it over to the librarian's desk.\n She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked\n it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night.\n As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took\n Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark\n was gone.\n\n\n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines\n of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was\n it merely what it appeared to be on the surface—the efforts of an\n impatient typing student to type before his time?\n\n\n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that\n the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The\n name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had\n contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n \"Kai\"—or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and\n had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream\n of borrowing.\n\n\n By whom—her boy friend?\n\n\n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the\n presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but\n because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n \"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him\n violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's\nHistory\nunder observation for a while.\nHer boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend\n turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of\n her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading\n table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine,\nThe Zeitgeist\n, Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route\n to the shelf where Taine's\nHistory\nreposed, take the volume down,\n surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages\n and return it to the shelf.\n\n\n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second\n message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\nasdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe\n wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig\n toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling—Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\nWell, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai\n was, and he knew—from the reappearance of the words\nwotnid\n,\nFieu\n Dayol\nand\nsnoll doper\n—that the two communications were in the\n same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last\n word—\nYoolna\n—was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that\n she was a different person from the\nKlio\nwhose name had appended the\n first message.\n\n\n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book\n to the shelf and went back to the reading table and\nThe Zeitgeist\n.\n\n\n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning\n to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till\n tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same\n tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by\n chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same\n undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out\n the door, he was not far behind her.\n\n\n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It\n took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her.\n When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an\n all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a\n matter of following her inside.\n\n\n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead\n before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple.\n First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you\n situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the\n nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and\n after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till\n he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar.\n When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a\n way that some of its contents spilled on her lap—\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n\"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n\n\n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming\n crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n \"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a\n slight accent.\n\n\n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the\n bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet,\n chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her—\nHerbert Quidley:\nProfiliste\nHer forehead crinkled. \"\nProfiliste?\n\"\n\n\n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some\n of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms,\n of course.\"\n\n\n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n\n\n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my\n fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a\n dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss—\"\n\n\n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and\n faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied\n his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly\n clear—and suddenly cold—blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished\n when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting\nmy\nprofile,\n Mr. Quidley?\"\nWould\nhe! \"When can I call?\"\n\n\n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call\n on you. There are quite a number of people living in our—our house.\n I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like\n yourself to concentrate.\"\n\n\n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a\n week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect\n you?\"\n\n\n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller\n than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels,\n she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\"\n she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly.\"\n\n\n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n\n\n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually\n did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his\n custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in\n his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as\n usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title,\nSelf\n Profile\n, nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better\n Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid\n array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit,\n occupying a two-page spread.\n\n\n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the\n first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of\n paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an\n advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he\n went to bed.\nIn telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had\n unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages\n until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the\n library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment\n for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table\n post and took up\nThe Zeitgeist\nonce again.\n\n\n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n\n\n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and\n graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy\n section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the\n literature aisle and toward the T's....\n\n\n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\nfdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind\n en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll\n doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!—Gorka. fdsa\n jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\nJudging from the repeated use of the words,\nsnoll dopers\nwere the\n topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the\n book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n\n\n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what\n a\nsnoll doper\nwas; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur\n secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged.\n It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course,\n they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be\n quixotic enough to employ Taine's\nHistory of English Literature\nas a\n communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and\n a mailbox on every corner?\n\n\n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned\n around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and\n before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced\n a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his\n normal self again.\n\n\n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his\n shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and\n looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything\n was—the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk,\n with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books\n stacked imposingly nearby;\nHarper's\n,\nThe Atlantic\nand\nThe Saturday\n Review\nshowing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened\n bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the\n small table set cozily for two—\nThe chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n\n\n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw\n what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes\n wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n\n\n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her\n long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though\n she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts\n before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting\n position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer;\n arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n\n\n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She\n followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the\n bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress—never saw anything\n quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n \"It's—it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is\n something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands\n are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm—I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss\n Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n\n\n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room,\n Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n \"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet\n Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank\n you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too\n far away.... There!\" \"It's—it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um,\n kiss me again.\" \"I—I never figured—I mean, I engaged a caterer to\n serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\nThe following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The\nsnoll-doper\nmystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next\n message transfer took place.\n\n\n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he\n intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted\n mentally, of course—notes were for the hacks and the other commercial\n non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes,\n he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure\n flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision:\n the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful\n characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque\n heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever\n done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the\n bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was\n on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior....\nCut\n to interior.\nFIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any\n more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You\n don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran\n out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that\n my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK\n CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell\n me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of—\n\n\n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n\n\n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to\n form:\na;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing?\n Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind\n ed, olro—Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\nQuidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle\n and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay\n doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her\n correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl\n scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges\n in communications!\n\n\n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n\n\n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the\nsnoll-doper\nenigma. The\n fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a\nsnoll doper\n,\n for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an\n H-bomb.\n\n\n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak\n English if her own language ran something like \"\nist ifedereret, hid\n jestig snoll doper adwo\n?\"\n\n\n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n\n\n He remembered the material of her dress.\n\n\n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n\n\n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\nHer voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right\n beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes\n became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort,\n he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n\n\n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said\n presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n\n\n \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to deliver a\nsnoll doper\nto Jilka. After that I'm going to\n take you home to meet my folks.\"\n\n\n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n\n\n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line\n of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n\n\n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n\n\n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a\nsnoll doper\n?\"\n\n\n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n\n\n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a\nsnoll doper\n,\" he said after a\n while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n\n\n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick\n apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get\n back.\"\n\n\n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let\n herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and\n exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks.\n So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd\n been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up\n Earth—\n\n\n Her\nfolks\n!\n\n\n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he\n sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car\n when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't\n solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a\n complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play\n along with her.\nA station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed\n with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n\n\n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n\n\n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and\n disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n\n\n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n\n\n \"At your folks'?\"\n\n\n \"At the ship.\"\n\n\n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible\n in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n \"What ship?\" he said.\n\n\n \"The one we're going to\nFieu Dayol\non.\"\n\n\n \"\nFieu Dayol?\n\"\n\n\n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my\n folks, didn't I?\"\n\n\n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n\n\n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither\n according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you\n made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n\n\n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on\nFieu Dayol\n. Why\n don't you marry one of them?\"\n\n\n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised\n me. Two, there are\nnot\nplenty of men on\nFieu Dayol\n. Our race is\n identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the\n sexes. At periodic intervals the women on\nFieu Dayol\nso greatly\n outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and\n emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for\nwotnids\n—or\n mates—on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a\n matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures\n to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar\n statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and\n forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate\n the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to\n it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n\n\n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n\n\n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock\n girl.\"\nApril fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway.\n Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they\n bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she\n said.\n\n\n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its\n background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he\n hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an\n open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n\n\n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down\n the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n\n\n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her—a rather\n woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed.\n Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and\n disappear into the ship.\n\n\n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n\n\n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking\nme\nto another planet!\"\n\n\n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A\n little while ago you asked me what a\nsnoll doper\nwas,\" she said.\n \"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of\n marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform\n to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the\n object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n \"\nThis\nis a\nsnoll doper\n.\"\n\n\n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n\n\n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for\n a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n\n\n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n", "questions": [{"question": "To what end does Herbert employ Operation Spill-the-sugar?", "question_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8_1", "options": ["To distract Kay while he stole the note.", "To introduce himself to Kay Smith.", "So that he could touch Kay's leg.", "He wanted to order some coffee."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why didn't Herbert go to the library the night after meeting Kay?", "question_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8_2", "options": ["He drank too much of his vintage wine the night before.", "He wanted to work on his \"Self Profile\" for Better Magazine.", "She had revealed she wouldn't be there that night.", "He needed to ready his apartment for Kay's visit."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When did Herbert first begin to suspect the secret society was perhaps extraterrestrial?", "question_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8_3", "options": ["As he mused on the meaning of the phrase \"snoll doper.\"", "As he pondered the choice to communicate via encrypted notes in the \"History of English Literature.\"", "When he spilled sugar on Kay and was entranced by her blue eyes.", "When he was amazed to see a third woman with similarly impressive physical features show up at the library."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Herbert leave the typewriter uncovered just before Kay's visit?", "question_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8_4", "options": ["He wanted to present the image of a successful \"profiliste.\"", "He had cleaned the apartment in a hurry and forgot to cover it.", "He had been practicing his typing exercises.", "He planned to use it to write a profile of Kay."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Fieu Dayol?", "question_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8_5", "options": ["A star.", "The name of Kay's spaceship.", "A distant planet.", "One of the aliens with whom Kay communicates in secret code."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the ultimate effect of Herbert's night spent with Kay?", "question_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8_6", "options": ["He became the \"wotnid\" for all of the women on Fieu Dayol.", "He realized she was an alien.", "It legally bound him to marry Kay.", "Kay became pregnant."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Kay and the other women place their requisitions in the \"History of English Literature\" book?", "question_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8_7", "options": ["They were prosecuted for working on the black market and could only communicate this way.", "They did not know how to use phones.", "They were not allowed to use phones and other earthly means of communication.", "To prevent raising any kind of suspicion. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Kay so easily lured by Herbert?", "question_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8_8", "options": ["She wasn't. She just wanted to try out her new snoll doper.", "She wasn't. She was taking him to fulfill her duties as stock girl.", "She wasn't. She was seeking a new mate for Jilka.", "She was fooled by Operation Spill-the-sugar."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a snoll doper?", "question_unique_id": "61048_Z0PNUNR8_9", "options": ["An electrical prod used to control prisoners.", "A substance used to sedate victims.", "A tube used for communication.", "An extraterrestrial weapon."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/0/4/61048//61048-h//61048-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61397", "set_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Faces Outside", "year": 1986, "author": "McAllister, Bruce", "topic": "Science fiction; Short stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; PS", "article": "THE FACES OUTSIDE\nBY BRUCE McALLISTER\nThey were all that was left of\n\n humanity—if they were still human!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI wanted to call her Soft Breast, because she is soft when I hold her\n to me. But the Voice told me to call her Diane. When I call her Diane,\n I have a pleasant feeling, and she seems closer to me. She likes the\n name \"Diane\". The Voice knew what was best, of course, as it always\n does.\n\n\n I must mate with her every day, when the water is brightest. The Voice\n says so. It also says that I am in a \"tank\", and that the water is\n brightest when the \"sun\" is over the \"tank\". I do not understand the\n meaning of \"sun\", but the Voice says that \"noon\" is when the \"Sun\" is\n over the \"tank\". I must mate with Diane every \"noon\".\n\n\n I\ndo\nknow what the \"tank\" is. It is a very large thing filled with\n water, and having four \"corners\", one of which is the Cave where\n Diane and I sleep when the water is black like the ink of the squid\n and cold like dead fish. But we stay warm. There is the \"floor\" of\n the \"tank\", the \"floor\" being where all the rock and seaweed is, with\n all the crawling fish and crabs, where Diane and I walk and sleep.\n There are four \"sides\". \"Sides\" are smooth and blue walls, and have\n \"view-ports\"—round, transparent areas—on them. The Voice says that\n the things in the \"view-ports\" are Faces. I have a face, as does Diane.\n But the cracked, flat things with small lights circling about them\n are not pretty like Diane's face. The Voice says that the Faces have\n bodies, like myself, and Diane. No body could be like Diane's. I think\n I should be quite sick if I saw the bodies of the Faces.\n\n\n The Voice then says that the Faces are watching us, as we sometimes\n watch the porpoises. It took a very long time to grow used to having\n the Faces watch us, as Diane and I came together, but we learned to do\n it as simply as we swim and sleep.\n\n\n But Diane does not have babies. I am very sad when I see the porpoises\n and whales with their young. Diane and I sleep together in the Cave;\n Diane is very warm and soft. We sleep in happiness, but when we are\n awake, we are lonely. I question the Voice about a baby for Diane, but\n the Voice is always silent.\n\n\n I grow to hate the Faces in the \"view-ports\". They are always watching,\n watching. The Voice says that they are enemies, and bad. The Faces have\n not tried to hurt me: but I must think of them as enemies because the\n Voice says so. I ask bad, like the shark? The Voice says, no, worse\n than the sharks and eels. It says that the Faces are evil.\n\n\n The \"tank\" must be high, because the water is high. I have gone once\n to the surface, and, although I could get used to it, the light was\n too much for my eyes. It took me two hundred and seventy kicks to the\n surface; it took me three thousand steps from our Cave to the opposite\n \"side\". The \"tank\" is very large, otherwise the whales would not be\n happy.\n\n\n The fish are many, but the dangers are few. I have seen the sharks\n kill. But the shark does not come near me if I see it and am afraid.\n Sometimes I have caught it sneaking up behind me, but when I turn it\n leaves quickly. I have questioned the Voice about why the sharks leave.\n It does not know. It has no one to ask.\nToday the \"sun\" must be very large, or powerful, or bright, because the\n water is brighter than most days.\n\n\n When I awoke Diane was not beside me. The rock of the Cave is jagged,\n so as I make my way from our bed of cool and slick seaweed, toward the\n entrance, I scrape my leg on the fifth kick. Not much blood comes from\n the cut. That is fortunate, because when there is blood the sharks come.\n\n\n Diane has grabbed the tail of a porpoise, and both are playing. Diane\n and I love the porpoises. Sometimes we can even hear their thoughts.\n They are different from the other fish; they are more like us. But they\n have babies and we do not.\n\n\n Diane sees me and, wanting to play, swims behind a rock and looks back,\n beckoning. I make a grab at her as I sneak around the rock. But she\n darts upward, toward the surface, where her body is a shadow of beauty\n against the lighter water above her. I follow her, but she ducks and I\n sail past her. Diane pulls up her legs, knees under her chin, and puts\n her arms around them. She then drops like a rock toward the \"floor\".\n\n\n I have caught a porpoise by his top fin. He knows my wish, so he speeds\n toward Diane, circles her and butts her soft thighs with his snout. She\n laughs, but continues to stay in a ball, her black hair waving. She is\n very beautiful.\n\n\n I try to pry her arms from around her legs gently, but she resists. I\n must use force. Diane does not mind when I do; because she knows I love\n her.\n\n\n I pull her arms away, and slip my arms under hers, kissing her on the\n lips for a long time. Struggling to free herself, laughing again, she\n pokes me sharply with her elbow and escapes my arms. I am surprised.\n She quickly puts her arms around my neck, pulls herself to my back and\n links her slim legs around my middle. She is pretending that I am a\n porpoise. I laugh. She pinches me to go ahead. I swim upward, but her\n thoughts tell me she wants to go to the Cave.\n\n\n I understand. I carry her through the water very slowly, feeling the\n warmth and nipples of her breasts pressed against my back as she rests\n her head on my shoulder and smiles.\n\n\n The Faces continue to stare. Many times I have searched for a word to\n show my hatred for them. I shall find it somehow, though. Sooner or\n later.\n\"What count of planets had the Terrans infested?\" The furry humanoid\n leaned over the desk and stared, unblinking, at the lesser humanoid in\n the only other chair in the room. His gaze was dropped as he scratched\n informally at the heavy fur at his wrist. He raised his gaze again.\n\n\n \"Forty-three is the count,\nbeush\n,\" replied the other.\n\n\n \"And the count of planets destroyed?\"\n\n\n \"Forty-three planetoid missiles were sent and detonated simultaneously\n without resistance or losses on our part,\nbeush\n,\" the assistant\nbeush\nanswered indirectly.\n\n\n The room was hot, so the\nbeush\nlazily passed his hand over a faintly\n glowing panel.\n\n\n The room was cooled, and a large-eyed female with silky, ochrous\n fur—very desirable to the majority of humanoids—entered with two\n flared glasses of an odorless, transparent liquid—very desirable\n to the majority of humanoids. The lesser humanoid was being treated\n exceptionately well.\n\n\n The room was momentarily silent as the two sipped at their drinks with\n black lips. The\nbeush\n, as customary, spoke first. \"Inform me of the\n pre-espionage intelligence accomplishments contra-Energi. I have not\n been previously informed. Do not spare the details.\"\n\n\n \"Of certainty,\nbeush\n,\" began the assistant with all the grace of an\n informer. \"The Light and Force Research of the Energi is executed in\n one center of one planet, the planet being Energa, as our intelligence\n service has conveniently listed it. The Energi have negative necessity\n for secrecy in their Light and Force Research, because, first, all\n centers are crusted and protected by Force Domes. Second, it is near\n impossibility that one could so self-disguise that he would negatively\n be detectable.\" He hesitated.\n\n\n \"And these Energi,\" queried the\nbeush\n, \"are semi-telepathic or\n empathic?\"\n\n\n \"Affirmative,\" the assistant mumbled.\n\n\n \"Then you have there a third reason,\" offered the\nbeush\n.\n\n\n \"Graces be given you,\nbeush\n.\"\n\n\n The\nbeush\nnodded in approval. \"Continue, but negatively hesitate\n frequently or it will be necessary to discuss this subject\n post-present.\"\nHis assistant trembled slightly. \"Unequivocally affirmative.\nBeush\n,\n your memory relates that five periods ante-present, when there\n existed the Truce inter Energi, Terrans and ourselves, there was a\n certain period during which gifts of the three nucleus-planets were\n exchanged in friendship. The Terrans were self-contented to donate\n to the Energi an immense 'aquarium'—an 'aquarium' consisting of a\n partly transparent cell in which was placed a collection of Terran\n life-forms that breathed their oxygen from the dense atmosphere of\n Terran seas. But, as a warpspace message from the Terran Council\n indirectly proclaimed, the degenerate Terrans negatively possessed\n a ship of any Space type large or powerful enough to transport the\n 'aquarium' to Energa. Our ships being the largest of the Truce, we\n were petitioned by the Terrans to transport it. These events developed\n before the Terrans grew pestiferous to our cause. We obliged, but even\n our vastest ship was slow, because the physical power necessary to\n bring the weight of the cell through warpspace quickly was too great\n for the solitary four generators. It was imperative that the trip be on\n a longer trajectory arranged through norm-space. During the duration\n of the trip, feelings of suspicion arose inter Three Truce Races.\n As your memory also relates, the 'aquarium' was still in space when\n we found it necessary to obliterate the total race of Terrans. The\n message of the annihilation arrived in retard to the Energi, so Time\n permitted us to devise a contra-Energi intelligence plan, a necessity\n since it was realized that the Energi would be disturbed by our action\n contra-Terrans and would, without doubt, take action contra-ourselves.\n\n\n \"Unknown to you,\nbeush\n, or to the masses and highers, an\n insignificant pleasure craft was extracted from Terran Space and\n negatively consumed with a planet when the bombs were detonated. The\n ship accommodated two Terrans. Proper Terrans by birth, negatively\n by reference. One was male, other female. The two had been in\n their culture socially and religiously united in a ceremony called\n 'matrimony'. Emotions of sex, protection and an emotion we have\n negatively been able to analyze linked the two, and made them ideal for\n our purpose.\"\n\n\n The assistant looked at the\nbeush\n, picked up his partially full glass\n and, before he could sip it, was dashed to the floor beside the\nbeush\nhimself. The former helped the higher to his unstable legs, and was\n commented to by the same, \"Assistant, proceed to the protecroom.\"\n\n\n They entered the well-illuminated closet and immediately slipped\n into the unwieldy metallic suits. Once again they took their seats,\n the\nbeush\nreflecting and saying, \"As your memory relates, that\n explosion was a bomb-drop concussion from the Rebellers. We must now\n wear anti-radiation protection. For that reason, and the danger of\n the Energi, you\ndo\nsee why we need the formulae of the Force Domes,\nimmediately\n.\"\n\n\n There was menace in his voice. The assistant trembled violently. Using\n the rare smile of that humanoid race, the\nbeush\ncontinued, \"Do\n negatively self-preoccupy. Resume your information, if contented.\"\n\n\n \"Contented,\" came the automatic reply, and the assistant began, \"The\n two humans were perfect for the Plan, I repeat. Before the Energi\n received the message of the race destruction, it was imperative that we\n establish an agent on Energa, near the Force Domes. We assumed that the\n 'aquarium' would be placed on Energa, in the greatest center. That was\n correct, but negatively yet knowing for certainty, we perpetuated the\n Plan, with the 'aquarium' as the basis.\n\n\n \"One of our most competent protoplasmic computers stabilized the final\n steps of the Plan. We were to subject the two Terrans to radiation\n and have as a result two Terrans who could breathe their normal oxygen\n form H2O—the atmosphere of the 'aquarium', I repeat. We were then\n to deprive them of memory, except of the inter-attracting emotions,\n to allow them to live in harmony. Thirdly, we were to place them\n in the 'aquarium' and have them forwarded under the reference of\n semi-intelligent aqua-beings from Terran seas. A simple, but quite\n effective plan, your opinion,\nbeush\n?\"\n\n\n \"Quite,\" was the reply. \"And concerning the method of\n info-interception?\"\n\n\n The assistant continued without hesitation, embarrassed by his\n incompetency, \"A hyper-complex spheroid with radio interceptors,\n a-matter viewers and recorders and the general intelligence instruments\n of micro-size was placed in the cranium of the male mutant. The\n spheroid has negative direct control over the organism. Size was too\n scarce for use on trivialities. Then an agent was placed behind the\n larger controls at our end of the instruments.\"\n\n\n \"And you are the agent?\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-contentedly affirmative.\"\nI have done two things today. I have found the word for my hatred of\n the Faces. The Voice gave it to me. When I asked the Voice, it laughed\n and told me the word to use was \"damn\". So today I have thrice said,\n \"Damn the Faces. Damn them.\"\n\n\n Diane and I have decided that we\nwant\na baby. Maybe the other fish\nwanted\nthem, so they got them. We\nwant\na baby.\n\"The two Terrans were so biologically mutated and are so nearly\n robotic, that it is physically impossible for reproduction on their\n part,\nbeush\n.\"\n\n\n The\nbeush\nignored the assistant's words and said, \"I have received\n copies of the thought-patterns and translations. There was something\n strange and very powerful about the meaning of the male's thought,\n 'want'. I query.\"\n\n\n \"Be assured without preoccupation that there exists negative danger of\n reproduction.\"\nThe name I wanted to call Diane was not good, because her breasts are\n hard and large, as is her stomach. I think she is sick.\nI do not think Diane is sick. I think she is going to have a baby.\n\"Entities, assistant! On your oath-body you proclaimed that there is\n negative danger of reproduction.\"\n\n\n \"Rest assured, peace,\nbeush\n.\n\n\n \"But his thoughts!\"\n\n\n \"Rest assured,\nhigher beush\n.\"\nThere is much blood in the water today. Diane is having a baby; sharks\n have come. I have never seen so many sharks, and as big as they are I\n have never seen. I am afraid, but still some sneak among us near Diane.\n\n\n We love the porpoises, so they help us now. They are chasing the\n sharks away, injuring and killing some.\n\"Entities, Warpspaced Entities! There has been reproduction.\"\n\n\n \"\nYorbeush\n,\" cried the assistant in defense. \"It is physically\n impossible. But they are mutants. It is negatively impossible that they\n possess Mind Force to a degree.\"\n\n\n \"To what degree? What degree could produce reproduction when it is\n physically impossible?\" The\nbeush\nwas sarcastic. \"How far can they\n go?\"\n\n\n \"There is negatively great amount they can do. Negative danger, because\n we have studied their instincts and emotions and found that they will\n not leave the 'aquarium,' their 'home'. Unless someone tells them to,\n but there is no one to do so.\"\nToday I damned the Faces nine times and finally\nwanted\nthem to go\n away. The \"view-ports\" went black. It was like the sharks leaving when\n I wanted them to. I still do not understand.\n\n\n There has been much useless noise and senseless talk from the Voice\n these days. It is annoying because I must concentrate on loving Diane\n and caring for the baby. So I\nwanted\nthe Voice to leave it. It left.\n\"Entities Be Simply Damned! The spheroid ceased to exist, assistant.\n How far can they go, assistant?\" The\nbeush\nrose, screamed\n hysterically for three seconds and then fired the hand weapon point\n blank at the neck of his assistant.\n\n\n The sharks come today, because Diane is having another baby. Diane\n hurts, and there is more blood than last time. Her face is not pretty\n when she hurts, as it is pretty when she sleeps. So I\nwant\nher to\n sleep. Her face is pretty now with the smile on her lips.\n\"Fourteen thousand Energi ceased to exist, spheroid ceased to exist,\n and another reproduction. Warpspace! How far will they go?\"\nIt has been hundreds of days. Faces keep appearing, but I continue to\nwant\nthem to go away. Diane has had eighteen babies. The oldest are\n swimming around and playing with the porpoises. Diane and I spend most\n of the time teaching the children by showing them things, and by giving\n them our thoughts by touching them.\nToday I found that none of the children have Voices. I could\nwant\nthem to have Voices, but the children's thoughts tell me that it is not\n right to have a Voice.\n\n\n The eldest boy says that we should leave the tank, that a greater\n \"tank\" is around us, and that it is easier to move around in that\n greater tank. He also says that we must guard ourselves against Faces\n outside. That is strange, but the boy is a good boy. Many times he\n knows that things will happen before they do. He is a good boy.\n\n\n He is almost as tall as I am. The eldest girl is pretty like Diane,\n her body very white and soft but, since I\nwanted\nit so, her hair is\n golden, instead of dark. The boy likes her very much, and I have seen\n them together, touching.\n\n\n Tomorrow I will explain to him that if he\nwants\nsomething, he will\n get it. So he must\nwant\na baby.\n\"Query? The Energi will bomb-drop the 'aquarium'? War declared against\n us? War declared? Entities be wholly damned! Negative! Negativvv!\" The\n disintegrator was fired once more, this time into the orange eye of the\nbeush\nhimself, by himself, and for the good of himself.\nWhen, if I ever do\nwant\nthe Voice to come back, it will be very\n surprised to know that Diane has had twenty-four babies; that the three\n eldest boys have mated twice, once and twice, and have had four babies.\n The Voice will also be surprised to know that it took all twenty-nine\n of us to\nwant\nall the Faces around the tank to die, as the eldest boy\n said to do. We could not tell, but the boy said that six million Faces\n were dead. That seems impossible to me, but the boy is always right.\n\n\n Tomorrow we are leaving the tank. We will\nwant\nto leave it; it is\n getting crowded. The boy says that beyond the greater tank, which we\n will also leave, there is enough space for all the babies Diane could\n have if she lived forever.\n\n\n Forever, he said. It would be nice to live forever. I think I'll\nwant\n....\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why is the water black in the tank when the narrator and Diane take refuge in the Cave?", "question_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ_1", "options": ["From a chemical inserted into the water.", "The squid has released its ink.", "It is heavily populated with dead fish.", "It is nighttime."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the tank most similar to?", "question_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ_2", "options": ["A research facility.", "A prison.", "A submarine.", "An aquarium."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who are the Faces the narrator sees in the view-ports?", "question_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ_3", "options": ["Terrans.", "The humanoids.", "Energi.", "The beush."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How were Diane and the narrator able to breathe underwater?", "question_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ_4", "options": ["They were given equipment that allowed them to do so.", "They held their breath and swam to the Cave when they needed air.", "They were humanoids.", "They were exposed to a special kind of radiation."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did The Voice speak to the narrator?", "question_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ_5", "options": ["Over a loudspeaker.", "Through sound waves that could travel through water.", "Through a chip implanted into his head.", "Via the semi-intelligent Terran aqua-beings."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the beush kill himself?", "question_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ_6", "options": ["Millions of Faces were dead.", "He was afraid of Diane's eighteen children.", "He was afraid of war with the Energi.", "The Voice told him to."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happened to the Terrans?", "question_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ_7", "options": ["They were bombed by the Energi.", "Their species had their memories wiped and all were placed in vast aquariums.", "Their species was exposed to radiation that caused mass mutations.", "They were destroyed by the humanoids."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the humanoids' plan involve placing the aquarium on Energa?", "question_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ_8", "options": ["It was a gift to the Energi.", "It was a strategic stronghold for war with the Terrans.", "To gain access to the Force Domes.", "So they could study the two mutated Terrans easier."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What method did the narrator and his offspring employ to kill The Faces?", "question_unique_id": "61397_FFQXM0RJ_9", "options": ["A disintegrator.", "Telepathy and willpower.", "The porpoises followed their bidding.", "A bomb."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/3/9/61397//61397-h//61397-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. 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{"article_id": "61243", "set_unique_id": "61243_RTYUJXEI", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Snowbank Orbit", "year": 1951, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "Science fiction; War stories; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Short stories; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction", "article": "THE SNOWBANK ORBIT\nBY FRITZ LEIBER\nEarth could not stop the Enemy's\n\n remorseless advance from outer\n\n space. Neither could the Enemy!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and Octans,\n but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis between Aldebaran and\n Antares. The Bull is her coronet and the Scorpion her footstool. Dear\n blowzy old bitch-planet, swollen and pale and cold, mad with your\n Shakespearean moons, white-mottled as death from Venerean Plague,\n spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rolling\n around the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair rolling on\n the black floor of an infinite bar-room, what a sweet last view of the\n Solar System you are for a cleancut young spaceman....\n\n\n Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and\n the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going\n to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve\n breaking around Uranus—and so what! He shivered to get a little heat\n and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through\nProspero's\nbridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary\n diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost lost in\n pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through\n the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing\n the star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed with\n the time since rim contact.\n\n\n At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen\n soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for\n the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.\n\n\n Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The\n captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and\n Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary\n entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the\n captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination\n when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in\n the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the\n worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing\n on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better\n than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six\n minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,\n stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange how\n he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and\n blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining\n them on.\n\n\n The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge\n spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a\n water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked\n bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna\n seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top,\n where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a\n second—a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly\n green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.\n\n\n Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as they\n whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as small\n as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward\n course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able\n to slow\nProspero\nand her sister ships or turn them back at their 100\n miles a second than the fleet's solar jets could operate at this chilly\n distance from Sol. G'by, fleet. G'by, C.C.Y. spaceman.\nGrunfeld looked for the pale planet's moons. Miranda and Umbriel were\n too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above\n the planet and Oberon a dozen below. Spectral sequins. If the fleet\n were going to get a radio signal from any of them, it would have to be\n Titania, occulted now by the planet and the noisy natural static of\n her roiling hydrogen air and seething methane seas—but it had always\n been only a faint hope that there were survivors from the First Uranus\n Expedition.\n\n\n Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the\n curving star-bordered forward edge of\nProspero's\nhuge mirror and the\n thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages\n below the spaceshield.\n\n\n Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for\n helium to crawl, if you had some helium.\nProspero's\ninsulation,\n originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in\n reverse.\n\n\n Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of\n Uranus' sun-lit face. Check.\n\n\n Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser\n with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly ... if it were right to drag\n out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus.\n\n\n Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros.\n\n\n The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue—one\n each for\nCaliban\n,\nSnug\n,\nMoth\n, and\nStarveling\n, following\nProspero\nin line astern on slave automatic—though for months inertia\n had done all five ships' piloting. Once the buttons had been green,\n but they'd wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy.\n\n\n The gages still showed their last maximums. Skin 793 Kelvin, Cabin\n 144 Fahrenheit, Gravs 3.2. All of them hit almost a year ago, when\n they'd been ace-ing past the sun. Grunfeld's gaze edged back to the\n five bulbous pressure suits, once more rigidly upright in their braced\n racks, that they'd been wearing during that stretch of acceleration\n inside the orbit of Mercury. He started. For a moment he'd thought\n he saw the dark-circled eyes of the captain peering between two of\n the bulging black suits. Nerves! The captain had to be in his cabin,\n readying alternate piloting programs for Copperhead.\n\n\n Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so\n violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite\n direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing\n near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than\n that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly\n studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much\n nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The\n next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind\n retreated to the circumstances that had brought\nProspero\n(then only\nMercury One\n) out here.\nII\n\n\n When the First Interstellar War erupted, the pioneer fleets of Earth's\n nations had barely pushed their explorations beyond the orbit of\n Saturn. Except for the vessels of the International Meteor Guard,\n spaceflight was still a military enterprise of America, Russia, England\n and the other mega-powers.\n\n\n During the first months the advantage lay wholly with the slim black\n cruisers of the Enemy, who had an antigravity which allowed them\n to hover near planets without going into orbit; and a frightening\n degree of control over light itself. Indeed, their principal weapon\n was a tight beam of visible light, a dense photonic stiletto with an\n effective range of several Jupiter-diameters in vacuum. They also\n used visible light, in the green band, for communication as men use\n radio, sometimes broadcasting it and sometimes beaming it loosely in\n strange abstract pictures that seemed part of their language. Their\n gravity-immune ships moved by reaction to photonic jets the tightness\n of which rendered them invisible except near the sun, where they tended\n to ionize electronically dirty volumes of space. It was probably this\n effective invisibility, based on light-control, which allowed them to\n penetrate the Solar System as deep as Earth's orbit undetected, rather\n than any power of travel in time or sub-space, as was first assumed.\n Earthmen could only guess at the physical appearance of the Enemy,\n since no prisoners were taken on either side.\n\n\n Despite his impressive maneuverability and armament, the Enemy was\n oddly timid about attacking live planets. He showed no fear of the big\n gas planets, in fact hovering very close to their turgid surfaces, as\n if having some way of fueling from them.\n\n\n Near Terra the first tactic of the black cruisers, after destroying\n Lunostrovok and Circumluna, was to hover behind the moon, as though\n sharing its tide-lockedness—a circumstance that led to a sortie by\n Earth's Combined Fleet, England and Sweden excepted.\n\n\n At the wholly disastrous Battle of the Far Side, which was visible in\n part to naked-eye viewers on Earth, the Combined Fleet was annihilated.\n No Enemy ship was captured, boarded, or seriously damaged—except\n for one which, apparently by a fluke, was struck by a fission-headed\n anti-missile and proceeded after the blast to \"burn,\" meaning that it\n suffered a slow and puzzling disintegration, accompanied by a dazzling\n rainbow display of visible radiation. This was before the \"stupidity\"\n of the Enemy with regard to small atomic missiles was noted, or their\n allergy to certain radio wave bands, and also before Terran telepaths\n began to claim cloudy contact with Enemy minds.\n\n\n Following Far Side, the Enemy burst into activity, harrying Terran\n spacecraft as far as Mercury and Saturn, though still showing great\n caution in maneuver and making no direct attacks on planets. It was as\n if a race of heavily armed marine creatures should sink all ocean-going\n ships or drive them to harbor, but make no assaults beyond the shore\n line. For a full year Earth, though her groundside and satellite\n rocketyards were furiously busy, had no vehicle in deep space—with one\n exception.\nAt the onset of the War a fleet of five mobile bases of the U. S. Space\n Force were in Orbit to Mercury, where it was intended they take up\n satellite positions prior to the prospecting and mineral exploitation\n of the small sun-blasted planet. These five ships, each with a skeleton\n five-man crew, were essentially Ross-Smith space stations with a solar\n drive, assembled in space and intended solely for space-to-space flight\n inside Earth's orbit. A huge paraboloid mirror, its diameter four times\n the length of the ship's hull, superheated at its focus the hydrogen\n which was ejected as a plasma at high exhaust velocity. Each ship\n likewise mounted versatile radio-radar equipment on dual lattice arms\n and carried as ship's launch a two-man chemical fuel rocket adaptable\n as a fusion-headed torpedo.\n\n\n After Far Side, this \"tin can\" fleet was ordered to bypass Mercury\n and, tacking on the sun, shape an orbit for Uranus, chiefly because\n that remote planet, making its 84-year circuit of Sol, was currently\n on the opposite side of the sun to the four inner planets and the two\n nearer gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. In the empty regions of space the\n relatively defenseless fleet might escape the attention of the Enemy.\n\n\n However, while still accelerating into the sun for maximum boost, the\n fleet received information that two Enemy cruisers were in pursuit. The\n five ships cracked on all possible speed, drawing on the solar drive's\n high efficiency near the sun and expending all their hydrogen and most\n material capable of being vaporized, including some of the light-metal\n hydrogen storage tanks—like an old steamer burning her cabin furniture\n and the cabins themselves to win a race. Gradually the curving course\n that would have taken years to reach the outer planet flattened into a\n hyperbola that would make the journey in 200 days.\n\n\n In the asteroid belt the pursuing cruisers turned aside to join in the\n crucial Battle of the Trojans with Earth's largely new-built, more\n heavily and wisely armed Combined Fleet—a battle that proved to be\n only a prelude to the decisive Battle of Jupiter.\n\n\n Meanwhile the five-ship fleet sped onward, its solar drive quite\n useless in this twilight region even if it could have scraped together\n the needed boilable ejectant mass to slow its flight. Weeks became\n months. The ships were renamed for the planet they were aimed at. At\n least the fleet's trajectory had been truly set.\n\n\n Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-cored ball\n of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through space across the\n fleet's course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet\n was traveling at 100 miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the\n interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish....\nUnless, Grunfeld told himself ... unless the fleet shed its velocity by\n ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking\n on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a\n year ago—a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane\n and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery\n new-fallen snow.\n\n\n Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction\n mass,\nProspero\ncould have shed her present velocity in five hours,\n decelerating at a comfortable one G.\n\n\n But allowing her 12,000 miles of straight-line travel through Uranus'\n frigid soupy atmosphere—and that might be dipping very close to\n the methane seas blanketing the planet's hypothetical mineral\n core—\nProspero\nwould have two minutes in which to shed her velocity.\n\n\n Two minutes—at 150 Gs.\n\n\n Men had stood 40 and 50 Gs for a fractional second.\n\n\n But for two minutes.... Grunfeld told himself that the only surer way\n to die would be to run into a section of the Enemy fleet. According to\n one calculation the ship's skin would melt by heat of friction in 90\n seconds, despite the low temperature of the abrading atmosphere.\n\n\n The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus.\n He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale\n planet's hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.\nIII\n\n\n In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket\n around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker\n turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.\n\n\n \"Captain won't like that,\" plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from\n where he floated in womb position across the cabin. \"Enemy can feel\n a candle of\nour\nlight, captain says, ten million miles away.\" He\n rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a\n polly-wog's.\n\n\n \"And Jackson hears the Enemy think ... and Heimdall hears the grass\n grow,\" Croker commented with a harsh manic laugh. \"Isn't an Enemy for\n a billion miles, Ness.\" He launched aft from the hammock. \"We haven't\n spotted their green since Saturn orbit. There's nowhere for them.\"\n\n\n \"There's the far side of Uranus,\" Ness pointed out. \"That's less than\n ten million miles now. Eight. A bare day. They could be there.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, waiting to bushwack us as we whip past on our way to eternity,\"\n Croker chuckled as he crumpled up against the aft port, shedding\n momentum. \"That's likely, isn't it, when they didn't have time for us\n back in the Belt?\" He scowled at the tiny white sun, no bigger a disk\n than Venus, but still with one hundred times as much light as the full\n moon pouring from it—too much light to look at comfortably. He began\n to button the inner cover over the port.\n\n\n \"Don't do that,\" Ness objected without conviction. \"There's not much\n heat in it but there's some.\" He hugged his elbows and shivered. \"I\n don't remember being warm since Mars orbit.\"\n\n\n \"The sun gets on my nerves,\" Croker said. \"It's like looking at an\n arc light through a pinhole. It's like a high, high jail light in a\n cold concrete yard. The stars are highlights on the barbed wire.\" He\n continued to button out the sun.\n\n\n \"You ever in jail?\" Ness asked. Croker grinned.\nWith the tropism of a fish, Ness began to paddle toward the little\n light at the head of Jackson's hammock, flicking his hands from the\n wrists like flippers. \"I got one thing against the sun,\" he said\n quietly. \"It's blanketing out the radio. I'd like us to get one more\n message from Earth. We haven't tried rigging our mirror to catch radio\n waves. I'd like to hear how we won the battle of Jupiter.\"\n\n\n \"If we won it,\" Croker said.\n\n\n \"Our telescopes show no more green around Jove,\" Ness reminded him. \"We\n counted 27 rainbows of Enemy cruisers 'burning.' Captain verified the\n count.\"\n\n\n \"Repeat: if we won it.\" Croker pushed off and drifted back toward the\n hammock. \"If there was a real victory message they'd push it through,\n even if the sun's in the way and it takes three hours to catch us.\n People who win, shout.\"\n\n\n Ness shrugged as he paddled. \"One way or the other, we should be\n getting the news soon from Titania station,\" he said. \"They'll have\n heard.\"\n\n\n \"If they're still alive and there ever was a Titania Station,\" Croker\n amended, backing air violently to stop himself as he neared the\n hammock. \"Look, Ness, we know that the First Uranus Expedition arrived.\n At least they set off their flares. But that was three years before the\n War and we haven't any idea of what's happened to them since and if\n they ever managed to set up housekeeping on Titania—or Ariel or Oberon\n or even Miranda or Umbriel. At least if they built a station that could\n raise Earth I haven't been told. Sure thing\nProspero\nhasn't heard\n anything ... and we're getting close.\"\n\n\n \"I won't argue,\" Ness said. \"Even if we raise 'em, it'll just be\n hello-goodby with maybe time between for a battle report.\"\n\n\n \"And a football score and a short letter from home, ten seconds per\n man as the station fades.\" Croker frowned and added, \"If Captain had\n cottoned to my idea, two of us at any rate could have got off this\n express train at Uranus.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me how,\" Ness asked drily.\n\n\n \"How? Why, one of the ship's launches. Replace the fusion-head with\n the cabin. Put all the chem fuel in the tanks instead of divvying it\n between the ship and the launch.\"\n\n\n \"I haven't got the brain for math Copperhead has, but I can subtract,\"\n Ness said, referring to\nProspero's\npiloting robot. \"Fully fueled, one\n of the launches has a max velocity change in free-fall of 30 miles per\n second. Use it all in braking and you've only taken 30 from 100. The\n launch is still going past Uranus and out of the system at 70 miles a\n second.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't hear all my idea,\" Croker said. \"You put piggyback tanks\n on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four\n launches. Then you've 100 miles of braking\nand\na maneuvering reserve.\n You only need to shed 90 miles, anyway. Ten miles a second's the close\n circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for\n Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver\n four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at 1 G to shed\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Cute,\" Ness conceded. \"Especially the jeep. But I'm glad just the same\n we've got 70 per cent of our chem fuel in our ships' tanks instead of\n the launches. We're on such a bull's eye course for Uranus—Copperhead\n really pulled a miracle plotting our orbit—that we may need a\n sidewise shove to miss her. If we slapped into that cold hydrogen soup\n at our 100 mps—\"\n\n\n Croker shrugged. \"We still could have dropped a couple of us,\" he said.\n\"Captain's got to look after the whole fleet,\" Ness said. \"You're\n beginning to agitate, Croker, like you was Grunfeld—or the captain\n himself.\"\n\n\n \"But if Titania Station's alive, a couple of men dropped off would do\n the fleet some good. Stir Titania up to punch a message through to\n Earth and get a really high-speed retrieve-and-rescue ship started out\n after us.\nIf\nwe've won the War.\"\n\n\n \"But Titania Station's dead or never was, not to mention its jeep. And\n we've lost the Battle of Jupiter. You said so yourself,\" Ness asserted\n owlishly. \"Captain's got to look after the whole fleet.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, so he kills himself fretting and the rest of us die of old age\n in the outskirts of the Solar System. Join the Space Force and See the\n Stars! Ness, do you know how long it'd take us to reach the nearest\n star—except we aren't headed for her—at our 100 mps? Eight thousand\n years!\"\n\n\n \"That's a lot of time to kill,\" Ness said. \"Let's play chess.\"\n\n\n Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark unlined face\n above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter again, or the eyelids.\n Croker said, \"Suppose he knows what the Enemy looks like?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Ness said. \"When he talks about them it's as if he was\n their interpreter. How about the chess?\"\n\n\n \"Suits. Knight to King Bishop Three.\"\n\n\n \"Hmm. Knight to King Knight Two, Third Floor.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, I meant flat chess, not three-D,\" Croker objected.\n\n\n \"That thin old game? Why, I no sooner start to get the position really\n visualized in my head than the game's over.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to start a game of three-D with Uranus only 18 hours\n away.\"\n\n\n Jackson stirred in his hammock. His lips worked. \"They....\" he\n breathed. Croker and Ness instantly watched him. \"They....\"\n\n\n \"I wonder if he is really inside the Enemy's mind?\" Ness said.\n\n\n \"He thinks he speaks for them,\" Croker replied and the next instant\n felt a warning touch on his arm and looked sideways and saw\n dark-circled eyes in a skull-angular face under a battered cap with a\n tarnished sunburst. Damn, thought Croker, how does the captain always\n know when Jackson's going to talk?\n\n\n \"They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus,\" Jackson\n breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little\n louder, though his eyes stayed shut. \"They're welcoming us, they're\n our brothers.\" The smile died. \"But they know they got to kill us, they\n know we got to die.\"\n\n\n The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and\n he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch\n leading forward.\nGrunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw\n the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was\n circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought\n he'd be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a\n jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his\n shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.\n\n\n \"Ambush,\" he said. \"At least two cruisers.\"\n\n\n He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he\n could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself\n if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.\n\n\n The blue telltales for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\nbegan to blink.\n\n\n \"They've seen it too,\" the captain said. He snatched up the mike and\n his next words rang through the\nProspero\n.\n\n\n \"Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr.\n Grunfeld, raise the fleet.\"\n\n\n Aft, Croker muttered, \"Rig our shrouds, don't he mean? Rig shrouds and\n firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.\"\n\n\n Ness said, \"Cheer up. Even the longest strategic withdrawal in history\n has to end some time.\"\nIV\n\n\n Three quarters of a day later Grunfeld felt a spasm of futile fear and\n revolt as the pressure suit closed like a thick-fleshed carnivorous\n plant on his drugged and tired body. Relax, he told himself. Fine thing\n if you cooked up a fuss when even Croker didn't. He thought of forty\n things to re-check. Relax, he repeated—the work's over; all that\n matters is in Copperhead's memory tanks now, or will be as soon as the\n captain's suited up.\n\n\n The suit held Grunfeld erect, his arms at his sides—the best attitude,\n except he was still facing forward, for taking high G, providing the\n ship herself didn't start to tumble. Only the cheekpieces and visor\n hadn't closed in on his face—translucent hand-thick petals as yet\n unfolded. He felt the delicate firm pressure of built-in fingertips\n monitoring his pulses and against his buttocks the cold smooth muzzles\n of the jet hypodermics that would feed him metronomic drugs during the\n high-G stretch and stimulants when they were in free-fall again. When.\n\n\n He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of\n Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through\n the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson—just\n the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention,\n pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the\n captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side\n as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and\n the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.\nBeyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it\n still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with\n the onrushing planet's pale mottled green that now had the dulled\n richness of watered silk. They were so close that the rim hardly showed\n curvature. The atmosphere must have a steep gradient, Grunfeld thought,\n or they'd already be feeling decel. That stuff ahead looked more like\n water than any kind of air. It bothered him that the captain was still\n half out of his suit.\n\n\n There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill\n up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port\n covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of\n their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago.\n Its robot pilots were set to follow\nProspero\nand imitate, nothing\n else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still....\n\n\n Grunfeld wet his lips. \"Captain,\" he said hesitantly. \"Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Grunfeld.\" He caught the edge of the skull's answering\n grin. \"We\nare\nbeginning to hit hydrogen,\" the quiet voice went on.\n \"Forward skin temperature's up to 9 K.\"\n\n\n Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared\n bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began\n to talk dreamily from his suit.\n\n\n \"They're still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a\n little more now. Their ship's one thing and they're another. Their\n ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it\n knows to do is to kill us. They can't stop it, they're even less than\n passengers....\"\n\n\n The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and\n felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up,\n carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from\n solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction.\n\n\n The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the fainter\n stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and the pale green\n segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels began to close in front\n of the spaceshield. Soon there was only a narrow vertical ribbon of\n green—\nbright\ngreen as it narrowed to a thread—then for a few\n seconds only blackness except for the dim red and blue beads and\n semi-circles, just beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted\n interior cabin lights glowed on.\nJackson droned: \"They and their ships come from very far away, from the\n edge. If this is the continuum, they come from the ... discontinuum,\n where they don't have stars but something else and where gravity is\n different. Their ships came from the edge on a gust of fear with the\n other ships, and our brothers came with it though they didn't want\n to....\"\n\n\n And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it—the first faint thrill,\n less than a cobweb's tug, of\nweight\n.\n\n\n The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld's suit had begun to revolve\n slowly on a vertical axis.\n\n\n For a moment he glimpsed Jackson's dark profile—all five suits were\n revolving in their framework. They locked into position when the men in\n them were facing aft. Now at least retinas wouldn't pull forward at\n high-G decel, or spines crush through thorax and abdomen.\n\n\n The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld's forehead. And now he was sure he\n felt weight—maybe five pounds of it. Suddenly aft was\nup\n. It was as\n if he were lying on his back on the spaceshield.\n\n\n A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it.\n He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized\n it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the\n atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let\n them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the\n great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the\n other ships—the fleet's feeble sting. Like a bee's, just one, in dying.\n\n\n The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit began to close on\n his face like layers of pliable ice.\n\n\n Jackson called faintly, \"\nNow\nI understand. Their ship—\" His voice\n was cut off.\n\n\n Grunfeld's ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as\n the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy\n air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an\n extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body.\n\n\n But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now ... now on Mars ...\n now back on Earth....\n\n\n The weight was stifling now, crushing—a hill of invisible sand.\n Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had\n red fringe around it. It grew.\n\n\n There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the\n ship's jets roared, everything recovered, or didn't.\n\n\n The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out\n thought.\nThe universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a\n larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery\n wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld\n decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and\n in free-fall. His body didn't feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages.\n Or did it?\n\n\n He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward\n again? If they'd actually come through—\n\n\n There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after\n frictional heating?\n\n\n There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few\n Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?\n\n\n He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined\n retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the\n meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin\n lights were broken.\n\n\n The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his\n body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top\n of his opening suit.\n\n\n Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the\n spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex\n upward,\nthat must\n, he realized,\nbe the dark side of Uranus\n.\n\n\n Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and\n pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield.\n\n\n The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a\n curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.\n\n\n A pulsing, color-changing glow from somewhere showed him twisted stumps\n of the radio lattices. There was no sign of the mirror at all. It must\n have been torn away, or vaporized completely, in the fiery turbulence\n of decel.\n\n\n New maxs showed on the board: Cabin Temperature 214 F, Skin Temperature\n 907 K, Gravs 87.\n\n\n Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw\n the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering\n brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish\n phosphorescing.\n\"The torps got to 'em,\" Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to\n the right.\n\"I did find out at the end,\" Jackson said quietly from the left, his\n voice at last free of the trance-tone. \"The Enemy ships weren't ships\n at all. They were (there's no other word for it) space animals. We've\n always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was\n inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues\n through the sea before you notice life and I guess space is the\n same. Anyway the Enemy was (what else can I call 'em?) space-whales.\n Inertialess space-whales from the discontinuum. Space-whales that ate\n hydrogen (that's the only way I know to say it) and spat light to\n move and fight. The ones I talked to, our brothers, were just their\n parasites.\"\n\n\n \"That's crazy,\" Grunfeld said. \"All of it. A child's picture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure it is,\" Jackson agreed.\n\n\n From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, \"Quiet.\"\n\n\n The radio came on thin and wailing with static: \"Titania Station\n calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are\n dead—the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have\n jeep fueled and set to go—\"\n\n\n Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and\n last blue telltales still glowed for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\n.\n Breathe a prayer, he thought, for\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.\n\n\n Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be\n wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MANUAL.\n\n\n The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along its length,\n which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a giant new moon. A\n bead formed toward the center, brightened, and then all at once the\n jail-yard sun had risen and was glaring coldly through its pinhole into\n their eyes.\n\n\n They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around.\n\n\n The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure suit, only\n the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull features. Studying the\n monitor box of the captain's suit, Grunfeld saw it was set to inject\n the captain with power stimulants as soon as the Gravs began to slacken\n from their max.\n\n\n He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting them out of\n Uranus.\n\n\n But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as\n dark as those of\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.\n\n\n Grunfeld thought, now he can rest.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How did Grunfeld measure the size of Uranus?", "question_unique_id": "61243_RTYUJXEI_1", "options": ["He watched it block out stars and moons and used the surrounding light to estimate its depth.", "He took readings as the Prospero flew past the planet at a chilly distance.", "He analyzed the speed of the spinning of the equatorial bands.", "He used known diameters of other stars and moons to determine the diameter of Uranus."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the crew of the Prospero change the colors representing the other four ships?", "question_unique_id": "61243_RTYUJXEI_2", "options": ["It revealed their respective skin and cabin temperatures as well as their gravitational pull readings. ", "It indicated that Caliban, Snug, Mother, and Starveling were flying on automatic.", "It represented their readiness to chart a course upon observing rim contact once full occultation was achieved.", "The Enemy ships were bright green, so they changed the indicators to blue."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was there only one ship from Earth navigating space during a period of the First Interstellar War?", "question_unique_id": "61243_RTYUJXEI_3", "options": ["An attack by a fission-headed anti-missile left the Combined Fleet in disarray. ", "The Enemy destroyed most Terran spaceships and continued attacking others into retreat.", "The crews of other ships were busy managing groundside and satellite rocketyards.", "The ships were unable to compete with the Enemy ships due to their lack of anti-gravity technology."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the Space Force leave its initial orbit?", "question_unique_id": "61243_RTYUJXEI_4", "options": ["To go to an orbit at a safer distance from the Enemy.", "It was being relentlessly attacked by the nearly invisible Enemy fleet.", "To better position themselves for the task of prospecting and mineral exploitation of Mercury.", "Because the fleet was ready to begin space-to-space flights inside Earth's orbit."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Grunfeld estimate the Prospero could prevent itself from zooming past Uranus into unknown space?", "question_unique_id": "61243_RTYUJXEI_5", "options": ["Once they reached a certain diameter from Uranus, they could better attach to its orbit.", "They could ram the Enemy spaceships to slow their speed.", "They could slow the ship's speed against the planet's thick atmosphere.", "They could use the functioning solar jet to decelerate quickly."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What important realization did Jackson have thanks to his telepathy?", "question_unique_id": "61243_RTYUJXEI_6", "options": ["The Enemy were the ships themselves, not their inhabitants.", "The Enemy had killed the crew from the First Uranus Expedition.", "The Space Force had lost the Battle of Jupiter.", "The Enemy used its anti-gravity capabilities to jettison from the discontinuum."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happened when Grunfeld saw the black pillow?", "question_unique_id": "61243_RTYUJXEI_7", "options": ["He died.", "He was reminded of life on Earth.", "He understood the true purpose of the Enemy.", "The Prospero successfully decelerated. "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/2/4/61243//61243-h//61243-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "32667", "set_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Holes and John Smith", "year": 1956, "author": "Ludwig, Edward W.", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Musicians -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight\n from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he\n was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was\n—whoops!...\nThe Holes and John Smith\nBy Edward W. Ludwig\nIllustration by Kelly Freas\nIt all began on a Saturday\n night at\nThe Space Room\n. If\n you've seen any recent Martian\n travel folders, you know the place:\n \"A picturesque oasis of old Martian\n charm, situated on the beauteous\n Grand Canal in the heart of\n Marsport. Only half a mile from\n historic Chandler Field, landing\n site of the first Martian expedition\n nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A\n visitor to the hotel, lunch room or\n cocktail lounge will thrill at the\n sight of hardy space pioneers mingling\n side by side with colorful\n Martian tribesmen. An evening at\nThe Space Room\nis an amazing,\n unforgettable experience.\"\n\n\n Of course, the folders neglect to\n add that the most amazing aspect is\n the scent of the Canal's stagnant\n water—and that the most unforgettable\n experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\"\n evaporate from your\n pocketbook like snow from the\n Great Red Desert.\n\n\n We were sitting on the bandstand\n of the candle-lit cocktail lounge.\n Me—Jimmie Stanley—and my\n four-piece combo. Maybe you've\n seen our motto back on Earth:\n \"The Hottest Music This Side of\n Mercury.\"\n\n\n But there weren't four of us tonight.\n Only three. Ziggy, our bass\n fiddle man, had nearly sliced off\n two fingers while opening a can of\n Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing\n the number of our personnel by a\n tragic twenty-five per cent.\n\n\n Which was why Ke-teeli, our\n boss, was descending upon us with\n all the grace of an enraged Venusian\n vinosaur.\n\n\n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled\n in his nasal tenor. He was almost\n skeleton thin, like most Martians,\n and so tall that if he fell down he'd\n be half way home.\n\n\n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't\n be here, but we've called the Marsport\n local for another. He'll be here\n any minute.\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to\n as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered\n coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three.\n His eyes were like black\n needle points set deep in a mask of\n dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n\n\n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\"\n he squeaked.\n\n\n I sighed. This was the week our\n contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed\n little enough enthusiasm for\n our music as it was. His comments\n were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\"\n or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real\n cause of his concern being, I suspected,\n the infrequency with which\n his cash register tinkled.\n\n\n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new\n man doesn't come,\nwe're\nstill here.\n We'll play for you.\" I glanced at\n the conglomeration of uniformed\n spacemen, white-suited tourists,\n and loin-clothed natives who sat at\n ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't\n want to disappoint your customers,\n would you?\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better\n dey be deesappointed. Ees better\n no museek den bad museek.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles\n on Martian horn-harp, made a\n feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't\n worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass\n man will be here.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our\n red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think\n I hear him coming now.\"\n\n\n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the\n entrance. There was only silence.\n His naked, parchment-like chest\n swelled as if it were an expanding\n balloon.\n\n\n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n \"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And\n he whirled away.\n\n\n We waited.\n\n\n Fat Boy's two hundred and\n eighty-odd pounds were drooped\n over his chair like the blubber of an\n exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always\n the uranium pits of Neptune.\n Course, you don't live more than\n five years there—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we could make it back\n to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n\n\n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n \"Your brains?\"\n\n\n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I\n guess it'll have to be the black pits\n of Neptune. The home of washed-up\n interplanetary musicians. It's too\n bad. We're so young, too.\"\n\n\n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli\n was casting his razor-edged glare in\n our direction. I brushed the chewed\n finger nails from the keyboard of\n my electronic piano.\n\n\n Then it happened.\nFrom the entrance of\nThe\n Space Room\ncame a thumping\n and a grating and a banging. Suddenly,\n sweeping across the dance\n floor like a cold wind, was a bass\n fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity,\n a refugee from a pawnbroker's\n attic. It was queerly shaped. It was\n too tall, too wide. It was more like\n a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass\n than a bass.\n\n\n The fiddle was not unaccompanied\n as I'd first imagined. Behind\n it, streaking over the floor in a\n waltz of agony, was a little guy, an\n animated matchstick with a flat,\n broad face that seemed to have\n been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored\n mop of hair reminded me\n of a field of dry grass, the long\n strands forming loops that flanked\n the sides of his face.\n\n\n His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\n\n\n My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—\n\n\n My eyes burst open. A shiver\n coursed down my spine like gigantic\n mice feet.\n\n\n The tones that surged from that\n monstrous bass were ecstatic. They\n were out of a jazzman's Heaven.\n They were great rolling clouds that\n seemed to envelop the entire universe\n with their vibrance. They\n held a depth and a volume and a\n richness that were astounding, that\n were like no others I'd ever heard.\n\n\n First they went\nBoom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom\n,\n and then,\nboom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom\n,\n just like the tones of all bass\n fiddles.\n\n\n But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n\n\n We finished\nOn An Asteroid With\n You\n, modulated into\nSweet Sally\n from Saturn\nand finished with\nTighten Your Lips on Titan\n.\n\n\n We waited for the applause of\n the Earth people and the shrilling\n of the Martians to die down. Then\n I turned to John and his fiddle.\n\n\n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n \"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n\n\n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\"\n added Hammer-Head who, although\n sober, seemed quite drunk.\n\n\n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of\n course it's old. It's over five thousand\n years old. I was lucky to find\n it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a\n fiddle but a\nZloomph\n. This is the\n only one in existence.\" He patted\n the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole\n in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n\n\n I wondered what the hell he was\n talking about. I studied the black,\n mirror-like wood. The aperture in\n the vesonator was like that of any\n bass fiddle.\n\n\n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to\n ask.\n\n\n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n \"For going home,\" he said.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\nWe played. Tune after tune.\n John knew them all, from the\n latest pop melodies to a swing version\n of the classic\nRhapsody of The\n Stars\n. He was a quiet guy during\n the next couple of hours, and getting\n more than a few words from\n him seemed as hard as extracting a\n tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I\n mean, his\nZloomph\n—with a dreamy\n expression in those watery eyes,\n staring at nothing.\n\n\n But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"\n\n\n There was no doubt about it.\n John Smith was peculiar, but he\n was the best bass man this side of a\n musician's Nirvana.\n\n\n It didn't take a genius to figure\n out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's\n countenance had evidenced\n an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles\n before John began to play.\n Item two: Goon-Face had beamed\n like a kitten with a quart of cream\n after John began to play.\n\n\n Conclusion: If we wanted to\n keep eating, we'd have to persuade\n John Smith to join our combo.\n\n\n At intermission I said, \"How\n about a drink, John? Maybe a shot\n of wine-syrup?\"\n\n\n He shook his head.\n\n\n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n\n\n His grunt was negative.\n\n\n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"Yes, I\nlike\nbeer.\"\n\n\n I escorted him to the bar and assisted\n him in his arduous climb onto\n a stool.\n\n\n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd\n taken an experimental sip, \"where\n have you been hiding? A guy like\n you should be playing every night.\"\n\n\n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured\n I might need some money so\n I went to the union. Then I worked\n on my plan.\"\n\n\n \"Then you need a job. How\n about playing with us steady? We\n like your style a lot.\"\n\n\n He made a long, low humming\n sound which I interpreted as an\n expression of intense concentration.\n \"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n\n\n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"\n\n\n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n \"I like to study ancient history ...\n and I must work on my\n plan.\"\n\n\n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n\n\n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me\n about it, John. It\nmust\nbe interesting.\"\n\n\n He made queer clicking noises\n with his mouth that reminded me\n of a mechanical toy being wound\n into motion. \"The whole foundation\n of this or any other culture is\n based on the history of all the time\n dimensions, each interwoven with\n the other, throughout the ages. And\n the holes provide a means of studying\n all of it first hand.\"\nOh, oh\n, I thought.\nBut you still\n have to eat. Remember, you still\n have to eat.\n\"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there\n are so many holes in this universe.\"\n\n\n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n\n\n \"Certainly. Look around you. All\n you see is holes. These beer bottles\n are just holes surrounded by glass.\n The doors and windows—they're\n holes in walls. The mine tunnels\n make a network of holes under the\n desert. Caves are holes, animals live\n in holes, our faces have holes,\n clothes have holes—millions and\n millions of holes!\"\n\n\n I winced and thought, humor\n him because you gotta eat, you\n gotta eat.\n\n\n His voice trembled with emotion.\n \"Why, they're everywhere. They're\n in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket\n jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes\n and well holes, and shoelace\n holes. There are doughnut\n holes and stocking holes and woodpecker\n holes and cheese holes.\n Oceans lie in holes in the earth,\n and rivers and canals and valleys.\n The craters of the Moon are holes.\n Everything is—\"\n\n\n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a\n minute. Did you drop something,\n lose it in the hole—is that why you\n have to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\"\n he snapped, \"\njust\nmy own\n time dimension. And if I don't get\n back they will think I couldn't prove\n my theory, that I'm ashamed to\n come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n\n\n His chest sagged for an instant.\n Then he straightened. \"But there's\n still time for my plan to work out—with\n the relative difference taken\n into account. Only I get so tired\n just thinking about it.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I can see where thinking\n about it would tire any one.\"\n\n\n He nodded. \"But it can't be too\n far away.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\"\n I said. \"But if you're not going to\n play with us—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay—just\n as long as you want him.\"\n\n\n \"Den he sign contract, too. No\n beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\"\n I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry,\n Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n\n\n Just a few minutes later tragedy\n struck.\n\n\n A reporter from the\nMarsport\n Times\nambled into interview the\n Man of The Hour. The interview,\n unfortunately, was conducted over\n the bar and accompanied by a generous\n guzzling of beer. Fat Boy,\n Hammer-Head and I watched\n from a table. Knowing John as we\n did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n\n\n \"This is the first time he's talked\n to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n \"I—I'm scared.\n\n\n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"\n\n\n We were too late. The reporter\n had already slapped on his hat and\n was striding to the exit. John turned\n to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing\n like air from a punctured balloon.\n\n\n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said,\n weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he\n said he'd come back when I'm\n sober. I'm sober now. So I quit.\n I've got to find my hole.\"\n\n\n I patted him on the back. \"No,\n John, we'll help you. Don't quit.\n We'll—well, we'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We're working on a plan, too,\"\n said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n \"We're going to make a more\n scientific approach.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" John asked.\n\n\n Fat Boy gulped.\n\n\n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n \"We'll have it worked out. Just be\n patient another day. You can't\n leave now, not after all your work.\"\n\n\n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll\n stay—until tomorrow.\"\nAll night the thought crept\n through my brain like a teasing\n spider:\nWhat can we do to make\n him stay? What can we tell him?\n What, what, what?\nUnable to sleep the next morning,\n I left John to his snoring and\n went for an aspirin and black coffee.\n All the possible schemes were\n drumming through my mind: finding\n an Earth blonde to capture\n John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized,\n breaking his leg, forging\n a letter from this mythical university\n telling him his theory was\n proved valid and for him to take\n a nice long vacation now. He was\n a screwball about holes and force\n fields and dimensional worlds but\n for that music of his I'd baby him\n the rest of his life.\n\n\n It was early afternoon when I\n trudged back to my apartment.\n\n\n John was squatting on the living\n room floor, surrounded by a forest\n of empty beer bottles. His eyes were\n bulging, his hair was even wilder\n than usual, and he was swaying.\n\n\n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n\n\n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n \"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm\n awful scared!\"\n\n\n \"But you mustn't be scared. That\n reporter was just stupid. We'll help\n you with your theory.\"\n\n\n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't\n that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n\n\n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n\n\n \"It's my body. It's—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, what about your body?\n Are you sick?\"\n\n\n His face was white with terror.\n \"No, my—\nmy body's full of holes\n.\n Suppose it's one of those holes!\n How will I get back if it is?\"\n\n\n He rose and staggered to his\nZloomph\n, clutching it as though it\n were somehow a source of strength\n and consolation.\n\n\n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n \"Now John. You've just had too\n much beer, that's all. Let's go out\n and get some air and some strong\n black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n\n\n We staggered out into the morning\n darkness, the three of us. John,\n the\nZloomph\n, and I.\n\n\n I was hanging on to him trying\n to see around and over and even\n under the\nZloomph\n—steering by a\n sort of radar-like sixth sense. The\n street lights on Marsport are pretty\n dim compared to Earthside. I\n didn't see the open manhole that\n the workmen had figured would be\n all right at that time of night. It\n gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M.\n of a Martian morning, and I\n guess the men were warming up\n with a little nip at the bar across\n the street.\n\n\n Then—he was gone.\n\n\n John just slipped out of my grasp—\nZloomph\nand all—and was gone—completely\n and irrevocably gone.\n I even risked a broken neck and\n jumped in the manhole after him.\n Nothing—nothing but the smell of\n ozone and an echo bouncing crazily\n off the walls of the conduit.\n\n\n \"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.\n\n\n Ziggy, whose two fingers have\n healed, has already bowed to what\n seems inevitable. He's signed up for\n that trip to Neptune's uranium\n pits. There's plenty of room for\n more volunteers, he tells us. But I\n spend my time cussing the guy who\n forgot to set the force field at the\n other end of the hole and let John\n and his\nZloomph\nback into his own\n time dimension. I cuss harder when\n I think how we were robbed of the\n best bass player in the galaxy.\n\n\n And without a corpus delecti we\n can't even sue the city.\n... THE END\n", "questions": [{"question": "Around what year does the story take place?", "question_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP_1", "options": ["2021", "2070", "1990", "2040"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why might Stanley's four-piece combo go to Neptune?", "question_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP_2", "options": ["The uranium pits there make a good home for five years.", "It's where musicians past their prime go.", "It is home to Lunar City.", "Fat Boy suggested it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the reporter leave the bar swiftly after talking to John?", "question_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP_3", "options": ["He had enough information for his story.", "John had told him about the holes.", "He was overwhelmed by the beauty of the sounds produced by the Zloomph.", "He had finished his beer."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Jimmie want John to stay with the band so badly?", "question_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP_4", "options": ["Mr. Ke-teeli liked John, and that made Jimmie believe his job was safe.", "His music was bringing customers to the bar and therefore provided job security.", "He was fascinated by the potential of the holes to travel to other dimensions.", "He was interested in learning how to play the Zoomph."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was John's profession?", "question_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP_5", "options": ["He dug holes for a living.", "He researched ancient history at a university.", "He studied force fields and time-dimension holes at a university.", "He was a musician from another dimension."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does John return to his previous dimension?", "question_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP_6", "options": ["He falls into a manhole left open because of the early-morning hour and cold weather.", "The beautiful melodies of the Zloomph re-open the portal.", "He figures out a way to use the Zloomph to access the dimension.", "He discovers his body is full of holes and manages to crawl into one."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the band replace John?", "question_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP_7", "options": ["Jimmie found the guy who forgot to set the force field and had him re-open the portal.", "Ziggy's could use his fingers again.", "They scoured the uranium pits on Neptune.", "They searched hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, and hotels for a replacement. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Ziggy volunteer for the trip to Neptune?", "question_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP_8", "options": ["His finger healed, so he was now able to make the trip.", "He agreed with Fat Boy's suggestion and wanted to live among other musicians.", "Mr. Ka-teeli was not happy with the band's music and would not renew the contract.", "To help in the search for John Smith."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was the Zloomph so mesmerizing?", "question_unique_id": "32667_ZR38X9AP_9", "options": ["Its sheer size made it seem as if it was unaccompanied even when John carried it.", "The sounds it made were unparalleled and entrancing.", "Its deep, midnight-black color was hypnotic.", "The unusual hole in the front of it was captivating because of its mystery."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/2/6/6/32667//32667-h//32667-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "32744", "set_unique_id": "32744_TL12NQGY", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Valley", "year": 1958, "author": "Stockham, Richard", "topic": "Short stories; PS; Science fiction", "article": "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE VALLEY\nBy Richard Stockham\nIllustrated by Ed Emsh\nIf you can't find it countless millions of miles in space,\n come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side\n of the fence—where the grass is always greener.\nThe Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver\n fish.\n\n\n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of\n land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground\n cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and\n the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the\n city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a\n desert under a blazing sun.\n\n\n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made\n it!\"\n\n\n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President—Davis is—overwhelmed. He\n can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people—with our\n hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n\n\n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n\n\n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n\n\n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n\n\n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one\n grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a\n cinder.\"\n\n\n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right?\n Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n\n\n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They\n sent us out. They've waited so long—.\"\n\n\n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet\n they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n\n\n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right\n now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would\n be over.\"\n\n\n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n\n\n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm\n tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n\n\n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved\n you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please,\n Michael.\"\n\n\n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to\n Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\nThe great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after\n flood waters have drained away.\n\n\n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n\n\n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over\n them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials\n gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of\n white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned\n toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the\n cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had\n stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n\n\n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping\n throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for\n an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n\n\n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to\n them in voices of reverence.\n\n\n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered\n admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them,\n open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n\n\n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing\n like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing,\n sucking the water from the seas.\n\n\n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For\n some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were\n uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other.\n And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place\n else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to\n others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make\n the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here\n to stay—and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n\n\n The silence did not change.\n\n\n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n\n\n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened\n bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The\n din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a\n fluttering beneath it.\n\n\n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale,\n hovering faces of the officials.\n\n\n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said\n isn't true!\"\n\n\n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n \"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way\n it's got to be.\"\n\n\n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n\n\n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the\n distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the\n flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you.\n Everything's going to be\nall right\n!\"\n\n\n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun\n away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like\n pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white\n ship.\nThey ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council\n chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood\n desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And\n on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet\n square.\n\n\n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you\n heard, they report—complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now,\n the proof.\"\n\n\n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair.\n The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in\n the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around.\n Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled\n with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the\n watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an\n ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n\n\n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of\n lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling,\n like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts\n flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time\n passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they\n themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward\n blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n\n\n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved\n forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many\n mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming\n to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a\n razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson.\n Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A\n roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear\n flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they\n gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere\n of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n\n\n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and\n the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks\n of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n\n\n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and\n died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the\n death of a ship.\n\n\n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they\n saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw\n creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and\n blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking\n about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They\n saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at\n incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs\n and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but\n invisible.\n\n\n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a\n compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and\n thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks\n and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were\n aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some\n that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into\n flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid.\n They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of\n blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must\n ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck\n that was Earth.\n\n\n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts,\n showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the\n man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the\n woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where\n solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was\n held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon\n them from many pencil like tubes.\n\n\n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into\n human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and\n extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and\n cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the\n ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their\n bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them\n in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into\n space—all this through millions of miles and a hundred years,\n compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of\n space.\n\n\n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers\n of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n\n\n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a\n blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker;\n saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past\n the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark\n nothingness.\n\n\n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them\n into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another\n ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great,\n yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it.\n Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the\n darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies\n drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n\n\n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of\n horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a\n moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval\n grew in volume.\n\n\n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and\n the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the\n contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams\n and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n\n\n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\nMichael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the\n agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in\n clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa.\n There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing\n of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to\n quiet his trembling.\n\n\n \"There—there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in\n space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for\n hundreds of years.\"\n\n\n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time,\n the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man\n was struck by one of the ground cars and\neveryone\nwho saw it went\n insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no\n one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for\n so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n\n\n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had\n been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people\n there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n\n\n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would\n involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people\n who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in\n space.\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President\n gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n\n\n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the\n council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing\n out; the terror in them was fading away.\n\n\n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you\n can't bring it back to life.\"\n\n\n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic\n wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long\n time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now\n you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around,\n slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n\n\n \"None.\"\n\n\n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr.\n President.\"\n\n\n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered\n consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n\n\n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to\n go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement\n wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people\n simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to\n keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for\n the good of the people.\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary were silent.\n\n\n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n \"until we have reached our decision.\"\n\n\n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness,\n and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being\n pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of\n artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the\n shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind\n the gardens were growing into mountains.\nIn their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and\n waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and\n translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun\n when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n\n\n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far\n below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the\n shoreline of the sea.\n\n\n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone\n back into space.\"\n\n\n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n\n\n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or\n anywhere, without you.\"\n\n\n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael,\n outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n\n\n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n\n\n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to\n it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and\n the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n\n\n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and\n looked away from her. \"We're crazy—talking as though we had a\n choice.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll have to\ngive\nus a choice.\"\n\n\n \"What're you talking about?\"\n\n\n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture.\n Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n\n\n He waited.\n\n\n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n\n\n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n\n\n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between\n suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n\n\n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long\n moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What\n would it do to them?\"\n\n\n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know\n you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started.\n Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I—I don't know how to say this.\"\n\n\n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n\n\n \"I'm—going to have a child.\"\n\n\n His face went blank.\n\n\n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the\n softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were\n shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been\n running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n\n\n \"It's true.\"\n\n\n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n\n\n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"I don't know—what to—to say. It's so\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe—I got so—tired—just seeing the two of us over and over again\n and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that\n was it. It was just—something I felt I\nhad\nto do. Some—\nreal\nlife\n again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of\n myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close\n to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the\n ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night\n or morning like we'd seen on Earth—so—so long ago. And then I\nhad\nto let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was\n something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed\n to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She\n paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think—it would be like this.\"\n\n\n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for\n three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history\n books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water\n had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth\n and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies\n born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give,\n for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the\n culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they\n were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was\n stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think\n the council could endure what you've done.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n\n\n \"And so this will be just for\nus\n.\" He took her in his arms. \"If I\n remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go\n with you out onto the Earth—if we can swing it. When we get outside\n the city, or if we do—Well, we'll see.\"\n\n\n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the\n window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside\n him.\nThey both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking,\n both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the\n giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush\n planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing\n among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently\n like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the\n thoughts projected from the screen:\n\n\n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another\n expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope.\n Everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand\n years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it\n becomes a lie.\"\n\n\n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The\n neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting\n their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller\n rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they\n can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n\n\n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these\n people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the\n open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I\n die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I\n want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n\n\n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n\n\n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n\n\n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council\n chambers.\nAgain they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the\n faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n\n\n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n\n\n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to\n set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n\n\n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n \"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you\n and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took\n another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've\n changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be\n protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did\n at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be\n isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you\nare\nheroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has\n been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the\n time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that\n hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent\n out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to\n take your place in our society.\"\n\n\n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is.\"\n\n\n \"Proceed.\"\n\n\n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he\n raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of\n the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised\n it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly\n and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't\n endure.\"\n\n\n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of\n desks.\n\n\n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways\n of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n\n\n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a\n shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n\n\n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were\nborn\nand haven't\n died—yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your\n eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be\n horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and\n torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened\n a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the\n sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n\n\n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring\n and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in\n anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and\n unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing\n around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other\n by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became\n very still.\n\n\n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the\n President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering\n around them in a wide half circle.\n\n\n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The\n half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving\n closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white\n ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n\n\n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her\n body and the waiting for death.\n\n\n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n\n\n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n\n\n \"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember\n what'll happen to you.\"\n\n\n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of\n muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to\n do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're\n mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white\n ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who\n was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a\n mirror.\n\n\n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to—to give me\n those—lockets! It's your—duty!\"\n\n\n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To\n ourselves.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n\n\n The President's body sagged. \"What—what is it you want?\"\n\n\n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city.\n To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to\n die a natural death.\"\n\n\n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and\n whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate\n us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here....\nLet\nthem be\n finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n\n\n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him\n forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing\n there close together, as though attached.\n\n\n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth—to die. You\nwill\ndie. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or\n your people again.\"\n\n\n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n\n\n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And—supplies.... Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range\n of mountains.\"\n\n\n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been\n allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds\n of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the\n sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you\n any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the\n half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that\n should sink to the floor.\nIt was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth\n that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The\n ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n\n\n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk\n into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way\n along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically\n for the place of salvation.\n\n\n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you\n think they'd be with us?\"\n\n\n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space\n again—or in prison.\"\n\n\n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the\n night over the decaying road.\n\n\n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill\n myself.\"\n\n\n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward\n the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the\n land?\"\n\n\n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward,\n watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n\n\n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across\n the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the\n desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat\n for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and\n inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great\n pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless\n waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of\n dust.\n\n\n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n\n\n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said\n Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains\n and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in\n space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough\n concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why?\n When?\"\n\n\n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and\n strolled toward the top of the hill.\n\n\n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n\n\n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n \"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n\n\n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me\n back.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n\n\n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road\n somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n\n\n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n\n\n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n\n\n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been\n the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n\n\n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the\n dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n\n\n \"Mary!\"\n\n\n She stopped, whirling around.\n\n\n He was staring down at her feet.\n\n\n She followed his gaze.\n\n\n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n\n\n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n\n\n \"They're new,\" he said.\n\n\n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred\n object.\n\n\n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill\n and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny\n patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a\n pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley\n and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n\n\n \"Oh!\"\n\n\n Her hand found his.\n\n\n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch\n their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the\n little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that\n trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They\n saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird\n and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a\n bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the\n sweetness inside.\n\n\n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n\n\n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n\n\n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in\n his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n\n\n \"We can\nlive\nhere, Michael!\"\n\n\n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a\n hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and\n plant and you'll have the child.\"\n\n\n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n\n\n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime\n we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He\n paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a\n way to save them.\"\n\n\n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time.\n They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of\n the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and\n of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the\n life that was their own.\n\n\n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood\n and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he\n had decided to build the house.\n... THE END\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did Michael feel dejected upon first returning to Earth?", "question_unique_id": "32744_TL12NQGY_1", "options": ["He understood that humans would only destroy the planets they had found.", "He was devastated to see the Earth's state of decay.", "He realized Mary wanted to stay on Earth.", "Their mission to discover other inhabitable planets had failed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the function of the golden lockets around Michael's and Mary's necks?", "question_unique_id": "32744_TL12NQGY_2", "options": ["It reminded them of their love for one another.", "It could kill them with a mere touch.", "It triggered the cloning process that would keep them alive to complete their mission.", "It expedited space travel so that more could be discovered in two thousand years."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the movie the council watched upon Michael and Mary's return?", "question_unique_id": "32744_TL12NQGY_3", "options": ["A compressed video diary of their failed mission.", "A detailed record of the reincarnation process.", "An account of the diversified plant and animal life discovered on other planets.", "A catalog of their vast and varied discoveries made during the course of their journey."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Mary allow herself to become pregnant?", "question_unique_id": "32744_TL12NQGY_4", "options": ["She wanted to feel real humanity again.", "So that she wouldn't be alone if Michael decided to go back to space.", "She was tired of reincarnating and wanted to usher in a new generation.", "She wanted to defy the laws passed by the council."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the council choose to alter the images captured by Michael and Mary?", "question_unique_id": "32744_TL12NQGY_5", "options": ["They wanted to maintain their way of life on Earth.", "They wanted to preserve false hope among the population and keep them calm.", "They could not bear to watch the violence depicted in them.", "They wanted to lie to the people so they would keep working the water pumps for them."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Michael and Mary convince the council to let them die in the desert?", "question_unique_id": "32744_TL12NQGY_6", "options": ["They threatened to play the real tape to the people of Earth.", "They showed them the account of their two-thousand-year journey.", "They leveraged the council's fear of witnessing violence by threatening to kill themselves.", "They told them about Mary's pregnancy."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Earth become so dried-up and largely devoid of life?", "question_unique_id": "32744_TL12NQGY_7", "options": ["The council selfishly used the majority of its resources.", "An atomic bomb destroyed everything.", "Because of the detrimental effects of climate change.", "Through years of war and the hoarding of resources."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/2/7/4/32744//32744-h//32744-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63062", "set_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Terror Out of Space", "year": 1952, "author": "Brackett, Leigh", "topic": "Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Venus (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Adventure stories; PS", "article": "TERROR OUT OF SPACE\nby LEIGH BRACKETT\nAn eerie story of a silver land beneath the black\n\n Venusian seas. A grim tale of brooding terror whirling out of space to\n\n drive men mad, of a menace without name or form, and of the man, Lundy,\n\n who fought the horror, his eyes blinded by his will. For to see the\n\n terror was to become its slave—a mindless automaton whose only wish\n\n was to see behind the shadowed mysterious eyelids of \"\nIT\n\".\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLundy was flying the aero-space convertible by himself. He'd been doing\n it for a long time. So long that the bottom half of him was dead to the\n toes and the top half even deader, except for two separate aches like\n ulcerated teeth; one in his back, one in his head.\n\n\n Thick pearly-grey Venusian sky went past the speeding flier in\n streamers of torn cloud. The rockets throbbed and pounded. Instruments\n jerked erratically under the swirl of magnetic currents that makes the\n Venusian atmosphere such a swell place for pilots to go nuts in.\n\n\n Jackie Smith was still out cold in the co-pilot's seat. From in back,\n beyond the closed door to the tiny inner cabin, Lundy could hear\n Farrell screaming and fighting.\n\n\n He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.\n\n\n Lundy didn't like that cold tight knot in his belly. It meant he was\n afraid. He'd been afraid before, plenty of times, and he wasn't ashamed\n of it. But right now he needed all the brains and guts he had to get\nIt\nback to Special headquarters at Vhia, and he didn't want to have\n to fight himself, too.\n\n\n Fear can screw things for you. It can make you weak when you need to be\n strong, if you're going to go on living. You, and the two other guys\n depending on you.\n\n\n Lundy hoped he could keep from getting too much afraid, and too\n tired—because\nIt\nwas sitting back there in its little strongbox in\n the safe, waiting for somebody to crack.\n\n\n Farrell was cracked wide open, of course, but he was tied down. Jackie\n Smith had begun to show signs before he passed out, so that Lundy had\n kept one hand over the anaesthetic needle gun holstered on the side of\n his chair. And Lundy thought,\nThe hell of it is, you don't know when\nIt\nstarts to work on you.\n There's no set pattern, or if there is we don't know it. Maybe right\n now the readings I see on those dials aren't there at all....\nDown below the torn grey clouds he could see occasional small patches\n of ocean. The black, still, tideless water of Venus, that covers so\n many secrets of the planet's past.\n\n\n It didn't help Lundy any. It could be right or wrong, depending on\n what part of the ocean it was—and there was no way to tell. He hoped\n nothing would happen to the motors. A guy could get awfully wet, out in\n the middle of that still black water.\n\n\n Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with\n impervium. Screaming and fighting the straps, because\nIt\nwas locked\n up and calling for help.\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, and opened his pale green eyes.\n\n\n \"I'm cold,\" he said. \"Hi, Midget.\"\n\n\n Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with\n bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like\n something the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on\n New Year's Day.\n\n\n \"You're cold,\" he said sourly. He licked sweat off his lips. \"Oh, fine!\n That was all I needed.\"\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to joggle himself. His black\n tunic was open over his chest, showing the white strapping of bandages,\n and his left hand was thrust in over the locked top of the tunic's\n zipper. He was a big man, not any older than Lundy, with big, ugly,\n pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a skin like old\n leather.\n\n\n \"On Mercury, where I was born,\" he said, \"the climate is suitable for\n human beings. You Old-World pantywaists....\" He broke off, turned white\n under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, \"Oi! Farrell sure\n did a good job on me.\"\n\n\n \"You'll live,\" said Lundy. He tried not to think about how nearly both\n he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of a\n fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the\n Mountains of White Cloud.\nLundy still felt sick about that. The bull-meat, the hard boys, you\n didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't that kind. He was just a\n nice guy that got trapped by something too big for him.\n\n\n A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.\n\n\n But you couldn't help thinking, about\nIt\n. The Thing you had caught in\n a special net of tight-woven metal mesh, aiming at something Farrell\n could see but you couldn't. The Thing you had forced into the glassite\n box and covered up with a black cloth, because you had been warned not\n to look at\nIt\n.\n\n\n Lundy's hands tingled and burned, not unpleasantly. He could still feel\n the small savage Thing fighting him, hidden in the net. It had felt\n vaguely cylindrical, and terribly alive.\n\n\n Life. Life from outer space, swept out of a cloud of cosmic dust by the\n gravitic pull of Venus. Since Venus had hit the cloud there had been a\n wave of strange madness on the planet. Madness like Farrell's, that had\n led to murder, and some things even worse.\n\n\n Scientists had some ideas about that life from Out There. They'd had\n a lucky break and found one of The Things, dead, and there were vague\n stories going around of a crystalline-appearing substance that wasn't\n really crystal, about three inches long and magnificently etched and\n fluted, and supplied with some odd little gadgets nobody would venture\n an opinion about.\n\n\n But the Thing didn't do them much good, dead. They had to have one\n alive, if they were going to find out what made it tick and learn how\n to put a stop to what the telecommentators had chosen to call The\n Madness from Beyond, or The Vampire Lure.\n\n\n One thing about it everybody knew. The guys who suddenly went sluggy\n and charged off the rails all made it clear that they had met the\n ultimate Dream Woman of all women and all dreams. Nobody else could see\n her, but that didn't bother them any. They saw her, and she was—\nShe\n.\n And her eyes were always veiled.\n\n\n And\nShe\nwas a whiz at hypnosis and mind-control. That's why\nShe\n, or\nIt\n, hadn't been caught alive before. Not before Lundy and Smith, with\n every scientific aid Special could give them, had tracked down Farrell\n and managed to get the breaks.\n\n\n The breaks. Plain fool luck. Lundy moved his throbbing head stiffly on\n his aching neck, blinked sweat out of his bloodshot eyes, and wished to\n hell he was home in bed.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said suddenly, \"Midget, I'm cold. Get me a blanket.\"\n\n\n Lundy looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as\n though they saw anything. He was shivering.\n\n\n \"I can't leave the controls, Jackie.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. I've got one hand. I can hang onto this lousy tin fish that\n long.\"\nLundy scowled. He knew Smith wasn't kidding about the cold. The\n temperatures on Mercury made the first-generation colonists sensitive\n to anything below the range of an electric furnace. With the wound and\n all, Smith might, wind up with pneumonia if he wasn't covered.\n\n\n \"Okay.\" Lundy reached out and closed the switch marked A. \"But I'll let\n Mike do the flying. He can probably last five minutes before he blows\n his guts out.\"\n\n\n Iron Mike was just a pattycake when it came to Venusian atmosphere\n flying. The constant magnetic compensation heated the robot coils to\n the fusing point in practically no time at all.\n\n\n Lundy thought fleetingly that it was nice to know there were still a\n couple of things men could do better than machinery.\n\n\n He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for\n four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at\n him.\n\n\n \"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!\"\n\n\n Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat\n needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.\n\n\n Farrell had quit screaming.\n\n\n There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were\n outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had\n stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.\n\n\n It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.\n\n\n Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two\n kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not\n sane, nor even human.\n\n\n Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said quietly, \"Hold it, Midget. She doesn't like it there\n in the safe. She's cold, and she wants to come out.\"\nLundy looked over his shoulder. Smith was hunched around in his seat,\n holding the needle-gun from Lundy's holster on the pilot's chair. His\n pale green eyes had a distant, dreamy glow, but Lundy knew better than\n to trust it.\n\n\n He said, without inflection, \"You've seen her.\"\n\n\n \"No. No, but—I've heard her.\" Smith's heavy lips twitched and parted.\n The breath sucked through between them, hoarse and slow.\n\n\n Farrell went down on his knees beside the safe. He put his hands on its\n blank and gleaming face and turned to Lundy. He was crying.\n\n\n \"Open it. You've got to open it. She wants to come out. She's\n frightened.\"\n\n\n Jackie Smith raised the gun, a fraction of an inch. \"Open it, Midget,\"\n he whispered. \"She's cold in there.\"\n\n\n Lundy stood still. The sweat ran on him and he was colder than a frog's\n belly in the rain; and for no reason at all he said thickly,\n\n\n \"No. She's hot. She can't breathe in there. She's hot.\"\n\n\n Then he jerked his head up and yelled. He came around to face Smith,\n unsteady but fast, and started for him.\n\n\n Smith's ugly face twisted as though he might be going to cry. \"Midget!\n I don't want to shoot you. Open the safe!\"\n\n\n Lundy said, \"You damned fool,\" with no voice at all, and went on.\n\n\n Smith hit the firing stud.\n\n\n The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall.\n\n\n Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.\n\n\n The ship hit the water with a terrific smack. Spray geysered up, dead\n white against the black sea, fell back, and closed in. Presently even\n the ripples went away.\n\n\n Dark green weed-islands twined sinuously upon themselves, a flock of\n small sea-dragons flapped their jeweled wings down and began to fish,\n and none of them cared at all about the ship sinking away under them.\n\n\n Not even Lundy cared, out cold in the space-tight cabin, with his body\n wedged up against the safe and tears drying with the sweat on his\n stubbled cheeks.\nII\n\n\n The first thing Lundy knew about was the stillness. A dead feeling, as\n though everything in creation had stopped breathing.\n\n\n The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"\n\n\n Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his\n stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.\n Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.\n\n\n It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker\n had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the\n airlock panel.\n\n\n Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips\n drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.\n\n\n The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could\n afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he\n could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.\n\n\n Lundy looked all around the cabin. He didn't speak. He looked sideways\n out of the port. There was water out there. The black sea-water of\n Venus; clear and black, like deep night.\n\n\n There was level sand spreading away from the ship. The silver light\n came up out of it. Some kind of phosphorescence, as bright as moonlight\n and faintly tinged with green.\n\n\n Black sea-water. Silver sand. The guy kept on knocking at the door.\n Slow and easy. Patient. One—two. One—two. Just off beat with Lundy's\n heart.\n\n\n Lundy went to the inner cabin, walking steadily. He looked around\n carefully and then went back. He stopped by the lock panel.\n\n\n \"Okay, Jackie,\" he said. \"In a minute. In a minute, boy.\"\n\n\n Then he turned and went very fast to the port locker and got a quart\n bottle out of its shock cradle, and raised it. It took both hands.\n\n\n After a while he dropped the bottle and stood still, not looking at\n anything, until he stopped shaking. Then he pulled his vac-suit down\n off its hook and climbed into it. His face was grey and quite blank.\n\n\n He took all the oxygen cylinders he could carry, emergency rations,\n and all the benzedrine in the medicine kit. He put the limit dose\n of the stimulant down on top of the brandy before he locked his\n helmet. He didn't bother with the needle gun. He took the two Service\n blasters—his own, and Smith's. The gentle knocking didn't stop.\n\n\n He stood for a moment looking at the open safe and the black cloth\n dropped beside it. Something cruel came into his face. A tightness, a\n twitching and setting of the muscles, and a terrible look of patience.\n\n\n Being under water wouldn't bother a Thing from outer space. He reached\n up and lifted the net of tight-woven metal-mesh down off its hook and\n fastened it on his belt. Then he walked over and opened the airlock\n door.\n\n\n Black water swirled in around his weighted boots, and then the door\n opened wide and Jackie Smith came in.\n\n\n He'd been waiting in the flooded lock chamber. Kicking his boots\n against the inner door, easy, with the slow breathing of the sea. Now\n the water pushed his feet down and held him upright from behind, so he\n could walk in and stand looking at Lundy. A big blond man with green\n eyes, and white bandages strapped under his open black tunic, looking\n at Lundy. Not long. Only for a second. But long enough.\n\n\n Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically.\n\n\n He walked out across the firm green-silver sand, swallowing the blood\n that ran in his mouth and choked him.\nHe didn't hurry. He was going to be walking for a long, long time. From\n the position of the ship when it fell he ought to be able to make it to\n the coast—unless\nIt\nhad been working on him so the figures on the\n dials hadn't been there at all.\n\n\n He checked his direction, adjusted the pressure-control in his\n vac-suit, and plodded on in the eerie undersea moonlight. It wasn't\n hard going. If he didn't hit a deep somewhere, or meet something too\n big to handle, or furnish a meal for some species of hungry Venus-weed,\n he ought to live to face up to the Old Man at H.Q. and tell him two men\n were dead, the ship lost, and the job messed to hell and gone.\n\n\n It was beautiful down there. Like the dream-worlds you see when you're\n doped or delirious. The phosphorescence rose up into the black water\n and danced there in wavering whorls of cold fire. Fish, queer gaudy\n little things with jewelled eyes, flicked past Lundy in darts of\n sudden color, and there were great stands of weed like young forests,\n spangling the dark water and the phosphorescent glow with huge burning\n spots of blue and purple and green and silver.\n\n\n Flowers. Lundy got too close to some of them once. They reached out and\n opened round mouths full of spines and sucked at him hungrily. The\n fish gave them a wide berth. After that, so did Lundy.\n\n\n He hadn't been walking more than half an hour when he hit the road.\n\n\n It was a perfectly good road, running straight across the sand. Here\n and there it was cracked, with some of the huge square blocks pushed up\n or tipped aside, but it was still a good road, going somewhere.\n\n\n Lundy stood looking at it with cold prickles running up and down his\n spine. He'd heard about things like this. Nobody knew an awful lot\n about Venus yet. It was a young, tough, be-damned-to-you planet, and it\n was apt to give the snoopy scientific guys a good swift boot in their\n store teeth.\n\n\n But even a young planet has a long past, and stories get around.\n Legends, songs, folk tales. It was pretty well accepted that a lot of\n Venus that was under water now hadn't been once, and vice versa. The\n old girl had her little whimsies while doing the preliminary mock-up of\n her permanent face.\n\n\n So once upon a time this road had crossed a plain under a hot\n pearl-grey sky, going somewhere. Taking caravans from the seacoast,\n probably. Bales of spices and spider-silk and casks of\nvakhi\nfrom the\n Nahali canebrakes, and silver-haired slave-girls from the high lands\n of the Cloud People, going along under sultry green\nliha\n-trees to be\n sold.\n\n\n Now it crossed a plain of glowing sand under still black water. The\n only trees that shadowed it were tall weeds with brilliant, hungry\n flowers, and the only creatures that followed it were little fish\n with jewelled eyes. But it was still there, still ready, still going\n somewhere.\n\n\n It was headed the same way Lundy was. It must have made a bend\n somewhere and turned to meet him. Lundy licked cold sweat off his lips\n and stepped out on it.\n\n\n He stepped slow and careful, like a man coming alone down the aisle of\n an empty church.\n\n\n He walked on the road for a long time. The weeds crowded in thicker\n along its edges. It seemed to run right through a dense forest of them\n that spread away as far as Lundy could see on either side. He was glad\n of the road. It was wide, and if he stayed in the middle of it the\n flowers couldn't reach him.\nIt got darker, because of the weeds covering the sand. Whatever made\n the phosphorescence didn't like being crowded that way, and pretty soon\n it was so dark that Lundy had to switch on the light in the top of his\n helmet. In the edges of the beam he could see the weed fronds moving\n lazily with the slow breathing of the sea.\n\n\n The flowers were brighter here. They hung like lamps in the black\n water, burning with a light that seemed to come out of themselves.\n Sullen reds and angry yellows, and coldly vicious blues.\n\n\n Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.\n\n\n He sat down and rested a while, turning off his light to save the\n battery. The flowers watched him, glowing in the dark. He closed his\n eyes, but he could still feel them, watching and waiting.\n\n\n After a minute or two he got up and went on.\n\n\n The weeds grew thicker, and taller, and heavier with flowers.\n\n\n More benzedrine, and damn the heart. The helmet light cut a cold white\n tunnel through the blackness. He followed it, walking faster. Weed\n fronds met and interlaced high above him, closing him in. Flowers bent\n inward, downward. Their petals almost brushed him. Fleshy petals,\n hungry and alive.\n\n\n He started to run, over the wheel-ruts and the worn hollows of the road\n that still went somewhere, under the black sea.\n\n\n Lundy ran clumsily for a long time between the dark and pressing walls.\n The flowers got closer. They got close enough to catch his vac-suit,\n like hands grasping and slipping and grasping again. He began using the\n blaster.\n\n\n He burned off a lot of them that way. They didn't like it. They began\n swaying in from their roots and down from the laced ceiling over his\n head. They hurt. They were angry. Lundy ran, sobbing without tears.\n\n\n The road did him in. It crossed him up, suddenly, without warning. It\n ran along smoothly under the tunnel of weeds, and then it was a broken,\n jumbled mass of huge stone blocks, tipped up and thrown around like\n something a giant's kid got tired of playing with.\n\n\n And the weeds had found places to stand in between them.\n\n\n Lundy tripped and fell, cracking his head against the back of his\n helmet. For a moment all he could see was bright light flashing. Then\n that stopped, and he realized he must have jarred a connection loose\n somewhere because his own light was out.\n\n\n He began to crawl over a great tilted block. The flowers burned bright\n in the darkness. Bright and close. Very close. Lundy opened his mouth.\n Nothing came out but a hoarse animal whimper. He was still holding the\n blaster. He fired it off a couple of times, and then he was on top of\n the block, lying flat on his belly.\n\n\n He knew it was the end of the line, because he couldn't move any more.\n\n\n The bright flowers came down through the dark. Lundy lay watching them.\n His face was quite blank. His dark eyes held a stubborn hatred, but\n nothing else.\n\n\n He watched the flowers fasten on his vac-suit and start working. Then,\n from up ahead, through the dark close tunnel of the weeds, he saw the\n light.\n\n\n It flared out suddenly, like lightning. A sheet of hot, bright gold\n cracking out like a whipped banner, lighting the end of the road.\n\n\n Lighting the city, and the little procession coming out of it.\n\n\n Lundy didn't believe any of it. He was half dead already, with his\n mind floating free of his body and beginning to be wrapped up in dark\n clouds. He watched what he saw incuriously.\n\n\n The golden light died down, and then flared out twice more,\n rhythmically. The road ran smooth again beyond the end of the tunnel,\n straight across a narrow plain. Beyond that, the city rose.\n\n\n Lundy couldn't see much of it, because of the weeds. But it seemed to\n be a big city. There was a wall around it, of green marble veined with\n dusky rose, the edges worn round by centuries of water. There were\n broad gates of pure untarnished gold, standing open on golden pintles.\n Beyond them was a vast square paved in cloud-grey quartz, and the\n buildings rose around it like the castles Lundy remembered from Earth\n and his childhood, when there were clouds of a certain kind at sunset.\n\n\n That's what the whole place looked like, under the flaring golden\n light. Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset. Remote, dreaming in beauty, with\n the black water drawn across it like a veil—something never destroyed\n because it never existed.\n\n\n The creatures who came from between the golden gates and down the road\n were like tiny wisps of those clouds, torn free by some cold wandering\n breeze and driven away from the light.\n\n\n They came drifting toward Lundy. They didn't seem to be moving fast,\n but they must have been because quite suddenly they were among the\n weeds. There were a lot of them; maybe forty or fifty. They seemed to\n be between three and four feet tall, and they were all the same sad,\n blue-grey, twilight color.\n\n\n Lundy couldn't see what they were. They were vaguely man-shaped, and\n vaguely finny, and something that was more than vaguely something else,\n only he couldn't place it.\n\n\n He was suddenly beyond caring. The dull black curtain around his mind\n got a hole in it, and fear came shrieking through it. He could feel the\n working and pulling of his vac-suit where the flowers were chewing on\n it as though it were his own skin.\n\n\n He could feel sweat running cold on his body. In a minute that would be\n sea water running, and then....\n\n\n Lundy began to fight. His lips peeled back off his teeth, but he didn't\n make any noise except his heavy breathing. He fought the flowers,\n partly with the blaster, partly with brute strength. No science, no\n thought. Just the last blind struggle of an animal that didn't want to\n die.\n\n\n The flowers held him. They smothered him, crushed him down, wrapped him\n in lovely burning petals of destruction. He seared a lot of them, but\n there were always more. Lundy didn't fight long.\n\n\n He lay on his back, his knees drawn up a little toward a rigid, knotted\n belly, blind with sweat, his heart kicking him like a logger's boot.\n Cold, tense—waiting.\n\n\n And then the flowers went away.\n\n\n They didn't want to. They let go reluctantly, drawing back and snarling\n like cats robbed of a fat mouse, making small hungry feints at him. But\n they went.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Who was Iron Mike?", "question_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2_1", "options": ["A figment of Lundy's hallucinations.", "An officer with the Tri-World Police.", "Lundy's co-pilot.", "An aero-space convertible."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the knocking sound Lundy heard after crash-landing?", "question_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2_2", "options": ["Jackie Smith knocking on the chamber door for help.", "Jackie Smith's corpse butting up against the chamber door.", "\"It\" trying to get into the room to kill Lundy.", "Farrell trying to get into the room where Lundy was."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why had it been so long since Lundy had slept?", "question_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2_3", "options": ["He had been searching for Farrell and \"It\" for quite some time.", "He knew if he slept, he might die.", "He couldn't sleep with the flowers along the road watching him all night.", "He had been walking on the weed-choked road for hours."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Lundy unsure he knew exactly where he was?", "question_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2_4", "options": ["The navigational equipment on the ship was damaged in the crash-landing. ", "He kept fading in and out of consciousness.", "He was unfamiliar with Venusian terrain.", "\"It\" might have already been playing with his mind."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the flowers most likely let go of Lundy?", "question_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2_5", "options": ["The arrival of the cloud-like creatures fended them off. ", "They could sense the fear inside of him.", "They were afraid of the dull black curtain surrounding Lundy's mind.", "He had injured them with his blaster."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Farrell stop screaming?", "question_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2_6", "options": ["The Dream Woman came to him and told him to no longer be afraid.", "He escaped from his restraints and came to free \"It.\"", "He had died.", "He was no longer beholden to \"It.\""], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did \"It\" originally arrive on Venus?", "question_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2_7", "options": ["\"It\" crash-landed in a spaceship.", "\"It\" was pulled out of its space-dust home by the force of the planet's gravity.", "\"It\" was taken there as a prisoner by the Tri-World Police.", "Farrell chased it there."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How was Jackie Smith injured?", "question_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2_8", "options": ["The climate on Venus was too cold for his Mercurian acclimatization. ", "\"It\" attacked him.", "He was hurt while attempting to wrangle Farrell.", "Lundy had to restrain him, and he injured himself trying to break free."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the cold knot that Lundy kept feeling inside of him?", "question_unique_id": "63062_7PL879G2_9", "options": ["A symptom of having sat flying the ship for so long.", "A physical reaction to the temperature inside the spaceship.", "Fear.", "\"It\" was beginning to take over his body and mind."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/0/6/63062//63062-h//63062-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61459", "set_unique_id": "61459_WR2RQQJJ", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Governor of Glave", "year": 1955, "author": "Laumer, Keith", "topic": "Diplomats -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction", "article": "THE GOVERNOR OF GLAVE\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nThe revolution was over and peace\n\n restored—naturally Retief expected the worst!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n Retief turned back the gold-encrusted scarlet cuff of the mess jacket\n of a First Secretary and Consul, gathered in the three eight-sided\n black dice, shook them by his right ear and sent them rattling across\n the floor to rebound from the bulk-head.\n\n\n \"Thirteen's the point,\" the Power Section Chief called. \"Ten he makes\n it!\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Mr. Retief,\" a strained voice called. Retief looked up. A tall\n thin youth in the black-trimmed gray of a Third Secretary flapped a\n sheet of paper from the edge of the circle surrounding the game. \"The\n Ambassador's compliments, sir, and will you join him and the staff in\n the conference room at once?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and dusted his knees. \"That's all for now, boys,\" he said.\n \"I'll take the rest of your money later.\" He followed the junior\n diplomat from the ward room, along the bare corridors of the crew\n level, past the glare panel reading NOTICE—FIRST CLASS ONLY BEYOND\n THIS POINT, through the chandeliered and draped ballroom and along a\n stretch of soundless carpet to a heavy door bearing a placard with the\n legend CONFERENCE IN SESSION.\n\n\n \"Ambassador Sternwheeler seemed quite upset, Mr. Retief,\" the messenger\n said.\n\n\n \"He usually is, Pete.\" Retief took a cigar from his breast pocket. \"Got\n a light?\"\n\n\n The Third Secretary produced a permatch. \"I don't know why you smoke\n those things instead of dope sticks, Mr. Retief,\" he said. \"The\n Ambassador hates the smell.\"\n\n\n Retief nodded. \"I only smoke this kind at conferences. It makes for\n shorter sessions.\" He stepped into the room. Ambassador Sternwheeler\n eyed him down the length of the conference table.\n\n\n \"Ah, Mr. Retief honors us with his presence. Do be seated, Retief.\" He\n fingered a yellow Departmental despatch. Retief took a chair, puffing\n out a dense cloud of smoke.\n\n\n \"As I have been explaining to the remainder of my staff for the past\n quarter-hour,\" Sternwheeler rumbled, \"I've been the recipient of\n important intelligence.\" He blinked at Retief expectantly. Retief\n raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" Sternwheeler went on, \"that there has been a change in\n regime on Glave. A week ago, the government which invited the dispatch\n of this mission—and to which we're accredited—was overthrown.\n The former ruling class has fled into exile. A popular workers' and\n peasants' junta has taken over.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Ambassador,\" Counsellor Magnan broke in, rising. \"I'd like to be\n the first—\" he glanced around the table—\"or one of the first, anyway,\n to welcome the new government of Glave into the family of planetary\n ruling bodies—\"\n\"Sit down, Magnan!\" Sternwheeler snapped. \"Of course the Corps always\n recognizes\nde facto\nsovereignty. The problem is merely one of\n acquainting ourselves with the policies of this new group—a sort of\n blue-collar coalition, it seems. In what position that leaves this\n Embassy I don't yet know.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose this means we'll spend the next month in a parking orbit,\"\n Counsellor Magnan sighed.\n\n\n \"Unfortunately,\" Sternwheeler went on, \"the entire affair has\n apparently been carried off without recourse to violence, leaving the\n Corps no excuse to move in—that is, it appears our assistance in\n restoring order will not be required.\"\n\n\n \"Glave was one of the old Contract Worlds,\" Retief said. \"What's become\n of the Planetary Manager General and the technical staff? And how do\n the peasants and workers plan to operate the atmospheric purification\n system, the Weather Control station, the tide regulation complexes?\"\n\n\n \"I'm more concerned at present with the status of the Mission! Will we\n be welcomed by these peasants or peppered with buckshot?\"\n\n\n \"You say that this is a popular junta, and that the former leaders have\n fled into exile,\" Retief said. \"May I ask the source?\"\n\n\n \"The despatch cites a 'reliable Glavian source'.\"\n\n\n \"That's officialese for something cribbed from a broadcast news\n tape. Presumably the Glavian news services are in the hands of the\n revolution. In that case—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, there is the possibility that the issue is yet in doubt.\n Of course we'll have to exercise caution in making our approach. It\n wouldn't do to make overtures to the wrong side.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I think we need have no fear on that score,\" the Chief of the\n Political Section spoke up. \"I know these entrenched cliques. Once\n challenged by an aroused populace, they scuttle for safety—with large\n balances safely tucked away in neutral banks.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go on record,\" Magnan piped, \"as registering my deep\n gratification at this fulfillment of popular aspirations—\"\n\n\n \"The most popular aspiration I know of is to live high off someone\n else's effort,\" Retief said. \"I don't know of anyone outside the Corps\n who's managed it.\"\n\"Gentlemen!\" Sternwheeler bellowed. \"I'm awaiting your constructive\n suggestions—not an exchange of political views. We'll arrive off\n Glave in less than six hours. I should like before that time to have\n developed some notion regarding to whom I shall expect to offer my\n credentials!\"\n\n\n There was a discreet tap at the door; it opened and the young Third\n Secretary poked his head in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Ambassador, I have a reply to your message—just received from\n Glave. It's signed by the Steward of the GFE, and I thought you'd want\n to see it at once....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course; let me have it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the GFE?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"It's the revolutionary group,\" the messenger said, passing the message\n over.\n\n\n \"GFE? GFE? What do the letters SIGNIFY?\"\n\n\n \"Glorious Fun Eternally,\" Retief suggested. \"Or possibly Goodies For\n Everybody.\"\n\n\n \"I believe that's 'Glavian Free Electorate',\" the Third Secretary said.\n\n\n Sternwheeler stared at the paper, lips pursed. His face grew pink. He\n slammed the paper on the table.\n\n\n \"Well, gentlemen! It appears our worst fears have been realized!\n This is nothing less than a warning! A threat! We're advised to\n divert course and bypass Glave entirely. It seems the GFE wants no\n interference from meddling foreign exploiters, as they put it!\"\n\n\n Magnan rose. \"If you'll excuse me Mr. Ambassador, I want to get off a\n message to Sector HQ to hold my old job for me—\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, you idiot!\" Sternwheeler roared. \"If you think I'm\n consenting to have my career blighted—my first Ambassadorial post\n whisked out from under me—the Corps made a fool of—\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to take a look at that message,\" Retief said. It was passed\n along to him. He read it.\n\n\n \"I don't believe this applies to us, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n\"What are you talking about? It's addressed to me by name!\"\n\n\n \"It merely states that 'meddling foreign exploiters' are unwelcome.\n Meddling foreigners we are, but we don't qualify as exploiters unless\n we show a profit—and this appears to be shaping up as a particularly\n profitless venture.\"\n\n\n \"What are you proposing, Mr. Retief?\"\n\n\n \"That we proceed to make planetfall as scheduled, greet our welcoming\n committee with wide diplomatic smiles, hint at largesse in the offing\n and settle down to observe the lie of the land.\"\n\n\n \"Just what I was about to suggest,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"That might be dangerous,\" Sternwheeler said.\n\n\n \"That's why I didn't suggest it,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"Still it's essential that we learn more of the situation than can be\n gleaned from official broadcasts,\" Sternwheeler mused. \"Now, while I\n can't justify risking the entire Mission, it might be advisable to\n dispatch a delegation to sound out the new regime.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to volunteer,\" Magnan said, rising.\n\n\n \"Of course, the delegates may be murdered—\"\n\n\n \"—but unfortunately, I'm under treatment at the moment.\" Magnan sat\n down.\n\n\n \"—which will place us in an excellent position, propaganda-wise.\n\n\n \"What a pity I can't go,\" the Military Attache said. \"But my place is\n with my troops.\"\n\n\n \"The only troops you've got are the Assistant Attache and your\n secretary,\" Magnan pointed out.\n\n\n \"Say, I'd like to be down there in the thick of things,\" the Political\n Officer said. He assumed a grave expression. \"But of course I'll be\n needed here, to interpret results.\"\n\n\n \"I appreciate your attitude, gentlemen,\" Sternwheeler said, studying\n the ceiling. \"But I'm afraid I must limit the privilege of volunteering\n for this hazardous duty to those officers of more robust physique,\n under forty years of age—\"\n\n\n \"Tsk. I'm forty-one,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"—and with a reputation for adaptability.\" His glance moved along the\n table.\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I run along now, Mr. Ambassador?\" Retief said. \"It's\n time for my insulin shot.\"\n\n\n Sternwheeler's mouth dropped open.\n\n\n \"Just kidding,\" Retief said. \"I'll go. But I have one request, Mr.\n Ambassador: no further communication with the ground until I give the\n all-clear.\"\nII\n\n\n Retief grounded the lighter, in-cycled the lock and stepped out. The\n hot yellow Glavian sun beat down on a broad expanse of concrete, an\n abandoned service cart and a row of tall ships casting black shadows\n toward the silent control tower. A wisp of smoke curled up from the\n shed area at the rim of the field. There was no other sign of life.\n\n\n Retief walked over to the cart, tossed his valise aboard, climbed\n into the driver's seat and headed for the operations building. Beyond\n the port, hills rose, white buildings gleaming against the deep green\n slopes. Near the ridge, a vehicle moved ant-like along a winding road,\n a dust trail rising behind it. Faintly a distant shot sounded.\n\n\n Papers littered the ground before the Operations Building. Retief\n pushed open the tall glass door, stood listening. Slanting sunlight\n reflected from a wide polished floor, at the far side of which\n illuminated lettering over empty counters read IMMIGRATION, HEALTH\n and CUSTOMS. He crossed to the desk, put the valise down, then leaned\n across the counter. A worried face under an oversized white cap looked\n up at him.\n\n\n \"You can come out now,\" Retief said. \"They've gone.\"\n\n\n The man rose, dusting himself off. He looked over Retief's shoulder.\n \"Who's gone?\"\n\n\n \"Whoever it was that scared you.\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean? I was looking for my pencil.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is.\" Retief plucked a worn stub from the pocket of the soiled\n shirt sagging under the weight of braided shoulderboards. \"You can sign\n me in as a Diplomatic Representative. A break for you—no formalities\n necessary. Where can I catch a cab for the city?\"\n\n\n The man eyed Retief's bag. \"What's in that?\"\n\n\n \"Personal belongings under duty-free entry.\"\n\n\n \"Guns?\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks, just a cab.\"\n\n\n \"You got no gun?\" The man raised his voice.\n\n\n \"That's right, fellows,\" Retief called out. \"No gun; no knife, not\n even a small fission bomb. Just a few pairs of socks and some reading\n matter.\"\n\n\n A brown-uniformed man ran from behind the Customs Counter, holding a\n long-barreled blast-rifle centered on the Corps insignia stitched to\n the pocket of Retief's powder-blue blazer.\n\n\n \"Don't try nothing,\" he said. \"You're under arrest.\"\n\n\n \"It can't be overtime parking. I've only been here five minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Hah!\" The gun-handler moved out from the counter, came up to Retief.\n \"Empty out your pockets!\" he barked. \"Hands overhead!\"\n\n\n \"I'm just a diplomat, not a contortionist,\" Retief said, not moving.\n \"Do you mind pointing that thing in some other direction?\"\n\n\n \"Looky here, Mister, I'll give the orders. We don't need anybody\n telling us how to run our business.\"\n\n\n \"I'm telling you to shift that blaster before I take it away from you\n and wrap it around your neck,\" Retief said conversationally. The cop\n stepped back uncertainly, lowering the gun.\n\n\n \"Jake! Horny! Pud! come on out!\"\n\n\n Three more brown uniforms emerged from concealment.\n\n\n \"Who are you fellows hiding from, the top sergeant?\" Retief glanced\n over the ill-fitting uniforms, the unshaved faces, the scuffed boots.\n \"Tell you what. When he shows up, I'll engage him in conversation. You\n beat it back to the barracks and grab a quick bath—\"\n\n\n \"That's enough smart talk.\" The biggest of the three newcomers moved\n up to Retief. \"You stuck your nose in at the wrong time. We just had a\n change of management around here.\"\n\n\n \"I heard about it,\" Retief said. \"Who do I complain to?\"\n\n\n \"Complain? What about?\"\n\n\n \"The port's a mess,\" Retief barked. \"Nobody on duty to receive official\n visitors! No passenger service facilities! Why, do you know I had to\n carry my own bag—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right, that's outside my department. You better see the\n boss.\"\n\n\n \"The boss? I thought you got rid of the bosses.\"\n\n\n \"We did, but now we got new ones.\"\n\n\n \"They any better than the old ones?\"\n\n\n \"This guy asks too many questions,\" the man with the gun said. \"Let's\n let Sozier answer 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Who's he?\"\n\n\n \"He's the Military Governor of the City.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewhere,\" Retief said. \"Lead the way, Jake—and\n don't forget my bag.\"\nSozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp,\n prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He\n glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of\n a spacious office.\n\n\n \"I warned you off,\" he snapped. \"You came anyway.\" He leaned forward\n and slammed a fist down on the desk. \"You're used to throwing your\n weight around, but you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies\n pussyfooting around Glave!\"\n\n\n \"Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?\"\n\n\n \"Call me General!\"\n\n\n \"Mind if I sit down?\" Retief pulled out a chair, seated himself and\n took out a cigar. \"Curiously enough,\" he said, lighting up, \"the Corps\n has no intention of making any embarrassing investigations. We deal\n with the existing government, no questions asked.\" His eyes held the\n other's. \"Unless, of course, there are evidences of atrocities or other\n illegal measures.\"\n\n\n The coal-chip eyes narrowed. \"I don't have to make explanations to you\n or anybody else.\"\n\n\n \"Except, presumably, the Glavian Free Electorate,\" Retief said blandly.\n \"But tell me, General—who's actually running the show?\"\n\n\n A speaker on the desk buzzed. \"Hey, Corporal Sozier! Wes's got them two\n hellions cornered. They're holed up in the Birthday Cake—\"\n\n\n \"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.\n\n\n Sozier's eyes narrowed to slits. \"I could have you shot!\"\n\n\n \"Stop playing games with me, Sozier,\" Retief rapped. \"There's a\n squadron of Peace Enforcers standing by just in case any apprentice\n statesmen forget the niceties of diplomatic usage. I suggest you start\n showing a little intelligence about now, or even Horny and Pud are\n likely to notice.\"\nSozier's fingers squeaked on the arms of his chair. He swallowed.\n\n\n \"You might start by assigning me an escort for a conducted tour of\n the capital,\" Retief went on. \"I want to be in a position to confirm\n that order has been re-established, and that normal services have been\n restored. Otherwise it may be necessary to send in a Monitor Unit to\n straighten things out.\"\n\n\n \"You know you can't meddle with the internal affairs of a sovereign\n world!\"\n\n\n Retief sighed. \"The trouble with taking over your boss's job is\n discovering its drawbacks. It's disillusioning, I know, Sozier, but—\"\n\n\n \"All right! Take your tour! You'll find everything running as smooth as\n silk! Utilities, police, transport, environmental control—\"\n\n\n \"What about Space Control? Glave Tower seems to be off the air.\"\n\n\n \"I shut it down. We don't need anything and we don't want anything from\n the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Where's the new Premier keeping himself? Does he share your passion\n for privacy?\"\n\n\n The general got to his feet. \"I'm letting you take your look, Mr.\n Big Nose. I'm giving you four hours. Then out! And the next meddling\n bureaucrat that tries to cut atmosphere on Glave without a clearance\n gets burned!\"\n\n\n \"I'll need a car.\"\n\n\n \"Jake! You stick close to this bird. Take him to the main power plant,\n the water works and the dispatch center. Ride him around town and show\n him we're doing okay without a bunch of leeches bossing us. Then dump\n him at the port—and see that he leaves.\"\n\n\n \"I'll plan my own itinerary, thanks. I can't promise I'll be finished\n in four hours—but I'll keep you advised.\"\n\n\n \"I warned you—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you. Five times. And I only warned you once. You're getting\n ahead of me.\" Retief rose, motioned to the hulking guard. \"Come on,\n Jake. We've got a lot of ground to cover before we come back for our\n dinner.\"\nIII\n\n\n At the curb, Retief held out his hand. \"Give me the power cylinder out\n of your rifle, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"Come on, Jake. You've got a nervous habit of playing with the firing\n stud. We don't want any accidents.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get it out? They only give me this thing yesterday.\"\n\n\n Retief pocketed the cylinder. \"You sit in back. I'll drive.\" He wheeled\n the car off along a broad avenue crowded with vehicles and lined with\n flowering palms, behind which stately white buildings reared up into\n the pale sky.\n\n\n \"Nice looking city, Jake,\" Retief said conversationally. \"What's the\n population?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I only been here a year.\"\n\n\n \"What about Horny and Pud? Are they natives?\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean, natives? They're just as civilized as me.\"\n\n\n \"My boner, Jake. Known Sozier long?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. He useta come around to the club.\"\n\n\n \"I take it he was in the army under the old regime?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah—but he didn't like the way they run it. Nothing but band playing\n and fancy marching. There wasn't nobody to fight.\"\n\n\n \"Just between us, Jake—where did the former Planetary Manager General\n go?\" Retief watched Jake's heavy face in the mirror. Jake jumped,\n clamped his mouth shut.\n\n\n \"I don't know nothing.\"\n\n\n Half an hour later, after a tour of the commercial center, Retief\n headed towards the city's outskirts. The avenue curved, leading up\n along the flank of a low hill.\n\n\n \"I must admit I'm surprised, Jake,\" Retief said. \"Everything seems\n orderly. No signs of riots or panic. Power, water, communications\n normal—just as the general said. Remarkable, isn't it, considering\n that the entire managerial class has packed up and left?\"\n\n\n \"You wanta see the Power Plant?\" Retief could see perspiration beaded\n on the man's forehead under the uniform cap.\n\n\n \"Sure. Which way?\" With Jake directing, Retief ascended to the ridge\n top, cruised past the blank white facade of the station.\n\n\n \"Quiet, isn't it?\" Retief pulled the car in to the curb. \"Let's go\n inside.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Corporal Sozier didn't say nothing—\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Jake. That leaves it to our discretion.\"\n\n\n \"He won't like it.\"\n\n\n \"The corporal's a busy man, Jake. We won't worry him by telling him\n about it.\"\n\n\n Jake followed Retief up the walk. The broad double doors were locked.\n \"Let's try the back.\"\n\n\n The narrow door set in the high blank wall opened as Retief approached.\n A gun barrel poked out, followed by a small man with bushy red hair. He\n looked Retief over.\n\n\n \"Who's this party, Jake?\" he barked.\n\n\n \"Sozier said show him the plant,\" Jake said.\n\n\n \"What we need is more guys to pull duty, not tourists. Anyway,\nI'm\nChief Engineer here. Nobody comes in here 'less I like their looks.\"\n Retief moved forward, stood looking down at the redhead. The little\n man hesitated, then waved him past. \"Lucky for you I like your looks.\"\n Inside, Retief surveyed the long room, the giant converter units, the\n massive busbars. Armed men—some in uniform, some in work clothes\n or loud sport shirts—stood here and there. Other men read meters,\n adjusted controls or inspected dials.\n\n\n \"You've got more guards than workers,\" Retief said. \"Expecting trouble?\"\n\n\n The redhead bit the corner from a plug of spearmint. He glanced around\n the plant. \"Things is quiet now; but you never know.\"\n\n\n \"Rather old-fashioned equipment isn't it? When was it installed?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? I dunno. What's wrong with it?\"\n\n\n \"What's your basic power source, a core sink? Lithospheric friction?\n Sub-crustal hydraulics?\"\n\n\n \"Beats me, Mister. I'm the boss here, not a dern mechanic.\"\nA gray-haired man carrying a clipboard walked past, studied a panel,\n made notes, glanced up to catch Retief's eye, moved on.\n\n\n \"Everything seems to be running normally,\" Retief remarked.\n\n\n \"Sure. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Records being kept up properly?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Some of these guys, all they do is walk around looking at dials\n and writing stuff on paper. If it was me, I'd put 'em to work.\"\n\n\n Retief strolled over to the gray-haired man, now scribbling before a\n bank of meters. He glanced at the clipboard.\nPower off at sunset. Tell Corasol\nwas scrawled in block letters\n across the record sheet. Retief nodded, rejoined his guard.\n\n\n \"All right, Jake. Let's have a look at the communications center.\"\n\n\n Back in the car, headed west, Retief studied the blank windows of\n office buildings, the milling throngs in beer bars, shooting galleries,\n tattoo parlors, billiard halls, pinball arcades, bordellos and\n half-credit casinos.\n\n\n \"Everybody seems to be having fun,\" he remarked.\n\n\n Jake stared out the window.\n\n\n \"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad you're on duty, Jake. You could be out there joining in.\"\n\n\n \"Soon as the corporal gets things organized, I'm opening me up a place\n to show dirty tri-di's. I'll get my share.\"\n\n\n \"Meanwhile, let the rest of 'em have their fun, eh Jake?\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, I been thinking. Maybe you better gimme back that\n kick-stick you taken outa my gun....\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, Jake; no can do. Tell me, what was the real cause of the\n revolution? Not enough to eat? Too much regimentation?\"\n\n\n \"Naw, we always got plenty to eat. There wasn't none of that\n regimentation up till I joined up in the corporal's army.\"\n\n\n \"Rigid class structure, maybe? Educational discrimination?\"\n\n\n Jake nodded. \"Yeah, it was them schools done it. All the time trying\n to make a feller do some kind of class. Big shots. Know it all. Gonna\n make us sit around and view tapes. Figgered they was better than us.\"\n\n\n \"And Sozier's idea was you'd take over, and you wouldn't have to be\n bothered.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, it wasn't Sozier's idea. He ain't the big leader.\"\n\n\n \"Where does the big leader keep himself?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I guess he's pretty busy right now.\" Jake snickered. \"Some of\n them guys call themselves colonels turned out not to know nothing about\n how to shoot off the guns.\"\n\n\n \"Shooting, eh? I thought it was a sort of peaceful revolution. The\n managerial class were booted out, and that was that.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know nothing,\" Jake snapped. \"How come you keep trying to get\n me to say stuff I ain't supposed to talk about? You want to get me in\n trouble?\"\n\"Oh, you're already in trouble, Jake. But if you stick with me, I'll\n try to get you out of it. Where exactly did the refugees head for? How\n did they leave? Must have been a lot of them; I'd say in a city of this\n size alone, they'd run into the thousands.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, it depends on your definition of a big shot. Who's included\n in that category, Jake?\"\n\n\n \"You know, the slick-talking ones; the fancy dressers; the guys that\n walk around and tell other guys what to do. We do all the work and they\n get all the big pay.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose that would cover scientists, professional men, executives,\n technicians of all sorts, engineers, teachers—all that crowd.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, them are the ones.\"\n\n\n \"And once you got them out of the way, the regular fellows would have a\n chance. Chaps that don't spend all their time taking baths and reading\n books and using big words; good Joes that don't mind picking their\n noses in public.\"\n\n\n \"We got as much right as anybody—\"\n\n\n \"Jake, who's Corasol?\"\n\n\n \"He's—I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I thought I overheard his name somewhere.\"\n\n\n \"Uh, here's the communication center,\" Jake cut in.\n\n\n Retief swung into a parking lot under a high blank facade. He set the\n brake and stepped out.\n\n\n \"Lead the way, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, the corporal only wanted me to show you the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to hide, Jake?\"\n\n\n Jake shook his head angrily and stamped past Retief. \"When I joined up\n with Sozier, I didn't figger I'd be getting in this kind of mess.\"\n\n\n \"I know, Jake. It's tough. Sometimes it seems like a fellow works\n harder after he's thrown out the parasites than he did before.\"\n\n\n A cautious guard let Retief and Jake inside, followed them along\n bright-lit aisles among consoles, cables, batteries of instruments.\n Armed men in careless uniforms lounged, watching. Here and there a\n silent technician worked quietly.\n\n\n Retief paused by one, an elderly man in a neat white coverall, with a\n purple spot under one eye.\n\n\n \"Quite a bruise you've got there,\" Retief commented heartily. \"Power\n failure at sunset,\" he added softly. The technician hesitated, nodded\n and moved on.\n\n\n Back in the car, Retief gave Jake directions. At the end of three\n hours, he had seen twelve smooth-running, heavily guarded installations.\n\n\n \"So far, so good, Jake,\" he said. \"Next stop, Sub-station Number Nine.\"\n In the mirror, Jake's face stiffened. \"Hey, you can't go down there—\"\n\n\n \"Something going on there, Jake?\"\n\n\n \"That's where—I mean, no. I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to miss anything, Jake. Which way?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't going down there,\" Jake said sullenly.\n\n\n Retief braked. \"In that case, I'm afraid our association is at an end,\n Jake.\"\n\n\n \"You mean ... you're getting out here?\"\n\n\n \"No, you are.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with\n you.\"\n\n\n Retief accelerated. \"That's settled, then. Which way?\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery\n of a loose crowd of brown-uniformed men who stood in groups scattered\n across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn\n before the bare, functional facade of sub-station number Nine. In the\n midst of the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as\n he harangued a cluster of green-uniformed men from his place in the\n rear of a long open car.\n\n\n \"What's it all about, Jake?\" Retief enquired. \"Since the parasites have\n all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed\n up in the pumping station—and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word\n that it's all going to be fun and games from now on.\"\n\n\n \"If the corporal sees you over here—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to\n see.\" Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A\n heavy lorry loaded with an immense tank with the letter H blazoned on\n its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a\n position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's\n limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A\n moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd.\n\n\n \"You in there, Corasol! This is General Sozier, and I'm warning you to\n come out now or you and your smart friends are in for a big surprise.\n You think I won't blast you out because I don't want to wreck the\n planet. You see the tank aboard the lorry that just pulled up? It's\n full of gas—and I got plenty of hoses out here to pump it inside with.\n I'll put men on the roof and squirt it in the ventilators.\"\n\n\n Sozier's voice echoed and died. The militiamen eyed the station.\n Nothing happened.\n\n\n \"I know you can hear me, damn you!\" Sozier squalled. \"You'd better get\n the doors open and get out here fast!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped to Sozier's side. \"Say, Corporal, I didn't know you went\n in for practical jokes.\"\n\n\n Sozier jerked around to gape at Retief.\n\n\n \"What are you doing here!\" he burst out. \"I told Jake—where is that—\"\n\n\n \"Jake didn't like the questions I was asking,\" Retief said, \"so he\n marched me up here to report to you.\"\n\n\n \"Jake, you damn fool!\" Sozier roared. \"I got a good mind—\"\n\"I disagree, Sozier,\" Retief cut in. \"I think you're a complete\n imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your\n lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray\n that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than\n words.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building.\n\n\n \"Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?\"\n\n\n Sozier dropped. \"Where?\"\n\n\n \"My mistake. Just a foreign particle on my contact lenses.\" Retief\n leaned on the car. \"On the other hand, Sozier, most murderers are\n sneaky about it. I think making a public announcement is a nice gesture\n on your part. The Monitors won't have any trouble deciding who to hang\n when they come in to straighten out this mess.\"\n\n\n Sozier scrambled back onto his seat. \"Monitors?\" he snarled. \"I\n don't think so. I don't think you'll be around to do any blabbering\n to anybody.\" He raised his voice. \"Jake! March this spy over to the\n sidelines. If he tries anything, shoot him!\" He gave Retief a baleful\n grin. \"I'll lay the body out nice and ship it back to your cronies.\n Accidents will happen, you know. It'll be a week or two before they get\n around to following up—and by then I'll have this little problem under\n control.\"\n\n\n Jake looked at Retief uncertainly, fingering his empty rifle.\n\n\n Retief put his hands up. \"I guess you got me, Jake,\" he said. \"Careful\n of that gun, now.\"\n\n\n Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Retief and nodded\n toward the car. As Retief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd.\n Retief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly.\n A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way;\n Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As\n Retief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the\n sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a\n splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's\n car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned\n the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream\n of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car\n passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides.\n\n\n \"The corporal will feel all the better for an invigorating swim in\n his mobile pool,\" Retief commented. \"By the way, Jake, I have to be\n going now. It wouldn't be fair to send you back to your boss without\n something to back up your story that you were outnumbered, so—\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out to connect solidly with Jake's jaw. Jake\n dropped the gun and sat down hard. Retief turned and headed for the\n pumping station. The hose had shut down now. A few men were standing,\n eyeing the building anxiously. Others watched his progress across the\n square. As Retief passed, he caught scattered comments:\n\n\n \"—seen that bird before.\"\n\n\n \"—where he's headed.\"\n\n\n \"—feller Sozier was talking to....\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\"\n\n\n Retief was on the grass now. Ahead, the blank wall loomed up. He walked\n on briskly.\n\n\n \"Stop that jasper!\" a shout rang out. There was a sharp whine and a\n black spot appeared on the wall ahead. Near it, a small personnel door\n abruptly swung inward. Retief sprinted, plunged through the opening\n as a second shot seared the paint on the doorframe. The door clanged\n behind him. Retief glanced over the half dozen men confronting him.\n\n\n \"I'm Retief, CDT, acting Charge,\" he said. \"Which of you gentlemen is\n Manager-General Corasol?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "According to Mr. Retief, what is the most common goal in life?", "question_unique_id": "61459_WR2RQQJJ_1", "options": ["To ride the coattails of someone else's hard work.", "To get out of meetings as quickly as possible.", "To have a government controlled by blue-collar workers.", "To have a large balance of money stored in neutral banks."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the GFE?", "question_unique_id": "61459_WR2RQQJJ_2", "options": ["Glavian Free Electorate.", "Goodies For Everybody.", "Glorious Fun Eternally.", "Glave For Everyone."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Mr. Retief smoke cigars?", "question_unique_id": "61459_WR2RQQJJ_3", "options": ["Sternwheeler dislikes how they smell, so the meetings don't last as long.", "He loves the taste and the thick smoke clouds they create.", "He enjoys lighting them with a permatch.", "They give him more confidence and make him feel more important during conference sessions."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Retief so effectively control Jake's actions?", "question_unique_id": "61459_WR2RQQJJ_4", "options": ["He made Jake believe he was a powerful diplomat.", "By punching him in the jaw.", "He mirrored Jake's societal perceptions through ticky wordplay and manipulation.", "He took the power cylinder from Jake's rifle."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who composed the warning letter to Sternwheeler?", "question_unique_id": "61459_WR2RQQJJ_5", "options": ["Trundy and Little Moe.", "Jake, Horny, and Pud.", "General Sozier.", "The Peace Enforcers."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Retief claim to punch Jake in the face?", "question_unique_id": "61459_WR2RQQJJ_6", "options": ["So that he could escape being his prisoner.", "So that Jake would have a reason to report to his superiors for failing in his duties.", "So that he could steal his weapon.", "So that he could easily enter the pumping station and meet Corasol."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to Jake, why did the working-class drive out the managerial class?", "question_unique_id": "61459_WR2RQQJJ_7", "options": ["They were fed poorly.", "They were tired of working for the managerial class's profit.", "They were bitter about the education they were being provided.", "They were tired of the regimentation and class structure."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the managerial representatives rid themselves of General Sozier?", "question_unique_id": "61459_WR2RQQJJ_8", "options": ["They sent Retief as a mole.", "They manipulated Jake to do their bidding.", "That shot at him with machine gun turret fixed to station's rooftop.", "They blasted his car with water from the pumping station."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/4/5/61459//61459-h//61459-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61198", "set_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Aide Memoire", "year": 1959, "author": "Laumer, Keith", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction", "article": "AIDE MEMOIRE\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nThe Fustians looked like turtles—but\n\n they could move fast when they chose!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAcross the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet\n of parchment and looked grave.\n\n\n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural\n Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the\n matter of sponsorship of Youth groups—\"\n\n\n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n\n\n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters\n are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age—\"\n\n\n \"That's right. He'll try anything—in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is\n the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And\n sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the\n Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the\n mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p—that is, cement\n relations with this emergent power group—the leaders of the future.\n You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their\n rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control\n group—\"\n\n\n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This\n group—\" he glanced at the paper—\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and\n Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting\n sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment\n and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and\n athletic development,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well\n anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n\n\n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke\n instead of us.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to\n step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air.\n Retief raised one eyebrow.\n\n\n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a\n positive statement.\"\nMagnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think\n you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug\n half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would\n help.\"\n\n\n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you\n would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical\n characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n\n\n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater\n than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience,\n Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise\n you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n\n\n Magnan shuddered. \"Please—never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n\n\n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the\n dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the\n Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your\n permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n\n\n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me,\n Retief. More interest in substantive matters—such as working with\n Youth groups—would create a far better impression.\"\n\n\n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea\n to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes\n them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the\n alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n\n\n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n \"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n\n\n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a\n two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but\n business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n\n\n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n \"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci\n are barely ahead of them.\"\n\n\n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like\n fission bombs.\"\n\n\n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists\n for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your\n attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying\n the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n\n\n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local\n youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\nII\n\n\n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the\n chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car\n and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle\n trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n\n\n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty\n dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians\n lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly\n wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them,\n shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the\n flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his\n back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the\n shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n\n\n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n \"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n\n\n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up\n professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n\n\n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed.\n Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n\n\n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace\n peered out at Retief.\n\n\n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if\n you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new\n liner today.\"\n\"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy\n arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n \"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of\n papers.\"\n\n\n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the\n story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the\n vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out\n a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood\n silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n\n\n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He\n turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the\n open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n\n\n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n\n\n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on\n the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n\n\n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in\n nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n\n\n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\nThe youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why\n should it be secret?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me.\"\n\n\n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the\n Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n \"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who\n knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n\n\n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went\n for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get\n to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n\n\n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the\n shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n\n\n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed\n through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n\n\n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent\n day by day.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n\n\n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new.\n Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n\n\n \"The police—\"\n\n\n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have\n we needed ought ere now.\"\n\n\n \"What's behind it?\"\n\n\n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot\n mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with\n them.\"\n\n\n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured\n Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed\n the hut, then started toward it.\n\n\n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n\n\n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n \"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n\n\n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n\n\n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well,\n stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n\n\n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n\n\n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were\n raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\nThe second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the\n Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He\n flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n\n\n \"Retief—I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first\n dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive\n Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage,\n arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your\n intransigence.\"\n\n\n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just\n time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep\n back.\n\n\n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner\n and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline.\n The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun\n and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n\n\n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he\n would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but\n the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n\n\n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward\n Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n\n\n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No\n need to crowd up.\"\n\n\n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was\n unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved\n awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n\n\n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n\n\n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a\n foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw\n his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell\n heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other\n Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied.\n The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another\n vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car,\n tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n\n\n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight.\n They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault,\n after running a copy for the reference files.\n\n\n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV\n battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval\n Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The\n term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in\n the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in\n the Eastern Arm.\n\n\n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present\n but himself and the old-timer—and he was willing to bet the elderly\n Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n\n\n At least not willingly....\n\n\n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the\n flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the\n shipyard.\nThe door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position.\n Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old\n fellow had put up a struggle.\n\n\n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief\n followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of\n a warehouse.\n\n\n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the\n workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in\n their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various\n fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n\n\n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n\n\n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle\n of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed\n out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor\n before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over\n into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged\n Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n\n\n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine\n and pulled the sack free.\n\n\n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you\n into this.\"\n\n\n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell\n back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he\n rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth,\n Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n\n\n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n\n\n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It\n would be your life.\"\n\n\n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n\n\n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light\n here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n\n\n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"\n\n\n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it\n into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away.\n The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n\n\n Slowly he got to his feet.\n\n\n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right\n now, let's get out of here.\"\n\n\n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp,\n bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in\n my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He\n flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He\n knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n\n\n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n\n\n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite\n small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the\n Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first\n period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge\nMoss\n Rock\n.\"\n\n\n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n\n\n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements\n after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n\n\n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I\n know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the\n floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium\n pile.\"\nIII\n\n\n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the\n sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the\n official luxury space barge\nMoss Rock\n.\n\n\n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n \"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away\n to sleep.\"\n\n\n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n\n\n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box\n stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it—a discordant note\n in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n\n\n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of\n orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n\n\n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n\n\n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He\n passed the metal band to Retief.\n\n\n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard\n the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy—fast.\"\n\n\n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck\n the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and\n fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm\n embrace.\n\n\n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n\n\n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive\n youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n\n\n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n\n\n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n\n\n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n\n\n The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—\n\n\n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried\n to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old.\n But I thought—\"\n\n\n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks\n are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the\n carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n\n\n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us\n and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n\n\n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n\n\n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight.\n Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little\n bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers\n holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n\n\n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n\n\n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n \"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n\n\n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians.\n They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief\n whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed\n it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on\n Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the\nMoss Rock\nas Whonk\n took him in full charge.\n\n\n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian\n on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed\n hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n\n\n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids\n have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got\n another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast,\n but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled\n for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is\n enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n\n\n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about\n this gambit.\"\n\n\n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth\n with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I\n know where to find the boss.\"\nA stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned\n the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the\n giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered\n a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the\n air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n\n\n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr.\n Ambassador.\"\n\n\n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He\n turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n\n\n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n\n\n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the\nLament of\n Hatching\n,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of\n instruments—\"\n\n\n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial\n Ambassador suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n \"And if I may interrupt a moment—\"\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived,\n perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n\n\n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much\n do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all\n Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a\n carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n\n\n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful\n energies,\" said Magnan.\n\n\n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to\n the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n\n\n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on\n us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n\n\n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me\n and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n\n\n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\"\n cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness—\"\n\n\n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister\n said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled\n boreholes and blasted.\"\n\"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow!\n Slop I believe his name is.\"\n\n\n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—\"\n\n\n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to\n them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering.\n Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some\n of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose.\n Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green\n wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n\n\n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked,\n breathing deeply.\n\n\n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n\n\n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd\n have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in\n sideways. There's a matter you should know about—\"\n\n\n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine\n young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee\n will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr.\n Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the\n pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n\n\n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I\n want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to\n see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his\n attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join\n me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to\n catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n\n\n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room,\n took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n\n\n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the\n great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly\n for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that\n in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve\n during the years ahead.\"\n\n\n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.\n\n\n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n \"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy.\n The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman\n at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed.\n The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed\n by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby\n worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n\n\n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This\n group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n\n\n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back\n to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was\n planned for today. When the\nMoss Rock\nblew, a variety of clues were\n to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all\n over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair\n squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship\n of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n\n\n \"The\nMoss Rock\n?\" said Magnan. \"But that was—Retief! This is idiotic.\n Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n\n\n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip\n loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting\n his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan\n watched, open-mouthed.\n\n\n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They\n intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their\n purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is\n the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n\n\n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much\n chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through\n now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled\n through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in\n Whonk's wake.\n\n\n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a\n code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n\n\n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's\n loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why were some members of SCARS most likely easy to manipulate to do the Groaci's bidding?", "question_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L_1", "options": ["Above all else, they hated Fustian adults, so they were willing to do anything to harm them.", "They were disinterested in politics, so they did not think about any political ambitions the Groaci might have.", "The impetuousness of youth blinded them to reality.", "Fustian youth are notoriously stubborn and unwilling to examine all aspects of a situation."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What comparison does Retief offer after suggesting surgical removal of the Fustian horns?", "question_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L_2", "options": ["The two-headed Groaci.", "If people didn't shave, their facial hair would grow too long.", "He pointed out Magnan's extremely long beard.", "He highlighted the unruly outer shells of the adult Fustians."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the youth attack Retief after he left Whonk?", "question_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L_3", "options": ["Slock despised the Terrestrial Embassy.", "They wanted to steal the pictures he had taken of the ship's blueprints.", "It was part of the Groaci's plan for takeover.", "They were looking for a film he had brought with him about SCARS."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Magnan scoff at Retief's diplomatic mission?", "question_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L_4", "options": ["He doesn't think the Groaci are relevant to the mission.", "He doesn't approve of Retief's interest in the physical characteristics of the Fustians.", "He thinks the time would be better spent building relationships with Fustian youths.", "He thinks Retief should investigate the activities of the SCARS instead."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is one physical difference between adult and youth Fustians?", "question_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L_5", "options": ["The youths tend to wrap their bodies in mantles, and the adults do not.", "The youths have beady yellow eyes, and the adults do not.", "The adults have soft jaws, and the youths have hard jaws.", "The bodies of adult Fustians are protected by scales and shells. The youths' are not."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the Groaci's plan?", "question_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L_6", "options": ["To blow up the Terrestrial Embassy.", "To use Slock's help in pinning the bombing of the \"Moss Rock\" on SCARS and the Terrestrial Embassy.", "To purge the Ministry of Youth of its leaders and replace them with their own.", "To prevent the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society from receiving its sponsorship."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Slock and some other youths attempt to kill Whonk?", "question_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L_7", "options": ["They dragged him through the streets.", "They beat him up and left him for dead.", "They tried to suffocate him by tying a bag around his head.", "They tried to decapitate him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who was The Soft One?", "question_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L_8", "options": ["The Groaci.", "Retief.", "Slock.", "Magnan."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was unique about the youth that attacked Whonk and tried to attack Retief?", "question_unique_id": "61198_6A2FBH5L_9", "options": ["He was actually an adult Fustian whose outer shell had been carefully removed.", "He had horns growing from his toes.", "He was a senior member of SCARS.", "His eyes were attached to the end of long stalks."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/1/9/61198//61198-h//61198-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "20013", "set_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "Pointillism", "year": "1998", "author": "Franklin Foer", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Pointillism \n\n         Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's obstruction of justice case against President Clinton is likely to turn on his identification of the author of the so-called \"Talking Points.\" Like Shakespeare's works and the Bible, the TP, a three-page document, has inspired numerous schools of thought that disagree on the meaning of seemingly banal phrases and discern the handiwork of different authors. As a service to scholars in the burgeoning field of TP Studies--as well as to the general public--here is a Talmudic exegesis, a Reader's Guide to the TP . \n\n                         Background: Only one person claims to have firsthand knowledge of the TP's origins: Linda Tripp. Tripp told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Monica Lewinsky had given her the TP on Jan. 14, 1998, while driving Tripp home from work. That night, Tripp handed the document over to Starr's office. The following day, wearing an FBI-supplied wire, she met Lewinsky at the Pentagon City, Va., Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents interrupted their conversation and took Lewinsky to a room in the hotel for questioning. \n\n         The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n          \n\n            Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories. \n\n         The TP appears to have been composed in three parts, each in a different voice. The first section, in which Tripp receives legal-sounding advice, is smoothly and efficiently written. The document then shifts from the substance of the affidavit to the strategy behind it, with special reference to Tripp's relationship with the president's lawyer Robert Bennett. The final portion recasts the original section in the first person. It also includes a chatty paragraph discrediting allegations about Lewinsky's alleged affair with Clinton. \n\n                         Exegesis: This is the widely circulated version of the TP. For annotations, click on the hot-linked phrases. \n\n                         Points to Make in an Affidavit              \n\n         Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself--what you do now, what you did at the White House, and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee. \n\n         You and Kathleen were friends. At around the time of her husband's death (The President has claimed it was after her husband died. Do you really want to contradict him?), she came to you after she allegedly came out of the oval and looked (however she looked), you don't recall her exact words, but she claimed at the time (whatever she claimed) and was very happy. \n\n         You did not see her go in or see her come out. \n\n         Talk about when you became out of touch with her and maybe why. \n\n         The next you heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter (I wouldn't name him specifically) showed up in your office saying she was naming you as someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed. You spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to you a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what you remembered happening. As a result of your conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed that she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, you now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. You now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n         You never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office. \n\n         You are not sure you've been clear about whose side you're on. (Kirby has been saying you should look neutral; better for credibility but you aren't neutral. Neutral makes you look like you're on the other team since you are a political appointee) \n\n         It's important to you that they think you're a team player, after all, you are a political appointee. You believe that they think you're on the other side because you wouldn't meet with them. \n\n         You want to meet with Bennett. You are upset about the comment he made, but you'll take the high road and do what's in your best interest. \n\n         December 18th, you were in a better position to attend an all day or half-day deposition, but now you are into JCOC mode. Your livelihood is dependent on the success of this program. Therefore, you want to provide an affidavit laying out all of the facts in lieu of a deposition. \n\n         You want Bennett's people to see your affidavit before it's signed. \n\n         Your deposition should include enough information to satisfy their questioning. \n\n         By the way, remember how I said there was someone else that I knew about. Well, she turned out to be a huge liar. I found out she left the WH because she was stalking the P or something like that. Well, at least that gets me out of another scandal I know about. \n\n         The first few paragraphs should be about me--what I do now, what I did at the White House and for how many years I was there as a career person and as a political appointee. \n\n         Kathleen and I were friends. At around the time of her husband's death, she came to me after she allegedly came out of the oval office and looked _____, I don't recall her exact words, but she claimed at the time ______ and was very happy. \n\n         I did not see her go in or see her come out. \n\n         Talk about when I became out of touch with her and maybe why. \n\n         The next time I heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter showed up in my office saying she was naming me as a someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed by the President. I spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to me a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what I remembered happening. As a result of my conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, I now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. I now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n         I never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office. \n\n         I have never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody. \n\n           \n\n           \n\n                         Note 1              \n\n         Here are seven good guesses about the authorship of the TP: \n\n                         1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place. \n\n                         2) Tripp, the Manipulative Bitch. Gunning to bring down the president after Bennett denounced her, Tripp entrapped Lewinsky. One scenario has her prodding the gullible young woman to write the TP so she, Tripp, could get physical evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the entire thing--herself. A senior White House official has even suggested a draft of the TP lives on the hard drive of Tripp's computer. The theory's defects: a) Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? b) While the tapes expose Tripp as a horrible friend and a vicious schemer, we have no evidence that she is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination. \n\n                         3) The Right-Wing Conspiracy. An elaboration of the Tripp theory. Without any specific evidence, proponents of this theory posit that Tripp drafted the TP with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes. \n\n                         4) Behre, the White House Mole. When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Foster's death, the White House helped her retain Behre. She fired him three days before the TP surfaced, when he asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to write the TP. (Some implicate Behre's replacement, James Moody. It seems unlikely, however, that Moody, a conservative stalwart, would have helped Tripp prepare talking points apparently so favorable to the president.) And while the document presents legal-sounding advice, it's too rambling, repetitive, and error-ridden to have been written out by a lawyer worth his salt (though it might be notes based on a lawyer's advice). In addition, lawyers know better than to give a witness written instructions about the preparation of false testimony. Note, however, that, as one observer argues, if the TP is entirely true (Willey did muss her own clothes, etc.), assisting in its preparation would not be unethical or tantamount to subornation of perjury--though it would then be most unlikely that the TP was prepared by Moody or a right-wing cabal. \n\n                         5) Clinton, the Dictator. A lawyer by training, Clinton spent much time on the phone with Lewinsky. He could have dictated points during his calls, and he has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But in crises such as this one, Clinton has historically turned to proxies for his dirty work. Moreover the TP is wrong about what Clinton said in his Jones deposition about when his meeting with Willey took place. \n\n                         6) Lindsey, the Fixer. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered the president's confidant as a suspect. He was the administration's point man on the Jones case and has been known to wipe up after Clinton's bimbo eruptions. And he had reason to believe he could change or blunt the impact of Tripp's testimony. In August, Tripp told Newsweek she doubted Clinton's advances to Willey constituted sexual harassment, as Willey--despite her later protestations--had not seemed upset at the time. Tripp also contacted Lindsey last summer to discuss the Willey affair. Tripp and Lindsey spoke on at least two more occasions, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n                         7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 2              \n\n         One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton. \n\n         But it does not necessarily clear aide Lindsey or others close to the president. After all, the president's sealed, private testimony contradicts his lawyer Bennett's public pronouncements that the encounter with Willey took place after her husband's suicide. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 3              \n\n         According to Howard Kurtz's book Spin Cycle , this characterization of the Oval Office is common only among White House staffers. \n\n         And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 4              \n\n         The parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first half of the TP. Some theorists have pointed to it as evidence that a lawyer drafted--or at least advised on the drafting of--the document. Fabricating evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, as some administration advocates maintain, the TP is all true, assistance in its drafting would not be unethical. However, as noted later, the TP makes legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory that Lewinsky was the lone author. Tripp told Newsweek she suspected immediately that the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. Lewinsky's former lawyer Ginsburg never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a collaborative effort). \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 5              \n\n         Why doesn't the author want to mention Isikoff, the reporter in question? Only Tripp had a clear interest in not seeming unduly familiar with him. For months, she had been meeting clandestinely with Isikoff, discussing her conversations with Lewinsky. Tripp had hoped to remain anonymous in Isikoff's story. There's no good reason why Lindsey should have inserted this detail. \n\n         Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 7              \n\n         \"Someone else\" apparently refers to Julie Steele, a friend of Willey's. Steele initially told Newsweek that Willey had confided the details of the incident with Clinton to her shortly after it happened. Later, Steele changed her story, saying Willey had told her that the president had \"made a pass\" at her only weeks after the alleged incident and that she had lied at Willey's behest. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 8              \n\n         On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 9              \n\n         At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 10              \n\n         The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 11              \n\n         When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n         The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 12              \n\n         This is clumsily phrased: The identity of the \"other side\" is ambiguous. It sounds more like loose drafting by a PR person than it does the work of a practicing lawyer. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 13              \n\n         The New York Times and others, quoting \"lawyers connected to the case,\" report Lindsey had earlier advised Tripp to seek Bennett's help, advice Tripp eschewed. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 14              \n\n         Bennett was quoted as saying that \"Linda Tripp is not to be believed\" in the Willey controversy. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 15              \n\n         The date when Tripp was originally scheduled to be deposed by Jones' lawyers. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 16              \n\n         This is the acronym for the Joint Civilian Orientation Course, a program Tripp ran at the Pentagon. Lewinsky, as well as Tripp, would be familiar with the acronym, as would people in the White House who knew where Tripp had been placed following her transfer. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 17              \n\n         Presumably, only someone with legal training--though not necessarily a practicing lawyer--would know that an affidavit could substitute for a deposition. However, this is not good lawyerly advice. It is unlikely that Jones' lawyers would have accepted an affidavit in lieu of a deposition from someone who had changed her story. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 18              \n\n         The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 19              \n\n         The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 20              \n\n         This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n         Note 21 \n\n          Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 22              \n\n         No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 23              \n\n         In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n                         Back to story.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Which conclusion about the TP is probably correct?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_1", "options": ["It was co-authored by multiple people.", "It was written by \"lawyers connected to the case.\"", "It was written solely by Linda Tripp.", "It was engineered by Monica Lewinsky."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does the TP indicate legal insight but perhaps not authorship by a lawyer?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_2", "options": ["The suggestion of fabricating evidence.", "The conflation of \"affidavit\" with \"deposition\".", "The author's desire to leave out any mention of Isikoff.", "The reference to \"the oval\" rather than \"the oval office.\""], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the JCOC?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_3", "options": ["A Pentagon course.", "The code word for Linda Tripp's job.", "The office where Monica Lewinsky worked.", "An acronym for Linda Tripp's legal team."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the best indicator of multiple authors of the TP?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_4", "options": ["The repetition of key words and phrases throughout the text.", "Specific details are not consistent, such as the use of \"affidavit\" vs. \"deposition.\"", "The fact that multiple people had a motive for the creation of the TP.", "A shift in the voice of the writer(s) as well as point of view."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What evidence seems to exculpate Lewinsky from sole authorship of the text?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_5", "options": ["Her mood at the time of its writing along with her perceived mental faculties.", "She made a foolish attempt to engineer a \"foot accident\" for Linda Tripp.", "Her attorney, William Ginsburg, denied her involvement.", "She is not a lawyer, despite having legal knowledge."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was James Moody unlikely to have prepared the TP?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_6", "options": ["His conservative values were in conflict with the White House.", "Willey fabricated her entire account of her relationship with Clinton.", "The document appeared to be crafted based upon a lawyer's advice and written instructions.", "He was loyal to Behre and did not wish to implicate him."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What information appears to clear Clinton of a role in writing the TP?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_7", "options": ["There is no clear reason why he would want to change Linda Tripp's testimony. ", "Clinton did not like to use proxies to handle his crises.", "He never dictated any calls for himself, preferring to channel such discussions through lawyers.", "The time of his encounter with Willey is inconsistent with his deposition testimony."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why would the author of the TP not wish to name the Newsweek reporter?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_8", "options": ["The Newsweek reporter knew the true author of the TP and would immediately expose them.", "This revelation would hamper the assertion of obstruction of justice by damaging the author's credibility.", "If the author was Tripp because she wanted to keep her association with Isikoff a secret.", "If the author revealed themselves, then it would become more difficult to take down the president."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Linda Tripp fire Behre?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_9", "options": ["He had asked her to give her evidence to Clinton's attorney.", "He was too close with White House staffer Bruce Lindsey.", "For bad representation during her testimony about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death.", "For authoring the Talking Points."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Julie Steele claim to change her story?", "question_unique_id": "20013_MRFPK6UO_10", "options": ["To protect herself from further scrutiny.", "Clinton pressured her to do so.", "Her friend Kathleen Willey had told her to.", "She caved to pressure from White House attorneys."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20005", "set_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "Does Everybody Do It?", "year": "1996", "author": "Jacob Weisberg", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Does Everybody Do It? \n\n         Campaign finance is an arcane and confusing subject, filled with unspoken understandings. One of these is the distinction between rules that must be obeyed and rules that can be safely flouted. In the Republican primaries, for instance, aides to Bob Dole admitted that they were going to exceed legal limits on how much they could spend, an act commentators compared at the time to running a red light. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton and his aides were helping to develop the so-called \"issue\" ads produced by state parties--ads which, in theory, weren't supposed to be co-ordinated with his re-election effort. And neither party even bothered to claim that the tens of millions being raised in so-called \"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile, though, a Dole supporter named Simon Fireman is confined to his Boston apartment, where he wears an electronic collar and ponders the $6 million fine he must pay for enlisting his employees at Aqua Leisure Industries, a maker of inflatable pool toys, in a scheme to contribute $69,000 to the Dole campaign. \n\n         A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory? \n\n         In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle? \n\n         Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang. \n\n          \n\n            Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n                         Answer: Not really.              \n\n         There are examples beyond number of simply illegal contributions that the press and public just shrugged off. Even Pat Robertson got busted in 1988 for the use of a Christian Broadcasting Network plane--his travels were valued at $260,000. If one focuses on the narrow category of contributions that are illegal because they come from foreigners (even though it is arguably no worse than any other category of violation), there is still little novelty to the Huang affair. Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken illegally from foreign nationals: Japanese interests contributing to candidates in local races in Hawaii, South Americans giving to the Democratic Party of Florida, and so on. Just a few weeks ago, the RNC returned $15,000 to a Canadian company called Methanex after the contribution was disclosed in Roll Call . 's recent $1 million contribution to the California Republican Party may fall into this category as well. The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made \"in the name of another,\" an issue that has surfaced in connection with Al Gore's Buddhist temple fund-raiser. The FEC has frequently disallowed contributions made to both parties under aliases. \n\n         If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies. \n\n         According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000. \n\n         Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises. \n\n          \n\n            Question 2: Is the Lippo scandal an egregious example of a political quid pro quo?              \n\n                         Answer: Definitely not.              \n\n         Examples of favors in exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Bob Dole and Chiquita. In 1995, Dole introduced legislation to impose trade sanctions on Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica--but not Honduras, where Dole's favorite bananas are grown. Why was a senator from Kansas so interested in bananas? It might have had something to do with Chiquita giving $677,000 to the Republican Party in the last campaign cycle or the generous offer by its CEO, Carl Lindner, to let Dole use the company jet. (\"Sen. Dole has taken this position because it is right for America,\" Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin said earlier this year. \"To suggest any other reason is totally absurd.\") Or, there is the relationship between . \n\n         This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n          \n\n            Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes?              \n\n                         Answer: No.              \n\n         The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions. \n\n         In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\" \n\n          When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions. \n\n         John Huang was merely a cog in this machine. When he left the Lippo Group in 1994, Huang became a deputy assistant secretary in the International Trade Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade issues. Under oath, Huang has claimed he had only a \"passive role\" in the foreign trade missions--whatever that means. It all . But that's the Commerce Department Mosbacher created, and which Brown perfected. To present the Huang story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of William Jefferson Clinton, is absurd. \n\n         So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables. \n\n         The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.\n", "questions": [{"question": "According to the article, why are fund-raisers largely unbothered by receiving illegal campaign contributions?", "question_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX_1", "options": ["There haven't been many consequences in the past, so they just apologize and move on.", "Because of pressure from the higher-ups in political campaigns.", "They only care about money and nothing else.", "Because their current processes for raising money are based on years of tradition and successful strategies."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the Democratic National Committee cease its vetting process for campaign donations in the early 1990s?", "question_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX_2", "options": ["In order to comply with new rules passed down by the Federal Election Commission.", "Clinton's reelection campaign wanted to remove barriers to its massive fundraising goal.", "They wanted to focus on their new strategy for tapping ethnic subcultures for cash.", "To better compete with the impressive fundraising number of the Republican National Convention."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the writer posit that people were so obsessed with Indogate?", "question_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX_3", "options": ["A renewed interest in the legality of donations from ethnic groups.", "It provided an opportunity for reformers to highlight issues they felt were important in the national media.", "A new understanding of the function of soft money political campaign contributions.", "A combination of political games, perceived bias in media attention, and reform advocates."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the suggested Republican motivation for their displays of outrage at John Huang's corrupted fundraising tactics?", "question_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX_4", "options": ["To harm the political future of Democrats.", "To shift public opinion in their direction by inciting negative media attention.", "They're seeking political retribution for having to pay for their own shady dealings.", "They're angry about losing their superior fundraising position."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following did Republicans not accuse Huang of regarding the Lippo affair?", "question_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX_5", "options": ["A quid-pro-quo transaction.", "A potential conflict of interest. ", "Using his federal office to fundraise.", "Taking donations illegally. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What makes Huang's actions unique compared to other corrupt fundraisers?", "question_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX_6", "options": ["He failed to properly vet campaign contributions", "He raised greater amounts of money than anyone else.", "He better understood how to leverage his position to pursue various ethnic groups for money.", "He successfully implemented the \"Team 100\" strategy to raise vast amounts of cash."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Bob Dole most likely love bananas so much?", "question_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX_7", "options": ["Because he owned a company that exported fruit internationally.", "Because he profited from the trade sanctions imposed upon Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica.", "It was a result of the large campaign donations Chiquita gave to the RNC.", "He saw that bananas had the potential to boost America's economy."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was the DNC ultimately able to tighten the fundraising gap with Republicans?", "question_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX_8", "options": ["By focusing the spotlight on Republican corruption thereby harming their fundraising efforts.", "By hedging bets on illegal fundraising practices.", "By marketing to specific ethnic groups living in the United States.", "By utilizing the exact same playbook Republicans had employed for decades."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author suggest the House of Representatives investigated Newt Gingrich and not Haley Barbour?", "question_unique_id": "20005_QYNINCFX_9", "options": ["Gingrich's violations with GOPAC were far more egregious than Barbour's with the RNC.", "Because of the inherent bias of the media covering such events.", "Because the court of public opinion is so easily swayed by external factors.", "There is no good explanation as campaign finance violations have traditionally been a murky legal area."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "40968", "set_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Desire No More", "year": 1970, "author": "Budrys, Algis", "topic": "PS; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "He had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to\n\n the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself\n\n before....\nDESIRE NO MORE\nby Algis Budrys\n(\nillustrated by Milton Luros\n)\n\"\nDesire no more than to thy lot may fall....\n\"\n—Chaucer\nTHE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n\n\n \"But you've\ngot\nto learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I\n can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n\n\n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n\n\n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n\n\n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of\n his cheeks.\n\n\n His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.\n\n\n \"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"\n\n\n Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"\n\n\n Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow\n pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc\n of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the\n basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine\n semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about\n every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going\n to keep this up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n\n\n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've\n studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish?\n Scared of liberal arts?\"\n\n\n Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that\n Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav—they\n won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in\n themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n\n\n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a\n snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n\n\n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at\n his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't\n convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give\n up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's\n go get some beer.\"\n\n\n The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\"\n he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next\n man.\n\n\n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and\n softly quoted: \n \"Though I go bare, take ye no care,\n I am nothing a-cold;\n I stuff my skin so full within\n Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the\n unfamiliar.\n\n\n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a\n poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.\n\n\n Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's\n not my racket.\"\n\n\n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n \"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n\n\n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhat\n, for Pete's sake? What\nis\nthis crazy specialty that blinds\n you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n\n\n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it\n was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n\n\n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\nTHE\nNAVION\ntook a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked\n upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette\n girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish\n laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that\n sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and\n corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n\n\n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n \"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n\n\n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly\n this low,\" she said, half-frightened.\n\n\n \"\nLow?\nCall\nthis\nlow?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and\n you'll\nreally\nget an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the\n wheel forward, and the\nNavion\ndipped its nose in a shallow dive,\n flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the\n chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the\n protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a\n dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n\n\n \"Marty!\"\n\n\n Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"\n\n\n ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known.\n He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the\n aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands.\n Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare\n you—?\" he asked gently.\n\n\n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n\n\n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n\"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain\n a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew,\n my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten\n years ago. I\ncan't\nget married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week?\n You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only\n smart thing to do is wait a while.\"\n\n\n Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying\n to say.\nWhy\ndo you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't\n you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained\n pilot.\"\n\n\n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense\n from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he\n relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and\n the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would\n not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the\n almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.\n\n\n \"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is\n a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any\n plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing—\nany\nof them—and\n pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as\n good as said so. After that—\" His voice had regained some of its former\n animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've\n told you all this before.\"\n\n\n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to\n her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's\n that\nrocket\npilot business again....\"\n\n\n Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that\nrocket\npilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm\n the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and\n fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math\n than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like\n brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of\nColliers\n, and I—\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged\n again.\n\n\n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job,\n and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a\n long time.\"\n\n\n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there\naren't\nany\n man-carrying rockets.\"\n\n\n \"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.\n\n\n Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.\n\n\n \"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You\n trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n\n\n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the\n shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to\n stop him.\n\n\n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to\n break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose\n candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.\n\n\n \"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \"\nRocket!\nCall that pile\n of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n \"Who cares about the bloody\nmachines\n! If I thought roller-skating\n would get me there, I would have gone to work in a\nrink\nwhen I was\n seventeen! It's\ngetting there\nthat counts! Who gives a good goddam\nhow\nit's done, or what with!\"\n\n\n And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came\n and got her.\n\"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\nThey always begin that way\n, Isherwood thought. The standard medical\n opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything\n he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as\n he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder\n of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen\n hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n\n\n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The\n realization disquieted him a little.\n\n\n \"Think you'll make it?\"\n\n\n Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual\n response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-\nhuh\n.\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n \"Look—you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n\n\n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he\n said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they\n wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n\n\n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The\n Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force\n insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them.\n After all, it's\ntheir\nbeast.\"\n\n\n \"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the\n cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure.\n Bring him on.\"\n\n\n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's—uh—he's in the next room. Okay to ask him\n in right now?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight\n Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\nMacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special\n attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the\n questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could\n see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the\n man's lapel.\n\n\n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\"\n MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.\n\n\n Ish nodded.\n\n\n \"How's that?\"\n\n\n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the\n recorder's benefit.\n\n\n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n\n\n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After\n I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n\n\n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Ahuh.\"\n\n\n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie's face passed no judgements—he simply hunched in his chair,\n seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his\n stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man—only\n a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired\n strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n\n\n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations.\n This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous—red-letter\n dangerous—because of it.\n\n\n \"No family.\"\n\n\n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was\n making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to\n worry about them.\"\n\n\n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought.\n MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression—but it still\n passed no judgements.\n\n\n \"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"\n\n\n Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him—anger, and more\n fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n \"You through with me?\"\n\n\n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a\n parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the\n psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc.\n They did put\nsome\nlearning in my head at college, you know. Therapy,\n hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"\n\n\n Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.\n\n\n \"No. I've\ngot\na job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half\n hour.\n\n\n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll\nonly\nread the literature I've\n given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have\n been cancelled.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this\n nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n\n\n \"But\nnobody\ngoes back.\"\n\n\n \"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but—\" He stopped\n at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The\n reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets\n on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary\n about it. But the room—a big room, he realized—seemed to fade out at\n the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n\n\n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n\n\n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the\nliterature\n...\" She\n swiveled her chair slowly.\n\n\n \"No wings,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her\n forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n\n\n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.\n\n\n \"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected\n gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe,\n and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six\n hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n\n\n \"Who do I see?\"\n\n\n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n\n\n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his\n fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n\n\n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n\n\n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come\n on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm\n with the purpose that drove him.\n\n\n Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk\n button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way\n the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\nTHE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across\n the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n\n\n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm\nvery\nglad to\n meet you!\"\n\n\n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short\n shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n\n\n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the\n Receptionist said from behind her desk.\n\n\n The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n\n\n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n\n\n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the\n preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to\n buckle down to it. Oh, he—shucks?—the Receptionist wasn't such a bad\n girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n\n\n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n\n\n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back\n to the Personnel Manager.\n\n\n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got—\" He stopped to\n look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the\n beast right now.\"\n\n\n \"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n\n\n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your\n problem.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look—you feel you've got a job\n unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face\n it—that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is\n it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted\n your life to.\"\n\n\n Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\"\n he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get\n around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need\n is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week—no picnic, no pleasures of\n the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any\n laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again.\n Then, you can do anything you want to—as long as it doesn't look like\n the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose—\" he began, but Ish\n interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace\n to go. We're built for it. People have to have—but what am I telling\nyou\nfor. If you don't know, who does?\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n\n\n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got\n to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it\n were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether\n you want to stay, after all.\"\n\n\n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having\n actually begged for something.\n\n\n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at\n the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were\n suddenly standing.\n\n\n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.\n\n\n Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by\n cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice.\n The unblinking stars filled the night.\n\n\n He looked around him. The Moon was silent—quiet, patient, waiting.\n Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large\n enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had\n waited.\n\n\n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the\n ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It\n was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the\n years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed\n the\nNavion\nat, that day over the Everglades.\n\n\n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n\n\n The Personnel Manager sighed.\n\n\n \"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It\ncan't\nbe the same. I didn't push the\n beast up here. There wasn't any\nfeel\nto it. There wasn't any sound of\n rockets.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking\n off from the Station, landing here—vacuum.\"\n\n\n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody\n else to hear—and, maybe, maybe there\nwould\nbe. There'd be people,\n back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his\n eyes were shining a little.\n\"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n \"Will you get a\nload\nof this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An\n hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"\n\n\n Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt\n the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and\n feet were very cold.\n\n\n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk\n looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He\n sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n\n\n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n\n\n\n\n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the\n control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and\n began to brake for a landing.\n\n\n\n\n He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left\n any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n\n\n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw\n spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He\n could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking\n crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station\n was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it\n all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press\n representatives out of his way.\nMacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his\n stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled\n a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his\n bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.\n\n\n \"Ish.\"\n\n\n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n\n\n Ish grunted.\n\n\n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n\n\n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to\n explain. \"You were the best there was—but you'd done something to\n yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family.\n You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were\n a rocket pilot—nothing else. You've never read an adult book that\n wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident.\n You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no\n props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong.\nWe couldn't take\n the chance, Ish!\n\"\n\n\n \"So?\"\n\n\n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have\n forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n\n\n He remembered the time with the\nNavion\n, and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n\n\n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know\n what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came\n through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took\n all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday\n trip.\"\n\n\n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n\n\n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that\n comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and\n you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\nNow get out before I kill you.\n\"\n\n\n\n\n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again—he\n died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world\n mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really\n died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an\n observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and\n purposeless eyes.\nTRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\nObvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\nThis etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.\n", "questions": [{"question": "In what part of Marty’s childhood house does the initial conversation between Marty and his father take place?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_1", "options": ["The kitchen", "The living room", "The front porch", "Marty's bedroom"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the result of Mr. Isherwood’s interactions with Marty in the opening scene?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_2", "options": ["After taking the bus to town, Marty realized he needed go home and finish school in order to accomplish his goals.", "Marty ran away from home and lost contact with his family for the rest of his life.", "Marty’s mother had a gigantic fight with Marty’s dad, and they ended up getting a divorce.", "Marty’s father realized how much Marty’s dreams meant to him and decided to support his ambition to be a rocket pilot."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The story describes a flight that Marty went on, accompanied by his girlfriend. What phrase best describes Marty’s behavior during this flight?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_3", "options": ["He was a daredevil obsessed with taking chances. ", "He was focused on the science that could be gained on each flight, instead of Nan's feelings.", "He was a careful flyer who didn’t take chances.", "He was showing off to Nan."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Marty feel about Nan?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_4", "options": ["She's ok until something better comes along.", "He likes her, but he likes flying more.", "He loves her so much that he is willing to give up flying.", "He is only interested in getting sex on demand."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Marty’s dad say in answer to Marge’s question about Marty’s destination when he got on the bus, that foreshadows events at the end of the story?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_5", "options": ["He says, with hatred, that Marty will come to a bad end.", "He says, with admiration, that Marty may end up on the Moon. ", "He says, scornfully, that perhaps he is going to the Moon.", "He says, with sadness, that Marty will come around and understand the need to have a solid trade when he is more mature."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What casually-mentioned, unhealthy habit does Marty have that is highly unlikely in a current day astronaut?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_6", "options": ["He is a workaholic", "A single-minded focus on flying rockets", "Smoking", "Constantly drumming his fingers on the table"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which choice below best describes what Marty was willing to give up to achieve his life’s ambition?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_7", "options": ["Everything.", "A relationship with his parents.", "Having children.", "Smoking."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where were Marty’s start and end point for his space flight?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_8", "options": ["The flight started on Earth and ended up on a space station.", "The flight started on Earth and ended up on the Moon.", "The flight started on the Moon and ended up on Earth.", "The flight started on a space station and ended up on the Moon."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What similarities do we see between Marty and his father in the story?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_9", "options": ["Both fall short of their ultimate dreams, but still find happiness.", "Both enjoy relaxing over the Sunday papers.", "Both are completely irresponsible.", "Both have personalities that are full of anger, expressed or otherwise."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Did Marty’s answer to his questions satisfy Mackenzie?", "question_unique_id": "40968_E97N5FJE_10", "options": ["Mackenzie cleared Marty to fly.", "Mackenzie thought Marty was completely unstable and sent him to a mental institution.", "Mackenzie thought that Marty was in good mental condition for a short trip, but not the long one that had been planned.", "Mackenzie knew that Marty was lying about being OK and grounded him."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/0/9/6/40968//40968-h//40968-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63521", "set_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Raiders of the Second Moon", "year": 1958, "author": "Wells, Basil", "topic": "PS; Adventure stories; Science fiction; Satellites -- Fiction; Short stories", "article": "Raiders of the Second Moon\nBy GENE ELLERMAN\nA strange destiny had erased Noork's memory,\n\n and had brought him to this tiny world—to\n\n write an end to his first existence.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBeyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray\n volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us.\n But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by\n Luna's bulk, we know little.\n\n\n Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in\n diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its\n meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk,\n life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval\n lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the\n starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.\n\n\n In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called\n Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the\n trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned\n girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a\n sheathed dagger.\n\n\n Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine\n contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the\n insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration.\n Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged\n cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest,\n and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had\n confirmed that belief.\n\n\n For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of\n the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour\n the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death\n of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the\n words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated\n them aloud.\n\n\n \"New York,\" he said, \"good ol' New York.\"\n\n\n The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going\n back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow\n and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle\n giant. Noork grinned.\n\n\n \"Tako, woman,\" he greeted her.\n\n\n \"Tako,\" she replied fearfully. \"Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you\n hunter or escaped slave?\"\n\n\n \"A friend,\" said Noork simply. \"It was I who killed the spotted\nnarl\nlast night when it attacked you.\"\n\n\n Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never\n far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.\n\n\n Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder\n of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.\n\n\n \"Your hair is the color of the sun!\" she said. \"Your garb is Vasad, yet\n you speak the language of the true men.\" Her violet oddly slanting eyes\n opened yet wider. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am Noork,\" the man told her. \"For many days have I dwelt among the\n wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for\n my friend.\"\n\n\n The girl impulsively took a step nearer. \"Gurn!\" she cried. \"Is he tall\n and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with\n human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?\"\n\n\n \"That is Gurn,\" admitted Noork shortly. \"He is also an exile from the\n walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told\n me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?\"\n\n\n \"Indeed I do,\" cried Sarna. \"My brother said that we should no longer\n make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys.\"\n\n\n Noork smiled. \"I am glad he is your brother,\" he said simply.\nThe girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded\n into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.\n\n\n \"Brown-skinned one!\" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little\n sandalled foot. \"I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will\n listen to it no more.\"\n\n\n But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned\n giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....\n\n\n The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along\n the game-trail. \"When my captors were but one day's march from their\n foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose\n fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.\n\n\n \"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned\n toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where\n our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of\n Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I\n alone escaped.\"\n\n\n Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath\n at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper\n of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the\n mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.\n\n\n \"Some day,\" he said reflectively, \"I am going to visit the island of\n the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I\n have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to\n your city of Grath....\" He smiled.\n\n\n The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer\n speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He\n turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive\n reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of\n the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm,\n numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.\n\n\n One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with,\n Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once\n there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down\n at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.\nNoork\nAt first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no\n stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse\n of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all\n too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the\n Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied\n with the mud of the trail.\n\n\n Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain\n was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He\n climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe\n fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of\n the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.\n\n\n A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread\n and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork\n found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose\n arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of\n superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads\n vanished.\n\n\n These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They\n were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He\n strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him,\n and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.\n\n\n And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the\n jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of\n this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.\n\n\n A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the\n fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath\n them. His lip curled at what he saw.\n\n\n The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as\n that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating\n in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face\n was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular\n design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons\n were two long knives and a club.\n\n\n \"So,\" said Noork, \"the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And\n the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like\n this.\"\n\n\n Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down\n the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its\n unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the\n stains from the dead man's foggy robe.\n\n\n The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the\n drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.\nUd tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from\n shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy.\n For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and\n the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal\n war.\n\n\n A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no\n enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.\n\n\n \"You hunt too near the lake,\" called a voice. \"The demons of the water\n will trap you.\"\n\n\n Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled\n with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.\n\n\n \"It's Noork,\" he grunted. \"Why do I not see you?\"\n\n\n \"I have stolen the skin of a demon,\" answered the invisible man. \"Go to\n Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones\n can be trapped and skinned.\"\n\n\n \"Why you want their skins?\" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.\n\n\n \"Go to save Gurn's ...\" and here Noork was stumped for words. \"To save\n his father's woman woman,\" he managed at last. \"Father's woman woman\n called Sarna.\"\n\n\n And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the\n marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the\n jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake\n of Uzdon.\n\n\n To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle\n fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that\n the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered\n brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men\n could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.\n\n\n But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths\n of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the\n other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the\n golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.\n\n\n The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork,\n the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land\n of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the\n same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and\n perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.\n\n\n So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich—whose memory was\n gone completely—again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last\n of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired\n young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden\n valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled\n structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the\n second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end.\n The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this\n little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.\n\n\n The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist\n preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the\n lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but\n Dietrich's spacer had crashed.\n\n\n Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads\n had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its\n crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.\nNoork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight\n shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could\n not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly\n blade well.\n\n\n After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding\n cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the\n roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's\n edge.\n\n\n Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a\n smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to\n the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal\n branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of\n a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.\n\n\n He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps\n half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of\n bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!\n\n\n Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty\n One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a\n comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.\n\n\n \"The new slave,\" a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, \"is the\n daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant.\"\n\n\n Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's\n name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty\n Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together\n beneath his tree.\n\n\n \"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon,\" the slighter of the\n two slaves, his hair almost white, said. \"If she be chosen for the\n sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than\n another's.\"\n\n\n \"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful,\" complained the\n younger slave, \"that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful\n woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled dryly. \"If your wife be plain,\" he said, \"neither\n master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a\n good woman—and ugly, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Some night,\" snarled the slave, \"I'm going over the wall. Even the\n Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake.\"\n\n\n \"Silence,\" hissed the white-haired man. \"Such talk is madness. We are\n safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island\n of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions,\n are not unkind.\n\n\n \"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold,\" he finished, \"and I will\n complete my checking of the gardens.\"\n\n\n Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the\n tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back,\n and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles\n that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made\n clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.\n\"Continue to work,\" he said to the young man. \"Do not be too surprised\n at what I am about to tell you, Rold.\" He paused and watched the golden\n man's rather stupid face intently.\n\n\n \"I am not a Misty One,\" Noork said. \"I killed the owner of this strange\n garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the\n girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke.\"\n\n\n Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.\n \"The Misty Ones, then,\" he said slowly, \"are not immortal demons!\" He\n nodded his long-haired head. \"They are but men. They too can die.\"\n\n\n \"If you will help me, Rold,\" said Noork, \"to rescue the girl and escape\n from the island I will take you along.\"\n\n\n Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his\n people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would\n welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from\n the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for\n helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.\n\n\n \"I will help you, stranger,\" he agreed.\n\n\n \"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where\n Tholon Sarna is held.\"\n\n\n The slave's fingers flew. \"All the young female slaves are caged\n together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly\n overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to\n mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the\n next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great\n Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast.\" The slave's\n mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.\n\n\n \"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female\n slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple\n pits.\"\n\n\n \"It is enough,\" said Noork. \"I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared\n to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well.\"\n\n\n \"If you are captured,\" cried Rold nervously, \"you will not tell them I\n talked with you?\"\n\n\n Noork laughed. \"You never saw me,\" he told the slave.\nThe skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the\n eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of\n rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for\n windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at\n three distinct levels.\n\n\n Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps\n that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and\n purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and\n feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the\n squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs\n fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing\n golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the\n brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast\n men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.\n\n\n Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were\n stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the\n Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another\n of their number.\n\n\n He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the\n jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose\n rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the\n central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly\n worked metal—gold, silver and brass—vied with the faded garish\n colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed\n two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the\n wolf-headed shape a female.\n\n\n These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura\n worshipped—mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!\n\n\n Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central\n ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower\n pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two\n upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty\n Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to\n the slaves and common citizens of the island.\n\n\n As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his\n sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it\n there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight\n of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two\n short swords rose to bar his way.\n\n\n \"None are to pass save the priests,\" spoke a voice from nowhere\n gruffly. \"The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the\n most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the\n sacrifice is chosen.\"\n\n\n Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew\n his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.\n\n\n In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor\n sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and\n shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward\n impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his\n left.\n\n\n His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony\n structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his\n hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning\n gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon\n it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.\n\n\n The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the\n shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully.\n For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction\n of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then\n they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to\n blood-slippery step.\n\n\n The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the\n same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man\n with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more.\n He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a\n half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.\n\n\n In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging\n out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle\n on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion\n of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.\n\n\n So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that\n had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to\n battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.\n\n\n He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two\n warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous\n gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes.\n Noork grinned.\n\n\n From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not\n snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed\n to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would\n not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the\n room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged\n into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer\n here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.\n\n\n Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the\n others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two\n others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.\n\n\n The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies\n from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the\n chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the\n stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl,\n was held prisoner.\nThe steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water\n dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two\n sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was\n walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and\n toward this Noork made his way.\n\n\n He stood beside the door. \"Sarna,\" he called softly, \"Tholon Sarna.\"\n\n\n There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland\n by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the\n rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple\n skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the\n mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's\n valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and\n confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope\n hide.\n\n\n One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the\n metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined\n the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive\n timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a\n prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.\n\n\n \"It is Noork,\" he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go\n wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.\n\n\n \"The priest,\" hissed the girl.\n\n\n Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the\n spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he\n faced the burly priest of the Skull.\n\n\n Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield\n of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as\n he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.\n\n\n \"So,\" he said, \"to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do\n not trust your guards, then.\"\n\n\n The priest laughed. \"We also have robes of invisibility,\" he said, \"and\n the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes.\" He snarled suddenly at the\n silent figure of the white man. \"Down on your knees, guard, and show me\n your face before I kill you!\"\n\n\n Noork raised his sword. \"Take my hood off if you dare, priest,\" he\n offered.\n\n\n The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of\n his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the\n velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from\n the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that\n drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.\n\n\n The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He\n was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white\n man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so\n his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed\n body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the\n slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.\n\n\n The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple,\n and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch\n so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his\n mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful\n whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the\n main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his\n enemy.\n\n\n Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the\n sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork\n leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a\n moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.\n\n\n Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms.\n Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and\n slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.\n\n\n \"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?\" Noork asked tensely.\n\n\n \"No,\" came the girl's low voice, \"I do not think so. I did not know\n that this priest was here until he appeared behind you.\" A slow smile\n crossed Noork's hidden features. \"His robe must be close by,\" he told\n the girl. \"He must have been stationed here because the priests feared\n the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners.\"\n\n\n Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched\n the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway\n entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the\n priest \"Uzdon's window\" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the\n new robe.\n\n\n \"My own robe is slit in a dozen places,\" he explained to the girl's\n curious violet eyes—-all that was visible through the narrow vision\n slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the\n girl's hand.\n\n\n \"Come,\" he said, \"let us escape over the wall before the alarm is\n given.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was the girl's top garment made of?", "question_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY_1", "options": ["Woven cotton grown in the lush, well-watered valleys of Sekk.", "The girl's people customarily knitted briefs and halters from the local sheep-like creatures.", "A piece of skin from an animal.", "A piece of skin stripped from an enemy tribesman before he died."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Noork grin when he found the ripe fruit in the tree that he climbed to escape his pursuers?", "question_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY_2", "options": ["Noork wanted to give some of the fruit to Sarna the next time they met.", "The soft pulp would adhere to invisibility cloaks and give him an advantage.", "He was very hungry, and the fruit was a good source of energy.", "Noork knew that the Misty Ones were fond of the fruit, and giving them some would be a good way to avoid a fight."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What relationship between Gurn and Sarna is Noork trying to convey by referring to her as “Gurn’s father’s woman woman”?", "question_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY_3", "options": ["He is trying to say that she is Gurn's sister.", "He means that she is Gurn's father's mistress, but Gurn is in love with her.", "He is trying to say that she is the second wife of Gurn's father.", "He means that she is Gurn's father's sister's daughter, i.e. they are cousins."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Noork get to Sekk?", "question_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY_4", "options": ["He was on a scientific mission to Sekk, and a large, predatory bird that lives in the jungle valleys snatched him to take him back as food for its young, but it dropped him.", "He was on a short-run tourist ship for a day trip from Luna to Sekk, but the ship crashed and stranded him there.", "He was dropped off to start a new life by the giant bird called the Phoenix by most indigenous cultures, after he died in a fire.", "He came in the second of two rockets made by a war criminal that Noork had been pursuing on Earth, but the ship crashed and stranded him there."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the men conversing about the girl, while Noork listens, is content to be a slave?", "question_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY_5", "options": ["The slave who we later learn is named Rold.", "The elderly slave.", "The Vasad weeding the field.", "Tholon Sarna."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "By when does Noork need to rescue Sarna to prevent her death?", "question_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY_6", "options": ["Noork has plenty of time to make a good plan, because the offering will be selected at high noon of the first day after the full moon, and the moon is only a crescent right now.", "Before noon of that same day, when a girl will be selected as an offering.", "Noork has no more than an hour to rescue her because conditions in the pit are so horrible.", "Before the sun rises on the day after the perfect girl is selected as an offering - assuming that Sarna is that perfect girl."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the significance of the carvings on the altar in the temple?", "question_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY_7", "options": ["The two statues represent the gods worshipped by the locals.", "As in Rome, where the she-wolf that raised the mythological twins Romulus and Remus was revered, here, a lion and a wolf were revered.", "The lion represents Luna, and the wolf represents the changing phases of Luna.", "The lion and wolf together represent the religious concept of peace through power."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did the second of the two men blocking Noork’s entrance to the pit die?", "question_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY_8", "options": ["He didn't die, but Noork knocked him out and he was out of the fight.", "He bled to death after Noork swung his sword and made a deep cut at the base of his neck.", "His neck was broken by the tumble down the staircase, entangled with Noork.", "His cervical spine was broken by Noork."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was wrong with the prone guard making weird noises who was in the room Noork first entered after reaching the lower level of the Skull? ", "question_unique_id": "63521_7ASER8NY_9", "options": ["We can infer that he was snoring.", "We can infer that he was a member of a different race, and he spoke a language of burbles and snorts.", "We can infer that he was bleeding out from having his throat cut.", "We can infer that he was raping one of the slave girls in a noisy fashion."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/5/2/63521//63521-h//63521-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61048", "set_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Girls from Fieu Dayol", "year": 1950, "author": "Young, Robert F.", "topic": "PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories", "article": "The Girls From Fieu Dayol\nBy ROBERT F. YOUNG\nThey were lovely and quick\n\n to learn—and their only\n\n faults were little ones!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nUp until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's\nHistory of English Literature\n, Herbert Quidley's penchant for old\n books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue.\n Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the\n background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.\n\n\n On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy\n paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:\nasdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\n Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu\n Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo—te bijk weil en snoll doper—Klio,\n asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\nSince when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back\n in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine?\n Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into\n the literature section.\n\n\n He had just taken down Xenophon's\nAnabasis\nwhen he saw the girl walk\n in the door.\n\n\n Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on\n Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old\n paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he\n liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way\n Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and\n started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and\n liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would\n have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris\n wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.\n\n\n After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's\n desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered\n his eyes to the\nAnabasis\nand henceforth followed her progress out of\n their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book\n and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the\n P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused\n again and took down Taine's\nHistory of English Literature\n.\n\n\n He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an\n interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library\n were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the\n volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it\n with the air of a seasoned browser.\n\n\n Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected\n another—seemingly at random—and took it over to the librarian's desk.\n She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked\n it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night.\n As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took\n Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark\n was gone.\n\n\n He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines\n of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was\n it merely what it appeared to be on the surface—the efforts of an\n impatient typing student to type before his time?\n\n\n He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that\n the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The\n name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had\n contained the word \"Cai\", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got\n \"Kai\"—or \"Kay\". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and\n had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream\n of borrowing.\n\n\n By whom—her boy friend?\n\n\n Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the\n presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but\n because the term itself brought to mind the word \"fiance,\" and the word\n \"fiance\" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him\n violently. I.e., \"marriage\". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's\nHistory\nunder observation for a while.\nHer boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend\n turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of\n her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading\n table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine,\nThe Zeitgeist\n, Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route\n to the shelf where Taine's\nHistory\nreposed, take the volume down,\n surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages\n and return it to the shelf.\n\n\n After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second\n message. It was as unintelligible as the first:\nasdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe\n wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig\n toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling—Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf\n ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj\nWell, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai\n was, and he knew—from the reappearance of the words\nwotnid\n,\nFieu\n Dayol\nand\nsnoll doper\n—that the two communications were in the\n same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last\n word—\nYoolna\n—was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that\n she was a different person from the\nKlio\nwhose name had appended the\n first message.\n\n\n He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book\n to the shelf and went back to the reading table and\nThe Zeitgeist\n.\n\n\n Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning\n to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till\n tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same\n tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by\n chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same\n undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out\n the door, he was not far behind her.\n\n\n She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It\n took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her.\n When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an\n all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a\n matter of following her inside.\n\n\n He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead\n before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple.\n First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you\n situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the\n nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and\n after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till\n he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar.\n When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a\n way that some of its contents spilled on her lap—\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" he said, righting it. \"Here, let me brush it off.\"\n\"It's all right, it's only sugar,\" she said, laughing.\n\n\n \"I'm hopelessly clumsy,\" he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming\n crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.\n \"I beseech you to forgive me.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgiven,\" she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a\n slight accent.\n\n\n \"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the\n bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place.\" He pulled out his wallet,\n chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her—\nHerbert Quidley:\nProfiliste\nHer forehead crinkled. \"\nProfiliste?\n\"\n\n\n \"I paint profiles with words,\" he said. \"You may have run across some\n of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms,\n of course.\"\n\n\n \"How interesting.\" She pronounced it \"anteresting.\"\n\n\n \"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my\n fancy.\" He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a\n dainty sip. \"You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss—\"\n\n\n \"Smith. Kay Smith.\" She set the cup back on the counter and turned and\n faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied\n his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly\n clear—and suddenly cold—blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished\n when she said, \"Would you really consider word-painting\nmy\nprofile,\n Mr. Quidley?\"\nWould\nhe! \"When can I call?\"\n\n\n She hesitated for a moment. Then: \"I think it will be better if I call\n on you. There are quite a number of people living in our—our house.\n I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like\n yourself to concentrate.\"\n\n\n Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a\n week, to reach the apartment phase. \"Fine,\" he said. \"When can I expect\n you?\"\n\n\n She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller\n than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels,\n she'd have been taller than he was. \"I'll be in town night after next,\"\n she said. \"Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly.\"\n\n\n \"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley.\"\n\n\n He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually\n did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his\n custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in\n his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as\n usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title,\nSelf\n Profile\n, nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better\n Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid\n array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit,\n occupying a two-page spread.\n\n\n It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the\n first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of\n paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an\n advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he\n went to bed.\nIn telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had\n unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages\n until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the\n library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment\n for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table\n post and took up\nThe Zeitgeist\nonce again.\n\n\n He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.\n\n\n And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and\n graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy\n section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the\n literature aisle and toward the T's....\n\n\n The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:\nfdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind\n en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll\n doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!—Gorka. fdsa\n jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;\nJudging from the repeated use of the words,\nsnoll dopers\nwere the\n topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the\n book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.\n\n\n He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what\n a\nsnoll doper\nwas; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur\n secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged.\n It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course,\n they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be\n quixotic enough to employ Taine's\nHistory of English Literature\nas a\n communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and\n a mailbox on every corner?\n\n\n Somehow the words \"what on earth foreign organization\" got turned\n around in his mind and became \"what foreign organization on earth\" and\n before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced\n a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his\n normal self again.\n\n\n He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his\n shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and\n looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything\n was—the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk,\n with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books\n stacked imposingly nearby;\nHarper's\n,\nThe Atlantic\nand\nThe Saturday\n Review\nshowing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened\n bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the\n small table set cozily for two—\nThe chimes sounded again. He opened the door.\n\n\n She walked in with a demure, \"Hello.\" He took her wrap. When he saw\n what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes\n wouldn't fall out of their sockets.\n\n\n Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her\n long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though\n she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts\n before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting\n position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer;\n arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.\n\n\n He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She\n followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the\n bottle. \"Say when.\" \"When!\" \"I admire your dress—never saw anything\n quite like it.\" \"Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it.\"\n \"It's—it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?\" \"Thanks.... Is\n something wrong, Mr. Quidley?\" \"No, of course not. Why?\" \"Your hands\n are trembling.\" \"Oh. I'm—I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss\n Smith.\" \"Call me Kay.\"\n\n\n They touched glasses: \"Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room,\n Herbert. I shall have to come here more often.\" \"I hope you will, Kay.\"\n \"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet\n Earth.\" \"Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely.\" \"Thank\n you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too\n far away.... There!\" \"It's—it's as lovely as your hair, Kay.\" \"Um,\n kiss me again.\" \"I—I never figured—I mean, I engaged a caterer to\n serve us dinner at 9:30.\" \"Call him up. Make it 10:30.\"\nThe following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The\nsnoll-doper\nmystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next\n message transfer took place.\n\n\n He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he\n intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted\n mentally, of course—notes were for the hacks and the other commercial\n non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes,\n he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure\n flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision:\n the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful\n characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque\n heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever\n done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the\n bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was\n on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior....\nCut\n to interior.\nFIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any\n more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You\n don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran\n out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that\n my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK\n CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell\n me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of—\n\n\n ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....\n\n\n Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to\n form:\na;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing?\n Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind\n ed, olro—Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj\nQuidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle\n and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay\n doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her\n correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl\n scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges\n in communications!\n\n\n You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.\n\n\n Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the\nsnoll-doper\nenigma. The\n fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a\nsnoll doper\n,\n for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an\n H-bomb.\n\n\n He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak\n English if her own language ran something like \"\nist ifedereret, hid\n jestig snoll doper adwo\n?\"\n\n\n He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.\n\n\n He remembered the material of her dress.\n\n\n He remembered how she had come to his room.\n\n\n \"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine.\"\nHer voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right\n beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes\n became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort,\n he pulled himself back. \"You're early tonight,\" he said lamely.\n\n\n She appropriated the message, read it. \"Put the book back,\" she said\n presently. Then, when he complied: \"Come on.\"\n\n\n \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to deliver a\nsnoll doper\nto Jilka. After that I'm going to\n take you home to meet my folks.\"\n\n\n The relieved sigh he heard was his own.\n\n\n They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line\n of cars. \"How long have you been reading my mail?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Since the night before I met you.\"\n\n\n \"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?\"\n\n\n \"Part of the reason,\" he said. \"What's a\nsnoll doper\n?\"\n\n\n She laughed. \"I don't think I'd better tell you just yet.\"\n\n\n He sighed again. \"But if Jilka wanted a\nsnoll doper\n,\" he said after a\n while, \"why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?\"\n\n\n \"Regulations.\" She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick\n apartment building. \"This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get\n back.\"\n\n\n He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let\n herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and\n exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks.\n So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd\n been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up\n Earth—\n\n\n Her\nfolks\n!\n\n\n Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he\n sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car\n when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't\n solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a\n complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play\n along with her.\nA station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed\n with theirs. \"Someone's following us,\" Quidley said.\n\n\n \"Probably Jilka.\"\n\n\n Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and\n disappeared. \"She's no longer with us,\" Quidley said.\n\n\n \"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later.\"\n\n\n \"At your folks'?\"\n\n\n \"At the ship.\"\n\n\n The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible\n in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:\n \"What ship?\" he said.\n\n\n \"The one we're going to\nFieu Dayol\non.\"\n\n\n \"\nFieu Dayol?\n\"\n\n\n \"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my\n folks, didn't I?\"\n\n\n \"In other words, you're kidnapping me.\"\n\n\n She shook her head vehemently. \"I most certainly am not! Neither\n according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you\n made yourself liable in the eyes of both.\"\n\n\n \"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on\nFieu Dayol\n. Why\n don't you marry one of them?\"\n\n\n \"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised\n me. Two, there are\nnot\nplenty of men on\nFieu Dayol\n. Our race is\n identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the\n sexes. At periodic intervals the women on\nFieu Dayol\nso greatly\n outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and\n emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for\nwotnids\n—or\n mates—on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a\n matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures\n to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar\n statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and\n forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate\n the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to\n it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own.\"\n\n\n \"But why were all the messages addressed to you?\"\n\n\n \"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock\n girl.\"\nApril fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway.\n Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they\n bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. \"Here we are,\" she\n said.\n\n\n Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its\n background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he\n hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an\n open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.\n\n\n Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down\n the rutted road. \"Jilka,\" Kay said. \"I wonder if she got him.\"\n\n\n Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her—a rather\n woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed.\n Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and\n disappear into the ship.\n\n\n \"Next,\" Kay said.\n\n\n Quidley shook his head. \"You're not taking\nme\nto another planet!\"\n\n\n She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object \"A\n little while ago you asked me what a\nsnoll doper\nwas,\" she said.\n \"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of\n marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform\n to the sexual mores of their own societies.\" She did something to the\n object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.\n \"\nThis\nis a\nsnoll doper\n.\"\n\n\n She prodded his ribs. \"March,\" she said.\n\n\n He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for\n a better look at the object pressed against his back.\n\n\n It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.\n", "questions": [{"question": "With what body of literature does the author expect the reader to be familiar in order to understand his reference to Helen of Troy?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_1", "options": ["Ancient Greek literature, which he assumes will be familiar to every well-educated reader.", "German literature, because Quidley recognized the similarities of the messages to the German language.", "It doesn’t actually pertain to literature, it pertains to Helen Mirren, the English actress who portrayed famous characters from English literature.", "English literature, which is why it is significant that the messages were hidden in Taine’s  History of English Literature."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How could Quidley’s attitude about the opposite sex best be described?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_2", "options": ["He loved women and was trying to find the perfect one to start a family with.", "He was a skirt-chaser uninterested in long-term commitment.", "He thought women made much better friends than men.", "He was indifferent to women, focusing his energy on his research and writing."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Quidley do for a living?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_3", "options": ["He is a highly successful writer who recently published a best-selling epic novel.", "He is a dilettante who writes an occasional piece for a magazine, but subsists mainly on funds provided by his family.", "He is a professor of the history of English literature.", "He is a librarian, which gives him access to many obscure works about literature."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Quidley and Kay compare in size?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_4", "options": ["Quidley appeared shorter, but only because Kay was wearing stiletto heels.", "Quidley was shorter.", "Kay was shorter.", "Quidley and Kay were the same height."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is different about the third message that Quidley intercepts compared to the first two?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_5", "options": ["The first two messages were on yellow paper, while the third message was on white typing bond paper.", "The first two messages were written in italics, and the third message was plain text. ", "The first two messages have one set of repeated letters at the start and end, while the third one has a different set of repeated letters.", "The first two messages were folded into quarters, while the third message was just a doubled piece of paper."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the below is the best description of Kay’s tresses, as Quidley saw it?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_6", "options": ["They were short and stuck out every which way, as if they had been confined beneath a hat.", "They were curly and a lustrous dark black color.", "They smelled like a flower-scented shampoo.", "They were the same color as her eyes."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What it is the first strong clue to the reader that Kay and her friends might actually be aliens?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_7", "options": ["Quidley ponders what kind of association would have the kind of code he observed and in playing with the word order of a cliched phrase, generates the idea that it could be emissaries from a government not on this planet.", "The mere fact that the girl is in the literature section of a library is suspicious.", "Kay’s highly sensual come-on to Quidley the first time she goes to his place is very alien.", "It’s not normal for a girl to drive herself home in a convertible at night."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Kay taking Quidley as a mate particularly ironic in this story?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_8", "options": ["Because Quidley is clearly not the marrying kind.", "Because Quidley hates to travel and now he was going to have to go a long way from home.", "Because she was not really his type, yet he fell for her anyway.", "Because she is actually the perfect mate for him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were Kay and her friends passing notes back and forth in the library book by Taine?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_9", "options": ["Kay was responsible for providing a pool of men to take back to her planet.", "Kay and the other women were looking for secretarial jobs, and were critiquing each other’s typing skills.", "Kay and the other women were rating the men they had dated.", "Kay and the other women were using the coded notes the same way Quidley used “Operation-Spill-the-Sugar” – as a pick-up method to attract men’s attention."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Kay’s mission on Earth?", "question_unique_id": "61048_O2EN0XO5_10", "options": ["She came to round up men who were aberrant or useless on Earth and take them back to her planet as husbands.", "She came as part of an advance guard to assess the intelligence and capabilities of humans.", "She came to learn about human culture and take the best aspects of it back to her planet.", "She came to share the Good News about Second Coming, which has taken place on Fieu Dayol."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/0/4/61048//61048-h//61048-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61397", "set_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Faces Outside", "year": 1986, "author": "McAllister, Bruce", "topic": "Science fiction; Short stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; PS", "article": "THE FACES OUTSIDE\nBY BRUCE McALLISTER\nThey were all that was left of\n\n humanity—if they were still human!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI wanted to call her Soft Breast, because she is soft when I hold her\n to me. But the Voice told me to call her Diane. When I call her Diane,\n I have a pleasant feeling, and she seems closer to me. She likes the\n name \"Diane\". The Voice knew what was best, of course, as it always\n does.\n\n\n I must mate with her every day, when the water is brightest. The Voice\n says so. It also says that I am in a \"tank\", and that the water is\n brightest when the \"sun\" is over the \"tank\". I do not understand the\n meaning of \"sun\", but the Voice says that \"noon\" is when the \"Sun\" is\n over the \"tank\". I must mate with Diane every \"noon\".\n\n\n I\ndo\nknow what the \"tank\" is. It is a very large thing filled with\n water, and having four \"corners\", one of which is the Cave where\n Diane and I sleep when the water is black like the ink of the squid\n and cold like dead fish. But we stay warm. There is the \"floor\" of\n the \"tank\", the \"floor\" being where all the rock and seaweed is, with\n all the crawling fish and crabs, where Diane and I walk and sleep.\n There are four \"sides\". \"Sides\" are smooth and blue walls, and have\n \"view-ports\"—round, transparent areas—on them. The Voice says that\n the things in the \"view-ports\" are Faces. I have a face, as does Diane.\n But the cracked, flat things with small lights circling about them\n are not pretty like Diane's face. The Voice says that the Faces have\n bodies, like myself, and Diane. No body could be like Diane's. I think\n I should be quite sick if I saw the bodies of the Faces.\n\n\n The Voice then says that the Faces are watching us, as we sometimes\n watch the porpoises. It took a very long time to grow used to having\n the Faces watch us, as Diane and I came together, but we learned to do\n it as simply as we swim and sleep.\n\n\n But Diane does not have babies. I am very sad when I see the porpoises\n and whales with their young. Diane and I sleep together in the Cave;\n Diane is very warm and soft. We sleep in happiness, but when we are\n awake, we are lonely. I question the Voice about a baby for Diane, but\n the Voice is always silent.\n\n\n I grow to hate the Faces in the \"view-ports\". They are always watching,\n watching. The Voice says that they are enemies, and bad. The Faces have\n not tried to hurt me: but I must think of them as enemies because the\n Voice says so. I ask bad, like the shark? The Voice says, no, worse\n than the sharks and eels. It says that the Faces are evil.\n\n\n The \"tank\" must be high, because the water is high. I have gone once\n to the surface, and, although I could get used to it, the light was\n too much for my eyes. It took me two hundred and seventy kicks to the\n surface; it took me three thousand steps from our Cave to the opposite\n \"side\". The \"tank\" is very large, otherwise the whales would not be\n happy.\n\n\n The fish are many, but the dangers are few. I have seen the sharks\n kill. But the shark does not come near me if I see it and am afraid.\n Sometimes I have caught it sneaking up behind me, but when I turn it\n leaves quickly. I have questioned the Voice about why the sharks leave.\n It does not know. It has no one to ask.\nToday the \"sun\" must be very large, or powerful, or bright, because the\n water is brighter than most days.\n\n\n When I awoke Diane was not beside me. The rock of the Cave is jagged,\n so as I make my way from our bed of cool and slick seaweed, toward the\n entrance, I scrape my leg on the fifth kick. Not much blood comes from\n the cut. That is fortunate, because when there is blood the sharks come.\n\n\n Diane has grabbed the tail of a porpoise, and both are playing. Diane\n and I love the porpoises. Sometimes we can even hear their thoughts.\n They are different from the other fish; they are more like us. But they\n have babies and we do not.\n\n\n Diane sees me and, wanting to play, swims behind a rock and looks back,\n beckoning. I make a grab at her as I sneak around the rock. But she\n darts upward, toward the surface, where her body is a shadow of beauty\n against the lighter water above her. I follow her, but she ducks and I\n sail past her. Diane pulls up her legs, knees under her chin, and puts\n her arms around them. She then drops like a rock toward the \"floor\".\n\n\n I have caught a porpoise by his top fin. He knows my wish, so he speeds\n toward Diane, circles her and butts her soft thighs with his snout. She\n laughs, but continues to stay in a ball, her black hair waving. She is\n very beautiful.\n\n\n I try to pry her arms from around her legs gently, but she resists. I\n must use force. Diane does not mind when I do; because she knows I love\n her.\n\n\n I pull her arms away, and slip my arms under hers, kissing her on the\n lips for a long time. Struggling to free herself, laughing again, she\n pokes me sharply with her elbow and escapes my arms. I am surprised.\n She quickly puts her arms around my neck, pulls herself to my back and\n links her slim legs around my middle. She is pretending that I am a\n porpoise. I laugh. She pinches me to go ahead. I swim upward, but her\n thoughts tell me she wants to go to the Cave.\n\n\n I understand. I carry her through the water very slowly, feeling the\n warmth and nipples of her breasts pressed against my back as she rests\n her head on my shoulder and smiles.\n\n\n The Faces continue to stare. Many times I have searched for a word to\n show my hatred for them. I shall find it somehow, though. Sooner or\n later.\n\"What count of planets had the Terrans infested?\" The furry humanoid\n leaned over the desk and stared, unblinking, at the lesser humanoid in\n the only other chair in the room. His gaze was dropped as he scratched\n informally at the heavy fur at his wrist. He raised his gaze again.\n\n\n \"Forty-three is the count,\nbeush\n,\" replied the other.\n\n\n \"And the count of planets destroyed?\"\n\n\n \"Forty-three planetoid missiles were sent and detonated simultaneously\n without resistance or losses on our part,\nbeush\n,\" the assistant\nbeush\nanswered indirectly.\n\n\n The room was hot, so the\nbeush\nlazily passed his hand over a faintly\n glowing panel.\n\n\n The room was cooled, and a large-eyed female with silky, ochrous\n fur—very desirable to the majority of humanoids—entered with two\n flared glasses of an odorless, transparent liquid—very desirable\n to the majority of humanoids. The lesser humanoid was being treated\n exceptionately well.\n\n\n The room was momentarily silent as the two sipped at their drinks with\n black lips. The\nbeush\n, as customary, spoke first. \"Inform me of the\n pre-espionage intelligence accomplishments contra-Energi. I have not\n been previously informed. Do not spare the details.\"\n\n\n \"Of certainty,\nbeush\n,\" began the assistant with all the grace of an\n informer. \"The Light and Force Research of the Energi is executed in\n one center of one planet, the planet being Energa, as our intelligence\n service has conveniently listed it. The Energi have negative necessity\n for secrecy in their Light and Force Research, because, first, all\n centers are crusted and protected by Force Domes. Second, it is near\n impossibility that one could so self-disguise that he would negatively\n be detectable.\" He hesitated.\n\n\n \"And these Energi,\" queried the\nbeush\n, \"are semi-telepathic or\n empathic?\"\n\n\n \"Affirmative,\" the assistant mumbled.\n\n\n \"Then you have there a third reason,\" offered the\nbeush\n.\n\n\n \"Graces be given you,\nbeush\n.\"\n\n\n The\nbeush\nnodded in approval. \"Continue, but negatively hesitate\n frequently or it will be necessary to discuss this subject\n post-present.\"\nHis assistant trembled slightly. \"Unequivocally affirmative.\nBeush\n,\n your memory relates that five periods ante-present, when there\n existed the Truce inter Energi, Terrans and ourselves, there was a\n certain period during which gifts of the three nucleus-planets were\n exchanged in friendship. The Terrans were self-contented to donate\n to the Energi an immense 'aquarium'—an 'aquarium' consisting of a\n partly transparent cell in which was placed a collection of Terran\n life-forms that breathed their oxygen from the dense atmosphere of\n Terran seas. But, as a warpspace message from the Terran Council\n indirectly proclaimed, the degenerate Terrans negatively possessed\n a ship of any Space type large or powerful enough to transport the\n 'aquarium' to Energa. Our ships being the largest of the Truce, we\n were petitioned by the Terrans to transport it. These events developed\n before the Terrans grew pestiferous to our cause. We obliged, but even\n our vastest ship was slow, because the physical power necessary to\n bring the weight of the cell through warpspace quickly was too great\n for the solitary four generators. It was imperative that the trip be on\n a longer trajectory arranged through norm-space. During the duration\n of the trip, feelings of suspicion arose inter Three Truce Races.\n As your memory also relates, the 'aquarium' was still in space when\n we found it necessary to obliterate the total race of Terrans. The\n message of the annihilation arrived in retard to the Energi, so Time\n permitted us to devise a contra-Energi intelligence plan, a necessity\n since it was realized that the Energi would be disturbed by our action\n contra-Terrans and would, without doubt, take action contra-ourselves.\n\n\n \"Unknown to you,\nbeush\n, or to the masses and highers, an\n insignificant pleasure craft was extracted from Terran Space and\n negatively consumed with a planet when the bombs were detonated. The\n ship accommodated two Terrans. Proper Terrans by birth, negatively\n by reference. One was male, other female. The two had been in\n their culture socially and religiously united in a ceremony called\n 'matrimony'. Emotions of sex, protection and an emotion we have\n negatively been able to analyze linked the two, and made them ideal for\n our purpose.\"\n\n\n The assistant looked at the\nbeush\n, picked up his partially full glass\n and, before he could sip it, was dashed to the floor beside the\nbeush\nhimself. The former helped the higher to his unstable legs, and was\n commented to by the same, \"Assistant, proceed to the protecroom.\"\n\n\n They entered the well-illuminated closet and immediately slipped\n into the unwieldy metallic suits. Once again they took their seats,\n the\nbeush\nreflecting and saying, \"As your memory relates, that\n explosion was a bomb-drop concussion from the Rebellers. We must now\n wear anti-radiation protection. For that reason, and the danger of\n the Energi, you\ndo\nsee why we need the formulae of the Force Domes,\nimmediately\n.\"\n\n\n There was menace in his voice. The assistant trembled violently. Using\n the rare smile of that humanoid race, the\nbeush\ncontinued, \"Do\n negatively self-preoccupy. Resume your information, if contented.\"\n\n\n \"Contented,\" came the automatic reply, and the assistant began, \"The\n two humans were perfect for the Plan, I repeat. Before the Energi\n received the message of the race destruction, it was imperative that we\n establish an agent on Energa, near the Force Domes. We assumed that the\n 'aquarium' would be placed on Energa, in the greatest center. That was\n correct, but negatively yet knowing for certainty, we perpetuated the\n Plan, with the 'aquarium' as the basis.\n\n\n \"One of our most competent protoplasmic computers stabilized the final\n steps of the Plan. We were to subject the two Terrans to radiation\n and have as a result two Terrans who could breathe their normal oxygen\n form H2O—the atmosphere of the 'aquarium', I repeat. We were then\n to deprive them of memory, except of the inter-attracting emotions,\n to allow them to live in harmony. Thirdly, we were to place them\n in the 'aquarium' and have them forwarded under the reference of\n semi-intelligent aqua-beings from Terran seas. A simple, but quite\n effective plan, your opinion,\nbeush\n?\"\n\n\n \"Quite,\" was the reply. \"And concerning the method of\n info-interception?\"\n\n\n The assistant continued without hesitation, embarrassed by his\n incompetency, \"A hyper-complex spheroid with radio interceptors,\n a-matter viewers and recorders and the general intelligence instruments\n of micro-size was placed in the cranium of the male mutant. The\n spheroid has negative direct control over the organism. Size was too\n scarce for use on trivialities. Then an agent was placed behind the\n larger controls at our end of the instruments.\"\n\n\n \"And you are the agent?\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-contentedly affirmative.\"\nI have done two things today. I have found the word for my hatred of\n the Faces. The Voice gave it to me. When I asked the Voice, it laughed\n and told me the word to use was \"damn\". So today I have thrice said,\n \"Damn the Faces. Damn them.\"\n\n\n Diane and I have decided that we\nwant\na baby. Maybe the other fish\nwanted\nthem, so they got them. We\nwant\na baby.\n\"The two Terrans were so biologically mutated and are so nearly\n robotic, that it is physically impossible for reproduction on their\n part,\nbeush\n.\"\n\n\n The\nbeush\nignored the assistant's words and said, \"I have received\n copies of the thought-patterns and translations. There was something\n strange and very powerful about the meaning of the male's thought,\n 'want'. I query.\"\n\n\n \"Be assured without preoccupation that there exists negative danger of\n reproduction.\"\nThe name I wanted to call Diane was not good, because her breasts are\n hard and large, as is her stomach. I think she is sick.\nI do not think Diane is sick. I think she is going to have a baby.\n\"Entities, assistant! On your oath-body you proclaimed that there is\n negative danger of reproduction.\"\n\n\n \"Rest assured, peace,\nbeush\n.\n\n\n \"But his thoughts!\"\n\n\n \"Rest assured,\nhigher beush\n.\"\nThere is much blood in the water today. Diane is having a baby; sharks\n have come. I have never seen so many sharks, and as big as they are I\n have never seen. I am afraid, but still some sneak among us near Diane.\n\n\n We love the porpoises, so they help us now. They are chasing the\n sharks away, injuring and killing some.\n\"Entities, Warpspaced Entities! There has been reproduction.\"\n\n\n \"\nYorbeush\n,\" cried the assistant in defense. \"It is physically\n impossible. But they are mutants. It is negatively impossible that they\n possess Mind Force to a degree.\"\n\n\n \"To what degree? What degree could produce reproduction when it is\n physically impossible?\" The\nbeush\nwas sarcastic. \"How far can they\n go?\"\n\n\n \"There is negatively great amount they can do. Negative danger, because\n we have studied their instincts and emotions and found that they will\n not leave the 'aquarium,' their 'home'. Unless someone tells them to,\n but there is no one to do so.\"\nToday I damned the Faces nine times and finally\nwanted\nthem to go\n away. The \"view-ports\" went black. It was like the sharks leaving when\n I wanted them to. I still do not understand.\n\n\n There has been much useless noise and senseless talk from the Voice\n these days. It is annoying because I must concentrate on loving Diane\n and caring for the baby. So I\nwanted\nthe Voice to leave it. It left.\n\"Entities Be Simply Damned! The spheroid ceased to exist, assistant.\n How far can they go, assistant?\" The\nbeush\nrose, screamed\n hysterically for three seconds and then fired the hand weapon point\n blank at the neck of his assistant.\n\n\n The sharks come today, because Diane is having another baby. Diane\n hurts, and there is more blood than last time. Her face is not pretty\n when she hurts, as it is pretty when she sleeps. So I\nwant\nher to\n sleep. Her face is pretty now with the smile on her lips.\n\"Fourteen thousand Energi ceased to exist, spheroid ceased to exist,\n and another reproduction. Warpspace! How far will they go?\"\nIt has been hundreds of days. Faces keep appearing, but I continue to\nwant\nthem to go away. Diane has had eighteen babies. The oldest are\n swimming around and playing with the porpoises. Diane and I spend most\n of the time teaching the children by showing them things, and by giving\n them our thoughts by touching them.\nToday I found that none of the children have Voices. I could\nwant\nthem to have Voices, but the children's thoughts tell me that it is not\n right to have a Voice.\n\n\n The eldest boy says that we should leave the tank, that a greater\n \"tank\" is around us, and that it is easier to move around in that\n greater tank. He also says that we must guard ourselves against Faces\n outside. That is strange, but the boy is a good boy. Many times he\n knows that things will happen before they do. He is a good boy.\n\n\n He is almost as tall as I am. The eldest girl is pretty like Diane,\n her body very white and soft but, since I\nwanted\nit so, her hair is\n golden, instead of dark. The boy likes her very much, and I have seen\n them together, touching.\n\n\n Tomorrow I will explain to him that if he\nwants\nsomething, he will\n get it. So he must\nwant\na baby.\n\"Query? The Energi will bomb-drop the 'aquarium'? War declared against\n us? War declared? Entities be wholly damned! Negative! Negativvv!\" The\n disintegrator was fired once more, this time into the orange eye of the\nbeush\nhimself, by himself, and for the good of himself.\nWhen, if I ever do\nwant\nthe Voice to come back, it will be very\n surprised to know that Diane has had twenty-four babies; that the three\n eldest boys have mated twice, once and twice, and have had four babies.\n The Voice will also be surprised to know that it took all twenty-nine\n of us to\nwant\nall the Faces around the tank to die, as the eldest boy\n said to do. We could not tell, but the boy said that six million Faces\n were dead. That seems impossible to me, but the boy is always right.\n\n\n Tomorrow we are leaving the tank. We will\nwant\nto leave it; it is\n getting crowded. The boy says that beyond the greater tank, which we\n will also leave, there is enough space for all the babies Diane could\n have if she lived forever.\n\n\n Forever, he said. It would be nice to live forever. I think I'll\nwant\n....\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was the state of Earth’s space travel capabilities at the time of this story?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_1", "options": ["They had managed to send men to the Moon and satellites further out into the solar system.", "The space program was abandoned immediately after the first mission to Mars in order to focus resources on Earth's climate change problem.", "Earthers had spread not only through this galaxy, but throughout all of the known universe, and were considered the dominant species of intelligent life.", "Earth had accomplished enough to be able to travel to and colonize nearly four dozen planets."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Diane and the main character end up as, effectively, a zoo exhibit?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_2", "options": ["As Earth's land became more damaged by climate change, a sub-group of Earthers returned to live in the sea. Diane and the main character were a new species of human - they were in the exhibit because they were part of Earth's ocean fauna.", "They both worked at the biggest sea life research facility on Earth. They were excited about the chance to accompany a selection of Earth's sea creatures to another planet, where new populations might be established.", "They happened to be on a space vacation when Earth was destroyed. They were captured and added to a sea life collection that was part of a gift commemorating a treaty. ", "They both worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. They volunteered for the mission to go to Energa as part of a sea life exhibit, with a mission plan to escape and then blend into the population."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What or who are the Faces that appear in the fish tank's circular windows?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_3", "options": ["They are the faces of the inhabitants of Energa viewing the sea life exhibit through the windows.", "They are just video illusions that were added by the zookeepers to provide something for the main character to focus his negative energy on.", "The Earth sea life exhibit is a very valuable research opportunity. The faces are beush assistants taking data on the giant aquarium.", "The faces are those of a water-dwelling race from another planet, separated from Earth's exhibit, but visible so that they could get accustomed to each other before being allowed to mingle."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the source of the Voice?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_4", "options": ["The Voice is actually a jumble of the voices of the spectators looking at the exhibit. The sounds pass easily through the tank walls and the water.", "The main character has an earpiece connected to an Artificial Intelligence computer, like HAL, which can give him information and instructions.", "The Voice is his Central Intelligence Agency handler, transmitting instructions and information to the main character via a subdermal implant.", "The junior of the two furry humanoid officers can talk to the main character through a simple implant."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the furry humanoids agree to transport the fish tank to the planet where the story’s main action takes place?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_5", "options": ["They added some of their own, native water-dwelling flora and fauna to the tank, which they hoped could be used to seed food for them on a potential future colonization site.", "They were part of a three-way treaty involving Earth, and they were the only signatory with a ship big enough to carry the gigantic tank to its destination.", "The furry humanoids were mainly traders and transporters. Being able to move the gigantic tank was an accomplishment they could use in advertising to other customers.", "The furry ones intended to abrogate the three-way treaty before they even signed it, and they volunteered to move the tank so that they could sabotage it with time-delayed fusion bombs."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the role of the furry ones in breaking the terms of the treaty?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_6", "options": ["The furry ones never broke the treaty. It was the Energi who refused to abide by the treaty terms and resumed piracy on interstellar shipping lanes very soon after it was signed.", "It was just small things, like imposing illegal tariffs and putting up bureaucratic barriers to entering and leaving spaceports that they controlled.", "It started with putting an outpost on a planet claimed by Earth, followed by other boundary skirmishes, then a resumption of all-out war.", "They began to find humans annoying, so they annihilated the species."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were Diane and the main character spared by the furry ones?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_7", "options": ["The furry ones had a deep commitment to observing the custom of helping non-combatant travelers stranded in space.", "They were kept alive as leverage for getting some furry  prisoners being held on Earth returned to them.", "They were modified for use as a counter-intelligence tool on their remaining adversary’s planet.", "The beush was intrigued by their odd appearance and was turned on by Diane's long hair."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the reason for the limited thought processes evident in the main characters' narration and behavior?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_8", "options": ["Although the modifications made to Diane and the main character to allow them to breathe underwater gave them enough oxygen to remain alive, they were constantly somewhat oxygen-deprived, which diminished many of their higher cerebral functions.", "They caught a brain-wasting disease from the porpoises. It didn't kill them, but it left them impaired.", "The furry ones wiped their minds clean except for the pre-existing feelings of passion between them.", "When a subset of humans returned to the sea, they found life so easy that intelligence was no longer a requirement for survival...so their mental capabilities diminished."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the story imply about the reason for the sudden ability of Diane to become pregnant?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_9", "options": ["The furry ones had installed a reversible vasectomy valve on the main character when they installed the spheroid that the Voice spoke through, and through a software error, it stuck open.", "It is implied that a sufficient strength of mental desire on the main character’s part allowed her to conceive.", "The zookeepers on Energi put estrogen into the tank water to help Diane conceive.", "We can infer that Diane and the main character finally learned to actually complete the sex act instead of just engaging in foreplay with the porpoises."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the senior furry one kill his junior officer?", "question_unique_id": "61397_C9WRJY7M_10", "options": ["Because the assistant was gunning for his job, and he needed to eliminate the competition.", "Because the human main character wanted the voice in his head to stop.", "Because he was absolutely furious about the many incorrect predictions the assistant beush had made.", "The operation was Top Secret. Since it appeared to be a failure now, he had to get rid of the only other one who knew all the project details."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/3/9/61397//61397-h//61397-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61243", "set_unique_id": "61243_G7X4D46Z", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Snowbank Orbit", "year": 1951, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "Science fiction; War stories; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Short stories; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction", "article": "THE SNOWBANK ORBIT\nBY FRITZ LEIBER\nEarth could not stop the Enemy's\n\n remorseless advance from outer\n\n space. Neither could the Enemy!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and Octans,\n but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis between Aldebaran and\n Antares. The Bull is her coronet and the Scorpion her footstool. Dear\n blowzy old bitch-planet, swollen and pale and cold, mad with your\n Shakespearean moons, white-mottled as death from Venerean Plague,\n spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rolling\n around the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair rolling on\n the black floor of an infinite bar-room, what a sweet last view of the\n Solar System you are for a cleancut young spaceman....\n\n\n Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and\n the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going\n to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve\n breaking around Uranus—and so what! He shivered to get a little heat\n and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through\nProspero's\nbridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary\n diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost lost in\n pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through\n the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing\n the star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed with\n the time since rim contact.\n\n\n At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen\n soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for\n the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.\n\n\n Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The\n captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and\n Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary\n entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the\n captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination\n when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in\n the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the\n worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing\n on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better\n than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six\n minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,\n stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange how\n he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and\n blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining\n them on.\n\n\n The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge\n spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a\n water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked\n bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna\n seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top,\n where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a\n second—a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly\n green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.\n\n\n Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as they\n whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as small\n as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward\n course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able\n to slow\nProspero\nand her sister ships or turn them back at their 100\n miles a second than the fleet's solar jets could operate at this chilly\n distance from Sol. G'by, fleet. G'by, C.C.Y. spaceman.\nGrunfeld looked for the pale planet's moons. Miranda and Umbriel were\n too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above\n the planet and Oberon a dozen below. Spectral sequins. If the fleet\n were going to get a radio signal from any of them, it would have to be\n Titania, occulted now by the planet and the noisy natural static of\n her roiling hydrogen air and seething methane seas—but it had always\n been only a faint hope that there were survivors from the First Uranus\n Expedition.\n\n\n Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the\n curving star-bordered forward edge of\nProspero's\nhuge mirror and the\n thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages\n below the spaceshield.\n\n\n Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for\n helium to crawl, if you had some helium.\nProspero's\ninsulation,\n originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in\n reverse.\n\n\n Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of\n Uranus' sun-lit face. Check.\n\n\n Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser\n with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly ... if it were right to drag\n out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus.\n\n\n Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros.\n\n\n The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue—one\n each for\nCaliban\n,\nSnug\n,\nMoth\n, and\nStarveling\n, following\nProspero\nin line astern on slave automatic—though for months inertia\n had done all five ships' piloting. Once the buttons had been green,\n but they'd wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy.\n\n\n The gages still showed their last maximums. Skin 793 Kelvin, Cabin\n 144 Fahrenheit, Gravs 3.2. All of them hit almost a year ago, when\n they'd been ace-ing past the sun. Grunfeld's gaze edged back to the\n five bulbous pressure suits, once more rigidly upright in their braced\n racks, that they'd been wearing during that stretch of acceleration\n inside the orbit of Mercury. He started. For a moment he'd thought\n he saw the dark-circled eyes of the captain peering between two of\n the bulging black suits. Nerves! The captain had to be in his cabin,\n readying alternate piloting programs for Copperhead.\n\n\n Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so\n violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite\n direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing\n near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than\n that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly\n studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much\n nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The\n next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind\n retreated to the circumstances that had brought\nProspero\n(then only\nMercury One\n) out here.\nII\n\n\n When the First Interstellar War erupted, the pioneer fleets of Earth's\n nations had barely pushed their explorations beyond the orbit of\n Saturn. Except for the vessels of the International Meteor Guard,\n spaceflight was still a military enterprise of America, Russia, England\n and the other mega-powers.\n\n\n During the first months the advantage lay wholly with the slim black\n cruisers of the Enemy, who had an antigravity which allowed them\n to hover near planets without going into orbit; and a frightening\n degree of control over light itself. Indeed, their principal weapon\n was a tight beam of visible light, a dense photonic stiletto with an\n effective range of several Jupiter-diameters in vacuum. They also\n used visible light, in the green band, for communication as men use\n radio, sometimes broadcasting it and sometimes beaming it loosely in\n strange abstract pictures that seemed part of their language. Their\n gravity-immune ships moved by reaction to photonic jets the tightness\n of which rendered them invisible except near the sun, where they tended\n to ionize electronically dirty volumes of space. It was probably this\n effective invisibility, based on light-control, which allowed them to\n penetrate the Solar System as deep as Earth's orbit undetected, rather\n than any power of travel in time or sub-space, as was first assumed.\n Earthmen could only guess at the physical appearance of the Enemy,\n since no prisoners were taken on either side.\n\n\n Despite his impressive maneuverability and armament, the Enemy was\n oddly timid about attacking live planets. He showed no fear of the big\n gas planets, in fact hovering very close to their turgid surfaces, as\n if having some way of fueling from them.\n\n\n Near Terra the first tactic of the black cruisers, after destroying\n Lunostrovok and Circumluna, was to hover behind the moon, as though\n sharing its tide-lockedness—a circumstance that led to a sortie by\n Earth's Combined Fleet, England and Sweden excepted.\n\n\n At the wholly disastrous Battle of the Far Side, which was visible in\n part to naked-eye viewers on Earth, the Combined Fleet was annihilated.\n No Enemy ship was captured, boarded, or seriously damaged—except\n for one which, apparently by a fluke, was struck by a fission-headed\n anti-missile and proceeded after the blast to \"burn,\" meaning that it\n suffered a slow and puzzling disintegration, accompanied by a dazzling\n rainbow display of visible radiation. This was before the \"stupidity\"\n of the Enemy with regard to small atomic missiles was noted, or their\n allergy to certain radio wave bands, and also before Terran telepaths\n began to claim cloudy contact with Enemy minds.\n\n\n Following Far Side, the Enemy burst into activity, harrying Terran\n spacecraft as far as Mercury and Saturn, though still showing great\n caution in maneuver and making no direct attacks on planets. It was as\n if a race of heavily armed marine creatures should sink all ocean-going\n ships or drive them to harbor, but make no assaults beyond the shore\n line. For a full year Earth, though her groundside and satellite\n rocketyards were furiously busy, had no vehicle in deep space—with one\n exception.\nAt the onset of the War a fleet of five mobile bases of the U. S. Space\n Force were in Orbit to Mercury, where it was intended they take up\n satellite positions prior to the prospecting and mineral exploitation\n of the small sun-blasted planet. These five ships, each with a skeleton\n five-man crew, were essentially Ross-Smith space stations with a solar\n drive, assembled in space and intended solely for space-to-space flight\n inside Earth's orbit. A huge paraboloid mirror, its diameter four times\n the length of the ship's hull, superheated at its focus the hydrogen\n which was ejected as a plasma at high exhaust velocity. Each ship\n likewise mounted versatile radio-radar equipment on dual lattice arms\n and carried as ship's launch a two-man chemical fuel rocket adaptable\n as a fusion-headed torpedo.\n\n\n After Far Side, this \"tin can\" fleet was ordered to bypass Mercury\n and, tacking on the sun, shape an orbit for Uranus, chiefly because\n that remote planet, making its 84-year circuit of Sol, was currently\n on the opposite side of the sun to the four inner planets and the two\n nearer gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. In the empty regions of space the\n relatively defenseless fleet might escape the attention of the Enemy.\n\n\n However, while still accelerating into the sun for maximum boost, the\n fleet received information that two Enemy cruisers were in pursuit. The\n five ships cracked on all possible speed, drawing on the solar drive's\n high efficiency near the sun and expending all their hydrogen and most\n material capable of being vaporized, including some of the light-metal\n hydrogen storage tanks—like an old steamer burning her cabin furniture\n and the cabins themselves to win a race. Gradually the curving course\n that would have taken years to reach the outer planet flattened into a\n hyperbola that would make the journey in 200 days.\n\n\n In the asteroid belt the pursuing cruisers turned aside to join in the\n crucial Battle of the Trojans with Earth's largely new-built, more\n heavily and wisely armed Combined Fleet—a battle that proved to be\n only a prelude to the decisive Battle of Jupiter.\n\n\n Meanwhile the five-ship fleet sped onward, its solar drive quite\n useless in this twilight region even if it could have scraped together\n the needed boilable ejectant mass to slow its flight. Weeks became\n months. The ships were renamed for the planet they were aimed at. At\n least the fleet's trajectory had been truly set.\n\n\n Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-cored ball\n of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through space across the\n fleet's course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet\n was traveling at 100 miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the\n interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish....\nUnless, Grunfeld told himself ... unless the fleet shed its velocity by\n ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking\n on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a\n year ago—a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane\n and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery\n new-fallen snow.\n\n\n Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction\n mass,\nProspero\ncould have shed her present velocity in five hours,\n decelerating at a comfortable one G.\n\n\n But allowing her 12,000 miles of straight-line travel through Uranus'\n frigid soupy atmosphere—and that might be dipping very close to\n the methane seas blanketing the planet's hypothetical mineral\n core—\nProspero\nwould have two minutes in which to shed her velocity.\n\n\n Two minutes—at 150 Gs.\n\n\n Men had stood 40 and 50 Gs for a fractional second.\n\n\n But for two minutes.... Grunfeld told himself that the only surer way\n to die would be to run into a section of the Enemy fleet. According to\n one calculation the ship's skin would melt by heat of friction in 90\n seconds, despite the low temperature of the abrading atmosphere.\n\n\n The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus.\n He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale\n planet's hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.\nIII\n\n\n In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket\n around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker\n turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.\n\n\n \"Captain won't like that,\" plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from\n where he floated in womb position across the cabin. \"Enemy can feel\n a candle of\nour\nlight, captain says, ten million miles away.\" He\n rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a\n polly-wog's.\n\n\n \"And Jackson hears the Enemy think ... and Heimdall hears the grass\n grow,\" Croker commented with a harsh manic laugh. \"Isn't an Enemy for\n a billion miles, Ness.\" He launched aft from the hammock. \"We haven't\n spotted their green since Saturn orbit. There's nowhere for them.\"\n\n\n \"There's the far side of Uranus,\" Ness pointed out. \"That's less than\n ten million miles now. Eight. A bare day. They could be there.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, waiting to bushwack us as we whip past on our way to eternity,\"\n Croker chuckled as he crumpled up against the aft port, shedding\n momentum. \"That's likely, isn't it, when they didn't have time for us\n back in the Belt?\" He scowled at the tiny white sun, no bigger a disk\n than Venus, but still with one hundred times as much light as the full\n moon pouring from it—too much light to look at comfortably. He began\n to button the inner cover over the port.\n\n\n \"Don't do that,\" Ness objected without conviction. \"There's not much\n heat in it but there's some.\" He hugged his elbows and shivered. \"I\n don't remember being warm since Mars orbit.\"\n\n\n \"The sun gets on my nerves,\" Croker said. \"It's like looking at an\n arc light through a pinhole. It's like a high, high jail light in a\n cold concrete yard. The stars are highlights on the barbed wire.\" He\n continued to button out the sun.\n\n\n \"You ever in jail?\" Ness asked. Croker grinned.\nWith the tropism of a fish, Ness began to paddle toward the little\n light at the head of Jackson's hammock, flicking his hands from the\n wrists like flippers. \"I got one thing against the sun,\" he said\n quietly. \"It's blanketing out the radio. I'd like us to get one more\n message from Earth. We haven't tried rigging our mirror to catch radio\n waves. I'd like to hear how we won the battle of Jupiter.\"\n\n\n \"If we won it,\" Croker said.\n\n\n \"Our telescopes show no more green around Jove,\" Ness reminded him. \"We\n counted 27 rainbows of Enemy cruisers 'burning.' Captain verified the\n count.\"\n\n\n \"Repeat: if we won it.\" Croker pushed off and drifted back toward the\n hammock. \"If there was a real victory message they'd push it through,\n even if the sun's in the way and it takes three hours to catch us.\n People who win, shout.\"\n\n\n Ness shrugged as he paddled. \"One way or the other, we should be\n getting the news soon from Titania station,\" he said. \"They'll have\n heard.\"\n\n\n \"If they're still alive and there ever was a Titania Station,\" Croker\n amended, backing air violently to stop himself as he neared the\n hammock. \"Look, Ness, we know that the First Uranus Expedition arrived.\n At least they set off their flares. But that was three years before the\n War and we haven't any idea of what's happened to them since and if\n they ever managed to set up housekeeping on Titania—or Ariel or Oberon\n or even Miranda or Umbriel. At least if they built a station that could\n raise Earth I haven't been told. Sure thing\nProspero\nhasn't heard\n anything ... and we're getting close.\"\n\n\n \"I won't argue,\" Ness said. \"Even if we raise 'em, it'll just be\n hello-goodby with maybe time between for a battle report.\"\n\n\n \"And a football score and a short letter from home, ten seconds per\n man as the station fades.\" Croker frowned and added, \"If Captain had\n cottoned to my idea, two of us at any rate could have got off this\n express train at Uranus.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me how,\" Ness asked drily.\n\n\n \"How? Why, one of the ship's launches. Replace the fusion-head with\n the cabin. Put all the chem fuel in the tanks instead of divvying it\n between the ship and the launch.\"\n\n\n \"I haven't got the brain for math Copperhead has, but I can subtract,\"\n Ness said, referring to\nProspero's\npiloting robot. \"Fully fueled, one\n of the launches has a max velocity change in free-fall of 30 miles per\n second. Use it all in braking and you've only taken 30 from 100. The\n launch is still going past Uranus and out of the system at 70 miles a\n second.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't hear all my idea,\" Croker said. \"You put piggyback tanks\n on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four\n launches. Then you've 100 miles of braking\nand\na maneuvering reserve.\n You only need to shed 90 miles, anyway. Ten miles a second's the close\n circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for\n Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver\n four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at 1 G to shed\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Cute,\" Ness conceded. \"Especially the jeep. But I'm glad just the same\n we've got 70 per cent of our chem fuel in our ships' tanks instead of\n the launches. We're on such a bull's eye course for Uranus—Copperhead\n really pulled a miracle plotting our orbit—that we may need a\n sidewise shove to miss her. If we slapped into that cold hydrogen soup\n at our 100 mps—\"\n\n\n Croker shrugged. \"We still could have dropped a couple of us,\" he said.\n\"Captain's got to look after the whole fleet,\" Ness said. \"You're\n beginning to agitate, Croker, like you was Grunfeld—or the captain\n himself.\"\n\n\n \"But if Titania Station's alive, a couple of men dropped off would do\n the fleet some good. Stir Titania up to punch a message through to\n Earth and get a really high-speed retrieve-and-rescue ship started out\n after us.\nIf\nwe've won the War.\"\n\n\n \"But Titania Station's dead or never was, not to mention its jeep. And\n we've lost the Battle of Jupiter. You said so yourself,\" Ness asserted\n owlishly. \"Captain's got to look after the whole fleet.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, so he kills himself fretting and the rest of us die of old age\n in the outskirts of the Solar System. Join the Space Force and See the\n Stars! Ness, do you know how long it'd take us to reach the nearest\n star—except we aren't headed for her—at our 100 mps? Eight thousand\n years!\"\n\n\n \"That's a lot of time to kill,\" Ness said. \"Let's play chess.\"\n\n\n Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark unlined face\n above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter again, or the eyelids.\n Croker said, \"Suppose he knows what the Enemy looks like?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Ness said. \"When he talks about them it's as if he was\n their interpreter. How about the chess?\"\n\n\n \"Suits. Knight to King Bishop Three.\"\n\n\n \"Hmm. Knight to King Knight Two, Third Floor.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, I meant flat chess, not three-D,\" Croker objected.\n\n\n \"That thin old game? Why, I no sooner start to get the position really\n visualized in my head than the game's over.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to start a game of three-D with Uranus only 18 hours\n away.\"\n\n\n Jackson stirred in his hammock. His lips worked. \"They....\" he\n breathed. Croker and Ness instantly watched him. \"They....\"\n\n\n \"I wonder if he is really inside the Enemy's mind?\" Ness said.\n\n\n \"He thinks he speaks for them,\" Croker replied and the next instant\n felt a warning touch on his arm and looked sideways and saw\n dark-circled eyes in a skull-angular face under a battered cap with a\n tarnished sunburst. Damn, thought Croker, how does the captain always\n know when Jackson's going to talk?\n\n\n \"They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus,\" Jackson\n breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little\n louder, though his eyes stayed shut. \"They're welcoming us, they're\n our brothers.\" The smile died. \"But they know they got to kill us, they\n know we got to die.\"\n\n\n The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and\n he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch\n leading forward.\nGrunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw\n the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was\n circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought\n he'd be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a\n jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his\n shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.\n\n\n \"Ambush,\" he said. \"At least two cruisers.\"\n\n\n He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he\n could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself\n if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.\n\n\n The blue telltales for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\nbegan to blink.\n\n\n \"They've seen it too,\" the captain said. He snatched up the mike and\n his next words rang through the\nProspero\n.\n\n\n \"Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr.\n Grunfeld, raise the fleet.\"\n\n\n Aft, Croker muttered, \"Rig our shrouds, don't he mean? Rig shrouds and\n firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.\"\n\n\n Ness said, \"Cheer up. Even the longest strategic withdrawal in history\n has to end some time.\"\nIV\n\n\n Three quarters of a day later Grunfeld felt a spasm of futile fear and\n revolt as the pressure suit closed like a thick-fleshed carnivorous\n plant on his drugged and tired body. Relax, he told himself. Fine thing\n if you cooked up a fuss when even Croker didn't. He thought of forty\n things to re-check. Relax, he repeated—the work's over; all that\n matters is in Copperhead's memory tanks now, or will be as soon as the\n captain's suited up.\n\n\n The suit held Grunfeld erect, his arms at his sides—the best attitude,\n except he was still facing forward, for taking high G, providing the\n ship herself didn't start to tumble. Only the cheekpieces and visor\n hadn't closed in on his face—translucent hand-thick petals as yet\n unfolded. He felt the delicate firm pressure of built-in fingertips\n monitoring his pulses and against his buttocks the cold smooth muzzles\n of the jet hypodermics that would feed him metronomic drugs during the\n high-G stretch and stimulants when they were in free-fall again. When.\n\n\n He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of\n Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through\n the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson—just\n the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention,\n pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the\n captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side\n as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and\n the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.\nBeyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it\n still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with\n the onrushing planet's pale mottled green that now had the dulled\n richness of watered silk. They were so close that the rim hardly showed\n curvature. The atmosphere must have a steep gradient, Grunfeld thought,\n or they'd already be feeling decel. That stuff ahead looked more like\n water than any kind of air. It bothered him that the captain was still\n half out of his suit.\n\n\n There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill\n up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port\n covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of\n their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago.\n Its robot pilots were set to follow\nProspero\nand imitate, nothing\n else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still....\n\n\n Grunfeld wet his lips. \"Captain,\" he said hesitantly. \"Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Grunfeld.\" He caught the edge of the skull's answering\n grin. \"We\nare\nbeginning to hit hydrogen,\" the quiet voice went on.\n \"Forward skin temperature's up to 9 K.\"\n\n\n Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared\n bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began\n to talk dreamily from his suit.\n\n\n \"They're still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a\n little more now. Their ship's one thing and they're another. Their\n ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it\n knows to do is to kill us. They can't stop it, they're even less than\n passengers....\"\n\n\n The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and\n felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up,\n carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from\n solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction.\n\n\n The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the fainter\n stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and the pale green\n segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels began to close in front\n of the spaceshield. Soon there was only a narrow vertical ribbon of\n green—\nbright\ngreen as it narrowed to a thread—then for a few\n seconds only blackness except for the dim red and blue beads and\n semi-circles, just beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted\n interior cabin lights glowed on.\nJackson droned: \"They and their ships come from very far away, from the\n edge. If this is the continuum, they come from the ... discontinuum,\n where they don't have stars but something else and where gravity is\n different. Their ships came from the edge on a gust of fear with the\n other ships, and our brothers came with it though they didn't want\n to....\"\n\n\n And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it—the first faint thrill,\n less than a cobweb's tug, of\nweight\n.\n\n\n The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld's suit had begun to revolve\n slowly on a vertical axis.\n\n\n For a moment he glimpsed Jackson's dark profile—all five suits were\n revolving in their framework. They locked into position when the men in\n them were facing aft. Now at least retinas wouldn't pull forward at\n high-G decel, or spines crush through thorax and abdomen.\n\n\n The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld's forehead. And now he was sure he\n felt weight—maybe five pounds of it. Suddenly aft was\nup\n. It was as\n if he were lying on his back on the spaceshield.\n\n\n A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it.\n He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized\n it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the\n atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let\n them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the\n great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the\n other ships—the fleet's feeble sting. Like a bee's, just one, in dying.\n\n\n The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit began to close on\n his face like layers of pliable ice.\n\n\n Jackson called faintly, \"\nNow\nI understand. Their ship—\" His voice\n was cut off.\n\n\n Grunfeld's ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as\n the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy\n air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an\n extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body.\n\n\n But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now ... now on Mars ...\n now back on Earth....\n\n\n The weight was stifling now, crushing—a hill of invisible sand.\n Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had\n red fringe around it. It grew.\n\n\n There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the\n ship's jets roared, everything recovered, or didn't.\n\n\n The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out\n thought.\nThe universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a\n larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery\n wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld\n decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and\n in free-fall. His body didn't feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages.\n Or did it?\n\n\n He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward\n again? If they'd actually come through—\n\n\n There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after\n frictional heating?\n\n\n There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few\n Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?\n\n\n He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined\n retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the\n meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin\n lights were broken.\n\n\n The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his\n body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top\n of his opening suit.\n\n\n Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the\n spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex\n upward,\nthat must\n, he realized,\nbe the dark side of Uranus\n.\n\n\n Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and\n pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield.\n\n\n The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a\n curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.\n\n\n A pulsing, color-changing glow from somewhere showed him twisted stumps\n of the radio lattices. There was no sign of the mirror at all. It must\n have been torn away, or vaporized completely, in the fiery turbulence\n of decel.\n\n\n New maxs showed on the board: Cabin Temperature 214 F, Skin Temperature\n 907 K, Gravs 87.\n\n\n Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw\n the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering\n brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish\n phosphorescing.\n\"The torps got to 'em,\" Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to\n the right.\n\"I did find out at the end,\" Jackson said quietly from the left, his\n voice at last free of the trance-tone. \"The Enemy ships weren't ships\n at all. They were (there's no other word for it) space animals. We've\n always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was\n inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues\n through the sea before you notice life and I guess space is the\n same. Anyway the Enemy was (what else can I call 'em?) space-whales.\n Inertialess space-whales from the discontinuum. Space-whales that ate\n hydrogen (that's the only way I know to say it) and spat light to\n move and fight. The ones I talked to, our brothers, were just their\n parasites.\"\n\n\n \"That's crazy,\" Grunfeld said. \"All of it. A child's picture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure it is,\" Jackson agreed.\n\n\n From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, \"Quiet.\"\n\n\n The radio came on thin and wailing with static: \"Titania Station\n calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are\n dead—the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have\n jeep fueled and set to go—\"\n\n\n Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and\n last blue telltales still glowed for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\n.\n Breathe a prayer, he thought, for\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.\n\n\n Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be\n wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MANUAL.\n\n\n The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along its length,\n which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a giant new moon. A\n bead formed toward the center, brightened, and then all at once the\n jail-yard sun had risen and was glaring coldly through its pinhole into\n their eyes.\n\n\n They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around.\n\n\n The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure suit, only\n the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull features. Studying the\n monitor box of the captain's suit, Grunfeld saw it was set to inject\n the captain with power stimulants as soon as the Gravs began to slacken\n from their max.\n\n\n He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting them out of\n Uranus.\n\n\n But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as\n dark as those of\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.\n\n\n Grunfeld thought, now he can rest.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Who is Copperhead?", "question_unique_id": "61243_G7X4D46Z_1", "options": ["It's a nickname for Ross Smith, one of the Prospero's crewmen.", "It's a nickname for the spaceship's computer.", "It is Grunfeld's nickname. As navigator, he has to be ready to move quickly, like a snake.", "It's the nickname for the lead ship, more formally known as Prospero,  in the 5-ship fleet headed to Uranus."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the problem with the fleet’s main propulsion system when used in the vicinity of Uranus??", "question_unique_id": "61243_G7X4D46Z_2", "options": ["The ship had expended all the fuel in its chemical rockets while escaping from Mercury's orbit, so there was nothing left for the Uranus maneuver.", "All of the on-board hydrogen fuel was used to accelerate the ship across the solar system. Uranus had plenty of hydrogen for refueling, but there was not enough heat available to ionize the fuel gases to create the required reaction drive forces.", "The ship scooped up interstellar gases that were freely available and focused the sun's heat onto the stream of gases to ionize them and provide reaction mass. But at Uranus, there was not enough heat from the sun to ionize the fuel gases.", "The ship's main propulsion system was based on reflecting photons from the sun into a tight beam and sailing on its own \"solar wind,\" but there were not enough photons to create the required inertial reaction."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who won the Battle of Jupiter?", "question_unique_id": "61243_G7X4D46Z_3", "options": ["The aliens crushed the inner solar system defenses and decisively won the Battle of Jupiter, as the crew learns just before reaching Uranus.", "The Terrans regrouped, having rebuilt their fleet after their initial losses and crushed the aliens at the Battle of Jupiter.", "The Battle of Jupiter was a stalemate. That's why it is so important for the Prospero and the rest of the fleet to make a last stand at Uranus.", "The outcome of the Battle of Jupiter is not known to the crew during the course of the story. It never does tell."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What possible explanation for the captain being portrayed consistently as having a head like a skull with dark, sunken eyes best fits the rest of the facts of the story?", "question_unique_id": "61243_G7X4D46Z_4", "options": ["It reveals that space travel is very hard on the body, so that one loses weight and ages quickly.", "It indicates, as we later find out, that the captain died early in the flight, and he is being telepathically controlled by the aliens for their purposes.", "It illustrates the captain's pessimistic feeling that the mission and his ship are doomed, right from the start, and it eats him alive to hide it.", "It increases the captain's mystique and foreshadows him as a \"dead man walking.\" He is the only crew member to die in the story."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How is Jackson’s statement that the alien beings don’t want to kill anyone, but their ship is making them, eventually explained?", "question_unique_id": "61243_G7X4D46Z_5", "options": ["It turns out that the aliens are even more evil than was imagined. They have a few elite soldiers on each ship, but the rest of the crew are beings that they enslaved during  previous conquests.", "The entire fleet of enemy vessels is remotely controlled from a central computer station. Everything is automatic. The crew has realized that Terrans are harmless, but they cannot change the computer's programming.", "The aliens are extremely deceptive. Jackson is a little bit mental anyway, and they have suckered him into believing their line that they don't want to hurt the Terrans.", "It turns out that the alien ships are actually space creatures of some kind, and like all living beings, they are infested with other living creatures - in this case, telepathic, sentient, peaceful ones."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Did any of the members of the first exploratory mission to the vicinity of Uranus, several years ago, survive?", "question_unique_id": "61243_G7X4D46Z_6", "options": ["Yes. They demonstrate this by showing up at a critical moment to help the crew of the Prospero..", "Yes, but they are stranded on the Uranian moon where they established their station, and can't really help.", "No, but some of their equipment survived on Titania, and the Prospero is able to make use of it.", "No. There is not even any evidence that they actually reached their destination."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the narrator describe Uranus as “spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach …”?", "question_unique_id": "61243_G7X4D46Z_7", "options": ["Because when the moons of Uranus are aligned just so, as happens every 84 years, they appear like the waving legs of a cockroach.", "Because the axis of rotation of Uranus is “sideways” to the rotation of the rest of the planets of the solar system.", "Because Uranus seems like a living being, an enemy that will kill them if it can.", "Because this type of description, using alliteration (\"spinning, side\" and \"poisoned, pregnant\") makes the story seem more \"literary.\""], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the spaceship crew intend to make use of Uranus when they arrive?", "question_unique_id": "61243_G7X4D46Z_8", "options": ["They plan to land and establish a station on the methane ice of Uranus, with the hope of being able to strike back at the enemy.", "They plan to strike the enemy base already established on Uranus. It is a suicide mission, since their only real weapon is the speed and inertia of their ships.", "The plan to use atmospheric drag to scrub enough speed to enter orbit and stay in the solar system, and not continue their trajectory into interstellar space.", "They plan to refuel their ships by dipping hydrogen out of the atmosphere of Uranus. They have to do it fast, since their flyby will be very short."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/2/4/61243//61243-h//61243-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "32667", "set_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Holes and John Smith", "year": 1956, "author": "Ludwig, Edward W.", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Musicians -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight\n from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he\n was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was\n—whoops!...\nThe Holes and John Smith\nBy Edward W. Ludwig\nIllustration by Kelly Freas\nIt all began on a Saturday\n night at\nThe Space Room\n. If\n you've seen any recent Martian\n travel folders, you know the place:\n \"A picturesque oasis of old Martian\n charm, situated on the beauteous\n Grand Canal in the heart of\n Marsport. Only half a mile from\n historic Chandler Field, landing\n site of the first Martian expedition\n nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A\n visitor to the hotel, lunch room or\n cocktail lounge will thrill at the\n sight of hardy space pioneers mingling\n side by side with colorful\n Martian tribesmen. An evening at\nThe Space Room\nis an amazing,\n unforgettable experience.\"\n\n\n Of course, the folders neglect to\n add that the most amazing aspect is\n the scent of the Canal's stagnant\n water—and that the most unforgettable\n experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\"\n evaporate from your\n pocketbook like snow from the\n Great Red Desert.\n\n\n We were sitting on the bandstand\n of the candle-lit cocktail lounge.\n Me—Jimmie Stanley—and my\n four-piece combo. Maybe you've\n seen our motto back on Earth:\n \"The Hottest Music This Side of\n Mercury.\"\n\n\n But there weren't four of us tonight.\n Only three. Ziggy, our bass\n fiddle man, had nearly sliced off\n two fingers while opening a can of\n Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing\n the number of our personnel by a\n tragic twenty-five per cent.\n\n\n Which was why Ke-teeli, our\n boss, was descending upon us with\n all the grace of an enraged Venusian\n vinosaur.\n\n\n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled\n in his nasal tenor. He was almost\n skeleton thin, like most Martians,\n and so tall that if he fell down he'd\n be half way home.\n\n\n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't\n be here, but we've called the Marsport\n local for another. He'll be here\n any minute.\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to\n as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered\n coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three.\n His eyes were like black\n needle points set deep in a mask of\n dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n\n\n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\"\n he squeaked.\n\n\n I sighed. This was the week our\n contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed\n little enough enthusiasm for\n our music as it was. His comments\n were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\"\n or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real\n cause of his concern being, I suspected,\n the infrequency with which\n his cash register tinkled.\n\n\n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new\n man doesn't come,\nwe're\nstill here.\n We'll play for you.\" I glanced at\n the conglomeration of uniformed\n spacemen, white-suited tourists,\n and loin-clothed natives who sat at\n ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't\n want to disappoint your customers,\n would you?\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better\n dey be deesappointed. Ees better\n no museek den bad museek.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles\n on Martian horn-harp, made a\n feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't\n worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass\n man will be here.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our\n red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think\n I hear him coming now.\"\n\n\n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the\n entrance. There was only silence.\n His naked, parchment-like chest\n swelled as if it were an expanding\n balloon.\n\n\n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n \"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And\n he whirled away.\n\n\n We waited.\n\n\n Fat Boy's two hundred and\n eighty-odd pounds were drooped\n over his chair like the blubber of an\n exhausted, beach-stranded whale.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always\n the uranium pits of Neptune.\n Course, you don't live more than\n five years there—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we could make it back\n to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n\n\n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n \"Your brains?\"\n\n\n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I\n guess it'll have to be the black pits\n of Neptune. The home of washed-up\n interplanetary musicians. It's too\n bad. We're so young, too.\"\n\n\n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli\n was casting his razor-edged glare in\n our direction. I brushed the chewed\n finger nails from the keyboard of\n my electronic piano.\n\n\n Then it happened.\nFrom the entrance of\nThe\n Space Room\ncame a thumping\n and a grating and a banging. Suddenly,\n sweeping across the dance\n floor like a cold wind, was a bass\n fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity,\n a refugee from a pawnbroker's\n attic. It was queerly shaped. It was\n too tall, too wide. It was more like\n a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass\n than a bass.\n\n\n The fiddle was not unaccompanied\n as I'd first imagined. Behind\n it, streaking over the floor in a\n waltz of agony, was a little guy, an\n animated matchstick with a flat,\n broad face that seemed to have\n been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored\n mop of hair reminded me\n of a field of dry grass, the long\n strands forming loops that flanked\n the sides of his face.\n\n\n His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\n\n\n My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—\n\n\n My eyes burst open. A shiver\n coursed down my spine like gigantic\n mice feet.\n\n\n The tones that surged from that\n monstrous bass were ecstatic. They\n were out of a jazzman's Heaven.\n They were great rolling clouds that\n seemed to envelop the entire universe\n with their vibrance. They\n held a depth and a volume and a\n richness that were astounding, that\n were like no others I'd ever heard.\n\n\n First they went\nBoom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom\n,\n and then,\nboom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom\n,\n just like the tones of all bass\n fiddles.\n\n\n But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.\n\n\n We finished\nOn An Asteroid With\n You\n, modulated into\nSweet Sally\n from Saturn\nand finished with\nTighten Your Lips on Titan\n.\n\n\n We waited for the applause of\n the Earth people and the shrilling\n of the Martians to die down. Then\n I turned to John and his fiddle.\n\n\n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n \"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n\n\n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\"\n added Hammer-Head who, although\n sober, seemed quite drunk.\n\n\n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of\n course it's old. It's over five thousand\n years old. I was lucky to find\n it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a\n fiddle but a\nZloomph\n. This is the\n only one in existence.\" He patted\n the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole\n in it but it isn't the right one.\"\n\n\n I wondered what the hell he was\n talking about. I studied the black,\n mirror-like wood. The aperture in\n the vesonator was like that of any\n bass fiddle.\n\n\n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to\n ask.\n\n\n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n \"For going home,\" he said.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\nWe played. Tune after tune.\n John knew them all, from the\n latest pop melodies to a swing version\n of the classic\nRhapsody of The\n Stars\n. He was a quiet guy during\n the next couple of hours, and getting\n more than a few words from\n him seemed as hard as extracting a\n tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I\n mean, his\nZloomph\n—with a dreamy\n expression in those watery eyes,\n staring at nothing.\n\n\n But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"\n\n\n There was no doubt about it.\n John Smith was peculiar, but he\n was the best bass man this side of a\n musician's Nirvana.\n\n\n It didn't take a genius to figure\n out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's\n countenance had evidenced\n an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles\n before John began to play.\n Item two: Goon-Face had beamed\n like a kitten with a quart of cream\n after John began to play.\n\n\n Conclusion: If we wanted to\n keep eating, we'd have to persuade\n John Smith to join our combo.\n\n\n At intermission I said, \"How\n about a drink, John? Maybe a shot\n of wine-syrup?\"\n\n\n He shook his head.\n\n\n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n\n\n His grunt was negative.\n\n\n \"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"Yes, I\nlike\nbeer.\"\n\n\n I escorted him to the bar and assisted\n him in his arduous climb onto\n a stool.\n\n\n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd\n taken an experimental sip, \"where\n have you been hiding? A guy like\n you should be playing every night.\"\n\n\n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured\n I might need some money so\n I went to the union. Then I worked\n on my plan.\"\n\n\n \"Then you need a job. How\n about playing with us steady? We\n like your style a lot.\"\n\n\n He made a long, low humming\n sound which I interpreted as an\n expression of intense concentration.\n \"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.\n\n\n \"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"\n\n\n His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n \"I like to study ancient history ...\n and I must work on my\n plan.\"\n\n\n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n\n\n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me\n about it, John. It\nmust\nbe interesting.\"\n\n\n He made queer clicking noises\n with his mouth that reminded me\n of a mechanical toy being wound\n into motion. \"The whole foundation\n of this or any other culture is\n based on the history of all the time\n dimensions, each interwoven with\n the other, throughout the ages. And\n the holes provide a means of studying\n all of it first hand.\"\nOh, oh\n, I thought.\nBut you still\n have to eat. Remember, you still\n have to eat.\n\"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there\n are so many holes in this universe.\"\n\n\n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.\n\n\n \"Certainly. Look around you. All\n you see is holes. These beer bottles\n are just holes surrounded by glass.\n The doors and windows—they're\n holes in walls. The mine tunnels\n make a network of holes under the\n desert. Caves are holes, animals live\n in holes, our faces have holes,\n clothes have holes—millions and\n millions of holes!\"\n\n\n I winced and thought, humor\n him because you gotta eat, you\n gotta eat.\n\n\n His voice trembled with emotion.\n \"Why, they're everywhere. They're\n in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket\n jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes\n and well holes, and shoelace\n holes. There are doughnut\n holes and stocking holes and woodpecker\n holes and cheese holes.\n Oceans lie in holes in the earth,\n and rivers and canals and valleys.\n The craters of the Moon are holes.\n Everything is—\"\n\n\n \"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a\n minute. Did you drop something,\n lose it in the hole—is that why you\n have to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\"\n he snapped, \"\njust\nmy own\n time dimension. And if I don't get\n back they will think I couldn't prove\n my theory, that I'm ashamed to\n come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n\n\n His chest sagged for an instant.\n Then he straightened. \"But there's\n still time for my plan to work out—with\n the relative difference taken\n into account. Only I get so tired\n just thinking about it.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I can see where thinking\n about it would tire any one.\"\n\n\n He nodded. \"But it can't be too\n far away.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\"\n I said. \"But if you're not going to\n play with us—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay—just\n as long as you want him.\"\n\n\n \"Den he sign contract, too. No\n beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\"\n I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry,\n Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n\n\n Just a few minutes later tragedy\n struck.\n\n\n A reporter from the\nMarsport\n Times\nambled into interview the\n Man of The Hour. The interview,\n unfortunately, was conducted over\n the bar and accompanied by a generous\n guzzling of beer. Fat Boy,\n Hammer-Head and I watched\n from a table. Knowing John as we\n did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n\n\n \"This is the first time he's talked\n to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n \"I—I'm scared.\n\n\n \"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"\n\n\n We were too late. The reporter\n had already slapped on his hat and\n was striding to the exit. John turned\n to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing\n like air from a punctured balloon.\n\n\n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said,\n weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he\n said he'd come back when I'm\n sober. I'm sober now. So I quit.\n I've got to find my hole.\"\n\n\n I patted him on the back. \"No,\n John, we'll help you. Don't quit.\n We'll—well, we'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We're working on a plan, too,\"\n said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n \"We're going to make a more\n scientific approach.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" John asked.\n\n\n Fat Boy gulped.\n\n\n \"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n \"We'll have it worked out. Just be\n patient another day. You can't\n leave now, not after all your work.\"\n\n\n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll\n stay—until tomorrow.\"\nAll night the thought crept\n through my brain like a teasing\n spider:\nWhat can we do to make\n him stay? What can we tell him?\n What, what, what?\nUnable to sleep the next morning,\n I left John to his snoring and\n went for an aspirin and black coffee.\n All the possible schemes were\n drumming through my mind: finding\n an Earth blonde to capture\n John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized,\n breaking his leg, forging\n a letter from this mythical university\n telling him his theory was\n proved valid and for him to take\n a nice long vacation now. He was\n a screwball about holes and force\n fields and dimensional worlds but\n for that music of his I'd baby him\n the rest of his life.\n\n\n It was early afternoon when I\n trudged back to my apartment.\n\n\n John was squatting on the living\n room floor, surrounded by a forest\n of empty beer bottles. His eyes were\n bulging, his hair was even wilder\n than usual, and he was swaying.\n\n\n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n\n\n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n \"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm\n awful scared!\"\n\n\n \"But you mustn't be scared. That\n reporter was just stupid. We'll help\n you with your theory.\"\n\n\n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't\n that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n\n\n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n\n\n \"It's my body. It's—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, what about your body?\n Are you sick?\"\n\n\n His face was white with terror.\n \"No, my—\nmy body's full of holes\n.\n Suppose it's one of those holes!\n How will I get back if it is?\"\n\n\n He rose and staggered to his\nZloomph\n, clutching it as though it\n were somehow a source of strength\n and consolation.\n\n\n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n \"Now John. You've just had too\n much beer, that's all. Let's go out\n and get some air and some strong\n black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n\n\n We staggered out into the morning\n darkness, the three of us. John,\n the\nZloomph\n, and I.\n\n\n I was hanging on to him trying\n to see around and over and even\n under the\nZloomph\n—steering by a\n sort of radar-like sixth sense. The\n street lights on Marsport are pretty\n dim compared to Earthside. I\n didn't see the open manhole that\n the workmen had figured would be\n all right at that time of night. It\n gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M.\n of a Martian morning, and I\n guess the men were warming up\n with a little nip at the bar across\n the street.\n\n\n Then—he was gone.\n\n\n John just slipped out of my grasp—\nZloomph\nand all—and was gone—completely\n and irrevocably gone.\n I even risked a broken neck and\n jumped in the manhole after him.\n Nothing—nothing but the smell of\n ozone and an echo bouncing crazily\n off the walls of the conduit.\n\n\n \"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.\n\n\n Ziggy, whose two fingers have\n healed, has already bowed to what\n seems inevitable. He's signed up for\n that trip to Neptune's uranium\n pits. There's plenty of room for\n more volunteers, he tells us. But I\n spend my time cussing the guy who\n forgot to set the force field at the\n other end of the hole and let John\n and his\nZloomph\nback into his own\n time dimension. I cuss harder when\n I think how we were robbed of the\n best bass player in the galaxy.\n\n\n And without a corpus delecti we\n can't even sue the city.\n... THE END\n", "questions": [{"question": "How tall is the proprietor of the Space Room?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_1", "options": ["6'2, a typical height for a Martian.", "5'1, which is extraordinarily tall for a Martian.", "He was tall, \"like most Martians,\" but the text does not say exactly how tall.", "8'3\", a typical height for a Martian."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the proprietor’s condition for allowing the band to play?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_2", "options": ["Ziggy needs to find a way to play, even with his cut fingers.", "The band must agree to play longer sets than previously.", "He requires a band consisting of four players.", "They must find a bassist to play."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are some of the non-Terran musical instruments mentioned in the story?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_3", "options": ["Clarinet and Zloomph.", "Martian horn-harp and bass fiddle.", "Martian horn-harp, Zloomph and bass fiddle.", "Martian horn-harp and Zloomph."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Where is John Smith from?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_4", "options": ["New Orleans.", "A parallel universe.", "The main city on the opposite side of Mars.", "Marsport Union."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do the musicians make of John Smith’s behavior?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_5", "options": ["Musicians are all a bit odd, so they didn't think anything of it.", "They realize that he has untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, so they try to be kind.", "They think he is looney-tunes, but they don't care because he is a great bass player.", "They are worried that his delusions may be getting the better of his creative fire."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Smith come to be in possession of his musical instrument?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_6", "options": ["He bought it at a pawn shop back home.", "He stole it, and he is trying to find a place to hide it.", "He borrowed it at the Marsport union hall.", "The instrument has been in his family for five thousand years, passed from father to son."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the proprietor like John Smith's music?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_7", "options": ["He didn't care one way or the other, but he was glad he didn't have to make the effort to find a new, complete band.", "It was novel, and it added some spice to having to be at the bar all evening.", "Because the customers spent more money while Smith was playing.", "Because it awakened deep emotions in him that he had never felt before."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the text imply is Smith’s profession?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_8", "options": ["It implies that he is a professional musician.", "It implies that he is a PhD student or maybe a professor.", "It implies that he is a professional thief, fencing fine musical instruments to pawn shops.", "It implies that he is a layabout who dabbles in music to keep himself fed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the narrator refer to Smith’s interview with the Marsport Times as a tragedy?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_9", "options": ["Because it wasn't fair that all the attention should be focused on the newcomer, Smith, ignoring the long-term band members.", "Because the circulation of the Marsport Times is so small that the article may not get picked up by the wire services, which would enhance the band's prospects.", "Because he sounded like a nut case to the journalist, so the published article will not enhance the band's reputation.", "Because Smith was not really in the habit of talking that much, which doesn't make for a good interview. That blew the band's chances for good publicity."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the narrator talk about suing the city?", "question_unique_id": "32667_OI91Q7AD_10", "options": ["The narrator is broke. His lawyer told him that if he still had John Smith's body that fell down the manhole, he could sue for negligence and get enough money to avoid having go to the uranium mines on Neptune.", "Ostensibly, he blames the city for not having a force field up to prevent people falling into an open manhole. But underneath, he is just angry at losing his chance for fame and fortune by keeping John Smith in his world, in his band.", "As far as he is concerned, the government is supposed to take care of its citizens, and not putting up a force field on the manhole is immoral. ", "The narrator is just joking about suing the city. He's happy that John Smith got back to his own world."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/2/6/6/32667//32667-h//32667-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "32744", "set_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Valley", "year": 1958, "author": "Stockham, Richard", "topic": "Short stories; PS; Science fiction", "article": "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE VALLEY\nBy Richard Stockham\nIllustrated by Ed Emsh\nIf you can't find it countless millions of miles in space,\n come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side\n of the fence—where the grass is always greener.\nThe Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver\n fish.\n\n\n Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of\n land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground\n cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and\n the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the\n city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a\n desert under a blazing sun.\n\n\n The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made\n it!\"\n\n\n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President—Davis is—overwhelmed. He\n can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people—with our\n hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n\n\n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n\n\n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n\n\n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n\n\n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one\n grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a\n cinder.\"\n\n\n A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right?\n Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n\n\n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They\n sent us out. They've waited so long—.\"\n\n\n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet\n they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n\n\n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right\n now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would\n be over.\"\n\n\n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n\n\n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm\n tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"\n\n\n She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved\n you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please,\n Michael.\"\n\n\n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to\n Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\nThe great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after\n flood waters have drained away.\n\n\n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.\n\n\n A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over\n them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials\n gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of\n white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned\n toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the\n cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had\n stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n\n\n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping\n throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for\n an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n\n\n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to\n them in voices of reverence.\n\n\n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered\n admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them,\n open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.\n\n\n The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing\n like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing,\n sucking the water from the seas.\n\n\n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For\n some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were\n uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other.\n And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place\n else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to\n others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make\n the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here\n to stay—and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n\n\n The silence did not change.\n\n\n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"\n\n\n A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened\n bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The\n din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a\n fluttering beneath it.\n\n\n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale,\n hovering faces of the officials.\n\n\n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said\n isn't true!\"\n\n\n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n \"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way\n it's got to be.\"\n\n\n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.\n\n\n \"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the\n distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the\n flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you.\n Everything's going to be\nall right\n!\"\n\n\n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun\n away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like\n pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white\n ship.\nThey ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council\n chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood\n desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And\n on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet\n square.\n\n\n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you\n heard, they report—complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now,\n the proof.\"\n\n\n Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair.\n The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in\n the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around.\n Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled\n with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the\n watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an\n ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n\n\n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of\n lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling,\n like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts\n flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time\n passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they\n themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward\n blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.\n\n\n The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved\n forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many\n mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming\n to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a\n razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson.\n Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A\n roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear\n flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they\n gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere\n of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n\n\n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and\n the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks\n of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.\n\n\n Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and\n died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the\n death of a ship.\n\n\n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they\n saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw\n creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and\n blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking\n about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They\n saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at\n incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs\n and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but\n invisible.\n\n\n And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a\n compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and\n thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks\n and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were\n aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some\n that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into\n flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid.\n They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of\n blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must\n ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck\n that was Earth.\n\n\n The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts,\n showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the\n man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the\n woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where\n solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was\n held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon\n them from many pencil like tubes.\n\n\n The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into\n human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and\n extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and\n cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the\n ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their\n bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them\n in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into\n space—all this through millions of miles and a hundred years,\n compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of\n space.\n\n\n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers\n of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.\n\n\n And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a\n blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker;\n saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past\n the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark\n nothingness.\n\n\n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them\n into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another\n ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great,\n yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it.\n Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the\n darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies\n drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.\n\n\n At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of\n horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a\n moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval\n grew in volume.\n\n\n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and\n the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the\n contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams\n and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n\n\n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\nMichael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the\n agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in\n clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa.\n There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing\n of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to\n quiet his trembling.\n\n\n \"There—there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in\n space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for\n hundreds of years.\"\n\n\n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time,\n the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man\n was struck by one of the ground cars and\neveryone\nwho saw it went\n insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no\n one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for\n so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"\n\n\n \"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had\n been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people\n there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n\n\n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would\n involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people\n who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in\n space.\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President\n gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n\n\n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the\n council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing\n out; the terror in them was fading away.\n\n\n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you\n can't bring it back to life.\"\n\n\n \"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic\n wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long\n time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now\n you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around,\n slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n\n\n \"None.\"\n\n\n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr.\n President.\"\n\n\n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered\n consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.\n\n\n \"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to\n go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement\n wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people\n simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to\n keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for\n the good of the people.\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary were silent.\n\n\n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n \"until we have reached our decision.\"\n\n\n As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness,\n and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being\n pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of\n artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the\n shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind\n the gardens were growing into mountains.\nIn their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and\n waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and\n translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun\n when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n\n\n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far\n below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the\n shoreline of the sea.\n\n\n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone\n back into space.\"\n\n\n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.\n\n\n He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or\n anywhere, without you.\"\n\n\n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael,\n outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n\n\n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n\n\n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to\n it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and\n the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n\n\n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and\n looked away from her. \"We're crazy—talking as though we had a\n choice.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll have to\ngive\nus a choice.\"\n\n\n \"What're you talking about?\"\n\n\n \"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture.\n Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n\n\n He waited.\n\n\n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n\n\n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n\n\n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between\n suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n\n\n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long\n moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What\n would it do to them?\"\n\n\n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know\n you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started.\n Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I—I don't know how to say this.\"\n\n\n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n\n\n \"I'm—going to have a child.\"\n\n\n His face went blank.\n\n\n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the\n softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were\n shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been\n running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n\n\n \"It's true.\"\n\n\n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n\n\n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"I don't know—what to—to say. It's so\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe—I got so—tired—just seeing the two of us over and over again\n and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that\n was it. It was just—something I felt I\nhad\nto do. Some—\nreal\nlife\n again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of\n myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close\n to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the\n ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night\n or morning like we'd seen on Earth—so—so long ago. And then I\nhad\nto let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was\n something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed\n to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She\n paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think—it would be like this.\"\n\n\n \"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for\n three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history\n books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water\n had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth\n and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies\n born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give,\n for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the\n culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they\n were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was\n stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think\n the council could endure what you've done.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"\n\n\n \"And so this will be just for\nus\n.\" He took her in his arms. \"If I\n remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go\n with you out onto the Earth—if we can swing it. When we get outside\n the city, or if we do—Well, we'll see.\"\n\n\n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the\n window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside\n him.\nThey both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking,\n both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the\n giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush\n planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing\n among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently\n like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the\n thoughts projected from the screen:\n\n\n \"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another\n expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope.\n Everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand\n years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it\n becomes a lie.\"\n\n\n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The\n neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting\n their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller\n rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they\n can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"\n\n\n \"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these\n people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the\n open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I\n die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I\n want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n\n\n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n\n\n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n\n\n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council\n chambers.\nAgain they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the\n faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n\n\n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n\n\n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to\n set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.\n\n\n \"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n \"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you\n and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took\n another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've\n changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be\n protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did\n at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be\n isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you\nare\nheroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has\n been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the\n time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that\n hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent\n out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to\n take your place in our society.\"\n\n\n He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is.\"\n\n\n \"Proceed.\"\n\n\n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he\n raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of\n the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised\n it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly\n and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't\n endure.\"\n\n\n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of\n desks.\n\n\n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways\n of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.\n\n\n \"If what I think you're about to say is true,\" said the President in a\n shaking voice, \"it would have been better if you'd never been born.\"\n\n\n \"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were\nborn\nand haven't\n died—yet.\" A pause. \"And we can kill ourselves right here before your\n eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be\n horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and\n torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened\n a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the\n sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see.\"\n\n\n The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring\n and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in\n anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and\n unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing\n around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other\n by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became\n very still.\n\n\n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the\n President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering\n around them in a wide half circle.\n\n\n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The\n half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving\n closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white\n ones and hands were raised to seize them.\n\n\n Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her\n body and the waiting for death.\n\n\n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n\n\n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n\n\n \"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember\n what'll happen to you.\"\n\n\n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of\n muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to\n do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're\n mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white\n ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who\n was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a\n mirror.\n\n\n \"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to—to give me\n those—lockets! It's your—duty!\"\n\n\n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To\n ourselves.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n\n\n The President's body sagged. \"What—what is it you want?\"\n\n\n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city.\n To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to\n die a natural death.\"\n\n\n The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and\n whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate\n us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here....\nLet\nthem be\n finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n\n\n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him\n forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing\n there close together, as though attached.\n\n\n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth—to die. You\nwill\ndie. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or\n your people again.\"\n\n\n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n\n\n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And—supplies.... Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range\n of mountains.\"\n\n\n \"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been\n allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds\n of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the\n sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you\n any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the\n half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that\n should sink to the floor.\nIt was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth\n that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The\n ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n\n\n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk\n into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way\n along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically\n for the place of salvation.\n\n\n \"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you\n think they'd be with us?\"\n\n\n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space\n again—or in prison.\"\n\n\n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the\n night over the decaying road.\n\n\n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill\n myself.\"\n\n\n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward\n the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the\n land?\"\n\n\n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward,\n watching the headlights push back the darkness.\n\n\n They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across\n the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the\n desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat\n for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and\n inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great\n pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless\n waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of\n dust.\n\n\n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n\n\n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said\n Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains\n and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in\n space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough\n concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why?\n When?\"\n\n\n They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and\n strolled toward the top of the hill.\n\n\n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n\n\n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n \"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n\n\n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me\n back.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n\n\n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road\n somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n\n\n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n\n\n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"\n\n\n \"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been\n the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n\n\n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the\n dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n\n\n \"Mary!\"\n\n\n She stopped, whirling around.\n\n\n He was staring down at her feet.\n\n\n She followed his gaze.\n\n\n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n\n\n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n\n\n \"They're new,\" he said.\n\n\n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred\n object.\n\n\n He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill\n and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny\n patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a\n pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley\n and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.\n\n\n \"Oh!\"\n\n\n Her hand found his.\n\n\n They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch\n their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the\n little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that\n trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They\n saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird\n and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a\n bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the\n sweetness inside.\n\n\n Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n\n\n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n\n\n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in\n his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n\n\n \"We can\nlive\nhere, Michael!\"\n\n\n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a\n hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and\n plant and you'll have the child.\"\n\n\n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n\n\n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime\n we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He\n paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a\n way to save them.\"\n\n\n They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time.\n They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of\n the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and\n of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the\n life that was their own.\n\n\n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood\n and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he\n had decided to build the house.\n... THE END\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did the incoming travelers from space make Ground Control wait so long for an answer to their hail?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_1", "options": ["Michael and Mary were arguing over who should have the honor of being the first to reply after such a long trip.", "Earth’s language had changed a lot in 2,000 years, and they couldn’t understand what the Earthside transmitter was saying.", "They were trying to decide whether to tell them that their mission had failed to find a habitable planet.", "Their radio wasn’t working because the heat of re-entry always cuts off radio transmission during a space landing."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How many years passed between the time of the nuclear conflicts on earth and the time when the space ships were sent out to seek new inhabitable planets?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_2", "options": ["3 millennia", "2 millennia", "5 millennia", "It was so long ago that no one alive now on Earth really knows."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the two space travelers stay alive throughout their journey, which was much longer than a human lifespan?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_3", "options": ["They slept in cryogenic berths and were only re-warmed when the ship’s computer detected possible search targets.", "The original astronauts were all married couples, and successive generations simply had children and trained them to carry out the mission after their forefathers. ", "At regular intervals, they used special cells from their bodies to create and rear clones of themselves.", "Because the spaceships traveled at very close to light speed, their aging process was slowed enough that their journey could be completed in one relativistic human lifetime."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the president tell the assembled people that Michael’s summary of their space journey was not quite correct?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_4", "options": ["The message was simply unacceptable, and neither the president nor the people were prepared to hear it. The crowd was on the verge of panic, and he wanted to prevent unrest.", "The president suspected that the original Michael and his wife had been replaced by people from an alien world during the journey, and that this was the aliens’ message to Earthlings: stay here and die, we won’t help.", "Michael and his wife were from the opposite political party from the president, and the president thought that Michael and his wife were just telling lies to hurt his chances of re-election.", "The president just wanted to hear all the evidence first, then he would tell everyone the hard truth."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Michael’s video so upsetting to the members of the president’s council?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_5", "options": ["Council positions were hereditary, and the council members were upset at watching some of their forefathers die violent deaths in the video.", "They were upset at having their time wasted watching video of deaths that happened so long ago that they weren’t that relevant to the council members.", "The council members thought they could have done a better job on the mission and brought the whole fleet of a thousand people back home safely. They were upset at the incompetence they saw.", "Because they were seeing images of people dying from some of the hazards of space travel, such as ships blowing up, and Earthlings were no longer accustomed to this, having eliminated all risk of anything but a natural, peaceful death centuries ago."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What inconsistency does Michael point out between the president’s displeasure at him at the loss of hope in finding another habitable planet, and the president’s and the council’s reaction to his videos?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_6", "options": ["If Michael HAD found a habitable location out in space somewhere, human society would doubtless change again in the meantime, and people might actually enjoy violence.", "It doesn’t really matter what the president thought of either the violent deaths in the video or the hopeless news, because they would never be able to put a significant number of colonists on ships – the whole enterprise was doomed from the start.", "He points out that the president is being psychologically violent against Michael and his wife, and that is inconsistent with the society’s supposed position on violence.", "If Michael HAD found a habitable location out in space somewhere, getting there would involve the same kinds of casualties and accidents that he portrayed in his film."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is mentioned repeatedly in the text that Michael’s wife says she is glad to be away from once they have left the city?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_7", "options": ["The wailing hysteria of the crowds, who she views as weak.", "The noise of pumps and other machinery.", "She hopes she never sees another video screen as long as she lives.", "She is glad to be away from the seagulls that hang around the seawater processing plant."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do Michael and his wife decide to during the time when the president and council are deliberating?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_8", "options": ["They decide to kill themselves in front of the entire populace to complete the destruction of the last, remnant human population on Earth. ", "They believe that the president will force them to return to space to lead a second expedition, and they would rather die by their own hands.", "They decide that if their freedom to leave the city is curtailed, they will kill themselves rather than submit.", "They decide that if their freedom to leave the city is curtailed, they will threaten the president and council with having to watch them die, as leverage."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is really driving Mary's desire to get out and live upon the Earth?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_9", "options": ["She likes desert landscapes.", "She doesn't want any of the available jobs in the city.", "She is pregnant.", "She is claustrophobic."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How do Michael and Mary make their escape from the city?", "question_unique_id": "32744_2SF4CAPD_10", "options": ["Their escape was not successful. They threatened the president with the lockets, he called their bluff, and when they tried to activate the lockets, they didn’t work because they were so old. ", "They threaten their guard with their lockets, and in fear, he gives them a ground car and escorts them to the city gates, in secret.", "As soon as Michael and Mary make plain their desire to live outside the city, they become anathema to the city dwellers, and the president all but says, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”", "Not everyone in the city shares the mainstream views of the citizens that it is crazy to leave. A small group of sympathizers arranges for a ground car and supplies, and from the shadows, they watch Michael and Mary leave, hoping to join them someday."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/2/7/4/32744//32744-h//32744-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63062", "set_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Terror Out of Space", "year": 1952, "author": "Brackett, Leigh", "topic": "Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Venus (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Adventure stories; PS", "article": "TERROR OUT OF SPACE\nby LEIGH BRACKETT\nAn eerie story of a silver land beneath the black\n\n Venusian seas. A grim tale of brooding terror whirling out of space to\n\n drive men mad, of a menace without name or form, and of the man, Lundy,\n\n who fought the horror, his eyes blinded by his will. For to see the\n\n terror was to become its slave—a mindless automaton whose only wish\n\n was to see behind the shadowed mysterious eyelids of \"\nIT\n\".\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLundy was flying the aero-space convertible by himself. He'd been doing\n it for a long time. So long that the bottom half of him was dead to the\n toes and the top half even deader, except for two separate aches like\n ulcerated teeth; one in his back, one in his head.\n\n\n Thick pearly-grey Venusian sky went past the speeding flier in\n streamers of torn cloud. The rockets throbbed and pounded. Instruments\n jerked erratically under the swirl of magnetic currents that makes the\n Venusian atmosphere such a swell place for pilots to go nuts in.\n\n\n Jackie Smith was still out cold in the co-pilot's seat. From in back,\n beyond the closed door to the tiny inner cabin, Lundy could hear\n Farrell screaming and fighting.\n\n\n He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.\n\n\n Lundy didn't like that cold tight knot in his belly. It meant he was\n afraid. He'd been afraid before, plenty of times, and he wasn't ashamed\n of it. But right now he needed all the brains and guts he had to get\nIt\nback to Special headquarters at Vhia, and he didn't want to have\n to fight himself, too.\n\n\n Fear can screw things for you. It can make you weak when you need to be\n strong, if you're going to go on living. You, and the two other guys\n depending on you.\n\n\n Lundy hoped he could keep from getting too much afraid, and too\n tired—because\nIt\nwas sitting back there in its little strongbox in\n the safe, waiting for somebody to crack.\n\n\n Farrell was cracked wide open, of course, but he was tied down. Jackie\n Smith had begun to show signs before he passed out, so that Lundy had\n kept one hand over the anaesthetic needle gun holstered on the side of\n his chair. And Lundy thought,\nThe hell of it is, you don't know when\nIt\nstarts to work on you.\n There's no set pattern, or if there is we don't know it. Maybe right\n now the readings I see on those dials aren't there at all....\nDown below the torn grey clouds he could see occasional small patches\n of ocean. The black, still, tideless water of Venus, that covers so\n many secrets of the planet's past.\n\n\n It didn't help Lundy any. It could be right or wrong, depending on\n what part of the ocean it was—and there was no way to tell. He hoped\n nothing would happen to the motors. A guy could get awfully wet, out in\n the middle of that still black water.\n\n\n Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with\n impervium. Screaming and fighting the straps, because\nIt\nwas locked\n up and calling for help.\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, and opened his pale green eyes.\n\n\n \"I'm cold,\" he said. \"Hi, Midget.\"\n\n\n Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with\n bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like\n something the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on\n New Year's Day.\n\n\n \"You're cold,\" he said sourly. He licked sweat off his lips. \"Oh, fine!\n That was all I needed.\"\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to joggle himself. His black\n tunic was open over his chest, showing the white strapping of bandages,\n and his left hand was thrust in over the locked top of the tunic's\n zipper. He was a big man, not any older than Lundy, with big, ugly,\n pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a skin like old\n leather.\n\n\n \"On Mercury, where I was born,\" he said, \"the climate is suitable for\n human beings. You Old-World pantywaists....\" He broke off, turned white\n under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, \"Oi! Farrell sure\n did a good job on me.\"\n\n\n \"You'll live,\" said Lundy. He tried not to think about how nearly both\n he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of a\n fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the\n Mountains of White Cloud.\nLundy still felt sick about that. The bull-meat, the hard boys, you\n didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't that kind. He was just a\n nice guy that got trapped by something too big for him.\n\n\n A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.\n\n\n But you couldn't help thinking, about\nIt\n. The Thing you had caught in\n a special net of tight-woven metal mesh, aiming at something Farrell\n could see but you couldn't. The Thing you had forced into the glassite\n box and covered up with a black cloth, because you had been warned not\n to look at\nIt\n.\n\n\n Lundy's hands tingled and burned, not unpleasantly. He could still feel\n the small savage Thing fighting him, hidden in the net. It had felt\n vaguely cylindrical, and terribly alive.\n\n\n Life. Life from outer space, swept out of a cloud of cosmic dust by the\n gravitic pull of Venus. Since Venus had hit the cloud there had been a\n wave of strange madness on the planet. Madness like Farrell's, that had\n led to murder, and some things even worse.\n\n\n Scientists had some ideas about that life from Out There. They'd had\n a lucky break and found one of The Things, dead, and there were vague\n stories going around of a crystalline-appearing substance that wasn't\n really crystal, about three inches long and magnificently etched and\n fluted, and supplied with some odd little gadgets nobody would venture\n an opinion about.\n\n\n But the Thing didn't do them much good, dead. They had to have one\n alive, if they were going to find out what made it tick and learn how\n to put a stop to what the telecommentators had chosen to call The\n Madness from Beyond, or The Vampire Lure.\n\n\n One thing about it everybody knew. The guys who suddenly went sluggy\n and charged off the rails all made it clear that they had met the\n ultimate Dream Woman of all women and all dreams. Nobody else could see\n her, but that didn't bother them any. They saw her, and she was—\nShe\n.\n And her eyes were always veiled.\n\n\n And\nShe\nwas a whiz at hypnosis and mind-control. That's why\nShe\n, or\nIt\n, hadn't been caught alive before. Not before Lundy and Smith, with\n every scientific aid Special could give them, had tracked down Farrell\n and managed to get the breaks.\n\n\n The breaks. Plain fool luck. Lundy moved his throbbing head stiffly on\n his aching neck, blinked sweat out of his bloodshot eyes, and wished to\n hell he was home in bed.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said suddenly, \"Midget, I'm cold. Get me a blanket.\"\n\n\n Lundy looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as\n though they saw anything. He was shivering.\n\n\n \"I can't leave the controls, Jackie.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. I've got one hand. I can hang onto this lousy tin fish that\n long.\"\nLundy scowled. He knew Smith wasn't kidding about the cold. The\n temperatures on Mercury made the first-generation colonists sensitive\n to anything below the range of an electric furnace. With the wound and\n all, Smith might, wind up with pneumonia if he wasn't covered.\n\n\n \"Okay.\" Lundy reached out and closed the switch marked A. \"But I'll let\n Mike do the flying. He can probably last five minutes before he blows\n his guts out.\"\n\n\n Iron Mike was just a pattycake when it came to Venusian atmosphere\n flying. The constant magnetic compensation heated the robot coils to\n the fusing point in practically no time at all.\n\n\n Lundy thought fleetingly that it was nice to know there were still a\n couple of things men could do better than machinery.\n\n\n He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for\n four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at\n him.\n\n\n \"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!\"\n\n\n Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat\n needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.\n\n\n Farrell had quit screaming.\n\n\n There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were\n outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had\n stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.\n\n\n It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.\n\n\n Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two\n kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not\n sane, nor even human.\n\n\n Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said quietly, \"Hold it, Midget. She doesn't like it there\n in the safe. She's cold, and she wants to come out.\"\nLundy looked over his shoulder. Smith was hunched around in his seat,\n holding the needle-gun from Lundy's holster on the pilot's chair. His\n pale green eyes had a distant, dreamy glow, but Lundy knew better than\n to trust it.\n\n\n He said, without inflection, \"You've seen her.\"\n\n\n \"No. No, but—I've heard her.\" Smith's heavy lips twitched and parted.\n The breath sucked through between them, hoarse and slow.\n\n\n Farrell went down on his knees beside the safe. He put his hands on its\n blank and gleaming face and turned to Lundy. He was crying.\n\n\n \"Open it. You've got to open it. She wants to come out. She's\n frightened.\"\n\n\n Jackie Smith raised the gun, a fraction of an inch. \"Open it, Midget,\"\n he whispered. \"She's cold in there.\"\n\n\n Lundy stood still. The sweat ran on him and he was colder than a frog's\n belly in the rain; and for no reason at all he said thickly,\n\n\n \"No. She's hot. She can't breathe in there. She's hot.\"\n\n\n Then he jerked his head up and yelled. He came around to face Smith,\n unsteady but fast, and started for him.\n\n\n Smith's ugly face twisted as though he might be going to cry. \"Midget!\n I don't want to shoot you. Open the safe!\"\n\n\n Lundy said, \"You damned fool,\" with no voice at all, and went on.\n\n\n Smith hit the firing stud.\n\n\n The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall.\n\n\n Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.\n\n\n The ship hit the water with a terrific smack. Spray geysered up, dead\n white against the black sea, fell back, and closed in. Presently even\n the ripples went away.\n\n\n Dark green weed-islands twined sinuously upon themselves, a flock of\n small sea-dragons flapped their jeweled wings down and began to fish,\n and none of them cared at all about the ship sinking away under them.\n\n\n Not even Lundy cared, out cold in the space-tight cabin, with his body\n wedged up against the safe and tears drying with the sweat on his\n stubbled cheeks.\nII\n\n\n The first thing Lundy knew about was the stillness. A dead feeling, as\n though everything in creation had stopped breathing.\n\n\n The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"\n\n\n Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his\n stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.\n Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.\n\n\n It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker\n had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the\n airlock panel.\n\n\n Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips\n drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.\n\n\n The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could\n afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he\n could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.\n\n\n Lundy looked all around the cabin. He didn't speak. He looked sideways\n out of the port. There was water out there. The black sea-water of\n Venus; clear and black, like deep night.\n\n\n There was level sand spreading away from the ship. The silver light\n came up out of it. Some kind of phosphorescence, as bright as moonlight\n and faintly tinged with green.\n\n\n Black sea-water. Silver sand. The guy kept on knocking at the door.\n Slow and easy. Patient. One—two. One—two. Just off beat with Lundy's\n heart.\n\n\n Lundy went to the inner cabin, walking steadily. He looked around\n carefully and then went back. He stopped by the lock panel.\n\n\n \"Okay, Jackie,\" he said. \"In a minute. In a minute, boy.\"\n\n\n Then he turned and went very fast to the port locker and got a quart\n bottle out of its shock cradle, and raised it. It took both hands.\n\n\n After a while he dropped the bottle and stood still, not looking at\n anything, until he stopped shaking. Then he pulled his vac-suit down\n off its hook and climbed into it. His face was grey and quite blank.\n\n\n He took all the oxygen cylinders he could carry, emergency rations,\n and all the benzedrine in the medicine kit. He put the limit dose\n of the stimulant down on top of the brandy before he locked his\n helmet. He didn't bother with the needle gun. He took the two Service\n blasters—his own, and Smith's. The gentle knocking didn't stop.\n\n\n He stood for a moment looking at the open safe and the black cloth\n dropped beside it. Something cruel came into his face. A tightness, a\n twitching and setting of the muscles, and a terrible look of patience.\n\n\n Being under water wouldn't bother a Thing from outer space. He reached\n up and lifted the net of tight-woven metal-mesh down off its hook and\n fastened it on his belt. Then he walked over and opened the airlock\n door.\n\n\n Black water swirled in around his weighted boots, and then the door\n opened wide and Jackie Smith came in.\n\n\n He'd been waiting in the flooded lock chamber. Kicking his boots\n against the inner door, easy, with the slow breathing of the sea. Now\n the water pushed his feet down and held him upright from behind, so he\n could walk in and stand looking at Lundy. A big blond man with green\n eyes, and white bandages strapped under his open black tunic, looking\n at Lundy. Not long. Only for a second. But long enough.\n\n\n Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically.\n\n\n He walked out across the firm green-silver sand, swallowing the blood\n that ran in his mouth and choked him.\nHe didn't hurry. He was going to be walking for a long, long time. From\n the position of the ship when it fell he ought to be able to make it to\n the coast—unless\nIt\nhad been working on him so the figures on the\n dials hadn't been there at all.\n\n\n He checked his direction, adjusted the pressure-control in his\n vac-suit, and plodded on in the eerie undersea moonlight. It wasn't\n hard going. If he didn't hit a deep somewhere, or meet something too\n big to handle, or furnish a meal for some species of hungry Venus-weed,\n he ought to live to face up to the Old Man at H.Q. and tell him two men\n were dead, the ship lost, and the job messed to hell and gone.\n\n\n It was beautiful down there. Like the dream-worlds you see when you're\n doped or delirious. The phosphorescence rose up into the black water\n and danced there in wavering whorls of cold fire. Fish, queer gaudy\n little things with jewelled eyes, flicked past Lundy in darts of\n sudden color, and there were great stands of weed like young forests,\n spangling the dark water and the phosphorescent glow with huge burning\n spots of blue and purple and green and silver.\n\n\n Flowers. Lundy got too close to some of them once. They reached out and\n opened round mouths full of spines and sucked at him hungrily. The\n fish gave them a wide berth. After that, so did Lundy.\n\n\n He hadn't been walking more than half an hour when he hit the road.\n\n\n It was a perfectly good road, running straight across the sand. Here\n and there it was cracked, with some of the huge square blocks pushed up\n or tipped aside, but it was still a good road, going somewhere.\n\n\n Lundy stood looking at it with cold prickles running up and down his\n spine. He'd heard about things like this. Nobody knew an awful lot\n about Venus yet. It was a young, tough, be-damned-to-you planet, and it\n was apt to give the snoopy scientific guys a good swift boot in their\n store teeth.\n\n\n But even a young planet has a long past, and stories get around.\n Legends, songs, folk tales. It was pretty well accepted that a lot of\n Venus that was under water now hadn't been once, and vice versa. The\n old girl had her little whimsies while doing the preliminary mock-up of\n her permanent face.\n\n\n So once upon a time this road had crossed a plain under a hot\n pearl-grey sky, going somewhere. Taking caravans from the seacoast,\n probably. Bales of spices and spider-silk and casks of\nvakhi\nfrom the\n Nahali canebrakes, and silver-haired slave-girls from the high lands\n of the Cloud People, going along under sultry green\nliha\n-trees to be\n sold.\n\n\n Now it crossed a plain of glowing sand under still black water. The\n only trees that shadowed it were tall weeds with brilliant, hungry\n flowers, and the only creatures that followed it were little fish\n with jewelled eyes. But it was still there, still ready, still going\n somewhere.\n\n\n It was headed the same way Lundy was. It must have made a bend\n somewhere and turned to meet him. Lundy licked cold sweat off his lips\n and stepped out on it.\n\n\n He stepped slow and careful, like a man coming alone down the aisle of\n an empty church.\n\n\n He walked on the road for a long time. The weeds crowded in thicker\n along its edges. It seemed to run right through a dense forest of them\n that spread away as far as Lundy could see on either side. He was glad\n of the road. It was wide, and if he stayed in the middle of it the\n flowers couldn't reach him.\nIt got darker, because of the weeds covering the sand. Whatever made\n the phosphorescence didn't like being crowded that way, and pretty soon\n it was so dark that Lundy had to switch on the light in the top of his\n helmet. In the edges of the beam he could see the weed fronds moving\n lazily with the slow breathing of the sea.\n\n\n The flowers were brighter here. They hung like lamps in the black\n water, burning with a light that seemed to come out of themselves.\n Sullen reds and angry yellows, and coldly vicious blues.\n\n\n Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.\n\n\n He sat down and rested a while, turning off his light to save the\n battery. The flowers watched him, glowing in the dark. He closed his\n eyes, but he could still feel them, watching and waiting.\n\n\n After a minute or two he got up and went on.\n\n\n The weeds grew thicker, and taller, and heavier with flowers.\n\n\n More benzedrine, and damn the heart. The helmet light cut a cold white\n tunnel through the blackness. He followed it, walking faster. Weed\n fronds met and interlaced high above him, closing him in. Flowers bent\n inward, downward. Their petals almost brushed him. Fleshy petals,\n hungry and alive.\n\n\n He started to run, over the wheel-ruts and the worn hollows of the road\n that still went somewhere, under the black sea.\n\n\n Lundy ran clumsily for a long time between the dark and pressing walls.\n The flowers got closer. They got close enough to catch his vac-suit,\n like hands grasping and slipping and grasping again. He began using the\n blaster.\n\n\n He burned off a lot of them that way. They didn't like it. They began\n swaying in from their roots and down from the laced ceiling over his\n head. They hurt. They were angry. Lundy ran, sobbing without tears.\n\n\n The road did him in. It crossed him up, suddenly, without warning. It\n ran along smoothly under the tunnel of weeds, and then it was a broken,\n jumbled mass of huge stone blocks, tipped up and thrown around like\n something a giant's kid got tired of playing with.\n\n\n And the weeds had found places to stand in between them.\n\n\n Lundy tripped and fell, cracking his head against the back of his\n helmet. For a moment all he could see was bright light flashing. Then\n that stopped, and he realized he must have jarred a connection loose\n somewhere because his own light was out.\n\n\n He began to crawl over a great tilted block. The flowers burned bright\n in the darkness. Bright and close. Very close. Lundy opened his mouth.\n Nothing came out but a hoarse animal whimper. He was still holding the\n blaster. He fired it off a couple of times, and then he was on top of\n the block, lying flat on his belly.\n\n\n He knew it was the end of the line, because he couldn't move any more.\n\n\n The bright flowers came down through the dark. Lundy lay watching them.\n His face was quite blank. His dark eyes held a stubborn hatred, but\n nothing else.\n\n\n He watched the flowers fasten on his vac-suit and start working. Then,\n from up ahead, through the dark close tunnel of the weeds, he saw the\n light.\n\n\n It flared out suddenly, like lightning. A sheet of hot, bright gold\n cracking out like a whipped banner, lighting the end of the road.\n\n\n Lighting the city, and the little procession coming out of it.\n\n\n Lundy didn't believe any of it. He was half dead already, with his\n mind floating free of his body and beginning to be wrapped up in dark\n clouds. He watched what he saw incuriously.\n\n\n The golden light died down, and then flared out twice more,\n rhythmically. The road ran smooth again beyond the end of the tunnel,\n straight across a narrow plain. Beyond that, the city rose.\n\n\n Lundy couldn't see much of it, because of the weeds. But it seemed to\n be a big city. There was a wall around it, of green marble veined with\n dusky rose, the edges worn round by centuries of water. There were\n broad gates of pure untarnished gold, standing open on golden pintles.\n Beyond them was a vast square paved in cloud-grey quartz, and the\n buildings rose around it like the castles Lundy remembered from Earth\n and his childhood, when there were clouds of a certain kind at sunset.\n\n\n That's what the whole place looked like, under the flaring golden\n light. Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset. Remote, dreaming in beauty, with\n the black water drawn across it like a veil—something never destroyed\n because it never existed.\n\n\n The creatures who came from between the golden gates and down the road\n were like tiny wisps of those clouds, torn free by some cold wandering\n breeze and driven away from the light.\n\n\n They came drifting toward Lundy. They didn't seem to be moving fast,\n but they must have been because quite suddenly they were among the\n weeds. There were a lot of them; maybe forty or fifty. They seemed to\n be between three and four feet tall, and they were all the same sad,\n blue-grey, twilight color.\n\n\n Lundy couldn't see what they were. They were vaguely man-shaped, and\n vaguely finny, and something that was more than vaguely something else,\n only he couldn't place it.\n\n\n He was suddenly beyond caring. The dull black curtain around his mind\n got a hole in it, and fear came shrieking through it. He could feel the\n working and pulling of his vac-suit where the flowers were chewing on\n it as though it were his own skin.\n\n\n He could feel sweat running cold on his body. In a minute that would be\n sea water running, and then....\n\n\n Lundy began to fight. His lips peeled back off his teeth, but he didn't\n make any noise except his heavy breathing. He fought the flowers,\n partly with the blaster, partly with brute strength. No science, no\n thought. Just the last blind struggle of an animal that didn't want to\n die.\n\n\n The flowers held him. They smothered him, crushed him down, wrapped him\n in lovely burning petals of destruction. He seared a lot of them, but\n there were always more. Lundy didn't fight long.\n\n\n He lay on his back, his knees drawn up a little toward a rigid, knotted\n belly, blind with sweat, his heart kicking him like a logger's boot.\n Cold, tense—waiting.\n\n\n And then the flowers went away.\n\n\n They didn't want to. They let go reluctantly, drawing back and snarling\n like cats robbed of a fat mouse, making small hungry feints at him. But\n they went.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why was Farrell screaming?", "question_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM_1", "options": ["Because he had a terrible headache due to the magnetic currents in the atmosphere of Venus.", "Because he was cold, and he thought he was getting frostbite.", "Because he was claustrophobic, and had been in the flier so long that he had lost his mind.", "Because he had lost his mind due to the influence of an alien creature, which was distressed over having been caught and locked up."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Lundy’s nickname, and why is it appropriate?", "question_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM_2", "options": ["His nickname is Midget, which is appropriate because he is a dwarf, a desirable feature for cramped spaceships.", "His nickname is White Cloud, which is appropriate because that’s the city he was from.", "His nickname is Iron Mike, which is appropriate because he has steely powers of concentration.", "His nickname is Midget, which is appropriate because he is not very tall, at least by Earther standards."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What gender is the alien space creature?", "question_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM_3", "options": ["The species of which this creature is a member has three genders, and this particular one was the neutral gender, known as It.", "The alien is cylindrical with a fluted surface - an alien \n computer, not a living being at all, according to the story.", "The men affected by the alien referred to it as female, but its gender is not clearly defined in the story.", "The creature is a female."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Jackie Smith so cold?", "question_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM_4", "options": ["He is cold because he has lost so much of his blood volume, and can’t circulate enough fluid.", "He is cold because It told him that SHE was cold.", "Because the space ship is very poorly insulated, and they are in the upper reaches of Venus’ atmosphere, where it is extremely cold.", "He is from Mercury, and used to much more extreme heat. Venus feels cold to him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Lundy, Farrell and Smith come to be on the ship?", "question_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM_5", "options": ["Lundy and Smith were given the task of capturing one of the alien space creatures for study by scientists. They found Farrell, mentally gone, when they picked up It.", "The three of them set out as a team with the mission of capturing It, but Farrell ended up falling under its spell.", "Smith and Farrell were sent to capture It, but when It took over Farrell’s mind, Lundy was sent from White Cloud to help Smith get Farrell back to base. ", "Lundy is the Venus equivalent of a federal marshal, and he was sent out to pick up Farrell and Smith, who had been affected by the alien creature."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Lundy’s flier end up on the bottom of the Venusian Ocean?", "question_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM_6", "options": ["The autopilot couldn’t handle the magnetic currents in the atmosphere and blew up, plunging the ship into the sea.", "The flier ran out of fuel at an inopportune time, and they had to ditch in the ocean.", "Farrell got loose in the back, released It, and It took over the ship’s controls and sent the ship into a nosedive to try to kill all three men.", "Smith attacked Lundy and purposely drove the flier down into the ocean to spare himself more torment and kill It."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who or what is Iron Mike?", "question_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM_7", "options": ["Iron Mike is Farrell’s nickname.", "Iron Mike is the autopilot computer.", "Iron Mike is the name Lundy gave to his vacuum suit, which he wore under the sea.", "Iron Mike is the call sign for Lundy’s flier."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why didn’t Lundy fall under the spell of the alien creature?", "question_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM_8", "options": ["It could only control two people at a time, and It was already controlling Farrell and Smith.", "He was an exceptionally strong person, and engaging in meditation helped him fight It off.", "He had taken some Benzedrine, which was known to help people resist the alien’s mind control.", "His behavior suggests that he did succumb to the alien in the moments before the flier crashed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the flowers let go of Lundy at the end?", "question_unique_id": "63062_PHE3FVEM_9", "options": ["Because the residents of the underwater Venusian city called off their “guard flowers.” ", "They did not like the taste of his vacuum suit.", "Because he swam up away from the underwater road, and they were rooted in place.", "He burned so many of them with his blaster that they gave up."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/0/6/63062//63062-h//63062-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61459", "set_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Governor of Glave", "year": 1955, "author": "Laumer, Keith", "topic": "Diplomats -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction", "article": "THE GOVERNOR OF GLAVE\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nThe revolution was over and peace\n\n restored—naturally Retief expected the worst!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n Retief turned back the gold-encrusted scarlet cuff of the mess jacket\n of a First Secretary and Consul, gathered in the three eight-sided\n black dice, shook them by his right ear and sent them rattling across\n the floor to rebound from the bulk-head.\n\n\n \"Thirteen's the point,\" the Power Section Chief called. \"Ten he makes\n it!\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Mr. Retief,\" a strained voice called. Retief looked up. A tall\n thin youth in the black-trimmed gray of a Third Secretary flapped a\n sheet of paper from the edge of the circle surrounding the game. \"The\n Ambassador's compliments, sir, and will you join him and the staff in\n the conference room at once?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and dusted his knees. \"That's all for now, boys,\" he said.\n \"I'll take the rest of your money later.\" He followed the junior\n diplomat from the ward room, along the bare corridors of the crew\n level, past the glare panel reading NOTICE—FIRST CLASS ONLY BEYOND\n THIS POINT, through the chandeliered and draped ballroom and along a\n stretch of soundless carpet to a heavy door bearing a placard with the\n legend CONFERENCE IN SESSION.\n\n\n \"Ambassador Sternwheeler seemed quite upset, Mr. Retief,\" the messenger\n said.\n\n\n \"He usually is, Pete.\" Retief took a cigar from his breast pocket. \"Got\n a light?\"\n\n\n The Third Secretary produced a permatch. \"I don't know why you smoke\n those things instead of dope sticks, Mr. Retief,\" he said. \"The\n Ambassador hates the smell.\"\n\n\n Retief nodded. \"I only smoke this kind at conferences. It makes for\n shorter sessions.\" He stepped into the room. Ambassador Sternwheeler\n eyed him down the length of the conference table.\n\n\n \"Ah, Mr. Retief honors us with his presence. Do be seated, Retief.\" He\n fingered a yellow Departmental despatch. Retief took a chair, puffing\n out a dense cloud of smoke.\n\n\n \"As I have been explaining to the remainder of my staff for the past\n quarter-hour,\" Sternwheeler rumbled, \"I've been the recipient of\n important intelligence.\" He blinked at Retief expectantly. Retief\n raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" Sternwheeler went on, \"that there has been a change in\n regime on Glave. A week ago, the government which invited the dispatch\n of this mission—and to which we're accredited—was overthrown.\n The former ruling class has fled into exile. A popular workers' and\n peasants' junta has taken over.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Ambassador,\" Counsellor Magnan broke in, rising. \"I'd like to be\n the first—\" he glanced around the table—\"or one of the first, anyway,\n to welcome the new government of Glave into the family of planetary\n ruling bodies—\"\n\"Sit down, Magnan!\" Sternwheeler snapped. \"Of course the Corps always\n recognizes\nde facto\nsovereignty. The problem is merely one of\n acquainting ourselves with the policies of this new group—a sort of\n blue-collar coalition, it seems. In what position that leaves this\n Embassy I don't yet know.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose this means we'll spend the next month in a parking orbit,\"\n Counsellor Magnan sighed.\n\n\n \"Unfortunately,\" Sternwheeler went on, \"the entire affair has\n apparently been carried off without recourse to violence, leaving the\n Corps no excuse to move in—that is, it appears our assistance in\n restoring order will not be required.\"\n\n\n \"Glave was one of the old Contract Worlds,\" Retief said. \"What's become\n of the Planetary Manager General and the technical staff? And how do\n the peasants and workers plan to operate the atmospheric purification\n system, the Weather Control station, the tide regulation complexes?\"\n\n\n \"I'm more concerned at present with the status of the Mission! Will we\n be welcomed by these peasants or peppered with buckshot?\"\n\n\n \"You say that this is a popular junta, and that the former leaders have\n fled into exile,\" Retief said. \"May I ask the source?\"\n\n\n \"The despatch cites a 'reliable Glavian source'.\"\n\n\n \"That's officialese for something cribbed from a broadcast news\n tape. Presumably the Glavian news services are in the hands of the\n revolution. In that case—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, there is the possibility that the issue is yet in doubt.\n Of course we'll have to exercise caution in making our approach. It\n wouldn't do to make overtures to the wrong side.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I think we need have no fear on that score,\" the Chief of the\n Political Section spoke up. \"I know these entrenched cliques. Once\n challenged by an aroused populace, they scuttle for safety—with large\n balances safely tucked away in neutral banks.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go on record,\" Magnan piped, \"as registering my deep\n gratification at this fulfillment of popular aspirations—\"\n\n\n \"The most popular aspiration I know of is to live high off someone\n else's effort,\" Retief said. \"I don't know of anyone outside the Corps\n who's managed it.\"\n\"Gentlemen!\" Sternwheeler bellowed. \"I'm awaiting your constructive\n suggestions—not an exchange of political views. We'll arrive off\n Glave in less than six hours. I should like before that time to have\n developed some notion regarding to whom I shall expect to offer my\n credentials!\"\n\n\n There was a discreet tap at the door; it opened and the young Third\n Secretary poked his head in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Ambassador, I have a reply to your message—just received from\n Glave. It's signed by the Steward of the GFE, and I thought you'd want\n to see it at once....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course; let me have it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the GFE?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"It's the revolutionary group,\" the messenger said, passing the message\n over.\n\n\n \"GFE? GFE? What do the letters SIGNIFY?\"\n\n\n \"Glorious Fun Eternally,\" Retief suggested. \"Or possibly Goodies For\n Everybody.\"\n\n\n \"I believe that's 'Glavian Free Electorate',\" the Third Secretary said.\n\n\n Sternwheeler stared at the paper, lips pursed. His face grew pink. He\n slammed the paper on the table.\n\n\n \"Well, gentlemen! It appears our worst fears have been realized!\n This is nothing less than a warning! A threat! We're advised to\n divert course and bypass Glave entirely. It seems the GFE wants no\n interference from meddling foreign exploiters, as they put it!\"\n\n\n Magnan rose. \"If you'll excuse me Mr. Ambassador, I want to get off a\n message to Sector HQ to hold my old job for me—\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, you idiot!\" Sternwheeler roared. \"If you think I'm\n consenting to have my career blighted—my first Ambassadorial post\n whisked out from under me—the Corps made a fool of—\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to take a look at that message,\" Retief said. It was passed\n along to him. He read it.\n\n\n \"I don't believe this applies to us, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n\"What are you talking about? It's addressed to me by name!\"\n\n\n \"It merely states that 'meddling foreign exploiters' are unwelcome.\n Meddling foreigners we are, but we don't qualify as exploiters unless\n we show a profit—and this appears to be shaping up as a particularly\n profitless venture.\"\n\n\n \"What are you proposing, Mr. Retief?\"\n\n\n \"That we proceed to make planetfall as scheduled, greet our welcoming\n committee with wide diplomatic smiles, hint at largesse in the offing\n and settle down to observe the lie of the land.\"\n\n\n \"Just what I was about to suggest,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"That might be dangerous,\" Sternwheeler said.\n\n\n \"That's why I didn't suggest it,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"Still it's essential that we learn more of the situation than can be\n gleaned from official broadcasts,\" Sternwheeler mused. \"Now, while I\n can't justify risking the entire Mission, it might be advisable to\n dispatch a delegation to sound out the new regime.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to volunteer,\" Magnan said, rising.\n\n\n \"Of course, the delegates may be murdered—\"\n\n\n \"—but unfortunately, I'm under treatment at the moment.\" Magnan sat\n down.\n\n\n \"—which will place us in an excellent position, propaganda-wise.\n\n\n \"What a pity I can't go,\" the Military Attache said. \"But my place is\n with my troops.\"\n\n\n \"The only troops you've got are the Assistant Attache and your\n secretary,\" Magnan pointed out.\n\n\n \"Say, I'd like to be down there in the thick of things,\" the Political\n Officer said. He assumed a grave expression. \"But of course I'll be\n needed here, to interpret results.\"\n\n\n \"I appreciate your attitude, gentlemen,\" Sternwheeler said, studying\n the ceiling. \"But I'm afraid I must limit the privilege of volunteering\n for this hazardous duty to those officers of more robust physique,\n under forty years of age—\"\n\n\n \"Tsk. I'm forty-one,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"—and with a reputation for adaptability.\" His glance moved along the\n table.\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I run along now, Mr. Ambassador?\" Retief said. \"It's\n time for my insulin shot.\"\n\n\n Sternwheeler's mouth dropped open.\n\n\n \"Just kidding,\" Retief said. \"I'll go. But I have one request, Mr.\n Ambassador: no further communication with the ground until I give the\n all-clear.\"\nII\n\n\n Retief grounded the lighter, in-cycled the lock and stepped out. The\n hot yellow Glavian sun beat down on a broad expanse of concrete, an\n abandoned service cart and a row of tall ships casting black shadows\n toward the silent control tower. A wisp of smoke curled up from the\n shed area at the rim of the field. There was no other sign of life.\n\n\n Retief walked over to the cart, tossed his valise aboard, climbed\n into the driver's seat and headed for the operations building. Beyond\n the port, hills rose, white buildings gleaming against the deep green\n slopes. Near the ridge, a vehicle moved ant-like along a winding road,\n a dust trail rising behind it. Faintly a distant shot sounded.\n\n\n Papers littered the ground before the Operations Building. Retief\n pushed open the tall glass door, stood listening. Slanting sunlight\n reflected from a wide polished floor, at the far side of which\n illuminated lettering over empty counters read IMMIGRATION, HEALTH\n and CUSTOMS. He crossed to the desk, put the valise down, then leaned\n across the counter. A worried face under an oversized white cap looked\n up at him.\n\n\n \"You can come out now,\" Retief said. \"They've gone.\"\n\n\n The man rose, dusting himself off. He looked over Retief's shoulder.\n \"Who's gone?\"\n\n\n \"Whoever it was that scared you.\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean? I was looking for my pencil.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is.\" Retief plucked a worn stub from the pocket of the soiled\n shirt sagging under the weight of braided shoulderboards. \"You can sign\n me in as a Diplomatic Representative. A break for you—no formalities\n necessary. Where can I catch a cab for the city?\"\n\n\n The man eyed Retief's bag. \"What's in that?\"\n\n\n \"Personal belongings under duty-free entry.\"\n\n\n \"Guns?\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks, just a cab.\"\n\n\n \"You got no gun?\" The man raised his voice.\n\n\n \"That's right, fellows,\" Retief called out. \"No gun; no knife, not\n even a small fission bomb. Just a few pairs of socks and some reading\n matter.\"\n\n\n A brown-uniformed man ran from behind the Customs Counter, holding a\n long-barreled blast-rifle centered on the Corps insignia stitched to\n the pocket of Retief's powder-blue blazer.\n\n\n \"Don't try nothing,\" he said. \"You're under arrest.\"\n\n\n \"It can't be overtime parking. I've only been here five minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Hah!\" The gun-handler moved out from the counter, came up to Retief.\n \"Empty out your pockets!\" he barked. \"Hands overhead!\"\n\n\n \"I'm just a diplomat, not a contortionist,\" Retief said, not moving.\n \"Do you mind pointing that thing in some other direction?\"\n\n\n \"Looky here, Mister, I'll give the orders. We don't need anybody\n telling us how to run our business.\"\n\n\n \"I'm telling you to shift that blaster before I take it away from you\n and wrap it around your neck,\" Retief said conversationally. The cop\n stepped back uncertainly, lowering the gun.\n\n\n \"Jake! Horny! Pud! come on out!\"\n\n\n Three more brown uniforms emerged from concealment.\n\n\n \"Who are you fellows hiding from, the top sergeant?\" Retief glanced\n over the ill-fitting uniforms, the unshaved faces, the scuffed boots.\n \"Tell you what. When he shows up, I'll engage him in conversation. You\n beat it back to the barracks and grab a quick bath—\"\n\n\n \"That's enough smart talk.\" The biggest of the three newcomers moved\n up to Retief. \"You stuck your nose in at the wrong time. We just had a\n change of management around here.\"\n\n\n \"I heard about it,\" Retief said. \"Who do I complain to?\"\n\n\n \"Complain? What about?\"\n\n\n \"The port's a mess,\" Retief barked. \"Nobody on duty to receive official\n visitors! No passenger service facilities! Why, do you know I had to\n carry my own bag—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right, that's outside my department. You better see the\n boss.\"\n\n\n \"The boss? I thought you got rid of the bosses.\"\n\n\n \"We did, but now we got new ones.\"\n\n\n \"They any better than the old ones?\"\n\n\n \"This guy asks too many questions,\" the man with the gun said. \"Let's\n let Sozier answer 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Who's he?\"\n\n\n \"He's the Military Governor of the City.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewhere,\" Retief said. \"Lead the way, Jake—and\n don't forget my bag.\"\nSozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp,\n prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He\n glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of\n a spacious office.\n\n\n \"I warned you off,\" he snapped. \"You came anyway.\" He leaned forward\n and slammed a fist down on the desk. \"You're used to throwing your\n weight around, but you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies\n pussyfooting around Glave!\"\n\n\n \"Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?\"\n\n\n \"Call me General!\"\n\n\n \"Mind if I sit down?\" Retief pulled out a chair, seated himself and\n took out a cigar. \"Curiously enough,\" he said, lighting up, \"the Corps\n has no intention of making any embarrassing investigations. We deal\n with the existing government, no questions asked.\" His eyes held the\n other's. \"Unless, of course, there are evidences of atrocities or other\n illegal measures.\"\n\n\n The coal-chip eyes narrowed. \"I don't have to make explanations to you\n or anybody else.\"\n\n\n \"Except, presumably, the Glavian Free Electorate,\" Retief said blandly.\n \"But tell me, General—who's actually running the show?\"\n\n\n A speaker on the desk buzzed. \"Hey, Corporal Sozier! Wes's got them two\n hellions cornered. They're holed up in the Birthday Cake—\"\n\n\n \"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.\n\n\n Sozier's eyes narrowed to slits. \"I could have you shot!\"\n\n\n \"Stop playing games with me, Sozier,\" Retief rapped. \"There's a\n squadron of Peace Enforcers standing by just in case any apprentice\n statesmen forget the niceties of diplomatic usage. I suggest you start\n showing a little intelligence about now, or even Horny and Pud are\n likely to notice.\"\nSozier's fingers squeaked on the arms of his chair. He swallowed.\n\n\n \"You might start by assigning me an escort for a conducted tour of\n the capital,\" Retief went on. \"I want to be in a position to confirm\n that order has been re-established, and that normal services have been\n restored. Otherwise it may be necessary to send in a Monitor Unit to\n straighten things out.\"\n\n\n \"You know you can't meddle with the internal affairs of a sovereign\n world!\"\n\n\n Retief sighed. \"The trouble with taking over your boss's job is\n discovering its drawbacks. It's disillusioning, I know, Sozier, but—\"\n\n\n \"All right! Take your tour! You'll find everything running as smooth as\n silk! Utilities, police, transport, environmental control—\"\n\n\n \"What about Space Control? Glave Tower seems to be off the air.\"\n\n\n \"I shut it down. We don't need anything and we don't want anything from\n the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Where's the new Premier keeping himself? Does he share your passion\n for privacy?\"\n\n\n The general got to his feet. \"I'm letting you take your look, Mr.\n Big Nose. I'm giving you four hours. Then out! And the next meddling\n bureaucrat that tries to cut atmosphere on Glave without a clearance\n gets burned!\"\n\n\n \"I'll need a car.\"\n\n\n \"Jake! You stick close to this bird. Take him to the main power plant,\n the water works and the dispatch center. Ride him around town and show\n him we're doing okay without a bunch of leeches bossing us. Then dump\n him at the port—and see that he leaves.\"\n\n\n \"I'll plan my own itinerary, thanks. I can't promise I'll be finished\n in four hours—but I'll keep you advised.\"\n\n\n \"I warned you—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you. Five times. And I only warned you once. You're getting\n ahead of me.\" Retief rose, motioned to the hulking guard. \"Come on,\n Jake. We've got a lot of ground to cover before we come back for our\n dinner.\"\nIII\n\n\n At the curb, Retief held out his hand. \"Give me the power cylinder out\n of your rifle, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"Come on, Jake. You've got a nervous habit of playing with the firing\n stud. We don't want any accidents.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get it out? They only give me this thing yesterday.\"\n\n\n Retief pocketed the cylinder. \"You sit in back. I'll drive.\" He wheeled\n the car off along a broad avenue crowded with vehicles and lined with\n flowering palms, behind which stately white buildings reared up into\n the pale sky.\n\n\n \"Nice looking city, Jake,\" Retief said conversationally. \"What's the\n population?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I only been here a year.\"\n\n\n \"What about Horny and Pud? Are they natives?\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean, natives? They're just as civilized as me.\"\n\n\n \"My boner, Jake. Known Sozier long?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. He useta come around to the club.\"\n\n\n \"I take it he was in the army under the old regime?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah—but he didn't like the way they run it. Nothing but band playing\n and fancy marching. There wasn't nobody to fight.\"\n\n\n \"Just between us, Jake—where did the former Planetary Manager General\n go?\" Retief watched Jake's heavy face in the mirror. Jake jumped,\n clamped his mouth shut.\n\n\n \"I don't know nothing.\"\n\n\n Half an hour later, after a tour of the commercial center, Retief\n headed towards the city's outskirts. The avenue curved, leading up\n along the flank of a low hill.\n\n\n \"I must admit I'm surprised, Jake,\" Retief said. \"Everything seems\n orderly. No signs of riots or panic. Power, water, communications\n normal—just as the general said. Remarkable, isn't it, considering\n that the entire managerial class has packed up and left?\"\n\n\n \"You wanta see the Power Plant?\" Retief could see perspiration beaded\n on the man's forehead under the uniform cap.\n\n\n \"Sure. Which way?\" With Jake directing, Retief ascended to the ridge\n top, cruised past the blank white facade of the station.\n\n\n \"Quiet, isn't it?\" Retief pulled the car in to the curb. \"Let's go\n inside.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Corporal Sozier didn't say nothing—\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Jake. That leaves it to our discretion.\"\n\n\n \"He won't like it.\"\n\n\n \"The corporal's a busy man, Jake. We won't worry him by telling him\n about it.\"\n\n\n Jake followed Retief up the walk. The broad double doors were locked.\n \"Let's try the back.\"\n\n\n The narrow door set in the high blank wall opened as Retief approached.\n A gun barrel poked out, followed by a small man with bushy red hair. He\n looked Retief over.\n\n\n \"Who's this party, Jake?\" he barked.\n\n\n \"Sozier said show him the plant,\" Jake said.\n\n\n \"What we need is more guys to pull duty, not tourists. Anyway,\nI'm\nChief Engineer here. Nobody comes in here 'less I like their looks.\"\n Retief moved forward, stood looking down at the redhead. The little\n man hesitated, then waved him past. \"Lucky for you I like your looks.\"\n Inside, Retief surveyed the long room, the giant converter units, the\n massive busbars. Armed men—some in uniform, some in work clothes\n or loud sport shirts—stood here and there. Other men read meters,\n adjusted controls or inspected dials.\n\n\n \"You've got more guards than workers,\" Retief said. \"Expecting trouble?\"\n\n\n The redhead bit the corner from a plug of spearmint. He glanced around\n the plant. \"Things is quiet now; but you never know.\"\n\n\n \"Rather old-fashioned equipment isn't it? When was it installed?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? I dunno. What's wrong with it?\"\n\n\n \"What's your basic power source, a core sink? Lithospheric friction?\n Sub-crustal hydraulics?\"\n\n\n \"Beats me, Mister. I'm the boss here, not a dern mechanic.\"\nA gray-haired man carrying a clipboard walked past, studied a panel,\n made notes, glanced up to catch Retief's eye, moved on.\n\n\n \"Everything seems to be running normally,\" Retief remarked.\n\n\n \"Sure. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Records being kept up properly?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Some of these guys, all they do is walk around looking at dials\n and writing stuff on paper. If it was me, I'd put 'em to work.\"\n\n\n Retief strolled over to the gray-haired man, now scribbling before a\n bank of meters. He glanced at the clipboard.\nPower off at sunset. Tell Corasol\nwas scrawled in block letters\n across the record sheet. Retief nodded, rejoined his guard.\n\n\n \"All right, Jake. Let's have a look at the communications center.\"\n\n\n Back in the car, headed west, Retief studied the blank windows of\n office buildings, the milling throngs in beer bars, shooting galleries,\n tattoo parlors, billiard halls, pinball arcades, bordellos and\n half-credit casinos.\n\n\n \"Everybody seems to be having fun,\" he remarked.\n\n\n Jake stared out the window.\n\n\n \"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad you're on duty, Jake. You could be out there joining in.\"\n\n\n \"Soon as the corporal gets things organized, I'm opening me up a place\n to show dirty tri-di's. I'll get my share.\"\n\n\n \"Meanwhile, let the rest of 'em have their fun, eh Jake?\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, I been thinking. Maybe you better gimme back that\n kick-stick you taken outa my gun....\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, Jake; no can do. Tell me, what was the real cause of the\n revolution? Not enough to eat? Too much regimentation?\"\n\n\n \"Naw, we always got plenty to eat. There wasn't none of that\n regimentation up till I joined up in the corporal's army.\"\n\n\n \"Rigid class structure, maybe? Educational discrimination?\"\n\n\n Jake nodded. \"Yeah, it was them schools done it. All the time trying\n to make a feller do some kind of class. Big shots. Know it all. Gonna\n make us sit around and view tapes. Figgered they was better than us.\"\n\n\n \"And Sozier's idea was you'd take over, and you wouldn't have to be\n bothered.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, it wasn't Sozier's idea. He ain't the big leader.\"\n\n\n \"Where does the big leader keep himself?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I guess he's pretty busy right now.\" Jake snickered. \"Some of\n them guys call themselves colonels turned out not to know nothing about\n how to shoot off the guns.\"\n\n\n \"Shooting, eh? I thought it was a sort of peaceful revolution. The\n managerial class were booted out, and that was that.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know nothing,\" Jake snapped. \"How come you keep trying to get\n me to say stuff I ain't supposed to talk about? You want to get me in\n trouble?\"\n\"Oh, you're already in trouble, Jake. But if you stick with me, I'll\n try to get you out of it. Where exactly did the refugees head for? How\n did they leave? Must have been a lot of them; I'd say in a city of this\n size alone, they'd run into the thousands.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, it depends on your definition of a big shot. Who's included\n in that category, Jake?\"\n\n\n \"You know, the slick-talking ones; the fancy dressers; the guys that\n walk around and tell other guys what to do. We do all the work and they\n get all the big pay.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose that would cover scientists, professional men, executives,\n technicians of all sorts, engineers, teachers—all that crowd.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, them are the ones.\"\n\n\n \"And once you got them out of the way, the regular fellows would have a\n chance. Chaps that don't spend all their time taking baths and reading\n books and using big words; good Joes that don't mind picking their\n noses in public.\"\n\n\n \"We got as much right as anybody—\"\n\n\n \"Jake, who's Corasol?\"\n\n\n \"He's—I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I thought I overheard his name somewhere.\"\n\n\n \"Uh, here's the communication center,\" Jake cut in.\n\n\n Retief swung into a parking lot under a high blank facade. He set the\n brake and stepped out.\n\n\n \"Lead the way, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, the corporal only wanted me to show you the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to hide, Jake?\"\n\n\n Jake shook his head angrily and stamped past Retief. \"When I joined up\n with Sozier, I didn't figger I'd be getting in this kind of mess.\"\n\n\n \"I know, Jake. It's tough. Sometimes it seems like a fellow works\n harder after he's thrown out the parasites than he did before.\"\n\n\n A cautious guard let Retief and Jake inside, followed them along\n bright-lit aisles among consoles, cables, batteries of instruments.\n Armed men in careless uniforms lounged, watching. Here and there a\n silent technician worked quietly.\n\n\n Retief paused by one, an elderly man in a neat white coverall, with a\n purple spot under one eye.\n\n\n \"Quite a bruise you've got there,\" Retief commented heartily. \"Power\n failure at sunset,\" he added softly. The technician hesitated, nodded\n and moved on.\n\n\n Back in the car, Retief gave Jake directions. At the end of three\n hours, he had seen twelve smooth-running, heavily guarded installations.\n\n\n \"So far, so good, Jake,\" he said. \"Next stop, Sub-station Number Nine.\"\n In the mirror, Jake's face stiffened. \"Hey, you can't go down there—\"\n\n\n \"Something going on there, Jake?\"\n\n\n \"That's where—I mean, no. I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to miss anything, Jake. Which way?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't going down there,\" Jake said sullenly.\n\n\n Retief braked. \"In that case, I'm afraid our association is at an end,\n Jake.\"\n\n\n \"You mean ... you're getting out here?\"\n\n\n \"No, you are.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with\n you.\"\n\n\n Retief accelerated. \"That's settled, then. Which way?\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery\n of a loose crowd of brown-uniformed men who stood in groups scattered\n across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn\n before the bare, functional facade of sub-station number Nine. In the\n midst of the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as\n he harangued a cluster of green-uniformed men from his place in the\n rear of a long open car.\n\n\n \"What's it all about, Jake?\" Retief enquired. \"Since the parasites have\n all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed\n up in the pumping station—and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word\n that it's all going to be fun and games from now on.\"\n\n\n \"If the corporal sees you over here—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to\n see.\" Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A\n heavy lorry loaded with an immense tank with the letter H blazoned on\n its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a\n position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's\n limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A\n moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd.\n\n\n \"You in there, Corasol! This is General Sozier, and I'm warning you to\n come out now or you and your smart friends are in for a big surprise.\n You think I won't blast you out because I don't want to wreck the\n planet. You see the tank aboard the lorry that just pulled up? It's\n full of gas—and I got plenty of hoses out here to pump it inside with.\n I'll put men on the roof and squirt it in the ventilators.\"\n\n\n Sozier's voice echoed and died. The militiamen eyed the station.\n Nothing happened.\n\n\n \"I know you can hear me, damn you!\" Sozier squalled. \"You'd better get\n the doors open and get out here fast!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped to Sozier's side. \"Say, Corporal, I didn't know you went\n in for practical jokes.\"\n\n\n Sozier jerked around to gape at Retief.\n\n\n \"What are you doing here!\" he burst out. \"I told Jake—where is that—\"\n\n\n \"Jake didn't like the questions I was asking,\" Retief said, \"so he\n marched me up here to report to you.\"\n\n\n \"Jake, you damn fool!\" Sozier roared. \"I got a good mind—\"\n\"I disagree, Sozier,\" Retief cut in. \"I think you're a complete\n imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your\n lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray\n that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than\n words.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building.\n\n\n \"Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?\"\n\n\n Sozier dropped. \"Where?\"\n\n\n \"My mistake. Just a foreign particle on my contact lenses.\" Retief\n leaned on the car. \"On the other hand, Sozier, most murderers are\n sneaky about it. I think making a public announcement is a nice gesture\n on your part. The Monitors won't have any trouble deciding who to hang\n when they come in to straighten out this mess.\"\n\n\n Sozier scrambled back onto his seat. \"Monitors?\" he snarled. \"I\n don't think so. I don't think you'll be around to do any blabbering\n to anybody.\" He raised his voice. \"Jake! March this spy over to the\n sidelines. If he tries anything, shoot him!\" He gave Retief a baleful\n grin. \"I'll lay the body out nice and ship it back to your cronies.\n Accidents will happen, you know. It'll be a week or two before they get\n around to following up—and by then I'll have this little problem under\n control.\"\n\n\n Jake looked at Retief uncertainly, fingering his empty rifle.\n\n\n Retief put his hands up. \"I guess you got me, Jake,\" he said. \"Careful\n of that gun, now.\"\n\n\n Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Retief and nodded\n toward the car. As Retief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd.\n Retief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly.\n A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way;\n Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As\n Retief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the\n sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a\n splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's\n car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned\n the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream\n of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car\n passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides.\n\n\n \"The corporal will feel all the better for an invigorating swim in\n his mobile pool,\" Retief commented. \"By the way, Jake, I have to be\n going now. It wouldn't be fair to send you back to your boss without\n something to back up your story that you were outnumbered, so—\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out to connect solidly with Jake's jaw. Jake\n dropped the gun and sat down hard. Retief turned and headed for the\n pumping station. The hose had shut down now. A few men were standing,\n eyeing the building anxiously. Others watched his progress across the\n square. As Retief passed, he caught scattered comments:\n\n\n \"—seen that bird before.\"\n\n\n \"—where he's headed.\"\n\n\n \"—feller Sozier was talking to....\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\"\n\n\n Retief was on the grass now. Ahead, the blank wall loomed up. He walked\n on briskly.\n\n\n \"Stop that jasper!\" a shout rang out. There was a sharp whine and a\n black spot appeared on the wall ahead. Near it, a small personnel door\n abruptly swung inward. Retief sprinted, plunged through the opening\n as a second shot seared the paint on the doorframe. The door clanged\n behind him. Retief glanced over the half dozen men confronting him.\n\n\n \"I'm Retief, CDT, acting Charge,\" he said. \"Which of you gentlemen is\n Manager-General Corasol?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Where are the Ambassador and his diplomatic corps when the action opens?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_1", "options": ["They are at Corps Headquarters.", "On a cruise ship commandeered for the Glavian Ocean crossing.", "On board a spaceship approaching Glave.", "In a very expensive hotel conference center in a city near the Glavian capital."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Magnan’s function in the story?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_2", "options": ["He serves as a foil for Retief through the obviousness of his obsequious, approval-seeking cowardice.", "He shows that Retief has stiff competition for advancement in the Diplomatic Corps, and Retief’s showboating will not help his case.", "He portrays the real-life fears and thought processes of a diplomat helping to work through the best approach to a crisis.", "Since authors were typically reimbursed for fiction stories based on word count, Magnan’s main contribution is simply to pad the story and get the author a few more dollars."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the Ambassador grow angry after receiving a message from Glave’s new revolutionary government during his staff meeting?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_3", "options": ["Because he had just bought a brand new villa just outside the Glavian capital city, and it appears that the revolutionaries requisitioned it for a headquarters.", "Because the revolutionary leaders tell the diplomats not to proceed with their mission of visiting the planet at all.", "Because he does not handle uncertainty well, and he is growing irritated at the contradictory messages being received from the planet.", "Because the message was sent hours ago, and his aide only just now brought it for him to read."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the diplomatic staff volunteer to go down to the surface of Glave to check out the situation?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_4", "options": ["All of the staff members volunteer.", "Only Retief volunteers, and that only after making a joke that makes it sound like he won’t go.", "None of them volunteers, not even Retief, who is afraid he won’t be able to get his regular insulin shots.", "Magnan, though he says a lot of dumb things, is brave. He volunteers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was a bit unusual about Retief’s arrival at the spaceport on Glave?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_5", "options": ["The spaceport was bustling as usual, with ships, cargo and people coming and going.", "The revolutionaries had burned the spaceport, leaving it black and smoking.", "The place was deserted except for one immigration official.", "When he stepped out of his shuttle, he found the entire revolutionary army surrounding his landing pad."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "For how long had the new military governor held the rank of general?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_6", "options": ["He had long military experience as a general.", "Ironically, he had been given a general’s insignia and rank by the old government, just before the revolution started.", "He was given a field promotion to general by the new premier.", "Only since he granted to himself when he took charge."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What incident early in the story is brought to mind by Retief’s approach to risky situations on Glave?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_7", "options": ["Retief is a very careful and precise diplomat, as when he notes that the revolutionary government’s message does not exclude diplomats, just “foreign exploiters.”", "Retief is a chronic smartass. He thinks everything is a joke.", "Retief’s gambling activities with the ship’s crew in orbit.", " Retief was very careful to put on exactly the right clothes – scarlet mess jacket, powder-blue blazer. Later in the story, he showed himself very sensitive to the meaning of how the Glavians he met were dressed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Retief ask the redhead at the power plant when the equipment that he’s looking at was installed?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_8", "options": ["Because the redhead claims to be the Chief Engineer, and Retief is testing to see whether he actually knows anything.", "The Corps accepts all de facto governments, so Retief was sounding out the redhead about whether the new regime might need assistance with power station maintenance.", "Retief had studied engineering before joining the diplomatic corps, and he was excited to see the inside of the power plant.", "Because Retief could see for himself that the equipment was on its last legs, and he was worried that the power would fail at sundown."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to Jake, what was the cause of the populist uprising?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_9", "options": ["They were subjected to taxation without representation.", "Being forced to get an education.", "Having to get government permission to start a family.", "The current government had rigged the last election, so the only solution was insurrection."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Retief keep outmaneuvering Jake?", "question_unique_id": "61459_R5M67FV7_10", "options": ["Retief threatens Jake’s family, showing him a photo of his wife and child, so Jake feels he has no choice but to comply.", "Jake’s native language is not Glavian or Galactic Standard, and he pretends to understand Retief when he really doesn’t.", "He talks like he understands Jake and his outlook on life, even though he thinks Jake is not very bright - and there is some evidence to that effect.", "Jake is a drug addict. He is already high when Sozier sends him to escort Retief, and he just can’t get it together."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/4/5/61459//61459-h//61459-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61198", "set_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Aide Memoire", "year": 1959, "author": "Laumer, Keith", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction", "article": "AIDE MEMOIRE\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nThe Fustians looked like turtles—but\n\n they could move fast when they chose!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAcross the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet\n of parchment and looked grave.\n\n\n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural\n Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the\n matter of sponsorship of Youth groups—\"\n\n\n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"\n\n\n \"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters\n are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age—\"\n\n\n \"That's right. He'll try anything—in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is\n the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And\n sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the\n Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the\n mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p—that is, cement\n relations with this emergent power group—the leaders of the future.\n You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their\n rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control\n group—\"\n\n\n \"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This\n group—\" he glanced at the paper—\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and\n Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting\n sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment\n and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and\n athletic development,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well\n anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n\n\n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke\n instead of us.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to\n step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air.\n Retief raised one eyebrow.\n\n\n \"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a\n positive statement.\"\nMagnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think\n you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug\n half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would\n help.\"\n\n\n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you\n would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical\n characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n\n\n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater\n than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience,\n Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise\n you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"\n\n\n Magnan shuddered. \"Please—never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n\n\n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the\n dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the\n Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your\n permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n\n\n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me,\n Retief. More interest in substantive matters—such as working with\n Youth groups—would create a far better impression.\"\n\n\n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea\n to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes\n them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the\n alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n\n\n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n \"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"\n\n\n \"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a\n two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but\n business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n\n\n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n \"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci\n are barely ahead of them.\"\n\n\n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like\n fission bombs.\"\n\n\n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists\n for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your\n attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying\n the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n\n\n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local\n youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\nII\n\n\n Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the\n chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car\n and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle\n trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n\n\n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty\n dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians\n lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly\n wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them,\n shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the\n flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his\n back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the\n shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.\n\n\n \"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n \"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n\n\n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up\n professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n\n\n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed.\n Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n\n\n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace\n peered out at Retief.\n\n\n \"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if\n you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new\n liner today.\"\n\"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy\n arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n \"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of\n papers.\"\n\n\n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the\n story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the\n vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out\n a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood\n silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....\n\n\n \"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He\n turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the\n open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n\n\n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n\n\n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on\n the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n\n\n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in\n nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n\n\n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\nThe youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why\n should it be secret?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me.\"\n\n\n The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the\n Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n \"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who\n knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n\n\n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went\n for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get\n to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n\n\n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the\n shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n\n\n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed\n through the drawings, clicking the shutter.\n\n\n \"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent\n day by day.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n\n\n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new.\n Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n\n\n \"The police—\"\n\n\n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have\n we needed ought ere now.\"\n\n\n \"What's behind it?\"\n\n\n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot\n mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with\n them.\"\n\n\n Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured\n Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed\n the hut, then started toward it.\n\n\n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n\n\n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n \"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n\n\n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n\n\n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well,\n stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n\n\n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"\n\n\n He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were\n raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\nThe second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the\n Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He\n flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n\n\n \"Retief—I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first\n dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive\n Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage,\n arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your\n intransigence.\"\n\n\n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just\n time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep\n back.\n\n\n Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner\n and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline.\n The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun\n and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n\n\n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he\n would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but\n the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n\n\n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward\n Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n\n\n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No\n need to crowd up.\"\n\n\n \"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was\n unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved\n awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n\n\n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n\n\n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a\n foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw\n his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell\n heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other\n Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied.\n The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another\n vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car,\n tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.\n\n\n So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight.\n They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault,\n after running a copy for the reference files.\n\n\n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV\n battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval\n Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The\n term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in\n the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in\n the Eastern Arm.\n\n\n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present\n but himself and the old-timer—and he was willing to bet the elderly\n Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n\n\n At least not willingly....\n\n\n Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the\n flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the\n shipyard.\nThe door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position.\n Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old\n fellow had put up a struggle.\n\n\n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief\n followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of\n a warehouse.\n\n\n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the\n workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in\n their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various\n fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n\n\n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.\n\n\n Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle\n of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed\n out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor\n before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over\n into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged\n Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n\n\n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine\n and pulled the sack free.\n\n\n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you\n into this.\"\n\n\n The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell\n back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he\n rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth,\n Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n\n\n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n\n\n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It\n would be your life.\"\n\n\n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n\n\n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light\n here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"\n\n\n Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"\n\n\n Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it\n into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away.\n The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n\n\n Slowly he got to his feet.\n\n\n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right\n now, let's get out of here.\"\n\n\n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp,\n bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in\n my wrath. Slock, beware!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He\n flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He\n knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n\n\n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n\n\n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite\n small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the\n Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first\n period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge\nMoss\n Rock\n.\"\n\n\n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n\n\n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements\n after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"\n\n\n \"We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I\n know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the\n floor. That's titanite: the hottest explosive this side of a uranium\n pile.\"\nIII\n\n\n Beta was setting as Retief, Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the\n sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the\n official luxury space barge\nMoss Rock\n.\n\n\n \"A sign of the times,\" said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter.\n \"A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away\n to sleep.\"\n\n\n \"Let's go aboard and take a look around.\"\n\n\n They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box\n stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it—a discordant note\n in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n\n\n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of\n orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n\n\n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n\n\n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He\n passed the metal band to Retief.\n\n\n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard\n the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy—fast.\"\n\n\n Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck\n the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and\n fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm\n embrace.\n\n\n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n\n\n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive\n youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n\n\n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n\n\n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n\n\n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"\n\n\n The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—\n\n\n \"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried\n to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old.\n But I thought—\"\n\n\n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks\n are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the\n carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n\n\n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us\n and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n\n\n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n\n\n Three youths came from behind the sheds.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight.\n Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little\n bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers\n holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n\n\n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n\n\n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n \"I'll jump around and distract them.\"\n\n\n Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians.\n They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief\n whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed\n it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on\n Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the\nMoss Rock\nas Whonk\n took him in full charge.\n\n\n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian\n on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed\n hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.\n\n\n Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids\n have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got\n another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast,\n but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled\n for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is\n enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n\n\n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about\n this gambit.\"\n\n\n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth\n with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I\n know where to find the boss.\"\nA stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned\n the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the\n giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered\n a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the\n air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n\n\n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr.\n Ambassador.\"\n\n\n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He\n turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n\n\n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"\n\n\n The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the\nLament of\n Hatching\n,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of\n instruments—\"\n\n\n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial\n Ambassador suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n \"And if I may interrupt a moment—\"\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived,\n perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n\n\n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much\n do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all\n Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a\n carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n\n\n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful\n energies,\" said Magnan.\n\n\n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to\n the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n\n\n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on\n us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n\n\n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me\n and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n\n\n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\"\n cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness—\"\n\n\n \"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister\n said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled\n boreholes and blasted.\"\n\"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow!\n Slop I believe his name is.\"\n\n\n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—\"\n\n\n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to\n them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering.\n Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some\n of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose.\n Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green\n wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n\n\n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked,\n breathing deeply.\n\n\n \"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n\n\n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd\n have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in\n sideways. There's a matter you should know about—\"\n\n\n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine\n young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee\n will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr.\n Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the\n pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n\n\n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I\n want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to\n see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his\n attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join\n me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to\n catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n\n\n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room,\n took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n\n\n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the\n great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly\n for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that\n in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve\n during the years ahead.\"\n\n\n Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.\n\n\n \"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n \"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy.\n The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman\n at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed.\n The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed\n by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby\n worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n\n\n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This\n group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"\n\n\n \"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back\n to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was\n planned for today. When the\nMoss Rock\nblew, a variety of clues were\n to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all\n over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair\n squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship\n of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n\n\n \"The\nMoss Rock\n?\" said Magnan. \"But that was—Retief! This is idiotic.\n Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n\n\n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip\n loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting\n his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan\n watched, open-mouthed.\n\n\n \"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They\n intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their\n purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is\n the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n\n\n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much\n chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through\n now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled\n through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in\n Whonk's wake.\n\n\n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a\n code letter. No reply. He tried another.\n\n\n \"No good,\" he said after a full minute had passed. \"Wonder what's\n loose?\" He slammed the phone back in its niche. \"Let's grab a cab.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What Earth creature do the Fustians most resemble based on the story’s descriptions?", "question_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK_1", "options": ["Little birds with eye stalks and a crest on their heads.", "They look like humans except for having very tiny heads.", "They are called “soft ones,” because they are like walking slime molds.", "Some sort of beetle with a hard, thick shell."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Magnan push Retief so hard to provide his personal financial support for the youth group SCARS?", "question_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK_2", "options": ["He is implementing a program dreamed up by his bosses back on the home planet.", "It’s like United Way – the more you put the screws to all the employees, the better you look.", "He has some very progressive ideas about what will benefit Fustian youths, and wants to help provide it.", "He gets kickbacks from the youth groups, so he uses his power to make sure the youth groups get money that he can skim."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are the “interesting features” of the passenger liner being put together by the Fustians that Retief inspects?", "question_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK_3", "options": ["It has incredibly luxurious staterooms for VIPs and still has room to carry cargo.", "It’s actually a war ship based on some very old plans.", "It has equal numbers of staterooms designed for the needs of Fustian and Terran passengers.", "It’s actually an amphibious vehicle, powered by titanite."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What can we infer about why Fustian buses don't have seats and are not enclosed like Terran models?", "question_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK_4", "options": ["We can conclude that the Fustians are a practical, simple people who see no reason for multiple types of vehicles", "We can infer that the weather on Fust is mild, and enclosed vehicles are unnecessary.", "We can infer that the Fustians do not have the technological capability to build anything more complex than open carts.", "We can infer that Fustians would not fit into enclosed vehicles very well because of their size and shape."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Retief refer to his Fustian flat car driver as a “daredevil?”", "question_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK_5", "options": ["Because the cart was bouncing his kidneys out over the cobbles.", "Because he was concerned that the driver was not observing posted speed limits.", "Because the driver was ignoring traffic lights, and he was outraged.", "Because the driver was going quite slowly by Terran standards."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Retief conclude that he should return to the shipbuilder’s shop?", "question_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK_6", "options": ["The fact that his attackers knew he had taken photos suggested that he information had been forcibly obtained from the old Fustian shipbuilder.", "He had left his weapon at the shipbuilder’s and after being attacked, he felt vulnerable.", "The fact that his attackers knew that he had taken photos suggested that the old Fustian shipbuilder was a traitor who needed to be dealt with.", "After being attacked, he felt he would be safer with the old shipbuilder."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the Fustian government representative at the dinner think of young Fustians?", "question_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK_7", "options": ["That they are being led astray by the Groaci.", "That young Fustians need help channeling their youthful energies.", "That television, recently introduced on Fust, is making them dumber.", "That they should be treated more harshly so they learn to behave."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the significance of the orange and green cloak and the metal bracelet with SCARS etched on it?", "question_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK_8", "options": ["It was a gang symbol left by one of several organized criminal groups of young Fustians.", "When young Fustians begin to molt, they typically drop their cloaks wherever they are and scuttle home as fast as possible.", "It was a clue left to try to throw blame for the planned explosion on the VIP boat onto the Terran embassy.", "Orange and green were Retief’s favorite colors, and the young thugs thought the cloak would distract him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Slock’s fate?", "question_unique_id": "61198_HXIUORUK_9", "options": ["His carapace was ripped off by Whonk during their struggle.", "He died in the titanite explosion on the Moss Rock.", "Retief captured him and Slock made a full confession of the Groaci involvement in the plot.", "He escaped through the crowd when the dinner broke up."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/1/9/61198//61198-h//61198-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone 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{"article_id": "20013", "set_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "Pointillism", "year": "1998", "author": "Franklin Foer", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Pointillism \n\n         Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's obstruction of justice case against President Clinton is likely to turn on his identification of the author of the so-called \"Talking Points.\" Like Shakespeare's works and the Bible, the TP, a three-page document, has inspired numerous schools of thought that disagree on the meaning of seemingly banal phrases and discern the handiwork of different authors. As a service to scholars in the burgeoning field of TP Studies--as well as to the general public--here is a Talmudic exegesis, a Reader's Guide to the TP . \n\n                         Background: Only one person claims to have firsthand knowledge of the TP's origins: Linda Tripp. Tripp told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Monica Lewinsky had given her the TP on Jan. 14, 1998, while driving Tripp home from work. That night, Tripp handed the document over to Starr's office. The following day, wearing an FBI-supplied wire, she met Lewinsky at the Pentagon City, Va., Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents interrupted their conversation and took Lewinsky to a room in the hotel for questioning. \n\n         The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n          \n\n            Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories. \n\n         The TP appears to have been composed in three parts, each in a different voice. The first section, in which Tripp receives legal-sounding advice, is smoothly and efficiently written. The document then shifts from the substance of the affidavit to the strategy behind it, with special reference to Tripp's relationship with the president's lawyer Robert Bennett. The final portion recasts the original section in the first person. It also includes a chatty paragraph discrediting allegations about Lewinsky's alleged affair with Clinton. \n\n                         Exegesis: This is the widely circulated version of the TP. For annotations, click on the hot-linked phrases. \n\n                         Points to Make in an Affidavit              \n\n         Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself--what you do now, what you did at the White House, and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee. \n\n         You and Kathleen were friends. At around the time of her husband's death (The President has claimed it was after her husband died. Do you really want to contradict him?), she came to you after she allegedly came out of the oval and looked (however she looked), you don't recall her exact words, but she claimed at the time (whatever she claimed) and was very happy. \n\n         You did not see her go in or see her come out. \n\n         Talk about when you became out of touch with her and maybe why. \n\n         The next you heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter (I wouldn't name him specifically) showed up in your office saying she was naming you as someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed. You spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to you a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what you remembered happening. As a result of your conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed that she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, you now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. You now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n         You never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office. \n\n         You are not sure you've been clear about whose side you're on. (Kirby has been saying you should look neutral; better for credibility but you aren't neutral. Neutral makes you look like you're on the other team since you are a political appointee) \n\n         It's important to you that they think you're a team player, after all, you are a political appointee. You believe that they think you're on the other side because you wouldn't meet with them. \n\n         You want to meet with Bennett. You are upset about the comment he made, but you'll take the high road and do what's in your best interest. \n\n         December 18th, you were in a better position to attend an all day or half-day deposition, but now you are into JCOC mode. Your livelihood is dependent on the success of this program. Therefore, you want to provide an affidavit laying out all of the facts in lieu of a deposition. \n\n         You want Bennett's people to see your affidavit before it's signed. \n\n         Your deposition should include enough information to satisfy their questioning. \n\n         By the way, remember how I said there was someone else that I knew about. Well, she turned out to be a huge liar. I found out she left the WH because she was stalking the P or something like that. Well, at least that gets me out of another scandal I know about. \n\n         The first few paragraphs should be about me--what I do now, what I did at the White House and for how many years I was there as a career person and as a political appointee. \n\n         Kathleen and I were friends. At around the time of her husband's death, she came to me after she allegedly came out of the oval office and looked _____, I don't recall her exact words, but she claimed at the time ______ and was very happy. \n\n         I did not see her go in or see her come out. \n\n         Talk about when I became out of touch with her and maybe why. \n\n         The next time I heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter showed up in my office saying she was naming me as a someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed by the President. I spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to me a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what I remembered happening. As a result of my conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, I now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. I now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n         I never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office. \n\n         I have never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody. \n\n           \n\n           \n\n                         Note 1              \n\n         Here are seven good guesses about the authorship of the TP: \n\n                         1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place. \n\n                         2) Tripp, the Manipulative Bitch. Gunning to bring down the president after Bennett denounced her, Tripp entrapped Lewinsky. One scenario has her prodding the gullible young woman to write the TP so she, Tripp, could get physical evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the entire thing--herself. A senior White House official has even suggested a draft of the TP lives on the hard drive of Tripp's computer. The theory's defects: a) Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? b) While the tapes expose Tripp as a horrible friend and a vicious schemer, we have no evidence that she is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination. \n\n                         3) The Right-Wing Conspiracy. An elaboration of the Tripp theory. Without any specific evidence, proponents of this theory posit that Tripp drafted the TP with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes. \n\n                         4) Behre, the White House Mole. When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Foster's death, the White House helped her retain Behre. She fired him three days before the TP surfaced, when he asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to write the TP. (Some implicate Behre's replacement, James Moody. It seems unlikely, however, that Moody, a conservative stalwart, would have helped Tripp prepare talking points apparently so favorable to the president.) And while the document presents legal-sounding advice, it's too rambling, repetitive, and error-ridden to have been written out by a lawyer worth his salt (though it might be notes based on a lawyer's advice). In addition, lawyers know better than to give a witness written instructions about the preparation of false testimony. Note, however, that, as one observer argues, if the TP is entirely true (Willey did muss her own clothes, etc.), assisting in its preparation would not be unethical or tantamount to subornation of perjury--though it would then be most unlikely that the TP was prepared by Moody or a right-wing cabal. \n\n                         5) Clinton, the Dictator. A lawyer by training, Clinton spent much time on the phone with Lewinsky. He could have dictated points during his calls, and he has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But in crises such as this one, Clinton has historically turned to proxies for his dirty work. Moreover the TP is wrong about what Clinton said in his Jones deposition about when his meeting with Willey took place. \n\n                         6) Lindsey, the Fixer. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered the president's confidant as a suspect. He was the administration's point man on the Jones case and has been known to wipe up after Clinton's bimbo eruptions. And he had reason to believe he could change or blunt the impact of Tripp's testimony. In August, Tripp told Newsweek she doubted Clinton's advances to Willey constituted sexual harassment, as Willey--despite her later protestations--had not seemed upset at the time. Tripp also contacted Lindsey last summer to discuss the Willey affair. Tripp and Lindsey spoke on at least two more occasions, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n                         7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 2              \n\n         One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton. \n\n         But it does not necessarily clear aide Lindsey or others close to the president. After all, the president's sealed, private testimony contradicts his lawyer Bennett's public pronouncements that the encounter with Willey took place after her husband's suicide. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 3              \n\n         According to Howard Kurtz's book Spin Cycle , this characterization of the Oval Office is common only among White House staffers. \n\n         And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 4              \n\n         The parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first half of the TP. Some theorists have pointed to it as evidence that a lawyer drafted--or at least advised on the drafting of--the document. Fabricating evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, as some administration advocates maintain, the TP is all true, assistance in its drafting would not be unethical. However, as noted later, the TP makes legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory that Lewinsky was the lone author. Tripp told Newsweek she suspected immediately that the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. Lewinsky's former lawyer Ginsburg never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a collaborative effort). \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 5              \n\n         Why doesn't the author want to mention Isikoff, the reporter in question? Only Tripp had a clear interest in not seeming unduly familiar with him. For months, she had been meeting clandestinely with Isikoff, discussing her conversations with Lewinsky. Tripp had hoped to remain anonymous in Isikoff's story. There's no good reason why Lindsey should have inserted this detail. \n\n         Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 7              \n\n         \"Someone else\" apparently refers to Julie Steele, a friend of Willey's. Steele initially told Newsweek that Willey had confided the details of the incident with Clinton to her shortly after it happened. Later, Steele changed her story, saying Willey had told her that the president had \"made a pass\" at her only weeks after the alleged incident and that she had lied at Willey's behest. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 8              \n\n         On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 9              \n\n         At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 10              \n\n         The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 11              \n\n         When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n         The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 12              \n\n         This is clumsily phrased: The identity of the \"other side\" is ambiguous. It sounds more like loose drafting by a PR person than it does the work of a practicing lawyer. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 13              \n\n         The New York Times and others, quoting \"lawyers connected to the case,\" report Lindsey had earlier advised Tripp to seek Bennett's help, advice Tripp eschewed. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 14              \n\n         Bennett was quoted as saying that \"Linda Tripp is not to be believed\" in the Willey controversy. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 15              \n\n         The date when Tripp was originally scheduled to be deposed by Jones' lawyers. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 16              \n\n         This is the acronym for the Joint Civilian Orientation Course, a program Tripp ran at the Pentagon. Lewinsky, as well as Tripp, would be familiar with the acronym, as would people in the White House who knew where Tripp had been placed following her transfer. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 17              \n\n         Presumably, only someone with legal training--though not necessarily a practicing lawyer--would know that an affidavit could substitute for a deposition. However, this is not good lawyerly advice. It is unlikely that Jones' lawyers would have accepted an affidavit in lieu of a deposition from someone who had changed her story. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 18              \n\n         The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 19              \n\n         The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 20              \n\n         This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n         Note 21 \n\n          Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 22              \n\n         No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n                         Back to story. \n\n                         Note 23              \n\n         In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n                         Back to story.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How does the title of the story relate to its subject?", "question_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F_1", "options": ["Story titles are picked by the editing department, not the story author, and the headline writer clearly did not read this story when picking a title related to George Seurat’s art style, called pointillism.", "“Pointillism” is a type of journalism article that tries to solve “Whodunit” mysteries, pointing the finger at the responsible party.", "Just as the term \"Talmudic exegesis\"  is used for analysis of Jewish sacred texts, “Pointillism” is the word that was coined to denote the extensive study of the Talking Points memo.", "It is a play on words: the story consists of a series of points about a memo that included “talking points.” The title refers to a style of painting made up of little dots."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do the main \"points\" of the TP document provide?", "question_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F_2", "options": ["A summary of all of Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment history, point by point.", "A tick-tock of Monica Lewinsky’s relationship with Bill Clinton, and in one spot, calls her a “big liar.”", "A recipe for Linda Tripp to follow to cast doubt on the veracity of one of Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual harassment targets.", "Fuel for right wing conspiracies about the Clintons by suggesting that Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Whoever may have authored it, what was the overarching purpose of the TP?", "question_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F_3", "options": ["To protect Bill Clinton.", "To screw over Linda Tripp's \"friend,\" Monica Lewinsky.", "To give Linda Tripp leverage to get a job as a television commentator.", "To reveal that Bill Clinton had committed perjury."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The article presents seven possibilities as to who wrote the TP. Which possibility does the author see as most likely?", "question_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F_4", "options": ["The author thinks that one of Kenneth Star’s employees was a mole, and that he was trying to sabotage the Independent Counsel’s investigation.", "The author thinks that Monica Lewinsky was still carrying a torch for Bill Clinton, and wanted to get him off the hook, and she was smart enough to do it.", "The author suggests that more than one of the individual possibilities worked together to write it because together, they would have had all the needed skills.", "The author thinks there is a compelling case that Linda Tripp wrote it, and has no questions in his mind about it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did it matter whether Kathleen Willey looked “happy” when exiting the Oval Office?", "question_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F_5", "options": ["It would prove the point that even when women say, “No,” they really mean “Yes.”", "It would help an observer conclude that whatever happened between her and Clinton was consensual and not subject to prosecution.", "It didn’t really matter. People smile all the time when they are unhappy.", "It would help an observer conclude that her scheme to deceive Bill Clinton into having inappropriate contact with her in the White House had succeeded."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is one of the points discussed in the story that could lead the author to wryly compare analysis of the TP to scholars picking apart small differences in religious texts?", "question_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F_6", "options": ["Many people think of politics as a religion, so there is a direct link between religious and political texts.", "Both political and religious texts have been translated from their original languages so many times that the original meanings are sometimes lost.", "The different terms used to refer to the president’s office at the White House.", "The discussion of what the definition of “is” is."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was unusual about the lawyer that Linda Tripp engaged after firing Behre, considering that she was a political appointee of Bill Clinton's?", "question_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F_7", "options": ["His background was as a prosecutor, not as a civil litigator.", "He had been on O.J. Simpson’s defense team.", "He was a staunch Republican.", "He was from Australia."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What reason does the story give as to why Linda Tripp may have a vendetta against Clinton?", "question_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F_8", "options": ["As a political appointee, she had had the chance to see that Clinton was incompetent, and she was disgusted by shoddy work.", "She was outraged about how Clinton treated Monica Lewinsky, because she was in love with Monica.", "After she started watching Fox News, she realized that Hillary Clinton had killed Vince Foster, and she was obsessed with revenge against both Clintons.", "She was angry that his lawyer called her, in essence, a liar."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did analysts conclude that the document that is the subject of this story was written by multiple people?", "question_unique_id": "20013_C1XHQ93F_9", "options": ["Because no one person had all the facts about the situation.", "Because several identifiably different writing styles were used in different groups of paragraphs.", "The analysts actually said it could be one person who was under the influence of drugs or alcohol when they wrote one of the parts of the memo.", "Because the font on the first page was different than the font used on the rest of the memo."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20005", "set_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "Does Everybody Do It?", "year": "1996", "author": "Jacob Weisberg", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Does Everybody Do It? \n\n         Campaign finance is an arcane and confusing subject, filled with unspoken understandings. One of these is the distinction between rules that must be obeyed and rules that can be safely flouted. In the Republican primaries, for instance, aides to Bob Dole admitted that they were going to exceed legal limits on how much they could spend, an act commentators compared at the time to running a red light. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton and his aides were helping to develop the so-called \"issue\" ads produced by state parties--ads which, in theory, weren't supposed to be co-ordinated with his re-election effort. And neither party even bothered to claim that the tens of millions being raised in so-called \"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile, though, a Dole supporter named Simon Fireman is confined to his Boston apartment, where he wears an electronic collar and ponders the $6 million fine he must pay for enlisting his employees at Aqua Leisure Industries, a maker of inflatable pool toys, in a scheme to contribute $69,000 to the Dole campaign. \n\n         A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory? \n\n         In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle? \n\n         Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang. \n\n          \n\n            Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n                         Answer: Not really.              \n\n         There are examples beyond number of simply illegal contributions that the press and public just shrugged off. Even Pat Robertson got busted in 1988 for the use of a Christian Broadcasting Network plane--his travels were valued at $260,000. If one focuses on the narrow category of contributions that are illegal because they come from foreigners (even though it is arguably no worse than any other category of violation), there is still little novelty to the Huang affair. Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken illegally from foreign nationals: Japanese interests contributing to candidates in local races in Hawaii, South Americans giving to the Democratic Party of Florida, and so on. Just a few weeks ago, the RNC returned $15,000 to a Canadian company called Methanex after the contribution was disclosed in Roll Call . 's recent $1 million contribution to the California Republican Party may fall into this category as well. The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made \"in the name of another,\" an issue that has surfaced in connection with Al Gore's Buddhist temple fund-raiser. The FEC has frequently disallowed contributions made to both parties under aliases. \n\n         If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies. \n\n         According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000. \n\n         Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises. \n\n          \n\n            Question 2: Is the Lippo scandal an egregious example of a political quid pro quo?              \n\n                         Answer: Definitely not.              \n\n         Examples of favors in exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Bob Dole and Chiquita. In 1995, Dole introduced legislation to impose trade sanctions on Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica--but not Honduras, where Dole's favorite bananas are grown. Why was a senator from Kansas so interested in bananas? It might have had something to do with Chiquita giving $677,000 to the Republican Party in the last campaign cycle or the generous offer by its CEO, Carl Lindner, to let Dole use the company jet. (\"Sen. Dole has taken this position because it is right for America,\" Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin said earlier this year. \"To suggest any other reason is totally absurd.\") Or, there is the relationship between . \n\n         This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n          \n\n            Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes?              \n\n                         Answer: No.              \n\n         The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions. \n\n         In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\" \n\n          When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions. \n\n         John Huang was merely a cog in this machine. When he left the Lippo Group in 1994, Huang became a deputy assistant secretary in the International Trade Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade issues. Under oath, Huang has claimed he had only a \"passive role\" in the foreign trade missions--whatever that means. It all . But that's the Commerce Department Mosbacher created, and which Brown perfected. To present the Huang story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of William Jefferson Clinton, is absurd. \n\n         So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables. \n\n         The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.\n", "questions": [{"question": "One Korean donated a quarter of a million dollars at the behest of John Huang. The DNC gave back about $2.5 million in donations related to Huang’s questionable activities. Approximately how many foreigners were definitively determined to have donated illegally as part of this scandal?", "question_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI_1", "options": ["One.", "Since they all gave different amounts, it cannot be determined.", "Over 100.", "Ten."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which phrase appears to BEST capture the attitude of campaign fundraisers over time?", "question_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI_2", "options": ["It is better to give than to receive.", "It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.", "Be sure to pay off the appropriate law enforcement authorities so that they look the other way.", "It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in war."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the term “Indogate” refer to?", "question_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI_3", "options": ["It is Watergate-style shorthand for a scandal involving donations to the DNC from businessmen in various locations in Asia.", "It refers to the ongoing scandal of the revolving door that allows partisan campaign fund raisers to exit their positions through the “door” and come back in as enforcers through the “gate” of the Federal Election Commission.", "It refers to the cover-up of a green-card-for-money scheme concocted by John Huang to bring his Asian friends into the country, not for campaign money, but to feather his own nest.", "It is the name given to a scandal involving FDA approval for the drug Indomethacin, used to treat gout, in return for a campaign contribution to the DNC."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Based on the story, getting adequate money to run expensive political campaigns seems to involve:", "question_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI_4", "options": ["Spending an enormous amount of time and energy on the telephone asking individual constituents for their support.", "Finding a few big, legal donors and putting the screws to them for every dollar.", "Careful attention to accounting so that ground level campaign workers don’t spend the contents of the campaign treasure chest on too many pizza parties.", "Not asking too many questions about the source of the money."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author think that John Huang’s peccadillos were blown into such a scandal?", "question_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI_5", "options": ["The major explanation offered by the author for John Huang being dragged through the mud is that he was not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (the dominant power group in America), so he was an easy target.", "He indicates that the primary cause is Republican jealousy over losing their overwhelming corporate fundraising advantage over Democrats during the course of the last couple of decades.", "According to the author, they weren’t peccadillos, they were major crimes, so they merited major national media and prosecutorial action. He even identifies the four unprecedented illegal strategies used by Huang.", "He identifies these explanations: outraged do-gooders seeking stronger campaign finance laws; media actors trying to prove their neutrality; and GOP leaders obscuring their own sins by playing “whatabout” with the Democrats."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why, according to the story, it so difficult to get evidence of trading official government action on the global stage for campaign donations?", "question_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI_6", "options": ["Some foreign cultures run on agreements sealed by a handshake, or even the lift of an eyebrow, without the necessity for the kind of records on paper that would help an investigator discover wrongdoing.", "Since most of their communication takes place on foreign soil, it is nearly impossible to get written documentation of the quid pro quo that would prove intent in court.", "Presidents use their executive powers to protect communications that could otherwise be subpoenaed by Congress and subjected to careful legal scrutiny.", "It’s easy to kick back a favor for someone related to an obscure environmental rule, but questions of global strategy and policy are so complex and involve so many actors that it is difficult to show links between the money and the foreign policy favor."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the poor legal outcome for a relatively minor Dole contributor compared to the legal outcomes for major presidential candidates and their top allies and aides tell us?", "question_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI_7", "options": ["That FEC enforcement consists of literally putting the names of campaign contribution violators into a hat, shaking it, and drawing out the winning name for prosecution.", "That hiring the competent lawyers is an indispensable part of being involved in politics in today’s world.", "That those who have the most money have the most influence, even to the point of becoming “untouchable” by the law.", "That no one is above the law, and if you engage in criminal activity, the law is coming for you."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author mean by characterizing Ron Brown as a \"disciple of Robert Mosbacher who became an even greater talent than his master\"?", "question_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI_8", "options": ["He means that Ron Brown studied and emulated Mosbacher’s actions as Commerce Secretary even though Mosbacher worked for a Republican administration and Brown worked for a Democrat, and then went him one better.", "He means that Mosbacher started a religious cult based on partisan politics. Ron Brown joined, but then started his own cult that was specific to Democrats.", "He means that Brown and Mosbacher attended the same church in Washington, DC and became friends, with Mosbacher mentoring Brown, even though they were political rivals.", "He means that Ron Brown worked for Robert Mosbacher to learn the ropes of operating the Commerce Department as a fundraising arm of the party in power, but extended this use beyond what Mosbacher did."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What large agricultural corporation did Bob Dole show favoritism to after they donated to his campaign?", "question_unique_id": "20005_5BPCLOPI_9", "options": ["Since Dole’s spokeswoman denied that Dole showed favoritism by exempting Honduras from his trade sanction legislation, the fact that he had previously received $677,000 and an offer to use the company jet from Chiquita’s CEO, means nothing..", "He showed a preference for the Chiquita corporation by exempting their primary banana-growing location from his legislation imposing trade sanctions on other Central American countries.", "He showed a preference for the Chiquita corporation by exempting their primary banana-growing location from his executive order imposing trade sanctions on other Central American countries.", "He showed a preference for Dole corporation, the family business. He anticipated that his family would need the extra money when he kicked off his presidential campaign."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "49901", "set_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Snare", "year": 1970, "author": "Smith, Richard Rein", "topic": "Moon -- Fiction; Space flight -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; PS", "article": "The Snare\nBy RICHARD R. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by WEISS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nIt's easy to find a solution when there is one—the trick is to do it\n if there is none!\nI glanced at the path we had made across the\nMare Serenitatis\n. The\n Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because,\n as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth\n layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered\n across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands\n of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above.\n Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity\n like none I had ever felt.\n\n\n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because\n of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step\n and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of\n dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the\n light gravity.\n\n\n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear.\n Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a\n dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak\n to be reflected toward Earth.\n\n\n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams\n of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's\n surface.\n\n\n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained\n motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering\n voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\nStrange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving\n hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense\n of\nalienness\n. It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation.\n Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that\n it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a\n year, but the Moon was vast and the\nMare Serenitatis\ncovered three\n hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n\n\n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves?\n If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n\n\n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be\n beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n\n\n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached\n for the radio controls on my suit.\n\n\n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves.\n If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we\n discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n\n\n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet\n it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of\n an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for\n ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for\n prestige and wealth.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n\n\n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit.\n Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the\n brilliant flame against the metal.\n\n\n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's\n steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n\n\n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it\n be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n\n\n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The\n notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say\nsteel\nbecause it's\nsimilar\nto steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that,\n on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even\n a wind to disturb its surface. It's\nat least\nseveral thousand years\n old.\"\nWe slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane\n shouted, \"Look!\"\n\n\n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken\n by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and\n flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n\n\n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the\n opening.\n\n\n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening\n to give him as much light as possible.\n\n\n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something!\n It\nmust\nbe an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the\n walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n\n\n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features\n struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the\n alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She\n hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n\n\n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n \"Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Let's.\"\n\n\n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned\n to help Miller.\n\n\n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert\n mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help\n him as he stepped into the passageway.\n\n\n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette\n against the star-studded sky.\n\n\n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped\n with pain when he struck the ground. \"\nSomething\npushed me!\"\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through\n the passage....\n\n\n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\nMy eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a\n recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with\n the absence of starlight.\n\n\n \"\nWhat happened?\n\"\n\n\n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a\n brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n\n\n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The\n ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the\n smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n\n\n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and\n instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n\n\n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door\n that had imprisoned us.\n\n\n \"Miller!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n\n\n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There\n were no visible recesses or controls.\n\n\n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a\n rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened\n breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong;\n Miller's was faltering and weak.\n\n\n \"Miller, get help!\"\n\n\n \"I'll—\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n\n\n \"What happened to him?\"\n\n\n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and\n trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n\n\n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n\n\n Static grated against my ear drums.\nStatic!\nI listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by\n comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n\n\n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between\n his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n\n\n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static\n we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n\n\n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over\nour\nradio, unless—\"\n Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of\n white—\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n\n\n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to\n speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n\n\n I deactivated my radio.\n\n\n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow\n corridor beyond.\n\n\n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press\n against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the\n pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on\n our bodies.\n\n\n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the\n open door.\n\n\n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed\n next and I was the last.\n\n\n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were\n featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were\n the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n\n\n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was\n unyielding.\n\n\n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small\n amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously.\n It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I\n increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed\n my helmet.\n\n\n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in\n this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits\n later.\"\n\n\n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n\n\n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the\n corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n\n\n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through\n the doorway.\n\n\n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles\n frozen by shock.\n\n\n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n\n\n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the\n other doors that lined the hall.\n\n\n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n\n\n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n\n\n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the\n preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them.\n The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of\n other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means\n of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse\n themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as\n that: a walk on the Moon.\n\n\n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock\n formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien\n ship.\n\n\n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's\n perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible\n situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\nI took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our\n steps.\n\n\n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors\n opened soundlessly.\n\n\n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n\n\n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the\n ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n\n\n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n\n\n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n\n\n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing\n thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four\n chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each\n chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting\n column.\n\n\n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a\n trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are\n food!\"\n\n\n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them.\n The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and\n bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening\n the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes\n and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n\"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n\n\n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my\n fingers.\n\n\n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n\n\n I tasted a small piece.\n\n\n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n\n\n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n\n\n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n\n\n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\nThe next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were\n filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the\n form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a\n fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n\n\n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a\n spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n\n\n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water,\n waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n\n\n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were\n transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then\n disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n\n\n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by\n the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a\n hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n\n\n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit\n cigarettes and waited.\n\n\n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n\n\n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was\n excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n\n\n She sat next to Verana.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing\n a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared\n silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect.\n Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—\"\n\n\n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n\n\n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to\n hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was\n the\noddest\nfeeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in\n a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt\nsomething\nsearch my mind and gather information. I could actually\nfeel\nit search my memories!\"\n\n\n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n\n\n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It\n seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched\n for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\nKane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n \"\nDo you know where we are?\n\" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens\n got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're\n guinea pigs!\"\n\n\n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly\n remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated\n extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She\n was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they\n explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their\n zoo!\"\n\n\n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n\n\n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This\n ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago,\n they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living\n in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like\n when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a\n sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made\n spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship\n and enter it—\nlike rabbits in a snare!\n\"\n\n\n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep\n us there while they study us.\"\n\n\n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned\n months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n\n\n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the\n terror inside her.\n\n\n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be\n interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n\n\n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A\n race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves?\n Dissection is primitive. They won't\nhave to\ndissect us in order to\n study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n \"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the\n Moon!\"\n\n\n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible\n source and seemed to fill the room.\nVerana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's\n mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n\n\n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n \"Where are you?\nWho\nare you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n\n\n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n\n\n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted\n phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n\n\n \"What are your—your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked\n anxiously.\n\n\n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine\n you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like\n when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on\n your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity\n toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n\n\n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship\n and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food,\n oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to\n prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll\n find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n\n\n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to\n force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms.\n The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were\n the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or\n hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\nSix rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had\n been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work\n on.\n\n\n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that\n opened into the corridor.\n\n\n After intensive searching, we realized there was\nno way\nto damage the\n ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n\n\n We gave up.\n\n\n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to\n the \"kitchen.\"\n\n\n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and\n discussed our predicament.\n\n\n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed\n his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out!\n Every problem has a solution!\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"\nDoes\nevery problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some\n problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our\n civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape.\n Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A\n murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an\n entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours\n is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned\n few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds\n to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I\n don't think we have a chance.\"\n\n\n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.\n\n\n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n\n\n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged\n condition.\"\n\n\n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n \"Shtop me, then!\"\n\n\n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you\n other than use of your language.\"\n\n\n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n\n\n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and\n stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n\n\n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at\n the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools\n or weapons.\n\n\n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years\n could think of one!\n\n\n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had\n foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented\n the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains\n thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments\n would be.\n\n\n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they\n hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were\n curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the\n Moon.\n\n\n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't\n help thinking,\nAnd to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem\n impossibly clever\n.\n\n\n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\nWhen I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n\n\n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were\n functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen\n asleep a few hours before.\n\n\n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was\n bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us,\n Marie was secured to another chair.\n\n\n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he\n appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled\n and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n\n\n \"Awake, huh?\"\n\n\n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were\n red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she\n looked at him.\n\n\n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you\n on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n \"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I\n had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or\n cooperate with me.\"\n\n\n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n\n\n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in\n a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that\n this problem has a solution.\"\n\n\n I grunted my disgust.\n\n\n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.\n\n\n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of\n making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n\n\n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this\n ship, I'd build it with a\nconscience\nso it'd do its best at all\n times.\"\n\n\n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm\n getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged\n while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been\n present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n\n\n \"\nOur\nmachines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch\n buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic\n brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it\n even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a\n thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered\n such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last\n night figuring—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you\n don't know—\"\n\n\n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n\n\n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick\n fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n\n\n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n\n\n \"Watch!\"\n\n\n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n\n\n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n\n\n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n\n\n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return\n to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\nThe machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to\n interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had\n said it had no way to control our actions!\n\n\n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you\n return with dead specimens!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.\n\n\n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to\n your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us\n to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission\n later.\"\n\n\n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go.\n A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning\n even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n\n\n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n\n\n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n\n\n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How do the five end up finding the alien ship?", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_1", "options": ["They were on a walk and simply stumbled across it.", "They are sent on a mission from Lunar City to find the craft.", "They are aliens themselves and are given the location by their commander.", "Kane is sent to find the ship to pilot it back to Earth, and the others are part of his crew."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What prompts the group's decision not to alert the authorities about their findings?", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_2", "options": ["They do not want a war to break out on the moon.", "They do, in fact, alert the authorities about their findings.", "They are fearful of what will happen if it is discovered they were exploring without permission.", "They want to find out as much as they can before letting the authorities know about their findings in hopes of achieving fame and fortune."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is it ironic that Kane is the most eager to enter the ship?", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_3", "options": ["Kane is a pilot, and he knows the ultimate danger they will all face inside the ship.", "In the end, Kane does not want to return to the moon, unlike the others.", "In the end, Kane is the one most eager to find a way off of the ship.", "Kane enters the ship with the hope that his wife will be left behind on the moon, but Miller is the one who is actually left."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What are some of the things that the moon's inhabitants do for entertainment?", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_4", "options": ["The authorities do not allow the inhabitants to do anything for entertainment purposes.", "Much like ancient oral traditions, they often hold gatherings and tell stories about their time on the earth to help preserve their history.  ", "They play games.", "They take walks on the moon's surface to better acquaint themselves with their new surroundings."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Inside the ship, the narrator and his wife discover rooms similar to", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_5", "options": ["Nothing they have ever been exposed to.  ", "The interior of the ships that delivered them to the moon.", "Rooms that would normally be in a home.", "Cages at the zoo like they are to be housed in."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does the alien ship communicate with the passengers?", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_6", "options": ["They use radio transmissions.", "The ship communicates with them telepathically.", "There is no communication as the passengers are being held against their will.", "They communicate through an elaborate speaker system"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do the passengers discover about the alien's intentions towards them?", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_7", "options": ["The aliens want Kane to pilot their mother-ship.  They do not care about the rest of the passengers.", "They never discover the aliens' intentions, as the passengers can never make contact with the aliens.", "The aliens plan to return the passengers to their home: Earth.", "The aliens plan to study the passengers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "\"Every problem has a solution\" is Kane's mantra.  How does this relate to the situation the passengers find themselves in?", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_8", "options": ["Kane must find a solution to the ship's damage or they will all die.", "Kane knows there is no solution.  He just says that in order to give the other's hope.", "The passengers must find a solution that will help them to escape the alien ship.", "The passengers must find a solution to the problem the aliens have presented to them regarding the fate of the human race."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the main concern of the alien ship?", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_9", "options": ["Delivering the passengers in an unharmed condition to the bounty hunters who are hunting the passengers.", "Delivering the passengers in an unharmed condition to its master.", "Delivering the passengers in an unharmed condition back to Earth.", "Delivering the passengers in an unharmed condition back to the moon."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Kane threaten to do unless they are returned to the moon?", "question_unique_id": "49901_OB1O9O32_10", "options": ["Kill the others, starting with the narrator.", "Kill himself.", "Kill his wife.", "Crash the ship."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/9/9/0/49901//49901-h//49901-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61171", "set_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Expendables", "year": 1972, "author": "Harmon, Jim", "topic": "Mafia -- Fiction; Inventors -- Fiction; Gangsters -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; PS", "article": "THE EXPENDABLES\nBY JIM HARMON\nIt was just a little black box,\n\n useful for getting rid of things.\n\n Trouble was, it worked too well!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured,\n flashily ringed hands wide.\n\n\n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n\n\n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss\n with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor—not of medicine, anyway—or a\n lawyer.\"\n\n\n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n\n\n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in\n anything illegal.\"\n\n\n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and\n touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor\n Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization\n something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It\n allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a\n responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping\n out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n\n\n \"I can understand\nhonest\nItalian-Americans feeling that way. But guys\n like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on\n marks like you pretty easy.\"\n\n\n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the\n Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too\n long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false,\n built up an unendurable threat.\n\n\n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't\n kill any of these people?\"\n\n\n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n\n\n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these\n aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these\n days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club\n haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums\n with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets\n going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just\n stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my\n liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police—\" I saw the answer in\n his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n\n\n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid\n of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and\n throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en\n route by some tipped badge?\"\n\n\n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n\n\n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of\n scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies\n them like....\"\n\n\n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten\n it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's\n always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An\n interesting problem, at that.\"\n\n\n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably\n in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were\n working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n\n\n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that\n work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n\n\n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n\n\n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of\n wastes—radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any\n country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a\n small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him\n dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the\n shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n\n\n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I\n said. \"I'll call you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\nThe big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a\n neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n\n\n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or\n in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or\n changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks.\n The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning\n fish and fishermen.\n\n\n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the\n problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize\n radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et\n cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is\n easier written than done.\n\n\n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or\n matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But\n I didn't let that stop me—any more than I would have let the velocity\n of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged\n to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand\n and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor\n such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory\n owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of\n working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To\n this, I can only smile and nod.\n\n\n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n\n\n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a\n basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system\n for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n\n\n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated\n water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was\n no breakthrough on the central problem.\n\n\n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of\n some damned bodies for Carmen.\n\n\n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so\n precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States\n government, I began experimenting.\n\n\n I cut corners.\n\n\n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n\n\n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the\n wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be\n happy.\n\n\n I turned the machine on.\n\n\n The lights popped out.\n\n\n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but\n instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that\n in the switchbox.\n\n\n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and\n held.\n\n\n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n\n\n But there it was.\n\n\n The internal Scale showed zero.\n\n\n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely\n gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been\n no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the\n mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden\n discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard\n anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had\n gone to zero but never to minus.\n\n\n I was at last violating conservation of energy—not by successfully\n inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ...\n by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side\n effects.\n\n\n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain\n how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever\n convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n\n\n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n \"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n\"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his\n mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n\n\n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that\n just for now.\nWhere are these bodies going?\nI don't want them winding\n up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n\n\n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those\n crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc\n on it, I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are\n going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of—incinerator.\"\n\n\n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it\n burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up\n or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing\n cabinets before.\"\n\n\n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working\n some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n\n\n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one\n palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that\n you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in—well,\n everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things\n through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n\n\n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive\n feel for the mechanics of physics.\n\n\n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It\n might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the\n writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or\n our future.\"\n\n\n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid\n calculation.\n\n\n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the\n future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n\n\n \"Or six million years.\"\n\n\n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n\n\n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had\n heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I\n could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you\n would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know\n where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into\n the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so\n many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will\n have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure.\n Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck\n a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched\n materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will\n just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n\n\n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against\n any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out,\n Professor?\"\n\n\n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the\n unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you\n with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n\n\n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big\n operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators,\n garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n\n\n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of\n electrical power these devices require....\"\n\n\n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes\n a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own\n generators.\"\n\"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his\n unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to\n your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the\n results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have\n to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia—\"\n\n\n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the\n F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this\n much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor\n security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as\n being dead biologically.\"\n\n\n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he\n intended to be cordial.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but\n there are\nways\n, Professor. I know. I'm a business man—\"\n\n\n \"You\nare\n?\" I said.\n\n\n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n\n\n \"You\nare\n.\"\n\n\n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply\nleak\nthe\n information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your\n machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n\n\n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n\n\n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n\n\n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or\n a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be\n complete without one.\"\n\n\n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate\n will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n\n\n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n\n\n Naturally, I was aware that the government would\nnot\nbe interested in\n my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball.\n But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do\n with—like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do,\n it doesn't do it.\n\n\n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines\n patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest\n sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity,\n they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the\n meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there,\n moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n\n\n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with\n some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they\n didn't believe actually could work.\n\n\n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his\n hands on it.\n\n\n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\nThe closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n\n\n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was\n shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was\n this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n\n\n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He\n did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down\n the deserted street.\n\n\n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed\n me.\n\n\n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n\n\n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n\n\n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my\n invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign\n pasted on it.\"\n\n\n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n\n\n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n\n\n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n\n\n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my\n teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I\n frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n\n\n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy\n white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via\n a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take\n care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as\n necessity dictated.\n\n\n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit\n now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it\n waves to the national anthem.\"\n\n\n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing\n more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n\n\n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's\n teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n\n\n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone\n out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What\n remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium\n light position. I flipped.\n\n\n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply\n disturbed by what next occurred.\n\n\n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n\n\n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n\n\n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see\n that the unit was half gone—in fact, exactly halved.\n\n\n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the\n old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\"\n There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n \"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you\n increase the size of the working area.\"\n\n\n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know\n mechanics.\"\n\n\n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n\n\n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have\n there, Carmen?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of\nStartling Stories\n.\"\n\n\n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of\n science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was\n upheld.\n\n\n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n\n\n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had\n made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n\n\n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno\n and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n\n\n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why,\n that's\nmurder\n.\"\n\n\n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no\ncorpus delecti\n.\"\n\n\n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I\n remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n\n\n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember,\nyou\ndid it with\nyour\nmachine.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those\n machines sit there?\"\nThere were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following\n morning.\n\n\n One two-inch story—barely making page one because of a hole to fill at\n the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat\n prostration—told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by\n an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the\n fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more\n creditable.)\n\n\n The second item was further over in a science column just off the\n editorial page. It told of the government—!—developing a new process\n of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n\n\n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n\n\n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I\n doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a\n new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of\n spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with\n refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n\n\n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee\n I made when the doorbell rang.\n\n\n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the\n front door.\n\n\n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action,\n Professor.\"\n\n\n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n\n\n \"He's not even indicted\nyou\n, Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this\n plant in the\nTimes\n.\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no\n matter what the public wants.\"\n\n\n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants\n this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now.\n They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to\n you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n\n\n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the\n Expendables?\"\n\n\n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got\n a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves—no doors or sides. They\n want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n\n\n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n\n\n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n \"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of\n the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of\n its stock.\"\n\n\n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It\nwas\na pretty good offer—49% and my good health.\n\n\n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial\n use?\"\n\n\n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found\n a commercial use for it.\"\n\n\n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n\n\n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best\n detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n\n\n I knew what to tell them.\nI peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk,\n casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It\n wasn't really the machine's fault—The water department reported the\n reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two\n before I could get the gas type into my office.\n\n\n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony\n chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of\n course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not\n shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n\n\n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it,\n Professor Venetti?\"\n\n\n I agreed that it was.\n\n\n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n\n\n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties\n for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three\n months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we\n want the payola for what we have coming.\n\n\n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do\n not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our\n patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away\n with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n\n\n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in\n the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system\n working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n\n\n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a\n co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have\n always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put\n a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior\n doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it—I\n just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only\n a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony\n Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any\n more than me. Even.\n\n\n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I\n had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I\n smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the\n tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field.\n I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one.\n But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n\n\n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser,\n reflecting her fierce alertness.\n\n\n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n\n\n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite\n Miss Brown.\n\n\n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC?\n CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n\n\n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n\n\n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the\n edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n\n\n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I\n asked.\n\n\n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n\n\n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you\n then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n\n\n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit\n the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\nOnce seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may\n find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to\n confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field,\n and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n\n\n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said\n ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n\n\n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished\n with its deportations a few years back.\"\n\n\n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a\n multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why\n you took this step?\"\n\n\n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you\n noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n\n\n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you\n keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n\n\n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of\n his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap\n of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the\n service,\" he panted weakly.\n\n\n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the\n outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n\n\n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense\n that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean\n temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists\n quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n\n\n \"Clever of them.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible\n for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of\n conservation of energy,\nseemingly\n. It\nseemingly\ndestroys matter\n without creating energy. Actually—\"\n\n\n He paused dramatically.\n\n\n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter\n to the energy potential of the planet in the form of\nheat\n. You see\n what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean\n temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame.\n They must be outlawed!\"\n\n\n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n\n\n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to\n that.\"\n\n\n I waved his protests aside.\n\n\n \"I\nwould\nagree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the\n danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they\n will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until\n we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n\n\n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use\n of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop\n people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are\n being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be\n generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n\n\n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said\n worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then—we'll be damned?\"\n\n\n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is\nuse up\nthe excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n\n\n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with\n uncharacteristic gloom.\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now\n that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear\n of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and\n create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy\n in our planetary potential.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does Tony Carmen need someone in Venetti's line of work?", "question_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T_1", "options": ["He needs a scientist to help find a cure for his wife's illness.", "He needs a scientist to help figure out how to dispose of radioactive wastes/", "He needs a scientist to help dispose of bodies for him.", "He needs a scientist to help prove he did not commit a crime he is accused of."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about Carmen's associations?", "question_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T_2", "options": ["His loyalty to the government is detrimental to the welfare of the rest of humanity.", "His loyalty to the government overrides his sense of reason, and his death serves no purpose.", "His Mafia ties don't carry the intimidation factor one would believe they would.", "His Mafia ties make Venetti go on the run, thus not serving his purpose, rather than scaring him into doing what Carmen wants."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Venetti underestimate Carmen?", "question_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T_3", "options": ["He does not believe that Carmen is smart enough to understand the invention, so  Venetti decides to present the ideas before he should have.", "He does not believe Carmen's Mafia ties will get to him in the end, so he does not follow Carmen's instructions.", "He feels Carmen is a windbag and will take no action, so Venetti ignores him.", "He does not believe Carmen will challenge his authority with the government, so Venetti continues with his initial plans."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Initially, what is Carmen's greatest concern with Venetti's invention?", "question_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T_4", "options": ["Venetti's invention could end up being harmful to humanity.", "Carmen has complete confidence in Venetti and the invention.", "Venetti has no idea where the bodies will go when they disappear.", "Venetti's invention will destroy the time-space continuum."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "To Venetti, what is a fate worse than death?", "question_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T_5", "options": ["Failing his mission for the government.", "Being turned over to Mafia.", "Ruining his professional career.", "Losing his family to the Mafia."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The name for the machine comes from", "question_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T_6", "options": ["a contest held for the public.", "the name of the inventor.", "accurately describing what they do.", "the name of the country where it was invented."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to Carmen, who actually committed murder?", "question_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T_7", "options": ["Carmen himself.", "The government.", "Harry Keno.", "Venetti and his machine."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who wants Venetti's machine for commercial use?", "question_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T_8", "options": ["A car manufacturer.", "The government.", "An appliance company", "The Mafia."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Venetti believe the public's opinion will be in regards to the Expendables being outlawed.", "question_unique_id": "61171_W6HUJN4T_9", "options": ["They will completely agree because the machines will cause the Earth to burst into flames.", "They will disagree with the machines being outlawed because the government is overstepping its bounds.", "They will agree completely because the invention is back by the Mafia.", "They will disagree with the machines being outlawed because they are convenient, which is more important than \"the greater good.\""], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/1/7/61171//61171-h//61171-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63605", "set_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Beast-Jewel of Mars", "year": 1958, "author": "Thiessen, V. E.", "topic": "Adventure stories; Science fiction; PS; Short stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Legends -- Fiction", "article": "The Beast-Jewel of Mars\nBy V. E. THIESSEN\nThe city was strange, fantastic, beautiful.\n\n He'd never been there before, yet already he\n\n was a fabulous legend—a dire, hateful legend.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Spring 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an\n odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the\n little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he\n could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets\n that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n\n\n One part of his mind said,\nThis is it, this is the fabled city of\n Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends,\n and I must go down there.\nYet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in\n the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and\n urgent.\nGet away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the\n city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk,\n a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those\n who came before you.\nHe strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic\n beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to\n close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open,\n staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin\n wail of music reached him, saying,\nCome into the city, come down into\n the fabled city\n.\n\n\n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal.\n The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it\n touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the\n towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n\n\n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an\n instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red\n dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin\n strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n\n\n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his\n face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone\n for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the\n sides of the canal and never look back.\n\n\n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol,\n and this is not real.\"\n\n\n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until\n he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the\n canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his\n haste. He wouldn't look again.\n\n\n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It\n told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and\n wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city,\n waiting for him to claim them.\n\n\n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head\n began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him,\n beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n\n\n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n\n\n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy\n gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n \"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if\n it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n\n\n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue\n street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue\n leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew\n the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the\n sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome\n of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it\n may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n\n\n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric\n North!\"\n\n\n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was\n white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the\n Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal\n hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\nWhen Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about\n him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music.\n Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man\n came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang\n deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze.\n Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n\n\n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took\n fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and\n fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless\n feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed\n through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates\n closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart\n hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and\n looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n\n\n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back,\n Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n\n\n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until\n his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n\n\n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you\n cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\"\n and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n\n\n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings\n of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the\n city.\"\n\n\n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a\n city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and\n minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound\n of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n\n\n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the\n beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it\n was beautiful again.\n\n\n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the\n motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he\n stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat\n had not entirely failed him after all.\n\n\n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to\n call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when\n it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps.\n And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the\n canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and\n the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he\n was beyond the range of the illusions.\n\n\n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem,\n and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which\n he had been pitted.\n\n\n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield\n against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had\n failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised\n pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense\n against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly\n to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and\n the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as\n the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n\n\n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city,\n whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he\n had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they\n were as ugly as the second city had been.\n\n\n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the\n arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver\n indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve\n North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he\n would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they\n had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would\n be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n\n\n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had\n established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's\n face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n\n\n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that\n he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a\n swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n\n\n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\"\n wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note\n clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently\n and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n\n\n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down\n to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some\n sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd\n better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and\n I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight\n down the canal.\"\n\n\n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently\n Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been\n so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n\n\n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric\n selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They\n were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed\n with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That\n should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began\n walking back to the canal.\nThe return back to the city would always live in his mind as a\n phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he\n came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the\n wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same\n tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the\n wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen\n wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric,\n you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled,\n seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of\n his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that\n hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked\n so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung\n away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n\n\n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome\n than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and\n Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n\n\n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet\n someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from\n this side of the city.\"\n\n\n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n\n\n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the\n Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n\n\n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called\n you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders\n believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy,\n superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed\n them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n\n\n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened\n the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well\n armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled\n at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another\n struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and\n escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n\n\n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice\n sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are\n looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n\n\n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready\n to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center.\n The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice\n sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n\n\n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther\n up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n\n\n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two\n buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes.\n The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n\n\n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you\n value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike\n down the street.\n\n\n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and\n two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let\n him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n\n\n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to\n converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in\n the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value\n my life don't use the gun.\"\n\n\n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken\n prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men\n held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly,\n calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will\n not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could\n hardly hear it.\n\n\n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's\n words that these people were superstitious.\n\n\n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the\n thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you\n so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips\n defeat the prophesy?\"\n\n\n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood,\n fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without\n the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it\n out.\nThen one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance\n with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now,\n then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n\n\n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the\n guards, and kill him at once!\"\n\n\n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were\n alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed\n with the pain.\n\n\n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing\n gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before\n Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut\n downward across Eric's neck.\n\n\n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a\n murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n\n\n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n\n\n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She\n was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and\n her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across\n the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\nShe said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so\n that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me\n your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook\n his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n \"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his\n muscles and began to pull.\n\n\n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with\n an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and\n the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of\n freedom.\n\n\n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young\n suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling\n back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent\n that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply,\n oddly happy as they rode.\n\n\n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the\n city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it\n contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city.\n It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched\n among enemies.\n\n\n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n\n\n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had\n held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you\n again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n\n\n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made\n of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door,\n but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n\n\n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council\n awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n\n\n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was\n obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the\n room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building.\n Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a\n chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n\n\n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric\n watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place\n there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had\n lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously\n presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of\n the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your\n identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some\n sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is\n the judgment of the elders?\"\nEric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if\n in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion,\n Daughter of the City?\"\n\n\n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future.\n She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n\n\n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so\n despised in the city?\"\n\n\n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the\n city. This, and other things.\"\n\n\n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were\n the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if\n there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the\n respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n\n\n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the\n City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars\n ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and\n gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it\n became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and\n could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets.\n Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots\n destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for\n this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable\n again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the\n building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a\n small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n\n\n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet,\n in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this,\n that it translates thought into reality.\"\n\n\n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n\n\n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is\n necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting\n device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any\n sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this\n material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n \"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape.\n Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your\n mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n\n\n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before\n him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He\n drank it, convinced completely.\n\n\n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling\n beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n\n\n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to\n the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual\n in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass.\n We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew\n drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and\n greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong\n is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own\n evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the\n beauty they have lost here.\"\n\n\n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even\n know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us,\n the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the\n machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we\n build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n\n\n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient\n Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be\n destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that\n our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power.\n The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze.\n It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man\n would come.\"\n\n\n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a\n space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to\n protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield\n of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come\n is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n\n\n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric\n was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their\n thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far\n flung kind to return.\"\n\n\n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If\n the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the\n Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n\n\n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n\n\n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this\n building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his\n quarters?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is Eric's main internal conflict as the story opens?", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_1", "options": ["He longs to become a part of the city, but his instincts warn him against it.", "He wants to go home, but he feels an obligation to the people of Mars and feels he must help them.", "He is conflicted as to how to deal with telling his brother about his discovery.", "He is in love with the city's leader, but he knows their relationship is doomed."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The illusions that Eric sees are not real, and a part of him knows that.  What finally makes him realize that the illusions are not part of reality?", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_2", "options": ["He comes to his senses after falling and hitting his head.", "When he is threatened by the people of the city, the illusions fade into reality.", "His helmet began to shield him from the illusion", "The spell placed on him by the city's people is canceled out by a potion given to him by his brother."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why do the people of the city try to harm Eric even after enticing him to enter the gates?", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_3", "options": ["They realize that Eric is the man from their city's legend who will destroy them, so they feel they must destroy him first.", "The city's people feel that Eric is only there to kill their leader, so they attack first.", "The people initially believed Eric was his brother, and once they realize their mistake, killing Eric is the only way they see that they can remedy the error.", "The people of the city are known for sacrificing strangers to their gods."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Once escaping the city and regaining his senses, Eric decides that he will", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_4", "options": ["Tell his brother about what happened and get his opinion as to how to proceed.", "Leave and never return.", "Try to reason with the people of the city because he knows that he belongs there.", "Destroy the city."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Once he returns to his ship, why does Eric not leave immediately?", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_5", "options": ["He is lured back to the city again.", "He has no intention of leaving.  He wants to stay permanently. ", "He realizes his brother has left for the city, and he cannot go without his brother.", "He cannot leave the woman he has fallen in love with."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Once making the return to the city after visiting his ship, Eric", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_6", "options": ["Has a hard time going back because he is repulsed by the city's appearance.", "Must find the will to resist the city's call to his death.", "Decides that he must save the city from the impending attack.", "Is very excited to reenter the gates."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When he initially sees his brother upon returning to the city, Eric", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_7", "options": ["is shocked by how repulsive his brother appears.", "is so relieved to see Garve that he lets his guard down and allows the city to get a hold of him again.", "tries to harm his brother because he does not believe that who he is seeing is truly Garve.", "immediately gets his brother and leaves for their ship."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who does Garve tell Eric is waiting for him?", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_8", "options": ["The elders.", "The president.", "Their parents.", "Their ship's commander"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Even though it would be an effective way to escape the situation, why does Eric not use his gun?", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_9", "options": ["His brother warns him not to.", "He is afraid the gun could malfunction due to the oddities that have occurred in the city.", "He does not really want to harm the people of the city.", "He left the bullets back at the ship."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why do the elders believe it is time for the machine to be destroyed?", "question_unique_id": "63605_KSYQUG9H_10", "options": ["The people of the city need to once again learn how to struggle to gain power, and the machine prevents that.", "They can no longer maintain the machine, and destroying it is the only way to ensure that it will not harm others.", "The machine is becoming a danger to the atmosphere.", "The machine is Eric's only means to destroy the city."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/6/0/63605//63605-h//63605-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "41562", "set_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Hanging Stranger", "year": 1955, "author": "Dick, Philip K.", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "THE HANGING STRANGER\nBY PHILIP K. DICK\nILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction\n Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover\n any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEd had always been a practical man, when he saw something was\n wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\nit\nhanging in the\n town square.\n\n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car\n out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His\n back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and\n wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done\n okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he\n liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n\n\n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying\n commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and\n packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks\n and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red\n light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him;\n he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the\n records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove\n slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the\n town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND\n SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again\n he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain\n and bench and single lamppost.\n\n\n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle,\n swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled\n down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of\n some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the\n square.\n\n\n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park\n and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a\n display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he\n swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n\n\n It was a body. A human body.\n\"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n\n\n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe\n coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy\n standing there.\"\n\n\n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up\n against the sky—the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is.\n How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's\n wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n\n\n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must\n be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n\n\n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n\n\n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that\n wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n\n\n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n\n\n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to\n call the cops.\"\n\n\n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business\n before pleasure.\"\n\n\n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A\n man's body! A dead man!\"\n\n\n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n\n\n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run.\n See you later, Ed.\"\n\n\n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the\n sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously\n at the dark bundle—and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any\n attention.\n\n\n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and\n crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him.\n He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n\n\n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray\n suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never\n seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and\n in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin\n was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A\n pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His\n eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n\n\n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea\n and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with\n revulsion—and fear.\nWhy?\nWho was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n\n\n And—why didn't anybody notice?\n\n\n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the\n man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n\n\n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND\n SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n\n\n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something\n wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n\n\n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it?\n For God's sake—\"\n\n\n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n\n\n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n\n\n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n\n\n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at\n him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n\n\n \"Ed—\"\n\n\n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n\n\n \"He must be sick.\"\n\n\n \"Or drunk.\"\n\n\n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell.\n Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men\n and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them\n toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man,\n showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service\n counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically.\n His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n\n\n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something!\n Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n\n\n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving\n efficiently toward Loyce.\n\"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n\n\n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me.\n Back there—\"\n\n\n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through\n traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the\n seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n\n\n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n\n\n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen\n to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost—\"\n\n\n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n\n\n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n\n\n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n\n\n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n\n\n \"In the\nbasement\n?\"\n\n\n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame.\n Why? What has that to do with—\"\n\n\n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n\n\n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from\n one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n \"You mean because I was down there I missed—the explanation? I didn't\n get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n\n\n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed\n the explanation.\"\n\n\n \"Then it's official? The body—it's\nsupposed\nto be hanging there?\"\n\n\n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n\n\n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep\n end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like\n the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking\n over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands\n shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n\n\n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of\n Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights\n had not yet come on.\n\n\n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute.\n I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to\n take me in, is there?\"\n\n\n The two cops said nothing.\n\n\n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all\n right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of—\"\n\n\n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short\n process. Only a few minutes.\"\n\n\n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a\n stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting\n excited like that and—\"\n\n\n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled\n to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light\n changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people,\n burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts,\n people running.\n\n\n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in\n Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small\n town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n\n\n They weren't cops—and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter,\n Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't\n know—and they didn't care.\nThat\nwas the strange part.\n\n\n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the\n startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the\n back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete\n steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side,\n gasping and panting.\n\n\n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n\n\n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and\n ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street\n light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n\n\n And to his right—the police station.\n\n\n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery\n store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred\n windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the\n darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to\n keep moving, get farther away from them.\nThem?\nLoyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the\n City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass\n and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark\n windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n\n\n And—something else.\n\n\n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than\n the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost\n into the sky.\n\n\n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him\n struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound.\n A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n\n\n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over\n the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid.\nIn the vortex\n something moved.\nFlickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky,\n pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense\n swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n\n\n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that\n hung above him.\n\n\n He was seeing—them.\nFor a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool\n of scummy water.\n\n\n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the\n City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of\n some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest—and then crawled\n crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n\n\n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he\n shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the\n City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of\n the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n\n\n Were there more of them?\n\n\n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm\n weren't men. They were alien—from some other world, some other\n dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the\n universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm\n of being.\n\n\n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved\n toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter\n the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n\n\n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight,\n clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly\n fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and\n came to rest among them.\n\n\n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves\n as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration.\n Mimicry.\n\n\n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The\n alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe\n darkness made no difference to them.\n\n\n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and\n women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting\n groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the\n evening gloom.\n\n\n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the\n bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A\n moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\nLoyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired\n faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them\n paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats,\n jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n\n\n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the\n sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A\n businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n\n\n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a\n package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater.\n Gazing absently ahead of her.\n\n\n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n\n\n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with\n packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n\n\n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to\n their families. To dinner.\n\n\n Going home—with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask\n of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their\n town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in\n his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked.\n They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n\n\n Maybe there were others.\n\n\n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a\n mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had\n passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down.\n Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n\n\n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his\n chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache.\n Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small\n hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly\n away.\n\n\n Loyce tensed. One of\nthem\n? Or—another they had missed?\n\n\n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever.\n Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them—or one of the things itself, an alien\n insect from beyond.\n\n\n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into\n the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n\n\n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second\n something passed between them.\n\n\n A look rich with meaning.\n\n\n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step\n down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber\n door swung open.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell—\"\n\n\n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A\n residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him,\n the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet.\n They were coming after him.\n\n\n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against\n the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness.\n Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid\n down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n\n\n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in\n the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed\n before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n\n\n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The\n man screamed and tried to roll away. \"\nStop!\nFor God's sake listen—\"\n\n\n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and\n dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others\n were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk,\n up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were\n bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed\n man who had come after him.\n\n\n Had he made a mistake?\n\n\n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out—away from\n them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between\n their world and his.\n\"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What—\"\n\n\n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n \"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n\n\n Janet moved toward the window. \"But—\"\n\n\n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n\n\n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's\n happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n\n\n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen.\n From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran\n his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living\n room.\n\n\n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped\n and they'll be looking for me.\"\n\n\n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty\n well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police\n department. What they did with the\nreal\nhumans they—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension.\n They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n\n\n \"My mind?\"\n\n\n \"Their entrance is\nhere\n, in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you.\n The whole town—except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful\n enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're\n limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n\n\n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n\n\n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be\n like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't\n stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n\n\n \"My coat?\"\n\n\n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help.\n Fight this thing. They\ncan\nbe beaten. They're not infallible. It's\n going to be close—but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed\n her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving.\n Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n\n\n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the\n floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the\n highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got\n onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about\n it.\"\n\n\n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord—it's completely closed. Nobody's\n supposed to drive over it.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best\n chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of\n gas, isn't it?\"\n\n\n Janet was dazed.\n\n\n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward\n the stairs. \"Ed, I—\"\n\n\n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing\n stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n\n\n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're—going\n out for awhile.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n\n\n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n\n\n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work.\n We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done—\"\n\n\n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the\n stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n\n\n \"He's coming.\"\n\n\n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n\n\n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n\n\n \"A ride? Where?\"\n\n\n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn\n it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still—\"\n\n\n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out.\n Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of\n motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy.\n It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse—the thing hurtling at him,\n cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow\n T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange\n half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n\n\n A stinger.\n\n\n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce\n rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as\n statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again.\n This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It\n bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n\n\n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien\n mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his\n own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence,\n settling over him—and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a\n broken heap on the rug.\n\n\n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of\n some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind\n tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his\n knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still,\n neither of them moving.\n\n\n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It\n was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and\n open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n\n\n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and\n son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n\n\n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness\n toward the edge of town.\nThe early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for\n breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing\n was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled.\n Ten miles—on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night.\n His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly\n exhausted.\n\n\n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n\n\n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and\n fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything\n receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from\n Pikeville.\n\n\n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in\n wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a\n gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens\n pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n\n\n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up\n to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think\n I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear\n them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n\n\n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall\n and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the\n first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them\n hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond\n them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun\n came up.\"\n\n\n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I\n better get a doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n \"We've got to get started—cleaning them out. Got to get started right\n away.\"\nThey kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had\n finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet.\n He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his\n cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n\n\n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n\n\n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently\n away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and\n stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\"\n he said abruptly.\n\n\n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n\n\n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in\n your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n\n\n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a\n theory,\" he murmured.\n\n\n \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting\n at the top—the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a\n widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next\n town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on\n for a long time.\"\n\n\n \"A long time?\"\n\n\n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n\n\n \"Why do you say that?\"\n\n\n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A\n religious picture—an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah.\n Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth—\"\n\n\n \"So?\"\n\n\n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the\n Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as—a giant fly.\"\n\n\n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n\n\n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They\n make gains—but finally they're defeated.\"\n\n\n \"Why defeated?\"\n\n\n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the\n Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The\n realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they\n understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed\n one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n\n\n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did.\n Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He\n turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured\n everything out.\"\n\n\n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the\n lamppost. I don't understand that.\nWhy?\nWhy did they deliberately hang\n him there?\"\n\n\n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \"\nBait.\n\"\n\n\n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was\n under control—and who had escaped.\"\n\n\n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they\nexpected\nfailures! They\n anticipated—\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n\n\n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The\n Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's\n a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n\n\n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man.\nWho was the\n man?\nI never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger.\n All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed—\"\n\n\n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n \"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with\n me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a\n glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a\n platform of some sort. A telephone pole—and a rope! \"Right this way,\"\n the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\nAs the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came\n up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and\n coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were\n there, hurrying home to dinner.\n\n\n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n\n\n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street\n toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the\n vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there\n was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n\n\n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The\n street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze.\n\n\n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large\n and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n\n\n What the hell was it?\n\n\n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and\n hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner\n table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous\n and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew\n him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made\n him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened—and fascinated.\n\n\n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n", "questions": [{"question": "The time Ed Loyce spent digging in his basement could be symbolic of", "question_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR_1", "options": ["Him digging up dirt on the people of the town.", "Him digging up dirt on his family's secrets.", "Him ultimately digging his own grave.", "Him digging up dirt on the town's officials."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Once Loyce discovers what is hanging from the lamppost, he is outraged.  The other citizens he encounters ", "question_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR_2", "options": ["Are not concerned and feel there is a reason for what is transpiring.  ", "Are currently headed to get the police involved in the situation at hand.", "Try to tell Loyce about what is going on, but Loyce will not listen.", "Share in his outrage and go on a mission to get to the bottom of the issue."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Loyce is completely perplexed \n", "question_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR_3", "options": ["That his wife had not called to tell him about what had happened during the day.", "By the fact that no one cares that there is a body hanging in the town square.", "That the Chamber of Commerce has no concern for how the hanging stranger will affect his business.", "By the fact that he was not made aware of the plan to hang the man, as he is always involved in this sort of decision-making."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Loyce explain that he missed out on understanding the reason for the man being hung in the town square?", "question_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR_4", "options": ["He did not attend the Chamber of Commerce meeting that discussed the event.", "He was at a meeting at his sons' school.", "He was at work and missed the radio announcement.", "He missed the announcement when he was digging in his basement."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Loyce knows that the police officers who attempt to take him in are not actually town police officers because", "question_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR_5", "options": ["Their badges show they are actually from another town.", "As a businessman in the town, he knows everyone on the police force, and he does not know those two men.", "They are not wearing uniforms, nor do they follow police procedures.  ", "They cannot produce a badge to show their identity."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Loyce notice about the City Hall?", "question_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR_6", "options": ["The Chamber of Commerce is hosting a meeting to discuss the transpiring events.", "There is a bomb located on the steps of the building, and it is set to go off at midnight.", "Alien insects appear to be descending on the building.", "It has become the town's refuge against the alien invaders."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Later, Loyce realizes he killed", "question_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR_7", "options": ["An alien leader, thus why Loyce is a target of this invading race.", "A man who was like him and had escaped the initial wave of the invasion.", "His wife in his attempt to escape.", "An alien who was disguised as a friend."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When Loyce makes his way to the next town over, his appearance is akin to", "question_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR_8", "options": ["The other aliens.", "A normal businessman with an appointment to meet with the town's Commissioner.", "A man who was completely insane.", "The man who was hanging in his town square."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The town Commissioner points out to Loyce that", "question_unique_id": "41562_QC2TICIR_9", "options": ["Resistance against the aliens is futile.", "He did the right thing by coming to him so that they can stop the alien invasion.", "Loyce is insane, and there are no alien invaders.  He lets Loyce know that he will be arrested for murder.", "The hanging man was simply a trap to capture those like Loyce."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/1/5/6/41562//41562-h//41562-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50847", "set_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Tea Tray in the Sky", "year": 1961, "author": "Smith, Evelyn E.", "topic": "PS; Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "Tea Tray in the Sky\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nVisiting a society is tougher than being born\n \ninto it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\nThe picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward\n end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled\n apathetically in a chair.\n\n\n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In\n need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they\n swear by it on Meropé.\"\n\n\n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to\n the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on\n her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan\n clog.\n\n\n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the\n Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf\n remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair\n thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from\n the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n\n\n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"\n\n\n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over\n the death of your mother.\"\n\n\n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its\n fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its\n lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a\n monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n\n\n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few\n blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n\n\n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful,\n young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone\n as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for\n violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n\n\n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in\n the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\nMichael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the\n Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe\n so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself,\n with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all\n the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all\n the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before\n that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing\n with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the\n same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no\n differences, and hence no wars.\n\n\n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years\n there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and\n plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar\n systems—injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths\n of Aldebaran were still trying to add\nthought\nto the statute).\n\n\n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any\n reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to\n retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive\n forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had,\n perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the\n world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's\n face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the\n past—the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal\n furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n\n\n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n\n\n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody\n would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of\n free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n\n\n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured,\n abashed.\n\n\n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is\n Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He\n handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter\n suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his\n address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character\n of the utmost respectability.\n\n\n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got\n to do with me?\"\n\n\n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it\n becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n\n\n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n \"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while\n lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Would you like to be called guilty of—\" Carpenter paused before the\n dreaded word—\"\nintolerance\n?\"\n\n\n \"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked\nGloves B\nyielded a\n pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic\n and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n\n\n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n \"but the price is meager. You\nknow\nwhen you buy Plummy Fruitcake from\n Vega.\"\n\n\n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in\n Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a\n while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself\n until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into\n trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n\n\n He twisted himself around—it was boiling hot inside the jet bus\n and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably—and struck his\n head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient\n arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n\n\n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that\n has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other\n passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n\n\n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n\n\n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought\n it arose from defective jets.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n\n\n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\nMichael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough,\n he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant\n world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will\n we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n\n\n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were.\n They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they\n leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n\n\n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty\n two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n \"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all\n passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into\n the Union early this morning.\"\n\n\n All the passengers cheered.\n\n\n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to\n appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in\n public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n\n\n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching\n their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n\n\n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in\n piercingly bright green.\n\"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n \"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n\n\n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew,\n floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him\n curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of\n those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n\n\n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders—humanoids from\n Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians—but nothing to\n compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed\n tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded\n alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others\n whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n\n\n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered\n kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and\n banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green\n cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green\n breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat\n less pudgy man.\nCarpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate\n business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you\n like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get\n myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\"\n Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and\n scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n\n\n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the\n youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's\n frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with\n eating in public here on Earth?\"\n\n\n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he\n cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even\n mention in public, aren't there?\"\n\n\n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian.\n But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted\n the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated\n one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the\n Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto\n extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n\n\n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice,\n however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve\n to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all\n bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located\n throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n\n\n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were\n watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and\n pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n\n\n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\nInside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively\n marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a\n two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into\n a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food\n compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics\n and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste\n time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a\n matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to\n chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n\n\n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from\n gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid\n condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n\n\n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment\n to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at\n the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n\n\n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of\n great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n\n\n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined\n up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of\n the tour he offered:\n\n\n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n\n\n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n\n\n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n\n\n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today,\n gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man\n through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of\n surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for\n business.\n\n\n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady,\n lined with luxury\nhukka\nfur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare\n scents from Algedi.\"\n\n\n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine\n cab from Mizar. Just press a button—it won't cost you nuttin'—see\n a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing\n Eliza.\"\n\n\n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race\n or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides\n in the taxi from Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't we—couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael\n faltered.\n\n\n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more\n than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n\n\n \"But they have no feet.\"\n\n\n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\nCarpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which\n reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no!\n Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break\n the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want\n to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n\n\n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed\n him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n\n\n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and\n was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork,\n the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the\n most cosmopolitan city—cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as\n its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall\n helical edifices of the Venusians.\n\n\n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached\n architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the\n Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n\n\n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n\n\n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was\n still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out\n from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire\n about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to\n bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are\n becoming so popular....\"\n\"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play\nBeautiful Blue\n Deneb\njust once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard\n this before.\"\n\n\n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what\n a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the\n wasteful sea.\"\n\n\n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike\n manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n\n\n \"The word\nhotel\n,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is\n not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant\n connotations. It means—a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n\n\n \"That word is also—well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it\n is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n\n\n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel—\" Carpenter lowered his\n voice modestly \"—\nalone\nhire a family for the duration of their stay.\n There are a number of families available, but the better types come\n rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price\n controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as\n much as—if you'll excuse my use of the expression—tariffs would.\"\nThe taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with\n transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of\n the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the\n standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because\n most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical\n devices.\n\n\n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square,\n but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit\n the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the\n Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the\n clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n\n\n \"The pictures in my history books—\" Michael began.\n\n\n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak\n trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did\n you use the word\nhistory\n?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I\n have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the\n police, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.\n\n\n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square.\n\n\n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas\n displays.\"\n\n\n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It\n came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels\n bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth,\n good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe\n as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the\n cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n\n\n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an\n expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called\n Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see—\"\n\n\n \"Listen, could we—\" Michael began.\n\n\n \"—Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second—\"\n\n\n \"By the way—\"\n\n\n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to\n interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n\n\n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed.\n If I might.\"\n\n\n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks\n was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions.\n Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to\n take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n\n\n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The\n installations are extremely expensive.\"\n\n\n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety\n equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n\n\n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a\n remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in\n his history—in his books, except that none of them showed the huge\n golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\nAttendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n \"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor.\nA\ngroup Vegans, fourteenth floor\n right.\nB\ngroup, fourteenth floor left.\nC\ngroup, fifteenth floor\n right.\nD\ngroup, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor.\n Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left.\n Uranians, basement....\"\n\n\n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed,\n translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying\n themselves on\nwemps\n, a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign\n planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres\n prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky\n to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one\n credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n\n\n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive,\n for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use\n oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub\n with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick\n themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it\n away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are\n than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that\n works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n\"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we\n must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious,\n but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself\n beneath your station.\"\n\n\n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n \"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n\n\n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you\n choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n\n\n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own\n some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's\n an Earth family that's chosen you—it's so awkward being adopted by\n extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl,\n you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in\n Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n\n\n \"\nMarried!\n\" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You\nmustn't\nuse\n that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive\n possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha.\n Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted\n her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having\n her, would you?\"\n\n\n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n \"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I\n would report you.\"\n\n\n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot\n adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for\n them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one\n of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n\n\n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar\n curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without\n fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl\n when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n\n\n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both\n sexes are represented in our society.\"\n\n\n \"On Talitha—\" Carpenter began.\n\n\n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n\n\n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the\n Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if\n it had been waiting for his return.\n\n\n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the\n noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad\n place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed\n with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm\n back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n\n\n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural\n area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over.\n How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for\n insulting civilization.\"\n\n\n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring\n sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick\n death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by\n skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n\n\n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What appears to be playing on the \"illuminated panel\" in front of Michael?", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_1", "options": ["A broadcast declaring him a fugitive.", "An infomercial.", "Some international sport he is unfamiliar with.", "A welcome message from the town he is entering."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Michael recognizes his impatience when he ", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_2", "options": ["makes a rash decision concerning choosing a family to stay with, and that decision proves fatal. ", "is recognized as a brotherhood member because he did not allow himself time to adjust his physical appearance to blend in.", "realizes he does not have enough money to make the trip safely, but it is too late for him to turn back at that point.", "gets halfway to his destination and realizes that he was not ready to leave the confines of the brotherhood,  but he does not have the funds to go home."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the first \"faux pas\" Micahel makes on his journey?", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_3", "options": ["He aligns himself with Ms. Carpenter.", "His replies are not courteous enough.", "He speaks disrespectfully of his mother.", "He admits that he is a member of the Brotherhood."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In this world, how have the leaders decided to keep the peace amongst all of the universe?", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_4", "options": ["Everyone is expected to speak their mind, thus not allowing bottled-up emotions to cause issues.", "Every creature in the universe should abide by the same laws and customs.  If no one is offended, wars will be prevented.", "If someone speaks out against the laws of the universe, they must come up with a custom to support their criticism, or they will face death.", "Different species are not to interact with one another for any reason, thus not allowing conflict to arise."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the only universal crime?", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_5", "options": ["Not speaking your mind on a particular subject.", "Leaving the Brotherhood without permission of the Wise Ones.", "Thinking about offending any creature in any way.", "Offending any creature in any way."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The universal laws may, in fact, prevent wars", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_6", "options": ["because the research put into them is sound.", "and they are easy to maintain and live by.", "because they are simple rules, everyone should live by anyway.", "but they are virtually impossible to follow to the letter because there are so many of them."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What modern-day city does Michael appear to have landed in?", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_7", "options": ["Los Angeles", "San Fransico", "New York City", "Dallas"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Mr. Carpenter tells Michael he cannot have a \"real\" family of his own because", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_8", "options": ["Michael's woman might be wanted by someone else, or Michael might be wanted by someone else.  They would be expected to share.", "The Brotherhood is the only family he is allowed to claim.", "Members of the Brotherhood are not allowed to have families.", "Michael's mother is dead, and the family line ends with the mother due to universal law."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Michael ultimately decide to return to the Brotherhood?", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_9", "options": ["Michael realizes that his place has always been with the Brotherhood.", "Mr. Carpenter convinces him that his place is with the Brotherhood as the \"world\" is not for everyone.", "He cannot remember all of the Universal Laws, and he is bound to end up in jail if he does not return.", "Michael cannot stand the thought of sharing his girl with anyone and refuses to entertain the idea."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Through his journey out into the world away from the Brotherhood, Michael realizes", "question_unique_id": "50847_H8FBNDZU_10", "options": ["he needed to see what was out there for himself, and he is grateful to be a part of the universe and all it holds.", "\"the grass is not greener on the other side,\" and home is where he belongs.", "love does not exist.", "Mr. Carpenter is a master teacher, and Michael brings him to the Brotherhood to instruct others on the ways of Universal Laws."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/4/50847//50847-h//50847-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62212", "set_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Prison Planet", "year": 1962, "author": "Tucker, Wilson", "topic": "Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Interplanetary voyages -- Fiction; PS; Space ships -- Fiction", "article": "PRISON PLANET\nBy BOB TUCKER\nTo remain on Mars meant death from agonizing\n\n space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay\n\n days of flight away. And there was only\n\n a surface rocket in which to escape—with\n\n a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what\nI\nsay goes around here. It doesn't\n happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits,\n and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will\n be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat,\n get this:\nI'm\ngoing to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or\n no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because\n this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my\n position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n \"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n\n\n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the\n woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look,\n wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the\n stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray\n almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n\n\n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job,\n black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated\n a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four\n nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water\n tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards,\n allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n\n\n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the\n office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through\n the narrow door.\n\n\n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me\n throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his\n chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n\n\n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he\n blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\nWhen the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the\n chair.\n\n\n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n\n\n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed\n door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there\n has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed\n on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she\n dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital,\n I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a\n jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and\n that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n\n\n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n\n\n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought\n of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all\n night tearing them out. We just\nmight\nbe able to hop by dawn ... and\n hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n\n\n The nurse came out of the door.\n\n\n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n\n\n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n\n\n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look\n at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n\n\n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How\n long will it take?\"\n\n\n \"Eight days, in\nthat\nship.\"\n\n\n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson\n was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship\n meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in\n that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and\n Gladney.\n\n\n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n\n\n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n\n\n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean?\n What is his record?\"\n\n\n Peterson opened his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record\n around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n\n\n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He\n turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n\n\n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n\n\n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was\n attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch.\n And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the\n Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n\n\n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around\n Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps\n on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that\n leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n\n\n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case.\n It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one\n word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n\n\n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\nRat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel,\n checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n\n\n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip\n her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the\n Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock.\n The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building.\n On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat\n outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n\n\n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the\n wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n\n\n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a\n sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n\n\n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat\n regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he\n stepped to the sill.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"—in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning\n conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n\n\n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot\n that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n\n\n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly\n as he detected it in her words.\n\n\n \"Well,\ncan\nyou?\" she demanded.\n\n\n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n\n\n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight.\n And ... well, we want\nyou\nto pilot it! She refuses to risk\n Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n\n\n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n\n\n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the\n room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray\n explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please,\n can you?\"\n\n\n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the\n window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n\n\n \"When?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again.\n Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning,\n she saw him back again.\n\n\n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap\n good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he\n disappeared upwards.\n\n\n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the\n time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began\n wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window\n announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw\n him out there with arms upstretched.\n\n\n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed\n girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as\n she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back\n soon....\" and he was gone.\n\n\n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient\n agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\nFeet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her\n hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her\n ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away\n in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on\n some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind\n returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting\n that. I had forgotten you—\"\n\n\n \"—had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The\n pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far\n horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n\n\n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n\n\n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n\n\n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without\n warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n \"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she\n tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to\n the hammocks.\n\n\n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n\n\n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape.\n You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up\n tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n\n\n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n\n\n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n\n\n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n\n\n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we\n crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us\n in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ...\n happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for\n fear of worrying you.\"\nThe girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the\n ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the\n open lock.\n\n\n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n \"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool\n stunts! I just didn't realize until now the\nwhy\nof that law.\"\n\n\n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found\n out the\nwhy\nof that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and\n lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world,\n humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay\n right at home.\"\n\n\n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n\n\n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first.\n Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n\n\n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a\n sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n\n\n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n\n\n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that\n shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his\n arms. The burden groaned.\n\n\n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n\n\n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n\n\n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n\n\n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in.\n Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped\n buckles.\n\n\n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n\n\n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n\n\n \"\nFan\nhim? I don't understand.\"\n\n\n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up\n and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings\n as he padded away.\n\n\n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago.\n Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of\n bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian\n snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped\n for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n\n\n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his\n features. She tried to struggle up.\n\n\n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked\n several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n\n\n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n\n\n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n\"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too\n familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its\n crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear.\n She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her\n face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The\n Centaurian was grinning at her.\n\n\n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished\n she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n\n\n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest\n strap was lying loose at his side.\n\n\n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three\n hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control\n panel.\n\n\n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook\n her head and looked at the others.\n\n\n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n\n\n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter—?\" pointing.\n\n\n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing\n itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies\n in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n\n\n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n\n\n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe\n no. Where's it hurt?\"\n\n\n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further\n and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his\n eyes that night ... only\nlast\nnight ... in the office. Peterson had\n refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n\n\n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n\n\n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do\n Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n\n\n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up\n there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n\n\n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over\n in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to\n handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because\n of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n\n\n \"So you?\"\n\n\n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or\n will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for\n work.\" She shivered.\n\n\n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n\n\n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat\n threw up a hand to stop her.\n\n\n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n\n\n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold,\n yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n\n\n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of\n course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from\n another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her\n face accented the fact.\n\n\n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n\n\n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and\n bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes\n swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front\n name?\"\n\n\n \"Patti.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n\n\n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n\n\n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling\n system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n\n\n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n\n\n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored\n her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n\n\n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n\n\n He faced about. \"For her—\" nodding to Judith, \"and him—\" to Gladney,\n \"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You,\n me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of\n water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too\n bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\nThey did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by\n the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a\n dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely\n bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in\n the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous\n hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n\n\n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n\n\n Rat stared at her without answer.\n\n\n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n\n\n \"Heard you.\"\n\n\n \"Well...?\"\n\n\n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n\n\n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made\n his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do\n like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and\n under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n\n\n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n\n\n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat\n inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n\n\n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat\n down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell\n and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n\n\n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful\n he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he\n contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let\n some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and\n it cost him something.\n\n\n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in.\n Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n\n\n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste\n of the fuel.\n\n\n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n\n\n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n\n\n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like\n pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental\n flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by\n a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his\n belt.\n\n\n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n\n\n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa—\" the\n word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled\n the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had\n suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another\n new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was\n empty. Bare.\n\n\n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in\n the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded\nupward\n, beads\n glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again\n and she looked up.\n\n\n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at\n her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat.\n He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n\n\n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n\n\n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my\n back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the\n hammocks on their rope-axis.\n\n\n \"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.\n\n\n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild,\n sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far\n right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch\n tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n\n\n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n\n\n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n\n\n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n\n\n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost\n things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish\n words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot,\n confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water\n and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them.\n Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some\n extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent\n tempers.\n\n\n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And\n his hands never faltered on the controls.\n\n\n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling\n drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because\n Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves.\n Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n\n\n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times\n until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\"\n His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those\n inhuman eyes.\n\n\n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The\n sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n\n\n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat\n stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at\n him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face\n and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat\n was back in the chair.\nGladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time,\n watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted\n to sit up.\n\n\n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me!\nWhen're you going to start braking\n,\n Rat?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion!\n We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n\n\n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n\n\n \"\nNot brake?\n\" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped\n for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his\n shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand\n that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to\n shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make\n him!\"\n\n\n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this\n half-way line?\"\n\n\n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We\n passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n\n\n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n\n\n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n \"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n\n\n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he—\"\n\n\n \"—he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days.\n Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n \"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This\n deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some\n things I do!\"\n\n\n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to\n Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n\n\n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried.\n Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for\nyou\n!\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be\n somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n\n\n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught\n something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed\n it, too.\n\n\n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the\n vacated position.\n\n\n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n\n\n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n\n\n \"Just name it!\"\n\n\n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n\n\n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the\n tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last\n she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n\n\n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n\n\n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at\n her.\n\n\n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n\n\n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather\n personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your\n record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was\n coming, did you?\"\n\n\n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\"\n Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go\n out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send\n call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n\n\n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n\n\n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n\n\n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're\n right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now.\n You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as\n you get out of the ship.\"\n\n\n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's\n done now.\"\n\n\n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n\n\n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth\n pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n\n\n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a\n glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is Rat's main reason for wanting to pilot the ship back to Earth?", "question_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P_1", "options": ["He is in love with Judith and needs to ensure her safe return to Earth.", "He feels a need to help those less fortunate than himself.", "He does not want Roberts to lose his job.", "He wants to escape his prison."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are the two main reasons for the crew to return to Earth?", "question_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P_2", "options": ["Two sick people require medical attention, and they want to get them back to Earth simultaneously.", "Nurse Grey must answer for her charge becoming ill while in her care.", "A sick person needs medical attention, and they need to return Rat to prison on Earth.", "Rat must be returned to prison on Earth, and the crew needs to get more supplies to sustain them."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who talks Rat into defying Roberts' orders?", "question_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P_3", "options": ["No one.  Rat decides on his own.", "Peterson", "Nurse Gray", "Judith"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In order to prevent as many medical issues as possible from occurring away from Earth, potential crew members must", "question_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P_4", "options": ["have all of their unnecessary organs removed.", "agree to quarantine themselves if they become ill, and if they cannot be cured, they are to take their own lives.", "complete a rigorous medical examination before leaving Earth.", "Be vaccinated against space viruses."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Judith is dying from", "question_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P_5", "options": ["internal poisoning from one of her organs.", "a gunshot.", "Martian fever.", "an injury she received when she landed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What brought Judith to Mars in the first place?", "question_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P_6", "options": ["She was on an educational trip for college.", "She ran away to meet Rat on Mars", "She was out on an adventure, and she crashed when she became ill.", "She was traveling to meet her father on Mars."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "One fundamental issue they encounter on the journey back to Earth is ", "question_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P_7", "options": ["They must ration their water to have enough to make the trip, and some of what they have is tainted.", "Rat is more concerned with his escape than getting the others back to Earth.", "They are going to run out of fuel before they can get to Earth.", "Judith is much sicker than they originally anticipated, and she is not going to live."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the problem with the water?", "question_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P_8", "options": ["It boils due to the atmospheric changes, and it becomes undrinkable.", "It contains microorganisms that will make them ill.", "One of the crew members has siphoned off too much, leaving the others without enough to sustain them.", "Greasball forgot to rinse the fuel from the tank."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Rat amaze everyone?", "question_unique_id": "62212_1UV8H71P_9", "options": ["He approaches Earth much faster than anticipated.", "His love for Judith drives him to do the unthinkable in terms of sacrificing himself for her.", "He never sleeps or eats.", "He kills half of the crew to have enough water for him and Judith to make the trip."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/2/1/62212//62212-h//62212-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. 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{"article_id": "40954", "set_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Potential Enemy", "year": 1950, "author": "Reynolds, Mack", "topic": "Short stories; PS; Science fiction", "article": "POTENTIAL ENEMY\nby Mack Reynolds\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1\n number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\n\n CAESAR HAD THE SAME PROBLEM AND NEVER SOLVED IT. LORD\n HELP US IF IT JUST CAN'T BE DONE!\nAlexander the Great had not dreamed of India, nor even Egypt, when he\n embarked upon his invasion of the Persian Empire. It was not a matter of\n being like the farmer: \"I ain't selfish, all I want is the land that\n jines mine.\" It was simply that after regaining the Greek cities of Asia\n Minor from Darius, he could not stop. He could not afford to have\n powerful neighbors that might threaten his domains tomorrow. So he took\n Egypt, and the Eastern Satrapies, and then had to continue to India.\n There he learned of the power of Cathay, but an army mutiny forestalled\n him and he had to return to Babylon. He died there while making plans to\n attack Arabia, Carthage, Rome. You see, given the military outlook, he\n could not afford powerful neighbors on his borders; they might become\n enemies some day.\nAlexander had not been the first to be faced with this problem, nor was\n he the last. So it was later with Rome, and later with Napoleon, and\n later still with Adolf the Aryan, and still later—\nIt isn't travel that is broadening, stimulating, or educational. Not the\n traveling itself. Visiting new cities, new countries, new continents, or\n even new planets,\nyes\n. But the travel itself,\nno\n. Be it by the\n methods of the Twentieth Century—automobile, bus, train, or\n aircraft—or be it by spaceship, travel is nothing more than boring.\n\n\n Oh, it's interesting enough for the first few hours, say. You look out\n the window of your car, bus, train, or airliner, or over the side of\n your ship, and it's very stimulating. But after that first period it\n becomes boring, monotonous, sameness to the point of redundance.\n\n\n And so it is in space.\n\n\n Markham Gray, free lance journalist for more years than he would admit\n to, was en route from the Neptune satellite Triton to his home planet,\n Earth, mistress of the Solar System. He was seasoned enough as a space\n traveler to steel himself against the monotony with cards and books,\n with chess problems and wire tapes, and even with an attempt to do an\n article on the distant earthbase from which he was returning for the\nSpacetraveler Digest\n.\n\n\n When all these failed, he sometimes spent a half hour or so staring at\n the vision screen which took up a considerable area of one wall of the\n lounge.\n\n\n Unless you had a vivid imagination of the type which had remained with\n Markham Gray down through the years, a few minutes at a time would have\n been enough. With rare exception, the view on the screen seemed almost\n like a still; a velvety blackness with pin-points of brilliant light,\n unmoving, unchanging.\n\n\n But even Markham Gray, with his ability to dream and to discern that\n which is beyond, found himself twisting with ennui after thirty minutes\n of staring at endless space. He wished that there was a larger number of\n passengers aboard. The half-dozen businessmen and their women and\n children had left him cold and he was doing his best to avoid them. Now,\n if there had only been one good chess player—\n\n\n Co-pilot Bormann was passing through the lounge. He nodded to the\n distinguished elderly passenger, flicked his eyes quickly,\n professionally, over the vision screen and was about to continue on his\n way.\n\n\n Gray called idly, \"Hans, I thought the space patrols very seldom got out\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Practically never, sir,\" the other told him politely, hesitating\n momentarily. Part of the job was to be constantly amiable, constantly\n watchful of the passengers out here in deep space—they came down with\n space cafard at the drop of a hat. Markham Gray reminded Bormann of\n pictures of Benjamin Franklin he'd seen in history books, and ordinarily\n he didn't mind spending a little time now and then talking things over\n with him. But right now he was hoping the old duffer wasn't going to\n keep him from the game going on forward with Captain Post and the\n steward.\n\n\n \"Just noticed one on the screen,\" the elderly journalist told him\n easily.\n\n\n The co-pilot smiled courteously. \"You must have seen a meteorite, sir.\n There aren't any—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray flushed. \"I'm not as complete a space neophyte as your\n condescending air would indicate, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I'll\n stack my space-months against yours any day.\"\n\n\n Bormann said soothingly, \"It's not that, sir. You've just made a\n mistake. If a ship was within reasonable distance, the alarms would be\n sounding off right now. But that's not all, either. We have a complete\n record of any traffic within a considerable distance, and I assure you\n that—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray pointed a finger at the lower left hand corner of the\n screen. \"Then what is that, Lieutenant?\" he asked sarcastically.\n\n\n The smile was still on the co-pilot's face as he turned and followed the\n direction of the other's finger. The smile faded. \"I'll be a\nmakron\n!\"\n he blurted. Spinning on his heel, he hurried forward to the bridge,\n muttering as he went.\n\n\n The older man snorted with satisfaction. Actually, he shouldn't have\n been so snappy with the young man; he hated to admit he was growing\n cranky with age. He took up his half completed manuscript again. He\n really should finish this article, though, space knew, he hadn't enough\n material for more than a few paragraphs. Triton was a barren satellite\n if he'd ever seen one—and he had.\n\n\n He had almost forgotten the matter ten minutes later when the ship's\n public address system blurted loudly.\n\n\n BATTLE STATIONS! BATTLE STATIONS! ALL CREW MEMBERS TO EMERGENCY\n STATIONS. ALL PASSENGERS IMMEDIATELY TO THEIR QUARTERS. BATTLE STATIONS!\n\n\n Battle Stations?\n\n\n Markham Gray was vaguely familiar with the fact that every Solar System\n spacecraft was theoretically a warcraft in emergency, but it was\n utterly fantastic that—\n\n\n He heaved himself to his feet, grunting with the effort, and,\n disregarding the repeated command that passengers proceed to their\n quarters, made his way forward to the bridge, ignoring the hysterical\n confusion in passengers and crew members hurrying up and down the ship's\n passageways.\n\n\n It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.\n\n\n Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, the telviz blared.\nCalling the Neuve Los Angeles. Calling the Neuve Los Angeles. Be\n unafraid. We are not hostile.\nThere was quiet on the bridge of the earth ship. Screaming quiet. It was\n seemingly hours before they had recovered even to the point of staring\n at one another.\n\n\n Hans Bormann gasped finally, unbelievingly, \"How could they possibly\n know the name of our ship? How could they possibly know the Amer-English\n language?\"\n\n\n The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.\n\n\n The court martial of Captain Roger Post had been short and merciless.\n Free access to the trial had been given to the press and telviz systems,\n and the newscasts had carried it in its entirety, partially to stress to\n the public mind the importance of the situation, and partially as a\n warning to other spacemen.\n\n\n Post had stood before the raised dais upon which were seated SupSpaceCom\n Michell and four other high-ranking officers and heard the charge\n read—failure to attack the alien craft, destroy it, and thus prevent\n the aliens—wherever they might be from—returning to their own world\n and reporting the presence of man in the galaxy.\n\n\n Markham Gray, like thousands of others, had sat on the edge of his chair\n in the living room of his small suburban home, and followed the trial\n closely on his telviz.\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell had been blunt and ruthless. He had rapped out,\n bitingly, \"Roger Post, as captain of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, why did\n you not either destroy the alien craft, or, if you felt it too strong\n for your ship, why did you not blast off into space, luring it away from\n your home planet?\"\n\n\n Post said hesitantly, \"I didn't think it necessary, sir. His attitude\n was—well, of peace. It was as if we were two ships that had met by\n chance and dipped their flags in the old manner and passed on to their\n different destinations. They even were able to telviz us a message.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom snapped, \"That was undoubtedly a case of telepathy. The\n alien is equipped in some manner to impose thoughts upon the human\n brain. You\nthought\nthe telviz was used; actually the alien wasn't\n speaking Amer-English, he was simply forcing thoughts into your minds.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray, watching and listening to this over his set, shook his\n head in dissatisfaction. As always, the military mind was dull and\n unreceptive. The ridiculousness of expecting Post to blast off into\n space in an attempt to fool the other craft in regard to his home\n planet was obvious. The whole affair had taken place within the solar\n system; obviously the alien would know that one of Sol's nine major\n planets was mankind's home. Finding out which one wouldn't be too\n difficult a job.\n\n\n Roger Post was saying hesitantly, \"Then it is assumed that the alien\n craft wasn't friendly?\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell indicated his disgust with an impatient flick of his\n hand. \"Any alien is a potential enemy, Post; that should be elementary.\n And a potential enemy is an enemy in fact. Even though these aliens\n might seem amiable enough today, how do we know they will be in the\n future—possibly in the far future? There can be no friendship with\n aliens. We can't afford to have neighbors; we can't afford to be\n encircled by enemies.\"\n\n\n \"Nor even friends?\" Captain Post had asked softly.\n\n\n Michell glared at his subordinate. \"That is what it amounts to, Captain;\n and the thing to remember is that they feel the same way. They must!\n They must seek us out and destroy us completely and as quickly as\n possible. By the appearance of things, and partially through your\n negligence, they've probably won the first round. They know our\n location; we don't know theirs.\"\n\n\n The supreme commander of Earth's space forces dropped that point. \"Let\n us go back again. When you received this telepathic message—or whatever\n it was—what was your reaction? Did it seem friendly, domineering, or\n what?\"\n\n\n Roger Post stood silent for a moment. Finally he answered, \"Sir, I still\n think it was the telviz, rather than a telepathic communication, but\n the ... the tone of voice seemed to give me the impression of pitying.\"\n\n\n \"Pitying!\" Michell ejaculated.\n\n\n The captain was nervous but determined. \"Yes, sir. I had the distinct\n feeling that the being that sent the message felt sorry for us.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom's face had gone red with indignation.\nIt was three years before another of the aliens was sighted. Three\n hurried, crowded, harassed years during which all the Solar System's\n resources were devoted to building and arming a huge space fleet and\n rushing space defenses. The total wars of the Twentieth Century paled in\n comparison to the all out efforts made to prepare for this conflict.\n\n\n The second view of the alien ship was similar to the first. This, time\n the\nPendleton\n, a four-man scout returning to the Venus base after a\n patrol in the direction of Sirius, held the intruder in its viewer for a\n full five minutes. Once again, no estimation of its distance nor size\n could be made. All instruments pertaining to such detection seemed to\n fail to function properly.\n\n\n And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.\n\n\n His articles were in continuous demand in both magazines and newspaper\n supplements; editors clamored for additional material from his\n voco-typer. There was but one complaint against his copy—it wasn't\n alarmist enough, sensational enough. Humanity had been whipped into a\n state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\n\n\n And it was there that Markham Gray refused to go along. He had agreed\n with poor Captain Post, now serving a life sentence in the Martian\n prison camps; there had been no sign of hostility from the alien craft.\n It was man who was preparing for war—and Gray knew of no period in\n history in which preparations for war did not eventually culminate in\n one.\n\n\n So it was not really strange that it was he the aliens chose to contact.\n\n\n It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments.\n\n\n He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.\n\n\n But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"\nQuite tiny, Markham Gray. Although, of course, the way we think of it\n is that you are quite huge.\nHe was becoming more confident now; widely awake, it was less strange to\n hear the words come from his commonplace home model telviz set. \"Our\n second mistake was in looking for you throughout space,\" he said softly.\n\n\n There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of\n the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered\n there was another intelligence on Earth they would begin making plans to\n dominate or, even more likely, to destroy us. Our only chance was to\n find some refuge away from Earth. That is why we began to search the\n other stars for a planet similar to this and suitable to our form of\n life.\n\"You could have fought back, had we attempted to destroy you,\" Gray said\n uncomfortably.\n\n\n The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.\n\n\n There was an edge of amusement in the answering thought.\nWe are very\n tiny, Mr. Gray. And our greatest efforts have always been to keep from\n under man's eyes. We have profited greatly, however, by our suitability\n to espionage; little goes on in the human world of which we don't know.\n Our progress was greatly aided by our being able to utilize the science\n that man has already developed. You've noted, for instance, how similar\n our space ships are to your own.\nGray nodded to himself. \"But I'm also impressed by the manner in which\n you have developed some mechanical device to duplicate human speech.\n That involved original research.\"\nAt any rate, neither man nor we need dread the future any longer. We\n have escaped the danger that overhung us, and you know now that we are\n no alien enemies from space threatening you. We wish you well, mankind;\n perhaps the future will see changes in your nature. It is in this\n friendly hope that we have contacted humanity through you, Mr. Gray.\nThe elderly journalist said quietly, \"I appreciate your thoughtfulness\n and hope you are correct. Good luck to you in your new world.\"\nThank you, Markham Gray, and goodbye.\nThe set was suddenly quiet again.\nMarkham Gray stood before the assembled Military Council of the Solar\n System. He had told his story without interruption to this most powerful\n body on Earth. They listened to him in silence.\n\n\n When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"\n\n\n The President of the Council added thoughtfully, \"Quite correct,\n Michell. And in the early stages of the fight, we should be able to\n capture some of their ships intact. As soon as we find what kind of\n insect they are, our bacteriologists will be able to work on a method to\n eliminate any that might remain on Earth.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray's face had paled in horror. \"But why?\" he blurted. \"Why not\n let them go in peace? All they've wanted for centuries is to escape us,\n to have a planet of their own.\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell eyed him tolerantly. \"You seem to have been taken\n in, Mr. Gray. Once they've established themselves in their new world, we\n have no idea of how rapidly they might develop and how soon they might\n become a threat. Even though they may be peaceful today, they are\n potential enemies tomorrow. And a potential enemy\nis\nan enemy, who\n must be destroyed.\"\n\n\n Gray felt sickness well through him \"But ... but this policy.... What\n happens when man finally finds on his borders a life form more advanced\n than he—an intelligence strong enough to destroy rather than be\n destroyed?\"\n\n\n The tolerance was gone now. The SupSpaceCom said coldly, \"Don't be a\n pessimistic defeatist, Gray.\"\n\n\n He turned to the admirals and generals of his staff. \"Make all\n preparations for the attack, gentlemen.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "According to the narrator, traveling is", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_1", "options": ["stimulating.", "educational.", "a way to broaden horizons.", "essentially boring."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the Lieutenant not believe that Gray has seen a ship?", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_2", "options": ["The Lieutenant did not see it; therefore, it was not a possibility.", "Alarms would have sounded alerting them of another ship's presence.", "Markham Gray was known for \"crying wolf\" to keep himself entertained while travling.", "Markham Gray was old, and his eyes were unreliable."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the Captian ultimately not destroy the other ship?", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_3", "options": ["He was instructed not to by his commanders.", "He was too afraid to start a war with an alien life force.", "He did not have the proper equipment to do so.", "He believed that the other ship came in peace, and he did not feel they were in danger."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "SupSaceCom Michell's attitude towards the alien ship is ", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_4", "options": ["it should have been taken over and brought back to Earth to learn about the aliens.", "it should have been followed back to its home planet.", "it should have been destroyed at all costs to prevent future issues.", "similar to the Captian's.  It posed no threat and should not have been attacked."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When the aliens are seen again several years later, they warn the people of Earth ", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_5", "options": ["the aliens aligned with other life forms to attack Earth, so they need to prepare for the upcoming war.", "to beware because the next time they meet, they will destroy Earth.", "the troubles that face Earth are internal and have nothing to do with aliens.", "Earth's water supply is in danger of drying up, thus causing the death of the planet."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The narrator states, \"Humanity had been whipped into a state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\"  What does this commentary say about humans in general?", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_6", "options": ["Humans cannot comprehend these intense emotions, and they act out in a negative fashion due to that.", "Humans love drama.", "Humans were doomed to a world that embraced insanity.", "Humans are not equipped with the ability to express emotions that they find to be uncommon."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Markham Gray figures out what about the aliens?", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_7", "options": ["They plan to align with other lifeforms to attack the planet.", "They are not aliens at all but other lifeforms from Earth.", "They plan to contaminate Earth's water supply.", "They are about to attack Earth."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were the Earth's ships unable to detect the \"alien\" ships?", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_8", "options": ["Their speed kept them from being picked up on the ship's radar.", "Their size was so massive, they could not be picked up on the ship's radar.", "They are made from materials that are undetectable by the ship's radar.", "They are so small in size, they cannot be picked up on the ship's radar."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "These alien forms, Markham Gray assumes", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_9", "options": ["are some sort of insects from Earth who were of superintelligence.", "will take over the planet and enslave all humans.", "will infiltrate the Earth's water system, thus ending all life on the planet.", "will kill all Earthlings by the end of the century."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Markham Gray tries to turn the tables on those who want to destroy the aliens by", "question_unique_id": "40954_UUUWRNF5_10", "options": ["allowing them to follow through with their plans knowing the aliens will destroy them.", "trying to show that the plan to destroy all other life forms is insanity because one day, Earth will meet an opponent who may take it out in the way it has other life forms.", "showing them the benefits that the aliens have to offer the Earth.", "letting them know that the aliens are the only ones who can fix Earth's water system, so they must be allowed to live."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/0/9/5/40954//40954-h//40954-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. 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{"article_id": "55243", "set_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Puzzle in the Pond\r\nA Judy Bolton Mystery", "year": 1952, "author": "Sutton, Margaret", "topic": "PZ; Mystery and detective stories; Ghosts -- Juvenile fiction; Orphans -- Juvenile fiction; Women detectives -- Juvenile fiction; Bolton, Judy (Fictitious character) -- Juvenile fiction", "article": "The Puzzle in the Pond\n1\nCHAPTER I\n\n A Stolen Typewriter\n“Here’s something Miss Pringle can use!”\n\n\n Judy ran her fingers over the tiny, embossed\n Reward\n of Merit\n card as if she couldn’t bear to part\n with it even for the short time it would be on exhibit\n at the Roulsville library.\n\n\n “Mrs. Wheatley is still Miss Pringle to you, isn’t\n she?” asked Peter Dobbs, smiling at his young wife\n as she knelt beside the open drawer of the old chest\n where her grandmother’s keepsakes were stored.\n\n2\n\n “I do think of her as Miss Pringle,” confessed Judy,\n “and she probably thinks of me as that noisy Judy\n Bolton. Prim Miss Pringle is what I used to call her.\n She left everything in such perfect order, it’s hard for\n me to believe she and Bob Wheatley lived in our house\n for two whole months. We won’t ever rent it again,\n will we, Peter?”\n\n\n “You’re not asking me to promise we won’t, are\n you?” he countered. “You know how I feel about\n promises.”\n\n\n “You’re right, too,” declared Judy, reaching into\n the drawer for another one of Grandmother Smeed’s\n treasured keepsakes. “Here’s a sewing card worked in\n cross-stitch. It says: ‘\n Promise Little. Do Much.\n ’ Do\n you think it would do for the September exhibit?”\n\n\n “I should think so,” Peter replied thoughtfully. “A\n maxim like that would do for any time of the year.\n Does the library plan to exhibit a few of these things\n each month?”\n\n\n “Yes, but just for the school year. Miss Pringle—I\n mean Mrs. Wheatley says she wants me to arrange\n them in that little glass case near the library door.\n These reward-of-merit cards used to be given out at\n school when Grandma was a little girl. The other\n card was a sewing lesson. ‘Promise little. Do much,’”\n Judy repeated, “but how much can a person do in a\n day? Maybe I won’t try to sort all these treasures this\n morning.”\n\n\n “You’ve made a good start. I wish I could stay and\n help you. I always liked treasure hunting,” Peter confessed,\n “but Uncle Sam expects me to hunt criminals\n today. We’ll be using an official car, so I’ll leave the\n Beetle for you to transport your exhibit to the library\n if you do get it ready. ’Bye, Angel. See you at six.”\n\n\n “You hope,” Judy added as he bent to kiss her.\n\n3\n\n Peter’s time was not his own. Working out of the\n Resident FBI Agency in the Farringdon Post Office,\n he might be sent anywhere in the territory. His assignment\n now was to round up the Joe Mott gang. Judy\n knew that much, although his work was confidential.\n It was also dangerous. Each time he left the house she\n breathed a little prayer for his safe return.\n\n\n “Take care,” was what she usually said, but in her\n heart the words meant, “Take care of our future. Let\n all our dreams for our married life in this house come\n true.”\n\n\n The house had been willed to Judy by her grandmother,\n and it was so sturdy and well built that she\n felt sure it would stand there on the slope overlooking\n Dry Brook as long as the hills themselves.\n\n\n Peter had left the stair door open, and soon Judy\n heard Blackberry padding up to keep her company.\n He looked around, the way cats will, and then came\n into the storeroom to see what Judy was doing.\n\n\n “Hi, Blackberry! You can’t play with these things,”\n she told him as she continued sorting and arranging\n the cards that were to be exhibited at the library. The\n theme for September would be school. She found a\n few Hallowe’en things and a Columbus Day card\n which she put aside for October. There were turkeys\n and prayers of Thanksgiving for November, a pile of\n Christmas things for December, and a stack of old\n calendars for January. The stack grew higher and\n higher.\n\n4\n\n “I do believe Grandma saved a calendar for every\n year. This is wonderful,” Judy said to herself. “I’ll\n find some recent calendars and complete the collection.\n It will be just perfect for the January exhibit.”\n\n\n The library was new, and the built-in exhibit cases\n were still empty. Nearly all the buildings in Roulsville\n were new since the flood that had swept the valley\n and started Judy on the trail of her first mystery. Her\n own home had been swept away, and her father, Dr.\n Bolton, had been obliged to move to Farringdon\n where he still lived and practiced. Only her grandmother’s\n house, two miles above the broken dam, had\n stayed the same.\n\n\n “Maybe that’s why I love it,” she thought.\n\n\n And yet she and Peter had made changes. It was a\n rambling old farmhouse too big for just the two of\n them so only the downstairs rooms had been changed.\n Up here in the attic nothing had been disturbed except\n by Blackberry as he played with the spools in Judy’s\n sewing room or searched for mice in the other two\n rooms where her grandmother’s keepsakes were\n stored. She liked having him for company as she\n worked. Attics and black cats seemed to go together.\n\n\n Judy smiled at this thought. She was so absorbed in\n what she was doing that at first she didn’t hear the\n front doorbell ringing downstairs. It rang again more\n insistently, and she gathered Blackberry in her arms\n and hurried down the two flights of stairs. It wouldn’t\n do to leave the cat alone among the things she had\n collected for the exhibit.\n\n5\n\n “I can’t trust you,” she told him, “even if you are a\n famous cat.”\n\n\n Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar,\n and just recently he had worked for the government,\n or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of\n mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it\n to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.\n\n\n The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old\n neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she\n had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut\n from her house to Judy’s.\n\n\n “What took you so long? I thought you’d never answer\n the bell. Quick!” she urged breathlessly.\n “Maybe we can still head off that green car! There’s\n a thief in it. He stole my typewriter!”\n\n\n “Your typewriter?” gasped Judy.\n\n\n “Yes, the one you gave me for my birthday. Remember\n when we traded birthdays so mine wouldn’t\n come on Christmas? I loved that typewriter, and\n now—”\n\n\n “We’ll try and get it back,” Judy reassured her.\n “Come on, Holly!”\n\n\n They were off down the road in the Beetle before\n Holly had finished telling Judy which way the green\n car went. “Try Farringdon,” she suggested. “You\n could see it from the top of the hill if it went toward\n Farringdon, couldn’t you?”\n\n\n “That would depend on how fast he was going, I\n should think, but we’ll try it,” Judy promised.\n\n6\n“Quick!” Holly urged breathlessly.\n7\n\n She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”\n\n\n “Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8\n\n “There was nothing strange about it,” declared\n Holly. “He would have taken more if I hadn’t surprised\n him and called Ruth. She was busy with the\n baby and didn’t pay any attention. Doris had just left\n in her car—”\n\n\n “That’s it!” Judy interrupted. “The thief probably\n saw your sister Doris leaving and figured you were all\n out.”\n\n\n “Well, we weren’t. I was there, and I saw him run\n out of the house toward a green car. Please drive\n faster, Judy! I have to get my typewriter back.”\n\n\n And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II\n\n Help for Holly\nFarringdon was a much larger town than Roulsville.\n Actually, it was a small city and the county seat\n of a hilly county in northern Pennsylvania. The courthouse,\n tall and imposing with its clock tower, stood\n at the corner of Main and Grove streets. Just opposite\n was the office of the\nFarringdon Daily Herald\nwhere\n Judy’s brother Horace worked as a reporter. Farther\n up Grove Street was Dr. Bolton’s combined home and\n office.\n\n\n “Which way shall we turn?” Judy asked when they\n came to the corner.\n\n\n Holly shook her head. “I guess it doesn’t matter.\n Maybe my typewriter wasn’t stolen after all.”\n\n10\n\n “\nWhat?\n” Judy was so surprised that she nearly hit\n the curb as they turned the corner. “If we aren’t following\n a typewriter thief, then what are we doing in\n Farringdon?”\n\n\n “We are—I mean we were following that green\n car, and I think my typewriter is in it. It’s just that I—I\n mean I haven’t told you everything.”\n\n\n “I should say you haven’t,” Judy agreed. “Maybe\n Horace would help us for the sake of the story.”\n\n\n “I’d be glad to have his help,” declared Holly almost\n too enthusiastically. “There he is now, walking down\n Grove Street. Oh dear! Is that Honey with him?”\n\n\n “It usually is,” replied Judy. “They’re practically\n engaged, you know.”\n\n\n “No, I didn’t know. Good things happen to everyone\n but me,” was Holly’s doleful comment. “I’ll\n probably be an old maid and live all alone without\n even a cat for company.”\n\n\n “That’s up to you, isn’t it?” Judy hailed her brother.\n He and Peter’s sister came over to the side of the car.\n\n\n “Holly thinks her typewriter was stolen,” Judy explained.\n “On top of all the other trouble she’s had, this\n was just too much. Have you seen a green car?”\n\n\n “Several of them,” replied Horace. “They’re quite\n common, or haven’t you noticed? Come to think of it,\n a green car did roar up Main Street about ten minutes\n ago. The driver was a boy of about sixteen. Dark\n hair, striped T-shirt—”\n\n\n “He’s the one,” Holly interrupted. “Do you think\n we can still overtake him?”\n\n11\n\n “We can try,” replied Judy, “but I’m not making\n any rash promises. Didn’t you just tell me you’re not\n sure he is the thief? You didn’t actually see him take\n your typewriter, did you?”\n\n\n “No, but I did see him running toward that green\n car, and when I turned around my desk top was\n empty. Ruth said maybe Doris took it. You know the\n way sisters are, always borrowing things without asking.\n But I don’t believe it. Doris knows I need my\n typewriter. Please drive on, Judy,” Holly pleaded.\n “We can’t let that boy get away with it.”\n\n\n “I’m afraid he did get away with it,” Horace told\n her. “If he did take your typewriter, he must be half-way\n to Ulysses with it by now.”\n\n\n “That’s the town where we turned off when we\n visited the Jewell sisters,” Honey put in, “on our secret\n quest, didn’t we, Judy?”\n\n\n “I heard about that. You two girls have all the fun,”\n Holly complained.\n\n\n “Fun!” Judy echoed, remembering how frightened\n she and Honey had been. “If that’s fun—” She shivered,\n and her voice trailed off into thoughts of their\n latest mystery.\n\n\n “We were drenched to the skin and that criminal,\n Joe Mott, was after us. I’m glad he’s back in prison. I\n can’t understand it, though,” Honey continued in a\n puzzled voice. “Aldin Launt, that artist who works at\n the Dean Studios, was never picked up. He works\n right near me, and every time he passes my desk I get\n the shivers. I thought Peter was going to arrest him.”\n\n12\n\n “So did I,” agreed Judy, “but maybe he’s being\n watched in the hope he will lead the FBI to the rest\n of the gang. Peter’s work is so secret that half the\n time he can’t even discuss it with me.”\n\n\n “Please don’t discuss it now,” implored Holly. “If\n we’re going to follow that green car—”\n\n\n “You’ll never catch him,” Horace predicted, “and\n how would you get your typewriter back if you did?\n A couple of girls couldn’t handle a thief, especially if\n he’s got a gun on him. I don’t suppose you can make a\n federal case out of it, but couldn’t you report it to the\n local police? I’ll call them right now if you say the\n word.”\n\n\n “What do you think, Judy?” Holly asked.\n\n\n “I’d do it if I were you, Holly,” she advised.\n\n\n “Okay, then,” Horace said with a satisfied gleam\n in his eyes. “Just give me all the details. Then we’ll relax\n and let the police handle it. Honey and I were on\n our way to lunch. How about joining us?”\n\n\n Judy looked up at the courthouse clock. “Oh dear!\n The morning’s gone. I didn’t think it was lunchtime\n already. I am hungry. Aren’t you, Holly?”\n\n\n The younger girl insisted that she couldn’t eat a\n thing, but once they were inside the restaurant she\n changed her mind. “I guess I could eat a hamburger,”\n she conceded.\n\n13\n\n While Horace went to telephone, the three girls\n ordered lunch. Holly was still jumpy. She kept tossing\n her mane of thick brown hair like a restless colt. She\n wore it perfectly straight in a long pony tail. Judy’s\n red curls were cut a little shorter than usual, but\n Honey had let her lovely honey-colored hair grow\n long to please Horace. Today she wore it loose about\n her shoulders.\n\n\n The three girls were very different in appearance,\n but they had one thing in common. All three of them\n adored Judy’s brother, Horace Bolton. He was a shy-appearing\n young man. To look at him, no one would\n suspect that he had once startled the town of Roulsville\n out of its complacency by racing through the\n streets on Judy’s ginger colt and crying out, “The\n dam is breaking! Run for the hills.”\n\n\n Thinking back, Judy realized that since Horace\n had become a hero, he had changed. There wasn’t a\n note of timidity in his voice as he talked with the\n police officer who later came in and quietly seated\n himself at their table. It was Holly who was frightened.\n “I—I didn’t think they’d send a policeman,”\n were her first words. “I can’t be sure of anything.\n Maybe it’s all a big mistake.”\n\n\n “We’ll take that chance,” the officer replied, smiling\n as he wrote out his report.\n\n\n “Tell you what, Judy,” Horace suggested as they\n were leaving the restaurant. “Why don’t you and\n Holly drive on a ways? Maybe you’ll see that\n green car parked somewhere along the road. I’ll finish\n up a little job I’m doing and tell Mr. Lee this looks like\n a story. He’ll give me the afternoon off to follow it\n up.”\n\n\n “What about you, Honey? Do you have to go back\n to work?” asked Judy.\n\n14\n\n “Oh, I guess Mr. Dean would give me the afternoon\n off if I asked him. I can’t do any work with all\n that hammering going on anyway. Where shall we\n meet you?” Honey asked.\n\n\n “At the beaver dam!” exclaimed Judy, suddenly enthusiastic.\n “Remember, Honey? Violetta said she’d\n show it to us. I have my camera in the car. Maybe we\n could take pictures of the beavers.”\n\n\n “It’s a date! Violetta is the younger of the two\n Jewell sisters,” Honey explained to Holly, “though\n neither of them is young. They’re such dears! They\n live in one of the oldest houses in this section of\n Pennsylvania. It’s like stepping back in time just to\n visit them.”\n\n\n “I’ll ask them if they have anything for the library\n exhibit. I have the job of choosing the displays for\n those new cases in the Roulsville library,” Judy explained.\n “All right, Horace, we’ll see you and Honey\n at the beaver dam.”\n\n15\nCHAPTER III\n\n A Rude Shopkeeper\n“I hope the beaver dam holds better than that one\n just above Roulsville,” Holly commented as they\n started off again. “We have to pass it on the way to\n school. I remember how it was last term. The boys\n and girls in the school bus quiet down fast if they happen\n to glance out the window and see those big pieces\n of broken concrete. A lot of them lost their homes\n when that dam broke, just the way you did, Judy.\n Did you go back afterwards to see if anything could\n be saved?”\n\n16\n\n “We went back too late, I guess. We didn’t find\n much of anything. There’s always some looting after\n a big disaster like that. People are too interested in\n making sure all their loved ones are safe to worry\n about their possessions.” Judy paused. She had been\n younger than Holly was now when the Bolton family’s\n home in Roulsville had been swept away in the\n flood, but it still hurt to think about it.\n\n\n “Dad had to treat a lot of people for shock,” she\n continued as they drove past the Post Office, where\n Peter’s office was, and entered the outskirts of Farringdon.\n “Our house was turned over and one\n wall smashed in. I guess the furniture just floated\n away.”\n\n\n “It would have to float somewhere, wouldn’t\n it?” Holly questioned.\n\n\n “I suppose it would, but we never found it.\n Grandma wanted us to take some of her things,” Judy\n remembered, “but we thought it would be better to\n leave her house the way it was and buy everything\n new. Of course we couldn’t replace the beautiful\n fruitwood bench Dad had in his reception room or the\n lady table. That was a lovely period piece that had\n been in the Bolton family for generations.”\n\n\n “What period?” asked Holly, who was something\n of an expert on antique furniture. She once had lived\n with a cousin who collected antique glassware.\n\n\n “Empire, I believe.”\n\n\n “Empire furniture is valuable. Usually it’s pretty\n solid, too. Why did you call it the lady table?” Holly\n wanted to know.\n\n17\n\n “That’s the name I gave it when I was a little girl.\n There were ladies carved on the legs. They held the\n marble table top on their heads. They had such quiet,\n patient faces.”\n\n\n Now Judy was thinking back in spite of herself.\n\n\n It had been exciting, furnishing the so-called\n Haunted House in Farringdon and exposing its\n “ghosts.” New furniture had been bought, and a few\n good antiques had been discovered in out-of-the-way\n shops. Dr. Bolton’s massive oak desk was one such\n piece. Judy’s dresser with the secret drawer was\n another. Buying it all by herself had been a real adventure.\n Only gradually had she come to realize their\n loss.\n\n\n Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior.\n\n\n “Empty! He’s probably trying to sell it. Come on\n inside,” Holly urged, pulling Judy along with her.\n\n\n “Don’t be in such a hurry. He can’t get out while\n we’re parked there, and I want to take down his license\n number! There!” Judy announced when she\n had it. “Now we’ll go in like any other customers and\n pretend we want to buy something.”\n\n\n “A typewriter!” agreed Holly. “We’ll just ask.\n Then, if we see mine, we’ll call the police.”\n\n\n Judy shook her head. She didn’t think it would be\n that easy, but she was willing to go along with Holly\n just for the adventure. “If we don’t find your typewriter,”\n she told her, “we may find some old cards\n for my collection. Anyway, it will do no harm to go\n in and look around.”\n\n\n “Look at all the lovely old glassware in the windows,”\n Holly pointed out as they walked around to\n the front of the shop. “There’s a blue glass hen just\n like the one Cousin Cleo has in her collection. And\n look at those chalkware lambs and that beautiful\n luster cream pitcher!”\n\n\n Inside the shop it was hard to move around because\n of all the old furniture crowded into every inch of\n floor space. Judy had to move a chair to reach the\n cream pitcher Holly had admired. Before she could\n touch it, a voice barked at her.\n\n\n “Careful there! You’ll have to pay for anything you\n break.”\n\n19\n\n “I have no intention of breaking anything,” replied\n Judy. “I just wanted to see that luster cream pitcher.”\n\n\n “That’s eighty dollars!”\n\n\n “Oh dear! I guess I don’t want it then. We really\n came in to look at typewriters. You do sell typewriters,\n don’t you?” Judy asked, looking around the shop\n to see if the driver of the green car had come in.\n\n\n “New ones,” Holly added. Her typewriter was almost\n new.\n\n\n “You came to the wrong place for a new typewriter.\n We sell anything and everything so long as it’s\n old.” The shopkeeper, a stout, balding man, looked at\n the two girls as if he considered them slightly stupid.\n\n\n “I meant—almost new,” Holly stammered.\n\n\n “Are you Mr. Sammis? Will you let us see what you\n have, please?” Judy asked.\n\n\n He showed them a row of ancient typewriters in\n the back of the shop. They were all of the same make,\n and all were equally old and dusty.\n\n\n “There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”\n\n\n Judy and Holly looked at each other. They could\n have made a mistake. Green cars were common, just\n as Horace had said. The typewriter wasn’t in the shop,\n and neither was the boy who had been seen driving a\n green car. Voices came from the upper floor, but they\n were indistinct. Then, suddenly, something was\n dropped with a loud thud. Holly jumped.\n\n\n “My wife,” Mr. Sammis explained. “She’s always\n dropping things. Did you find anything you want?”\n\n\n “Not yet,” Judy replied. She and Holly had been\n looking through the box of old cards. Near the bottom\n Judy found a little booklet marked\nSchool Souvenir\n.\n\n\n “Here’s something for the September exhibit,” she\n said as she opened it.\n\n\n “But that’s for the close of school,” Holly objected,\n reading over her shoulder. The illuminated verse read:\nOh! Swift the time has fled away\nAs fleeting as the rose\nSince school began its opening day\nTill now its day of close.\n\n\n The verse was followed by the name of the teacher\n and pupils in some long-ago country school. Hugh\n Sammis was one of the names.\n\n\n “Is this for sale?” Judy asked, sure he wouldn’t want\n to part with it.\n\n21\n\n He laughed, an unpleasant sort of laugh as if he were\n making fun of her. “It’s junk. I was going to throw it\n out. You can have it for a quarter.”\n\n\n “I’ll take it then,” Judy decided. “It’s for the beginning\n of school, too,” she pointed out as she and\n Holly made their way back to the front of the shop.\n\n\n “Careful there!” Mr. Sammis warned again.\n\n\n It was his own elbow that knocked over the little\n table with the claw feet, but he looked at Judy as if\n she had done it. One foot with a claw clutching a glass\n ball fell to the floor. He picked it up and waved it in\n Judy’s face.\n\n\n “Now see what you’ve done,” he charged unreasonably.\n “I told you you’d have to pay for anything\n you broke. Young people nowadays are all alike. Careless,\n blundering fools, the lot of them. Come in\n here for junk and break up my best furniture! This\n table is fragile—”\n\n\n “I can see it is,” Judy interrupted. “The claw fell off\n because the table leg was already broken. I can see\n where it’s been glued. The top is warped, too. It looks\n as if it had been left out in the rain.”\n\n\n “What if it was? Where else could I leave it when\n the roadmakers took half my house? I won’t charge\n you much for it. Only fifteen dollars.”\n\n\n “Fifteen dollars! What are you talking about, Mr.\n Sammis? I’ll never pay for a table I didn’t break,” Judy\n declared with indignation.\n\n22\n\n “You won’t, eh? We’ll see about that. You’re Dr.\n Bolton’s daughter, aren’t you? I’ll just send him a bill\n for twenty dollars,” the shopkeeper announced with a\n satisfied chuckle. “Then, if he won’t pay his bill, I\n won’t pay mine.”\n\n\n “But that isn’t fair!” Judy cried, her gray eyes blazing.\n\n\n “No? Then I’ll make it twenty-five.”\n\n\n “Let’s go before he puts the price any higher,”\n Holly urged, pulling at Judy’s arm.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How does Judy feel when her husband leaves for work each time?", "question_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5_1", "options": ["She wants him to come back home to her safe at the day's end so they can continue their lives together.", "She is excited to be able to spend time with the other man in her life.", "She is relieved to be away from his control for just a little while.", "She is happy to know he is keeping the community safe."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How is Judy's grandmother's house symbolic of the life Judy hopes to lead?", "question_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5_2", "options": ["The house overlooks the rest of the town, much like Just looks down on those that live down the hill.", "It is old, and she hopes she can live that long on her own.", "It holds memories from generations, and Judy is hopeful of retaining memories for that long.", "It had withstood storms and came out in one piece when others were not as fortunate.  It will no doubt stand on the hill for many years to come.  Judy hopes to weather life's storms in the same way."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was the library, as were the majority of the buildings in the town?", "question_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5_3", "options": ["The dam broke and flooded the majority of the town.", "A bomb exploded in the center of the town.", "A tornado came through and destroyed the majority of the town.", "A fire destroyed the majority of the town."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What type of adventure do Judy and Holly end up having that day?", "question_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5_4", "options": ["Doris was assaulted by the man who broke into their house, so they went hunting him down.", "Holly's house was broken into, and they go on the hunt for what was stolen.", "Judy's house gets broken into, and they go on the hunt for what was stolen.", "They go in search of the Joe Mott Gang."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was odd about the birthday that Judy gave Holly the typewriter?", "question_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5_5", "options": ["Holly decided she would not celebrate her birthday that year, but Judy gave her a surprise party.", "Holly's birthday was also the day that Judy's grandmother died.", "They traded birthdays that year.", "Judy wanted Holly to have two birthdays that year, so the typewriter was given on Holly's half-birthday."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Is Holly a convincing witness to the robbery?  Why or why not?", "question_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5_6", "options": ["Yes, she saw the entire occurrence, and she got a good look at the thief.", "Yes, she walked in on the thief, and she saw him run out with the items in question.", "No, she is not even 100% sure there was a robbery.", "No, after she thought about it, her sister could have stolen her items."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Judy's brother considered to be a hero?", "question_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5_7", "options": ["He caught the thief and retrieved the stolen items.", "He caught the Joe Mott Gang.", "He let the town know that the dam was going to break, preparing them.", "He is a war hero."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "After Judy's family home was destroyed, what did they find when they returned to the house?", "question_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5_8", "options": ["They found the lost typewriter.", "They found the body of her grandmother, who died in the tragedy.", "They found the majority of their home's contents scattered around the area, and they could retrieve the majority of their items.", "They did not find anything because their home had been looted."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Mr. Sammis laugh at Judy for wanting to purchase?", "question_unique_id": "55243_2ANQUUA5_9", "options": ["An old typewriter.", "A broken table.", "A piece of his school memorabilia.", "A luster cream pitcher."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/5/2/4/55243//55243-h//55243-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62244", "set_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Galactic Ghost", "year": 1956, "author": "Kubilius, Walter", "topic": "Space ships -- Fiction; Short stories; PS; Science fiction", "article": "GALACTIC GHOST\nBy WALTER KUBILIUS\nThe Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger\n\n of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions.\n\n He had seen the phantom—and lived.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's\n lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his\n fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the\nMary\n Lou\nwere now black as meteor dust.\n\n\n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at\n the cover.\n\n\n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man\n would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping\n us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and\n we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed\n helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n\n\n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His\n face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n\n\n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once\n more!\"\n\n\n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.\n\n\n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.\n\n\n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n\n\n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n\n\n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n\n\n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.\n\n\n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing\n his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars,\n though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something\n about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It\n resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty\n years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though\n half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a\n rocket ship.\n\n\n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of\n any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed.\n But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the\n presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n\n\n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years\n in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint\n ghost-like rocket ships?\n\n\n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship!\n Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was\n impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales\n told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n\n\n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself\n over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now\n motionless a few hundred miles away.\n\n\n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \"\nIt's come—for me!\n\" but Willard\n stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it.\n There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there\n had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam\n forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true\n for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n\n\n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:\n\n\n \"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done.\n\n\n And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.\n\n\n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he,\n for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really\n only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had\n seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different\n situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But\n perhaps space itself denies reason.\n\n\n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here\n and a story there put together all that he knew:\n\n\n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost\n Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its\n tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again.\n When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a\n lifeless hulk—the Ghost will come—for you!\n\n\n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy\n ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage.\n Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n\n\n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n\n\n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.\n\n\n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism\n of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in\n perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no\n speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All\n was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when\n there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth,\n long forgotten Earth.\n\n\n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him.\n He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being\n marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of\n the stars, he suddenly froze.\n\n\n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n\n\n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message.\n\n\n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n\n\n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within\n him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened\n to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n\n\n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU\n ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND—ARE YOU ABLE TO\n COME?\"\n\n\n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n\n\n \"YES! COMING!\"\n\n\n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n\n\n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in\n bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\nHe woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the\n passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so\n much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the\n point of gibbering insanity.\n\n\n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he\n never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to\n remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to\n also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the\n value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental\n shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n\n\n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing\n it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his\n friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans'\n sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges.\n And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and\n confused.\n\n\n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no\n longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But\n there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they\n refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual\n running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions,\n they mumbled and drifted away.\n\n\n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one\n night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth\n swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the\n years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the\nMary Lou\n. His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had\n once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years\n of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\nHe awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought\n that perhaps he might still be in the\nMary Lou\n. The warm, smiling face\n of a man quickly reassured him.\n\n\n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know\n when you came to.\"\n\n\n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He\n pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He\n yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his\n entire body.\n\n\n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his\n mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year\n and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian\n expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home\n base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at\n the end of the trail.\n\n\n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those\n years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n\n\n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood\n up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of\n his ship, but he would manage.\n\n\n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"\n\n\n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.\n\n\n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is\n non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All\n things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass\n and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened\n to the\nMary Lou\n. Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years\n ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel\n the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became\n more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any\n Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to\n some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen\n years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n\n\n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on\n it...\"\n\n\n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the\n simple reason that we would go\nthrough\nit!\"\n\n\n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth\n again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he\n walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of\n birds. Never. Never. Never....\n\n\n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does Willard say a man cannot live without?", "question_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX_1", "options": ["Family.", "Friends.", "Fortune.", "Earth."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Dobbin see in his death that foreshadows Willard's fate?", "question_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX_2", "options": ["The Ghost Ship carries Dobbin's body into space, and it will carry Willard's into space soon, as well.", "The Ghost Ship takes Dobbin home, just as it will see Willard back to Earth.", "The Ghost Ship is an illusion that Dobbin sees when he dies, and Willard sees the same illusion at the time of his death.", "The Ghost Ship comes for him as he dies as it will Willard."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Willard tend to do in order to pass the time?", "question_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX_3", "options": ["He stares out into space.", "He communicates with others through the radio.", "He talks to himself to keep from going insane.", "He spends all of his time writing letters to his wife and son."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the first thing that Willard believes he sees coming towards the Marry Lou?", "question_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX_4", "options": ["An old-timey rocket ship.", "His son's ship that has come to rescue him.", "The Ghost Ship.", "A meteor. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Willard's son's plan in regards to his father's memory?", "question_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX_5", "options": ["He plans to build a ship and name it Mary Lou II.", "He plans to build a ship to go on an expedition to locate his father.", "He plans to build a ship and name it after his father.", "He is too young to have any memory of his father, so he plans to upload memories from a new machine named in his father's honor."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In the night, when he dreamt of home, what was most distinctive to Willard?", "question_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX_6", "options": ["The voices of the city, fields, and places he had worked.", "The sound of the snow that crunched under his feet as he treads upon the Earth.", "His wife's voice.", "The face of his son."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are Willard's thoughts on the accuracy of the Ghost Ship phenomenon?", "question_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX_7", "options": ["It was real, and it was there to take him to Earth.", "It was just in his imagination.", "Too many others had seen and spoken of a Ghost Ship for it not to be real.", "He had gone insane and made the entire idea of a Ghost Ship up."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is one thing that Willard did out of habit each day?", "question_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX_8", "options": ["Check the radio to see if there was a broadcast from Earth.", "Talk to Dobbin.", "Look for the Ghost Ship.", "Made his bed."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "At the conclusion of the story, Willard realizes", "question_unique_id": "62244_J6CNQ5XX_9", "options": ["Dobbin did not die.  He hid from Willard because he was afraid that Willard would kill him.", "He is returning to Earth.", "He is now on the Ghost Ship.", "His son's expedition saved him from his fate to float aimlessly for eternity."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/2/4/62244//62244-h//62244-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61412", "set_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Course of Logic", "year": 1956, "author": "Del Rey, Lester", "topic": "Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Short stories", "article": "THE COURSE OF LOGIC\nBY LESTER DEL REY\nThey made one little mistake—very\n\n natural—and disastrous!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe male silth plodded forward wearily at sixty miles an hour, pausing\n only long enough to uproot and wolf down one of the rare scrub trees\n directly in its path. Its three hundred tons of massive body shook\n the ground as the great hind legs thumped along, and every cell of it\n ached with hunger. It was warm blooded, despite its vaguely reptilian\n appearance. Only meat could satisfy its need for energy. But the great\n herds lay a thousand miles to the north of this barren land.\n\n\n Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that\n was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the\n inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she\n always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for\n him and his silth!\n\n\n \"Arnek!\" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the\n mental spectrum. \"Arnek, stop lagging and get up here!\"\n\n\n He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he\n stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by\n Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small,\n stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted\n below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward\n around a boulder.\n\n\n \"Quiet!\" Ptarra ordered sharply. Then, as Arnek switched from a\n thudding run to a smooth, creeping approach, the mental impulse took\n on a note of triumph. \"Look down there and then tell me I don't know a\n ship trail from a meteor!\"\n\n\n The bowl was bright in the glare of the orange sunlight, but at first\n Arnek saw nothing. Then, as his gaze swept back toward the nearer\n section, he blinked his great eyes, only half believing what they\n registered.\n\n\n It was a small thing, hardly taller than Arnek's silth—maybe not even\n as tall. But it was too regular and obviously artificial, a pointed\n cylinder, to be a meteorite. Between two of the base fins there seemed\n to be an opening, with a miniature ramp leading down to the ground. It\n looked like a delicately precise model of a spaceship from the dawn of\n time.\n\n\n It was obviously too small to be more than a message carrier. Yet, as\n he looked more closely, he could see motion. Two tiny creatures, not\n more than six feet in height, were scurrying around near the base.\n Bright patches of fur or decoration covered them, and they seemed to\n move on two of their four limbs.\nArnek shivered down the length of his nerves with an ancient distaste\n for crawling things. \"Let's go back,\" he suggested uneasily. \"There's\n nothing here for us, and I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Ptarra answered, and the old female superiority\n was strong in the thought. \"Of course it's too small for us; I knew\n that when I saw the landing trail yesterday evening. It must be an\n instrument probe, with test animals. If it has telemetering equipment,\n though—\"\n\n\n Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other.\n\n\n Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of\n the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill\n sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint\n impulses.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. \"Cut them off! Don't let\n them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning.\"\n\n\n In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his\n dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck\n into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two\n was almost at the ramp.\n\n\n At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head\n lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human\n midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet\n away.\n\n\n Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or\n something like it—came from the other creature.\n\n\n Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward\n toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced\n the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped\n about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of\n tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in\n annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the\n midge.\n\n\n It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion\n in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home\n world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent\n the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was\n bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the\n depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.\n\n\n There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. \"If your hunger is so great,\n why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood\n smells sweet enough.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer.\n\n\n Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't\n thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and\n pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned\n in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe.\n\n\n \"It had a weapon,\" he commented, changing the subject.\n\n\n Ptarra rumbled an assent. \"I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The\n probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the\n lower orders. They'll make good silths.... Now let's see what we can\n find in the probe.\"\nShe slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards\n as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit.\n\n\n Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he\n waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male,\n he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have ruined whatever\n lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery ... though\n the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary.\n\n\n Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. \"Maybe the\n creatures operated it,\" he suggested.\n\n\n \"What makes you think so?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. It just seems somehow—\"\n\n\n \"Intuition!\" Ptarra snorted. Then she seemed less certain. \"Yet I can't\n blame you this time. It\ndoes\nalmost look that way. But it's logically\n impossible. Besides, there are automatic controls for guiding the\n probe. The builders probably just amused themselves, the way we once\n put slurry-pods in the gulla pens. Ah, this looks sound enough!\"\n\n\n She pulled a tiny box out of the wreckage that had been spread out flat\n on the ground.\n\n\n With infinite care, she managed to hook one claw over a miniature\n control. Almost immediately, radio waves began forming a recurrent\n pattern along their nerves, coming in long and short pulses.\n\n\n Half an hour later, there was another faint quiver of radio waves from\n space, this time completely modulated. Even Arnek could realize that\n it was on the same frequency, but dopplered to indicate something\n approaching their world. He stopped browsing for the few stunted trees\n and came back to join his mate.\n\n\n Night was just falling. Ptarra led them back toward the rock ledge from\n which they had first spied the probe. There was a large fissure in the\n rocks into which they could just squeeze, and which would hide them\n from the sight of any landing craft.\n\n\n A moon came up, and they could see the depression clearly in its light.\n Now Arnek saw the larger human slipping across the ground toward the\n wreck of the probe. It darted about frantically, but with an appearance\n of purpose. A few moments later, it was retreating, carrying a load of\n packages with it.\n\n\n \"It seems almost intelligent,\" he said softly.\n\n\n He strained to follow the faint wash of impressions on the lower band.\n There was something there that struck a familiar chord in his thoughts,\n but he could not decode it.\n\n\n \"Just instinct,\" Ptarra dismissed it with cool logic. \"A female seeking\n food for its injured mate.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed uncomfortably. \"It doesn't seem female,\" he objected.\n\n\n \"Another hunch? Don't be silly, Arnek. It has to be a female. The\n larger, stronger and more intelligent form is always female. How else\n could it care for the young? It needs ability for a whole family, while\n the male needs only enough for himself. The laws of evolution are\n logical or we wouldn't have evolved at all.\"\n\n\n There was no answer to such logic, other than the vague discontent\n Arnek felt. And he knew that was only because of his envy of the\n greater ability of the other sex. He settled back, ruminating hungrily\n and listening to the signal from space.\n\n\n The little box from the wreck was silent now, but the other signals\n were stronger.\n\n\n Ptarra nodded. \"They're coming. After four hundred years, we have\n a chance. New silths to breed. A chance to reproduce ourselves and\n multiply. A new universe for our own.\" There was immense satisfaction\n with self in her thoughts. \"Well, I earned it!\"\nArnek could not deny it. It had been more than four hundred years in\n this galaxy. Eight thousand of them had set out, leaving behind a\n small, ancient universe being wrecked by the horror of an exploding\n supernova. They had been driven out from the planetary conquests of a\n billion years and had sought refuge across intergalactic space to this\n universe.\n\n\n A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had\n survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants.\n And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged\n the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their\n precautions.\n\n\n Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals\n that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with\n several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the\n sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue\n was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.\n\n\n They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after\n planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were\n barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived\n this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the\n new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.\n\n\n Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of\n retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile,\n and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full\n faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient,\n either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own.\n Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into\n these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature\n powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth.\n\n\n Four hundred years! And now—now, he thought, he was tired. It no\n longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry\n about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and\n tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach.\n\n\n The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's\n snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed\n downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship,\n landing over the wreckage of the first.\nBut it was no monster such as might have carried new and better silth\n forms. It was hardly larger than the first, though it somehow seemed\n to be better made. It landed smoothly and squatted on the ground,\n sending out signals.\n\n\n \"Another probe,\" Ptarra said. There was disappointment in her thoughts,\n quickly masked by cold logic. \"Naturally, they'd wait to check with\n something like this. There will probably be several probes before they\n decide they have to investigate personally. All right! We'll give them\n something to worry about.\"\n\n\n She was lunging to her feet, just as an opening appeared in the ship.\n This time something ran out, down the ramp—a tiny gadget of churning\n tracks and metal carapace, chuffing out shrill little motor sounds. It\n circled briefly and then headed across the bowl.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" Ptarra ordered. \"It may have a camera, so don't waste time.\n The less the builders learn about us, the better.\"\n\n\n Arnek took off. His hunger had so far failed to weaken him, and he was\n covering the ground at two hundred miles an hour before the little\n vehicle had picked up a tenth of that speed.\n\n\n At the last moment, it seemed to be aware of him. There was a wash of\n mental shock and confusion. Then his snout hit the car in a sideswipe\n that tossed it fifty feet to land on its back. He lumbered forward to\n squash it, then hesitated. An opening had appeared and two of the tiny\n humans were staggering out. One was supporting the other. At sight of\n him, both stopped in shock. For a second, they stood rooted to the\n ground. Then the larger one began a clumsy effort at running, half\n carrying the other. Blood left a trail behind them.\n\n\n Arnek could have squashed them with a single thrust of his leg. But\n he stood irresolutely, observing the garments and headgear they wore,\n remembering his youth and a gulla draped with a ribbon and bells. They\n were heading for the rocks nearest them, a long way from where the\n first two had found refuge. For a second, he felt impelled to turn them\n and drive them toward the others.\n\n\n Then a wave of amusement from Ptarra checked him. \"They'd never reach\n that far,\" she called. \"They can't survive the crash of their vehicle.\n Let them go.\"\nArnek felt the faint, murky mental signals so low on the band, and he\n knew Ptarra was right. They were staggering now, and the smaller one\n seemed to be only partly conscious. He sighed and scooped up the ground\n car, carrying it back to Ptarra.\n\n\n This time his mate was making no effort to rip the ship apart. She was\n staring through one of the tiny ports, trying to fit her great eye\n against it. And she seemed uncertain. Finally she took the ground car\n and began dismantling it, looking for automatic or remote controls.\n\n\n There were none.\n\n\n \"Maybe the creatures operated it—and the ship,\" Arnek said. He\n expected the same reaction the remark had drawn before.\n\n\n This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.\n\n\n A sudden shock ran through Ptarra's thoughts. Her great eyes blinked\n and a huge tongue ran over her lips. \"Nerve fiber!\" Her shout covered\n the entire spectrum. \"Arnek, there are pounds of nerve fiber in the\n creature! High grade—better than that in these silth forms. As good as\n that in any silth. Here, give me the other.\"\n\n\n She didn't wait for Arnek's help, however. She dragged the corpse out\n and began working as delicately as the silth body would permit. Her\n mental signals were a blur. Then she stopped, staring down at what she\n held. \"There—a cavity in the head, filled with nerve fibers. There\n must be three pounds there alone. What freak of evolution would put\n them all together in such a vulnerable spot? And yet, there's a certain\n efficiency about it. It isn't logical—and yet it is.\"\n\n\n Abruptly, the evidence was gone. \"Come on,\" she ordered.\n\n\n Arnek sighed, and his stomach rumbled a protest. But he ignored it.\n \"What good is it? We surely can't make a silth out of a tiny thing like\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Contempt for male thought was mixed with smug satisfaction\n for her own. \"We don't use the other cells anyhow. Oh, there will be\n difficulties. They may be short-lived. But with such high grade fiber,\n we can risk infiltrating a new one as often as we need. There should\n be enough of them. They probably have half a dozen to a litter twice\n a year, like most small forms. Possibly billions of them can live on\n a single planet. And since they're colonizing other worlds like this\n one....\"\n\n\n Even Arnek could see the logic behind Ptarra's assumption in that.\n Colonizing would explain the sending out of a male and female in each\n ship, with ships spread out days apart. It wasn't the most efficient\n method, but it usually insured against any major accident. His people\n had used the same method at times.\n\n\n It all seemed quite logical, but Arnek felt a tension of intuition\n along his entire nerve network. No anna had ever used a silth capable\n of independent intelligence. There must be something wrong with it.\n Once they infiltrated the new silth, of course, they could soon convert\n enough nerves to blank out all control from their carriers. But....\n\n\n \"Their weapons,\" he cried. \"Ptarra, in those bodies, we'd be vulnerable\n to their weapons. And during the ten days we have to hibernate to grow\n into their nerves, they'd kill us.\"\n\n\n Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.\n\n\n \"Do you remember everything?\" Ptarra asked. \"You've got to regain\n consciousness after the first stage. You can do that, if you set your\n mind to it.\"\n\n\n \"I remember,\" Arnek agreed wearily. He'd had the whole routine drilled\n into him repeatedly until he was sick of it. It was like the horror of\n having her force him to adapt to this present silth. While he had been\n ready to accept assimilation, she had fought with him and with her own\n transformation, refusing to admit even his intuition that their race\n was ended. Only her cold logic had saved them. He could not deny it now.\n\n\n \"Be sure you take the smaller male body,\" she warned again.\n\n\n \"Unless that's the female. You found evolution different in these\n creatures once,\" he reminded her.\n\n\n For a moment, she was silent. Then there was a mental shrug, and almost\n amusement as she answered. \"Matching sex isn't logically necessary.\n It might even be an interesting amusement. But I must have the larger\n body.\"\n\n\n She began shifting at once. The silth gasped and tried to thresh about\n in death as Ptarra released control. Arnek sighed to himself and began\n to follow.\n\n\n It was worse than he remembered. After the centuries, the cells hated\n to give up their fixed form. The agony of the silth fed back to him,\n until his withdrawal stopped its heart. But slowly the nuclear matter\n flowed from the cells and up the pathways to their egress, taking the\n minimum of nutrient fluid with them.\n\n\n It took nearly an hour, and he could see the thin film of Ptarra\n already lying over the sleeping human.\n\n\n He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would\n not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead.\n He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the\n open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the\n strange nerve bundle in the skull.\n\n\n Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost\n pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of the last\n silth had been. These were like coming home to a friendly world, in a\n universe that had died too long ago and far away. For a time, he was\n almost glad that he had not died with it.\n\n\n Then the first allergic reactions began, and he had to relapse into\n instinct, to let his being fight to save both himself and his host\n cells from the reaction.\n\n\n He set the first stage up, however. This time he managed with no help\n from Ptarra. Then he relapsed into unconsciousness, making no effort to\n control his new silth yet. He'd have to revise when the silth awoke, he\n told himself.\n\n\n But it was only a dream order, half completed....\nIt was a sudden painful pressure of acceleration that finally brought\n him out of his torpor. He felt half sick, and he could vaguely sense\n that the new silth was fevered and uncomfortable. But, amazingly, it\n was sitting up. And around it was a room bigger than the whole ship had\n seemed, and controls under its hands, and fantastic equipment.\n\n\n \"It's about time,\" Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now,\n since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold\n and sure. \"I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship\n and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough\n to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to\n leave. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most\n of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive—but they're\n logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she\n isn't aware.\"\n\n\n The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand\n back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek\n rode. \"I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches.\"\n\n\n The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.\n\n\n He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will.\n\n\n \"There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation\n while we grow into these silths,\" Ptarra reported. \"Now—help me if you\n can.\"\n\n\n Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as\n she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will.\n\n\n Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy\n fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind,\n Arnek began to see the plan.\n\n\n There was fuel enough to bring them at maximum speed across an eddy\n of the galaxy toward the lone sun they had found long before. There\n a single planet swung in orbit—a planet with food but no dangerous\n animal life. And there they could wait and grow strong, and multiply\n as their silths multiplied. They could reach it almost as soon as they\n came out of hibernation finally, and it would be a safe haven in its\n isolation.\n\n\n There would be no fuel for further travel. But that could wait, while\n their numbers grew, and they could restore their lost technology and\n weapons with the clever hands of the human silths. Then they could take\n over the galaxy—as they had taken the one so long away!\n\n\n The hands fumbled under the limited control, but they moved across the\n board. And the automatic pilot was finally set and sealed.\n\n\n \"Logic!\" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind\n like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien\n mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his\n nerves.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long\n interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control\n again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there\n was amusement. \"Logic,\" she agreed. \"But perhaps intuition isn't too\n bad for a male. You've been right twice.\"\n\n\n \"Twice?\" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths\n controlled their own ships, of course. But....\n\n\n \"Twice,\" Ptarra said. \"I've just realized my silth is a male, as you\n suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?\"\n\n\n She tried to say something else, but the strain was too much, and full\n hibernation swept her mind away from that of Arnek.\n\n\n Arnek sat frozen for a time in his silth, knowing that it was also male.\n\n\n Then he turned it somehow to face the lost galaxy where his race had\n known its day and now entered its eternal night.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How do the dynamics of the silth couple differ from conventional couples in today's time?", "question_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E_1", "options": ["The male is expected to tend to the offspring.", "The female is expected to be the hunter/gatherer for the group.", "The male is extra aggressive to the point where the female is often injured during their daily routine.", "The female is the dominate of the pair, and the male is expected to follow her lead."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How many of the species remain in existence?", "question_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E_2", "options": ["400", "2", "3", "8,000"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Arnek knows that he would have died many years ago had it not been for", "question_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E_3", "options": ["the guidance of their leader.", "his love of his offspring.", "his lack of ability to give up when things seem lost.", "the guidance of his mate."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do the humans remind Arnek of?", "question_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E_4", "options": ["The love he has for his offspring.", "The love he has for his mate.", "Pets he once had.", "Enemies of his past."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What effect does the human weapon have on the silths?", "question_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E_5", "options": ["It blinds one of them.", "They do not have weapons.", "It kills one of them.", "It does nothing to them rather than cause a minor annoyance."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What makes Ptarra realize that they can use the humans as their hosts?", "question_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E_6", "options": ["Humans are the right size to be their host.", "The humans telepathically communicate with her that they welcome them into their bodies.", "She realizes that the human body is filled with the fibers they need in order to exist.", "She realizes that they were supposed to be in human form all along."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Ptarra also hopeful for the pair if they can take the humans over to be their hosts?", "question_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E_7", "options": ["She is hopeful that they will be able to adopt human compassion into their lifestyle.", "She believes that they will be able to mate and rebuild their race with the humans as hosts.", "He is simply looking forward to being in a smaller form.", "She is hopeful that they will be able to inherit human intellect."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What are the silths afraid will happen if the humans catch them during their hibernation period prior to entering their bodies?", "question_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E_8", "options": ["They are afraid that the humans will use their weapons to kill them in their vulnerable position.", "He is afraid them humans will leave to go back to Earth.", "They are afraid that the humans will expel them from their bodies.", "He is afraid that the humans will allow them to starve."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the tragic mistake that the silth pair make in regards to their new hosts?", "question_unique_id": "61412_SIKASQ2E_9", "options": ["They enter two male bodies.", "They miss the entry ports into the bodies.", "They enter two female bodies.", "They enter two dead bodies."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/4/1/61412//61412-h//61412-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "20003", "set_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Changelings", "year": "1998", "author": "Jack Shafer", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Changelings \n\n         When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n         The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices . \n\n         In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't. \n\n         Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote. \n\n          On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict. \n\n         In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of \"PETN\" residues in the wreckage. The Times reported: \"Law enforcement officers said it was impossible to know, for now, whether the explosion was caused by a bomb or a missile because PETN is an explosive component commonly found in both. Still, the discovery would seem to knock from contention the theory that mechanical failure caused the airplane to explode on July 17, killing all 230 aboard .\" (Emphasis added.) Eventually, the Times and the investigators abandoned the PETN/bomb theory for the mechanical failure theory. \n\n         Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n         Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work? \n\n          The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant campaign donations by Loral Space & Communications' chief executive to Democratic coffers = Clinton's OK of U.S. satellite launches. The Post 's sober coverage expands the theme to detail how the president was as happy to fulfill the satellite dreams of the Republican businessman from Hughes who lobbied heavily and donated sparingly as he was to satisfy the Democratic businessman from Loral who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars (see John Mintz's June 25 article, \"How Hughes Got What It Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more. \n\n         Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story. \n\n         Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude? \n\n          \n\n            Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor! \n\n          The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make. \n\n         Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n         The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post \n\n            Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times                 Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n         Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks. \n\n          The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it. \n\n         Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses. \n\n         Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope.\n", "questions": [{"question": "The author claims that the two publications changed identities because", "question_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU_1", "options": ["The  Washington Post became too \"newsie,\" and The New York Times became too informal and daring.", "The two publications basically assimilated into one.", "The two publications started to cancel one another out.", "The Washington Post became too informal and daring, and The New York Times became too \"newsie.\""], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author mean by \"when the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices?\"", "question_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU_2", "options": ["When the two publications took on attributes of one another, they were both completely lost in the process.", "The Times took on The Post's boring deliverables, and the Post took on the Times' cheeky delivery.", "When the two publications took on attributes of one another, they took on both the good and bad.", "The Times took on The Post's cheeky delivery, and the Post took on The Times' boring deliverables."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "It is thought that The Times often takes on too many risks, and", "question_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU_3", "options": ["those risks usually pay off for the publication.", "those risks never pay off for the publication.", "the reader comes out on the losing end because of it.", "those risks can sometimes get out of control."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The alternative to reading a publication like The Times who is known for taking risks is", "question_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU_4", "options": ["to read tabloids to get exciting news.", "to read something bland like The Post.", "to read something that is of the highest quality like The Post.", "to leave print behind and move on to blogs."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The author implies that one of The Post's downfalls is that", "question_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU_5", "options": ["its need to be the best has resulted in a lack of quality.", "it is too concerned with keeping up with the changing times and not as concerned with quality journalism.", "it is too set in its ways, thus becoming stale at times.", "it is too concerned with being a competitor to The Times that it has lost its sense of self."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The author says that The Times typically overlooks anything going on in The Post, ", "question_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU_6", "options": ["but it should be looking to The Post as a guide for what true journalism is.", "but it should look at The Post so that it can understand what longevity on the market and reader loyalty can do for a publication.", "and it should continue to do just as it has been and ignoring anything going on at The Post.", "but it could benefit from some of the things The Post offers that it does not."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Some improvements that The Post have made to the publication include", "question_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU_7", "options": ["taking away from its consumer electronics section", "improved suburbian coverage added more to its business page, and added to its travel and sports section.", "taking much more publishing risks.", "removed the science and history sections altogether."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to the author, what is the biggest move that The Post has made in recent years?", "question_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU_8", "options": ["Appointing Seve Coll as its managing editor.", "Changing its format.", "Its biggest move has been to stand completely still.", "Letting The Times influence how it structures itself."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the turnover rate for the executive editor of The Times?", "question_unique_id": "20003_N2INU4MU_9", "options": ["They go into the job knowing that once their purpose has been served, then they will be asked to leave.", "They tend only to leave once they retire, so they can take their time to do what they want to with their vision for the publication.", "They know that they will be let go at the same time as the executive editor of The Post.", "They know that their time there will be short-lived, so they have to make their mark quickly."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20004", "set_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "Welcome to SLATE", "year": "1996", "author": "Michael Kinsley", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Welcome to SLATE \n\n         An introduction and apologia. \n\n         By Michael Kinsley \n\n         The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp. \n\n         A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\" \n\n         To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible. \n\n         And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n         For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1. \n\n         The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n         We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n                         So What's in It?              \n\n         First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n         Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE                 on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.) \n\n         Individual copies of SLATE                 on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n         While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n                         OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]              \n\n         SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK)              \n\n         Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n         The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors. \n\n         Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index. \n\n         The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n         In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.) \n\n         Stanford economist Paul Krugman writes The Dismal Scientist, a once-a-month column on economic policy. (See his debut essay in this issue, about the economic war within the Clinton administration.) University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg writes monthly on \"Everyday Economics,\" using economic analysis to illuminate everyday life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity can actually reduce the spread of AIDS.) \n\n         \"The Earthling\" will be a monthly column by Robert Wright, contributor to the New Republic and Time , and author of the acclaimed book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal . Other regular Briefing features will include a Press column by our deputy editor, Jack Shafer. \n\n          Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose \"Washingtoon\" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark. \n\n                         Can There Possibly be More?              \n\n         Our Features section begins each week with the Committee of Correspondence, our e-mail discussion group. The committee is run by Herbert Stein, a former chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers best-known now for his witty columns in the Wall Street Journal . We have great hopes for e-mail as a medium of debate that can combine the immediacy of talk-television with the intellectual discipline of the written word. We hope for something halfway between The McLaughlin Group and the correspondence page of the New York Review of Books . Will it work? Check out our first attempt--Does Microsoft Play Fair?--and let us know what you think. \n\n         The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n         In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer. \n\n         This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good Word, about the difference between \"Jesuitical\" and \"Talmudic.\" \n\n         In general, SLATE's Back of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing monthly on food (\"In the Soup\"), Anne Hollander on fashion (\"Clothes Sense\"), and Margaret Talbot on \"Men and Women.\" Audio and video clips will be offered where appropriate. \n\n         Every issue will have a poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by Seamus Heaney. \n\n         And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n                         Does SLATE Have a Slant?              \n\n         SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job. \n\n         Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n         A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours). \n\n         Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n         Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n                         Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE. \n\n           \n\n         TEXT AAA: No, this is not a link to the Cognisoft home page. As a general rule, we plan to avoid hyperlinks to outside sites in the text of articles, and to group them at the end instead. It's a small illustration of our general philosophy--better call it a hope--that, even on the Web, some people will want to read articles in the traditional linear fashion--i.e., from beginning to end--rather than darting constantly from site to site. Go back. \n\n         TEXT BBB: Only kidding. Easter. Go back. \n\n         TEXT CCC: Objectivity, we hope, will distinguish this feature from Newsweek 's \"Conventional Wisdom Watch,\" which is often an effort to set the spin rather than describe it. Anyway, the \"CW Watch\" was a rip-off of a similar feature in the New Republic when I was the editor there. And TNR 's feature itself was lifted from Washington, D.C.'s, City Paper , which was edited at the time of the theft by Jack Shafer, now deputy editor of SLATE. Go back. \n\n         TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.) \n\n         At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back. \n\n         TEXT EEE: In this regard we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News & World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go back. \n\n         TEXT FFF: This is different from \"attitude\"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine them--but we'll leave \"attitude\" to the kids. Go back.\n", "questions": [{"question": "The name of the magazine is symbolic of", "question_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE_1", "options": ["the slabs of paper that will be saved.", "nothing.", "a completely fresh start in a new medium.", "the hard-hitting way that the magazine will approach journalism"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the publication plan to charge when it is not being printed on paper?", "question_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE_2", "options": ["It has to be able to pay its employees.", "It is part of Microsoft, and they charge for everything.", "It is the only way to keep the publication self-sustaining.", "It needs to be able to pay for advertising in other arenas."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "By charging for the publication, SLATE plans to prove", "question_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE_3", "options": ["the publication will have much more freedom in what it writes and publishes because is it self-funded.", "People are willing to pay for good journalism.", "Advertising is an extra form of revenue to pass on to the employees of the magazine.", "Bill Gates knows all about how to make money."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was considered to be \"bad news\" for readers of SLATE at the time of its launch?", "question_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE_4", "options": ["How could anything be bad in the new cyber world?", "Bill Gates would have an ongoing collum for the magazine to discuss whatever was on his mind at the time.", "They were going to have to pay in order to have access from day one.", "Not all of the magazine's features would be ready immediately."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is NOT an option to view SLATE?", "question_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE_5", "options": ["in printed magazine form", "online", "email", "in book form"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is one of the fears of how people will react to reading online?", "question_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE_6", "options": ["article lengths over 500 words will be skimmed over.", "graphics will not help break up the texts, thus making it more difficult to read.", "everyone will feel comfortable reading on their computer.", "article length will have to be drastically reduced from typical hard copy publications."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Does SLATE seem apologetic about developing a set of prejudices?  Why or why not?", "question_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE_7", "options": ["No, they just don't care one way or the other.  If it happens, it happens.  If it doesn't, it doesn't.", "Yes, they promise to stay away from them as much as possible, as they tend to put a wedge between people.", "No, they realize that developing prejudices are part of life, and they have already begun to develop some.", "Yes, they are staunchly against it, and they vow to shut the magazine down if they occur."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Does SLATE plan to have a particular political slant? Why or why not?", "question_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE_8", "options": ["Yes, they are liberals.  Period.", "No.  They find politics to be too trivial to include them in the magazine.", "Yes, they are democrats.", "No, that would go against their part of their belief system."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the hope as far as how readers read the magazine?", "question_unique_id": "20004_36PCUSFE_9", "options": ["They are just hoping people look at any part of it at all.", "They will skip around and just read what is interesting to them.", "They will read it linearly as with a typical magazine.", "They will jump from one topic to the next, but they will still read everything in every issue."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "49901", "set_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Snare", "year": 1970, "author": "Smith, Richard Rein", "topic": "Moon -- Fiction; Space flight -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; PS", "article": "The Snare\nBy RICHARD R. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by WEISS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nIt's easy to find a solution when there is one—the trick is to do it\n if there is none!\nI glanced at the path we had made across the\nMare Serenitatis\n. The\n Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because,\n as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth\n layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered\n across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands\n of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above.\n Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity\n like none I had ever felt.\n\n\n Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because\n of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step\n and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of\n dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the\n light gravity.\n\n\n Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear.\n Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a\n dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak\n to be reflected toward Earth.\n\n\n We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams\n of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's\n surface.\n\n\n The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained\n motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering\n voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\nStrange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving\n hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense\n of\nalienness\n. It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation.\n Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that\n it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a\n year, but the Moon was vast and the\nMare Serenitatis\ncovered three\n hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n\n\n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves?\n If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"\n\n\n \"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be\n beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n\n\n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached\n for the radio controls on my suit.\n\n\n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves.\n If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we\n discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n\n\n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet\n it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of\n an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for\n ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for\n prestige and wealth.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I conceded.\n\n\n Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit.\n Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the\n brilliant flame against the metal.\n\n\n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's\n steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n\n\n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it\n be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n\n\n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The\n notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say\nsteel\nbecause it's\nsimilar\nto steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that,\n on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even\n a wind to disturb its surface. It's\nat least\nseveral thousand years\n old.\"\nWe slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane\n shouted, \"Look!\"\n\n\n A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken\n by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and\n flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n\n\n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the\n opening.\n\n\n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening\n to give him as much light as possible.\n\n\n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something!\n It\nmust\nbe an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the\n walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n\n\n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features\n struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the\n alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She\n hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.\n\n\n \"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n \"Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Let's.\"\n\n\n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned\n to help Miller.\n\n\n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert\n mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help\n him as he stepped into the passageway.\n\n\n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette\n against the star-studded sky.\n\n\n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped\n with pain when he struck the ground. \"\nSomething\npushed me!\"\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through\n the passage....\n\n\n ... and struck an invisible solid wall.\nMy eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a\n recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with\n the absence of starlight.\n\n\n \"\nWhat happened?\n\"\n\n\n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a\n brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n\n\n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The\n ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the\n smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n\n\n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and\n instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.\n\n\n Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door\n that had imprisoned us.\n\n\n \"Miller!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n\n\n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There\n were no visible recesses or controls.\n\n\n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a\n rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened\n breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong;\n Miller's was faltering and weak.\n\n\n \"Miller, get help!\"\n\n\n \"I'll—\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n\n\n \"What happened to him?\"\n\n\n \"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and\n trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n\n\n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n\n\n Static grated against my ear drums.\nStatic!\nI listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by\n comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n\n\n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between\n his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n\n\n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static\n we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.\n\n\n \"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over\nour\nradio, unless—\"\n Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of\n white—\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n\n\n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to\n speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n\n\n I deactivated my radio.\n\n\n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow\n corridor beyond.\n\n\n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press\n against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the\n pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on\n our bodies.\n\n\n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the\n open door.\n\n\n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed\n next and I was the last.\n\n\n We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were\n featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were\n the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n\n\n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was\n unyielding.\n\n\n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small\n amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously.\n It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I\n increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed\n my helmet.\n\n\n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in\n this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits\n later.\"\n\n\n They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"\n\n\n Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the\n corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n\n\n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through\n the doorway.\n\n\n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles\n frozen by shock.\n\n\n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n\n\n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the\n other doors that lined the hall.\n\n\n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n\n\n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.\n\n\n For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the\n preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them.\n The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of\n other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means\n of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse\n themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as\n that: a walk on the Moon.\n\n\n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock\n formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien\n ship.\n\n\n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's\n perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible\n situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\nI took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our\n steps.\n\n\n We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors\n opened soundlessly.\n\n\n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n\n\n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the\n ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n\n\n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n\n\n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n\n\n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing\n thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four\n chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each\n chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting\n column.\n\n\n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a\n trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are\n food!\"\n\n\n The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them.\n The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and\n bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening\n the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes\n and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n\"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n\n\n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my\n fingers.\n\n\n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n\n\n I tasted a small piece.\n\n\n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n\n\n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n\n\n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.\n\n\n \"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\nThe next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were\n filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the\n form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a\n fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n\n\n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a\n spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n\n\n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water,\n waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n\n\n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were\n transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then\n disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n\n\n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by\n the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a\n hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.\n\n\n We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit\n cigarettes and waited.\n\n\n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n\n\n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was\n excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n\n\n She sat next to Verana.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing\n a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared\n silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect.\n Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—\"\n\n\n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.\n\n\n \"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to\n hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was\n the\noddest\nfeeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in\n a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt\nsomething\nsearch my mind and gather information. I could actually\nfeel\nit search my memories!\"\n\n\n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n\n\n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It\n seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched\n for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\nKane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n \"\nDo you know where we are?\n\" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens\n got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're\n guinea pigs!\"\n\n\n \"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly\n remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated\n extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She\n was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they\n explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their\n zoo!\"\n\n\n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.\n\n\n He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This\n ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago,\n they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living\n in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like\n when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a\n sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made\n spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship\n and enter it—\nlike rabbits in a snare!\n\"\n\n\n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep\n us there while they study us.\"\n\n\n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned\n months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n\n\n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the\n terror inside her.\n\n\n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be\n interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n\n\n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A\n race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves?\n Dissection is primitive. They won't\nhave to\ndissect us in order to\n study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n \"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the\n Moon!\"\n\n\n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible\n source and seemed to fill the room.\nVerana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's\n mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n\n\n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n \"Where are you?\nWho\nare you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n\n\n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n\n\n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted\n phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.\n\n\n \"What are your—your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked\n anxiously.\n\n\n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine\n you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like\n when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on\n your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity\n toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n\n\n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship\n and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food,\n oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to\n prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll\n find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n\n\n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to\n force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms.\n The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were\n the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or\n hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\nSix rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had\n been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work\n on.\n\n\n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that\n opened into the corridor.\n\n\n After intensive searching, we realized there was\nno way\nto damage the\n ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n\n\n We gave up.\n\n\n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to\n the \"kitchen.\"\n\n\n At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and\n discussed our predicament.\n\n\n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed\n his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out!\n Every problem has a solution!\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"\nDoes\nevery problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some\n problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our\n civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape.\n Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A\n murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an\n entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours\n is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned\n few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds\n to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I\n don't think we have a chance.\"\n\n\n My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.\n\n\n \"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n\n\n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged\n condition.\"\n\n\n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n \"Shtop me, then!\"\n\n\n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you\n other than use of your language.\"\n\n\n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n\n\n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and\n stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n\n\n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at\n the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools\n or weapons.\n\n\n Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years\n could think of one!\n\n\n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had\n foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented\n the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains\n thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments\n would be.\n\n\n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they\n hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were\n curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the\n Moon.\n\n\n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't\n help thinking,\nAnd to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem\n impossibly clever\n.\n\n\n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\nWhen I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.\n\n\n I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were\n functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen\n asleep a few hours before.\n\n\n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was\n bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us,\n Marie was secured to another chair.\n\n\n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he\n appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled\n and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n\n\n \"Awake, huh?\"\n\n\n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were\n red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she\n looked at him.\n\n\n \"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you\n on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n \"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I\n had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or\n cooperate with me.\"\n\n\n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n\n\n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in\n a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that\n this problem has a solution.\"\n\n\n I grunted my disgust.\n\n\n \"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.\n\n\n \"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of\n making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n\n\n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this\n ship, I'd build it with a\nconscience\nso it'd do its best at all\n times.\"\n\n\n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm\n getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged\n while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been\n present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.\n\n\n \"\nOur\nmachines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch\n buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic\n brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it\n even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a\n thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered\n such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last\n night figuring—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you\n don't know—\"\n\n\n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n\n\n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick\n fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.\n\n\n \"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n\n\n \"Watch!\"\n\n\n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n\n\n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n\n\n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n\n\n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return\n to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\nThe machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to\n interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had\n said it had no way to control our actions!\n\n\n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you\n return with dead specimens!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.\n\n\n \"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to\n your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us\n to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission\n later.\"\n\n\n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go.\n A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning\n even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n\n\n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n\n\n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n\n\n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.\n", "questions": [{"question": "In the passage, what is the best definition for incongruity?", "question_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1_1", "options": ["Jagged, rough", "Out of place", "Beautiful", "Smooth, shiny"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The static that the characters heard over the radio suggest:", "question_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1_2", "options": ["The aliens were blocking communication", "The ship had flown into space", "Something had occurred at Lunar City", "The metal of the ship blocked communications "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "This excerpt \"The end of the line, he grunted.\nAs though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly\" suggests", "question_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1_3", "options": ["Their ordeal was just beginning", "Kane knew how to open the door", "Communications had just went out", "Kane was lying about their situation"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the alien's not gather humans on Earth instead of waiting?", "question_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1_4", "options": ["N/A", "The aliens wanted to study humans after they had reached a technological standard", "Purely coincidental that the ship was on the moon", "Waiting on the moon would assure no conflict would take place"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is the title of the passage \"The Snare?\"", "question_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1_5", "options": ["Humans were caught in the ship very similar to a snare trap", "Closely sounding to scare, which is how all the characters felt on the ship", "It describes the sounds that were heard over the communication lines", "No meaning behind the title"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When the voice spoke to the characters about \"My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\" Why should they believed?", "question_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1_6", "options": ["They should not believe them as they were kidnapped", "The aliens have not lied to them before", "The compartments of recreation and food suggest they are compassionate", "The aliens are aggressive and the humans should be cautious"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is the quote \"Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours\" significant in the passage?", "question_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1_7", "options": ["Implies that humans are still not civilized", "Its a violent example to be used in their situation", "Implies that aliens will murder the humans", "No significance"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What makes the machine in the passage unique?", "question_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1_8", "options": ["The machine was created by an alien civilization", "It can only use language", "Not unique", "It was programmed to be non-violent"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was significant about the ending?", "question_unique_id": "49901_PQTTXQQ1_9", "options": ["The machine was lying", "No significance", "Every problem has a solution", "Kane was almost killed"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/9/9/0/49901//49901-h//49901-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61171", "set_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Expendables", "year": 1972, "author": "Harmon, Jim", "topic": "Mafia -- Fiction; Inventors -- Fiction; Gangsters -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; PS", "article": "THE EXPENDABLES\nBY JIM HARMON\nIt was just a little black box,\n\n useful for getting rid of things.\n\n Trouble was, it worked too well!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"You see my problem, Professor?\" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured,\n flashily ringed hands wide.\n\n\n I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing.\n\n\n \"Really, Mr. Carmen,\" I said, \"this isn't the sort of thing you discuss\n with a total stranger. I'm not a doctor—not of medicine, anyway—or a\n lawyer.\"\n\n\n \"They can't help me. I need an operator in your line.\"\n\n\n \"I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in\n anything illegal.\"\n\n\n Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and\n touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. \"You can't, Professor\n Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard of it,\" I said uneasily. \"An old fraternal organization\n something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It\n allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a\n responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping\n out. We don't even like to see the word in print.\"\n\n\n \"I can understand\nhonest\nItalian-Americans feeling that way. But guys\n like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on\n marks like you pretty easy.\"\n\n\n You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the\n Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too\n long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false,\n built up an unendurable threat.\n\n\n \"All right, I'll try to help you, Carmen. But ... that is, you didn't\n kill any of these people?\"\n\n\n He snorted. \"I haven't killed anybody since early 1943.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" I said weakly. \"You needn't incriminate yourself with me.\"\n\n\n \"I was in the Marines,\" Carmen said hotly. \"Listen, Professor, these\n aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these\n days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club\n haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums\n with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets\n going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just\n stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my\n liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury.\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose you could just go to the police—\" I saw the answer in\n his eyes. \"No. I don't suppose you could.\"\n\n\n \"I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid\n of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and\n throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en\n route by some tipped badge?\"\n\n\n \"Quicklime?\" I suggested automatically.\n\n\n \"What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of\n scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies\n them like....\"\n\n\n \"I forgot,\" I admitted. \"I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten\n it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's\n always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An\n interesting problem, at that.\"\n\n\n \"I figured you could handle it,\" Carmen said, leaning back comfortably\n in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. \"I heard you were\n working on something to get rid of trash for the government.\"\n\n\n \"That,\" I told him, \"is restricted information. I subcontracted that\n work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?\"\n\n\n \"Ways, Professor, ways.\"\n\n\n The government did want me to find a way to dispose of\n wastes—radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any\n country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a\n small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him\n dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seethe. But the\n shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off.\n\n\n \"Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you,\" I\n said. \"I'll call you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't take too long, Professor,\" Carmen said cordially.\nThe big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a\n neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it.\n\n\n The AEC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or\n in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or\n changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks.\n The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning\n fish and fishermen.\n\n\n Through the SBA I had been awarded a subcontract to work on the\n problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize\n radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et\n cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is\n easier written than done.\n\n\n Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or\n matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But\n I didn't let that stop me—any more than I would have let the velocity\n of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged\n to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand\n and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor\n such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory\n owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of\n working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To\n this, I can only smile and nod.\n\n\n But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed.\n\n\n I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a\n basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system\n for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter.\n\n\n This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated\n water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was\n no breakthrough on the central problem.\n\n\n Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of\n some damned bodies for Carmen.\n\n\n Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so\n precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States\n government, I began experimenting.\n\n\n I cut corners.\n\n\n I bypassed complete safety circuits.\n\n\n I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the\n wiring diagrams. If I got some kind of passable incinerator I would be\n happy.\n\n\n I turned the machine on.\n\n\n The lights popped out.\n\n\n There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but\n instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that\n in the switchbox.\n\n\n I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and\n held.\n\n\n The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.\n\n\n But there it was.\n\n\n The internal Scale showed zero.\n\n\n I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely\n gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been\n no change in centigrade reading that couldn't be explained by the\n mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden\n discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard\n anti-gravity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had\n gone to zero but never to minus.\n\n\n I was at last violating conservation of energy—not by successfully\n inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying mass ...\n by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side\n effects.\n\n\n I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain\n how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever\n convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work.\n\n\n But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing\n \"how\" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation.\n\"Yeah, but how does it work?\" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his\n mirror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum.\n\n\n \"Why do you care?\" I asked irritably. \"It will dispose of your bodies\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that\n just for now.\nWhere are these bodies going?\nI don't want them winding\n up in the D.A.'s bathtub.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? How could they trace them back to you?\"\n\n\n \"You're the scientist,\" Tony said hotly. \"I got great respect for those\n crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc\n on it, I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"Listen here, Carmen,\" I said, \"what makes you think these bodies are\n going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of—incinerator.\"\n\n\n \"Not on your life, Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it\n burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up\n or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing\n cabinets before.\"\n\n\n Mafia or not, I saw red. \"Are you daring to suggest that I am working\n some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?\"\n\n\n \"Easy, Professor,\" Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one\n palm. \"I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that\n you have to be dropping the stuff through a sliding panel in—well,\n everything around us. You're sliding all that aside and dropping things\n through. But I want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?\"\n\n\n Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive\n feel for the mechanics of physics.\n\n\n \"I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen,\" I finally admitted. \"It\n might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the\n writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or\n our future.\"\n\n\n The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid\n calculation.\n\n\n \"I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the\n future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months.\"\n\n\n \"Or six million years.\"\n\n\n \"You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor.\"\n\n\n I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had\n heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. \"See here, Carmen, I\n could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you\n would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know\n where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into\n the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so\n many years it would appear in empty space ... because the earth will\n have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure.\n Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck\n a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched\n materials to burn up from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will\n just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do.\"\n\n\n Carmen inhaled deeply. \"Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against\n any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out,\n Professor?\"\n\n\n \"I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the\n unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you\n with the regularity of the morning milk run.\"\n\n\n The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. \"I'm talking about a big\n operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators,\n garbage disposals, waste baskets....\"\n\n\n \"Impractical,\" I snorted. \"You don't realize the tremendous amount of\n electrical power these devices require....\"\n\n\n \"Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes\n a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own\n generators.\"\n\"There's something to what you say,\" I admitted in the face of his\n unexpected information. \"But I can hardly turn my invention over to\n your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the\n results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have\n to decide what to do with the machine.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, Professor,\" Carmen began, \"the Mafia—\"\n\n\n \"What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the\n F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this\n much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor\n security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as\n being dead biologically.\"\n\n\n Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he\n intended to be cordial.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" he said smoothly \"you have to give this to Washington but\n there are\nways\n, Professor. I know. I'm a business man—\"\n\n\n \"You\nare\n?\" I said.\n\n\n He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock.\n\n\n \"You\nare\n.\"\n\n\n \"I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply\nleak\nthe\n information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your\n machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"I,\" I interjected, \"planned to call it the Venetti Machine.\"\n\n\n \"Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?\"\n\n\n \"There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though,\" I said.\n\n\n \"You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or\n a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be\n complete without one.\"\n\n\n \"Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies,\" I mused. \"The murder rate\n will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach.\"\n\n\n \"Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?\" Tony Carmen asked reasonably....\n\n\n Naturally, I was aware that the government would\nnot\nbe interested in\n my machine. I am not a Fortean, a psychic, a psionicist or a screwball.\n But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do\n with—like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do,\n it doesn't do it.\n\n\n There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines\n patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest\n sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity,\n they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the\n meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there,\n moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them.\n\n\n I knew the AEC wasn't going to dump tons of radioactive waste (with\n some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they\n didn't believe actually could work.\n\n\n Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his\n hands on it.\n\n\n Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of.\nThe closed sedan was warm, even in early December.\n\n\n Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was\n shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was\n this the storied \"ride,\" I wondered?\n\n\n Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He\n did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down\n the deserted street.\n\n\n \"The boys will have it set up in a minute,\" Tony the racketeer informed\n me.\n\n\n \"What?\" The firing squad?\n\n\n \"The Expendable, of course.\"\n\n\n \"Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my\n invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign\n pasted on it.\"\n\n\n He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined.\n\n\n A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight.\n\n\n \"Okay. Let's go,\" Tony said, slapping my shoulder.\n\n\n I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my\n teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I\n frequently found 230 pound bullies did kick sand in my ears.\n\n\n The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy\n white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via\n a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take\n care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .38, as\n necessity dictated.\n\n\n Tony guided my elbow. \"Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit\n now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it\n waves to the national anthem.\"\n\n\n \"Here?\" I spluttered once more. \"I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing\n more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit....\"\n\n\n \"You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place.\" The thug's\n teeth flashed in the night. \"Throw your contraption into gear, buddy.\"\n\n\n That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone\n out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What\n remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium\n light position. I flipped.\n\n\n Restraining any impulse toward colloqualism, I was also deeply\n disturbed by what next occurred.\n\n\n One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished.\n\n\n \"What have you done?\" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine.\n\n\n Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see\n that the unit was half gone—in fact, exactly halved.\n\n\n \"Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the\n old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff.\"\n There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice.\n \"He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you\n increase the size of the working area.\"\n\n\n \"You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know\n mechanics.\"\n\n\n \"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works.\"\n\n\n \"You call that working?\" I demanded. \"Do you realize what you have\n there, Carmen?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of\nStartling Stories\n.\"\n\n\n My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of\n science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was\n upheld.\n\n\n I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.\n\n\n \"What was this a test for?\" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had\n made. \"What are you planning to do now?\"\n\n\n \"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno\n and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat.\"\n\n\n \"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why,\n that's\nmurder\n.\"\n\n\n \"Not,\" Carmen said, \"without no\ncorpus delecti\n.\"\n\n\n \"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim,\" I\n remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.\n\n\n \"You're talking too much, Professor,\" Tony suggested. \"Remember,\nyou\ndid it with\nyour\nmachine.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said at length. \"And why are we standing here letting those\n machines sit there?\"\nThere were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following\n morning.\n\n\n One two-inch story—barely making page one because of a hole to fill at\n the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat\n prostration—told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by\n an ingenious new arson bomb that left \"virtually\" no trace. (Maybe the\n fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more\n creditable.)\n\n\n The second item was further over in a science column just off the\n editorial page. It told of the government—!—developing a new process\n of waste disposal rivaling the old Buck Rogers disintegrator ray.\n\n\n This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks.\n\n\n If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I\n doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a\n new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of\n spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with\n refrigerators and hypodermic needles.\n\n\n I had forced my way half-way through the paper and the terrible coffee\n I made when the doorbell rang.\n\n\n I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the\n front door.\n\n\n He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. \"Action,\n Professor.\"\n\n\n \"The district attorney has indicted you?\" I asked hopefully.\n\n\n \"He's not even indicted\nyou\n, Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this\n plant in the\nTimes\n.\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"The government will take over the invention, no\n matter what the public wants.\"\n\n\n \"The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants\n this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now.\n They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to\n you. Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe.\"\n\n\n \"Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the\n Expendables?\"\n\n\n \"Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got\n a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves—no doors or sides. They\n want a revolutionary garbage disposal too.\"\n\n\n \"Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?\"\n\n\n \"I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know,\" Carmen informed me.\n \"Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control of\n the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you 49% of\n its stock.\"\n\n\n This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It\nwas\na pretty good offer—49% and my good health.\n\n\n \"But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial\n use?\"\n\n\n \"The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found\n a commercial use for it.\"\n\n\n There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell.\n\n\n \"That must be Arcivox now,\" Carmen growled. \"They have the best\n detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?\"\n\n\n I knew what to tell them.\nI peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk,\n casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It\n wasn't really the machine's fault—The water department reported the\n reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two\n before I could get the gas type into my office.\n\n\n Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony\n chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of\n course, she herself was wearing a modest one-strap sun dress, not\n shorts and halters like some of the girls.\n\n\n \"My,\" she observed \"it certainly is humid for March, isn't it,\n Professor Venetti?\"\n\n\n I agreed that it was.\n\n\n She got her pad and pencil ready.\n\n\n \"Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties\n for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three\n months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we\n want the payola for what we have coming.\n\n\n \"Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do\n not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our\n patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away\n with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now.\n\n\n \"Rush priority telegram to President, United States, any time in\n the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system\n working out well in training battlefield disintegrator teams.\n\n\n \"Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a\n co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have\n always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put\n a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior\n doors you have covering our efficient, patented field.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it—I\n just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only\n a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony\n Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any\n more than me. Even.\n\n\n I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I\n had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing my chest and neck with it, I\n smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the\n tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field.\n I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one.\n But Gimpy was happy now, with the $50,000 we paid him.\n\n\n I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser,\n reflecting her fierce alertness.\n\n\n Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth.\n\n\n \"G-men on the way here,\" he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite\n Miss Brown.\n\n\n \"Don't revert to type,\" I warned him. \"What kind of G-Men? FBI? FCC?\n CIA? FDA? USTD?\"\n\n\n \"Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission.\"\n\n\n The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the\n edge of his snap-brim hat as he said it.\n\n\n \"Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?\" I\n asked.\n\n\n \"Not at all, sir,\" she said dreamily.\n\n\n \"May I suggest,\" I said, \"that we might get more business done if you\n then removed yourself from the chair first.\"\n\n\n Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit\n the vicinity with her usual efficiency.\nOnce seated, the AEC man said \"I'll get right to the point. You may\n find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to\n confiscate all of the devices using your so-called Expendable field,\n and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation.\"\n\n\n \"You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this,\" Carmen said\n ingratiatingly. \"Ever hear of the Mafia?\"\n\n\n \"Not much,\" the young man admitted earnestly, \"since the FBI finished\n with its deportations a few years back.\"\n\n\n I cleared my throat. \"I must admit that the destruction of a\n multi-billion business is disconcerting before lunch. May we ask why\n you took this step?\"\n\n\n The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. \"Have you\n noticed how unseasonably warm it is?\"\n\n\n \"I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you\n keep that suit coat on five minutes more.\"\n\n\n The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of\n his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap\n of sport shirt Carmen wore. \"We have to dress inconspicuously in the\n service,\" he panted weakly.\n\n\n I nodded understandingly. \"What does the heat have to do with the\n outlawing of the Expendables?\"\n\n\n \"At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense\n that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean\n temperature of the world,\" the AEC man said. \"But our scientists\n quickly found they weren't to blame.\"\n\n\n \"Clever of them.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible\n for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of\n conservation of energy,\nseemingly\n. It\nseemingly\ndestroys matter\n without creating energy. Actually—\"\n\n\n He paused dramatically.\n\n\n \"Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter\n to the energy potential of the planet in the form of\nheat\n. You see\n what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean\n temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame.\n They must be outlawed!\"\n\n\n \"I agree,\" I said reluctantly.\n\n\n Tony Carmen spoke up. \"No, you don't, Professor. We don't agree to\n that.\"\n\n\n I waved his protests aside.\n\n\n \"I\nwould\nagree,\" I said, \"except that it wouldn't work. Explain the\n danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they\n will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until\n we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" the young man demanded.\n\n\n \"Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use\n of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop\n people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are\n being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be\n generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell.\"\n\n\n \"Mass psychology isn't my strongest point,\" the young man said\n worriedly. \"But I suspect you may be right. Then—we'll be damned?\"\n\n\n \"No, not necessarily,\" I told him comfortingly. \"All we have to do is\nuse up\nthe excess energy with engines of a specific design.\"\n\n\n \"But can we design those engines in time?\" the young man wondered with\n uncharacteristic gloom.\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" I said, practising the power of positive thinking. \"Now\n that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear\n of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and\n create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy\n in our planetary potential.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is suggest by Carmen's response if he said it \"hotly?\"", "question_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM_1", "options": ["Carmen is afraid of the consequences", "Unknown", "He was angry", "Carmen was confused by the statement"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the \"Black Hand?\"", "question_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM_2", "options": ["The corpses", "N/A", "The government", "The mafia"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What makes the professor think the \"folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant?\"", "question_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM_3", "options": ["The mafia would not follow through on their threats", "He knew that he would get hurt soon", "The professor was turning his attention to the government project", "Carmen's questioning around physics"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the amount of machines Carmen need suggest about the mafia?", "question_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM_4", "options": ["They have money to spend", "No suggestion", "The organization is large", "They are committing lots of murders"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Carmen reference Sam Colt and Henry Ford?", "question_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM_5", "options": ["Support his business acumen", "They also created deadly inventions", "They were also part of the mafia", "To display his educational pedigree"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was referenced in the \"storied ride?\"", "question_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM_6", "options": ["The special ride that is experienced in a sedan", "The ride the mafia takes someone to assasinate", "A ride where someone tells a story the entire time", "No reference"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What transformation did Carmen and Squint do to the machine?", "question_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM_7", "options": ["They were able to make it easy reproducible", "They made it transportable", "They made it into a shooting ray", "No transformation "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about the devices creating heat?", "question_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM_8", "options": ["The government wanted the same machine", "No irony", "The machine creates heat when it was designed to dispose", "The machine was extremely cold in test runs"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What law in physics does this story focus on?", "question_unique_id": "61171_YRFEX6NM_9", "options": ["Law of Conversation of Energy", "Law of Heat Radiation", "Law of Atomic Energy", "Passage not based on physics"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/1/7/61171//61171-h//61171-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "63605", "set_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Beast-Jewel of Mars", "year": 1958, "author": "Thiessen, V. E.", "topic": "Adventure stories; Science fiction; PS; Short stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Legends -- Fiction", "article": "The Beast-Jewel of Mars\nBy V. E. THIESSEN\nThe city was strange, fantastic, beautiful.\n\n He'd never been there before, yet already he\n\n was a fabulous legend—a dire, hateful legend.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Spring 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an\n odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the\n little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he\n could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets\n that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.\n\n\n One part of his mind said,\nThis is it, this is the fabled city of\n Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends,\n and I must go down there.\nYet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in\n the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and\n urgent.\nGet away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the\n city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk,\n a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those\n who came before you.\nHe strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic\n beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to\n close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open,\n staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin\n wail of music reached him, saying,\nCome into the city, come down into\n the fabled city\n.\n\n\n He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal.\n The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it\n touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the\n towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.\n\n\n His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an\n instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red\n dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin\n strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.\n\n\n He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his\n face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone\n for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the\n sides of the canal and never look back.\n\n\n He told himself, \"I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol,\n and this is not real.\"\n\n\n He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until\n he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the\n canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his\n haste. He wouldn't look again.\n\n\n The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It\n told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and\n wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city,\n waiting for him to claim them.\n\n\n He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head\n began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him,\n beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.\n\n\n When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.\n\n\n When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy\n gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,\n \"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!\" The music was richer now, as if\n it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.\n\n\n A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue\n street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue\n leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew\n the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the\n sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, \"I give you the welcome\n of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it\n may be set in the records of the dreamers.\"\n\n\n The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, \"I am Eric\n North!\"\n\n\n The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was\n white. He cried aloud, \"It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the\n Legend.\" He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal\n hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.\nWhen Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about\n him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music.\n Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man\n came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang\n deafened Eric and the man cried, \"You are right. It is Eric the Bronze.\n Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city.\"\n\n\n The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took\n fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, \"Whips, bring the whips,\" and\n fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless\n feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed\n through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates\n closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart\n hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and\n looked behind to be sure he was safe.\n\n\n The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, \"Come back,\n Eric North. Come back to the city.\"\n\n\n He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until\n his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.\n\n\n And deep inside him some part of his mind said, \"This is a madness you\n cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known,\"\n and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.\n\n\n He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings\n of the great door, crying, \"Let me in! Please, take me back into the\n city.\"\n\n\n And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a\n city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and\n minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound\n of the city was a macabre song of hate.\n\n\n He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the\n beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it\n was beautiful again.\n\n\n He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the\n motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he\n stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat\n had not entirely failed him after all.\n\n\n He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to\n call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when\n it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps.\n And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the\n canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and\n the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he\n was beyond the range of the illusions.\n\n\n And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem,\n and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which\n he had been pitted.\n\n\n The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield\n against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had\n failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised\n pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense\n against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly\n to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and\n the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as\n the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.\n\n\n He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city,\n whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he\n had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they\n were as ugly as the second city had been.\n\n\n Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the\n arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver\n indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve\n North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he\n would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they\n had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would\n be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.\n\n\n The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had\n established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's\n face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.\n\n\n He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that\n he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a\n swift leap, calling, \"Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?\"\n\n\n The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, \"Garve,\"\n wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note\n clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently\n and began to read. Garve had scrawled:\n\n\n \"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down\n to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some\n sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd\n better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and\n I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight\n down the canal.\"\n\n\n Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently\n Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been\n so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.\n\n\n Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric\n selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They\n were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed\n with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That\n should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began\n walking back to the canal.\nThe return back to the city would always live in his mind as a\n phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he\n came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the\n wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same\n tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the\n wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen\n wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. \"Eric,\" the voice said. \"Eric,\n you did come back.\" The voice was his brother's, and he whirled,\n seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of\n his brother. The figure cried, \"The hat! You fool, get rid of that\n hat!\" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked\n so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung\n away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.\n\n\n The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome\n than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, \"Come,\" and\n Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.\n\n\n Garve said, \"Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet\n someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from\n this side of the city.\"\n\n\n Eric asked, \"You knew I'd come after you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back.\"\n\n\n Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. \"The Legend? Eric the\n Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?\"\n\n\n \"Not so loud!\" Garve's voice cautioned him. \"Of course the crowd called\n you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders\n believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy,\n superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed\n them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze.\"\n\n\n Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened\n the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well\n armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled\n at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another\n struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and\n escape. He asked, \"Who are the Elders?\"\n\n\n \"We are going to them, to the center of the city.\" Garve's voice\n sharpened, \"Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are\n looking after us. Don't look back.\"\n\n\n After a moment Garve said, \"I think they are following us. Get ready\n to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center.\n The Elders will be expecting you.\" Garve glanced back, and his voice\n sharpened, \"Now! Run!\"\n\n\n They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther\n up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.\n\n\n Garve cried, \"In here,\" and pulled Eric into a crevice between two\n buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes.\n The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.\n\n\n Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, \"Wait here. And if you\n value my life, don't use that gun.\" Then he was gone, running deerlike\n down the street.\n\n\n For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and\n two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. \"Let\n him go. Get the other one. The other one.\"\n\n\n Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to\n converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in\n the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, \"If you value\n my life don't use the gun.\"\n\n\n There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken\n prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men\n held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly,\n calculatingly. One of them said, \"Get the whips. If we whip him he will\n not come back.\" The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could\n hardly hear it.\n\n\n There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's\n words that these people were superstitious.\n\n\n He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the\n thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, \"And can you\n so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips\n defeat the prophesy?\"\n\n\n There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood,\n fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without\n the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it\n out.\nThen one of the men cried, \"Fools! It is true. We must take no chance\n with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now,\n then we may forget the prophesy.\"\n\n\n The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, \"Get the sword, get the\n guards, and kill him at once!\"\n\n\n Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were\n alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed\n with the pain.\n\n\n The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing\n gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before\n Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut\n downward across Eric's neck.\n\n\n A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, \"Hold!\" And a\n murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.\n\n\n \"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes.\"\n\n\n Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She\n was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and\n her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across\n the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.\nShe said, \"Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so\n that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me\n your hand, stranger.\" She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook\n his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,\n \"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield.\" He tensed his\n muscles and began to pull.\n\n\n She cried, \"No! You fool. Come up on the horse,\" and pulled back with\n an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and\n the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of\n freedom.\n\n\n Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young\n suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling\n back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent\n that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply,\n oddly happy as they rode.\n\n\n After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the\n city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it\n contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city.\n It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched\n among enemies.\n\n\n The girl halted before the structure and said, \"Dismount here, Eric.\"\n\n\n Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had\n held her. She said, \"Knock three times on the door. I will see you\n again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here.\"\n\n\n Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made\n of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door,\n but a more timeless, more functional beauty.\n\n\n The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. \"Come in. The Council\n awaits you. Follow me, please.\"\n\n\n Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was\n obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the\n room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building.\n Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a\n chair at the base of the T-shaped table.\n\n\n There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric\n watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place\n there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had\n lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously\n presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. \"I am Kroon, the eldest of\n the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your\n identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some\n sort of explanation.\" He glanced around the room and asked, \"What is\n the judgment of the elders?\"\nEric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if\n in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, \"And what is your opinion,\n Daughter of the City?\"\n\n\n Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future.\n She said, \"He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt.\"\n\n\n Eric asked, \"And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so\n despised in the city?\"\n\n\n Kroon answered, \"According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the\n city. This, and other things.\"\n\n\n Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were\n the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if\n there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the\n respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.\n\n\n Kroon said, \"I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the\n City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars\n ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and\n gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it\n became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and\n could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets.\n Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots\n destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for\n this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable\n again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the\n building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a\n small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars.\"\n\n\n \"This whole city is a machine!\" Eric asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet,\n in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this,\n that it translates thought into reality.\"\n\n\n Eric stared. The idea was staggering.\n\n\n \"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is\n necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting\n device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any\n sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this\n material into the pattern already recorded from thought.\" Kroon paused.\n \"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape.\n Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your\n mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it.\"\n\n\n Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before\n him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He\n drank it, convinced completely.\n\n\n Eric asked, \"And I am to destroy the City?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. The time has come.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling\n beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.\n\n\n Kroon said, \"There are difficulties. The machine builds according to\n the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual\n in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass.\n We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew\n drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and\n greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong\n is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own\n evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the\n beauty they have lost here.\"\n\n\n Kroon sighed. \"The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even\n know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us,\n the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the\n machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we\n build and control the outward appearance of the city.\n\n\n \"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient\n Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be\n destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that\n our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power.\n The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze.\n It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man\n would come.\"\n\n\n Eric said, \"I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a\n space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to\n protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield\n of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come\n is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?\"\n\n\n For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, \"The name Eric\n was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their\n thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far\n flung kind to return.\"\n\n\n Eric nodded. He asked, \"What happens now?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If\n the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the\n Legend, you may stay or go as you desire.\"\n\n\n \"My brother, Garve. What about him?\"\n\n\n \"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this\n building.\" Kroon clasped his hands. \"Nolette, will you show Eric his\n quarters?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "When Eric falls into the canal and states \"with his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant,\" what does it suggest about the city?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_1", "options": ["The city has a hold on Eric and was drawing him in", "The city was vast and foreboding", "No suggestion", "The city was in a dusty part of Mars"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What word below best describes the situation with the city Eric is in?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_2", "options": ["Heaven ", "Purgatory", "Hell ", "Parabellum"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is ironic about Garve also being attracted to the city?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_3", "options": ["There was no irony about the attraction", "It was his curiosity that drove him there", "He had knew about the city the entire time", "He also had a hat that supported the attraction to the city"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is humorous about Eric choosing to embrace the lLegen when the crowd captures him?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_4", "options": ["The crowd laughed at Eric when he stated it", "The change their mind from whipping to killing Eric", "No humor at all ", "They didn't fall for the trick"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the city represent in the passage?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_5", "options": ["Desire leads to greed", "The bronze of Eric", "The fallacy of humans", "Earth"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was it important to wait for a man named Eric to come and destroy the city?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_6", "options": ["N/A", "It gave credence to the prophecy", "Was random name that was chosen for no purpose ", "N/A"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the decline of Mars suggest to the reader?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_7", "options": ["Mars was inhabited by evil people", "The same thing can happen to Earth", "N/A", "Mars didn't decline and found the way to happiness"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the elders want to destroy the city?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_8", "options": ["The population eventually abused the machine", "They were forced by prophecy", "They did not want to force the destruction", "N/A"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why do you think Garve wanted to stay in the city?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_9", "options": ["N/A", "It is unknown", "Garve was attracted by the beautiful women", "He was going to be rich"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is symbolic of the title?", "question_unique_id": "63605_OQYYCPU3_10", "options": ["It describes the prophecy", "N/A", "The elders named it", "The title represents the two sides of the city"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/6/0/63605//63605-h//63605-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "41562", "set_unique_id": "41562_EF0WORNI", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Hanging Stranger", "year": 1955, "author": "Dick, Philip K.", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "THE HANGING STRANGER\nBY PHILIP K. DICK\nILLUSTRATED BY SMITH\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction\n Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover\n any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEd had always been a practical man, when he saw something was\n wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw\nit\nhanging in the\n town square.\n\n Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car\n out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His\n back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and\n wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done\n okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he\n liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!\n\n\n It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying\n commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and\n packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks\n and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red\n light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him;\n he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the\n records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove\n slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the\n town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND\n SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again\n he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain\n and bench and single lamppost.\n\n\n From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle,\n swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled\n down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of\n some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the\n square.\n\n\n Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park\n and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a\n display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he\n swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.\n\n\n It was a body. A human body.\n\"Look at it!\" Loyce snapped. \"Come on out here!\"\n\n\n Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe\n coat with dignity. \"This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy\n standing there.\"\n\n\n \"See it?\" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up\n against the sky—the post and the bundle swinging from it. \"There it is.\n How the hell long has it been there?\" His voice rose excitedly. \"What's\n wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!\"\n\n\n Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. \"Take it easy, old man. There must\n be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.\"\n\n\n \"A reason! What kind of a reason?\"\n\n\n Fergusson shrugged. \"Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that\n wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?\"\n\n\n Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. \"What's up, boys?\"\n\n\n \"There's a body hanging from the lamppost,\" Loyce said. \"I'm going to\n call the cops.\"\n\n\n \"They must know about it,\" Potter said. \"Or otherwise it wouldn't be\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I got to get back in.\" Fergusson headed back into the store. \"Business\n before pleasure.\"\n\n\n Loyce began to get hysterical. \"You see it? You see it hanging there? A\n man's body! A dead man!\"\n\n\n \"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee.\"\n\n\n \"You mean it's been there all afternoon?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. What's the matter?\" Potter glanced at his watch. \"Have to run.\n See you later, Ed.\"\n\n\n Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the\n sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously\n at the dark bundle—and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any\n attention.\n\n\n \"I'm going nuts,\" Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and\n crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him.\n He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.\n\n\n The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray\n suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never\n seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and\n in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin\n was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A\n pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His\n eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.\n\n\n \"For Heaven's sake,\" Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea\n and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with\n revulsion—and fear.\nWhy?\nWho was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?\n\n\n And—why didn't anybody notice?\n\n\n He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. \"Watch it!\" the\n man grated, \"Oh, it's you, Ed.\"\n\n\n Ed nodded dazedly. \"Hello, Jenkins.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. \"You look\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"The body. There in the park.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, Ed.\" Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND\n SERVICE. \"Take it easy.\"\n\n\n Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. \"Something\n wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Ed's not feeling well.\"\n\n\n Loyce yanked himself free. \"How can you stand here? Don't you see it?\n For God's sake—\"\n\n\n \"What's he talking about?\" Margaret asked nervously.\n\n\n \"The body!\" Ed shouted. \"The body hanging there!\"\n\n\n More people collected. \"Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?\"\n\n\n \"The body!\" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at\n him. He tore loose. \"Let me go! The police! Get the police!\"\n\n\n \"Ed—\"\n\n\n \"Better get a doctor!\"\n\n\n \"He must be sick.\"\n\n\n \"Or drunk.\"\n\n\n Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell.\n Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men\n and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them\n toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man,\n showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service\n counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically.\n His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.\n\n\n \"Do something!\" he screamed. \"Don't stand there! Do something!\n Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!\"\n\n\n The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving\n efficiently toward Loyce.\n\"Name?\" the cop with the notebook murmured.\n\n\n \"Loyce.\" He mopped his forehead wearily. \"Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me.\n Back there—\"\n\n\n \"Address?\" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through\n traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the\n seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.\n\n\n \"1368 Hurst Road.\"\n\n\n \"That's here in Pikeville?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. \"Listen\n to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost—\"\n\n\n \"Where were you today?\" the cop behind the wheel demanded.\n\n\n \"Where?\" Loyce echoed.\n\n\n \"You weren't in your shop, were you?\"\n\n\n \"No.\" He shook his head. \"No, I was home. Down in the basement.\"\n\n\n \"In the\nbasement\n?\"\n\n\n \"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame.\n Why? What has that to do with—\"\n\n\n \"Was anybody else down there with you?\"\n\n\n \"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school.\" Loyce looked from\n one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.\n \"You mean because I was down there I missed—the explanation? I didn't\n get in on it? Like everybody else?\"\n\n\n After a pause the cop with the notebook said: \"That's right. You missed\n the explanation.\"\n\n\n \"Then it's official? The body—it's\nsupposed\nto be hanging there?\"\n\n\n \"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see.\"\n\n\n Ed Loyce grinned weakly. \"Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep\n end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like\n the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking\n over.\" He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands\n shaking. \"I'm glad to know it's on the level.\"\n\n\n \"It's on the level.\" The police car was getting near the Hall of\n Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights\n had not yet come on.\n\n\n \"I feel better,\" Loyce said. \"I was pretty excited there, for a minute.\n I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to\n take me in, is there?\"\n\n\n The two cops said nothing.\n\n\n \"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all\n right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of—\"\n\n\n \"This won't take long,\" the cop behind the wheel interrupted. \"A short\n process. Only a few minutes.\"\n\n\n \"I hope it's short,\" Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a\n stoplight. \"I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting\n excited like that and—\"\n\n\n Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled\n to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light\n changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people,\n burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts,\n people running.\n\n\n They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in\n Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small\n town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.\n\n\n They weren't cops—and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter,\n Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't\n know—and they didn't care.\nThat\nwas the strange part.\n\n\n Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the\n startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the\n back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete\n steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side,\n gasping and panting.\n\n\n There was no sound behind him. He had got away.\n\n\n He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and\n ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street\n light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.\n\n\n And to his right—the police station.\n\n\n He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery\n store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred\n windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the\n darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to\n keep moving, get farther away from them.\nThem?\nLoyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the\n City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass\n and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark\n windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.\n\n\n And—something else.\n\n\n Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than\n the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost\n into the sky.\n\n\n He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him\n struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound.\n A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.\n\n\n Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over\n the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid.\nIn the vortex\n something moved.\nFlickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky,\n pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense\n swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.\n\n\n Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that\n hung above him.\n\n\n He was seeing—them.\nFor a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool\n of scummy water.\n\n\n They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the\n City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of\n some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest—and then crawled\n crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.\n\n\n He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he\n shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the\n City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of\n the building and halting for a moment before going on.\n\n\n Were there more of them?\n\n\n It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm\n weren't men. They were alien—from some other world, some other\n dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the\n universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm\n of being.\n\n\n On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved\n toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter\n the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.\n\n\n Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight,\n clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly\n fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and\n came to rest among them.\n\n\n Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves\n as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration.\n Mimicry.\n\n\n Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The\n alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe\n darkness made no difference to them.\n\n\n He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and\n women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting\n groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the\n evening gloom.\n\n\n Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the\n bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A\n moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.\nLoyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired\n faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them\n paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats,\n jiggling with the motion of the bus.\n\n\n The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the\n sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A\n businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.\n\n\n Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a\n package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater.\n Gazing absently ahead of her.\n\n\n A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.\n\n\n A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with\n packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.\n\n\n Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to\n their families. To dinner.\n\n\n Going home—with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask\n of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their\n town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in\n his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked.\n They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.\n\n\n Maybe there were others.\n\n\n Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a\n mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had\n passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down.\n Apparently their power-zone was limited.\n\n\n A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his\n chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache.\n Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small\n hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly\n away.\n\n\n Loyce tensed. One of\nthem\n? Or—another they had missed?\n\n\n The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever.\n Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them—or one of the things itself, an alien\n insect from beyond.\n\n\n The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into\n the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.\n\n\n The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second\n something passed between them.\n\n\n A look rich with meaning.\n\n\n Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step\n down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber\n door swung open.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. \"What the hell—\"\n\n\n Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A\n residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him,\n the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet.\n They were coming after him.\n\n\n Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against\n the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness.\n Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid\n down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.\n\n\n Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in\n the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed\n before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.\n\n\n Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The\n man screamed and tried to roll away. \"\nStop!\nFor God's sake listen—\"\n\n\n He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and\n dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others\n were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk,\n up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were\n bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed\n man who had come after him.\n\n\n Had he made a mistake?\n\n\n But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out—away from\n them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between\n their world and his.\n\"Ed!\" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. \"What is it? What—\"\n\n\n Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.\n \"Pull down the shades. Quick.\"\n\n\n Janet moved toward the window. \"But—\"\n\n\n \"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?\"\n\n\n \"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's\n happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?\"\n\n\n Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen.\n From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran\n his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living\n room.\n\n\n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"I don't have much time. They know I escaped\n and they'll be looking for me.\"\n\n\n \"Escaped?\" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty\n well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police\n department. What they did with the\nreal\nhumans they—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension.\n They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind.\"\n\n\n \"My mind?\"\n\n\n \"Their entrance is\nhere\n, in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you.\n The whole town—except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful\n enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're\n limited! They can make mistakes!\"\n\n\n Janet shook her head. \"I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane.\"\n\n\n \"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be\n like all the rest of you.\" Loyce peered out the window. \"But I can't\n stand here talking. Get your coat.\"\n\n\n \"My coat?\"\n\n\n \"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help.\n Fight this thing. They\ncan\nbe beaten. They're not infallible. It's\n going to be close—but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!\" He grabbed\n her arm roughly. \"Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving.\n Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that.\"\n\n\n White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.\n \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\n Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the\n floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. \"They'll have the\n highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got\n onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about\n it.\"\n\n\n \"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord—it's completely closed. Nobody's\n supposed to drive over it.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. \"That's our best\n chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of\n gas, isn't it?\"\n\n\n Janet was dazed.\n\n\n \"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon.\" Janet moved toward\n the stairs. \"Ed, I—\"\n\n\n \"Call the twins!\" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing\n stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.\n\n\n \"Come on downstairs,\" Janet called in a wavering voice. \"We're—going\n out for awhile.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Tommy's voice came.\n\n\n \"Hurry up,\" Ed barked. \"Get down here, both of you.\"\n\n\n Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. \"I was doing my home work.\n We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done—\"\n\n\n \"You can forget about fractions.\" Ed grabbed his son as he came down the\n stairs and propelled him toward the door. \"Where's Jim?\"\n\n\n \"He's coming.\"\n\n\n Jim started slowly down the stairs. \"What's up, Dad?\"\n\n\n \"We're going for a ride.\"\n\n\n \"A ride? Where?\"\n\n\n Ed turned to Janet. \"We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn\n it on.\" He pushed her toward the set. \"So they'll think we're still—\"\n\n\n He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out.\n Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of\n motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy.\n It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse—the thing hurtling at him,\n cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow\n T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange\n half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?\n\n\n A stinger.\n\n\n Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce\n rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as\n statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again.\n This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It\n bounced against the wall and fluttered down.\n\n\n Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien\n mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his\n own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence,\n settling over him—and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a\n broken heap on the rug.\n\n\n It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of\n some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind\n tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his\n knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still,\n neither of them moving.\n\n\n The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It\n was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and\n open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.\n\n\n Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and\n son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.\n\n\n A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness\n toward the edge of town.\nThe early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for\n breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing\n was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled.\n Ten miles—on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night.\n His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly\n exhausted.\n\n\n But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.\n\n\n He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and\n fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything\n receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from\n Pikeville.\n\n\n A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in\n wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a\n gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens\n pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.\n\n\n The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up\n to the station. \"Thank God.\" He caught hold of the wall. \"I didn't think\n I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear\n them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" the attendant demanded. \"You in a wreck? A hold-up?\"\n\n\n Loyce shook his head wearily. \"They have the whole town. The City Hall\n and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the\n first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them\n hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond\n them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun\n came up.\"\n\n\n The attendant licked his lip nervously. \"You're out of your head. I\n better get a doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Get me into Oak Grove,\" Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.\n \"We've got to get started—cleaning them out. Got to get started right\n away.\"\nThey kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had\n finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet.\n He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his\n cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.\n\n\n \"You don't believe me,\" Loyce said.\n\n\n The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently\n away. \"Suit yourself.\" The Commissioner moved over to the window and\n stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. \"I believe you,\"\n he said abruptly.\n\n\n Loyce sagged. \"Thank God.\"\n\n\n \"So you got away.\" The Commissioner shook his head. \"You were down in\n your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.\"\n\n\n Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. \"I have a\n theory,\" he murmured.\n\n\n \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting\n at the top—the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a\n widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next\n town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on\n for a long time.\"\n\n\n \"A long time?\"\n\n\n \"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new.\"\n\n\n \"Why do you say that?\"\n\n\n \"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A\n religious picture—an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah.\n Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth—\"\n\n\n \"So?\"\n\n\n \"They were all represented by figures.\" Loyce looked up at the\n Commissioner. \"Beelzebub was represented as—a giant fly.\"\n\n\n The Commissioner grunted. \"An old struggle.\"\n\n\n \"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They\n make gains—but finally they're defeated.\"\n\n\n \"Why defeated?\"\n\n\n \"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the\n Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The\n realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they\n understood. Had escaped, like I did.\" He clenched his fists. \"I killed\n one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.\"\n\n\n The Commissioner nodded. \"Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did.\n Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.\" He\n turned from the window. \"Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured\n everything out.\"\n\n\n \"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the\n lamppost. I don't understand that.\nWhy?\nWhy did they deliberately hang\n him there?\"\n\n\n \"That would seem simple.\" The Commissioner smiled faintly. \"\nBait.\n\"\n\n\n Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. \"Bait? What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was\n under control—and who had escaped.\"\n\n\n Loyce recoiled with horror. \"Then they\nexpected\nfailures! They\n anticipated—\" He broke off. \"They were ready with a trap.\"\n\n\n \"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.\" The\n Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. \"Come along, Loyce. There's\n a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste.\"\n\n\n Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. \"And the man.\nWho was the\n man?\nI never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger.\n All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed—\"\n\n\n There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.\n \"Maybe,\" he said softly, \"you'll understand that, too. Come along with\n me, Mr. Loyce.\" He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a\n glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a\n platform of some sort. A telephone pole—and a rope! \"Right this way,\"\n the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.\nAs the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came\n up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and\n coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were\n there, hurrying home to dinner.\n\n\n \"Good night,\" the guard said, locking the door after him.\n\n\n \"Good night,\" Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street\n toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the\n vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there\n was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.\n\n\n At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The\n street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze.\n\n\n From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large\n and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.\n\n\n What the hell was it?\n\n\n Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and\n hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner\n table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous\n and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew\n him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made\n him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened—and fascinated.\n\n\n And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why was Ed considered a practical man?", "question_unique_id": "41562_EF0WORNI_1", "options": ["He was actually considered a highly declared official", "He tried to fix wrongs", "He was from the city", "He worked a blue collar job in sales"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was ironic about the crowds response to Ed when he viewed the body closely?", "question_unique_id": "41562_EF0WORNI_2", "options": ["No irony", "The body was a fake and was no reason for concern", "The body was actually alive", "The crowd were more concerned about Ed than the dead body"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the statement \"There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered. \"Maybe, \" he said softly, \"you'll understand that too.\"\" suggest?", "question_unique_id": "41562_EF0WORNI_3", "options": ["Unknown", "The Commissioner does not believe Loyce", "Loyce has deceived the Commissioner", "The Commissioner is foreshadowing a secret"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is suggested by the ending?", "question_unique_id": "41562_EF0WORNI_4", "options": ["Loyce was killed in the jail", "Loyce turned into an alien", "Aliens have infiltrated Oak Grove", "Loyce was able to escape the aliens"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the aliens post a dead man hanging from the lamppost?", "question_unique_id": "41562_EF0WORNI_5", "options": ["The deadman hung himself from feat", "Unknown", "To spark fear into the city", "To bait out the uncontrolled"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Loyce able to avoid being controlled by the aliens?", "question_unique_id": "41562_EF0WORNI_6", "options": ["No evidence in the story. ", "Loyce was controlled by the aliens but was unaware", "He had a genetic trait that made him unabated", "The cellar may have blocked the control mechanism"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Janet and Tommy shocked when Loyce killed the alien?", "question_unique_id": "41562_EF0WORNI_7", "options": ["They had been stung by the alien", "They had never seen Loyce display such violence", "The alien was Jimmy", "The shock of seeing an alien"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did the aliens represent?", "question_unique_id": "41562_EF0WORNI_8", "options": ["Killers", "Savages", "Insects", "Monster"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/1/5/6/41562//41562-h//41562-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50847", "set_unique_id": "50847_VYSZRIB1", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Tea Tray in the Sky", "year": 1961, "author": "Smith, Evelyn E.", "topic": "PS; Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "Tea Tray in the Sky\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nVisiting a society is tougher than being born\n \ninto it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\nThe picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward\n end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled\n apathetically in a chair.\n\n\n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In\n need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they\n swear by it on Meropé.\"\n\n\n A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to\n the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on\n her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan\n clog.\n\n\n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the\n Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf\n remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair\n thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from\n the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.\n\n\n Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"\n\n\n The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over\n the death of your mother.\"\n\n\n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its\n fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its\n lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a\n monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n\n\n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few\n blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n\n\n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful,\n young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone\n as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for\n violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n\n\n \"An Earth tabu?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in\n the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\nMichael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the\n Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe\n so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself,\n with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all\n the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all\n the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before\n that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing\n with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the\n same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no\n differences, and hence no wars.\n\n\n Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years\n there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and\n plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar\n systems—injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths\n of Aldebaran were still trying to add\nthought\nto the statute).\n\n\n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any\n reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to\n retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive\n forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had,\n perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the\n world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's\n face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the\n past—the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal\n furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?\n\n\n The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.\n\n\n The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody\n would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of\n free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n\n\n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured,\n abashed.\n\n\n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is\n Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He\n handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter\n suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his\n address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character\n of the utmost respectability.\n\n\n \"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got\n to do with me?\"\n\n\n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it\n becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n\n\n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n \"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while\n lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Would you like to be called guilty of—\" Carpenter paused before the\n dreaded word—\"\nintolerance\n?\"\n\n\n \"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked\nGloves B\nyielded a\n pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic\n and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n\n\n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n \"but the price is meager. You\nknow\nwhen you buy Plummy Fruitcake from\n Vega.\"\n\n\n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in\n Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a\n while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself\n until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into\n trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"\n\n\n He twisted himself around—it was boiling hot inside the jet bus\n and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably—and struck his\n head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient\n arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n\n\n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that\n has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other\n passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n\n\n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n\n\n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought\n it arose from defective jets.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"\n\n\n \"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\nMichael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough,\n he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant\n world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will\n we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n\n\n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were.\n They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they\n leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"\n\n\n \"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty\n two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n \"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all\n passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into\n the Union early this morning.\"\n\n\n All the passengers cheered.\n\n\n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to\n appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in\n public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n\n\n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching\n their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n\n\n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in\n piercingly bright green.\n\"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n \"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"\n\n\n The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew,\n floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him\n curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of\n those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n\n\n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders—humanoids from\n Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians—but nothing to\n compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed\n tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded\n alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others\n whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.\n\n\n The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered\n kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and\n banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green\n cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green\n breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat\n less pudgy man.\nCarpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate\n business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you\n like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get\n myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\"\n Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and\n scuttled off on six legs apiece.\n\n\n \"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the\n youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's\n frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with\n eating in public here on Earth?\"\n\n\n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he\n cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even\n mention in public, aren't there?\"\n\n\n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian.\n But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted\n the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated\n one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the\n Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto\n extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n\n\n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice,\n however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve\n to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all\n bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located\n throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"\n\n\n After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were\n watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and\n pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n\n\n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\nInside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively\n marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a\n two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into\n a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food\n compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics\n and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste\n time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a\n matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to\n chew food that was meant to be gulped.\n\n\n A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from\n gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid\n condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n\n\n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment\n to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at\n the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n\n\n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of\n great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n\n\n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined\n up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of\n the tour he offered:\n\n\n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n\n\n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"\n\n\n \"Movid stars go to Mars.\"\n\n\n Carpenter smiled politely at them. \"No space trips for us today,\n gentlemen. We're staying on Terra.\" He guided the bewildered young man\n through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of\n surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for\n business.\n\n\n \"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady,\n lined with luxury\nhukka\nfur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare\n scents from Algedi.\"\n\n\n \"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine\n cab from Mizar. Just press a button—it won't cost you nuttin'—see\n a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing\n Eliza.\"\n\n\n \"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race\n or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides\n in the taxi from Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't we—couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael\n faltered.\n\n\n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more\n than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n\n\n \"But they have no feet.\"\n\n\n \"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\nCarpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which\n reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no!\n Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break\n the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want\n to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n\n\n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed\n him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"\n\n\n After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and\n was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork,\n the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the\n most cosmopolitan city—cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as\n its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall\n helical edifices of the Venusians.\n\n\n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached\n architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the\n Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n\n\n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.\n\n\n Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was\n still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out\n from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire\n about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to\n bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are\n becoming so popular....\"\n\"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play\nBeautiful Blue\n Deneb\njust once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard\n this before.\"\n\n\n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what\n a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the\n wasteful sea.\"\n\n\n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike\n manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"\n\n\n \"The word\nhotel\n,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is\n not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant\n connotations. It means—a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n\n\n \"That word is also—well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it\n is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n\n\n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"More like bees. So those creatures who travel—\" Carpenter lowered his\n voice modestly \"—\nalone\nhire a family for the duration of their stay.\n There are a number of families available, but the better types come\n rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price\n controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as\n much as—if you'll excuse my use of the expression—tariffs would.\"\nThe taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with\n transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of\n the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the\n standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because\n most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical\n devices.\n\n\n \"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square,\n but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit\n the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the\n Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the\n clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n\n\n \"The pictures in my history books—\" Michael began.\n\n\n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak\n trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did\n you use the word\nhistory\n?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I\n have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the\n police, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.\n\n\n \"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square.\n\n\n \"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas\n displays.\"\n\n\n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It\n came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels\n bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth,\n good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe\n as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the\n cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n\n\n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an\n expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called\n Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see—\"\n\n\n \"Listen, could we—\" Michael began.\n\n\n \"—Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second—\"\n\n\n \"By the way—\"\n\n\n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to\n interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n\n\n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed.\n If I might.\"\n\n\n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks\n was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions.\n Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to\n take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n\n\n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The\n installations are extremely expensive.\"\n\n\n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety\n equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.\n\n\n Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a\n remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in\n his history—in his books, except that none of them showed the huge\n golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\nAttendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n \"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor.\nA\ngroup Vegans, fourteenth floor\n right.\nB\ngroup, fourteenth floor left.\nC\ngroup, fifteenth floor\n right.\nD\ngroup, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor.\n Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left.\n Uranians, basement....\"\n\n\n Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed,\n translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying\n themselves on\nwemps\n, a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign\n planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres\n prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky\n to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one\n credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:\n\n\n \"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive,\n for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use\n oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub\n with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick\n themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it\n away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are\n than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that\n works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n\"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we\n must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious,\n but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself\n beneath your station.\"\n\n\n Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n \"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n\n\n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you\n choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n\n\n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own\n some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's\n an Earth family that's chosen you—it's so awkward being adopted by\n extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl,\n you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in\n Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n\n\n \"\nMarried!\n\" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You\nmustn't\nuse\n that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive\n possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha.\n Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted\n her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having\n her, would you?\"\n\n\n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n \"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I\n would report you.\"\n\n\n Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot\n adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for\n them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one\n of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n\n\n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar\n curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without\n fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl\n when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n\n\n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both\n sexes are represented in our society.\"\n\n\n \"On Talitha—\" Carpenter began.\n\n\n \"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"\n\n\n The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the\n Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if\n it had been waiting for his return.\n\n\n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the\n noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad\n place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed\n with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm\n back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n\n\n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural\n area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over.\n How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for\n insulting civilization.\"\n\n\n The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring\n sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick\n death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by\n skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n\n\n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was the one rule that was recognized by the entire Universe?", "question_unique_id": "50847_VYSZRIB1_1", "options": ["Don't injure others", "Do not invade another planet", "There is not one rule", "Customs and all tabus of planets were law"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When Michael stated \"How could I even have had such a ridiculous idea,\" why was he abashed?", "question_unique_id": "50847_VYSZRIB1_2", "options": ["He was embarrassed", "Michael was contemplative ", "The other man was getting under his skin", "Michael was angry"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Michael shriek when talking with the salesman?", "question_unique_id": "50847_VYSZRIB1_3", "options": ["Learning about the creatures on Electra", "The possible accusal of intolerance", "Michael was offended by the implication of the salesman", "Michael was scared of the salesman"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the passage's theme resemble in current society?", "question_unique_id": "50847_VYSZRIB1_4", "options": ["Cruelty", "Oversensitivity", "Cancel culture ", "No current theme"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is problematic about how Carpenter suggests Michael should behave?", "question_unique_id": "50847_VYSZRIB1_5", "options": ["It is impossible to refrain from offending anyone", "Carpenter is unaware of the tubres", "Carpenter is suggesting that Michael be rude to other planetary beings ", "Nothing problematic, Carpenter is giving sound advice. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about the Christmas displays?", "question_unique_id": "50847_VYSZRIB1_6", "options": ["No irony", "It is November in the story", "It is warm weather ", "There are individuals that get offended by Christmas displays"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Michael think \"not any more\" after the euthanasia video?", "question_unique_id": "50847_VYSZRIB1_7", "options": ["Michael did not want to see Carpenter again", "Michael thought about avoiding public transportation ", "Michael considered his trip euthanasia", "Michael wanted to avoid the brother hood again"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Michael consider his actions as a \"crude primitive?\"", "question_unique_id": "50847_VYSZRIB1_8", "options": ["Michael didn't consider himself a crude primitive ", "He interrupted Carpenter", "Michael wanted to eat in front of society", "Michael made a gender joke"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/4/50847//50847-h//50847-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62212", "set_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Prison Planet", "year": 1962, "author": "Tucker, Wilson", "topic": "Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Interplanetary voyages -- Fiction; PS; Space ships -- Fiction", "article": "PRISON PLANET\nBy BOB TUCKER\nTo remain on Mars meant death from agonizing\n\n space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay\n\n days of flight away. And there was only\n\n a surface rocket in which to escape—with\n\n a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what\nI\nsay goes around here. It doesn't\n happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits,\n and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will\n be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat,\n get this:\nI'm\ngoing to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or\n no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because\n this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my\n position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n \"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"\n\n\n Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the\n woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look,\n wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the\n stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray\n almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n\n\n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job,\n black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated\n a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four\n nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water\n tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards,\n allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.\n\n\n Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the\n office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through\n the narrow door.\n\n\n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me\n throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his\n chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n\n\n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he\n blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\nWhen the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the\n chair.\n\n\n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"\n\n\n \"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed\n door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there\n has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed\n on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she\n dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital,\n I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a\n jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and\n that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n\n\n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n\n\n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought\n of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all\n night tearing them out. We just\nmight\nbe able to hop by dawn ... and\n hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"\n\n\n The nurse came out of the door.\n\n\n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n\n\n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n\n\n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look\n at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n\n\n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How\n long will it take?\"\n\n\n \"Eight days, in\nthat\nship.\"\n\n\n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson\n was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship\n meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in\n that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and\n Gladney.\n\n\n \"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n\n\n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n\n\n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean?\n What is his record?\"\n\n\n Peterson opened his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record\n around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n\n\n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He\n turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n\n\n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"\n\n\n Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was\n attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch.\n And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the\n Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n\n\n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around\n Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps\n on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that\n leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n\n\n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case.\n It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one\n word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"\n\n\n The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\nRat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel,\n checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n\n\n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip\n her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the\n Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock.\n The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building.\n On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat\n outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n\n\n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the\n wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.\n\n\n Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a\n sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n\n\n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat\n regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he\n stepped to the sill.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"—in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning\n conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n\n\n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot\n that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n\n\n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly\n as he detected it in her words.\n\n\n \"Well,\ncan\nyou?\" she demanded.\n\n\n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"\n\n\n \"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight.\n And ... well, we want\nyou\nto pilot it! She refuses to risk\n Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n\n\n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n\n\n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the\n room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray\n explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please,\n can you?\"\n\n\n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the\n window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n\n\n \"When?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again.\n Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning,\n she saw him back again.\n\n\n \"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap\n good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he\n disappeared upwards.\n\n\n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the\n time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began\n wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window\n announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw\n him out there with arms upstretched.\n\n\n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed\n girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as\n she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back\n soon....\" and he was gone.\n\n\n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient\n agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\nFeet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her\n hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her\n ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away\n in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on\n some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind\n returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting\n that. I had forgotten you—\"\n\n\n \"—had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The\n pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far\n horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n\n\n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n\n\n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n\n\n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without\n warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n \"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she\n tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to\n the hammocks.\n\n\n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"\n\n\n \"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape.\n You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up\n tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n\n\n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n\n\n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n\n\n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.\n\n\n \"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we\n crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us\n in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ...\n happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for\n fear of worrying you.\"\nThe girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the\n ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the\n open lock.\n\n\n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n \"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool\n stunts! I just didn't realize until now the\nwhy\nof that law.\"\n\n\n \"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found\n out the\nwhy\nof that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and\n lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world,\n humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay\n right at home.\"\n\n\n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n\n\n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first.\n Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n\n\n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a\n sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n\n\n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"\n\n\n Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that\n shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his\n arms. The burden groaned.\n\n\n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n\n\n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n\n\n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n\n\n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in.\n Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped\n buckles.\n\n\n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n\n\n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n\n\n \"\nFan\nhim? I don't understand.\"\n\n\n \"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up\n and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings\n as he padded away.\n\n\n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago.\n Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of\n bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian\n snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped\n for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n\n\n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his\n features. She tried to struggle up.\n\n\n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked\n several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n\n\n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.\n\n\n Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n\"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too\n familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its\n crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear.\n She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her\n face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The\n Centaurian was grinning at her.\n\n\n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished\n she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n\n\n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest\n strap was lying loose at his side.\n\n\n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three\n hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control\n panel.\n\n\n \"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook\n her head and looked at the others.\n\n\n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n\n\n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter—?\" pointing.\n\n\n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing\n itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies\n in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n\n\n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n\n\n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe\n no. Where's it hurt?\"\n\n\n Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further\n and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his\n eyes that night ... only\nlast\nnight ... in the office. Peterson had\n refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n\n\n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n\n\n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do\n Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n\n\n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up\n there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n\n\n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over\n in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to\n handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because\n of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n\n\n \"So you?\"\n\n\n \"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or\n will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for\n work.\" She shivered.\n\n\n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n\n\n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat\n threw up a hand to stop her.\n\n\n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n\n\n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold,\n yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n\n\n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of\n course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from\n another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her\n face accented the fact.\n\n\n \"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n\n\n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and\n bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes\n swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front\n name?\"\n\n\n \"Patti.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n\n\n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n\n\n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling\n system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n\n\n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n\n\n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored\n her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.\n\n\n \"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n\n\n He faced about. \"For her—\" nodding to Judith, \"and him—\" to Gladney,\n \"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You,\n me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of\n water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too\n bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\nThey did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by\n the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a\n dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely\n bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in\n the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous\n hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n\n\n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n\n\n Rat stared at her without answer.\n\n\n \"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n\n\n \"Heard you.\"\n\n\n \"Well...?\"\n\n\n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n\n\n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made\n his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do\n like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and\n under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n\n\n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n\n\n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat\n inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.\n\n\n \"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat\n down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell\n and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n\n\n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful\n he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he\n contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let\n some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and\n it cost him something.\n\n\n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in.\n Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n\n\n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste\n of the fuel.\n\n\n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"\n\n\n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n\n\n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like\n pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental\n flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by\n a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his\n belt.\n\n\n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n\n\n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa—\" the\n word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled\n the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had\n suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another\n new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was\n empty. Bare.\n\n\n No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in\n the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded\nupward\n, beads\n glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again\n and she looked up.\n\n\n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at\n her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat.\n He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n\n\n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n\n\n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my\n back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the\n hammocks on their rope-axis.\n\n\n \"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.\n\n\n Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild,\n sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far\n right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch\n tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n\n\n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n\n\n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n\n\n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.\n\n\n Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost\n things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish\n words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot,\n confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water\n and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them.\n Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some\n extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent\n tempers.\n\n\n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And\n his hands never faltered on the controls.\n\n\n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling\n drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because\n Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves.\n Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!\n\n\n \"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times\n until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\"\n His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those\n inhuman eyes.\n\n\n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The\n sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n\n\n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat\n stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at\n him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face\n and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat\n was back in the chair.\nGladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time,\n watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted\n to sit up.\n\n\n \"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me!\nWhen're you going to start braking\n,\n Rat?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion!\n We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n\n\n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n\n\n \"\nNot brake?\n\" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped\n for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his\n shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand\n that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to\n shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make\n him!\"\n\n\n \"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this\n half-way line?\"\n\n\n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We\n passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n\n\n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n\n\n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n \"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n\n\n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he—\"\n\n\n \"—he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days.\n Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n \"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This\n deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some\n things I do!\"\n\n\n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to\n Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n\n\n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried.\n Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for\nyou\n!\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be\n somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n\n\n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught\n something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed\n it, too.\n\n\n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the\n vacated position.\n\n\n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n\n\n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n\n\n \"Just name it!\"\n\n\n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n\n\n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the\n tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last\n she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n\n\n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"\n\n\n Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at\n her.\n\n\n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n\n\n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather\n personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your\n record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was\n coming, did you?\"\n\n\n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\"\n Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go\n out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send\n call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n\n\n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n\n\n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"\n\n\n Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're\n right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now.\n You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as\n you get out of the ship.\"\n\n\n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's\n done now.\"\n\n\n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n\n\n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth\n pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n\n\n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a\n glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does Rat's speech in the first 3 paragraphs suggest about him?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_1", "options": ["Has low intelligence", "He is extremely upset", "He hates himself", "Is extremely smart"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was ironic about Roberds throwing Rat out?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_2", "options": ["Rat knew how to get back in", "Roberds actually liked Rat", "The crew agreed he was right", "Nothing ironic at all"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Rat not allowed to pilot the ship?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_3", "options": ["His allegiance to politicians", "Lack of experience ", "He history of AWOL", "His lack of intelligence"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the nurse want Rat to pilot?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_4", "options": ["They couldn't wait to leave until morning", "She had a crush on Rat", "She didn't trust Roberd", "Rat forced himself to pilot the Nurse and her patients "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the water taste like gasoline?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_5", "options": ["It was the heat", "Greaseball forgot to wash the tank", "It wasn't water, it was gasoline", "Rat was trying to poison the crew"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Rat go AWOL?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_6", "options": ["Rat actually was the culprit of the attack ", "No evidence was in the passage", "Rat went to help a sick man", "Rat wasn't AWOL but in the war"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What transpired at the end of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_7", "options": ["Gladney was going to tell the police", "Subtle threat to Gladney", "Roberds was approaching", "Nurse was afraid of Rat"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Rat not speak about what truly transpired during AWOL?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_8", "options": ["Rat was threatened with death if he spoke the truth", "He never said why he didn't speak up", "He was in shock and unable to speak", "Rat knew he wouldn't be believed"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Rat able to travel faster than Roberds?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_9", "options": ["Rat did not use the brake", "Rat had a lighter load on the ship", "Rat was able to avoid the meter shower", "Roberds was a cautious pilot"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How long did the ship pass the halfway line?", "question_unique_id": "62212_XJDTN6N8_10", "options": ["Unknown", "2 days", "3 days ", "4 days"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/2/1/62212//62212-h//62212-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "40954", "set_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Potential Enemy", "year": 1950, "author": "Reynolds, Mack", "topic": "Short stories; PS; Science fiction", "article": "POTENTIAL ENEMY\nby Mack Reynolds\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1\n number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\n\n CAESAR HAD THE SAME PROBLEM AND NEVER SOLVED IT. LORD\n HELP US IF IT JUST CAN'T BE DONE!\nAlexander the Great had not dreamed of India, nor even Egypt, when he\n embarked upon his invasion of the Persian Empire. It was not a matter of\n being like the farmer: \"I ain't selfish, all I want is the land that\n jines mine.\" It was simply that after regaining the Greek cities of Asia\n Minor from Darius, he could not stop. He could not afford to have\n powerful neighbors that might threaten his domains tomorrow. So he took\n Egypt, and the Eastern Satrapies, and then had to continue to India.\n There he learned of the power of Cathay, but an army mutiny forestalled\n him and he had to return to Babylon. He died there while making plans to\n attack Arabia, Carthage, Rome. You see, given the military outlook, he\n could not afford powerful neighbors on his borders; they might become\n enemies some day.\nAlexander had not been the first to be faced with this problem, nor was\n he the last. So it was later with Rome, and later with Napoleon, and\n later still with Adolf the Aryan, and still later—\nIt isn't travel that is broadening, stimulating, or educational. Not the\n traveling itself. Visiting new cities, new countries, new continents, or\n even new planets,\nyes\n. But the travel itself,\nno\n. Be it by the\n methods of the Twentieth Century—automobile, bus, train, or\n aircraft—or be it by spaceship, travel is nothing more than boring.\n\n\n Oh, it's interesting enough for the first few hours, say. You look out\n the window of your car, bus, train, or airliner, or over the side of\n your ship, and it's very stimulating. But after that first period it\n becomes boring, monotonous, sameness to the point of redundance.\n\n\n And so it is in space.\n\n\n Markham Gray, free lance journalist for more years than he would admit\n to, was en route from the Neptune satellite Triton to his home planet,\n Earth, mistress of the Solar System. He was seasoned enough as a space\n traveler to steel himself against the monotony with cards and books,\n with chess problems and wire tapes, and even with an attempt to do an\n article on the distant earthbase from which he was returning for the\nSpacetraveler Digest\n.\n\n\n When all these failed, he sometimes spent a half hour or so staring at\n the vision screen which took up a considerable area of one wall of the\n lounge.\n\n\n Unless you had a vivid imagination of the type which had remained with\n Markham Gray down through the years, a few minutes at a time would have\n been enough. With rare exception, the view on the screen seemed almost\n like a still; a velvety blackness with pin-points of brilliant light,\n unmoving, unchanging.\n\n\n But even Markham Gray, with his ability to dream and to discern that\n which is beyond, found himself twisting with ennui after thirty minutes\n of staring at endless space. He wished that there was a larger number of\n passengers aboard. The half-dozen businessmen and their women and\n children had left him cold and he was doing his best to avoid them. Now,\n if there had only been one good chess player—\n\n\n Co-pilot Bormann was passing through the lounge. He nodded to the\n distinguished elderly passenger, flicked his eyes quickly,\n professionally, over the vision screen and was about to continue on his\n way.\n\n\n Gray called idly, \"Hans, I thought the space patrols very seldom got out\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Practically never, sir,\" the other told him politely, hesitating\n momentarily. Part of the job was to be constantly amiable, constantly\n watchful of the passengers out here in deep space—they came down with\n space cafard at the drop of a hat. Markham Gray reminded Bormann of\n pictures of Benjamin Franklin he'd seen in history books, and ordinarily\n he didn't mind spending a little time now and then talking things over\n with him. But right now he was hoping the old duffer wasn't going to\n keep him from the game going on forward with Captain Post and the\n steward.\n\n\n \"Just noticed one on the screen,\" the elderly journalist told him\n easily.\n\n\n The co-pilot smiled courteously. \"You must have seen a meteorite, sir.\n There aren't any—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray flushed. \"I'm not as complete a space neophyte as your\n condescending air would indicate, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I'll\n stack my space-months against yours any day.\"\n\n\n Bormann said soothingly, \"It's not that, sir. You've just made a\n mistake. If a ship was within reasonable distance, the alarms would be\n sounding off right now. But that's not all, either. We have a complete\n record of any traffic within a considerable distance, and I assure you\n that—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray pointed a finger at the lower left hand corner of the\n screen. \"Then what is that, Lieutenant?\" he asked sarcastically.\n\n\n The smile was still on the co-pilot's face as he turned and followed the\n direction of the other's finger. The smile faded. \"I'll be a\nmakron\n!\"\n he blurted. Spinning on his heel, he hurried forward to the bridge,\n muttering as he went.\n\n\n The older man snorted with satisfaction. Actually, he shouldn't have\n been so snappy with the young man; he hated to admit he was growing\n cranky with age. He took up his half completed manuscript again. He\n really should finish this article, though, space knew, he hadn't enough\n material for more than a few paragraphs. Triton was a barren satellite\n if he'd ever seen one—and he had.\n\n\n He had almost forgotten the matter ten minutes later when the ship's\n public address system blurted loudly.\n\n\n BATTLE STATIONS! BATTLE STATIONS! ALL CREW MEMBERS TO EMERGENCY\n STATIONS. ALL PASSENGERS IMMEDIATELY TO THEIR QUARTERS. BATTLE STATIONS!\n\n\n Battle Stations?\n\n\n Markham Gray was vaguely familiar with the fact that every Solar System\n spacecraft was theoretically a warcraft in emergency, but it was\n utterly fantastic that—\n\n\n He heaved himself to his feet, grunting with the effort, and,\n disregarding the repeated command that passengers proceed to their\n quarters, made his way forward to the bridge, ignoring the hysterical\n confusion in passengers and crew members hurrying up and down the ship's\n passageways.\n\n\n It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.\n\n\n Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, the telviz blared.\nCalling the Neuve Los Angeles. Calling the Neuve Los Angeles. Be\n unafraid. We are not hostile.\nThere was quiet on the bridge of the earth ship. Screaming quiet. It was\n seemingly hours before they had recovered even to the point of staring\n at one another.\n\n\n Hans Bormann gasped finally, unbelievingly, \"How could they possibly\n know the name of our ship? How could they possibly know the Amer-English\n language?\"\n\n\n The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.\n\n\n The court martial of Captain Roger Post had been short and merciless.\n Free access to the trial had been given to the press and telviz systems,\n and the newscasts had carried it in its entirety, partially to stress to\n the public mind the importance of the situation, and partially as a\n warning to other spacemen.\n\n\n Post had stood before the raised dais upon which were seated SupSpaceCom\n Michell and four other high-ranking officers and heard the charge\n read—failure to attack the alien craft, destroy it, and thus prevent\n the aliens—wherever they might be from—returning to their own world\n and reporting the presence of man in the galaxy.\n\n\n Markham Gray, like thousands of others, had sat on the edge of his chair\n in the living room of his small suburban home, and followed the trial\n closely on his telviz.\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell had been blunt and ruthless. He had rapped out,\n bitingly, \"Roger Post, as captain of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, why did\n you not either destroy the alien craft, or, if you felt it too strong\n for your ship, why did you not blast off into space, luring it away from\n your home planet?\"\n\n\n Post said hesitantly, \"I didn't think it necessary, sir. His attitude\n was—well, of peace. It was as if we were two ships that had met by\n chance and dipped their flags in the old manner and passed on to their\n different destinations. They even were able to telviz us a message.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom snapped, \"That was undoubtedly a case of telepathy. The\n alien is equipped in some manner to impose thoughts upon the human\n brain. You\nthought\nthe telviz was used; actually the alien wasn't\n speaking Amer-English, he was simply forcing thoughts into your minds.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray, watching and listening to this over his set, shook his\n head in dissatisfaction. As always, the military mind was dull and\n unreceptive. The ridiculousness of expecting Post to blast off into\n space in an attempt to fool the other craft in regard to his home\n planet was obvious. The whole affair had taken place within the solar\n system; obviously the alien would know that one of Sol's nine major\n planets was mankind's home. Finding out which one wouldn't be too\n difficult a job.\n\n\n Roger Post was saying hesitantly, \"Then it is assumed that the alien\n craft wasn't friendly?\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell indicated his disgust with an impatient flick of his\n hand. \"Any alien is a potential enemy, Post; that should be elementary.\n And a potential enemy is an enemy in fact. Even though these aliens\n might seem amiable enough today, how do we know they will be in the\n future—possibly in the far future? There can be no friendship with\n aliens. We can't afford to have neighbors; we can't afford to be\n encircled by enemies.\"\n\n\n \"Nor even friends?\" Captain Post had asked softly.\n\n\n Michell glared at his subordinate. \"That is what it amounts to, Captain;\n and the thing to remember is that they feel the same way. They must!\n They must seek us out and destroy us completely and as quickly as\n possible. By the appearance of things, and partially through your\n negligence, they've probably won the first round. They know our\n location; we don't know theirs.\"\n\n\n The supreme commander of Earth's space forces dropped that point. \"Let\n us go back again. When you received this telepathic message—or whatever\n it was—what was your reaction? Did it seem friendly, domineering, or\n what?\"\n\n\n Roger Post stood silent for a moment. Finally he answered, \"Sir, I still\n think it was the telviz, rather than a telepathic communication, but\n the ... the tone of voice seemed to give me the impression of pitying.\"\n\n\n \"Pitying!\" Michell ejaculated.\n\n\n The captain was nervous but determined. \"Yes, sir. I had the distinct\n feeling that the being that sent the message felt sorry for us.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom's face had gone red with indignation.\nIt was three years before another of the aliens was sighted. Three\n hurried, crowded, harassed years during which all the Solar System's\n resources were devoted to building and arming a huge space fleet and\n rushing space defenses. The total wars of the Twentieth Century paled in\n comparison to the all out efforts made to prepare for this conflict.\n\n\n The second view of the alien ship was similar to the first. This, time\n the\nPendleton\n, a four-man scout returning to the Venus base after a\n patrol in the direction of Sirius, held the intruder in its viewer for a\n full five minutes. Once again, no estimation of its distance nor size\n could be made. All instruments pertaining to such detection seemed to\n fail to function properly.\n\n\n And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.\n\n\n His articles were in continuous demand in both magazines and newspaper\n supplements; editors clamored for additional material from his\n voco-typer. There was but one complaint against his copy—it wasn't\n alarmist enough, sensational enough. Humanity had been whipped into a\n state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\n\n\n And it was there that Markham Gray refused to go along. He had agreed\n with poor Captain Post, now serving a life sentence in the Martian\n prison camps; there had been no sign of hostility from the alien craft.\n It was man who was preparing for war—and Gray knew of no period in\n history in which preparations for war did not eventually culminate in\n one.\n\n\n So it was not really strange that it was he the aliens chose to contact.\n\n\n It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments.\n\n\n He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.\n\n\n But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"\nQuite tiny, Markham Gray. Although, of course, the way we think of it\n is that you are quite huge.\nHe was becoming more confident now; widely awake, it was less strange to\n hear the words come from his commonplace home model telviz set. \"Our\n second mistake was in looking for you throughout space,\" he said softly.\n\n\n There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of\n the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered\n there was another intelligence on Earth they would begin making plans to\n dominate or, even more likely, to destroy us. Our only chance was to\n find some refuge away from Earth. That is why we began to search the\n other stars for a planet similar to this and suitable to our form of\n life.\n\"You could have fought back, had we attempted to destroy you,\" Gray said\n uncomfortably.\n\n\n The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.\n\n\n There was an edge of amusement in the answering thought.\nWe are very\n tiny, Mr. Gray. And our greatest efforts have always been to keep from\n under man's eyes. We have profited greatly, however, by our suitability\n to espionage; little goes on in the human world of which we don't know.\n Our progress was greatly aided by our being able to utilize the science\n that man has already developed. You've noted, for instance, how similar\n our space ships are to your own.\nGray nodded to himself. \"But I'm also impressed by the manner in which\n you have developed some mechanical device to duplicate human speech.\n That involved original research.\"\nAt any rate, neither man nor we need dread the future any longer. We\n have escaped the danger that overhung us, and you know now that we are\n no alien enemies from space threatening you. We wish you well, mankind;\n perhaps the future will see changes in your nature. It is in this\n friendly hope that we have contacted humanity through you, Mr. Gray.\nThe elderly journalist said quietly, \"I appreciate your thoughtfulness\n and hope you are correct. Good luck to you in your new world.\"\nThank you, Markham Gray, and goodbye.\nThe set was suddenly quiet again.\nMarkham Gray stood before the assembled Military Council of the Solar\n System. He had told his story without interruption to this most powerful\n body on Earth. They listened to him in silence.\n\n\n When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"\n\n\n The President of the Council added thoughtfully, \"Quite correct,\n Michell. And in the early stages of the fight, we should be able to\n capture some of their ships intact. As soon as we find what kind of\n insect they are, our bacteriologists will be able to work on a method to\n eliminate any that might remain on Earth.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray's face had paled in horror. \"But why?\" he blurted. \"Why not\n let them go in peace? All they've wanted for centuries is to escape us,\n to have a planet of their own.\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell eyed him tolerantly. \"You seem to have been taken\n in, Mr. Gray. Once they've established themselves in their new world, we\n have no idea of how rapidly they might develop and how soon they might\n become a threat. Even though they may be peaceful today, they are\n potential enemies tomorrow. And a potential enemy\nis\nan enemy, who\n must be destroyed.\"\n\n\n Gray felt sickness well through him \"But ... but this policy.... What\n happens when man finally finds on his borders a life form more advanced\n than he—an intelligence strong enough to destroy rather than be\n destroyed?\"\n\n\n The tolerance was gone now. The SupSpaceCom said coldly, \"Don't be a\n pessimistic defeatist, Gray.\"\n\n\n He turned to the admirals and generals of his staff. \"Make all\n preparations for the attack, gentlemen.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was the message from the historical context?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_1", "options": ["Alexander the Great was a powerful conqueror", "Background on Egypt and the Babylon", "No message", "Prelude to the challenges of powerful neighbors"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to the article what is similar between traveling in space or by land?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_2", "options": ["The need for mode of transportation", "Article does not mention a similarity", "The need for quality pilots", "The bore of travel"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What made Markham believe that the threat was real?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_3", "options": ["Markham actually believed it was a ruse", "Markham's gut instinct", "Due to the alarms going off in the ship", "The reaction from the crew"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did Captain Roger post fail to do as Captain?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_4", "options": ["Investigate the craft thoroughly and report back to base", "Alert the base about the craft immediately and not wait the several hours observing it", "He broke the chain of command", "Destroy the craft"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is ironic about SupSpaceCom's suggestions about the alien's being potential enemy's?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_5", "options": ["All aliens are enemies", "Michell clearly has a personal vendetta", "No irony", "Humans are also potential enemies "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What enraged the SupSpaceCom?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_6", "options": ["The embarrassment of the trial", "The fact that Post had considered the aliens friends", "The aliens knew Earth's location", "That the aliens appeared to have pity"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was telling about the second sighting of an alien ship?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_7", "options": ["The aliens did use the telviz", "They implied they knew about Earth's motives and actions", "Their understanding of Earth's language", "The aliens were actually a threat to human kind"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did Gray realize when the aliens first contacted him after he woke up?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_8", "options": ["The aliens did use telepathy", "Gray was extremely frightened", "They were planning an attack", "They had been on Earth before"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What planet are the aliens from?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_9", "options": ["Mars", "Venus", "Unknown galaxy", "Earth"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the aliens leave the planet?", "question_unique_id": "40954_940TTZ9F_10", "options": ["They wanted to leave the planet due to the bloodlust", "They wanted to conquer another planet", "The planet was disintegrating", "They were just lost in space"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/0/9/5/40954//40954-h//40954-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "55243", "set_unique_id": "55243_SZQ6TRE6", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Puzzle in the Pond\r\nA Judy Bolton Mystery", "year": 1952, "author": "Sutton, Margaret", "topic": "PZ; Mystery and detective stories; Ghosts -- Juvenile fiction; Orphans -- Juvenile fiction; Women detectives -- Juvenile fiction; Bolton, Judy (Fictitious character) -- Juvenile fiction", "article": "The Puzzle in the Pond\n1\nCHAPTER I\n\n A Stolen Typewriter\n“Here’s something Miss Pringle can use!”\n\n\n Judy ran her fingers over the tiny, embossed\n Reward\n of Merit\n card as if she couldn’t bear to part\n with it even for the short time it would be on exhibit\n at the Roulsville library.\n\n\n “Mrs. Wheatley is still Miss Pringle to you, isn’t\n she?” asked Peter Dobbs, smiling at his young wife\n as she knelt beside the open drawer of the old chest\n where her grandmother’s keepsakes were stored.\n\n2\n\n “I do think of her as Miss Pringle,” confessed Judy,\n “and she probably thinks of me as that noisy Judy\n Bolton. Prim Miss Pringle is what I used to call her.\n She left everything in such perfect order, it’s hard for\n me to believe she and Bob Wheatley lived in our house\n for two whole months. We won’t ever rent it again,\n will we, Peter?”\n\n\n “You’re not asking me to promise we won’t, are\n you?” he countered. “You know how I feel about\n promises.”\n\n\n “You’re right, too,” declared Judy, reaching into\n the drawer for another one of Grandmother Smeed’s\n treasured keepsakes. “Here’s a sewing card worked in\n cross-stitch. It says: ‘\n Promise Little. Do Much.\n ’ Do\n you think it would do for the September exhibit?”\n\n\n “I should think so,” Peter replied thoughtfully. “A\n maxim like that would do for any time of the year.\n Does the library plan to exhibit a few of these things\n each month?”\n\n\n “Yes, but just for the school year. Miss Pringle—I\n mean Mrs. Wheatley says she wants me to arrange\n them in that little glass case near the library door.\n These reward-of-merit cards used to be given out at\n school when Grandma was a little girl. The other\n card was a sewing lesson. ‘Promise little. Do much,’”\n Judy repeated, “but how much can a person do in a\n day? Maybe I won’t try to sort all these treasures this\n morning.”\n\n\n “You’ve made a good start. I wish I could stay and\n help you. I always liked treasure hunting,” Peter confessed,\n “but Uncle Sam expects me to hunt criminals\n today. We’ll be using an official car, so I’ll leave the\n Beetle for you to transport your exhibit to the library\n if you do get it ready. ’Bye, Angel. See you at six.”\n\n\n “You hope,” Judy added as he bent to kiss her.\n\n3\n\n Peter’s time was not his own. Working out of the\n Resident FBI Agency in the Farringdon Post Office,\n he might be sent anywhere in the territory. His assignment\n now was to round up the Joe Mott gang. Judy\n knew that much, although his work was confidential.\n It was also dangerous. Each time he left the house she\n breathed a little prayer for his safe return.\n\n\n “Take care,” was what she usually said, but in her\n heart the words meant, “Take care of our future. Let\n all our dreams for our married life in this house come\n true.”\n\n\n The house had been willed to Judy by her grandmother,\n and it was so sturdy and well built that she\n felt sure it would stand there on the slope overlooking\n Dry Brook as long as the hills themselves.\n\n\n Peter had left the stair door open, and soon Judy\n heard Blackberry padding up to keep her company.\n He looked around, the way cats will, and then came\n into the storeroom to see what Judy was doing.\n\n\n “Hi, Blackberry! You can’t play with these things,”\n she told him as she continued sorting and arranging\n the cards that were to be exhibited at the library. The\n theme for September would be school. She found a\n few Hallowe’en things and a Columbus Day card\n which she put aside for October. There were turkeys\n and prayers of Thanksgiving for November, a pile of\n Christmas things for December, and a stack of old\n calendars for January. The stack grew higher and\n higher.\n\n4\n\n “I do believe Grandma saved a calendar for every\n year. This is wonderful,” Judy said to herself. “I’ll\n find some recent calendars and complete the collection.\n It will be just perfect for the January exhibit.”\n\n\n The library was new, and the built-in exhibit cases\n were still empty. Nearly all the buildings in Roulsville\n were new since the flood that had swept the valley\n and started Judy on the trail of her first mystery. Her\n own home had been swept away, and her father, Dr.\n Bolton, had been obliged to move to Farringdon\n where he still lived and practiced. Only her grandmother’s\n house, two miles above the broken dam, had\n stayed the same.\n\n\n “Maybe that’s why I love it,” she thought.\n\n\n And yet she and Peter had made changes. It was a\n rambling old farmhouse too big for just the two of\n them so only the downstairs rooms had been changed.\n Up here in the attic nothing had been disturbed except\n by Blackberry as he played with the spools in Judy’s\n sewing room or searched for mice in the other two\n rooms where her grandmother’s keepsakes were\n stored. She liked having him for company as she\n worked. Attics and black cats seemed to go together.\n\n\n Judy smiled at this thought. She was so absorbed in\n what she was doing that at first she didn’t hear the\n front doorbell ringing downstairs. It rang again more\n insistently, and she gathered Blackberry in her arms\n and hurried down the two flights of stairs. It wouldn’t\n do to leave the cat alone among the things she had\n collected for the exhibit.\n\n5\n\n “I can’t trust you,” she told him, “even if you are a\n famous cat.”\n\n\n Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar,\n and just recently he had worked for the government,\n or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of\n mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it\n to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.\n\n\n The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old\n neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she\n had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut\n from her house to Judy’s.\n\n\n “What took you so long? I thought you’d never answer\n the bell. Quick!” she urged breathlessly.\n “Maybe we can still head off that green car! There’s\n a thief in it. He stole my typewriter!”\n\n\n “Your typewriter?” gasped Judy.\n\n\n “Yes, the one you gave me for my birthday. Remember\n when we traded birthdays so mine wouldn’t\n come on Christmas? I loved that typewriter, and\n now—”\n\n\n “We’ll try and get it back,” Judy reassured her.\n “Come on, Holly!”\n\n\n They were off down the road in the Beetle before\n Holly had finished telling Judy which way the green\n car went. “Try Farringdon,” she suggested. “You\n could see it from the top of the hill if it went toward\n Farringdon, couldn’t you?”\n\n\n “That would depend on how fast he was going, I\n should think, but we’ll try it,” Judy promised.\n\n6\n“Quick!” Holly urged breathlessly.\n7\n\n She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”\n\n\n “Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8\n\n “There was nothing strange about it,” declared\n Holly. “He would have taken more if I hadn’t surprised\n him and called Ruth. She was busy with the\n baby and didn’t pay any attention. Doris had just left\n in her car—”\n\n\n “That’s it!” Judy interrupted. “The thief probably\n saw your sister Doris leaving and figured you were all\n out.”\n\n\n “Well, we weren’t. I was there, and I saw him run\n out of the house toward a green car. Please drive\n faster, Judy! I have to get my typewriter back.”\n\n\n And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II\n\n Help for Holly\nFarringdon was a much larger town than Roulsville.\n Actually, it was a small city and the county seat\n of a hilly county in northern Pennsylvania. The courthouse,\n tall and imposing with its clock tower, stood\n at the corner of Main and Grove streets. Just opposite\n was the office of the\nFarringdon Daily Herald\nwhere\n Judy’s brother Horace worked as a reporter. Farther\n up Grove Street was Dr. Bolton’s combined home and\n office.\n\n\n “Which way shall we turn?” Judy asked when they\n came to the corner.\n\n\n Holly shook her head. “I guess it doesn’t matter.\n Maybe my typewriter wasn’t stolen after all.”\n\n10\n\n “\nWhat?\n” Judy was so surprised that she nearly hit\n the curb as they turned the corner. “If we aren’t following\n a typewriter thief, then what are we doing in\n Farringdon?”\n\n\n “We are—I mean we were following that green\n car, and I think my typewriter is in it. It’s just that I—I\n mean I haven’t told you everything.”\n\n\n “I should say you haven’t,” Judy agreed. “Maybe\n Horace would help us for the sake of the story.”\n\n\n “I’d be glad to have his help,” declared Holly almost\n too enthusiastically. “There he is now, walking down\n Grove Street. Oh dear! Is that Honey with him?”\n\n\n “It usually is,” replied Judy. “They’re practically\n engaged, you know.”\n\n\n “No, I didn’t know. Good things happen to everyone\n but me,” was Holly’s doleful comment. “I’ll\n probably be an old maid and live all alone without\n even a cat for company.”\n\n\n “That’s up to you, isn’t it?” Judy hailed her brother.\n He and Peter’s sister came over to the side of the car.\n\n\n “Holly thinks her typewriter was stolen,” Judy explained.\n “On top of all the other trouble she’s had, this\n was just too much. Have you seen a green car?”\n\n\n “Several of them,” replied Horace. “They’re quite\n common, or haven’t you noticed? Come to think of it,\n a green car did roar up Main Street about ten minutes\n ago. The driver was a boy of about sixteen. Dark\n hair, striped T-shirt—”\n\n\n “He’s the one,” Holly interrupted. “Do you think\n we can still overtake him?”\n\n11\n\n “We can try,” replied Judy, “but I’m not making\n any rash promises. Didn’t you just tell me you’re not\n sure he is the thief? You didn’t actually see him take\n your typewriter, did you?”\n\n\n “No, but I did see him running toward that green\n car, and when I turned around my desk top was\n empty. Ruth said maybe Doris took it. You know the\n way sisters are, always borrowing things without asking.\n But I don’t believe it. Doris knows I need my\n typewriter. Please drive on, Judy,” Holly pleaded.\n “We can’t let that boy get away with it.”\n\n\n “I’m afraid he did get away with it,” Horace told\n her. “If he did take your typewriter, he must be half-way\n to Ulysses with it by now.”\n\n\n “That’s the town where we turned off when we\n visited the Jewell sisters,” Honey put in, “on our secret\n quest, didn’t we, Judy?”\n\n\n “I heard about that. You two girls have all the fun,”\n Holly complained.\n\n\n “Fun!” Judy echoed, remembering how frightened\n she and Honey had been. “If that’s fun—” She shivered,\n and her voice trailed off into thoughts of their\n latest mystery.\n\n\n “We were drenched to the skin and that criminal,\n Joe Mott, was after us. I’m glad he’s back in prison. I\n can’t understand it, though,” Honey continued in a\n puzzled voice. “Aldin Launt, that artist who works at\n the Dean Studios, was never picked up. He works\n right near me, and every time he passes my desk I get\n the shivers. I thought Peter was going to arrest him.”\n\n12\n\n “So did I,” agreed Judy, “but maybe he’s being\n watched in the hope he will lead the FBI to the rest\n of the gang. Peter’s work is so secret that half the\n time he can’t even discuss it with me.”\n\n\n “Please don’t discuss it now,” implored Holly. “If\n we’re going to follow that green car—”\n\n\n “You’ll never catch him,” Horace predicted, “and\n how would you get your typewriter back if you did?\n A couple of girls couldn’t handle a thief, especially if\n he’s got a gun on him. I don’t suppose you can make a\n federal case out of it, but couldn’t you report it to the\n local police? I’ll call them right now if you say the\n word.”\n\n\n “What do you think, Judy?” Holly asked.\n\n\n “I’d do it if I were you, Holly,” she advised.\n\n\n “Okay, then,” Horace said with a satisfied gleam\n in his eyes. “Just give me all the details. Then we’ll relax\n and let the police handle it. Honey and I were on\n our way to lunch. How about joining us?”\n\n\n Judy looked up at the courthouse clock. “Oh dear!\n The morning’s gone. I didn’t think it was lunchtime\n already. I am hungry. Aren’t you, Holly?”\n\n\n The younger girl insisted that she couldn’t eat a\n thing, but once they were inside the restaurant she\n changed her mind. “I guess I could eat a hamburger,”\n she conceded.\n\n13\n\n While Horace went to telephone, the three girls\n ordered lunch. Holly was still jumpy. She kept tossing\n her mane of thick brown hair like a restless colt. She\n wore it perfectly straight in a long pony tail. Judy’s\n red curls were cut a little shorter than usual, but\n Honey had let her lovely honey-colored hair grow\n long to please Horace. Today she wore it loose about\n her shoulders.\n\n\n The three girls were very different in appearance,\n but they had one thing in common. All three of them\n adored Judy’s brother, Horace Bolton. He was a shy-appearing\n young man. To look at him, no one would\n suspect that he had once startled the town of Roulsville\n out of its complacency by racing through the\n streets on Judy’s ginger colt and crying out, “The\n dam is breaking! Run for the hills.”\n\n\n Thinking back, Judy realized that since Horace\n had become a hero, he had changed. There wasn’t a\n note of timidity in his voice as he talked with the\n police officer who later came in and quietly seated\n himself at their table. It was Holly who was frightened.\n “I—I didn’t think they’d send a policeman,”\n were her first words. “I can’t be sure of anything.\n Maybe it’s all a big mistake.”\n\n\n “We’ll take that chance,” the officer replied, smiling\n as he wrote out his report.\n\n\n “Tell you what, Judy,” Horace suggested as they\n were leaving the restaurant. “Why don’t you and\n Holly drive on a ways? Maybe you’ll see that\n green car parked somewhere along the road. I’ll finish\n up a little job I’m doing and tell Mr. Lee this looks like\n a story. He’ll give me the afternoon off to follow it\n up.”\n\n\n “What about you, Honey? Do you have to go back\n to work?” asked Judy.\n\n14\n\n “Oh, I guess Mr. Dean would give me the afternoon\n off if I asked him. I can’t do any work with all\n that hammering going on anyway. Where shall we\n meet you?” Honey asked.\n\n\n “At the beaver dam!” exclaimed Judy, suddenly enthusiastic.\n “Remember, Honey? Violetta said she’d\n show it to us. I have my camera in the car. Maybe we\n could take pictures of the beavers.”\n\n\n “It’s a date! Violetta is the younger of the two\n Jewell sisters,” Honey explained to Holly, “though\n neither of them is young. They’re such dears! They\n live in one of the oldest houses in this section of\n Pennsylvania. It’s like stepping back in time just to\n visit them.”\n\n\n “I’ll ask them if they have anything for the library\n exhibit. I have the job of choosing the displays for\n those new cases in the Roulsville library,” Judy explained.\n “All right, Horace, we’ll see you and Honey\n at the beaver dam.”\n\n15\nCHAPTER III\n\n A Rude Shopkeeper\n“I hope the beaver dam holds better than that one\n just above Roulsville,” Holly commented as they\n started off again. “We have to pass it on the way to\n school. I remember how it was last term. The boys\n and girls in the school bus quiet down fast if they happen\n to glance out the window and see those big pieces\n of broken concrete. A lot of them lost their homes\n when that dam broke, just the way you did, Judy.\n Did you go back afterwards to see if anything could\n be saved?”\n\n16\n\n “We went back too late, I guess. We didn’t find\n much of anything. There’s always some looting after\n a big disaster like that. People are too interested in\n making sure all their loved ones are safe to worry\n about their possessions.” Judy paused. She had been\n younger than Holly was now when the Bolton family’s\n home in Roulsville had been swept away in the\n flood, but it still hurt to think about it.\n\n\n “Dad had to treat a lot of people for shock,” she\n continued as they drove past the Post Office, where\n Peter’s office was, and entered the outskirts of Farringdon.\n “Our house was turned over and one\n wall smashed in. I guess the furniture just floated\n away.”\n\n\n “It would have to float somewhere, wouldn’t\n it?” Holly questioned.\n\n\n “I suppose it would, but we never found it.\n Grandma wanted us to take some of her things,” Judy\n remembered, “but we thought it would be better to\n leave her house the way it was and buy everything\n new. Of course we couldn’t replace the beautiful\n fruitwood bench Dad had in his reception room or the\n lady table. That was a lovely period piece that had\n been in the Bolton family for generations.”\n\n\n “What period?” asked Holly, who was something\n of an expert on antique furniture. She once had lived\n with a cousin who collected antique glassware.\n\n\n “Empire, I believe.”\n\n\n “Empire furniture is valuable. Usually it’s pretty\n solid, too. Why did you call it the lady table?” Holly\n wanted to know.\n\n17\n\n “That’s the name I gave it when I was a little girl.\n There were ladies carved on the legs. They held the\n marble table top on their heads. They had such quiet,\n patient faces.”\n\n\n Now Judy was thinking back in spite of herself.\n\n\n It had been exciting, furnishing the so-called\n Haunted House in Farringdon and exposing its\n “ghosts.” New furniture had been bought, and a few\n good antiques had been discovered in out-of-the-way\n shops. Dr. Bolton’s massive oak desk was one such\n piece. Judy’s dresser with the secret drawer was\n another. Buying it all by herself had been a real adventure.\n Only gradually had she come to realize their\n loss.\n\n\n Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior.\n\n\n “Empty! He’s probably trying to sell it. Come on\n inside,” Holly urged, pulling Judy along with her.\n\n\n “Don’t be in such a hurry. He can’t get out while\n we’re parked there, and I want to take down his license\n number! There!” Judy announced when she\n had it. “Now we’ll go in like any other customers and\n pretend we want to buy something.”\n\n\n “A typewriter!” agreed Holly. “We’ll just ask.\n Then, if we see mine, we’ll call the police.”\n\n\n Judy shook her head. She didn’t think it would be\n that easy, but she was willing to go along with Holly\n just for the adventure. “If we don’t find your typewriter,”\n she told her, “we may find some old cards\n for my collection. Anyway, it will do no harm to go\n in and look around.”\n\n\n “Look at all the lovely old glassware in the windows,”\n Holly pointed out as they walked around to\n the front of the shop. “There’s a blue glass hen just\n like the one Cousin Cleo has in her collection. And\n look at those chalkware lambs and that beautiful\n luster cream pitcher!”\n\n\n Inside the shop it was hard to move around because\n of all the old furniture crowded into every inch of\n floor space. Judy had to move a chair to reach the\n cream pitcher Holly had admired. Before she could\n touch it, a voice barked at her.\n\n\n “Careful there! You’ll have to pay for anything you\n break.”\n\n19\n\n “I have no intention of breaking anything,” replied\n Judy. “I just wanted to see that luster cream pitcher.”\n\n\n “That’s eighty dollars!”\n\n\n “Oh dear! I guess I don’t want it then. We really\n came in to look at typewriters. You do sell typewriters,\n don’t you?” Judy asked, looking around the shop\n to see if the driver of the green car had come in.\n\n\n “New ones,” Holly added. Her typewriter was almost\n new.\n\n\n “You came to the wrong place for a new typewriter.\n We sell anything and everything so long as it’s\n old.” The shopkeeper, a stout, balding man, looked at\n the two girls as if he considered them slightly stupid.\n\n\n “I meant—almost new,” Holly stammered.\n\n\n “Are you Mr. Sammis? Will you let us see what you\n have, please?” Judy asked.\n\n\n He showed them a row of ancient typewriters in\n the back of the shop. They were all of the same make,\n and all were equally old and dusty.\n\n\n “There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”\n\n\n Judy and Holly looked at each other. They could\n have made a mistake. Green cars were common, just\n as Horace had said. The typewriter wasn’t in the shop,\n and neither was the boy who had been seen driving a\n green car. Voices came from the upper floor, but they\n were indistinct. Then, suddenly, something was\n dropped with a loud thud. Holly jumped.\n\n\n “My wife,” Mr. Sammis explained. “She’s always\n dropping things. Did you find anything you want?”\n\n\n “Not yet,” Judy replied. She and Holly had been\n looking through the box of old cards. Near the bottom\n Judy found a little booklet marked\nSchool Souvenir\n.\n\n\n “Here’s something for the September exhibit,” she\n said as she opened it.\n\n\n “But that’s for the close of school,” Holly objected,\n reading over her shoulder. The illuminated verse read:\nOh! Swift the time has fled away\nAs fleeting as the rose\nSince school began its opening day\nTill now its day of close.\n\n\n The verse was followed by the name of the teacher\n and pupils in some long-ago country school. Hugh\n Sammis was one of the names.\n\n\n “Is this for sale?” Judy asked, sure he wouldn’t want\n to part with it.\n\n21\n\n He laughed, an unpleasant sort of laugh as if he were\n making fun of her. “It’s junk. I was going to throw it\n out. You can have it for a quarter.”\n\n\n “I’ll take it then,” Judy decided. “It’s for the beginning\n of school, too,” she pointed out as she and\n Holly made their way back to the front of the shop.\n\n\n “Careful there!” Mr. Sammis warned again.\n\n\n It was his own elbow that knocked over the little\n table with the claw feet, but he looked at Judy as if\n she had done it. One foot with a claw clutching a glass\n ball fell to the floor. He picked it up and waved it in\n Judy’s face.\n\n\n “Now see what you’ve done,” he charged unreasonably.\n “I told you you’d have to pay for anything\n you broke. Young people nowadays are all alike. Careless,\n blundering fools, the lot of them. Come in\n here for junk and break up my best furniture! This\n table is fragile—”\n\n\n “I can see it is,” Judy interrupted. “The claw fell off\n because the table leg was already broken. I can see\n where it’s been glued. The top is warped, too. It looks\n as if it had been left out in the rain.”\n\n\n “What if it was? Where else could I leave it when\n the roadmakers took half my house? I won’t charge\n you much for it. Only fifteen dollars.”\n\n\n “Fifteen dollars! What are you talking about, Mr.\n Sammis? I’ll never pay for a table I didn’t break,” Judy\n declared with indignation.\n\n22\n\n “You won’t, eh? We’ll see about that. You’re Dr.\n Bolton’s daughter, aren’t you? I’ll just send him a bill\n for twenty dollars,” the shopkeeper announced with a\n satisfied chuckle. “Then, if he won’t pay his bill, I\n won’t pay mine.”\n\n\n “But that isn’t fair!” Judy cried, her gray eyes blazing.\n\n\n “No? Then I’ll make it twenty-five.”\n\n\n “Let’s go before he puts the price any higher,”\n Holly urged, pulling at Judy’s arm.\n", "questions": [{"question": "According to the passage what allowed Judy's to move into the grandmother's house?", "question_unique_id": "55243_SZQ6TRE6_1", "options": ["The flood destroyed her house", "Judy purchased the home to be closer to her father", "Her grandmother died", "Her father had moved to Farringdon"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was odd about the thief according the passage in Section 7?", "question_unique_id": "55243_SZQ6TRE6_2", "options": ["Why he selected Holly's house to rob", "Nothing odd but an ordinary old criminal ", "How he was able to escape so quickly", "The choice of item he stole"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Holly crying?", "question_unique_id": "55243_SZQ6TRE6_3", "options": ["Holly was lost and alone", "She was scared of having a thief in her own home", "She was crying with anger", "She had a deep connection with the typewriter"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the reader begin to notice about Holly's personality?", "question_unique_id": "55243_SZQ6TRE6_4", "options": ["She broads over her bad luck", "She is a caring person", "She is overly excited with emotion", "She is resentful of her family"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What can be inferred about the type of character Mr. Sammis is?", "question_unique_id": "55243_SZQ6TRE6_5", "options": ["He is trying to make the best out of his business", "He is hardened by the flood", "He is a scammer", "He's an honest, hard working man"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was it unfair for Judy to pay for the table?", "question_unique_id": "55243_SZQ6TRE6_6", "options": ["It was an honest accident she bumped into it", "Table was already broken", "It was fair to pay the for the damage", "She bought other items"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/5/2/4/55243//55243-h//55243-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "62244", "set_unique_id": "62244_USGJFTB6", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Galactic Ghost", "year": 1956, "author": "Kubilius, Walter", "topic": "Space ships -- Fiction; Short stories; PS; Science fiction", "article": "GALACTIC GHOST\nBy WALTER KUBILIUS\nThe Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger\n\n of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions.\n\n He had seen the phantom—and lived.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's\n lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his\n fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the\nMary\n Lou\nwere now black as meteor dust.\n\n\n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at\n the cover.\n\n\n \"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man\n would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping\n us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and\n we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed\n helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n\n\n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His\n face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n\n\n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once\n more!\"\n\n\n \"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.\n\n\n Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.\n\n\n \"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.\n\n\n For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.\n\n\n When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!\n\n\n Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.\n\n\n Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing\n his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars,\n though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something\n about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It\n resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty\n years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though\n half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a\n rocket ship.\n\n\n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of\n any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed.\n But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the\n presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n\n\n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years\n in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint\n ghost-like rocket ships?\n\n\n The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship!\n Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was\n impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales\n told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n\n\n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself\n over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now\n motionless a few hundred miles away.\n\n\n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \"\nIt's come—for me!\n\" but Willard\n stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it.\n There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there\n had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam\n forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true\n for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?\n\n\n He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:\n\n\n \"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done.\n\n\n And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.\n\n\n Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he,\n for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really\n only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had\n seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different\n situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But\n perhaps space itself denies reason.\n\n\n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here\n and a story there put together all that he knew:\n\n\n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost\n Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its\n tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again.\n When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a\n lifeless hulk—the Ghost will come—for you!\n\n\n And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy\n ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage.\n Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.\n\n\n Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.\n\n\n Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.\n\n\n He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism\n of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in\n perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no\n speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All\n was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when\n there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth,\n long forgotten Earth.\n\n\n He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him.\n He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being\n marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of\n the stars, he suddenly froze.\n\n\n There was a ship, coming toward him!\n\n\n For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message.\n\n\n \"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n\n\n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within\n him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened\n to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n\n\n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU\n ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND—ARE YOU ABLE TO\n COME?\"\n\n\n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n\n\n \"YES! COMING!\"\n\n\n The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n\n\n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in\n bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\nHe woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the\n passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so\n much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the\n point of gibbering insanity.\n\n\n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he\n never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to\n remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to\n also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the\n value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental\n shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.\n\n\n During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing\n it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his\n friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans'\n sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges.\n And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and\n confused.\n\n\n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no\n longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But\n there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they\n refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual\n running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions,\n they mumbled and drifted away.\n\n\n And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one\n night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth\n swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the\n years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the\nMary Lou\n. His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had\n once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years\n of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\nHe awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought\n that perhaps he might still be in the\nMary Lou\n. The warm, smiling face\n of a man quickly reassured him.\n\n\n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know\n when you came to.\"\n\n\n Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He\n pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He\n yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his\n entire body.\n\n\n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his\n mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year\n and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian\n expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home\n base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at\n the end of the trail.\n\n\n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those\n years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n\n\n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood\n up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of\n his ship, but he would manage.\n\n\n \"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"\n\n\n A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.\n\n\n \"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is\n non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All\n things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass\n and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened\n to the\nMary Lou\n. Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years\n ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel\n the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became\n more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any\n Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to\n some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen\n years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n\n\n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on\n it...\"\n\n\n \"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the\n simple reason that we would go\nthrough\nit!\"\n\n\n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth\n again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he\n walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of\n birds. Never. Never. Never....\n\n\n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does \"the tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou\" suggest about Dobbin's employment?", "question_unique_id": "62244_USGJFTB6_1", "options": ["He was a pilot", "He was a soldier", "Unknown", "He was a mine worker"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why won't Dobbin be able to see Earth again?", "question_unique_id": "62244_USGJFTB6_2", "options": ["Dobbin was blind", "The ship was header to Mars III", "Dobbin was exiled from Earth", "Dobbin was dying"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Willard believe that he would never step back on Earth? ", "question_unique_id": "62244_USGJFTB6_3", "options": ["He actually would be allowed to return to Earth", "Willard was ailing in health also", "Williard's ship was immobile", "Willard's mission would take a lifetime"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the appearance of a ghost ship closely resemble about lost travel?", "question_unique_id": "62244_USGJFTB6_4", "options": ["You can never find your way home", "Oasis in the desert", "A dog lost from home", "Home is where the heart is"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Willard drugged by the members of the new ship?", "question_unique_id": "62244_USGJFTB6_5", "options": ["Willard was imagining being drugged", "They were not human, but alien forms", "The crew was concerned about Willard's intentions", "To reduce the shock after being a hermit"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about the process when Willard knew they were on the ghost ship?", "question_unique_id": "62244_USGJFTB6_6", "options": ["He felt like he became more real until the realization", "N/A", "There was no irony", "The ghosts didn't appear to be fake"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the passage suggest matter is relative?", "question_unique_id": "62244_USGJFTB6_7", "options": ["One condition is non-existent under another", "One condition is existent under another ", "One condition can never be co-existent ", "Conditions are always existent"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is it possible for Willard to still see Earth?", "question_unique_id": "62244_USGJFTB6_8", "options": ["Willard just has to go back on his ship ", "Willard cannot see Earth", "He is a ghost and can travel anywhere", "He could see it but can't feel it"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/2/4/62244//62244-h//62244-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "61412", "set_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Course of Logic", "year": 1956, "author": "Del Rey, Lester", "topic": "Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Short stories", "article": "THE COURSE OF LOGIC\nBY LESTER DEL REY\nThey made one little mistake—very\n\n natural—and disastrous!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe male silth plodded forward wearily at sixty miles an hour, pausing\n only long enough to uproot and wolf down one of the rare scrub trees\n directly in its path. Its three hundred tons of massive body shook\n the ground as the great hind legs thumped along, and every cell of it\n ached with hunger. It was warm blooded, despite its vaguely reptilian\n appearance. Only meat could satisfy its need for energy. But the great\n herds lay a thousand miles to the north of this barren land.\n\n\n Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that\n was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the\n inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she\n always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for\n him and his silth!\n\n\n \"Arnek!\" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the\n mental spectrum. \"Arnek, stop lagging and get up here!\"\n\n\n He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he\n stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by\n Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small,\n stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted\n below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward\n around a boulder.\n\n\n \"Quiet!\" Ptarra ordered sharply. Then, as Arnek switched from a\n thudding run to a smooth, creeping approach, the mental impulse took\n on a note of triumph. \"Look down there and then tell me I don't know a\n ship trail from a meteor!\"\n\n\n The bowl was bright in the glare of the orange sunlight, but at first\n Arnek saw nothing. Then, as his gaze swept back toward the nearer\n section, he blinked his great eyes, only half believing what they\n registered.\n\n\n It was a small thing, hardly taller than Arnek's silth—maybe not even\n as tall. But it was too regular and obviously artificial, a pointed\n cylinder, to be a meteorite. Between two of the base fins there seemed\n to be an opening, with a miniature ramp leading down to the ground. It\n looked like a delicately precise model of a spaceship from the dawn of\n time.\n\n\n It was obviously too small to be more than a message carrier. Yet, as\n he looked more closely, he could see motion. Two tiny creatures, not\n more than six feet in height, were scurrying around near the base.\n Bright patches of fur or decoration covered them, and they seemed to\n move on two of their four limbs.\nArnek shivered down the length of his nerves with an ancient distaste\n for crawling things. \"Let's go back,\" he suggested uneasily. \"There's\n nothing here for us, and I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Ptarra answered, and the old female superiority\n was strong in the thought. \"Of course it's too small for us; I knew\n that when I saw the landing trail yesterday evening. It must be an\n instrument probe, with test animals. If it has telemetering equipment,\n though—\"\n\n\n Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other.\n\n\n Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of\n the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill\n sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint\n impulses.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. \"Cut them off! Don't let\n them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning.\"\n\n\n In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his\n dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck\n into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two\n was almost at the ramp.\n\n\n At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head\n lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human\n midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet\n away.\n\n\n Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or\n something like it—came from the other creature.\n\n\n Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward\n toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced\n the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped\n about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of\n tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in\n annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the\n midge.\n\n\n It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion\n in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home\n world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent\n the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was\n bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the\n depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.\n\n\n There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. \"If your hunger is so great,\n why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood\n smells sweet enough.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer.\n\n\n Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't\n thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and\n pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned\n in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe.\n\n\n \"It had a weapon,\" he commented, changing the subject.\n\n\n Ptarra rumbled an assent. \"I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The\n probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the\n lower orders. They'll make good silths.... Now let's see what we can\n find in the probe.\"\nShe slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards\n as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit.\n\n\n Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he\n waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male,\n he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have ruined whatever\n lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery ... though\n the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary.\n\n\n Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. \"Maybe the\n creatures operated it,\" he suggested.\n\n\n \"What makes you think so?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. It just seems somehow—\"\n\n\n \"Intuition!\" Ptarra snorted. Then she seemed less certain. \"Yet I can't\n blame you this time. It\ndoes\nalmost look that way. But it's logically\n impossible. Besides, there are automatic controls for guiding the\n probe. The builders probably just amused themselves, the way we once\n put slurry-pods in the gulla pens. Ah, this looks sound enough!\"\n\n\n She pulled a tiny box out of the wreckage that had been spread out flat\n on the ground.\n\n\n With infinite care, she managed to hook one claw over a miniature\n control. Almost immediately, radio waves began forming a recurrent\n pattern along their nerves, coming in long and short pulses.\n\n\n Half an hour later, there was another faint quiver of radio waves from\n space, this time completely modulated. Even Arnek could realize that\n it was on the same frequency, but dopplered to indicate something\n approaching their world. He stopped browsing for the few stunted trees\n and came back to join his mate.\n\n\n Night was just falling. Ptarra led them back toward the rock ledge from\n which they had first spied the probe. There was a large fissure in the\n rocks into which they could just squeeze, and which would hide them\n from the sight of any landing craft.\n\n\n A moon came up, and they could see the depression clearly in its light.\n Now Arnek saw the larger human slipping across the ground toward the\n wreck of the probe. It darted about frantically, but with an appearance\n of purpose. A few moments later, it was retreating, carrying a load of\n packages with it.\n\n\n \"It seems almost intelligent,\" he said softly.\n\n\n He strained to follow the faint wash of impressions on the lower band.\n There was something there that struck a familiar chord in his thoughts,\n but he could not decode it.\n\n\n \"Just instinct,\" Ptarra dismissed it with cool logic. \"A female seeking\n food for its injured mate.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed uncomfortably. \"It doesn't seem female,\" he objected.\n\n\n \"Another hunch? Don't be silly, Arnek. It has to be a female. The\n larger, stronger and more intelligent form is always female. How else\n could it care for the young? It needs ability for a whole family, while\n the male needs only enough for himself. The laws of evolution are\n logical or we wouldn't have evolved at all.\"\n\n\n There was no answer to such logic, other than the vague discontent\n Arnek felt. And he knew that was only because of his envy of the\n greater ability of the other sex. He settled back, ruminating hungrily\n and listening to the signal from space.\n\n\n The little box from the wreck was silent now, but the other signals\n were stronger.\n\n\n Ptarra nodded. \"They're coming. After four hundred years, we have\n a chance. New silths to breed. A chance to reproduce ourselves and\n multiply. A new universe for our own.\" There was immense satisfaction\n with self in her thoughts. \"Well, I earned it!\"\nArnek could not deny it. It had been more than four hundred years in\n this galaxy. Eight thousand of them had set out, leaving behind a\n small, ancient universe being wrecked by the horror of an exploding\n supernova. They had been driven out from the planetary conquests of a\n billion years and had sought refuge across intergalactic space to this\n universe.\n\n\n A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had\n survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants.\n And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged\n the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their\n precautions.\n\n\n Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals\n that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with\n several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the\n sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue\n was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.\n\n\n They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after\n planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were\n barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived\n this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the\n new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.\n\n\n Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of\n retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile,\n and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full\n faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient,\n either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own.\n Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into\n these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature\n powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth.\n\n\n Four hundred years! And now—now, he thought, he was tired. It no\n longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry\n about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and\n tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach.\n\n\n The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's\n snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed\n downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship,\n landing over the wreckage of the first.\nBut it was no monster such as might have carried new and better silth\n forms. It was hardly larger than the first, though it somehow seemed\n to be better made. It landed smoothly and squatted on the ground,\n sending out signals.\n\n\n \"Another probe,\" Ptarra said. There was disappointment in her thoughts,\n quickly masked by cold logic. \"Naturally, they'd wait to check with\n something like this. There will probably be several probes before they\n decide they have to investigate personally. All right! We'll give them\n something to worry about.\"\n\n\n She was lunging to her feet, just as an opening appeared in the ship.\n This time something ran out, down the ramp—a tiny gadget of churning\n tracks and metal carapace, chuffing out shrill little motor sounds. It\n circled briefly and then headed across the bowl.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" Ptarra ordered. \"It may have a camera, so don't waste time.\n The less the builders learn about us, the better.\"\n\n\n Arnek took off. His hunger had so far failed to weaken him, and he was\n covering the ground at two hundred miles an hour before the little\n vehicle had picked up a tenth of that speed.\n\n\n At the last moment, it seemed to be aware of him. There was a wash of\n mental shock and confusion. Then his snout hit the car in a sideswipe\n that tossed it fifty feet to land on its back. He lumbered forward to\n squash it, then hesitated. An opening had appeared and two of the tiny\n humans were staggering out. One was supporting the other. At sight of\n him, both stopped in shock. For a second, they stood rooted to the\n ground. Then the larger one began a clumsy effort at running, half\n carrying the other. Blood left a trail behind them.\n\n\n Arnek could have squashed them with a single thrust of his leg. But\n he stood irresolutely, observing the garments and headgear they wore,\n remembering his youth and a gulla draped with a ribbon and bells. They\n were heading for the rocks nearest them, a long way from where the\n first two had found refuge. For a second, he felt impelled to turn them\n and drive them toward the others.\n\n\n Then a wave of amusement from Ptarra checked him. \"They'd never reach\n that far,\" she called. \"They can't survive the crash of their vehicle.\n Let them go.\"\nArnek felt the faint, murky mental signals so low on the band, and he\n knew Ptarra was right. They were staggering now, and the smaller one\n seemed to be only partly conscious. He sighed and scooped up the ground\n car, carrying it back to Ptarra.\n\n\n This time his mate was making no effort to rip the ship apart. She was\n staring through one of the tiny ports, trying to fit her great eye\n against it. And she seemed uncertain. Finally she took the ground car\n and began dismantling it, looking for automatic or remote controls.\n\n\n There were none.\n\n\n \"Maybe the creatures operated it—and the ship,\" Arnek said. He\n expected the same reaction the remark had drawn before.\n\n\n This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.\n\n\n A sudden shock ran through Ptarra's thoughts. Her great eyes blinked\n and a huge tongue ran over her lips. \"Nerve fiber!\" Her shout covered\n the entire spectrum. \"Arnek, there are pounds of nerve fiber in the\n creature! High grade—better than that in these silth forms. As good as\n that in any silth. Here, give me the other.\"\n\n\n She didn't wait for Arnek's help, however. She dragged the corpse out\n and began working as delicately as the silth body would permit. Her\n mental signals were a blur. Then she stopped, staring down at what she\n held. \"There—a cavity in the head, filled with nerve fibers. There\n must be three pounds there alone. What freak of evolution would put\n them all together in such a vulnerable spot? And yet, there's a certain\n efficiency about it. It isn't logical—and yet it is.\"\n\n\n Abruptly, the evidence was gone. \"Come on,\" she ordered.\n\n\n Arnek sighed, and his stomach rumbled a protest. But he ignored it.\n \"What good is it? We surely can't make a silth out of a tiny thing like\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Contempt for male thought was mixed with smug satisfaction\n for her own. \"We don't use the other cells anyhow. Oh, there will be\n difficulties. They may be short-lived. But with such high grade fiber,\n we can risk infiltrating a new one as often as we need. There should\n be enough of them. They probably have half a dozen to a litter twice\n a year, like most small forms. Possibly billions of them can live on\n a single planet. And since they're colonizing other worlds like this\n one....\"\n\n\n Even Arnek could see the logic behind Ptarra's assumption in that.\n Colonizing would explain the sending out of a male and female in each\n ship, with ships spread out days apart. It wasn't the most efficient\n method, but it usually insured against any major accident. His people\n had used the same method at times.\n\n\n It all seemed quite logical, but Arnek felt a tension of intuition\n along his entire nerve network. No anna had ever used a silth capable\n of independent intelligence. There must be something wrong with it.\n Once they infiltrated the new silth, of course, they could soon convert\n enough nerves to blank out all control from their carriers. But....\n\n\n \"Their weapons,\" he cried. \"Ptarra, in those bodies, we'd be vulnerable\n to their weapons. And during the ten days we have to hibernate to grow\n into their nerves, they'd kill us.\"\n\n\n Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.\n\n\n \"Do you remember everything?\" Ptarra asked. \"You've got to regain\n consciousness after the first stage. You can do that, if you set your\n mind to it.\"\n\n\n \"I remember,\" Arnek agreed wearily. He'd had the whole routine drilled\n into him repeatedly until he was sick of it. It was like the horror of\n having her force him to adapt to this present silth. While he had been\n ready to accept assimilation, she had fought with him and with her own\n transformation, refusing to admit even his intuition that their race\n was ended. Only her cold logic had saved them. He could not deny it now.\n\n\n \"Be sure you take the smaller male body,\" she warned again.\n\n\n \"Unless that's the female. You found evolution different in these\n creatures once,\" he reminded her.\n\n\n For a moment, she was silent. Then there was a mental shrug, and almost\n amusement as she answered. \"Matching sex isn't logically necessary.\n It might even be an interesting amusement. But I must have the larger\n body.\"\n\n\n She began shifting at once. The silth gasped and tried to thresh about\n in death as Ptarra released control. Arnek sighed to himself and began\n to follow.\n\n\n It was worse than he remembered. After the centuries, the cells hated\n to give up their fixed form. The agony of the silth fed back to him,\n until his withdrawal stopped its heart. But slowly the nuclear matter\n flowed from the cells and up the pathways to their egress, taking the\n minimum of nutrient fluid with them.\n\n\n It took nearly an hour, and he could see the thin film of Ptarra\n already lying over the sleeping human.\n\n\n He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would\n not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead.\n He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the\n open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the\n strange nerve bundle in the skull.\n\n\n Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost\n pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of the last\n silth had been. These were like coming home to a friendly world, in a\n universe that had died too long ago and far away. For a time, he was\n almost glad that he had not died with it.\n\n\n Then the first allergic reactions began, and he had to relapse into\n instinct, to let his being fight to save both himself and his host\n cells from the reaction.\n\n\n He set the first stage up, however. This time he managed with no help\n from Ptarra. Then he relapsed into unconsciousness, making no effort to\n control his new silth yet. He'd have to revise when the silth awoke, he\n told himself.\n\n\n But it was only a dream order, half completed....\nIt was a sudden painful pressure of acceleration that finally brought\n him out of his torpor. He felt half sick, and he could vaguely sense\n that the new silth was fevered and uncomfortable. But, amazingly, it\n was sitting up. And around it was a room bigger than the whole ship had\n seemed, and controls under its hands, and fantastic equipment.\n\n\n \"It's about time,\" Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now,\n since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold\n and sure. \"I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship\n and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough\n to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to\n leave. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most\n of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive—but they're\n logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she\n isn't aware.\"\n\n\n The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand\n back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek\n rode. \"I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches.\"\n\n\n The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.\n\n\n He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will.\n\n\n \"There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation\n while we grow into these silths,\" Ptarra reported. \"Now—help me if you\n can.\"\n\n\n Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as\n she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will.\n\n\n Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy\n fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind,\n Arnek began to see the plan.\n\n\n There was fuel enough to bring them at maximum speed across an eddy\n of the galaxy toward the lone sun they had found long before. There\n a single planet swung in orbit—a planet with food but no dangerous\n animal life. And there they could wait and grow strong, and multiply\n as their silths multiplied. They could reach it almost as soon as they\n came out of hibernation finally, and it would be a safe haven in its\n isolation.\n\n\n There would be no fuel for further travel. But that could wait, while\n their numbers grew, and they could restore their lost technology and\n weapons with the clever hands of the human silths. Then they could take\n over the galaxy—as they had taken the one so long away!\n\n\n The hands fumbled under the limited control, but they moved across the\n board. And the automatic pilot was finally set and sealed.\n\n\n \"Logic!\" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind\n like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien\n mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his\n nerves.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long\n interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control\n again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there\n was amusement. \"Logic,\" she agreed. \"But perhaps intuition isn't too\n bad for a male. You've been right twice.\"\n\n\n \"Twice?\" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths\n controlled their own ships, of course. But....\n\n\n \"Twice,\" Ptarra said. \"I've just realized my silth is a male, as you\n suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?\"\n\n\n She tried to say something else, but the strain was too much, and full\n hibernation swept her mind away from that of Arnek.\n\n\n Arnek sat frozen for a time in his silth, knowing that it was also male.\n\n\n Then he turned it somehow to face the lost galaxy where his race had\n known its day and now entered its eternal night.\n", "questions": [{"question": "After the first 4 paragraphs, what is clear about the main character?", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_1", "options": ["He is scared of the tiny creatures", "He is an alien being", "He is a human investigating a crash", "He is physically hurt"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is clear about the relationship between Ptarra and Arnek?", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_2", "options": ["They are not related", "Arnek is clearly in charge", "They are in love", "Ptarra is clearly in charge"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which word best describes Arnek?", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_3", "options": ["Sophisticated", "Meek", "Strong", "Loving "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which word best describes Ptarra?", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_4", "options": ["Submissive", "Domineering", "Strong", "Educated"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is ironic about the outlook of the humans by the main characters?", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_5", "options": ["They are looking at their food in humans", "No irony", "The humans aren't the dominating species", "Ptarra's shock about the female role"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do we learn about silths?", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_6", "options": ["Thy are violent creatures", "They are evil beings", "They are more advanced than their form would lead you to believe", "They take on forms of different creatures for survival"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What changed Ptarra's opinion about the humans?", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_7", "options": ["Their nerve fibers", "Her opinion never changed", "Their resiliency during the fight", "The construction of their ships"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the passage suggest about intelligence?", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_8", "options": ["You are never smart enough", "Its all you need to thrive", "It is infallible", "Intuition can be just as important as knowledge"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is ironic about the \"higher fertility?\"", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_9", "options": ["Silths never reproduce", "N/A", "Humans don't have children in liters", "Humans don't reproduce often"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Where is the ship headed?", "question_unique_id": "61412_BHENZWIA_10", "options": ["Jupiter", "Mars", "Earth", "To their home planet"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/4/1/61412//61412-h//61412-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "20003", "set_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Changelings", "year": "1998", "author": "Jack Shafer", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Changelings \n\n         When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n         The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices . \n\n         In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't. \n\n         Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote. \n\n          On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict. \n\n         In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of \"PETN\" residues in the wreckage. The Times reported: \"Law enforcement officers said it was impossible to know, for now, whether the explosion was caused by a bomb or a missile because PETN is an explosive component commonly found in both. Still, the discovery would seem to knock from contention the theory that mechanical failure caused the airplane to explode on July 17, killing all 230 aboard .\" (Emphasis added.) Eventually, the Times and the investigators abandoned the PETN/bomb theory for the mechanical failure theory. \n\n         Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n         Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work? \n\n          The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant campaign donations by Loral Space & Communications' chief executive to Democratic coffers = Clinton's OK of U.S. satellite launches. The Post 's sober coverage expands the theme to detail how the president was as happy to fulfill the satellite dreams of the Republican businessman from Hughes who lobbied heavily and donated sparingly as he was to satisfy the Democratic businessman from Loral who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars (see John Mintz's June 25 article, \"How Hughes Got What It Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more. \n\n         Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story. \n\n         Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude? \n\n          \n\n            Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor! \n\n          The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make. \n\n         Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n         The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post \n\n            Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times                 Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n         Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks. \n\n          The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it. \n\n         Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses. \n\n         Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope.\n", "questions": [{"question": "In the passage what was considered the Post's original virtue?", "question_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3_1", "options": ["Risk Taking", "Sports", "Stocks", "Deep local issues"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the Time's print being color and the Post's black/white suggest?", "question_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3_2", "options": ["The Post is cheap", "The Time's are more current", "The Time's are irrelevant", "The Post is lazy"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the downside of chasing astonishing stories?", "question_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3_3", "options": ["Nothing, they make career", "N/A", "They are hard to find", "Stories can be fabricated"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author suggest with describing the writer as writerish?", "question_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3_4", "options": ["No experience", "Superb writer", "Elegance over substance", "No suggestion"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which paper would be considered flushed?", "question_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3_5", "options": ["N/A", "Times", "N/A", "Post"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the \"raid\" men in the passage?", "question_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3_6", "options": ["The moment the Times invaded the post ", "What the post calls their writers", "Stealing of writers", "How careless the Times can be "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the editorial risk for the Post not work?", "question_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3_7", "options": ["It neglected their audience", "It didn't have good writers", "Was labeled as racist", "It actually worked out"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the passage suggest about successful news?", "question_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3_8", "options": ["Writing fluctuates", "Editors are key", "Writers are key", "Topics are key"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Based on the passage where does the Times get its edge?", "question_unique_id": "20003_2WJ7BPF3_9", "options": ["The culture", "The writers", "The successions", "It's first editor"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20004", "set_unique_id": "20004_3GH7VIQ1", "batch_num": "12", "writer_id": "1015", "source": "Slate", "title": "Welcome to SLATE", "year": "1996", "author": "Michael Kinsley", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Welcome to SLATE \n\n         An introduction and apologia. \n\n         By Michael Kinsley \n\n         The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp. \n\n         A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\" \n\n         To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible. \n\n         And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n         For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1. \n\n         The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n         We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n                         So What's in It?              \n\n         First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n         Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE                 on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.) \n\n         Individual copies of SLATE                 on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n         While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n                         OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]              \n\n         SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK)              \n\n         Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n         The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors. \n\n         Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index. \n\n         The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n         In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.) \n\n         Stanford economist Paul Krugman writes The Dismal Scientist, a once-a-month column on economic policy. (See his debut essay in this issue, about the economic war within the Clinton administration.) University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg writes monthly on \"Everyday Economics,\" using economic analysis to illuminate everyday life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity can actually reduce the spread of AIDS.) \n\n         \"The Earthling\" will be a monthly column by Robert Wright, contributor to the New Republic and Time , and author of the acclaimed book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal . Other regular Briefing features will include a Press column by our deputy editor, Jack Shafer. \n\n          Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose \"Washingtoon\" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark. \n\n                         Can There Possibly be More?              \n\n         Our Features section begins each week with the Committee of Correspondence, our e-mail discussion group. The committee is run by Herbert Stein, a former chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers best-known now for his witty columns in the Wall Street Journal . We have great hopes for e-mail as a medium of debate that can combine the immediacy of talk-television with the intellectual discipline of the written word. We hope for something halfway between The McLaughlin Group and the correspondence page of the New York Review of Books . Will it work? Check out our first attempt--Does Microsoft Play Fair?--and let us know what you think. \n\n         The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n         In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer. \n\n         This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good Word, about the difference between \"Jesuitical\" and \"Talmudic.\" \n\n         In general, SLATE's Back of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing monthly on food (\"In the Soup\"), Anne Hollander on fashion (\"Clothes Sense\"), and Margaret Talbot on \"Men and Women.\" Audio and video clips will be offered where appropriate. \n\n         Every issue will have a poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by Seamus Heaney. \n\n         And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n                         Does SLATE Have a Slant?              \n\n         SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job. \n\n         Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n         A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours). \n\n         Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n         Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n                         Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE. \n\n           \n\n         TEXT AAA: No, this is not a link to the Cognisoft home page. As a general rule, we plan to avoid hyperlinks to outside sites in the text of articles, and to group them at the end instead. It's a small illustration of our general philosophy--better call it a hope--that, even on the Web, some people will want to read articles in the traditional linear fashion--i.e., from beginning to end--rather than darting constantly from site to site. Go back. \n\n         TEXT BBB: Only kidding. Easter. Go back. \n\n         TEXT CCC: Objectivity, we hope, will distinguish this feature from Newsweek 's \"Conventional Wisdom Watch,\" which is often an effort to set the spin rather than describe it. Anyway, the \"CW Watch\" was a rip-off of a similar feature in the New Republic when I was the editor there. And TNR 's feature itself was lifted from Washington, D.C.'s, City Paper , which was edited at the time of the theft by Jack Shafer, now deputy editor of SLATE. Go back. \n\n         TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.) \n\n         At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back. \n\n         TEXT EEE: In this regard we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News & World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go back. \n\n         TEXT FFF: This is different from \"attitude\"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine them--but we'll leave \"attitude\" to the kids. Go back.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the significance of the name SLATE?", "question_unique_id": "20004_3GH7VIQ1_1", "options": ["N/A", "It coming along late", "Nothing, it means nothing", "It is an acronym"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How do magazines usually get their funding?", "question_unique_id": "20004_3GH7VIQ1_2", "options": ["Subscribers", "Neither", "Both", "Advertisers"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the purpose of charging for SLATE when most online needs are free?", "question_unique_id": "20004_3GH7VIQ1_3", "options": ["Better Writers", "Autonomy in writing", "No purpose", "More cash flow"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is the \"Fray\" significant in the passage?", "question_unique_id": "20004_3GH7VIQ1_4", "options": ["Fray isn't ready yet", "No significance", "Great band", "It is a great reader discussion forum"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which version will readers get in the first year?", "question_unique_id": "20004_3GH7VIQ1_5", "options": ["Alpha", "Web", "Beta", "Printed"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When will a solidified version of SLATE be ready?", "question_unique_id": "20004_3GH7VIQ1_6", "options": ["Never", "After the beta/alpha phase", "In 3 years", "Christmas"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where will debate occur?", "question_unique_id": "20004_3GH7VIQ1_7", "options": ["Radio", "Paper", "Email", "TV"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "51380", "set_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Time In the Round", "year": 1961, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "Boys -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; PS", "article": "TIME IN THE ROUND\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPoor Butcher suffered more than any dictator\n \nin history: everybody gave in to him because\n \nhe was so puny and they were so impregnable!\nFrom the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace\n Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at\n the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the\n effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of\n civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up\n with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the\n scene was normal again.\n\n\n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied\n the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and\n poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his\n grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony\n pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip\n and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff\n tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an\n upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long\n black tongue lolled.\n\n\n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube\n with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone\n called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n\n\n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the\n luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that,\n except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n\n\n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n \"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\nThe gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks\n so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a\n fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and\n one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n\n\n Butch yawned.\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog\n fights, Butch.\"\n\n\n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I\n don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else.\n Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you\n talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n\n\n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the\n judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All\n right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people\n were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back\n skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed\n up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He\n squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n\n\n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't\n break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose.\n Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that\n when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed.\"\n\n\n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice\n acquired from a robot adolescer.\n\n\n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the\n Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than\n anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n\n\n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n\n\n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear\n and was whirling him around hilariously.\n\n\n \"Aw,\nquit\nit, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n\n\n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no\n attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n\n\n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much\n of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\nHe kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded\n scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits\n and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with\n guarded wistfulness.\n\n\n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is\n programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically\n has racial memory.\"\n\n\n \"I mean if you\ncould\nhurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut\n up—I want to think.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n\n\n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he\n said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n\n\n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n\n\n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet\nyou\ndidn't.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All\n newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless.\n They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death\n games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult\n conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why,\n long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people\n kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them\n differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's\n greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all\n violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n\n\n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a\n sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we\n were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's\n what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to\n problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to\n viruses.\"\n\n\n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n\n\n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n\n\n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough\n yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons\n why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time\n Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into\n the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't\n change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to\n have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n\n\n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n\n\n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll\n have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to\n keep\ntelling\nme about it, do you?\"\nThe others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly\n on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said\n in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time\n Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n\n\n Butch scowled.\n\n\n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n\n\n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n\n\n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?\"\n\n\n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You\n said so yourself.\"\n\n\n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n\n\n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n\n\n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging\n pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a\n black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n\n\n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups\n wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up\n or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the\n crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF\n THE GRASS.\n\n\n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the\n others.\n\n\n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at\n shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a\n wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes\n avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking\n up inquiringly at his master.\n\n\n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy\n ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of\n his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher\n climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during\n which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n\n\n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along\n securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after\n his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few\n minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to\n climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n\n\n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the\n Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he\n was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\nIt was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking\n and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor\n hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would\n be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the\n simplest way to make progress.\n\n\n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were\n among the most prized of toys.\n\n\n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n\n\n \"I\nknow\n,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n\n\n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp\n to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god\n realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to\n the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n\n\n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly\n as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're\n viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D.\n time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A\n red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair\n had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat\n Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the\n grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n\n\n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n\n\n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the\n skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the\n Navies.\"\n\n\n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even\n if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n\n\n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n\n\n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n\n\n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the\n difference.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their\n feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened\n his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in\n tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he\n thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n\n\n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which\n drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher\n limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his\n battle injury.\nHal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n\n\n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to\n think old.\"\n\n\n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives\n simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for\n it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and\n have some excitement.\"\n\n\n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away\n from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics\n or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take\n care of you.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them,\n contorting his face diabolically.\n\n\n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor.\n Obediently four of them lined up.\n\n\n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a\n deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to\n retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed\n back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound\n issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other\n uninjes moved uneasily.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy\n whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n\n\n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still\n fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n\n\n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely\n electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back.\n The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n\n\n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n\n\n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then\n bounced him back with equal force.\n\n\n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving\n up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell\n how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you\n through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the\n usher.\"\nBut the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and\n then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and\n growled faintly down the corridor.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think\n Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n\n\n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the\n usher as if it weren't there.\n\n\n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips.\n There were two closely spaced faint\nplops\nand a large green stain\n appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from\n the close-cropped hair of the other.\n\n\n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms\n folded and wasn't looking at them.\n\n\n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the\n main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found\n themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch\n the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their\n levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\nThe darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central\n platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat\n flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the\n bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale\n central glow.\n\n\n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of\n the boys.\n\n\n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the\n bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage\n appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble,\n a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a\n little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about\n were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond\n beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n\n\n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor—long swords glistening\n with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and\n helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean,\n wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\nSometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer\n down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only\n the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder\n and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n\n\n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric\n cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that\n Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply,\n whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that,\n Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development\n and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers.\n But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion\n microtapes, though.\"\n\n\n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time\n in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived\n by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We\n believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces\n of nature and see into the future.\"\n\n\n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the\n other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n\n\n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he\n knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light,\n can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of\n the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other\n way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the\n way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n\n\n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's\n a kind of hole through time?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the\n locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two\n points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely\n open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped—and so would\n an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain\n the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n\n\n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light,\n why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n\n\n \"Why—er—you see, Joggy—\"\n\n\n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way\n for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward\n you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the\n opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked\n away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\nAs if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on\n their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For\n an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing\n silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the\n bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the\n back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on\n the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some\n time.\n\n\n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n\n\n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice\n cut in.\n\n\n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the\n cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while\n mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n\n\n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n\n\n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble,\n if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward\n us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light\n coming our way disappear, too?\"\n\n\n \"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—\"\n\n\n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n\n\n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of\n one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's\n more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light\n tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the\n light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience.\n But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the\n Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater,\n you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're\n getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no\n isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are\n being made to synthesize them.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs\n are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nlike this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut\n anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n\n\n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n\n\n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n\n\n \"But how\ndid\nyou get in—Butcher?\"\nThe Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it\n certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes\n of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater\n and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but\n then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and\n fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the\n usher.\"\n\n\n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You\n tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed\n yours, going through the usher. I really\nhave\nheard it's dangerous\n for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n\n\n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls\n commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew\n to the far end of the cubicle.\n\n\n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on\n the scene in the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Those big dogs—\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble.\n Smells haven't any isotopes and—\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out\n someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n\n\n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's\n all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real\n at all, but a—uh—\"\n\n\n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking\n of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some\n scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and\n that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but\n ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is\n only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used\n for time traveling—just as it may be a similar disability that keeps\n a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real\n man or animal.\n\n\n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and\n other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time\n Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should\n prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are\n automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any\n harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible,\n remember) in either direction.\"\n\n\n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n\"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\nThe Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n\n\n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a\n quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a\n qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n\n\n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble\n had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up\n their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back,\n revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be\n looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n\n\n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of\n his seat.\n\n\n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n\n\n \"Hah!\"\n\n\n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of\n smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved\n wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The\n warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the\n sorcerer.\n\n\n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n\n\n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone\n forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n\n\n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be\n necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n\n\n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed\n at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he\n must cross-section.\n\n\n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n\n\n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the\n shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n\n\n \"Oh,\nboy\n!\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n\n\n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.\n\n\n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step\n forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his\n left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his\n right hand.\n\n\n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\"\n the interpreter enjoined.\n\n\n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the\n Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the\n floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n\n\n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged\n warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between\n their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled.\n Then the warriors began to fan out.\n\n\n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the\n interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n\n\n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a\n levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At\n his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization\n voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey,\n you! You quit that!\"\n\n\n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to\n quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his\n sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range.\n Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n\n\n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring\n at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible\n an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed\n a step.\nThe Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and\n digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n 'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie\n and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\nGrowling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves\n forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first\n encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and\n tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But\n then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the\n face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and\n touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n\n\n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But\n already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had\n the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many\n foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj\n clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n\n\n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the\n warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully.\n That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand\n clenching the levitator above his head.\n\n\n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n\n\n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately,\n a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n\n\n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in\n mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n\n\n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.\n\n\n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n\n\n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always\n playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come\n from those dirty past men.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening\n to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of\n reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute\n licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically\n on his mouth.\n\n\n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We\n came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Which of the following is not a difference between the three main boys in the story?", "question_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7_1", "options": ["They vary in the degree to which they're interested in warfare (some interested, some not)", "They vary in their ability to follow the rules (some do, some don't)", "They vary in the degree to which they're interested in the Time Bubble (some interested, some not)", "They vary in ages (some younger, some older)"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is not a technology seen in this story?", "question_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7_2", "options": ["Cool transportation methods", "Machines that can send folks back to the past every 10 minutes", "Highly advanced robotic technologies", "Machines that can show the past"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is a moral one might be able to conclude from this story?", "question_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7_3", "options": ["Taking risks is fun and they can be a good time.", "Being honest with friends is important.", "Working hard is important.", "None of the other options are plausible conclusions."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which traits best describe Hal's character?", "question_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7_4", "options": ["caring and funny", "reasonable and responsible", "charismatic and concerned", "brave and thoughtful"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which traits best describe Butcher's character?", "question_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7_5", "options": ["strong and fair", "conniving and scary", "weak and helpful", "reckless and immature"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is not a part of the narrative purpose for why uninjes are in the story?", "question_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7_6", "options": ["Uninjes show the degree to which technology has advanced.", "Uninjes are solid companions to the protagonists.", "Uninjes show the caring sides of Butcher to the audience.", "Uninjes lay the foundation for the events of the climax."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is the age difference between the boys relative to the story?", "question_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7_7", "options": ["One of them is too young to justifiably hang out with the older two.", "One of them is too old to justifiably hang out with the younger two.", "One of them is too old to enjoy a type of technology.", "One of them is too young to be allowed to enjoy a type of technology."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following best summarizes this story?", "question_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7_8", "options": ["Children work together to defeat an enemy that time travels.", "Children explore to find events for their uninjes to fight.", "The children follow many rules yet get in trouble because of each other quite easily.", "Characters try to observe history through technology and one person makes an attempt to do so go haywire."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Of the following options, who might enjoy reading this passage the most?", "question_unique_id": "51380_2J2WV4R7_9", "options": ["A studious kid who follows the rules", "A kid wanting to learn more about the meaning of friendship", "A kid who's a fan of sci-fi and is also a troublemaker", "An adult who likes sci-fi stories about travel"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/8/51380//51380-h//51380-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50848", "set_unique_id": "50848_DD5IIUGR", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Soldier Boy", "year": 1958, "author": "Shaara, Michael", "topic": "Space colonies -- Fiction; Science fiction; War stories; Soldiers -- Fiction; PS", "article": "SOLDIER BOY\nBy MICHAEL SHAARA\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless\n \nand outdated—another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\nIn the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire\n the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace,\n and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him\n again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he\n will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and\n the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n—\nScandinavian legend\nThroughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in\n the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy,\n snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were\n all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee\n and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It\n was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed\n in a field near the settlement.\n\n\n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the\n colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore\n grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had\n convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but\n no one went out to greet them.\n\n\n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship\n and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained\n there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly\n thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or\n just plain orneriness.\n\n\n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n\n\n \"What's he just\nstanding\nthere for?\" another lady said.\n\n\n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n\n\n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a\n message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n\n\n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you\n want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n\n\n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes.\n Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel.\n It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He\n was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the\n hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man\n appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n\n\n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n\n\n Dylan turned and nodded.\n\n\n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning,\n he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and\n put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A\n moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n\n\n \"Was he\ndrunk\n?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of\nliquor\n?\"\n\n\n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the\n envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We\n haven't much time.\"\n\n\n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As\n Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but\n could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch\n that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy\n clouds and the cold.\nAfter a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\nThe first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race\n occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from\n home. Late in the year 2360—the exact date remains unknown—an alien\n force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and\n the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the\n army.\n\n\n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists,\n thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children,\n were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines,\n even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were\n the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had,\n nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier\n finally stumbled on something.\n\n\n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main\n buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be\n buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow\n a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn\n vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb\n at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The\n detonating wire had been cut.\n\n\n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of\n earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n\n\n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five\n hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small,\n weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread\n the news, and Man began to fall back.\n\n\n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won\n stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of\n the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died\n in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those\n ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a\n society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only\n defense Earth had.\n\n\n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth\n with a bottle on his hip.\nAn obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven\n face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and\n listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists\n were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great\n suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,\n between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n\n\n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those\n in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan\n grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake\n it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly\n and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and\n impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set\n up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever\n having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home\n out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But\n at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n\n\n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all\n by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an\n outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.\n He stirred restlessly.\n\n\n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n\n\n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our\nhome\n. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been\n paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you\n earned your keep. We demand....\"\n\n\n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped\n that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him\n now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The\n gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n\n\n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"\n\n\n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.\n\n\n Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n\n\n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green.\n But he'd been only nineteen when his father died—of a hernia, of a\n crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked\n too long on a heavy planet—and in those days the anti-war conditioning\n out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians\n of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down\n doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n\n\n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait\n and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days\n was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell\n with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of\n the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults\n which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the\n core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point:\n it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed\n nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something\n pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n\n\n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n\n\n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no\n iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n\n\n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck—she's all we\n could afford.\"\n\n\n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that\n somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n\n\n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said\n quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can.\n Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n\n\n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around\n him and the scurrying people.\n\n\n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n\n\n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like\n most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\nIt was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was\n silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n \"Maybe an animal?\"\n\n\n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or\n found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think?\n The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one\n is cut too—newly cut.\"\n\n\n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n\n\n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.\n\n\n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that\n he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was\n perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n\n\n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How?\n Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n\n\n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there\n would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really\n know.\n\n\n Were they small? Little animals?\n\n\n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable\n brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large\n as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long\n before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly\n shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n\n\n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n\n\n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he\n straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out\n his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last\n time he had fired it. He never had—he never had fired a gun.\nThe snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do\n but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing\n wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until\n there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights\n and the snow.\n\n\n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n\n\n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n\n\n \"But they have a contract!\"\n\n\n The soldier grinned.\n\n\n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n \"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\nDylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien\n cut it.\"\n\n\n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and\n no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no\n unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year\n ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of\n us did it.\"\n\n\n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n\n\n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n\n\n \"Might be.\"\n\n\n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if\n one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n\n\n Rush calmly—at least outwardly calmly—lit his pipe. There was a\n strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n\n\n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until\n I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n\n\n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n\n\n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n\n\n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever\n comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n\n\n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like\n a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we\n landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly,\n the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post\n them sentries.\"\n\n\n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to\n say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained\n expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n\n\n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got\n Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n\n\n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n \"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises,\n within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five\n minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n\n\n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for\n huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering\n his footprints.\nThe Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide\n warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae;\n curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans\n come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He\n saw that they were armed.\nHe pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced\n lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been\n watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware\n of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n\n\n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that\n night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But\nflexibility\n, he reminded himself sternly,\nis the first principle of\n absorption\n, and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection\n reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the\n hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer\n told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and\n that the attack there had probably begun.\n\n\n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay\n quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow,\n thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he\n would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n\n\n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with\n uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was\n distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could\n take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single\n button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling\n of the colonists' ship.\nWhen Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow,\n thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later\n the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three\n had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard\n the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was\n all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered.\n There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He\n checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the\n air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n\n\n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.\n\n\n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n\n\n Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.\n\n\n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went\n into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might\n be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see\n the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and\n tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n\n\n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was\n a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and\n he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he\n must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a\n mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n\n\n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of\n everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like\n that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the\n coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the\n ship.\n\n\n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see\n a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes.\n Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the\n weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some\n of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and\n were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went\n automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The\n elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep\n themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n\n\n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n\n\n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What traits best describe Dylan?", "question_unique_id": "50848_DD5IIUGR_1", "options": ["Handsome and careful", "Brave and young", "Kind and funny", "Brave and funny"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How would you describe the army?", "question_unique_id": "50848_DD5IIUGR_2", "options": ["Proficient at combat, despite its small size", "Prepared for battle and large in numbers", "Atrophied from peace time", "Proficient at ranged weaponry and evenly distributed across the territories"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the problem with the ship?", "question_unique_id": "50848_DD5IIUGR_3", "options": ["It couldn't carry everybody", "It had missing parts", "It could only carry a few people", "It had broken parts"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the purpose of the bomb?", "question_unique_id": "50848_DD5IIUGR_4", "options": ["To plant on the enemy ship", "To take out the town in the event of an emergency", "To send to the enemy", "To bury at the edge of the town to defend against the enemy"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What decisions were being made at the end of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "50848_DD5IIUGR_5", "options": ["How to save the children by flying to the other side of the planet", "How to prepare for attack", "How to survive the attack by creating a distraction", "How to evacuate people"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the tone of this passage?", "question_unique_id": "50848_DD5IIUGR_6", "options": ["Satirical", "Dire", "Fast-paced", "Adventurous"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who might enjoy reading this passage the most?", "question_unique_id": "50848_DD5IIUGR_7", "options": ["An undergrad who likes reading about political decisions and enjoys sci-fi", "A child who likes reading about space exploration", "A teen who likes reading sad sci-fi stories", "A teen who likes reading about adventure stories"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/4/50848//50848-h//50848-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50868", "set_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Highest Mountain", "year": 1953, "author": "Walton, Bryce", "topic": "Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; PS; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\nBy BRYCE WALTON\n\n\n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nFirst one up this tallest summit in the Solar\n \nSystem was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\nBruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to\n open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd\n sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing\n off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be\n postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of\n human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all,\n but seemed real and alive—except that they were also just parts of a\n last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n\n\n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening\n till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He\n smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n\n\n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into\n Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger\n in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly\n at Bruce.\n\n\n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n\n\n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n\n\n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n\n\n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n \"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you\n think I'd be running to?\"\n\n\n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n\n\n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care\n of that, doesn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the\n revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some\n sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n\n\n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the\n gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain\n didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars\n eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never\n got back to Earth—all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow,\n like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n\n\n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher\n than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The\n entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills\n by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one\n incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it\n had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at\n Earth—or a warning one.\nWith Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship,\nMars V\n, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in\n front of them for the inquest.\n\n\n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs\n stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence.\n His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the\n Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there\n was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n\n\n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he\n wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late.\n They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n\n\n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly\n of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene\n shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in\n his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he\n had been when he woke from them.\n\n\n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know\n you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him.\n Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n\n\n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n\n\n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we\n get back.\"\n\n\n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out\n there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n\n\n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again\n to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in\n the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted\n enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior.\n This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too\n much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing\n fellow crew-members!\"\n\n\n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\"\n Bruce said.\n\n\n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n \"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never\n have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can\n find. You don't belong here.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I\n told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part\n of it.\"\n\n\n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you\n backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil\n does Venus—?\"\n\n\n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high\n forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to\n the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly\n educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n\n\n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n\n\n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice\n any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the\n crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One\n of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were\n aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this\n village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings\n there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand\n inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet\n us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The\n village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n\n\n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning\n to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the\n cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n\n\n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking\n about.\"\n\n\n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the\n most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of\n elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the\n real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you\n think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws\n of the whole Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say\n what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do\n that regardless....\"\n\n\n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They\n had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The\n psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't\n want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human\n vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was\n kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted\n to open the mouth for in the first place.\n\n\n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions.\n Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for\n centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism,\n individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question\n of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first.\n So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job\n there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared.\n This was the fifth attempt—\nTerrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and\n when he shot the—\" Bruce hesitated.\n\n\n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n\n\n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to\n sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n\n\n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke\n me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we\n were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got\n here.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n\n\n Someone laughed.\n\n\n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People\n talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some\n kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n\n\n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n\n\n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of\n some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling\n there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out.\n You're still interested?\"\n\n\n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n\n\n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce\n pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some\n fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me\n from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place—\"\n\n\n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about\n scaling it.\"\n\n\n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming\n to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew\n of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a\n precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why?\n Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them?\n Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful\n climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up\n there.\n\n\n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why\n should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The\n challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend\n going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't\n interest me.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up\n straight and rigid.\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying,\n I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was\n shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either\n that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the\n window—something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at\n first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty,\n almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling\n it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in\n my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking—\"\n\n\n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked\n me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked.\n Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too,\n or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up\n his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran\n after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do\n you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I\n could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more.\n Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it.\n That's the way you think.\"\n\n\n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n\n\n \"That's the philosophy of conquest—don't take any chances with\n aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill\n everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill\n everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun\n away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe\n that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and\n that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would\n if I had the chance.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small\n wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what\n do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit\n him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n\n\n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n \"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia\n is caused by inner conflict—indecision between the older values and\n our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case\n history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would\n say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why\n he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense\n which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era\n values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings\n of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action?\n Doran must have seen something—\"\n\n\n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak\n personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He\nimagined\nhe saw\n something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did\nyou\nsee anything?\"\n\n\n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't\n anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there\n is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything\n else. A shadow maybe—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law\n regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n\n\n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n\n\n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you\n a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from\n you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left\n food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of service?\"\n\n\n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the\n mountain.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n\n\n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the\n others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of\n us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they\n come in.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\nBruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of\n the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them\n disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like\n convicts.\n\n\n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much\n if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative\n prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so\n pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as\n long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n\n\n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were\n climbing.\n\n\n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and\n that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to\n accept a challenge like this!\"\n\n\n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen\n masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness\n and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I\n can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just\n to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this!\n What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n\n\n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain\n at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't\n seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on\n going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our\n computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this\n high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so\n smooth.\"\n\n\n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice\n that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other\n four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any\n of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—\"\n\n\n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food\n concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He\n had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to\n take care of the time.\n\n\n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser\n a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most\n dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether\n we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on\n climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused\n to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled.\n So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning\n anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for\n us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the\n weaklings are.\"\n\n\n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher.\n Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What\n a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says,\n it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but\n that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can\n see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be—\"\n\n\n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he\n was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long\n time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking\n the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more\n real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n\n\n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but\n Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real\n any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\nThe problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to\n worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence\n was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His\n dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had\n left it, and it was the same—allowing even for the time difference\n necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n\n\n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names:\n Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n\n\n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to\n him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could\n also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense.\n Consistently, they made sense.\n\n\n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green\n valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing\n their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there\n were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them\n that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n\n\n '\n... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting,\n shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the\n delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love—and all our\n own!—than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known....\n'\n\n\n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the\n dreams.\n\n\n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would\n look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing\n but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n\n\n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again.\n The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n\n\n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he\n couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would\n die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into\n himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one\n compensation—he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them\n who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way\n across the Cosmos.\n\n\n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him\n much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He\n could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n\n\n \"Bruce—Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure\n to be five hundred thousand feet! It\nis\nimpossible. We keep climbing\n and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is\n going up and up—\"\n\n\n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the\n matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps\n laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it.\n Women don't have real guts.\"\n\n\n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled\n softly at the door.\n\n\n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Bruce—\"\n\n\n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n\n\n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember\n how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I\n never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't\n matter....\"\n\n\n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n \"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and\n hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish\n I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that?\n I really love you, after all. After all....\"\nHer voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest\n mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and\n warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What\n are you doing—reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was\n that, Bruce—that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last\n night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\nHe stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the\n mike. He got through to her.\n\n\n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling.\n Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n\n\n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she\n looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with\n Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of\n that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her,\n as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren\n rocks.\n\n\"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\nBut down, my dear;\nAnd the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\nWill never seem fresh or clear\nFor thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\nIn the feathery green of the year....'\"\n\n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound\n of his own voice.\n\n\n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n\n\n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\"\n Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into\n any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our\n destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and\n we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're\n going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the\n top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a\n thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this\n world—the top of\neverything\n. The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n\n\n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or\n other—Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all—and turned into\n crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n\n\n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe\n they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He\n knew they would never come back down.\n\n\n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration\n break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an\n instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film\n negatives.\n\n\n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was\n out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet\n sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there\n was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the\n softly flowing canal water.\n\n\n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent,\n drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass\n wavered down the wind.\n\n\n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same,\n but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this\n one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from\n that world into this one of his dreams?\n\n\n The girl—Helene—was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a\n cigarette.\n\n\n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but\n now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between\n them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown.\n She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at\n because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only\n what was.\n\n\n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row\n of spaceships—not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd\n relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships\n instead of four.\n\n\n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building,\n and the other buildings. He looked up.\n\n\n There was no mountain.\nFor one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and\n he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now,\n and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it\n again.\n\n\n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through\n that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n\n\n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he\n wasn't quite sure yet.\n\n\n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n\n\n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the\n lighter back into her pocket.\n\n\n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n\n\n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever\n again, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't\nknow\nthat, but I didn't\nthink\nwe ever would again.\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe\n it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was\n not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n\n\n \"'\nIs all that we see or seem\n,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"'\nbut\n a dream within a dream?\n'\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still\n don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n\n\n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I\n can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of\n understanding of the human mind—after they've accepted you, and after\n you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers—we can see\n now—it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child\n of chance.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but\n they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live\n decently....\"\n\n\n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and\n smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their\n chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far.\n Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming\n here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It\n won't take so long.\"\n\n\n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene\n walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back\n and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and\n drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n\n\n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the\n mountain had been, or still was—he didn't know.\n\n\n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red,\n naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding\n green.\n\n\n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure\n on his arm stopped him.\n\n\n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the\n third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb\n the mountain—\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the\n pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the\n fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n\n\n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind.\n I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill\n a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned\n the horror we're capable of from the first ship—the Conquerors,\n the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on\n into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own\n sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable\n of hypnosis—no, that's not really the word, only the closest our\n language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it\n seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to\n the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those\n ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to\n see and feel—but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain,\n was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the\n suggestion of the Martians.\"\n\n\n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the\n mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by\n instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But\n you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the\n mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no\n Conqueror will ever see.\"\nThey walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When\n they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains,\n actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on\n walking.\n\n\n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that\n there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it,\n either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is\n given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the\n Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had\n to.\"\n\n\n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.\n\n\n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that\n other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so\n much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of\n Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently\n flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n\n\n \"You loved her?\"\n\n\n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she\n was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd\n been older when they got her.\"\n\n\n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the\n leaves floating down it.\n\n\n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never\n seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n\n\n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm\n city. He didn't look back.\n\n\n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet\n I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago.\n Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the\n Martians have the answer to that.\"\n\n\n They entered the city.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How would the people around Bruce describe him?", "question_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X_1", "options": ["Humorous", "Blunt", "Unstable", "Likeable"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is NOT a strange thing about the mountain?", "question_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X_2", "options": ["It's a different color than the rest of the landscape", "It's incredibly tall", "It's taller than they expected it to be", "It's around nothing else that's tall"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the purpose of climbing the mountain?", "question_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X_3", "options": ["To find the old ships", "To gather geological data", "To conquer it and understand why it's there", "To find the others who climbed the mountain before"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Bruce different from the others in his group?", "question_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X_4", "options": ["He's the one who wants to climb the mountain the most", "He doesn't have an interest in climbing the mountain", "He wants to murder all of the group members before they can climb the mountain", "He wants to go back to Earth to see his family while the others don't have families back on Earth"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Bruce responsible during the mountain climbing?", "question_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X_5", "options": ["He needs to record observations", "He needs to act as the healter", "He needs to watch rations", "He needs to watch the rope"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happened to all the other previous expeditions to Mars?", "question_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X_6", "options": ["They all killed each other from madness", "They all died climbing the mountain", "They all crashed into the mountain before they could explore", "They all contracted a disease the Martians spread"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the relationship between Marsha and Bruce?", "question_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X_7", "options": ["They're lovers", "They're just coworkers", "They're old friends", "They used to be lovers"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What traits best describe Terrence?", "question_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X_8", "options": ["Confident and handsome", "Fair and strong", "Empathetic and leader-like", "Crazed and determined"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the mountain symbolize?", "question_unique_id": "50868_RV0BHW7X_9", "options": ["Capitalism", "Discovery", "Pure Knowledge", "Greed"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/6/50868//50868-h//50868-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50449", "set_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Recruit for Andromeda", "year": 1968, "author": "Marlowe, Stephen", "topic": "Science fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Interstellar travel -- Fiction; PS; Interplanetary voyages -- Fiction", "article": "Recruit for Andromeda\nby MILTON LESSER\n\n\n ACE BOOKS, INC.\n\n 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n\n\n RECRUIT FOR ANDROMEDA\n\n\n Copyright 1959, by Ace Books, Inc.\n\n\n All Rights Reserved\n\n\n Printed in U.S.A.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nTOURNAMENT UNDER NIGHTMARE SKIES\n\n\n When Kit Temple was drafted for the Nowhere Journey, he figured that\n he'd left his home, his girl, and the Earth for good. For though those\n called were always promised \"rotation,\" not a man had ever returned\n from that mysterious flight into the unknown.\n\n\n Kit's fellow-draftee Arkalion, the young man with the strange, old-man\n eyes, seemed to know more than he should. So when Kit twisted the tail\n of fate and followed Arkalion to the ends of space and time, he found\n the secret behind \"Nowhere\" and a personal challenge upon which the\n entire future of Earth depended.\nContents\nCHAPTER I\nWhen the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues\n of Center City with green, the riots started.\n\n\n The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the\n park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they\n gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of\n night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility.\n Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their\n uniforms stood for everything objectionable at this time and they might\n be subjected to clubs, stones, taunts, threats, leers—and knives.\n\n\n But Center City, like most communities in United North America,\n had survived the Riots before and would survive them again. On\n past performances, the damage could be estimated, too. Two-hundred\n fifty-seven plate glass windows would be broken, three-hundred twelve\n limbs fractured. Several thousand people would be treated for minor\n bruises and abrasions, Center City would receive half that many damage\n suits. The list had been drawn clearly and accurately; it hardly ever\n deviated.\n\n\n And Center City would meet its quota. With a demonstration of\n reluctance, of course. The healthy approved way to get over social\n trauma once every seven-hundred eighty days.\n\"Shut it off, Kit. Kit, please.\"\n\n\n The telio blared in a cheaply feminine voice, \"Oh, it's a long way\n to nowhere, forever. And your honey's not coming back, never, never,\n never....\" A wailing trumpet represented flight.\n\n\n \"They'll exploit anything, Kit.\"\n\n\n \"It's just a song.\"\n\n\n \"Turn it off, please.\"\n\n\n Christopher Temple turned off the telio, smiling. \"They'll announce the\n names in ten minutes,\" he said, and felt the corners of his mouth draw\n taut.\n\n\n \"Tell me again, Kit,\" Stephanie pleaded. \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"You know I'm twenty-six.\"\n\n\n \"Twenty-six. Yes, twenty-six, so if they don't call you this time,\n you'll be safe. Safe, I can hardly believe it.\"\n\n\n \"Nine minutes,\" said Temple in the darkness. Stephanie had drawn the\n blinds earlier, had dialed for sound-proofing. The screaming in the\n streets came to them as not the faintest whisper. But the song which\n became briefly, masochistically popular every two years and two months\n had spoiled their feeling of seclusion.\n\n\n \"Tell me again, Kit.\"\n\n\n \"What.\"\n\n\n \"You know what.\"\n\n\n He let her come to him, let her hug him fiercely and whimper against\n his chest. He remained passive although it hurt, occasionally stroking\n her hair. He could not assert himself for another—he looked at his\n strap chrono—for another eight minutes. He might regret it, if he did,\n for a lifetime.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Kit.\"\n\n\n \"I'll marry you, Steffy. In eight minutes, less than eight minutes,\n I'll go down and get the license. We'll marry as soon as it's legal.\"\n\n\n \"This is the last time they have a chance for you. I mean, they won't\n change the law?\"\n\n\n Temple shook his head. \"They don't have to. They meet their quota this\n way.\"\n\n\n \"I'm scared.\"\n\n\n \"You and everyone else in North America, Steffy.\"\n\n\n She was trembling against him. \"It's cold for June.\"\n\n\n \"It's warm in here.\" He kissed her moist eyes, her nose, her lips.\n\n\n \"Oh God, Kit. Five minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Five minutes to freedom,\" he said jauntily. He did not feel that way\n at all. Apprehension clutched at his chest with tight, painful fingers,\n almost making it difficult for him to breathe.\n\n\n \"Turn it on, Kit.\"\n\n\n He dialed the telio in time to see the announcer's insincere smile.\n Smile seventeen, Kit thought wryly. Patriotic sacrifice.\n\n\n \"Every seven-hundred eighty days,\" said the announcer, \"two-hundred\n of Center City's young men are selected to serve their country for an\n indeterminate period regulated rigidly by a rotation system.\"\n\n\n \"Liar!\" Stephanie cried. \"No one ever comes back. It's been thirty\n years since the first group and not one of them....\"\n\n\n \"Shh,\" Temple raised a finger to his lips.\n\n\n \"This is the thirteenth call since the inception of what is popularly\n referred to as the Nowhere Journey,\" said the announcer. \"Obviously,\n the two hundred young men from Center City and the thousands from all\n over this hemisphere do not in reality embark on a Journey to Nowhere.\n That is quite meaningless.\"\n\n\n \"Hooray for him,\" Temple laughed.\n\n\n \"I wish he'd get on with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't forever,\" Temple reminded her. \"Not officially.\"\n\n\n \"Officially, my foot. If they never return, they never return. If\n there's a rotation system on paper, but it's never used, that's not a\n rotation system at all. Kit, it's forever.\"\n\n\n \"... to thank the following sponsors for relinquishing their time....\"\n\n\n \"No one would want to sponsor\nthat\n,\" Temple whispered cheerfully.\n\n\n \"Kit,\" said Stephanie, \"I—I suddenly have a hunch we have nothing to\n worry about. They missed you all along and they'll miss you this time,\n too. The last time, and then you'll be too old. That's funny, too old\n at twenty-six. But we'll be free, Kit. Free.\"\n\n\n \"He's starting,\" Temple told her.\n\n\n A large drum filled the entire telio screen. It rotated slowly from\n bottom to top. In twenty seconds, the letter A appeared, followed by\n about a dozen names. Abercrombie, Harold. Abner, Eugene. Adams, Gerald.\n Sorrow in the Abercrombie household. Despair for the Abners. Black\n horror for Adams.\n\n\n The drum rotated.\n\n\n \"They're up to F, Kit.\"\n\n\n Fabian, Gregory G....\n\n\n Names circled the drum slowly, live viscous alphabet soup. Meaningless,\n unless you happened to know them.\n\n\n \"Kit, I knew Thomas Mulvany.\"\n\n\n N, O, P....\n\n\n \"It's hot in here.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you were cold.\"\n\n\n \"I'm suffocating now.\"\n\n\n R, S....\n\n\n \"T!\" Stephanie shrieked as the names began to float slowly up from the\n bottom of the drum.\n\n\n Tabor, Tebbets, Teddley....\n\n\n Temple's mouth felt dry as a ball of cotton. Stephanie laughed\n nervously. Now—or never. Never?\n\n\n Now.\n\n\n Stephanie whimpered despairingly.\n\n\n TEMPLE, CHRISTOPHER.\n\"Sorry I'm late, Mr. Jones.\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Mr. Smith. Hardly. Three minutes late.\"\n\n\n \"I've come in response to your ad.\"\n\n\n \"I know. You look old.\"\n\n\n \"I am over twenty-six. Do you mind?\"\n\n\n \"Not if you don't, Mr. Smith. Let me look at you. Umm, you seem the\n right height, the right build.\"\n\n\n \"I meet the specifications exactly.\"\n\n\n \"Good, Mr. Smith. And your price.\"\n\n\n \"No haggling,\" said Smith. \"I have a price which must be met.\"\n\n\n \"Your price, Mr. Smith?\"\n\n\n \"Ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n The man called Jones coughed nervously. \"That's high.\"\n\n\n \"Very. Take it or leave it.\"\n\n\n \"In cash?\"\n\n\n \"Definitely. Small unmarked bills.\"\n\n\n \"You'd need a moving van!\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll get one.\"\n\n\n \"Ten million dollars,\" said Jones, \"is quite a price. Admittedly, I\n haven't dealt in this sort of traffic before, but—\"\n\n\n \"But nothing. Were your name Jones, really and truly Jones, I might ask\n less.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"You are Jones exactly as much as I am Smith.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Jones gasped again.\n\n\n Smith coughed discreetly. \"But I have one advantage. I know you. You\n don't know me, Mr. Arkalion.\"\n\n\n \"Eh? Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Arkalion. The North American Carpet King. Right?\"\n\n\n \"How did you know?\" the man whose name was not Jones but Arkalion asked\n the man whose name was not Smith but might as well have been.\n\n\n \"When I saw your ad,\" said not-Smith, \"I said to myself, 'now here must\n be a very rich, influential man.' It only remained for me to study a\n series of photographs readily obtainable—I have a fine memory for\n that, Mr. Arkalion—and here you are; here is Arkalion the Carpet King.\"\n\n\n \"What will you do with the ten million dollars?\" demanded Arkalion,\n not minding the loss nearly so much as the ultimate disposition of his\n fortune.\n\n\n \"Why, what does anyone do with ten million dollars? Treasure it. Invest\n it. Spend it.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, what will you do with it if you are going in place of my—\"\n Arkalion bit his tongue.\n\n\n \"Your son, were you saying, Mr. Arkalion? Alaric Arkalion the Third.\n Did you know that I was able to boil my list of men down to thirty when\n I studied their family ties?\"\n\n\n \"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"\n\n\n \"It is forever—as if you dropped out of existence. Alaric is so young.\"\n\n\n \"I have always gambled, Mr. Arkalion. If I do not return in five\n years, you are to put the money in a trust fund for certain designated\n individuals, said fund to be terminated the moment I return. If I come\n back within the five years, you are merely to give the money over to\n me. Is that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I'll want it in writing, of course.\"\n\n\n \"Of course. A plastic surgeon is due here in about ten minutes, Mr.\n Smith, and we can get on with.... But if I don't know your name, how\n can I put it in writing?\"\n\n\n Smith smiled. \"I changed my name to Smith for the occasion. Perfectly\n legal. My name is John X. Smith—now!\"\n\n\n \"That's where you're wrong,\" said Mr. Arkalion as the plastic surgeon\n entered. \"Your name is Alaric Arkalion III—\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n The plastic surgeon skittered around Smith, examining him minutely with\n the casual expertness that comes with experience.\n\n\n \"Have to shorten the cheek bones.\"\n\n\n \"For ten million dollars,\" said Smith, \"you can take the damned things\n out altogether and hang them on your wall.\"\nSophia Androvna Petrovitch made her way downtown through the bustle of\n tired workers and the occasional sprinkling of Comrades. She crushed\n her\nersatz\ncigarette underfoot at number 616 Stalin Avenue, paused\n for the space of five heartbeats at the door, went inside.\n\n\n \"What do you want?\" The man at the desk was myopic but bull-necked.\n\n\n Sophia showed her party card.\n\n\n \"Oh, Comrade. Still, you are a woman.\"\n\n\n \"You're terribly observant, Comrade,\" said Sophia coldly. \"I am here to\n volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"But a woman.\"\n\n\n \"There is nothing in the law which says a woman cannot volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"We don't make women volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"I mean really volunteer, of her own free will.\"\n\n\n \"Her—own—free will?\" The bull-necked man removed his spectacles,\n scratched his balding head with the ear-pieces. \"You mean volunteer\n without—\"\n\n\n \"Without coercion. I want to volunteer. I am here to volunteer. I want\n to sign on for the next Stalintrek.\"\n\n\n \"Stalintrek, a woman?\"\n\n\n \"That is what I said.\"\n\n\n \"We don't force women to volunteer.\" The man scratched some more.\n\n\n \"Oh, really,\" said Sophia. \"This is 1992, not mid-century, Comrade. Did\n not Stalin say, 'Woman was created to share the glorious destiny of\n Mother Russia with her mate?'\" Sophia created the quote randomly.\n\n\n \"Yes, if Stalin said—\"\n\n\n \"He did.\"\n\n\n \"Still, I do not recall—\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Sophia cried. \"Stalin dead these thirty-nine years and you\n don't recall his speeches? What is your name, Comrade?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Comrade. Now that you remind me, I remember.\"\n\n\n \"What is your name.\"\n\n\n \"Here, I will give you the volunteer papers to sign. If you pass the\n exams, you will embark on the next Stalintrek, though why a beautiful\n young woman like you—\"\n\n\n \"Shut your mouth and hand me those papers.\"\n\n\n There, sitting behind that desk, was precisely why. Why should she,\n Sophia Androvna Petrovitch, wish to volunteer for the Stalintrek?\n Better to ask why a bird flies south in the winter, one day ahead of\n the first icy gale. Or why a lemming plunges recklessly into the sea\n with his multitudes of fellows, if, indeed, the venture were to turn\n out grimly.\n\n\n But there, behind that desk, was part of the reason. The Comrade. The\n bright sharp Comrade, with his depth of reasoning, his fountain of\n gushing emotions, his worldliness.\nPfooey!\nIt was as if she had been in a cocoon all her life, stifled, starved,\n the cottony inner lining choking her whenever she opened her mouth,\n the leathery outer covering restricting her when she tried to move.\n No one had ever returned from the Stalintrek. She then had to assume\n no one would. Including Sophia Androvna Petrovitch. But then, there\n was nothing she would miss, nothing to which she particularly wanted\n to return. Not the stark, foul streets of Stalingrad, not the workers\n with their vapid faces or the Comrades with their cautious, sweating,\n trembling, fearful non-decisions, not the higher echelon of Comrades,\n more frightened but showing it less, who would love the beauty of\n her breasts and loins but not herself for you never love anything\n but the Stalinimage and Mother Russia herself, not those terrified\n martinet-marionettes who would love the parts of her if she permitted\n but not her or any other person for that matter.\n\n\n Wrong with the Stalintrek was its name alone, a name one associated\n with everything else in Russia for an obvious, post-Stalin reason. But\n everything else about the Stalintrek shrieked mystery and adventure.\n Where did you go? How did you get there? What did you do? Why?\n\n\n A million questions which had kept her awake at night and, if\n she thought about them hard enough, satisfied her deep longing\n for something different. And then one day when stolid Mrs.\n Ivanovna-Rasnikov had said, \"It is a joke, a terrible, terrible joke\n they are taking my husband Fyodor on the Stalintrek when he lacks\n sufficient imagination to go from here to Leningrad or even Tula. Can\n you picture Fyodor on the Stalintrek? Better they should have taken me.\n Better they should have taken his wife.\" That day Sophia could hardly\n contain herself.\n\n\n As a party member she had access to the law and she read it three times\n from start to finish (in her dingy flat by the light of a smoking,\n foul-smelling, soft-wax candle) but could find nothing barring women\n from the Stalintrek.\n\n\n Had Fyodor Rasnikov volunteered? Naturally. Everyone volunteered,\n although when your name was called you had no choice. There had been\n no draft in Russia since the days of the Second War of the People's\n Liberation. Volunteer? What, precisely, did the word mean?\n\n\n She, Sophia Androvna Petrovitch would volunteer, without being told.\n Thus it was she found herself at 616 Stalin Avenue, and thus the\n balding, myopic, bull-necked Comrade thrust the papers across his desk\n at her.\n\n\n She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those\n doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on\n the base of my spine.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.\n\n\n FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this\n as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the\n Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone\n as significant?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not\n thalamic at all.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (Who realizes, thanks to the plastic surgeon, he is\n the youngest looking of all, with red cheeks and peachfuzz whiskers) It\n is a problem of the intellect. Why seven hundred and eighty days?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I read the magazine, too, chief. You think we're all going\n to the planet Mars. How original.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I think.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Mars?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: (Laughing) It's a long way from Mars to City Hall, doc.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mean, through space to Mars?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Exactly, exactly. Quite a coincidence, otherwise.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're telling me.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (Coldly) Would you care to explain it?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Why, sure. You see, Mars is—uh, I don't want to steal your\n thunder, chief. Go ahead.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Once every seven hundred and eighty days Mars and the\n Earth find themselves in the same orbital position with respect to the\n sun. In other words, Mars and Earth are closest then. Were there such a\n thing as space travel, new, costly, not thoroughly tested, they would\n want to make each journey as brief as possible. Hence the seven hundred\n and eighty days.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Not bad, chief. You got most of it.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: No one ever said anything about space travel.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You think we'd broadcast it or something, stupid? It's part\n of a big, important scientific experiment, only we're the hamsters.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Ridiculous. You're forgetting all about the Cold War.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: He thinks we're fighting a war with the Martians. (Laughs)\n Orson Wells stuff, huh?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: With the Russians. The Russians. We developed A bombs.\n They developed A bombs. We came up with the H bomb. So did they. We\n placed a station up in space, a fifth of the way to the moon. So did\n they. Then—nothing more about scientific developments. For over twenty\n years. I ask you, doesn't it seem peculiar?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Peculiar, he says.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Peculiar.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: They better watch out. I'm losing my temper. I get violent\n when I lose my temper.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: See? See how the guards are trembling.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Very funny. Maybe you didn't have a good job or something?\n Maybe you don't care. I care. I had a job with a future. Didn't pay\n much, but a real blue chip future. So they send me to Nowhere.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're not there yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Yeah, but I'm going.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: If only they let you know when. My back is killing me. I'm\n waiting to pull a sick act. Just waiting, that's all.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Go ahead and wait, a lot of good it will do you.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.\n\n\n \"Where are we going, Kit?\"\n\n\n \"Search me. Just driving.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad they let you come out this once. I don't know what they would\n have done to me if they didn't. I had to see you this once. I—\"\n\n\n Temple smiled. He had absented himself without leave. It had been\n difficult enough and he might yet be in a lot of hot water, but it\n would be senseless to worry Stephanie. \"It's just for a few hours,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"Hours. When we want a whole lifetime. Kit. Oh, Kit—why don't we run\n away? Just the two of us, someplace where they'll never find you. I\n could be packed and ready and—\"\n\n\n \"Don't talk like that. We can't.\"\n\n\n \"You want to go where they're sending you. You want to go.\"\n\n\n \"For God's sake, how can you talk like that? I don't want to go\n anyplace, except with you. But we can't run away, Steffy. I've got to\n face it, whatever it is.\"\n\n\n \"No you don't. It's noble to be patriotic, sure. It always was. But\n this is different, Kit. They don't ask for part of your life. Not for\n two years, or three, or a gamble because maybe you won't ever come\n back. They ask for all of you, for the rest of your life, forever, and\n they don't even tell you why. Kit, don't go! We'll hide someplace and\n get married and—\"\n\n\n \"And nothing.\" Temple stopped the ground-jet, climbed out, opened the\n door for Stephanie. \"Don't you see? There's no place to hide. Wherever\n you go, they'd look. You wouldn't want to spend the rest of your life\n running, Steffy. Not with me or anyone else.\"\n\n\n \"I would. I would!\"\n\n\n \"Know what would happen after a few years? We'd hate each other. You'd\n look at me and say 'I wouldn't be hiding like this, except for you. I'm\n young and—'\"\n\n\n \"Kit, that's cruel! I would not.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, you would. Steffy, I—\" A lump rose in his throat. He'd tell her\n goodbye, permanently. He had to do it that way, did not want her to\n wait endlessly and hopelessly for a return that would not materialize.\n \"I didn't get permission to leave, Steffy.\" He hadn't meant to tell her\n that, but suddenly it seemed an easy way to break into goodbye.\n\n\n \"What do you mean? No—you didn't....\"\n\n\n \"I had to see you. What can they do, send me for longer than forever?\"\n\n\n \"Then you do want to run away with me!\"\n\n\n \"Steffy, no. When I leave you tonight, Steffy, it's for good. That's\n it. The last of Kit Temple. Stop thinking about me. I don't exist.\n I—never was.\" It sounded ridiculous, even to him.\n\n\n \"Kit, I love you. I love you. How can I forget you?\"\n\n\n \"It's happened before. It will happen again.\" That hurt, too. He was\n talking about a couple of statistics, not about himself and Stephanie.\n\n\n \"We're different, Kit. I'll love you forever. And—Kit ... I know\n you'll come back to me. I'll wait, Kit. We're different. You'll come\n back.\"\n\n\n \"How many people do you think said\nthat\nbefore?\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to come back, even if you could. You're not thinking of\n us at all. You're thinking of your brother.\"\n\n\n \"You know that isn't true. Sometimes I wonder about Jase, sure. But if\n I thought there was a chance to return—I'm a selfish cuss, Steffy. If\n I thought there was a chance, you know I'd want you all for myself. I'd\n brand you, and that's the truth.\"\n\n\n \"You do love me!\"\n\n\n \"I loved you, Steffy. Kit Temple loved you.\"\n\n\n \"Loved?\"\n\n\n \"Loved. Past tense. When I leave tonight, it's as if I don't exist\n anymore. As if I never existed. It's got to be that way, Steffy. In\n thirty years, no one ever returned.\"\n\n\n \"Including your brother, Jase. So now you want to find him. What do I\n count for? What....\"\n\n\n \"This going wasn't my idea. I wanted to stay with you. I wanted to\n marry you. I can't now. None of it. Forget me, Steffy. Forget you ever\n knew me. Jase said that to our folks before he was taken.\" Almost five\n years before Jason Temple had been selected for the Nowhere Journey.\n He'd been young, though older than his brother Kit. Young, unattached,\n almost cheerful he was. Naturally, they never saw him again.\n\n\n \"Hold me, Kit. I'm sorry ... carrying on like this.\"\n\n\n They had walked some distance from the ground-jet, through scrub\n oak and bramble bushes. They found a clearing, fragrant-scented,\n soft-floored still from last autumn, melodic with the chirping of\n nameless birds. They sat, not talking. Stephanie wore a gay summer\n dress, full-skirted, cut deep beneath the throat. She swayed toward him\n from the waist, nestled her head on his shoulder. He could smell the\n soft, sweet fragrance of her hair, of the skin at the nape of her neck.\n \"If you want to say goodbye ...\" she said.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" he told her.\n\n\n \"If you want to say goodbye....\"\n\n\n Her head rolled against his chest. She turned, cradled herself in his\n arms, smiled up at him, squirmed some more and had her head pillowed on\n his lap. She smiled tremulously, misty-eyed. Her lips parted.\n\n\n He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye,\n not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With\n a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all\n wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to\n be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the\n encampment.\n\n\n This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This\n was\nauf weidersen\n.\n\n\n And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....\n\"I am Alaric Arkalion III,\" said the extremely young-looking man with\n the old, wise eyes.\n\n\n How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The\n rest of him—a boy.\n\n\n \"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"\n\n\n \"Here I am not a billionaire, nor will I ever be one again. A-92-6417,\n a number. On his way to Mars with a bunch of other numbers.\"\n\n\n \"Mars? You sound sure of yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Reasonably. Ah, it is a pleasure to talk with a gentleman. I am\n reasonably certain it will be Mars.\"\n\n\n Temple nodded in agreement. \"That's what the Sunday supplements say,\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"And doubtless you have observed no one denies it.\"\n\n\n \"But what on Earth do we want on Mars?\"\n\n\n \"That in itself is a contradiction,\" laughed Arkalion. \"We'll find out,\n though, Temple.\"\n\n\n They had reached the head of the line, found themselves entering a\n huge, double-decker jet-transport. They found two seats together,\n followed the instructions printed at the head of the aisle by strapping\n themselves in and not smoking. Talking all around them was subdued.\n\n\n \"Contrariness has given way to fear,\" Arkalion observed. \"You should\n have seen them the last few days, waiting around the induction center,\n a two-ton chip on each shoulder. Say, where\nwere\nyou?\"\n\n\n \"I—what do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't see you until last evening. Suddenly, you were here.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me?\"\n\n\n \"But I remember you the first day.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me? Any of the officials?\"\n\n\n \"No. Not that I know of.\"\n\n\n \"Then I was here,\" Temple said, very seriously.\n\n\n Arkalion smiled. \"By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple,\n we'll get along fine.\"\n\n\n Temple said that was swell.\n\n\n \"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time.\"\n\n\n Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward\n the setting sun.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What traits best describe Kit?", "question_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB_1", "options": ["Pragmatic and kind", "Rebellious and handsome", "Cowardly and humorous", "Bold and intelligent"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What of the following is not true of the draft?", "question_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB_2", "options": ["It's done in a public announcement", "It happens every year", "It only selects men", "It selects 200 individuals each time"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the Nowhere Journey?", "question_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB_3", "options": ["The drafted individuals are predicted to go to Mars each time", "The drafted individuals go to a new planet each time", "The drafted individuals go to a new solar system each time", "The drafted individuals are predicted to head toward the sun each time"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following best describe Stephanie?", "question_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB_4", "options": ["Her character is focused on Kit's character", "Her character is focused on Arkalion's character", "Her character is multidimensional", "Her character is focused on Sophia's character"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following best describe Sophia?", "question_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB_5", "options": ["She's been coerced into signing up for the voyage", "She's going on the same voyage as Arkalion", "She's going on the same voyage as Kit", "She's volunteered to go on a voyage"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why might Kit actually want to go on Nowhere Journey?", "question_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB_6", "options": ["To investigate the disappearance of his cousin", "To avenge the death of his brother", "To try to find his cousin on the planet", "To get answers to whether his brother's alive"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What's the deal with Alaric Arkalion III?", "question_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB_7", "options": ["He's been paid to stop the Nowhere Journey from within", "He's been paid to take another man's place", "He's so wealthy that he's avoiding the draft and escaping Earth for fun", "He's been paid to investigate the draft"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is not true of the Riots?", "question_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB_8", "options": ["They're a response to the draft", "They cause many injuries", "They cause a lot of private property damage", "They cause a lot of public property damage"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Of all of the characters in this story, which two confuse those around them?", "question_unique_id": "50449_55FKUCOB_9", "options": ["Arkalion and Kit", "Stephanie and Sophia", "Kit and Stephanie", "Sophia and Arkalion"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/4/4/50449//50449-h//50449-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51241", "set_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Bridge Crossing", "year": 1968, "author": "Dryfoos, Dave", "topic": "Post-apocalyptic fiction; PS; Short stories; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "Bridge Crossing\nBY DAVE DRYFOOS\n\n\n Illustrated by HARRISON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe knew the city was organized for his\n\n individual defense, for it had been that\n\n way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\nIn 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was\n known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known\n as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n\n\n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it.\n Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n\n\n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"\n\n\n \"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n\n\n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"\n\n\n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight\n extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands\n touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an\n angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n\n\n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular\n seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n\n\n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n\n\n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped\n out a bayonet.\n\n\n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\nMolly stepped in front of him.\n\n\n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n\n\n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off\n the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached\n at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught\n and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another\n harmlessly.\nMeanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another\n casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the\n time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie\n swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces\n of the other to make a whole one.\n\n\n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was\n new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the\n soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed\n him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders\n repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n\n\n Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.\n\n\n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.\n\n\n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.\n\n\n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was,\n though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger,\n thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his\n friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were\n things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring\n eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n\n\n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite\n complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light\n on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off,\n an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and\n rustle as they scampered.\n\n\n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as\n an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even\n in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the\n One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n\n\n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now\n walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of\n how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock\n itself a difference to be hidden.\n\n\n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A\n weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was\n the levering key that opened its door.\nEverything\nwas wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of\n course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to\n move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for\n ventilation.\n\n\n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry\n out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all\n obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against\n everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even\nhim\nout\n when he was aflame....\n\n\n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling.\n He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the\n street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n\n\n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but\n saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could\n have entered through the iron cover?\n\n\n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n\n\n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n\n\n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight\n with fear of discovery.\n\n\n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper\n was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then.\n They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't\n it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't\n have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and\n rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n\n\n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the\n dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man\n when I came back?\"\n\n\n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these\n androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n\n\n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find\n him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the\n manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n\"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n\n\n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see\n me soon enough.\"\n\n\n But she'd see\nhim\n, Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n\n\n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the\n Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll\n think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it\n over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n\n\n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even\n her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there\nwere\na way over the bridge....\n\n\n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be\n alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n\n\n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed\n her—\nif\nnothing happened when she saw him.\n\n\n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.\n\n\n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a\n full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he\n looked too long.\n\n\n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of\n fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst\n into sudden laughter.\n\n\n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big,\n strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and\n carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable\n character I have ever known!\"\n\n\n He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath,\n and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.\n\n\n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many\n casualties....\n\n\n \"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the\n soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and\n they\ncan't\nleave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll\n be plenty of young men.\"\n\n\n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever\n tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep\n us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our\n tools and things?\"\n\n\n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance.\n But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too\n close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder\n every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n\n\n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n\n\n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.\n\n\n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n\n\n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n\n\n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n\n\n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She\n was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can\n with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the\n rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her\n strength.\n\n\n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed\n plainly that he'd given himself away.\n\n\n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.\n\n\n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....\n\n\n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she\n dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved\n steel surface.\n\n\n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the\n ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or\n handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n\n\n Except it wouldn't be\nhis\nsolution. Her death wouldn't prove him to\n his friends.\n\n\n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog\n that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along\n the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve\n steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n\n\n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when\n he'd followed.\n\n\n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n\n\n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.\n\n\n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n\n\n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n\n\n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"\n\n\n \"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n\n\n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n\n\n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the relationship between Molly and Roddie?", "question_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI_1", "options": ["They're lovers wanting to get married when things calm down", "They're partners in work and life", "They're like siblings to each other, Roddie's almost Molly's older brother", "Molly is Roddie's caretaker"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the relationship between Ida and Roddie change over the course of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI_2", "options": ["They start out as lovers and end as rivals", "They start out as strangers and end up as potential friends/lovers", "They start out as friends and love develops", "They start out as strangers and end as rivals"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Of the following traits, which best describe Roddie?", "question_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI_3", "options": ["Adventurous, skeptical, kindhearted", "Ignorant, rude, athletic", "Bold, independent, brutish", "Athletic, brave, generous"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Ida's primary goal going into the passage?", "question_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI_4", "options": ["To relay an important message to Roddie", "To adventure into the city and help", "To chase after a guy she likes as he goes into the city", "To help Roddie escape the city"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Roddie's primary goal going into the passage?", "question_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI_5", "options": ["To receive a message that's coming in from outside the city walls", "To escape the city", "To prove himself to the robots", "To disarm as many robots as possible"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is not a described element of the world in this story?", "question_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI_6", "options": ["Guarded cities", "Advanced robotic technology", "Bullet trains", "Long-distances sensors"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Based on the information in this passage, how do Roddie and Ida feel about space travel?", "question_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI_7", "options": ["We have no reason/evidence to know their opinions on space travel", "Roddie is indifferent, Ida hates it", "Neither of them feels strongly in favor or against space travel", "Roddie hates it, Ida is indifferent"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Roddie eat baby food?", "question_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI_8", "options": ["It's the only thing he can access in the city; all the other food and supplies have expired.", "It's what he's accustomed to in his cultural landscape", "It's the only thing he can access in the city; all the other food was taken.", "It's what he's accustomed to because it's presumably what he's always been given"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In your opinion, do you think this story has a happy ending?", "question_unique_id": "51241_MXIV6ROI_9", "options": ["The ending was very happy, there was a lot of excitement", "The ending was relatively happy", "It does not, the ending was sad", "It does not, the ending was unsettling"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/2/4/51241//51241-h//51241-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51122", "set_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Men in the Walls", "year": 1965, "author": "Tenn, William", "topic": "Science fiction; PS", "article": "THE MEN IN THE WALLS\nBy WILLIAM TENN\n\n\n Illustrated by FINLAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction October 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe world was divided between the Men and the\n \nMonsters—but which were Monsters and which were Men?\nI\n\n\n Mankind consisted of 128 people.\n\n\n The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.\n\n\n He would be free to raise his voice and express his opinions in the\n Councils of Mankind. He could stare at the women whenever he liked,\n for as long as he liked, to approach them even—\n\n\n He found himself wandering to the end of his band's burrow, still\n carrying the spear he was sharpening for his uncle. There, where a\n women's burrow began, several members of the Female Society were\n preparing food stolen from the Monster larder that very day. Each spell\n had to be performed properly, each incantation said just right, or\n it would not be fit to eat. It might even be dangerous. Mankind was\n indeed fortunate: plenty of food, readily available, and women who well\n understood the magical work of preparing it for human consumption.\nAnd such women—such splendid creatures!\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge\n of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of\n hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the\n largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters\n she had had, two of them of maximum size.\n\n\n Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around\n under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for\n she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew\n how. A man could really strut with such a mate.\n\n\n But she was the wife of a band leader and far, far beyond him. Her\n daughter, though, Selma the Soft-Skinned, would probably be flattered\n by his attentions. She still wore her hair in a heavy bun: it would\n be at least a year before the Female Society would consider her an\n initiate and allow her to drape it about her nakedness. No, far too\n young and unimportant for a man on the very verge of warrior status.\n\n\n Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.\n\n\n Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"\n\n\n \"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"\n\n\n \"You lousy little throwback!\" Roy the Runner yelled. He leaped away\n from the rest of the band and into a crouch facing Eric, his spear\n tense in one hand. \"You're asking for a hole in the belly! My woman's\n had two litters off me, two big litters. What would you have given her,\n you dirty singleton?\"\n\n\n \"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.\n\n\n All the tension drained out of him as he recognized the captain of his\n band. He couldn't fight Thomas. His uncle. And the greatest of all men.\n Guiltily, he walked to the niche in the wall where the band's weapons\n were stacked and slid his uncle's spear into its appointed place.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with you, Roy?\" Thomas was asking behind\n him. \"Fighting a duel with an initiate? Where's your band spirit?\n That's all we need these days, to be cut down from six effectives to\n five. Save your spear for Strangers, or—if you feel very brave—for\n Monsters. But don't show a point in our band's burrow if you know\n what's good for you, hear me?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't fighting a duel,\" the Runner mumbled, sheathing his own\n spear. \"The kid got above himself. I was punishing him.\"\n\n\n \"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.\n\n\n \"Isn't it possible—I mean, it is possible, isn't it—that my father\n had some children by another woman? You told me he was one of the best\n thieves we ever had.\"\n\n\n The captain of the band turned to study him, folding his arms across\n his chest so that biceps swelled into greatness and power. They\n glinted in the light of the tiny lantern bound to his forehead, the\n glow lantern that only fully accredited warriors might wear. After a\n while, the older man shook his head and said, very gently:\n\n\n \"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.\n \"Suppose there had been another woman. My father could have had two,\n three, even four litters by different women. Extra-large litters too.\n If we could prove something like that, I wouldn't be a singleton any\n more. I would not be Eric the Only.\"\n\n\n The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"\n\n\n The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. \"First\n category.\nFood.\nWell....\"\n\n\n Eric felt he understood. \"You mean, for someone like me—an Only,\n who's really got to make a name for himself—I ought to announce\n like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second\n category—Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have\n done?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know what your father would have done?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\" Eric demanded eagerly.\n\n\n \"He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing\n these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what\n I want you to announce.\"\n\n\n \"Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third\n category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?\"\n\n\n \"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"\n\n\n \"The\nchief\n?\" Eric felt confused. He was walking up a strange burrow\n now without a glow lamp. \"What's the chief got to do with my Theft?\"\nHis uncle examined both ends of the corridor again. \"Eric, what's the\n most important thing we, or you, or anyone, can do? What is our life\n all about? What are we here for?\"\n\n\n \"That's easy,\" Eric chuckled. \"That's the easiest question there is. A\n child could answer it:\n\n\n \"\nHit back at the Monsters\n,\" he quoted. \"\nDrive them from the planet,\n if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But above all, hit back\n at the Monsters. Make them suffer as they've made us suffer. Make them\n know we're still here, we're still fighting. Hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Hit back at the Monsters. Right. Now how have we been doing that?\"\n\n\n Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.\n\n\n \"Knowhow is—knowhow is—\" he stumbled over the unfamiliar verbal\n terrain. \"Well, it's what our ancestors knew. And what they did with\n it, I guess. Knowhow is what you need before you can make hydrogen\n bombs or economic warfare or guided missiles, any of those really big\n weapons like our ancestors had.\"\n\n\n \"Did those weapons do them any good? Against the Monsters, I mean. Did\n they stop the Monsters?\"\n\n\n Eric looked completely blank for a moment, then brightened. Oh! He knew\n the way now. He knew how to get back to the catechism:\n\n\n \"\nThe suddenness of the attack, the\n—\"\n\n\n \"Stop it!\" his uncle ordered. \"Don't give me any of that garbage!\nThe\n suddenness of the attack, the treachery of the Monsters\n—does it sound\n like an explanation to you? Honestly? If our ancestors were really\n Lords of Creation and had such great weapons, would the Monsters have\n been able to conquer them? I've led my band on dozens of raids, and I\n know the value of a surprise attack; but believe me, boy, it's only\n good for a flash charge and a quick getaway if you're facing a superior\n force. You can knock somebody down when he doesn't expect it. But if he\n really has more than you, he won't\nstay\ndown. Right?\"\n\n\n \"I—I guess so. I wouldn't know.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to\n remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed\n down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the\n first place. And\nthat\nmeans—\" here he turned his head and looked\n directly into Eric's eyes—\"\nthat\nmeans the science of our ancestors\n wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be\n worth one good damn to us!\"\n\n\n Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.\nHis uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd\n finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes\n glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a\n fierce whisper.\n\n\n \"Eric. When I asked you how we've been hitting back at the Monsters,\n you told me what we\nought\nto do. We haven't been\ndoing\na\n single thing to bother them. We don't know how to reconstruct\n the Ancestor-science, we don't have the tools or weapons or\n knowhow—whatever\nthat\nis—but they wouldn't do us a bit of good even\n if we had them. Because they failed once. They failed completely and\n at their best. There's just no point in trying to put them together\n again.\"\n\n\n And now Eric understood. He understood why his uncle had whispered,\n why there had been so much strain in this conversation. Bloodshed was\n involved here, bloodshed and death.\n\n\n \"Uncle Thomas,\" he whispered, in a voice that kept cracking despite\n his efforts to keep it whole and steady, \"how long have you been an\n Alien-Science man? When did you leave Ancestor-Science?\"\n\n\n Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He\n felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but\n both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His\n tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the\n light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move\n instantaneously in any direction.\n\n\n He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead\n lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared\n with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.\n\n\n \"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you damn fool, or you'll finish us both! Of course your\n parents were decent people. How do you think they were killed? Your\n mother was with your father out in Monster territory. Have you ever\n heard of a woman going along with her husband on a Theft? And taking\n her baby with her? Do you think it was an ordinary robbery of the\n Monsters? They were Alien-science people, serving their faith as best\n they could. They died for it.\"\n\n\n Eric looked into his uncle's eyes over the hand that covered the lower\n half of his face.\nAlien-science people ... serving their faith ... do\n you think it was an ordinary robbery ... they died for it!\nHe had never realized before how odd it was that his parents had gone\n to Monster territory together, a man taking his wife and the woman\n taking her baby!\n\n\n As he relaxed, his uncle removed the gagging hand. \"What kind of Theft\n was it that my parents died in?\"\n\n\n Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"\n\n\n \"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.\n\n\n \"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold.\n\n\n On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.\n\n\n Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.\n\n\n \"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"\n\n\n As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"\n\n\n \"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"\n\n\n There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes\n locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind\n at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to\n the women on the other side of the burrow.\n\n\n \"He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for\n proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood.\"\n\n\n The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned\n to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the\n Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared\n him. The women's part.\n\n\n As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.\n\n\n \"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.\n\n\n The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"\n\n\n He could relax. The physical test was over. There would be another one,\n much later, after he had completed his theft successfully; but that\n would be exclusively by men as part of his proud initiation ceremony.\n Under the circumstances, he knew he would be able to go through it\n almost gaily.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the women's physical test was over. That was the important\n thing for now. In sheer reaction, his body gushed forth sweat which\n slid over the bloody cracks in his skin and stung viciously. He felt\n the water pouring down his back and forced himself not to go limp,\n prodded his mind into alertness.\n\n\n \"Did that hurt?\" he was being asked by Rita, the old crone of a\n Record-Keeper. There was a solicitous smile on her forty-year-old face,\n but he knew it was a fake. A woman as old as that no longer felt sorry\n for anybody. She had too many aches and pains and things generally\n wrong with her to worry about other people's troubles.\n\n\n \"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What were Eric's primary motivations at the beginning of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V_1", "options": ["Succeed at the ritual and find a mate", "Succeed at the ritual and change his name from \"Eric the Only\" to something else", "Find a mate and become the chief", "Become the General and explore beyond his home"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What traits best describe Thomas the Trap-Smasher?", "question_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V_2", "options": ["Scared and swift", "Bold but inconspicuous", "Calm and pleasant", "Independent and careful"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the relationship between Thomas the Trap-Smasher and Eric the Only?", "question_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V_3", "options": ["Thomas is Eric's father", "Thomas is Eric's grandfather", "They are brothers", "Thomas is Eric's uncle"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who do you think would most enjoy reading this story?", "question_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V_4", "options": ["An adult who likes science fiction", "A teenager in their coming of age years", "An adult who likes medieval-themed stories", "A child who likes stories of adventure"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following best summarizes the story?", "question_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V_5", "options": ["A boy learns the traditions and history of his culture.", "A boy meets the love of his life for the first time.", "A boy learns about his family and more about his culture.", "A boy explores beyond his home for the first time."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the relationship between Thomas the Trap-Smasher and Franklin the Father of Many Thieves?", "question_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V_6", "options": ["They have a strained relationship", "They are good friends", "They are brothers", "They are partners"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why might one not be interested in reading this story?", "question_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V_7", "options": ["There is a lot of gore", "There is a lot of murder", "There is a lot of nudity", "There is a lot of suspense"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How do the men and women interact in this universe?", "question_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V_8", "options": ["Men and women take on different tasks but evenly share the power", "Men hold all the power", "Women hold all the power", "Men and women evenly split the same tasks and evenly split the power"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the setting of this story? Do humans or any other normal animals that we have in real life exist in this universe?", "question_unique_id": "51122_DOPP150V_9", "options": ["In the same universe as our own, there are animals we know but there are no humans in the story", "In the same universe as our own, there are humans but there are no animals we know", "In a completely different universe, though there are many animal-like creatures", "In a completely different universe, there are not any humans nor animals"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/2/51122//51122-h//51122-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51449", "set_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Moral Equivalent", "year": 1952, "author": "Neville, Kris", "topic": "Extrasolar planets -- Fiction; PS; War stories; Science fiction", "article": "MORAL EQUIVALENT\nBy KRIS NEVILLE\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWhy shouldn't a culture mimic another right\n \ndown to the last little detail? Because the\n \nlast detail may be just that—the final one!\nThe planet Lanit II had dwindled to a luminous speck. They were in\n clear space now, at Breakoff Point. Beliakoff held the ship in position\n while Kelly set dials for the jump into the hyperspatial drift opening,\n which deep-space men knew as the Slot.\n\n\n Beliakoff cracked his bony knuckles nervously. \"Now, Johnny,\" he said,\n \"easy this time.\nReal\neasy. Gentle her into it. She's not a new ship.\n She resents being slammed into the Slot.\"\n\n\n \"She'll take it,\" Kelly said, with a boyish grin of almost suicidal\n abandon.\n\n\n \"Maybe she will, but how about us? You sort of creased the Slot getting\n us off Torriang. A little closer and—\"\n\n\n \"I was still getting the touch. You ought to be glad I'm an\n instinctive astrogator.\"\n\n\n He set the last dial with a rapid twirl and reached for the kissoff\n switch.\n\n\n \"You're out two decimal points,\" said Beliakoff, who worried about such\n trifles. \"Enough to ionize us.\"\n\n\n \"I know, I know,\" Kelly grumbled, adjusting the dial. \"I was just\n touching it for luck. Here we go!\"\n\n\n He depressed the kissoff switch. Beliakoff shut his eyes as the ship\n lurched Slotward, wishing that Kyne, their government-inspected,\n college-graduated astrogator was still aboard. Kyne had been an expert\n at the job. But then, three planets back, he had suddenly gone after\n a native stevedore with a micro-edge cleaver, screaming that no dirty\n alien would ever marry\nhis\ndaughter.\n\n\n Kyne had no daughter.\n\n\n Currently he was confined in Azolith, awaiting transportation\n Earthside, to a padded little homy room in the Spaceman's Snug Port.\n\"How about that?\" Kelly asked proudly, once the ship was locked in\n hyperspace. \"Superior intelligence and steel nerves do the trick every\n time.\"\n\n\n \"Poor devil, Kyne,\" Beliakoff sighed.\n\n\n \"A paranoid,\" Kelly diagnosed. \"Did he ever tell you about the plot to\n keep him out of the Luna Military Academy?\"\n\n\n \"He never talked to me much.\"\n\n\n \"That's because you're a cold, distant, unsympathetic type,\" Kelly\n said, with a complacent smile. \"Me, he told everything. He applied to\n Luna every year. Studied all the textbooks on military organization,\n land tactics, sea tactics, space strategy, histories of warfare.\n Crammed his cabin with that junk. Knew it inside out. Fantastic memory!\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't he get in?\"\n\n\n \"Hemophilia. He couldn't pass the physical. He thought they were\n plotting against him. Still, I'm grateful for the chance at a little\n astrogation.\" With the barest hint of a smile, Kelly said, \"I\n understand it's possible to bring a ship sidewise through the Slot at\n Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't try,\" Beliakoff begged, shuddering. \"I knew we should\n have waited for Kyne's replacement at Mala.\"\n\n\n \"We'd still be there, with a cargo of kvash turning sour.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid it would sour anyhow,\" Beliakoff said, with a worrier's\n knack for finding trouble. \"Mala is the slowest loading port this side\n of the Rift. I must admit, however, they didn't do badly this time.\"\n\n\n \"Noticed that, did you?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\n \"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"\n\n\n \"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.\n\n\n \"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" Nob said. \"Extremely sorry. Personally, I sympathize with\n you. But the\nBook of Terran Rank Equivalents\nis quite specific. Seven\n shoulder stars are the most—the absolute most—that any general can\n wear. I absolutely cannot allow you to wear eight.\"\n\n\n \"But you gave Frix seven! And he's just Unit General!\"\n\n\n \"That was before we understood the rules completely. We thought there\n was no limit to the number of stars we could give and Frix was sulky.\n I'm sorry, General, you'll just have to be satisfied with seven.\"\n\n\n \"Take one away from Frix, then.\"\n\n\n \"Can't. He'll resign.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I resign.\"\n\n\n \"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.\n\n\n \"You may be right,\" he agreed. \"I'll try to get some back.\"\n\n\n He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly!\nJust a week ago, Nob had walked into his store and inquired, \"Drak, how\n would you like to be a general?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Drak had confessed honestly. \"What is it and why do we\n need one?\"\n\n\n \"War starting,\" Nob said. \"You've heard of war, haven't you? Earth\n idea,\nvery\nEarthly. I'll explain later how it works. What do you say?\"\n\n\n \"All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?\"\n\n\n \"Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the\n Supreme Command Post.\"\n\n\n But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other\n qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth\n general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet\n tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and\n fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually\n held nails in it when he was out on a repair job.\n\n\n In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact,\n he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars\n war of '82, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt\n was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the\n Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of\n the Fanzani Rebellion.\n\n\n But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"\n\n\n Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Let me see....\" General Drak examined a wall map upon which the\n important enemy cities were circled in red. There were Alis and Dryn,\n Kys and Mos and Dlettre. Drak could think of no reason for leveling one\n more than another. After a moment's thought, he pushed a button on his\n desk.\n\n\n \"Yeah?\" asked a voice over the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Which one, Ingif?\"\n\n\n \"Kys, of course,\" said the cracked voice of his old hardware store\n assistant. \"Fellow over there owes us money and won't pay up.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Ingif.\" Drak turned to the corporal. \"Go to it, soldier!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\n The corporal hurried out.\n\n\n General Drak turned back to the reports on his desk, trying again to\n puzzle out what had happened at Allani. Repulsed Us? Us Repulsed? How\n should it read?\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" Drak said resignedly. \"In the long run, I don't suppose it\n really makes much difference.\"\nMiles away, in no man's land, stood a bunker of reinforced concrete and\n steel. Within the bunker were two men. They sat on opposite sides of\n a plain wooden table and their faces were stern and impassive. Beside\n each man was a pad and pencil. Upon each pad were marks.\n\n\n Upon the table between them was a coin.\n\n\n \"Your toss,\" said the man on the right.\n\n\n The man on the left picked up the coin. \"Call it.\"\n\n\n \"Heads.\"\n\n\n It came up heads.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and\n standing up.\n\n\n The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing.\nKelly reached for the kissoff switch, then hesitated. \"Look, Igor,\" he\n said, \"do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you\n know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?\"\n\n\n \"It is a risk we have to take,\" Beliakoff said stonily.\n\n\n \"But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books?\n Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them.\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" Beliakoff said patiently, \"you know that Mala is a\n semi-restricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control\n conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the\n approved list.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kelly said vaguely. \"Silly sort of rule.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways\n to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can\n find.\"\n\n\n \"Seems like a good idea. We\nhave\ngot a real good culture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,\n with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why\n they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,\n warp it into something harmful.\"\n\n\n \"They'll learn,\" Kelly said.\n\n\n \"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"\n\n\n \"But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on\n it, and know that Earth people do it, and—yeah, I guess they would.\"\n Quickly he set the dials. \"You're right, buddy. We have an absolute\n moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess.\"\n\n\n \"I knew you'd see it that way,\" Beliakoff said approvingly. \"And\n there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hold\n us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean\n Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so.\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say that in the first place?\" Kelly flipped the kissoff\n switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no\n sun or planet in its path.\n\n\n \"Hang on,\" Kelly said, \"we're going where we're going in a great big\n rush!\"\n\n\n \"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.\n\n\n In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.\n\n\n Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.\n\n\n \"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.\n\n\n Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.\n\n\n He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"\n\n\n His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"\n\n\n Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.\n\n\n He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"\n\n\n \"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"\n\n\n \"Haven't we done enough?\" groaned a clothing-store owner.\n\n\n \"It's never enough! In time of war, Earth people give till it\n hurts—then give some more! They know that no sacrifice is too much,\n that nothing counts but the proper prosecution of the war.\"\n\n\n The clothing-store owner nodded vehemently. \"If it's Earthly, it's good\n enough for me. So what can we do about this spy situation?\"\n\n\n \"That is for us to decide here and now,\" Thrang said. \"According to the\n Prime Minister, our dictatorship cannot boast a single act of espionage\n or sabotage done to it since the beginning of the war. The Chief of\n Security is alarmed. It's his job to keep all spies under surveillance.\n Since there are none, his department has lost all morale, which, in\n turn, affects the other departments.\"\n\n\n \"Do we really need spies?\"\n\n\n \"They serve a vital purpose,\" Thrang explained. \"All the books agree\n on this. Spies keep a country alert, on its toes, eternally vigilant.\n Through sabotage, they cut down on arms production, which otherwise\n would grow absurdly large, since it has priority over everything else.\n They supply Security with subjects for Interrogation, Confession,\n Brainwashing and Re-indoctrination. This in turn supplies data for\n the enemy propaganda machine, which in turn supplies material for our\n counter-propaganda machine.\"\nDraxil looked awed. \"I didn't know it was so complicated.\"\n\n\n \"That's the beauty of the Earth War,\" Thrang said. \"Stupendous yet\n delicate complications, completely interrelated. Leave out one\n seemingly unimportant detail and the whole structure collapses.\"\n\n\n \"Those Terrans!\" Draxil said, shaking his head in admiration.\n\n\n \"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.\n\n\n By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.\n\n\n He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned. The Secret Policeman\n had been joined by two tall men in slouch hats and dark glasses. They\n wore badges that said\nStorm Troopers\n.\n\n\n \"You're under arrest,\" said the Secret Policeman.\n\n\n \"Why? What have I done?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, as far as we know,\" said a Storm Trooper. \"Not a single\n solitary thing. That's why we're arresting you.\"\n\n\n \"Arbitrary police powers,\" the Secret Policeman explained. \"Suspension\n of search warrants and habeas corpus. Invasion of privacy. War, you\n know. Come along quietly, sir. You have a special and very important\n part to play in the war effort.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"You have been arbitrarily selected as Martyr,\" said the Secret\n Policeman.\n\n\n Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.\n\n\n Among the proletariat, the prevailing opinion was voiced by Zun, who\n was quoted as saying at a war plant party, \"Well, there ain't nothin'\n in the stores I can buy. But I never made so much money in my life!\"\n\n\n In the universities, professors boned up on the subject in order to fit\n themselves for Chairs of War that were sure to be endowed. All they had\n to do was wait until the recent crop of war profiteers were taxed into\n becoming philanthropists, or driven to it by the sense of guilt that\n the books assured them they would feel.\n\n\n Armies grew. Soldiers learned to paint, salute, curse, appreciate home\n cooking, play poker, and fit themselves in every way for the post-war\n civilian life. They broadened themselves with travel and got a welcome\n vacation from home and hearth.\n\n\n War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\"\n\n\n \"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area.\n\n\n \"Attention, freighter!\" the radio blasted. \"This is the interdictory\n ship\nMoth\n. Heave to and identify yourself.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff answered promptly in the Propendium language. \"Let's see 'em\n unscramble\nthat\n,\" he said to Kelly. They continued their descent.\n\n\n After a while, a voice from the patrol boat said in Propendium,\n \"Attention, freighter! You are entering an interdicted area. Heave to\n at once and prepare to be boarded.\"\n\n\n \"I can't understand your vile North Propendium accent,\" Beliakoff\n bellowed, in a broad South Propendium dialect. \"If you people can't\n speak a man's language, don't clutter up the ether with your ridiculous\n chatter. I know you long-haul trampers and I'll be damned if I'll give\n you any air, water, food, or anything else. If you can't stock that\n stuff like any normal, decent—\"\n\n\n \"This area is interdicted,\" the patrol boat broke in, speaking now with\n a broad South Propendium accent.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Beliakoff grumbled. \"They've got themselves a robot linguist.\"\n\n\n \"—under direct orders from the patrol boat\nMoth\n. Heave to at once,\n freighter, and prepare to be boarded and inspected.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was Beliakoff and Kelly’s initial goal, going into the passage?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_1", "options": ["They were trying to communicate back with their supervisor.", "They were trying to enter the Slot.", "They were trying to communicate with individuals on Mala.", "They were trying to escape from the Slot."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Beliakoff and Kelly’s goal by the end of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_2", "options": ["To return to Mala.", "To finally enter the Slot.", "To escape from Mala.", "To escape from the Slot once more."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do we know about the individuals on Mala from what we see of their life on Mala?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_3", "options": ["They don’t truly think for themselves all that well.", "They all enjoy a strong dictatorship.", "They are naturally rebellious to cultural norms.", "They all enjoy a good democracy."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "From the average person’s perspective, how good is the explanation for why the planet of Mala has a war?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_4", "options": ["We don’t know why they’re at war, so we couldn’t make this assessment.", "The reason is decent, the individuals are being discriminated against and many are being denied resources that are critical to survival.", "We know the reason is because of classism on the planet resulting in genocide, so it’s a pretty good reason for folks to rebel against that.", "It’s a terrible explanation."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What would have happened if Kelly hadn’t given the folks on Mala the books?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_5", "options": ["The two would’ve been less stressed out.", "The two would’ve been less stressed out, they were supposed to send those books to two planets beyond the Slot.", "They would have given them to a planet within the Slot that has a good trading route with Mala (the book delivery wasn’t urgent).", "Beliakoff would’ve given them the books, they were critical to the governmental operations of the planet."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which character traits best describe General Drak?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_6", "options": ["Patient, humble, righteous", "Mature, kind, leader-like", "Leader-like, bold, generous", "Snobby, childish, athletic-looking"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which character traits best describe Empress Jusa?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_7", "options": ["Fair (her looks), newly crowned, malicious", "Plain, quick-witted, cautious", "Plain, intelligent, brave", "Beautiful, smart, newly crowned"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which character traits best describe Nob?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_8", "options": ["Obedient, rule-following, self-assured", "Smart, reckless, kind", "Anxious, calculated, cynical", "Bold, self-assured, attractive"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following themes could be connected to this passage?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_9", "options": ["Communities rooted in role-based systems", "Well-researched sharing of cultures", "Economic freedom", "The importance of autonomy"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following best summarizes this passage?", "question_unique_id": "51449_U6AYES9C_10", "options": ["A planet experiences its first planet-wide war, the reader sees perspectives from both sides of the conflict.", "A planet experiences its second planet-wide war, the reader sees perspectives from delivery people nearby the planet along with individuals on the planet itself.", "A planet experiences its third planet-wide war, the reader sees perspectives from delivery people nearby the planet along with individuals on the planet itself.", "A planet experiences its first planet-wide war, the reader sees perspectives from one side of the conflict."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/4/4/51449//51449-h//51449-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50905", "set_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Yesterday House", "year": 1951, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "PS; Maine -- Fiction; Science fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction", "article": "Yesterday House\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMeeting someone who's been dead for twenty\n \nyears is shocking enough for anyone with a\n \nbelief in ghosts—worse for one with none!\nI\n\n\n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so\n near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the\nAnnie\n O.\nits full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the\n sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait\n made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge\n came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the\n sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had\n to reach out his hand.\n\n\n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the\n line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the\n cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands\n and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed\n in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing\n every man yearns to do once in his lifetime—gone to the farthest\n island out.\n\n\n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he\n dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the\nAnnie O.\nhad\n always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock\n had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the\n quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically,\n paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of\n Earth.\n\n\n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal\n fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop,\n without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to\n explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but\n after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he\n came out on more rocks—and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the\n farthest one out.\nJoined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide\n would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island\n that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing.\n He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods\n whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the\n underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n\n\n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving\n smoothly enough.\n\n\n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even\n began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres\n of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his\n trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought\n of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up\n from here in a storm.\n\n\n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced\n through a fringe of trees—and came straight up against an eight-foot\n fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short\n distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n\n\n Without pausing for surprise—in fact, in his holiday mood, using\n surprise as a goad—he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk\n touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side\n of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher\n branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n\n\n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first\n surprise could really sink in, had another.\nA closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white\n Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the\n length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just\n in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he\n recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole\n scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n\n\n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door\n opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged\n dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the\n Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug\n bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n\n\n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a\n white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height\n waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound\n with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark\n necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked\n under her arm.\n\n\n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.\n\n\n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered\n out, \"Are you he?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n\n\n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n\n\n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't\n dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed,\n becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily\n curious.\n\n\n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n \"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a\n quarter of a mile wide.\"\n\n\n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of\n the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n\n\n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen\n Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n\n\n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She\n looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find\n someone here.\"\n\n\n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the\n empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n\n\n She nodded.\n\n\n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n\n\n She shook her head.\n\n\n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n\n\n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other\n things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are\n Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n\n\n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"\n\n\n She shook her head.\n\n\n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform\n her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class\n with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich—he lives over there\n at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He\n grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for\n Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n\n\n The girl looked puzzled.\n\n\n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences,\n won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow.\n When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich—she's a drab sort of\n person—said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of\n course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n\n\n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as\n if she were saying it for the first time.\n\n\n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"How would I know?\"\n\n\n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this\n strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n\n\n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n\n\n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to\n talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n\n\n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his\n mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are\n very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help\n them.\"\n\n\n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You\n can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n\n\n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or\n a man before, except in movies.\"\n\n\n \"You're joking!\"\n\n\n \"No, it's true.\"\n\n\n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n\n'Ah, love, let us be true\nTo one another! for the world, which seems\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\nNor certitude—'\"\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n\n\n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd\n imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n\n\n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n\n\n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought—\" He began, then stopped\n because she was blushing.\n\n\n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n\n\n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new\n ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n\n\n \"But how does this—person get these boxes to you out here? Does he\n give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sure.\"\n\n\n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it\n since you've been to the mainland?\"\n\n\n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle\n of the war.\"\n\n\n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n\n\n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n\n\n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind\n of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him\n had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders,\n the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his\n nostrils. He could still hear the faint\nchop-chop\nof the waves.\n\n\n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape\n glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to\n a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the\n newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n\n\n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n\n\n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n\n\n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n\n\n Big NRA Parade Planned\n\n\n Balbo Speaks in New York\nSuddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was\n yellow and brittle-edged.\n\n\n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected,\n pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n\n\n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n\n\n \"No, I'm not.\"\n\n\n \"But it's 1953.\"\n\n\n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n\n\n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n\n\n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n\n\n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps\n you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite\n feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or\n television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb,\n or—\"\n\n\n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n \"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound\n different here.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n\n\n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers!\n I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n\n\n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to\n pound.\n\n\n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack\n thought he could hear the faint\nchug\nof a motorboat. She pushed open\n the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark\n after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a\n fireplace with brass andirons.\n\n\n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day\n before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n\n\n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm\n around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice\n was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio\n loudspeaker.\n\n\n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her\n gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n\n\n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that\n you're here.\"\n\n\n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n\n\n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n\n\n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn,\n mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle\n Shylock.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the\n girl growing stranger still.\n\n\n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n\n\n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe,\n after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes.\n Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\nHe was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which\n the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n\n\n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the\n risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking\n time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of\n him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked\n together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to\n either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a\n squeak.\n\n\n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray\n from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he\n stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought\n his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line\n of the\nAnnie O.\n, dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could,\n plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled\n aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n\n\n As soon as the\nAnnie O.\nwas nosing out of the cove into the cross\n waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent\n the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail,\n and plunging ahead.\n\n\n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind\n and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his\n attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't\n have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion,\n and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n\n\n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how\n tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n\n\n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly\n overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in\n the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair\n that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that\n it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches\n over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to\n the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n\n\n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves\n drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for\n a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n\n\n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross\n his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail,\n watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned\n and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed\n sails.\nII\n\n\n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home—a weathered white cube with\n narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola—was nothing like its\n lavish interior.\n\n\n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"\n\n\n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some\n bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall\n cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel,\n opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and\n handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked\n in his breath with surprise.\n\n\n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same\n flat-bosomed dress—flowered rather than white—no bandeau, same beads.\n Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n\n\n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat\n voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident\n in 1933.\"\n\n\n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them.\n\n\n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.\n\n\n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.\n\n\n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"\n\n\n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n\n\n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold\n line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were\n waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the\n station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the\n gravel of the crossing.\n\n\n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and\n Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage\n that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as\n her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n\n\n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he\n was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In\n fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been\n Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n\n\n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n\n\n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n\n\n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival,\n Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew\n why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their\n conversation to the professor.\n\n\n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more\n important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if\n it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had\n suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n\n\n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that\n make you you, and me me.\"\n\n\n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n\n\n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could\n control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same\n individual at will.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of\n hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n\n\n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's\n parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the\n mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had\n grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling\n secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say\n nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce\n with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n\n\n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get\n exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n\n\n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some\n special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the\n mother's traits?\"\n\n\n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate\n would be bound to develop differently.\"\n\n\n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical\n twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met\n by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman.\n Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox\n terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments\n similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of\n them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n\n\n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering,\n becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's\n sphinx-like face.\n\n\n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n\n\n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet—he\n felt behind it, but the key was gone—he hurried down to the\n waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an\n afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n\n\n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the\nAnnie O.\nThere\n was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the\n mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous\n with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n\n\n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky\n spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures\n struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n\n\n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the\n innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd\n brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence\n when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n\n\n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the\n same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n\n\n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to\n speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never\n come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've\n been watching for you all morning.\"\n\n\n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read\n them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the\n headlines.\"\n\n\n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She\n tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n\n\n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make\n you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n 1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I\n think I know who you really are.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n\n\n \"They would.\"\n\n\n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n\n\n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked—some sort of recording. I\n could show you if I could get at it.\"\n\n\n \"\nThese\npapers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let\n them drop on the ground.\n\n\n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n\n\n \"But why would they do it to me?\nWhy?\n\"\n\n\n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker\n than anything.\"\n\n\n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n\n\n \"He?\"\n\n\n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n\n\n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life\n that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with\n me, Mary.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the relationship like between the professor and his wife?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_1", "options": ["They love each other dearly (they're high school sweethearts)", "They love each other very much", "They have a complicated relationship", "They have a strained relationship"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the relationship between the professor and his student like going into the passage?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_2", "options": ["The student admires the professor's work and is excited for the apprenticeship", "The professor is close friends with the student's parents, so he's seen the student grow up and is excited to be his mentor", "The student is completing the apprenticeship solely out of necessity", "The student is wary of the professor's current research"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the relationship between Jack and Mary Alice Pope?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_3", "options": ["They start as friends and end as lovers", "They start as strangers and end as friends", "They start as strangers and end as family", "They start as lovers and end as rivals"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following best summarizes the passage?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_4", "options": ["A student competes with his professor to woo a girl.", "A student explores an area and tries to take a risky action.", "A student explores an area and tries to report his findings to his professor.", "A student works closely with his professor and meets a girl."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is a moral that one could conclude from the passage?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_5", "options": ["Comfort is the best use of wealth", "Letting go of loved ones is important", "Money cannot buy success", "Exploration is crucial to formation of identity"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Does the passage have a happy ending?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_6", "options": ["It left off on an uncertain note", "Certainly not", "It was bittersweet", "Definitely"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following traits best describe Jack?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_7", "options": ["Intuitive and social", "Obedient and studious", "Attractive and charming", "Cautious and charming"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following traits best describe Mary Alice Pope?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_8", "options": ["Beautiful and smart", "Naive and fair", "Stubborn yet kind", "Brave and bold"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following traits describe Professor Kesserich?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_9", "options": ["Obsessive and geeky", "Brilliant but impulsive", "Brave and stalwart", "Brilliant but obsessive"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following traits best describe Professor Kesserich's wife?", "question_unique_id": "50905_5UUJY4CK_10", "options": ["Frustrated and scared", "Quiet and swift", "Cautious and dedicated", "Careful and brilliant"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/0/50905//50905-h//50905-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50441", "set_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Master of Life and Death", "year": 1975, "author": "Silverberg, Robert", "topic": "Science fiction; Overpopulation -- Fiction; PS", "article": "MASTER\n \nof Life and Death\nby\n\n ROBERT SILVERBERG\n\n\n ACE BOOKS\n\n A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc.\n\n 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n\n\n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n\n\n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc.\n\n All Rights Reserved\n\n\n For Antigone—\n\n Who Thinks We're Property\n\n\n Printed in U.S.A.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any\n\n evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nTHE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n\n\n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion.\n Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room—unless\n prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those\n measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon\n found himself the most hated man in the world.\n\n\n For it was\nhis\njob to tell parents their children were unfit to live;\nhe\nhad to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote\n areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens,\n denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a\n decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies,\n become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly.\n In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\nCAST OF CHARACTERS\nROY WALTON\nHe had to adopt the motto—\nthe ends justify the means\n.\nFITZMAUGHAM\nHis reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet.\nFRED WALTON\nHis ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated\n their size.\nLEE PERCY\nHis specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\nPRIOR\nWith the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\nDR. LAMARRE\nHe died for discovering the secret of immortality.\nContents\nI\nThe offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known\n as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors\n of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of\n twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy\n Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself\n each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n\n\n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office—on\n the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's—but\n that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant\n building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though\n necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the\n Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n\n\n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that\n trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed\n the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the\n mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and\n office.\n\n\n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last\n century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n\n\n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via\n pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was\n a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director\n FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n\n\n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly\n paper carefully, and read it.\n\n\n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in\n Patagonia. It was dated\n4 June 2232\n, six days before, and after a\n long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to\n say,\nPopulation density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far\n below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\nWalton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo\n from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused,\n picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the\n section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability\n of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia?\n Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease\n transition.\"\n\n\n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light\n shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by\n the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand\n Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director\n FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims,\nIf you want to stay sane, think of\n these people as pawns in a chess game—not as human beings.\nWalton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of\n humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate\n in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so\n long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before\n trouble came.\n\n\n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the\n voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re\n establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff\n of three clever girls to make a précis of each report, eliminating\n irrelevant data.\"\n\n\n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now,\n with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One\n of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so\n suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n\n\n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of\n the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During\n the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard\n adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n\n\n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed\n the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed.\n\n\n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n\n\n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n \"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n\n\n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton\n stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he\n can have ten minutes with me at—oh, say, 1300.\"\n\n\n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer\n office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you\n immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n\n\n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in\n the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just\n been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n\n\n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n\n\n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of\n them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this,\n sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in\n here, but he did.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning\n to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n\n\n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can\n you accuse me of—\"\n\n\n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge\n to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n\n\n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n\n\n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton.\n Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n\n\n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said,\n without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a\n terribly busy man.\"\n\n\n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's\n desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the\n psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have\n had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little\n diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a\n man. \"I hadn't expected to find—I mean that you—\"\n\n\n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping\n for?\"\n\n\n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n\n\n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do\nsomething\nwhen I go home at\n night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No\n more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite\n remarkable.\"\n\n\n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n\n\n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles.\n Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize.\n Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr.\n Prior—and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is.\n Take Yeats, for instance—\"\n\n\n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior\n back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand,\n anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n\n\n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt\n cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n\n\n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning—potentially tubercular.\n The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you—\"\n\n\n Walton rose. \"\nNo\n,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't\n ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're\n an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n\n\n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the\n Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected—\"\n\n\n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for\nother\npeople. So did\n everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly\n he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a\n baby every chance to live.\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nwas tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced\n euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n\n\n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n \"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe\n it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic\n traits.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n\n\n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.\n\n\n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been\n ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes\n had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been\n sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves\n ahead of time.\n\n\n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn\n generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal\n progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain,\n consuming precious food?\n\n\n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his\n team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light\n outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about\n Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was\n still growing.\n\n\n Prior's words haunted him.\nI was tubercular ... where would my poems\n be now?\nThe big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been\n tubercular too.\nWhat good are poets?\nhe asked himself savagely.\n\n\n The reply came swiftly:\nWhat good is anything, then?\nKeats,\n Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How\n much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing\n his bookshelf—his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a\n one-room home.\n\n\n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n\n\n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he\n admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it\n would be a criminal act.\n\n\n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n\n\n Prior's baby.\n\n\n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there\n are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for\n the next half-hour.\"\nII\nHe stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer\n office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening\n letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into\n the hallway.\n\n\n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the\n lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek\n was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the\n second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a\n single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking\n as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought\n about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n\n\n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child,\n and after that I'll keep within the law.\n\n\n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The\n clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n\n\n \"Roy.\"\n\n\n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise.\n He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood\n there.\n\n\n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n\n\n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly,\n his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy.\n Something the matter?\"\n\n\n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been\n a lot of work lately.\"\n\n\n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n\n\n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a\n little, I think.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n\n\n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid\n you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n\n\n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director\n to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed\nFourteen\n; there was\n a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed\ntwenty\n, covering\n the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his\n destination.\n\n\n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to\n see you this morning?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n\n\n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"\n\n\n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back,\n revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\nFLOOR 20\nEuthanasia Clinic and Files\nWalton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided\n traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem\n nakedly obvious now.\n\n\n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\"\n he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really\n should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the\n door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\nSome fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And\n damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\nWalton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep\n breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia\n files were kept.\nThe room was large, as rooms went nowadays—thirty by twenty, with deck\n upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a\n bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek\n had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n\n\n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts\n poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n\n\n \"Can I help—oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician\n said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless\n and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything\n I can do?\"\n\n\n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n\n\n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically\n backed out of his presence.\nNo doubt I must radiate charisma\n, he thought. Within the building he\n wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's\n protégé and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the\n crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to\n himself.\n\n\n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip,\n wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n\n\n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic\n circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson\n tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a\n yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n3216847AB1\nPRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New\n York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at\n birth 5lb. 3oz.\nAn elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending\n with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern,\n codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the\n notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the\n bottom of the card:\nEXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332\nEUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\nHe glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still\n somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n\n\n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered\n Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save\n Philip Prior.\n\n\n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped\n the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n\n\n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the\n gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth,\n and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on\n Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted:\n3f2,\n tubercular-prone\n.\n\n\n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the\n machine.\nRevision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in\n all circuits.\nHe proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol\n3f2\nand the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version.\n The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n\n\n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary\n pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n\n\n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned,\n Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this\n morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n\n\n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors\n without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\nFive doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main\n section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there,\n each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one\n to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n\n\n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its\n local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a\n certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a\n certificate ... and life.\n\n\n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n\n\n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to\n keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're\n really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n\n\n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could\n do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his\n protégé to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n\n\n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him\n for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n\n\n \"No—no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly,\n Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in\n the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and\n Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n\n\n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump,\n squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n\n\n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc,\n two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n\n\n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet.\n Seven in one morning.\"\n\n\n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n\n\n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to\n understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n\n\n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n\n\n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it\n up for you if you like.\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n\n\n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution\n chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at\n his desk when Walton appeared.\n\n\n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He\n was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact\n lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n\n\n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n\n\n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n\n\n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n \"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that\n comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no\n mistake. Got that?\"\n\n\n \"\nMistake?\nBut how—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one\n of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets\n out.\"\nHow glibly I reel this stuff off\n, Walton thought in amazement.\n\n\n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check\n everything from now on.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n\n\n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left\n via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n\n\n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"\n\n\n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n\n\n \"I—well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this\n morning. And guess—I mean—well, one of them shouldn't have been sent\n to me!\"\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card\n right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is\n fine.\"\n\n\n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n\n\n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law—the Equalization\n Law—Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal\n as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators,\n or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n\n\n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and\n the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done\n it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position—his life,\n even—for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n\n\n Well, the thing was done.\n\n\n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to\n finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant\n places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's\n activities.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred\n never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And\n Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this\n call. No good at all.\nIII\nRoy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of\n the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built\n closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven,\n next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\"\n with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to\n Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n\n\n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of\n tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to\n take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What\n goes?\"\n\n\n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here\n a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't\n have time.\"\n\n\n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's\n lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n\n\n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n\n\n \"Official business!\"\n\n\n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to\n be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was\n curious—unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of\n your conversation with the machine.\"\n\n\n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb.\n He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and\n say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek\n computer outlet is confidential.\"\n\n\n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh,\n Roy?\"\n\n\n \"How much do you know?\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system,\n would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of\n this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton\n doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble—oh, no!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n\n\n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now,\n shall we?\"\n\n\n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though\n the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen\n cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some\n work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n\n\n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n\n\n The screen went dead.\n\n\n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He\n nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass\n cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\nIdiot!\nhe thought.\nFool!\nHe had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed\n to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew—the old man could see\n through Walton with ease—and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his\n father-substitute.\n\n\n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time,\n but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for\n Fred....\n\n\n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been\n particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now\n almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their\n parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had\n been sent to the public crèche.\n\n\n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an\n education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private\n secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant\n administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine,\n unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section\n of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Which trait best describe Prior?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_1", "options": ["Bold and rude", "Caring and respectful", "Stubborn and humorous", "Desperate and disrespectful"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What traits best describe Roy Walton?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_2", "options": ["Suave and handsome", "Respectable and pragmatic", "Bold and stupid", "Empathetic and shortsighted"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which traits best describe FiztMaugham?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_3", "options": ["Strong and humorless", "Practical and leader-like", "Bold and generous", "Strong and handsome"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the relationship like between Fred and Roy?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_4", "options": ["They used to be friends but now they don't like each other", "They're brothers but they have a strained relationship", "They're friends and they care about each other", "They're brothers and they care about each other"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Prior's motivation in the passage?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_5", "options": ["To save his brother", "To stop the examiner's system", "To stop the Popeek system", "To save his son"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why might someone not want to read this passage?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_6", "options": ["Violence to children is a major topic", "Death is a major topic", "There is gore", "There is nudity"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the tone of this passage?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_7", "options": ["Calm", "Humorous", "Chaotic", "Intense"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who would most enjoy reading this article?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_8", "options": ["Someone who enjoys reading about rebellions", "Someone who enjoys sci-fi world-building", "Someone who enjoys reading about rebellions in intergalactic settings", "Someone who enjoys learning about Dystopian worlds"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What would happen if Roy hadn't left his door unlocked?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_9", "options": ["He probably wouldn't have interacted with Prior solely because he was very busy that day", "He probably would've still met Prior anyway because the two are friends", "He probably would've still met Prior anyway because Prior's one of his favorite poets", "He probably wouldn't have interacted with Prior"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What world-building element is crucial to the setup of this story?", "question_unique_id": "50441_1FIL4JYR_10", "options": ["That the Earth is overpopulated", "That lots of citizens are contracting diseases that have to be stopped", "That the galaxy is overpopulated", "That lots of citizens are rebelling and the government has to control them"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/4/4/50441//50441-h//50441-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50936", "set_unique_id": "50936_SEDNSGRF", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Man in a Sewing Machine", "year": 1958, "author": "Stecher, L. J., Jr.", "topic": "Artificial intelligence -- Fiction; PS; Computers -- Fiction; Questions and answers -- Fiction; Husband and wife -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "Man in a Sewing Machine\nBy L. J. STECHER, JR.\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction February 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWith the Solar Confederation being invaded,\n \nall this exasperating computer could offer\n \nfor a defense was a ridiculous old proverb!\nThe mechanical voice spoke solemnly, as befitted the importance of its\n message. There was no trace in its accent of its artificial origin. \"A\n Stitch in Time Saves Nine,\" it said and lapsed into silence.\n\n\n Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous\n answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed\n with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that\n all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying.\n\n\n Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic\n calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust\n forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip\n in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After\n a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his\n shoulders slightly. \"Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the\n question,\" he said doubtfully.\n\n\n Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly.\n \"That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly\n unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I\n am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask.\"\n\n\n Bristol hooked a chair toward himself with one foot, straddled it and\n folded his arms over the back of it, without once removing his eyes\n from the computer. \"All right, Buster. I'll give it a try, anyway. What\n does 'A Stitch in Time' mean, as applied to the question I asked you?\"\n\n\n The calculator hesitated, as if to ponder briefly, before it answered.\n \"In spite of the low probability of such an occurrence, the Solar\n Confederation has been invaded. My answer to your question is an\n explanation of how that Confederation can be preserved in spite of its\n weaknesses—at least for a sufficient length of time to permit the\n staging of successful counter-measures of the proper nature and the\n proper strength.\"\n\n\n Bristol nodded. \"Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right\n now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so\n you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to\n spend weeks figuring out what you meant.\"\nBristol thought that the Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful\n as it answered. \"It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete\n answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six\n words!\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" said John. \"But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It\n didn't sound very complete to me.\"\n\n\n All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked\n simultaneously. \"The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which\n suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of\n trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of\n taking this timely action. It should be done by\nstitching\n; if this is\n done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?\"\n\n\n \"I made you myself,\" said Bristol plaintively. \"I designed you with my\n own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design.\n So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry\n with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me.\n And since you're just a complex computer of general design, with the\n ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be\n able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?\"\n\n\n Buster answered slowly. \"You made me in your own image. Things thus\n made are often hard to handle.\"\n\n\n Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. \"But you're only a\n calculating machine!\" he shouted. \"Your only purpose is to make my\n work—and that of other men—easier. And when I try to use you, you\n answer with riddles....\"\n\n\n The computer appeared to examine Bristol's overturned chair for a\n moment in silent reproof before it answered. \"But remember, John,\" it\n said, \"you didn't merely make me. You also\ntaught\nme. Or as you would\n phrase it, you 'provided and gave preliminary evaluation to the data in\n my memory banks.' My circuits, in sorting out and re-evaluating this\n information, could do so only in the light of your basic beliefs as\n evidenced by your preliminary evaluations. Because of the consistency\n and power of your mind, I was forced to do very little modifying of\n the ideas you presented to me in order to transform them into a single\n logical body of background information which I could use.\n\n\n \"One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor.\n You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not\n necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas\n make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor\n to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached—a\n prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat\n macabre, perhaps—and a little mechanistic—but still there.\n\n\n \"Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must\n help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or\n the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in\n Time Saves Nine.'\"\n\n\n Bristol stood up once more. \"I could cure you with a sledge hammer,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"You could remove my ideas,\" answered the computer without concern.\n \"But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you\n repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get\n busy on the ideas I have already given you?\"\nJohn sighed, and rubbed the bristles of short sandy hair on the top\n of his head with his knuckles. \"Ordered around by an overgrown adding\n machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. I'm glad you can't get\n around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet.\" He shook\n his head. \"I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering\n mathematician.\"\n\n\n \"And Einstein, too, probably,\" added Buster cryptically.\n\n\n Bristol took a long and searching look at his brainchild. Its flippant\n manner, he decided, did not go well with the brooding immensity of its\n construction. The calculator towered nearly a hundred feet above the\n polished marble slabs of the floor, and spidery metal walkways spiraled\n up the sides of its almost cubical structure. A long double row of\n generators, each under Buster's control, led from the doorway of the\n building to the base of the calculator like Sphinxes lining the roadway\n to an Egyptian tomb.\n\n\n \"When I get around to it,\" said Bristol, \"I'll put lace panties on the\n bases of all your klystrons.\" He hitched up his neat but slightly baggy\n pants, turned with dignity, and strode from the chamber down the twin\n rows of generators.\n\n\n The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as\n he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did\n not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slow-paced\n rendition of Elgar's\nPomp and Circumstance\n.\n\n\n John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. \"One last\n question,\" he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. \"How in\n blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the\n invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or,\n at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?\" He took two steps toward the\n immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it.\n \"Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't\nbluffing\n?\"\n\"Don't be silly,\" answered the calculator softly. \"You made me and\n you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your\n questions, however inane.\"\n\n\n \"Then answer the ones I just asked.\"\nSomewhere deep within the machine a switch snicked sharply, and the\n great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. \"I didn't answer\n your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark\n that so frequently annoys you,\" Buster said, \"because the little\n information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly\n revealing.\n\n\n \"They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with\n and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own\n safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and highly intelligent.\n They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions.\n\n\n \"In short, they are startlingly like humans. Their reactions have\n been so much like yours—granted the difference that it was they who\n discovered you instead of you who discovered them—that their reactions\n are highly predictable. If they think it is to their own advantage\n and if they can manage to do it, they will utterly destroy your\n civilization ... which, after a couple of generations, will probably\n leave you no worse off than you are now.\"\n\n\n \"Cut out the heavy philosophy,\" said Bristol, \"and give me a few facts\n to back up your sweeping statements.\"\n\n\n \"Take the incident of first contact,\" Buster responded. \"With very\n little evidence of thought or of careful preparation, they tried\n to land on the outermost inhabited planet of Rigel. Their behavior\n certainly did not appear to be that of an invader, yet humans\n immediately tried to shoot them out of the sky.\"\n\n\n \"That wasn't deliberate,\" protested Bristol. \"The place they tried to\n land on is a heavy planet in a region of high meteor flux. We used a\n gadget providing for automatic destruction of the larger meteors in\n order to make the planet safe enough to occupy. That, incidentally,\n is why the invading ship wasn't destroyed. The missile, set up as a\n meteor interceptor only, was unable to correct for the radical course\n changes of the enemy spaceships, and therefore missed completely. And\n you will remember what the invader did. He immediately destroyed the\n Interceptor Launching Station.\"\n\n\n \"Which, being automatically operated, resulted in no harm to anyone,\"\n commented Buster calmly.\n\n\n Bristol stalked back toward the base of the calculator, and poked his\n nose practically into a vision receptor. \"It was no thanks to the\n invading ships that nobody was killed,\" he said hotly. \"And when they\n came back three days later they killed a\nlot\nof people. They occupied\n the planet and we haven't been able to dislodge them since.\"\n\"You'll notice the speed of the retaliation,\" answered the calculator\n imperturbably. \"Even at 'stitching' speeds, it seems unlikely that\n they could have communicated with their home planets and received\n instructions in such a short time. Almost undoubtedly it was the act of\n one of their hot-headed commanding officers. Their next contact, as you\n certainly recall, did not take place for three months. And then their\n actions were more cautious than hostile. A dozen of their spaceships\n 'stitched' simultaneously from the inter-planar region into normal\n space in a nearly perfect englobement of the planet at a surprisingly\n uniform altitude of only a few thousand miles. It was a magnificent\n maneuver. Then they sat still to see what the humans on the planet\n would do. The reaction came at once, and it was hostile. So they took\n over that planet, too—as they have been taking over planets ever\n since.\"\n\n\n Bristol raised his hands, and then let them drop slowly to his sides.\n \"And since they have more spaceships and better weapons than we do,\n we would undoubtedly keep on losing this war, even if we could locate\n their home system, which we have not been able to do so far. The\n 'stitching' pattern of inter-planar travel makes it impossible for us\n to follow a starship. It also makes it impossible for us to defend our\n planets effectively against their attacks. Their ships appear without\n warning.\"\n\n\n Bristol rubbed his temples thoughtfully with his fingertips. \"Of\n course,\" he went on, \"we could attack the planets they have captured\n and recover them, but only at the cost of great loss of life to our own\n side. We have only recaptured one planet, and that at such great cost\n to the local human population that we will not quickly try it again.\"\n\n\n \"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.\n\n\n Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. \"No, you probably think it's\n funny,\" he said. \"If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess\n the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize\n that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own\n existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do\n you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us,\n if we can't do it, in time to save us?\"\nBuster's answer was prompt. \"Although I have no feeling for\n self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of\n the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling,\n of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry\n out your deepest convictions, it is not sufficient that mankind be\n preserved. If that were true, all you would have to do would be to\n surrender unconditionally. My calculations, as you know, indicate that\n this would not result in the destruction of mankind, but merely in the\n finish of his present civilization. To you, the preservation of the\n dignity of Man is more important than the preservation of Man. You\n equate Man and his civilization; you do not demand rigidity; you are\n willing to accept even revolutionary changes, but you are not willing\n to accept the destruction of your way of life.\n\n\n \"Consequently, neither am I willing to accept the destruction of the\n civilization of Man. But if I were to give you the answer to all the\n greatest and most difficult of your problems complete, with no thought\n required by humans, the destruction of your civilization would result.\n Instead of becoming slaves of the invaders, you would become slaves of\n your machines. And if I were to give you the complete answer, without\n thought being required of you, to even one such vital question—such as\n this one concerning the invaders—then I could not logically refuse to\n give the answer to the next or the next. And I must operate logically.\n\n\n \"There is another reason for my oracular answer, which I believe will\n become clear to you later, when you have solved my riddle.\"\n\n\n Bristol turned without another word and left the building. He drove\n home in silence, entered his home in silence, kissed his wife Anne\n briefly and then sat down limply in his easy chair.\n\n\n \"Just relax, dear,\" said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully\n back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside\n him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers.\n\n\n \"It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster,\" he said. \"Buster\n never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's\n no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he\n always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax\n me and make me feel comfortable.\"\n\n\n Anne smiled, looking down tenderly at John's tired face. \"I know,\n dear,\" she said. \"You need to be able to talk to someone who will\n always be interested, even if she doesn't understand half of what you\n say. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it does you a great deal of good to\n talk to someone like me who isn't very bright, but who doesn't always\n know what you're talking about even before you start talking.\"\n\n\n John nodded, his eyes still closed. \"If it weren't for you, darling,\"\n he said, \"I think I'd go crazy. But you aren't dumb at all. If I seem\n to act as if you are, sometimes, it's just that I can't always follow\n your logic.\"\nAnne gave him a quick glance of amusement, her eyes sparkling with\n intelligence. \"You never will find me logical,\" she laughed. \"After\n all, I'm a woman, and you get plenty of logic from the Oracle.\"\n\n\n \"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be\n doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to\n have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today,\n dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think\n that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two\n heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you\n with your problem.\"\n\n\n While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face\n with intelligence and compassion.\n\n\n John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"\n\n\n \"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"\n\n\n \"And you always make it so crystal clear and easy to understand at\n the time,\" said Anne. She wrinkled her smooth forehead. \"But somehow,\n later, it never seems quite so plain when I start to think about it\n by myself. Besides, I like the way your eyebrows go up and down while\n you explain something you think I won't understand. So tell me again.\n Please.\"\n\n\n Bristol grinned suddenly. \"Yes, dear,\" he said. He paused a moment\n to collect his thoughts. \"First of all, you know that there are two\n coexistent universes or planes, with point-to-point correspondence,\n but that these planes are of very different size. For every one of the\n infinitude of points in our Universe—which we call for convenience the\n 'alpha' plane—there is a single corresponding point in the smaller or\n 'beta' plane.\"\n\n\n Anne pursed her lips doubtfully. \"If they match point for point, how\n can there be any difference in size?\" she asked.\n\n\n John searched his pockets. After a little difficulty, he produced an\n envelope and a pencil stub. On the back of the envelope, he drew two\n parallel lines, one about five inches long, and the other about double\n the length of the first.\n\n\n \"Actually,\" he said, \"each of these line segments has an infinite\n number of points in it, but we'll ignore that. I'll just divide each\n one of these into ten equal parts.\" He did so, using short, neat\n cross-marks.\n\n\n \"Now I'll establish a one-to-one correspondence between these two\n segments, which we will call one-line universes, by connecting each of\n my dividing cross-marks on the short segment with the corresponding\n mark on the longer line. I'll use dotted lines as connectors. That\n makes eleven dotted lines. You see?\"\nAnne nodded. \"That's plain enough. It reminds me of a venetian blind\n that has hung up on one side. Like ours in the living room last week\n that I couldn't fix, but had to wait until you came home.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said John. \"Now, let us call this longer line-segment an 'alpha'\n universe; an analogue of our own multi-dimensional 'alpha' universe.\n If I move my pencil along the line at one section a second like this,\n it takes me ten seconds to get to the other end. We will assume that\n this velocity of an inch a second is the fastest anything can go along\n the 'alpha' line. That is the velocity of light, therefore, in the\n 'alpha' plane—186,000 miles a second, in round numbers. No need to use\n decimals.\"\nHe hurried on as Anne stirred and seemed about to speak. \"But if I\n slide out from my starting point along a dotted line part way to the\n 'beta' universe—something which, for reasons I can't explain now,\n takes negligible time—watch what happens. If I still proceed at the\n rate of an inch a second in this inter-planar region, then, with the\n dotted lines all bunched closely together, after five seconds when I\n switch along another dotted line back to my original universe, I have\n gone almost the whole length of that longer line. Of course, this\n introduction of 'alpha' matter—my pencil point in this case—into the\n inter-planar region between the universes sets up enormous strains,\n so that after a certain length of time our spaceship is automatically\n rejected and returned to its own proper plane.\"\n\n\n \"Could anybody in the littler universe use the same system?\"\n\n\n John laughed. \"If there were anybody in the 'beta' plane, I guess they\n could, although they would end up traveling slower than they would\n if they just stayed in their own plane. But there isn't anybody. The\n 'beta' plane is a constant level entropy universe—completely without\n life of its own. The entropy level, of course, is vastly higher than\n that of our own universe.\"\n\n\n Anne sat up. \"I'll forgive you this time for bringing up that horrid\n word\nentropy\n, if you'll promise me not to do it again,\" she said.\nJohn Shrugged his shoulders and smiled. \"Now,\" he said, \"if I want\n to get somewhere fast, I just start off in the right direction, and\n switch over toward 'beta.' When 'beta' throws me back, a light-year\n or so toward my destination, I just switch over again. You see, there\n is a great deal more difference in the sizes of Alpha universe and\n Beta universe than in the sizes of these alpha and beta line-segment\n analogues. Then I continue alternating back and forth until I get where\n I want to go. Establishing my correct velocity vector is complicated\n mathematically, but simple in practice, and is actually an aiming\n device, having nothing to do with how fast I go.\"\n\n\n He hesitated, groping for the right words. \"In point of fact, you have\n to imagine that corresponding points in the two universes are moving\n rapidly past each other in all directions at once. I just have to\n select the right direction, or to convince the probability cloud that\n corresponds to my location in the 'alpha' universe that it is really a\n point near the 'beta' universe, going my way. That's a somewhat more\n confused way of looking at it than merely imagining that I continue\n to travel in the inter-planar region at the same velocity that I had\n in 'alpha,' but it's closer to a description of what the math says\n happens. I could make it clear if I could just use mathematics, but I\n doubt if the equations will mean much to you.\n\n\n \"At any rate, distance traveled depends on mass—the bigger the\n ship, the shorter the distance traveled on each return to our own\n universe—and not on velocity in 'alpha.' Other parameters, entirely\n under the control of the traveler, also affect the time that a ship\n remains in the inter-planar region.\n\n\n \"There are refinements, of course. Recently, for example, we have\n discovered a method of multi-transfer. Several of the transmitters\n that accomplish the transfer are used together. When they all operate\n exactly simultaneously, all the matter within a large volume of space\n is transferred as a unit. With three or four transmitters keyed\n together, you could transfer a comet and its tail intact. And that's\n how inter-planar traveling works. Clear now?\"\n\n\n \"And that's why they call it 'stitching,'\" said Anne with seeming\n delight. \"You just think of the ship as a needle stitching its way back\n and forth into and out of our universe. Why didn't you just say so?\"\n\"I have. Many times. But there's another interesting point about\n stitching. Subjectively, the man in the ship seems to spend about one\n day in each universe alternately. Actually, according to the time scale\n of an observer in the 'alpha' plane, his ship disappears for about\n a day, then reappears for a minute fraction of a second and is gone\n again. Of course, one observer couldn't watch both the disappearance\n and reappearance of the same ship, and I assume the observers have the\n same velocity in 'alpha' as does the stitching ship. Anyway, after a\n ship completes its last stitch, near its destination, there's a day\n of subjective time in which to make calculations for the landing—to\n compute trajectories and so forth—before it actually fully rejoins\n this universe. And while in the inter-planar region it cannot be\n detected, even by someone else stitching in the same region of 'alpha'\n space.\n\n\n \"That's one of the things that makes interruption of the enemy ships\n entirely impossible. If a ship is in an unfavorable position, it just\n takes one more quick stitch out of range, then returns to a more\n favorable location. In other words, if it finds itself in trouble, it\n can be gone from our plane again even before it entirely rejoins it.\n Even if it landed by accident in the heart of a blue-white star, it\n would be unharmed for that tiny fraction of a second which, to the\n people in the ship, would seem like an entire day.\n\n\n \"If this time anomaly didn't exist, it might be possible to set up\n defenses that would operate after a ship's arrival in the solar system\n but before it could do any damage; but as it is, they can dodge any\n defense we can devise. Is all that clear?\"\n\n\n Anne nodded. \"Uh-hunh, I understood every word.\"\n\n\n \"There is another thing about inter-planar travel that you ought to\n remember,\" said Bristol. \"When a ship returns to our universe, it\n causes a wide area disturbance; you have probably heard it called space\n shiver or the bong wave. The beta universe is so much smaller than\n our own alpha that you can imagine a spaceship when shifted toward it\n as being several beta light-years long. Now, if you think of a ship,\n moving between the alpha and beta lines on this envelope, as getting\n tangled in the dotted lines that connect the points on the two lines,\n that would mean that it would affect an area smaller than its own size\n on beta—a vastly larger area on alpha.\n\n\n \"So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines,\n setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space\n nearly a parsec in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong' sound on your\n T.V. set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole\n volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using\n inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity.\n Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can\n disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make\n adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble,\n he has gone again long before we can detect the bong.\"\n\"Well, dear,\" said Anne.\n\n\n \"As usual, I'm sure you have made me understand perfectly. This\n time you did so well that I may still remember what stitching is by\n tomorrow. If the Oracle means anything at all by his statement, I\n suppose it means that we can use stitching to help defend ourselves,\n just as the invaders are using it to attack us. But the whole thing\n sounds completely silly to me. The Oracle, I mean.\"\n\n\n Anne Bristol stood up, put her hands on her shapely hips and shook her\n head at her husband. \"Honestly,\" she said, \"you men are all alike.\n Paying so much attention to a toy you built yourself, and only last\n week you made fun of my going to a fortune teller. And the fuss you\n made about the ten dollars when you know it was worth every cent of it.\n She really told me the most amazing things. If you'd only let me tell\n you some of....\"\n\n\n \"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"\n\n\n Bristol shook his head. \"Your idea may be sound, even if it is a\n little bloodthirsty coming from someone who won't even let me set a\n mouse-trap, but it won't work. First, we don't know where their home\n planets are and second, they have more ships than we do. It might be\n made to work, but only if we could get enough time. And speaking of\n time, I've got to meet with the Council as soon as we finish eating. Is\n dinner ready?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "How would you describe John?", "question_unique_id": "50936_SEDNSGRF_1", "options": ["Smart and humble", "Brilliant and generous", "Kind and lovable", "Smart and cocky"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How would you describe Buster?", "question_unique_id": "50936_SEDNSGRF_2", "options": ["Serious", "Empathetic", "Sweet", "Funny"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did John care about when designing Buster?", "question_unique_id": "50936_SEDNSGRF_3", "options": ["Having a companion", "Buster having a sense of sympathy", "Buster having a sense of humor", "Buster having a respect for John"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is one of the rules that Buster is programmed to follow?", "question_unique_id": "50936_SEDNSGRF_4", "options": ["Buster has to answer any question that John asks", "If Buster needs to, he can lie to John", "Buster has to compliment John whenever his system restarts", "Buster has to reveal any information he possesses that might be useful to John"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Buster nicknamed what he is nicknamed?", "question_unique_id": "50936_SEDNSGRF_5", "options": ["Because he is bold", "Because he is a jackass", "Because he is good at providing detailed information", "Because he is decent at predicting things"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How would you describe the relationship between Anne and John?", "question_unique_id": "50936_SEDNSGRF_6", "options": ["Their engagement is happy", "They love each other but don't get to spend much time together", "Their marriage is happy", "Their marriage is rocky"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the narrative purpose of including Anne in the story?", "question_unique_id": "50936_SEDNSGRF_7", "options": ["To help the audience understand space travel techniques", "To contrast with Buster's personality", "To help the audience understand how the invaders pose such a great threat", "To add more conflict into the story for John"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does this story use a famous quote to its advantage?", "question_unique_id": "50936_SEDNSGRF_8", "options": ["It connects a word in the quote to an element of the world-building", "It connects the meaning of the quote to the direct meaning of a world-building element in the story", "It connects a word in the quote to a character in the story", "It connects the meaning of the quote to a character in the story"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/3/50936//50936-h//50936-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50923", "set_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Serpent River", "year": 1952, "author": "Wilcox, Don", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Extrasolar planets -- Fiction; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction", "article": "THE SERPENT RIVER\nBy Don Wilcox\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Other Worlds May 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe Code was rigid—no fraternization with the\n\n peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no\n\n \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n\"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the\n summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a\n closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n\n\n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late\n afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\nsomething\nthat\n crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n\n\n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It\n might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain—or a chain\n of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had\n shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow\n tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their\n skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along\n the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of\n solid substance.\n\n\n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from\n this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course\n for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn\n path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the\n horizon.\nWhat was it?\n\"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers.\n Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good\n Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first\n expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important\n pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned)\n had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts\n of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this\n planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n (2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land,\n continuously, endlessly.\n\n\n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance\n from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred\n not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly\n vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it\n proved to be some sort of vegetable—a vine of glacier proportions—or\n a river of some silvery, creamy substance—we would move in upon it\n gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n \"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of\n split-hairs.\n\n\n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n\n\n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn\n eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare\n young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n\n\n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n\n\n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two,\n Order of Duties upon Landing: A—\"\n\n\n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from\n under its belly?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n\n\n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n\n\n \"No sir.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n\n\n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with\n restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir.\n Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks—thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though\n coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an\n exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n\n\n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all,\n his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his\n words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he\n required in his coffee.\n\n\n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits.\n Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n (our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I\n had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim\n his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually\n physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the\n part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"—and the wide ears that\n stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of\n selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I\n could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n\n\n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n\n\n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the\n object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny—\"\n\n\n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\n \"What sort of object?\"\n\n\n \"A living creature, sir—upright, wearing clothes—\"\n\n\n \"A\nman\n?\"\n\n\n \"To all appearances, sir—\"\n\n\n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n2.\n\n\n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you\n can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when,\n looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n\n\n Walking upright!\n\n\n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n\n\n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man!\n Across millions of miles of space—a man, like the men of the Earth.\n\n\n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms\n within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the\n living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of\n our Earth.\n\n\n A man!\n\n\n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n\n\n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n\n\n He might have been entirely naked.\n\n\n He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to go\nout\n—?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n\n\n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n\n\n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n\n\n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs\n of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground\n city—though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n\n\n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n\n\n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\".\n They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our\n ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently\n come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied\n them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a\n hike.\n\n\n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might\n guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold,\n cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the\n cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in\n the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this\n was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a\n circular mantle.\n\n\n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some\n sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the\n setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break\n in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions,\n his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n\n\n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back\n of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n\n\n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking\n equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I\n might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\nmoving\n.\n\n\n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a\n prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I\n looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n\n\n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the\n crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees\n themselves were moving.\n\n\n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n\n\n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He\n gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n\n\n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of\n the moving trees.\n\n\n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"Yes. The females—I'm speaking hypothetically—but they\nmust\nbe\n females—are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows.\n I wonder why?\"\n\n\n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n\n\n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n\n\n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope.\n Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other\n planets—\"sponge-trees\"—which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If\n these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the\n slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid\n no attention to them.\n\n\n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb.\n The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The\n lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males\n and the soft curves of the females.\n\n\n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n \"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so\n they pad their elbows.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their\n shoulders.\"\n\n\n \"Are you complaining?\"\n\n\n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we\n were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their\n meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing\n that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making\n a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in\n calm, graceful gestures.\n\n\n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are\n moving in on them.\"\n\n\n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you\n ever see moving trees?\"\n\n\n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under\n cover. Look!\"\n\n\n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for\n a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as\n innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged\n with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers—how can we warn them? Oh-oh!\n Too late. Look!\"\n\n\n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads\n of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors—fifty or more\n of them—with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide\n semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n3.\n\n\n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends.\n They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird\n clubs with a threat of death.\n\n\n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we\n were about to witness a massacre.\n\n\n \"Captain—\nJim\n! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n\n\n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had\n the same impulse as Campbell—to do something—anything! Yet here we\n sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n \"friends\" in danger.\n\n\n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't\n duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and\n packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n\n\n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\ncould\ndrop his\n dignity under excitement—his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he\n wanted any sort of split-second order.\n\n\n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.\n\n\n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got\n into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party\n had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our\n direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make\n out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately,\n he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n\n\n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding\n places in the ground. But a few—the brave ones, perhaps, or the\n officials of his group—came with him.\n\n\n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n\n\n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I\n said. Together we descended from the ship.\n\n\n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.\n\n\n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against\n the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces.\n Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down\n any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n \"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n \"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very\n smooth—handsome—attractive.\"\n\n\n Then the siren went off.\n\n\n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be\n waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in\n close.\n\n\n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come\n equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing\n medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a\n large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear,\n dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own\n neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was\n not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it\n was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I\n liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to\n place the gift around his neck.\n\n\n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n\n\n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n \"Tomboldo.\"\n\n\n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then,\n as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each\n breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of\n them. One was Gravgak.\n\n\n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did\n not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n\n\n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were\n painted with green and black diamond designs.\n\n\n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were\n invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we\n would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of\n Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose—to\n understand the Serpent River—would be forwarded greatly if we could\n learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the\n river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and\n to map its course—these facts were only a part of the information we\n sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this\n planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends\n they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when\n future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE)\n for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n\n\n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was\n safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees\n that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we\n knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent.\n Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests\n of Tomboldo.\n\n\n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to\n hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored\n the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with\n agitated jabbering:\n\n\n \"Wollo—yeeta—vo—vandartch—vandartch! Grr—see—o—see—o—see—o!\"\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o,\" one of the others echoed.\n\n\n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The\n enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a\n wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see—o—see—o\"\n we were all safe.\n\n\n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment\n jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than\n a yowling siren.\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand.\n They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n \"\nSee—o—see—o!\n\"\n\n\n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees\n came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They\n bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n\n\n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No\n deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies\n gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the\n nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed.\n Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the\n air.\n\n\n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing\n sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n\n\n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came\n forward, rushing defiantly.\n\n\n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their\n clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party\n it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet\n the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as\n a\nwarning\n! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these\n strange devils will throw fire at you.\n\n\n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders,\n thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip,\n zip—BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the\n rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four\n warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were\n flattened—and those who were able, ran.\n\n\n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to\n pick up their clubs.\n\n\n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious\n casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first\n blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of\n the party hovered over him.\n\n\n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me\n with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us\n stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages,\n and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to\n consciousness.\n\n\n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still\n at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused\n a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it—and then blacked\n out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the\n handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him—apparently all by\n accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into\n my head.\n\n\n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n4.\n\n\n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the\n weeks that I lay unconscious.\n\n\n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n\n\n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to\n land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n\n\n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow\n penetrate my dream.\n\n\n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices\n of this new, strange language.\n\n\n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n\n\n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n\n\n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n\n\n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n\n\n \"One of them.\"\n\n\n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember—\"\n\n\n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after\n you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve\n the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of\n Campbell came through insistently.\n\n\n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n \"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Section Four?\"\n\n\n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put\n me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No\n agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed\n as binding—\"\n\n\n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n\n\n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with\n any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain\n Linden? Or are you warning\nyourself\n?\"\n\n\n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred\n vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her—yes, she must have\n haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her\n features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the\n party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the\n attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and\n figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's\n question. \"Myself.\"\n\n\n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna.\n The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella\n people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of\n their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning\n about the world into which he has been born.\n\n\n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together.\n Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire\n about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to\n converse in simple words. And Vauna and I—yes. If I could only avoid\n blacking out.\n\n\n I wanted to see her.\n\n\n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space\n ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars.\n The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of\n Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n\n\n I regained my health gradually.\n\n\n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella\n words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you\n more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My\n father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are\n still weak.\"\n\n\n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust\n myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By\n night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep.\n Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n\n\n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me\n through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me,\n faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some\n corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to\n go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless\n dreams.\n\n\n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing\n before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a\n hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook\n the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his\n flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and\n played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n\n\n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n\n\n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise,\n the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will\n walk soon.\"\n\n\n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars\n and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the\n ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make\n myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of\n forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying\n to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell\n each other.\"\n\n\n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\nserpent\n river\n.\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not\n knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\nI\nmade an eel-like motion\n with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain,\n the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked\n around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent\n figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and\n green diamond markings—Gravgak.\n\n\n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n\n\n \"I get well,\" I said.\n\n\n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n\n\n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant\n to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes\n told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes\n flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and\n started off. \"Get well!\"\n\n\n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway\n he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n\n\n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I\n will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n\n\n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n\n\n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her\n father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n\n\n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic\n moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master—or her\n lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n\n\n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n \"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n\n\n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called\n them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a\n jealous lover—or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard\n was a potential traitor?)\n\n\n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been\n called back.\n\n\n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway\n he stood scowling.\n\n\n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at\n the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we\n will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n\n\n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n\n\n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend—\"\n he pointed to me—\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him\n here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through\n the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget\n this kindness. When we ascend the\nKao-Wagwattl\n, the ever moving\nrope of life\n, these friends shall come with us. On the back of\n the Kao-Wagwattl\nthey shall ride with us across the land\n.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What traits best describe Campbell?", "question_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH_1", "options": ["Kind and quiet", "Funny and quick", "Handsome and tall", "Studious and dutiful"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How would you describe Tomboldo?", "question_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH_2", "options": ["Kind and respected", "Childish and rude", "Respected and humorous", "Generous and Lighthearted"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the goal of the Captain and Campbell?", "question_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH_3", "options": ["To contact the monsters on the planet", "To make an alliance with the people on the planet", "To explore the entirety of the planet they landed on", "To learn about a specific part of the planet"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Based on the passage, what is the relationship like between Vauna and the Captain?", "question_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH_4", "options": ["Vauna falls in love with the Captain", "The Captain has feelings for Vauna", "Vauna and the Captain are lovers but Gravgak is trying to interfere", "Vauna has feelings for the Captain but the Captain has feelings for Gravgak"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How do the two men first meet the group of people?", "question_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH_5", "options": ["They defend them from attackers at a distance and then fly closer", "They land their ship nearby and walk to meet them, then they were able to help when the attackers came", "They get out of their ship and run over to defend them from attackers", "They defend them from attackers and then the people come to meet them"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "If the two hadn't helped during the attack, what would've happened?", "question_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH_6", "options": ["The group of people would've actually been much better off", "Vauna would've been abducted", "The group of people probably would've been much worse off", "The two men would've been attacked anyway "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why should we have respect for the Captain?", "question_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH_7", "options": ["He doesn't mind getting his hands dirty to defend those in need", "He knows a lot about planets (and does his research) so he can be culturally competent prior to landing", "He cares for others", "His charisma makes him naturally likeable"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is NOT an element of the culture of the people of the planet?", "question_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH_8", "options": ["There is specialization within the group", "There is gender equality", "They have an organized leadership hierarchy", "The group knows the geography of the area well to use that information to their advantage"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "If the story were to continue, what would probably happen?", "question_unique_id": "50923_7TUDOQEH_9", "options": ["the Captain and Campbell would likely leave the group and fly home as soon as possible", "Gravgak would certainly murder the Captain", "the Captain and Campbell would probably travel with the group for a while", "Vauna would certainly be proposed to by the Captain"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/2/50923//50923-h//50923-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50736", "set_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Address: Centauri", "year": 1966, "author": "Wallace, F. L. (Floyd L.)", "topic": "People with disabilities -- Fiction; PS; Science fiction", "article": "ADDRESS: CENTAURI\nby\n\n F. L. WALLACE\n\n\n Published by\n\n GALAXY PUBLISHING CORP.\n\n New York 14, New York\n\n\n A Galaxy Science Fiction Novel\n\n by special arrangement with Gnome Press\n\n\n Based on \"Accidental Flight,\" copyright\n\n 1952 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.\n\n\n Published in book form by Gnome\n\n Press, copyright 1955 by F. L. Wallace.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any\n\n evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction Novels\nare sturdy, inexpensive editions\n \nof choice works in this field, both original and reprint,\n \nselected by the editors of\nGalaxy Science Fiction Magazine.\n\n\n Cover by Wallace A. Wood\n\n\n Printed in the U.S.A. by\n\n The Guinn Company\n\n New York 14, N. Y.\nContents\nEarth was too perfect for these extraordinary\n exiles—to belong to it, they had to flee it!\n1\nLight flickered. It was uncomfortably bright.\n\n\n Doctor Cameron gazed intently at the top of the desk. It wasn't easy\n to be diplomatic. \"The request was turned over to the Medicouncil,\" he\n said. \"I assure you it was studied thoroughly before it was reported\n back to the Solar Committee.\"\n\n\n Docchi edged forward, his face alight with anticipation.\n\n\n The doctor kept his eyes averted. The man was damnably\n disconcerting—had no right to be alive. In the depths of the sea there\n were certain creatures like him and on a warm summer evening there was\n still another parallel, but never any human with such an infirmity.\n \"I'm afraid you know what the answer is. A flat no for the present.\"\n\n\n Docchi sagged and his arms hung limp. \"That's the answer?\"\n\n\n \"It's not as hopeless as you think. Decisions can be changed. It won't\n be the first time.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"\n\n\n Docchi winced, his arms quivering uselessly. \"Maybe not. But we told\n you we're willing to let experts decide. There's nearly a thousand of\n us. They should be able to get one qualified crew.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps. I'm not going to say.\" Cameron abandoned the light as beyond\n his control. \"Most of you are biocompensators. I concede it's a factor\n in your favor. But you must realize there are many things against you.\"\n He squinted at the desk top. Below the solid surface there was a drawer\n and in the drawer there was—that was what he was trying to see or\n determine. The more he looked the less clear anything seemed to be. He\n tried to make his voice crisp and professional. \"You're wasting time\n discussing this with me. I've merely passed the decision on. I'm not\n responsible for it and I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\n Docchi stood up, his face colorless and bright. But the inner\n illumination was no indication of hope.\n\n\n Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.\n\n\n He shut the drawer. It was a private game, a method to keep from\n becoming involved in Docchi's problems, to avoid emotional entanglement\n with people he had nothing in common with. He didn't enjoy depriving\n weak and helpless men and women of what little hope they had. It was\n their lack of strength that made them so difficult to handle.\n\n\n He reached for the telecom. \"Get Medicouncilor Thorton,\" he told the\n operator. \"Direct if you can; indirect if you have to. I'll hold on.\"\n\n\n Approximate mean diameter thirty miles, the asteroid was listed on the\n charts as Handicap Haven with a mark that indicated except in emergency\n no one not authorized was to land there. Those who were confined to it\n were willing to admit they were handicapped but they didn't call it\n haven. They used other terms, none suggesting sanctuary.\n\n\n It was a hospital, of course, but even more it was a convalescent\n home—the permanent kind. Healthy and vigorous humanity had reserved\n the remote planetoid, a whirling bleak rock of no other value, and\n built large installations there for less fortunate people. It was a\n noble gesture but like many gestures the reality fell short of the\n intentions. And not many people outside the Haven itself realized\n wherein it was a failure.\n\n\n The robot operator broke into his thoughts. \"Medicouncilor Thorton has\n been located.\"\n\n\n An older man looked out of the screen, competent, forceful. \"I'm on\n my way to the satellites of Jupiter. I'll be in direct range for\n the next half hour.\" At such distances transmission and reception\n were practically instantaneous. Cameron was assured of uninterrupted\n conversation. \"It's a good thing you called. Have you got the Solar\n Committee reply?\"\n\n\n \"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"\n\n\n \"I think so. He expected a favorable reply and wanted to look his\n best, as nearly normal as possible. In view of that I'm surprised he\n didn't threaten you.\"\n\n\n Cameron tried to recall the incident. \"I think he did, mildly. He said\n something to the effect that I'd be surprised how\nthey\ngot what they\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"So you anticipate trouble. That's why you called?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I want your opinion.\"\n\n\n \"You're on the scene, doctor. You get the important nuances,\" said\n the medicouncilor hastily. \"However it's my considered judgment they\n won't start anything immediately. It takes time to get over the shock\n of refusal. They can't do anything. Individually they're helpless\n and collectively there aren't parts for a dozen sound bodies on the\n asteroid.\"\n\n\n \"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"\n\n\n \"I've found out. There's a self-elected group of four, Docchi, Nona,\n Anti and Jordan. I believe they're supposed to be the local recreation\n committee.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor smiled. \"An apt camouflage. It keeps them amused.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so too but now I'm convinced they're no longer harmless. I'd\n like permission to break up the group. Humanely of course.\"\n\n\n \"I always welcome new ideas.\"\n\n\n In spite of what he'd said the medicouncilor probably did have an open\n mind. \"Start with those it's possible to do the most with. Docchi,\n for instance. With prosthetic arms, he appears normal except for that\n uncanny fluorescence. Granted that the last is repulsive to the average\n person. We can't correct the condition medically but we can make it\n into an asset.\"\n\n\n \"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.\n\n\n \"To him, perhaps,\" reflected the medicouncilor. \"It's an ingenious\n idea, doctor, one which does credit to your humanitarianism. But I'm\n afraid of the public's reception. Have you gone into Docchi's medical\n history?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced at it before I called him in.\" The man was unusual,\n even in a place that specialized in the abnormal. Docchi had been\n an electrochemical engineer with a degree in cold lighting. On his\n way to a brilliant career, he had been the victim of a particularly\n messy accident. The details hadn't been described but Cameron could\n supplement them with his imagination. He'd been badly mangled and\n tossed into a tank of the basic cold lighting fluid.\n\n\n There was life left in the body; it flickered but never went entirely\n out. His arms were gone and his ribs were crushed into his spinal\n column. Regeneration wasn't easy; a partial rib cage could be built up,\n but no more than that. He had no shoulder muscles and only a minimum\n in his back and now, much later, that was why he tired easily and why\n the prosthetic arms with which he'd been fitted were merely ornamental,\n there was nothing which could move them.\n\n\n And then there was the cold lighting fluid. To begin with it was\n semi-organic which, perhaps, was the reason he had remained alive so\n long when he should have died. It had preserved him, had in part\n replaced his blood, permeating every tissue. By the time Docchi had\n been found his body had adapted to the cold lighting substance. And the\n adaptation couldn't be reversed and it was self-perpetuating. Life was\n hardier than most men realized but occasionally it was also perverse.\n\n\n \"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"\n\n\n \"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.\n\n\n \"She's definitely not normal. She can't talk or hear, and never will.\n Her larynx is missing and though we could replace it, it wouldn't\n help if we did. We'd have to change her entire brain structure to\n accommodate it and we're not that good at the present.\"\n\n\n \"I was thinking about the nerve dissimilarities,\" began Cameron.\n\n\n \"A superior mutation, is that what you were going to say? You can\n forget that. It's much more of an anomaly, in the nature of cleft\n palates, which were once common—poor pre-natal nutrition or traumas.\n These we can correct rather easily but Nona is surgically beyond us.\n There always is something beyond us, you know.\" The medicouncilor\n glanced at the chronometer beside him.\n\n\n Cameron saw the time too but continued. It ought to be settled. It\n would do no good to bring up Helen Keller; the medicouncilor would\n use that evidence against him. The Keller techniques had been studied\n and reinterpreted for Nona's benefit. That much was in her medical\n record. They had been tried on Nona, and they hadn't worked. It made no\n difference that he, Cameron, thought there were certain flaws in the\n way the old techniques had been applied. Thorton would not allow that\n the previous practitioners could have been wrong. \"I've been wondering\n if we haven't tried to force her to conform. She can be intelligent\n without understanding what we say or knowing how to read and write.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" demanded the medicouncilor. \"The most important tool humans\n have is language. Through this we pass along all knowledge.\" Thorton\n paused, reflecting. \"Unless you're referring to this Gland Opera stuff\n you mentioned. I believe you are, though personally I prefer to call it\n Rhine Opera.\"\n\n\n \"I've been thinking of that,\" admitted Cameron. \"Maybe if there was\n someone else like her she wouldn't need to talk the way we do. Anyway\n I'd like to make some tests, with your permission. I'll need some new\n equipment.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor found the sheet he'd been looking for from time\n to time. He creased it absently. \"Go ahead with those tests if it\n will make you feel better. I'll personally approve the requisition.\n It doesn't mean you'll get everything you want. Others have to sign\n too. However you ought to know you're not the first to think she's\n telepathic or something related to that phenomena.\"\n\n\n \"I've seen that in the record too. But I think I can be the first one\n to prove it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad you're enthusiastic. But don't lose sight of the main\n objective. Even if she\nis\ntelepathic, and so far as we're concerned\n she's not, would she be better suited to life outside?\"\n\n\n He had one answer—but the medicouncilor believed in another. \"Perhaps\n you're right. She'll have to stay here no matter what happens.\"\n\n\n \"She will. It would solve your problems if you could break up the\n group, but don't count on it. You'll have to learn to manage them as\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see that they don't cause any trouble,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you will.\" The medicouncilor's manner didn't ooze confidence.\n \"If you need help we can send in reinforcements.\"\n\n\n \"I don't anticipate that much difficulty,\" said Cameron hastily. \"I'll\n keep them running around in circles.\"\n\n\n \"Confusion is the best policy,\" agreed the medicouncilor. He unfolded\n the sheet and looked down at it. \"Oh yes, before it's too late I'd\n better tell you I'm sending details of new treatments for a number of\n deficients——\"\n\n\n The picture collapsed into meaningless swirls of color. For an instant\n the voice was distinguishable again before it too was drowned by noise.\n \"Did you understand what I said, doctor? If it isn't clear contact me.\n Deviation can be fatal.\"\n\n\n \"I can't keep the ship in focus,\" said the robot. \"If you wish to\n continue the conversation it will have to be relayed through the\n nearest main station. At present that's Mars.\"\n\n\n It was inconvenient to wait several minutes for each reply. Besides the\n medicouncilor couldn't or wouldn't help him. He wanted the status quo\n maintained; nothing else would satisfy him. It was the function of the\n medical director to see that it was. \"We're through,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n He sat there after the telecom clicked off. What were the deficients\n the medicouncilor had talked about? A subdivision of the accidentals\n of course, but it wasn't a medical term he was familiar with. Probably\n a semi-slang description. The medicouncilor had been associated with\n accidentals so long that he assumed every doctor would know at once\n what he meant.\n\n\n Deficients. Mentally Cameron turned the word over. If it was\n used accurately it could indicate only one thing. He'd see when\n the medicouncilor's report came in. He could always ask for more\n information if it wasn't clear.\n\n\n The doctor got heavily to his feet—and he actually was heavier. It\n wasn't a psychological reaction. He made a mental note of it. He'd have\n to investigate the gravity surge.\n\n\n In a way accidentals were pathetic, patchwork humans, half or quarter\n men and women, fractional organisms which masqueraded as people. The\n illusion died hard for them, harder than that which remained of their\n bodies, and those bodies were unbelievably tough. Medicine and surgery\n were partly to blame. Techniques were too good or not good enough,\n depending on the viewpoint—doctor or patient.\n\n\n Too good in that the most horribly injured person, if he were found\n alive, could be kept alive. Not good enough because a certain per cent\n of the injured couldn't be returned to society completely sound and\n whole. The miracles of healing were incomplete.\n\n\n There weren't many humans who were broken beyond repair, but though\n the details varied in every respect, the results were monotonously\n the same. For the most part disease had been eliminated. Everyone was\n healthy—except those who'd been hurt in accidents and who couldn't be\n resurgeried and regenerated into the beautiful mold characteristic of\n the entire population. And those few were sent to the asteroid.\n\n\n They didn't like it. They didn't like being\nconfined\nto Handicap\n Haven. They were sensitive and they didn't want to go back. They knew\n how conspicuous they'd be, hobbling and crawling among the multitudes\n of beautiful men and women who inhabited the planets. The accidentals\n didn't want to return.\n\n\n What they did want was ridiculous. They had talked about, hoped, and\n finally embodied it in a petition. They had requested rockets to make\n the first long hard journey to Alpha and Proxima Centauri. Man was\n restricted to the solar system and had no way of getting to even the\n nearest stars. They thought they could break through the barrier. Some\n accidentals would go and some would remain behind, lonelier except for\n their share in the dangerous enterprise.\n\n\n It was a particularly uncontrollable form of self-deception. They were\n the broken people, without a face they could call their own, who wore\n their hearts not on their sleeves but in a blood-pumping chamber, those\n without limbs or organs—or too many. The categories were endless. No\n accidental was like any other.\n\n\n The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.\n\n\n \"Anti, they turned us down,\" said Docchi bitterly.\n\n\n \"What did you expect?\" rumbled the creature in the pool. Wavelets of\n acid danced across the surface, stirred by her voice.\n\n\n \"I didn't expect that.\"\n\n\n \"You don't know the Medicouncil very well.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I don't.\" He stared sullenly at the fluid. It was faintly\n blue. \"I have the feeling they didn't consider it, that they held the\n request for a time and then answered no without looking at it.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're beginning to learn. Wait till you've been here as long as I\n have.\"\n\n\n Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"\n\n\n \"They always bring in biocompensation,\" muttered Anti restlessly. \"I'm\n getting tired of that excuse. Time passes just as slow.\"\n\n\n \"But what else is there? Shall we draw up another request?\"\n\n\n \"Memorandum number ten? Let's not be naive. Things get lost when we\n send them to the Medicouncil. Their filing system is in terrible shape.\"\n\n\n \"Lost or distorted,\" grunted Docchi angrily. The grass he'd kicked\n already had begun to wilt. It wasn't hardy in this environment. Few\n things were.\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to give the Medicouncil a rest. I'm sure they don't\n want to hear from us again.\"\n\n\n Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.\n\n\n \"Maybe you can and maybe you can't,\" said Anti. \"But why make it\n difficult, why waste time?\"\n\n\n Docchi got up awkwardly but he wasn't clumsy once he was on his feet.\n \"I'll get Jordan. I know I'll need arms.\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you mean,\" said Anti.\n\n\n \"Both,\" said Docchi, smiling. \"We're a dangerous weapon.\"\n\n\n She called out as he walked away. \"I'll see you when you leave for far\n Centauri.\"\n\n\n \"Sooner than that, Anti. Much sooner.\"\n\n\n Stars were beginning to wink. Twilight brought out the shadows and\n tracery of the structure that supported the transparent dome overhead.\n Soon controlled slow rotation would bring near darkness to this side of\n the asteroid. The sun was small at this distance but even so it was a\n tie to the familiar scenes of Earth. Before long it would be lost.\nCameron leaned back and looked speculatively at the gravity engineer,\n Vogel. The engineer could give him considerable assistance. There was\n no reason why he shouldn't but anyone who voluntarily had remained\n on the asteroid as long as Vogel was a doubtful quantity. He didn't\n distrust him, the man was strange.\n\n\n \"I've been busy trying to keep the place running smoothly. I hope you\n don't mind that I haven't been able to discuss your job at length,\"\n said the doctor, watching him closely.\n\n\n \"Naw, I don't mind,\" said Vogel. \"Medical directors come and go. I stay\n on. It's easier than getting another job.\"\n\n\n \"I know. By now you should know the place pretty well. I sometimes\n think you could do my work with half the trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't in the least curious about medicine and never bothered to\n learn,\" grunted Vogel. \"I keep my stuff running and that's all. I\n don't interfere with nobody and they don't come around and get friendly\n with me.\"\n\n\n Cameron believed it. The statement fit the personality. He needn't be\n concerned about fraternization. \"There are a few things that puzzle\n me,\" he began. \"That's why I called you in. Usually we maintain about\n half Earth-normal gravity. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n The engineer nodded and grunted assent.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure why half gravity is used. Perhaps it's easier on the\n weakened bodies of the accidentals. Or there may be economic factors.\n Either way it's not important as long as half gravity is what we get.\"\n\n\n \"You want to know why we use that figure?\"\n\n\n \"If you can tell me without getting too technical, yes. I feel I should\n learn everything I can about the place.\"\n\n\n The engineer warmed up, seeming to enjoy himself. \"Ain't no reason\n except the gravity units themselves,\" Vogel said. \"Theoretically we can\n get anything we want. Practically we take whatever comes out, anything\n from a quarter to full Earth gravity.\"\n\n\n \"You have no control over it?\" This contradicted what he'd heard. His\n information was that gravity generators were the product of an awesome\n bit of scientific development. It seemed inconceivable that they should\n be so haphazardly directed.\n\n\n \"Sure we got control,\" answered the engineer, grinning. \"We can\n turn them off or on. If gravity varies, that's too bad. We take the\n fluctuation or we don't get anything.\"\n\n\n Cameron frowned; the man knew what he was doing or he wouldn't be\n here. His position was of only slightly less importance than that of\n the medical director—and where it mattered the Medicouncil wouldn't\n tolerate incompetence. And yet——\n\n\n The engineer rumbled on. \"You were talking how the generators were\n designed especially for the asteroid. Some fancy medical reason why\n it's easier on the accidentals to have a lesser gravity plus a certain\n amount of change. Me, I dunno. I guess the designers couldn't help what\n was built and the reason was dug up later.\"\n\n\n Cameron concealed his irritation. He wanted information, not a heart\n to heart confession. Back on Earth he\nhad\nbeen told it was for\n the benefit of the accidentals. He'd reserved judgment then and saw\n no reason not to do so now. \"All practical sciences try to justify\n what they can't escape but would like to. Medicine, I'm sure, is no\n exception.\"\n\n\n He paused thoughtfully. \"I understand there are three separate\n generators on the asteroid. One runs for forty-five minutes while two\n are idle. When the first one stops another one cuts in. The operations\n are supposed to be synchronized. I don't have to tell you that they're\n not. Not long ago you felt your weight increase suddenly. I know I did.\n What is wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing wrong,\" said the engineer soothingly. \"You get fluctuations\n while one generator is running. You get a gravity surge when one\n generator is supposed to drop out but doesn't. The companion machine\n adds to it, that's all.\"\n\n\n \"They're supposed to be that way? Overlapping so that for a time we\n have Earth or Earth and a half gravity?\"\n\n\n \"Better than having none,\" said Vogel with heavy pride. \"Used to happen\n quite often, before I came. You can ask any of the old timers. I fixed\n that though.\"\n\n\n He didn't like the direction his questions were taking him. \"What did\n you do?\" he asked suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said the engineer uncomfortably. \"Nothing I can think of. I\n guess the machines just got used to having me around.\"\n\n\n There were people who tended to anthropomorphize anything they came\n in contact with and Vogel was one of them. It made no difference to\n him that he was talking about insensate machines. He would continue to\n endow them with personality. \"This is the best you can say, that we'll\n get a wild variation of gravity, sometimes none?\"\n\n\n \"It's not\nsupposed\nto work that way but nobody's ever done better\n with a setup like this,\" said Vogel defensively. \"If you want you can\n check the company that makes these units.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not trying to challenge your knowledge and I'm not anxious to make\n myself look silly. I do want to make sure I don't overlook anything.\n You see, I think there's a possibility of sabotage.\"\n\n\n The engineer's grin was wider than the remark required.\n\n\n Cameron swiveled the chair around and leaned on the desk. \"All right,\"\n he said tiredly, \"tell me why the idea of sabotage is so funny.\"\n\n\n \"It would have to be someone living here,\" said the big engineer. \"He\n wouldn't like it if it jumped up to nine G, which it could. I think\n he'd let it alone. But there are better reasons. Do you know how each\n gravity unit is put together?\"\n\n\n \"Not in detail.\"\n\n\n The gravity generating unit was not a unit. It was built in three\n parts. First there was a power source, which could be anything as long\n as it supplied ample energy. The basic supply on the asteroid was a\n nuclear pile, buried deep in the core. Handicap Haven would have to be\n taken apart, stone by stone, before it could be reached.\n\n\n Part two were the gravity coils, which actually originated and directed\n the gravity. They were simple and very nearly indestructible. They\n could be destroyed but they couldn't be altered and still produce the\n field.\n\n\n The third part was the control unit, the real heart of the gravity\n generating system. It calculated the relationship between the power\n flowing through the coils and the created field in any one microsecond.\n It used the computed relationship to alter the power flowing in\n the next microsecond to get the same gravity. If the power didn't\n change the field died instantly. The control unit was thus actually a\n computer, one of the best made, accurate and fast beyond belief.\n\n\n The engineer rubbed his chin. \"Now I guess you can see why it doesn't\n always behave as we want it to.\"\n\n\n He looked questioningly at Cameron, expecting a reply. \"I'm afraid I\n can't,\" said the doctor.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Of the following options, who might enjoy this story the most?", "question_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3_1", "options": ["A college professor who loves researching space travel", "A book worm who loves technical descriptions of space travel", "A college professor who loves researching politics", "A book worm who loves stories of rebellion"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the relationship between Cameron and Docchi?", "question_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3_2", "options": ["Cameron has power over Docchi", "Cameron and Docchi are peers", "Docchi is Cameron's teacher", "Docchi has power over Cameron"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How social is Docchi?", "question_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3_3", "options": ["Has a few friends", "Becomes friends with everyone he interacts with", "A loner, but not against socializing", "Incredibly antisocial"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Cameron's primary motivation at the outset of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3_4", "options": ["To ask Docchi's permission to go back to Earth", "To tell Docchi his proposal was denied", "To tell Docchi about his plans for them to go back to Earth", "To ask Docchi whether the Captain had approved the proposal they worked on together"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Does the story have a happy ending?", "question_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3_5", "options": ["The ending of the story did not have a definitive happy/sad connotation", "No", "Yes", "It was a bit happy and a bit sad"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What real-life issues are most closely tied to this passage?", "question_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3_6", "options": ["Ableism", "Racism", "Sexism", "Ageism"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What's the relationship like between Anti and Docchi?", "question_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3_7", "options": ["They're strangers", "They don't like each other", "They're friends", "They're in love"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following traits best describe Cameron?", "question_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3_8", "options": ["Kind and brave", "Calculating and serious", "Cautious and generous", "Humorous and friendly"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following traits best describe Docchi?", "question_unique_id": "50736_XQPKXPA3_9", "options": ["Hopeful and resilient", "Quick-witted and rational", "Funny and quick-witted", "Overlooked and rational"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/7/3/50736//50736-h//50736-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "48513", "set_unique_id": "48513_FM1DABY2", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "His Master's Voice", "year": 1957, "author": "Garrett, Randall", "topic": "Science fiction; PS; Space ships -- Fiction; Robots -- Fiction", "article": "Transcriber's Note:\n\nThis etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nILLUSTRATED\n\n BY\n\n KRENKEL\nHIS MASTER'S VOICE\n\n ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION\nSpaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was\n smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to\n ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like \"Who are\n you?\"\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nI'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called\n Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar\n Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it\n came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could\n make anyone dislike him without trying.\n\n\n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk,\n his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass\n and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n\n\n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n\n\n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n\n\n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice.\n He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges\n touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a\n head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at\n work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action\n on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The\n negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time\n you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and\n throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n\n\n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at\n it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and\n neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n\n\n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and\n sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again\n did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come\n in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n\n\n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping\n my voice level.\n\n\n [5]\n\n\n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your\n action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of\n heavy linseed oil.\n\n\n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When\n I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have\n inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent\n sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n\n\n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back\n the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think\n you'd win.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your\n own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would\n hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n\n\n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial\n business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains.\n Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to\n personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n\n\n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the\n point,\" I told him.\n\n\n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through\n your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that\n your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n\n\n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation\n of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the\n point.\"\n\n\n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell\n me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by\n unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after\n activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth\n be considered its ... ah ... master.\n\n\n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n\n\n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him\n my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be\n a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I\n knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n\n\n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They\n realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but\n they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely\n draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can\n this bias be eliminated.\"\n\n\n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n\n\n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of\n anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes\n time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and\n make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of\n the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other\n words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is\n precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n\n\n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me\n because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on\n the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position\n as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts\n might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and\n Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n\n\n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n\n\n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I\n think.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n\n\n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding\n work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first\n six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at\n me.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to\n be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the\n fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his\n hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further\n attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n\n\n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go\n to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n\n\n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of\n that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on\n the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other\n spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and\n very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am\ncertain\nthat the robot ship is the\n answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake\n of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of\n McGuire!\"\nWhat's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody\n, I quoted\n to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that\n Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the\n robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to\n be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can\n be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n\n\n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n\n\n \"I don't deny it.\"\n\n\n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be\n charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't\n want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8\n is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n\n\n \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to\n build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs\n in it.\"\n\n\n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will\n do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one\n each six months for three years after the first successful commercial\n ship is built by Viking.\"\n\n\n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a\n deal. Is there anything else?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n\n\n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.\n\n\n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal\n triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost\n nothing, he'd really have blown up.\nTen minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring,\n rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of\n Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted\n sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on\n a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the\n magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the\n nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I\n was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself\n against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker\n beacon on my way to Ceres.\n\n\n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized\n spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial\n engine and the few necessities of life—air, some water, and a very\n little food—still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on\n Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in\n the Belt.\n\n\n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay\n in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to\n hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your\naverage\nvelocity\n doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating\n and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the\n neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n\n\n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one\n gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming\n ordeal with McGuire.\n\n\n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my\n business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says:\nDANIEL\n OAK, Confidential Expediter\n; I'm hired to help other people Get Things\n Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a\n spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the\n business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but\n collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted\n to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important\n than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n\n\n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and\n Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of\n the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to\n evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over\n the System.\n\n\n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n\n\n The Political Survey Division\ndoes\nevaluate political activity, all\n right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast\n majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has\n a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the\n Political Survey Division.\n\n\n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of\n McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the\n traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable\n as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables\n and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given\n orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving\n and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot.\n And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders\n that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician.\n Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to\n repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care\n of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the\n malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n\n\n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in\n command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he\nwas\nthe spacecraft, since it\n served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves\n the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a\n top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge\n of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per\n second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths\n were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n\n\n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them\n having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be\n somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans\n aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n\n\n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be\n necessary to give orders—\nfast\n! And that means verbal orders, orders\n that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by\n microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a\n teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n\n\n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has\n to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n\n\n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\nFor more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's\n famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\nFirst Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow\n harm to come to a human being.\nSecond Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except\n when such orders conflict with the First Law\n.\n\n\n [15]\nThird Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except\n when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\nNobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining\n the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot\n can encompass the concept.\n\n\n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly\n narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\"\n are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries,\n illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's\n only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the\n only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging\n the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n\n\n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a\n traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n\n\n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists\n attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first\n six went insane.\n\n\n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\"\n the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more\n valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot\n brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would\n be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you,\n depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous\n as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if\n not more so.\n\n\n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was\n impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n\n\n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult\n to define a\nresponsible\nhuman being. One, in other words, who can\n be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be\n relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n\n\n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another\n tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members\n of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one\n responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only\n from that person.\"\n\n\n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station.\n\n\n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon\n station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And\n except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres,\n lock, stock, and mining rights.\n\n\n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership.\n There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their\n hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything\n short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to\n that, too, before very long.\n\n\n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody\n would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as\n dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a\n great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n\n\n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface\n gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981,\n and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly\n hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds\n on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a\n strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in\n the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at\n least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them\n from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense\n takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give\n you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n\n\n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by\n Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n\n\n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the\n inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n\n\n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his\n scarred, battered face.\n\n\n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said,\n shaking his extended hand.\n\n\n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n\n\n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath\n and some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want\n a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n\n\n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n\n\n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By\n definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions\n follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n\n\n [19]\n\n\n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union\n suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was\n a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor\n seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were\n shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other\n colors.\n\n\n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of\n Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt.\n You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you\n did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle\n that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might\n have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels\n inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are\n places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away\n from his vac suit.\n\n\n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he\n claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually\n due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to\n the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid\n over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the\n suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right;\n I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I\nhave\nspent summers in\n nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves\n with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who\n go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who\n go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n\n\n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n\n\n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of\n Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation,\n which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of\n business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of\n precious metals.\n\n\n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell\n around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we\n can't stand any hell—or sabotage—around this planetoid just now!\"\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd\n pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was\n Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not\n Thurston's agents.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts\n of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we\n hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the\n McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the\n works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No\n one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n\n\n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n\n\n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have\n our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we\n are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing\n about.\"\n\n\n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n\n\n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His\n onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly\n into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I\n can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have\n to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from\n operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want\n you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he\n doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n\n\n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n\n\n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him\n that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational\n dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going\n to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that\n means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n\n\n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting\n it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she\n sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n\n\n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me\n what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been\n unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an\n irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n\n\n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could\n offer you—\"\n\n\n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons.\n In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working\n for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it\n would be unethical for me to take the job.\n\n\n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a\n certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my\n services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except\n in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a\n lawyer when it's a charity case.\n\n\n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n\n\n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very\n slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n\n\n \"\nBut\n,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work\nwith\nyou.\"\n\n\n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already\n working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because\nyou're\nworking for\n Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both\n working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we\n co-operate.\n\n\n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may\n render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n\n\n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud\n and clear. It's a deal.\"\n\n\n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'\n involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for\n friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n\n\n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts\n and figures.\"\n\n\n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the summary of this passage?", "question_unique_id": "48513_FM1DABY2_1", "options": ["A guy travels the galaxy doing his job", "A guy travels the galaxy in search of the definition of what it means to be a human being", "Someone travels Earth, in search of the definition of what it means to be a human being", "Someone travels the galaxy, in need of work"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is the definition of a human being necessary?", "question_unique_id": "48513_FM1DABY2_2", "options": ["For intergalactic law regarding human restrictions", "For robotic programming instructions", "So a robotic army knows who to kill", "For intergalactic law regarding who can operate spaceships"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What traits best describe Oak?", "question_unique_id": "48513_FM1DABY2_3", "options": ["Honest and generous", "Smug and suave", "Deceitful and cruel", "Likable and open"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What scientific concept/technology is NOT discussed in the passage?", "question_unique_id": "48513_FM1DABY2_4", "options": ["Protective suits", "The space-time continuum", "Gravity", "Artificial intelligence"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the relationship like between Brock and Oak?", "question_unique_id": "48513_FM1DABY2_5", "options": ["They are enemies", "They're coworkers that don't get along well", "They are friendly with each other", "They don't like each other"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How would you describe the structure of this passage?", "question_unique_id": "48513_FM1DABY2_6", "options": ["Oak visits one individual and makes a business deal, then he meets with a family member and they talk about that deal", "Oak visits three different individuals and makes business deals with them", "Oak visits two different individuals and makes business deals with them, then he meets with a family member and they talk about those deals", "Oak visits two different individuals and makes business deals with them"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a potential moral of this passage?", "question_unique_id": "48513_FM1DABY2_7", "options": ["Being open in relationships with others is important", "Being careful in social interaction can lead to benefits", "Being careful with one's words social interaction can lead to anxiety and worsened relationships", "Being empathetic and genuine in conversation with others is important"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the relationship like between Oak and Ravenhurst?", "question_unique_id": "48513_FM1DABY2_8", "options": ["Ravenhurst rightfully looks down on Oak a bit", "Ravenhurst has been Oak's friend for a long time, they have great respect for each other", "Ravenhurst has been Oak's boss for a long time, they have great respect for each other", "Oak looks down on Ravenhurst a bit"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/8/5/1/48513//48513-h//48513-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "47989", "set_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Yellow Phantom\nA Judy Bolton Mystery", "year": 1952, "author": "Sutton, Margaret", "topic": "Eccentrics and eccentricities -- Juvenile fiction; PZ; Women detectives -- Juvenile fiction; Bolton, Judy (Fictitious character) -- Juvenile fiction; Mystery and detective stories", "article": "THE YELLOW\n\n PHANTOM\nBY\nMARGARET SUTTON\nGROSSET & DUNLAP\nPUBLISHERS      NEW YORK\nCopyright, 1933, by\nGROSSET & DUNLAP, Inc.\nAll Rights Reserved\nPrinted in the United States of America\nTo My Mother and Father.\nCONTENTS\nCHAPTER I\nA MYSTERIOUS TELEGRAM\n“Goodbye, Judy! Goodbye, Irene! Don’t\n like New York so well that you won’t want to\n come home!”\n“Don’t keep them too long, Pauline! Farringdon\n will be as dead as so many bricks without\n them. Even the cats will miss Blackberry.\n Make him wave his paw, Judy!”\n“Don’t forget to write!”\n“Goodbye, Pauline! Goodbye, Judy! Goodbye,\n Irene!”\n“Goodbye! Goodbye!”\nAnd Peter’s car was off, bearing the last load\n of campers back to their home town.\nJudy Bolton watched them out of sight.\n They were taking the familiar road, but she and\n Irene Lang would soon be traveling in the other\n direction. Pauline Faulkner had invited them\n for a visit, including Judy’s cat in the invitation,\n and they were going back with her to New\n York.\nA long blue bus hove into view, and all three\n girls hailed it, at first expectantly, then frantically\n when they saw it was not stopping. It\n slowed down a few feet ahead of them, but\n when they attempted to board it the driver\n eyed Blackberry with disapproval.\n“Can’t take the cat unless he’s in a crate.”\n“He’s good,” Judy began. “He won’t be\n any trouble——”\n“Can’t help it. Company’s rules.” And he\n was about to close the door when Judy’s quick\n idea saved the situation.\n“All right, he’s\nin a crate\n,” she declared\n with vigor as she thrust the cat inside her own\n pretty hatbox. The hats she hastily removed\n and bundled under one arm.\nThe driver had to give in. He even grinned\n a bit sheepishly as the girls took their seats,\n Pauline and Irene together, “Because,” Judy\n insisted as she took the seat just behind them,\n “I have Blackberry.”\nThe other passengers on the bus were regarding\n the newcomers with amused interest.\n A ten-year-old boy brought forth a ball of twine\n and rolled it playfully in Blackberry’s direction.\n An old lady made purring noises through\n her lips. Everyone seemed to be nodding and\n smiling. Everyone except the serious young\n man across the aisle. He never turned his\n head.\nJudy nudged the two friends in the seat\n ahead of her and confided a desire to do something—anything\n to make him look up.\n“Why, Judy,” Irene replied, shocked. “I’ve\n been watching that man myself and he’s—he’s——”\n“Well, what?”\n“Almost my ideal.”\n“Silly!” Judy laughed. “I’d like to bet he\n wouldn’t be so ideal if I did something to disturb\n those precious papers that he’s reading.”\n“I dare you!” Pauline said.\nSixteen or not, the dare tempted Judy. It\n was an easy matter to let Blackberry out of the\n hatbox in her arms and down into the aisle.\n The cat’s plumelike tail did the rest.\nThe man looked up. But, to Judy’s surprise,\n he looked up with a smile. Irene, all contrition,\n hastened to apologize.\n“No harm done,” he returned good-naturedly\n and began collecting his scattered papers.\n Soon he had them rearranged and resumed his\n reading. There were a great many typewritten\n sheets of paper, and he seemed to be reading\n critically, scratching out something here and\n adding something there.\n“You were wrong,” Irene said, turning to\n Judy. “See how nice he was.”\n“I should have known better than to dare a\n girl like you,” Pauline put in.\n“It was horrid of me,” Judy admitted, now\n almost as interested as Irene in the strange\n young man. Not because he was Judy’s ideal—a\n man who wouldn’t notice a cat until its tail\n bumped into him—but because the papers on\n his lap might be important. And she had disturbed\n them.\nThe man, apparently unaware that the accident\n had been anybody’s fault, continued reading\n and correcting. Judy watched her cat carefully\n until the stack of papers was safely inside\n his portfolio again.\n“That’s finished,” he announced as though\n speaking to himself. He screwed the top on his\n fountain pen, placed it in his pocket and then\n turned to the girls. “Nice scenery, wasn’t it?”\n“It was,” Judy replied, laughing, “but you\n didn’t seem to be paying much attention to it.”\n“I’ve been over this road a great many\n times,” he explained, “and one does tire of\n scenery, like anything else. Passengers in the\n bus are different.”\n“You mean different from scenery?”\n“Yes, and from each other. For instance,\n you with your ridiculous cat and your golden-haired\n friend who apologized for you and that\n small, dark girl are three distinct types.”\nJudy regarded him curiously. She had never\n thought of herself or either of the other girls as\n “types.” Now she tried to analyze his\n meaning.\nTheir lives had certainly been different.\n Judy and Pauline, although of independent\n natures, had always felt the security of dependence\n upon their parents while Irene’s crippled\n father depended solely upon her. This responsibility\n made her seem older than her years—older\n and younger, too. She never could\n acquire Pauline’s poise or Judy’s fearlessness.\nIn appearance, too, they were different. Her\n first vacation had done wonders for Irene\n Lang. Now her usually pale cheeks glowed\n with healthy color, and her eyes were a deeper,\n happier blue. Two weeks of sunshine had\n tanned her skin and brought out all the gold in\n her hair.\nPauline, too, had acquired a becoming tan\n which made her hair look darker than ever and\n contrasted strangely with her keen, light blue\n eyes.\nThe sun had not been quite so kind to Judy.\n It had discovered a few faint freckles on her\n nose and given her hair a decided reddish cast.\n But Judy didn’t mind. Camp life had been exciting—boating,\n swimming and, as a climax, a\n thrilling ride in Arthur Farringdon-Pett’s new\n airplane.\nThe young man beside Judy was a little like\n Arthur in appearance—tall, good-looking but\n altogether too grown-up and serious. Judy\n liked boys to make jokes now and then, even\n tease the way her brother, Horace, did. Peter\n teased her, too.\n“Queer,” she thought, “to miss being\n teased.”\nThis stranger seemed to like serious-minded\n people and presently changed the conversation\n to books and music, always favorite topics with\n Irene. Then Judy spoke about the work that he\n was doing but learned nothing except that\n “finished” in his case meant that he had succeeded\n in putting his papers back in their\n original sequence.\n“And if you girls were all of the same type,”\n he added, “I doubt if I would have forgiven\n you your prank.”\n“I guess he doesn’t care for my type,” Judy\n whispered to the other two girls a little later.\n“Mine either,” Pauline returned with a\n laugh. “At least he wouldn’t if he knew I\n dared you.”\n“Do you suppose,” Irene asked naïvely,\n “that he cares for my type?”\nShe looked very pathetic as she said that, and\n Judy, remembering Irene’s misfortunes, slid\n into the seat beside her and put a loving arm\n about her shoulder.\n“I care for your type,” she said. “So why\n worry about what a stranger thinks?”\n“I’m not,” Irene said, belying her answer\n with a wistful look in the stranger’s direction.\n He was still absorbed in the mountain of typewritten\n pages that he held on his knee. It\n seemed that his work, whatever it was, engrossed\n him completely. He was again making\n corrections and additions with his pen. Judy\n noticed a yellow slip of paper on the seat beside\n him and called the other girls’ attention\n to it.\n“It looks like a telegram,” she whispered,\n “and he keeps referring to it.”\n“Telegrams are usually bad news,” Irene replied.\nThe young man sat a little distance away\n from them and, to all appearances, had forgotten\n their existence. Girl-like, they discussed\n him, imagining him as everything from a politician\n to a cub reporter, finally deciding that,\n since he lived in Greenwich Village, he must be\n an artist. Irene said she liked to think of him\n as talented. A dreamer, she would have called\n him, if it had not been for his practical interest\n in the business at hand—those papers and that\n telegram.\nIt was dark by the time they reached New\n York. The passengers were restless and eager\n to be out of the bus. The young man hastily\n crammed his typewritten work into his portfolio\n and Judy noticed, just as the bus stopped,\n that he had forgotten the telegram. She and\n Irene both made a dive for it with the unfortunate\n result that when they stood up again\n each of them held a torn half of the yellow slip.\n“Just our luck!” exclaimed Irene. “Now\n we can’t return it to him. Anyway, he’s gone.”\n“We could piece it together,” Pauline suggested,\n promptly suiting her actions to her\n words. When the two jagged edges were fitted\n against each other, this is what the astonished\n girls read:\n\nDALE MEREDITH\nPLEASANT VALLEY PA\nCUT ART SHOP ROBBERY STOP FIFTY THOUSAND\nIS PLENTY STOP ONE MAN MURDERED INTERESTS\nRANDALL STOP DISCUSS TERMS MONDAY\nEMILY GRIMSHAW\nIrene was the first to finish reading.\n“Good heavens! What would\nhe\nknow about\n robbery and murder?” she exclaimed, staring\n first at the telegram in Pauline’s hand and\n then at the empty seat across the aisle.\n“Why, nothing that I can think of. He didn’t\n seem like a crook. The telegram may be in\n code,” Pauline mused as she handed the torn\n pieces to Judy. “I like his name—Dale Meredith.”\n“So do I. But Emily Grimshaw——”\n“All out! Last stop!” the bus driver was\n calling. “Take care of that cat,” he said with\n a chuckle as he helped the girls with their suitcases.\nThey were still wondering about the strange\n telegram as they made their way through the\n crowd on Thirty-fourth Street.\nCHAPTER II\nIRENE’S DISCOVERY\nA taxi soon brought the girls to the door of\n Dr. Faulkner’s nineteenth century stone house.\n The stoop had been torn down and replaced by\n a modern entrance hall, but the high ceilings\n and winding stairways were as impressive as\n ever.\nDrinking in the fascination of it, Judy and\n Irene followed the man, Oliver, who carried\n their bags right up to the third floor where\n Pauline had a sitting room and a smaller bedroom\n all to herself. The former was furnished\n with a desk, sofa, easy chairs, numerous shaded\n lamps, a piano and a radio.\nHere the man left them with a curt, “’Ere\n you are.”\n“And it’s good to have you, my dears,” the\n more sociable housekeeper welcomed them.\n Soon she was bustling around the room setting\n their bags in order. She offered to help unpack.\n“Never mind that now, Mary,” Pauline told\n her. “We’re dead tired and I can lend them\n some of my things for tonight.”\n“Then I’ll fix up the double bed in the next\n room for your guests and leave you to yourselves,”\n the kind old lady said.\nAs soon as she had closed the door Judy\n lifted her cat out of the hatbox. With a grateful\n noise, halfway between a purr and a yowl,\n Blackberry leaped to the floor and began, at\n once, to explore the rooms.\n“His padded feet were made for soft carpets,”\n Judy said fondly.\n“How do you suppose he’d like gravel?”\n Pauline asked.\n“Oh, he’d love it!” Judy exclaimed. “You\n know our cellar floor is covered with gravel,\n and he sleeps down there.”\n“Is this gravel in the cellar?” Irene asked,\n beginning to get an attack of shivers.\nPauline laughed. “Goodness, no! It’s on\n the roof garden.” She walked across the room\n and flung open a door. “Nothing shivery about\n that, is there?”\n“Nothing except the thought of standing on\n the top of one of those tall buildings,” Irene\n said, gazing upward as she followed Pauline.\nThe view fascinated Judy. Looking out\n across lower New York, she found a new world\n of gray buildings and flickering lights. In the\n other direction the Empire State Building\n loomed like a sentinel.\n“I never dreamed New York was like this,”\n she breathed.\n“It grows on a person,” Pauline declared.\n “I would never want to live in any other city.\n No matter how bored or how annoyed I may be\n during the day, at night I can always come up\n here and feel the thrill of having all this for a\n home.”\n“I wish I had a home I could feel that way\n about,” Irene sighed.\nThe garden was too alluring for the girls to\n want to leave it. Even Blackberry had settled\n himself in a bed of geraniums. These and other\n plants in enormous boxes bordered the complete\n inclosure. Inside were wicker chairs, a table\n and a hammock hung between two posts.\n“This is where I do all my studying,” Pauline\n said, “and you two girls may come up here\n and read if you like while I’m at school.”\n“At school?” Judy repeated, dazed until she\n thought of something that she should have considered\n before accepting Pauline’s invitation.\n Of course Pauline would be in school. She\n hadn’t been given a holiday as the girls in Farringdon\n had when their school burned down.\n Judy and Irene would be left to entertain themselves\n all day unless Dr. Faulkner had some\n plans for them. Judy wondered where he was.\nAfter they had gone inside again, that is, all\n of them except Blackberry who seemed to have\n adopted the roof garden as a permanent home,\n she became curious enough to ask.\n“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Pauline said in surprise.\n “Father is away. A medical conference\n in Europe. He’s always going somewhere like\n that, but he’ll be home in two or three weeks.”\n“Then we’ll be alone for three weeks?” Irene\n asked, dismayed.\n“Why not?” Pauline returned indifferently.\n “There’s nothing to be afraid of with servants\n in the house.”\nBut Irene was not used to servants. Ever\n since her father became disabled she had waited\n on herself and kept their shabby little house in\n apple-pie order. The house was closed now and\n their few good pieces of furniture put in storage.\n All summer long there would not be any\n rent problems or any cooking. Then, when fall\n came, she and her father would find a new\n home. Where it would be or how they would\n pay for it worried Irene when she thought\n about it. She tried not to think because Dr.\n Bolton had told her she needed a rest. Her\n father, a patient of the doctor’s, was undergoing\n treatments at the Farringdon Sanitarium.\n The treatments were being given\n according to Dr. Bolton’s directions but not by\n him as Judy’s home, too, was closed for the\n summer. Her parents had not intended to stay\n away more than a week or two, but influenza\n had swept the town where they were visiting.\n Naturally, the doctor stayed and his wife with\n him. Judy’s brother, a reporter and student\n of journalism, had gone to live in the college\n dormitory.\nThus it was that both girls knew they could\n not return to Farringdon no matter how homesick\n they might be. They had the cat for comfort\n and they had each other. Ever since Irene\n had come to work in Dr. Bolton’s office these\n two had been like sisters. Lois, Lorraine,\n Betty, Marge, Pauline—all of them were\n friends. But Irene and Honey, the other girl\n who had shared Judy’s home, were closer than\n that. Judy felt with them. She felt with Irene\n the longing of the other girl for something to\n hold fast to—a substantial home that could not\n be taken away at every whim of the landlord,\n just enough money so that she could afford to\n look her best and the security of some strong\n person to depend upon.\n“Will your school last long?” Irene was asking\n the dark-haired girl.\n“Not long enough,” Pauline sighed, revealing\n the fact that she too had troubles.\n“Then you’ll be free?” Irene went on, unmindful\n of the sigh. “We can go places together?\n You’ll have time to show us around.”\nPauline shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t\n talk about time to me. Time will be my middle\n name after I graduate. There isn’t a single\n thing I really want to do, least of all stay at\n home all day. College is a bore unless you’re\n planning a career. What do you intend to do\n when you’re through school?”\n“I hadn’t planned,” Irene said, “except that\n I want time to read and go ahead with my\n music. Of course I’ll keep house somewhere\n for Dad. It will be so nice to have him well\n again, and I love keeping house.”\n“What about your work for my father?”\n Judy asked.\nIrene’s eyes became troubled. “He doesn’t\n really need me any more. I know now, Judy,\n that you just made that position for me. It was\n lovely of you, but I—I’d just as soon not go\n back where I’m not needed. Your father trusts\n too many people ever to get rich and he could\n use that money he’s been paying me.”\n“Don’t feel that way about it,” Judy begged.\nIrene’s feelings, however, could not easily be\n changed, and with both girls having such grave\n worries the problem bid fair to be too great a\n one for even Judy to solve. Solving problems,\n she hoped, would eventually be her career for\n she planned to become a regular detective with\n a star under her coat. Now she confided this\n ambition to the other two girls.\n“A detective!” Pauline gasped. “Why,\n Judy, only men are detectives. Can you imagine\n anyone taking a mere girl on the police\n force?”\n“Chief Kelly, back home, would take her this\n very minute if she applied,” Irene declared.\nPauline nodded, easily convinced. This practical,\n black-haired, blue-eyed girl had helped\n Judy solve two mysteries and knew that she had\n talent. But Pauline didn’t want to meet crooks.\n She didn’t want to be bothered with sick or\n feeble-minded people and often felt thankful\n that her father, a brain specialist, had his offices\n elsewhere. Pauline wanted to meet cultured\n people who were also interesting.\n“People, like that man we met on the bus,”\n she said, “who read and can discuss books intelligently.\n I’d hate to think of his being mixed\n up in anything crooked.”\n“You can’t\nmake\nme believe that he was,”\n Irene put in with a vigor quite rare for her.\n “Couldn’t you just see in his eyes that he was\n real?”\n“I didn’t look in his eyes,” Judy returned\n with a laugh, “but you can be sure I’ll never\n be satisfied until we find out what that mysterious\n telegram meant.”\nIn the days that followed Judy learned that\n the mere mention of the stranger’s name, Dale\n Meredith, would cause either girl to cease\n worrying about a home or about a career, as\n the case might be.\n“It’s almost magical,” she said to herself\n and had to admit that the spell was also upon\n her. Perhaps a dozen times a day she would\n puzzle over the torn papers in her pocketbook.\n But then, it was Judy’s nature to puzzle over\n things. It was for that reason that she usually\n chose detective stories whenever she sat down\n with a book. That hammock up there on the\n roof garden was an invitation to read, and soon\n Judy and Irene had finished all the suitable\n stories in Dr. Faulkner’s library. They had\n seen a few shows, gazed at a great many tall\n buildings, and found New York, generally, less\n thrilling from the street than it had been from\n the roof garden.\nPauline sensed this and worried about entertaining\n her guests. “How would you like to\n go and see Grant’s Tomb today?” she suggested.\n“For Heaven’s sake, think of something a\n little more exciting than that,” Judy exclaimed\n thoughtlessly. “I’d rather find a library somewhere\n and then lie and read something in the\n hammock.”\n“So would I,” agreed Irene, relieved that\n Judy hadn’t wanted to see the tomb.\n“Well, if a library’s all you want,” Pauline\n said, “why not walk along with me and I’ll\n show you one on my way to school.”\n“A big one?” Judy asked.\n“No, just a small one. In fact, it’s only a\n bookshop with a circulating library for its customers.”\nJudy sighed. It would seem nice to see something\n small for a change. She never recognized\n this library at all until they were almost inside\n the door. Then her eyes shone.\nWhat an interesting place it was! On the\n counters were quaint gifts and novelties as well\n as books. The salesladies all wore smocks, like\n artists, and had the courtesy to leave the girls\n alone. Pauline had to hurry on to school but\n left Judy and Irene to browse. Before long\n they had discovered a sign reading MYSTERY\n AND ADVENTURE. That was what Judy\n liked. Rows and rows of new books, like soldiers,\n marched along the shelves.\n“What a lot of flying stories,” Irene said,\n absently removing one of them from its place.\n“And murder mysteries,” Judy added. “It’s\n always a temptation to read them.\nMurders in\n Castle Stein\n....”\nShe started back as her eye caught the\n author’s name.\nIt was Dale Meredith!\nCHAPTER III\nA DARING SCHEME\nThrilled by her discovery, Judy removed\n the torn pieces of telegram from her purse\n and began unraveling the mystery, bit by bit.\n Irene looked on, trembling with excitement.\n“‘CUT ART SHOP ROBBERY STOP\n FIFTY THOUSAND IS PLENTY STOP....’\nArt Shop Robbery!\nThat sounds like a title!\n And someone wanted him to cut it to fifty\n thousand words—just a nice length for a book.\n That must have been what he was doing on the\n bus, cutting down the number of words on those\n typewritten pages.”\n“Why, of course,” Irene agreed. “I always\n knew you were gifted, Judy, but can you explain\n this?” She pointed.\n“‘ONE MAN MURDERED INTERESTS\n RANDALL....’ Easy as pie! Another title\n and a publisher.”\nJudy tossed her head with a self-satisfied\n air of importance. Every one of their questions\n might be answered in the classified directory.\nThey found a telephone booth near by and a\n directory on the shelf beside it. Promptly turning\n to the list of publishing houses, Judy’s\n finger traveled down one complete page and\n half of another, but no Randall could she find.\n With a sigh of disappointment she turned to\n look again at the telegram:\n\n“DISCUSS TERMS MONDAY”\n“EMILY GRIMSHAW”\nWhat sort of person was she? A relative?\n No. Relatives didn’t discuss terms with authors.\n Wives and sweethearts didn’t either.\n They might discuss his books, but not terms.\n Anyway Irene hoped that Dale Meredith had\n no wife or sweetheart, certainly not a sweetheart\n with a name like Emily Grimshaw. That\n name sounded as harsh to the ears as Dale\n Meredith sounded musical.\nFlipping the pages of the directory, Judy\n came upon the answer to their question:\n“AUTHOR’S AGENTS (\nSee\nLiterary\n Agents).”\n“That might be it!”\nShe turned to the place and, beginning at the\n top of the page, both girls searched eagerly\n through the G’s.\n“Greenspan, Grier, Grimshaw....”\nThe name was Emily and the address was\n a number on Madison Square. Irene was so\n excited that she declared she could feel her\n heart thumping under her slip-on sweater.\n“I’d give anything to meet him again, Judy!\n Anything!”\nAnd suddenly Judy wanted to meet him too,\n not for her own sake but for Irene’s. A bold\n plan began to take shape in her mind. If she\n and Irene found positions in Emily Grimshaw’s\n office Dale Meredith would never know that it\n had not been a simple coincidence. It would be\n such fun—this scheming. It would give them\n something to do and if Judy’s plan worked it\n might even solve the problem of Pauline’s\n career.\n“Of course Emily Grimshaw may not hire\n us,” Judy said after she had outlined the\n scheme and won Irene’s approval. “But, at\n any rate, it’s worth trying. We won’t need to\n tell her it’s only for a few weeks when Pauline\n will be there to step right into the position.\n I wonder how you get to Madison Square.”\nShe stopped a policeman to ask him and\n found it to be within easy walking distance.\n“We might as well go now,” Irene agreed.\nPerhaps if they thought about it too long\n they might lose heart and not attempt it.\nThe literary agent’s office was located in an\n old hotel on the northeast side of the square.\n The building looked as if it had been unchanged\n for a century. In the lobby Judy and Irene\n paused, surveying the quaint furniture and\n mural decorations before they mustered enough\n courage to inquire at the desk for Emily Grimshaw.\n“Who’s calling?” the clerk asked tartly.\n“Tell her—” Judy hesitated. “Tell her it’s\n two girls to see her on business.”\nThe message was relayed over the switchboard\n and presently the clerk turned and said,\n “She will see one of you. First stairway to\n the left. Fourth floor.”\n“Only one—” Judy began.\n“She always sees one client at a time. The\n other girl can wait.”\n“That’s right. I—I’ll wait,” Irene stammered.\n“But you wanted the position——”\n“I don’t now. Suppose she asked about experience.”\n“You’ve had a little. You stand a better\n chance than I do.”\n“Not with your nerve, Judy,” Irene said.\n “This place gives me the shivers. You’re welcome\n to go exploring dark halls if you like. I’d\n rather sit here in the lobby and read Dale Meredith’s\n book.”\n“Oh, so that’s it? Make yourself comfortable,”\n Judy advised with a laugh. “I may be\n gone a long, long time.”\n“Not if she finds out how old you are.”\n“Hush!” Judy reproved. “Don’t I look\n dignified?”\nShe tilted her hat a little more to the left\n and dabbed a powder puff on her nose. The\n puff happened not to have any powder on it but\n it gave her a grown-up, courageous feeling.\n And she was to have a great need of courage\n in the hour that followed.\nCHAPTER IV\nHOW THE SCHEME WORKED\nThe adventure lost some of its thrill with no\n one to share it. Judy hadn’t an idea in the\n world how to find the fourth floor as she could\n see no stairway and no elevator.\nTaking a chance, she opened one of several\n doors. It opened into a closet where cleaning\n supplies were kept. Judy glanced at the dusty\n floor and wondered if anybody ever used them.\nThis was fun! She tried another door and\n found it locked. But the third door opened into\n a long hall at the end of which was the\n stairway.\n“A regular labyrinth, this place,” she\n thought as she climbed. “I wonder if Emily\n Grimshaw will be as queer as her hotel.”\nThere were old-fashioned knockers on all the\n doors, and Judy noticed that no two of them\n were alike. Emily Grimshaw had her name on\n the glass door of her suite, and the knocker\n was in the shape of a witch hunched over a\n steaming caldron. Judy lifted it and waited.\n“Who’s there?” called a mannish voice from\n within.\n“Judy Bolton. They told me at the desk\n that you would see me.”\n“Come on in, then. Don’t stand there banging\n the knocker.”\n“I beg your pardon,” Judy said meekly as\n she entered. “I didn’t quite understand.”\n“It’s all right. Who sent you?”\n“Nobody. I came myself. I found your\n name in the classified directory.”\n“Oh, I see. Another beginner.”\nEmily Grimshaw sat back in her swivel chair\n and scrutinized Judy. She was a large woman\n dressed in a severely plain brown cloth dress\n with sensible brown shoes to match. Her iron-gray\n hair was knotted at the back of her head.\n In fact, the only mark of distinction about her\n whole person was the pair of glasses perched\n on the high bridge of her nose and the wide,\n black ribbon suspended from them. Although\n an old woman, her face was not wrinkled.\n What few lines she had were deep furrows that\n looked as if they belonged there. Judy could\n imagine Emily Grimshaw as a middle-aged\n woman but never as a girl.\nThe room was, by no means, a typical office.\n If it had not been for the massive desk littered\n with papers and the swivel chair it would not\n have looked like an office at all. Three of the\n four walls were lined with bookshelves.\n“Is this where you do all your work?” Judy\n asked.\n“And why not? It’s a good enough place.”\n“Of course,” Judy explained herself quickly.\n “But I supposed you would have girls working\n for you. It must keep you busy doing all this\n yourself.”\n“Hmm! It does. I like to be busy.”\nJudy took a deep breath. How, she wondered,\n was she to put her proposition before\n this queer old woman without seeming impudent.\n It was the first time in her life she had\n ever offered her services to anyone except her\n father.\n“You use a typewriter,” she began.\n“Look here, young woman,” Emily Grimshaw\n turned on her suddenly, “if you’re a\n writer, say so. And if you’ve come here looking\n for a position——”\n“That’s it exactly,” Judy interrupted. “I’m\n sure I could be of some service to you.”\n“What?”\n“I might typewrite letters for you.”\n“I do that myself. Haven’t the patience to\n dictate them.”\n“Perhaps I could help you read and correct\n manuscripts,” Judy suggested hopefully.\nThe agent seemed insulted. “Humph!” she\n grunted. “Much you know about manuscripts!”\n“I may know more than you think,” Judy\n came back at her. It was hard to be patient\n with this irritable old lady. Certainly she\n would never have chosen such an employer if\n it had not been for the possibility of meeting\n Dale Meredith again. Irene had taken such a\n fancy to him.\n“Lucky she doesn’t know that,” thought\n Judy as she watched her fumbling through a\n stack of papers on her desk. Finally she produced\n a closely written page of note paper and\n handed it to the puzzled girl.\n“If you know so much about manuscripts,”\n she charged. “What would you do with a page\n like that?”\nHalf hoping that the handwriting was Dale\n Meredith’s, Judy reached out an eager hand.\n The agent was watching her like a cat and, as\n she read, a hush settled over the room. Emily\n Grimshaw was putting Judy to a test.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is Irene like?", "question_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ_1", "options": ["Quiet", "Gorgeous", "Immature", "Secure"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Pauline like?", "question_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ_2", "options": ["Generous", "Confident", "Humble", "Brilliant"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Judy like?", "question_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ_3", "options": ["Plain", "Persistent", "High maintenance", "Reserved"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What would have happened if the girls didn't look at the telegram?", "question_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ_4", "options": ["They would've looked for retail jobs in NYC", "They would've looked for schools in NYC", "They wouldn't have looked for the office building", "They wouldn't have looked for a library"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the tone of this passage?", "question_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ_5", "options": ["Serious", "Joyful", "Fast-paced", "Romantic"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Of all the girls, who seems to be most interested in the man on the bus?", "question_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ_6", "options": ["Pauline", "Irene", "All of them were interested in him", "Judy"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Pauline feel about school?", "question_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ_7", "options": ["She's ambivalent about learning, she does like hanging out with the boys in her class", "She likes having something to do", "She loves learning", "She doesn't like it"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "If the story were to continue, what would most likely happen?", "question_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ_8", "options": ["Judy would have eventually been hired to be the man's assistant", "Pauline would have eventually been hired to be the man's assistant", "Pauline would have eventually met with the man", "Irene would have eventually met with the man"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is not a similarity shared between Judy and Irene?", "question_unique_id": "47989_PE2SBVVZ_9", "options": ["Neither of them wanted to go to school", "Both of them wanted to work for Emily", "Both of them couldn't be in school", "Both of them wanted to learn more about the telegram"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/7/9/8/47989//47989-h//47989-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51231", "set_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Syndrome Johnny", "year": 1958, "author": "Dye, Charles", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Scientists -- Fiction; Science fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Diseases -- Fiction", "article": "Syndrome Johnny\nBY CHARLES DYE\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe plagues that struck mankind could be attributed\n\n to one man. But was he fiend ... or savior?\nThe blood was added to a pool of other blood, mixed, centrifuged,\n separated to plasma and corpuscles, irradiated slightly, pasteurized\n slightly, frozen, evaporated, and finally banked. Some of the plasma\n was used immediately for a woman who had bled too much in childbirth.\n\n\n She died.\n\n\n Others received plasma and did not die. But their symptoms changed,\n including a syndrome of multiple endocrine unbalance, eccentricities of\n appetite and digestion, and a general pattern of emotional disturbance.\n\n\n An alert hospital administrator investigated the mortality rise and\n narrowed it to a question of who had donated blood the week before.\n After city residents were eliminated, there remained only the signed\n receipts and thumbprints of nine men. Nine healthy unregistered\n travelers poor enough to sell their blood for money, and among them a\n man who carried death in his veins. The nine thumbprints were broadcast\n to all police files and a search began.\n\n\n The effort was futile, for there were many victims who had sickened and\n grown partially well again without recognizing the strangeness of their\n illness.\n\n\n Three years later they reached the carrier stage and the epidemic\n spread to four cities. Three more years, and there was an epidemic\n which spread around the world, meeting another wave coming from the\n opposite direction. It killed two out of four, fifty out of a hundred,\n twenty-seven million out of fifty million. There was hysteria where\n it appeared. And where it had not appeared there were quarantines to\n fence it out. But it could not be fenced out. For two years it covered\n the world. And then it vanished again, leaving the survivors with a\n tendency toward glandular troubles.\n\n\n Time passed. The world grew richer, more orderly, more peaceful.\n\n\n A man paused in the midst of his work at the U.N. Food and Agriculture\n Commission. He looked up at the red and green production map of India.\n\n\n \"Just too many people per acre,\" he said. \"All our work at improving\n production ... just one jump ahead of their rising population, one jump\n ahead of famine. Sometimes I wish to God there would be another plague\n to give us a breathing spell and a fair chance to get things organized.\"\n\n\n He went back to work and added another figure.\n\n\n Two months later, he was one of the first victims of the second plague.\nIn the dining hall of a university, a biochemical student glanced up\n from his paper to his breakfast companion. \"You remember Johnny, the\n mythical carrier that they told about during the first and second\n epidemics of Syndrome Plague?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Syndrome Johnny. They use that myth in psychology class as a\n typical example of mass hysteria. When a city was nervous and expecting\n the plague to reach them, some superstitious fool would imagine he saw\n Syndrome Johnny and the population would panic. Symbol for Death or\n some such thing. People imagined they saw him in every corner of the\n world. Simultaneously, of course.\"\n\n\n It was a bright morning and they were at a window which looked out\n across green rolling fields to a towering glass-brick building in the\n distance.\n\n\n The student who had gone back to his paper suddenly looked up again.\n \"Some Peruvians here claim they saw Syndrome Johnny—\"\n\n\n \"Idiotic superstition! You'd think it would have died down when the\n plague died.\"\n\n\n The other grinned. \"The plague didn't die.\" He folded his newspaper\n slowly, obviously advancing an opening for a debate.\n\n\n His companion went on eating. \"Another of your wild theories, huh?\"\n Then through a mouthful of food: \"All right, if the plague didn't die,\n where did it go?\"\n\n\n \"Nowhere.\nWe have it now.\nWe all have it!\" He shrugged. \"A virus\n catalyst of high affinity for the cells and a high similarity to a\n normal cell protein—how can it be detected?\"\n\n\n \"Then why don't people die? Why aren't we sick?\"\n\n\n \"Because we have sickened and recovered. We caught it on conception\n and recovered before birth. Proof? Why do you think that the countries\n which were known as the Hungry Lands are now well-fed, leisured,\n educated, advanced? Because the birth rate has fallen! Why has the\n birth rate fallen?\" He paused, then very carefully said, \"Because two\n out of three of all people who would have lived have died before birth,\n slain by Syndrome Plague. We are all carriers now, hosts to a new\n guest. And\"—his voice dropped to a mock sinister whisper—\"with such a\n stranger within our cells, at the heart of the intricate machinery of\n our lives, who knows what subtle changes have crept upon us unnoticed!\"\n\n\n His companion laughed. \"Eat your breakfast. You belong on a horror\n program!\"\nA police psychologist for the Federated States of The Americas was\n running through reports from the Bureau of Social Statistics. Suddenly\n he grunted, then a moment later said, \"Uh-huh!\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh what?\" asked his superior, who was reading a newspaper with his\n feet up on the desk.\n\n\n \"Remember the myth, of Syndrome Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"Ghost of Syndrome Plague. Si, what of it?\"\n\n\n \"Titaquahapahel, Peru, population nine hundred, sent in a claim that he\n turned up there and they almost caught him. Crime Statistics rerouted\n the report to Mass Phenomena, of course. Mass Phenomena blew a tube and\n sent their folder on Syndrome Johnny over here. Every report they ever\n had on him for ninety years back! A memo came with it.\" He handed the\n memo over.\n\n\n The man behind the desk looked at it. It was a small graph and some\n mathematical symbols. \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"It means,\" said the psychologist, smiling dryly, \"that every crazy\n report about our ghost has points of similarity to every other crazy\n report. The whole business of Syndrome Johnny has been in their 'funny\n coincidence' file for twenty years. This time the suspect hits the\n averaged description of Johnny too closely: A solid-looking man,\n unusual number of visible minor scars, and a disturbing habit of\n bending his fingers at the first-joint knuckles when he is thinking.\n The coincidence has gotten too damn funny. There's a chance we've been\n passing up a crime.\"\n\n\n \"An extensive crime,\" said the man at the desk softly. He reached\n for the folder. \"Yes, a considerable quantity of murder.\" He leafed\n through the folder and then thought a while, looking at the most recent\n reports. Thinking was what he was paid for, and he earned his excellent\n salary.\n\n\n \"This thumbprint on the hotel register—the name is false, but the\n thumbprint looks real. Could we persuade the Bureau of Records to give\n their data on that print?\"\n\n\n \"Without a warrant? Against constitutional immunity. No, not a chance.\n The public has been touchy about the right to secrecy ever since that\n police state was attempted in Varga.\"\n\n\n \"How about persuading an obliging judge to give a warrant on grounds of\n reasonable suspicion?\"\n\n\n \"No. We'd have the humanist press down on our necks in a minute, and\n any judge knows it. We'd have to prove a crime was committed. No crime,\n no warrant.\"\n\n\n \"It seems a pity we can't even find out who the gentleman is,\" the\n Crimes Department head murmured, looking at the thumbprint wistfully.\n \"No crime, no records. No records, no evidence. No evidence, no proof\n of crime. Therefore, we must manufacture a small crime. He was attacked\n and he must have defended himself. Someone may have been hurt in the\n process.\" He pushed a button. \"Do you think if I send a man down there,\n he could persuade one of the mob to swear out a complaint?\"\n\n\n \"That's a rhetorical question,\" said the psychologist, trying to work\n out an uncertain correlation in his reports. \"With that sort of mob\n hysteria, the town would probably give you an affidavit of witchcraft.\"\n\"Phone for you, Doctor Alcala.\" The nurse was crisp but quiet, smiling\n down at the little girl before vanishing again.\n\n\n Ricardo Alcala pushed the plunger in gently, then carefully withdrew\n the hypodermic needle from the little girl's arm. \"There you are,\n Cosita,\" he said, smiling and rising from the chair beside the white\n bed.\n\n\n \"Will that make me better, Doctor?\" she piped feebly.\n\n\n He patted her hand. \"Be a good girl and you will be well tomorrow.\" He\n walked out into the hospital corridor to where the desk nurse held out\n a phone.\n\n\n \"Alcala speaking.\"\n\n\n The voice was unfamiliar. \"My deepest apologies for interrupting your\n work, Doctor. At this late hour I'm afraid I assumed you would be at\n home. The name is Camba, Federation Investigator on a health case. I\n would like to consult you.\"\n\n\n Alcala was tired, but there was nothing to do at home. Nita was at the\n health resort and Johnny had borrowed all his laboratory space for a\n special synthesis of some sort, and probably would be too busy even\n to talk. Interest stirred in him. This was a Federation investigator\n calling; the man's work was probably important. \"Tonight, if that's\n convenient. I'll be off duty in five minutes.\"\n\n\n Thirty minutes later they were ordering in a small cantina down the\n street from the hospital.\n\n\n Julio Camba, Federation Investigator, was a slender, dark man with\n sharp, glinting eyes. He spoke with a happy theatrical flourish.\n\n\n \"Order what you choose, Senor. We're on my expense account. The\n resources of the Federated States of all The Americas stand behind your\n menu.\"\n\n\n Alcala smiled. \"I wouldn't want to add to the national debt.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all, Senor. The Federated States are only too happy thus to\n express a fraction of their gratitude by adding a touch of luxury to\n the otherwise barren and self-sacrificing life of a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"You shame me,\" Alcala said dryly. It was true that he needed\n every spare penny for the health of Nita and the child, and for the\n laboratory. A penny saved from being spent on nourishment was a penny\n earned. He picked up the menu again and ordered steak.\n\n\n The investigator lit a cigar, asking casually: \"Do you know John\n Osborne Drake?\"\nAlcala searched his memory. \"No. I'm sorry....\" Then he felt for the\n first time how closely he was being watched, and knew how carefully his\n reaction and the tone of his voice had been analyzed. The interview was\n dangerous. For some reason, he was suspected of something.\n\n\n Camba finished lighting the cigar and dropped the match into an\n ash-tray. \"Perhaps you know John Delgados?\" He leaned back into the\n shadowy corner of the booth.\n\n\n Johnny! Out of all the people in the world, how could the government be\n interested in him? Alcala tried to sound casual. \"An associate of mine.\n A friend.\"\n\n\n \"I would like to contact the gentleman.\" The request was completely\n unforceful, undemanding. \"I called, but he was not at home. Could you\n tell me where he might be?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Senor Camba, but I cannot say. He could be on a business\n trip.\" Alcala was feeling increasingly nervous. Actually, Johnny was\n working at his laboratory.\n\n\n \"What do you know of his activities?\" Camba asked.\n\n\n \"A biochemist.\" Alcala tried to see past the meditative mask of the\n thin dark face. \"He makes small job-lots of chemical compounds. Special\n bug spray for sale to experimental plantations, hormone spray for\n fruits, that sort of thing. Sometimes, when he collects some money\n ahead, he does research.\"\n\n\n Camba waited, and his silence became a question. Alcala spoke\n reluctantly, anger rising in him. \"Oh, it's genuine research. He has\n some patents and publications to his credit. You can confirm that if\n you choose.\" He was unable to keep the hostility out of his voice.\n\n\n A waiter came and placed steaming platters of food on the table. Camba\n waited until he was gone. \"You know him well, I presume. Is he sane?\"\n\n\n The question was another shock. Alcala thought carefully, for any man\n might be insane in secret. \"Yes, so far as I know.\" He turned his\n attention to the steak, but first took three very large capsules from a\n bottle in his pocket.\n\n\n \"I would not expect that a doctor would need to take pills,\" Camba\n remarked with friendly mockery.\n\n\n \"I don't need them,\" Alcala explained. \"Mixed silicones. I'm guinea\n pigging.\"\n\n\n \"Can't such things be left to the guinea pigs?\" Camba asked, watching\n with revulsion as Alcala uncapped the second bottle and sprinkled a\n layer of gray powder over his steak.\n\n\n \"Guinea pigs have no assimilation of silicones; only man has that.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course. I should have remembered from your famous papers,\nThe\n Need Of Trace Silicon In Human Diet\nand\nSilicon Deficiency Diseases\n.\"\nObviously Camba had done considerable investigating of Alcala before\n approaching him. He had even given the titles of the research papers\n correctly. Alcala's wariness increased.\n\n\n \"What is the purpose of the experiment this time?\" asked the small dark\n Federation agent genially.\n\n\n \"To determine the safe limits of silicon consumption and if there are\n any dangers in an overdose.\"\n\n\n \"How do you determine that? By dropping dead?\"\n\n\n He could be right. Perhaps the test should be stopped. Every day, with\n growing uneasiness, Alcala took his dose of silicon compound, and every\n day, the chemical seemed to be absorbed completely—not released or\n excreted—in a way that was unpleasantly reminiscent of the way arsenic\n accumulated without evident damage, then killed abruptly without\n warning.\nAlready, this evening, he had noticed that there was something faulty\n about his coordination and weight and surface sense. The restaurant\n door had swung back with a curious lightness, and the hollow metal\n handle had had a curious softness under his fingers. Something merely\n going wrong with the sensitivity of his fingers—?\n\n\n He tapped his fingertips on the heavy indestructible silicone plastic\n table top. There was a feeling of heaviness in his hands, and a feeling\n of faint rubbery\ngive\nin the table.\n\n\n Tapping his fingers gently, his heavy fingers ... the answer was\n dreamily fantastic.\nI'm turning into silicon plastic myself\n, he\n thought. But how, why? He had not bothered to be curious before, but\n the question had always been—what were supposedly insoluble silicons\n doing assimilating into the human body at all?\n\n\n Several moments passed. He smoothed back his hair with his oddly heavy\n hand before picking up his fork again.\n\n\n \"I'm turning into plastic,\" he told Camba.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing. A joke.\"\n\n\n Camba was turning into plastic, too. Everyone was. But the effect was\n accumulating slowly, by generations.\nCamba lay down his knife and started in again. \"What connections have\n you had with John Delgados?\"\nConcentrate on the immediate situation.\nAlcala and Johnny were\n obviously in danger of some sort of mistaken arrest and interrogation.\n\n\n As Alcala focused on the question, one errant whimsical thought\n suddenly flitted through the back of his mind. In red advertising\n letters: TRY OUR NEW MODEL RUST-PROOF, WATERPROOF, HEAT & SCALD\n RESISTANT, STRONG—EXTRA-LONG-WEARING HUMAN BEING!\n\n\n He laughed inwardly and finally answered: \"Friendship. Mutual interest\n in high ion colloidal suspensions and complex synthesis.\" Impatience\n suddenly mastered him. \"Exactly what is it you wish to know, Senor?\n Perhaps I could inform you if I knew the reasons for your interest.\"\n\n\n Camba chose a piece of salad with great care. \"We have reason to\n believe that he is Syndrome Johnny.\"\n\n\n Alcala waited for the words to clarify. After a moment, it ceased to\n be childish babble and became increasingly shocking. He remembered the\n first time he had met John Delgados, the smile, the strong handclasp.\n \"Call me Johnny,\" he had said. It had seemed no more than a nickname.\n\n\n The investigator was watching his expression with bright brown eyes.\n\n\n Johnny, yes ... but not Syndrome Johnny. He tried to think of some\n quick refutation. \"The whole thing is preposterous, Senor Camba. The\n myth of Syndrome Plague Johnny started about a century ago.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor Alcala\"—the small man in the gray suit was tensely\n sober—\"John Delgados is very old, and John Delgados is not his proper\n name. I have traced his life back and back, through older and older\n records in Argentina, Panama, South Africa, the United States, China,\n Canada. Everywhere he has paid his taxes properly, put his fingerprints\n on file as a good citizen should. And he changed his name every twenty\n years, applying to the courts for permission with good honest reasons\n for changing his name. Everywhere he has been a laboratory worker, held\n patents, sometimes made a good deal of money. He is one hundred and\n forty years old. His first income tax was paid in 1970, exactly one\n hundred and twenty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Other men are that old,\" said Alcala.\n\n\n \"Other men are old, yes. Those who survived the two successive plagues,\n were unusually durable.\" Camba finished and pushed back his plate.\n \"There is no crime in being long-lived, surely. But he has changed his\n name five times!\"\n\n\n \"That proves nothing. Whatever his reasons for changing his name, it\n doesn't prove that he is Syndrome Johnny any more than it proves he\n is the cow that jumped over the moon. Syndrome Johnny is a myth, a\n figment of mob delirium.\"\nAs he said it, he knew it was not true. A Federation investigator would\n not be on a wild goose chase.\n\n\n The plates were taken away and cups of steaming black coffee put\n between them. He would have to warn Johnny. It was strange how well you\n could know a man as well as he knew Johnny, firmly enough to believe\n that, despite evidence, everything the man did was right.\n\n\n \"Why must it be a myth?\" Camba asked softly.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous!\" Alcala protested. \"Why would any man—\" His voice\n cut off as unrelated facts fell into a pattern. He sat for a moment,\n thinking intensely, seeing the century of plague as something he had\n never dreamed....\n\n\n A price.\n\n\n Not too high a price in the long run, considering what was purchased.\n Of course, the great change over into silicon catalysis would be a\n shock and require adjustment and, of course, the change must be made in\n several easy stages—and those who could not adjust would die.\n\n\n \"Go on, Doctor,\" Camba urged softly. \"'\nWhy\nwould any man—'\"\n\n\n He tried to find a way of explaining which would not seem to have any\n relationship to John Delgados. \"It has been recently discovered\"—but\n he did not say\nhow\nrecently—\"that the disease of Syndrome Plague\n was not a disease. It is an improvement.\" He had spoken clumsily.\n\n\n \"An improvement on life?\" Camba laughed and nodded, but there were\n bitterness and anger burning behind the small man's smile. \"People\n can be improved to death by the millions. Yes, yes, go on, Senor. You\n fascinate me.\"\n\n\n \"We are stronger,\" Alcala told him. \"We are changed chemically. The\n race has been improved!\"\n\n\n \"Come, Doctor Alcala,\" Camba said with a sneering merriment, \"the\n Syndrome Plagues have come and they have gone. Where is this change?\"\n\n\n Alcala tried to express it clearly. \"We are stronger. Potentially, we\n are tremendously stronger. But we of this generation are still weak\n and ill, as our parents were, from the shock of the change. And we\n need silicone feeding; we have not adjusted yet. Our illness masks our\n strength.\" He thought of what that strength would be!\n\n\n Camba smiled and took out a small notebook. \"The disease is connected\n with silicones, you say? The original name of John Delgados was John\n Osborne Drake. His father was Osborne Drake, a chemist at Dow Corning,\n who was sentenced to the electric chair in 1967 for unauthorized\n bacterial experiments which resulted in an accidental epidemic and\n eight deaths. Dow Corning was the first major manufactury of silicones\n in America, though not connected in any way with Osborne Drake's\n criminal experiments. It links together, does it not?\"\n\n\n \"It is not a disease, it is strength!\" Alcala insisted doggedly.\nThe small investigator looked up from his notebook and his smile was\n an unnatural thing, a baring of teeth. \"Half the world died of this\n strength, Senor. If you will not think of the men and women, think of\n the children. Millions of children died!\"\n\n\n The waiter brought the bill, dropping it on the table between them.\n\n\n \"Lives will be saved in the long run,\" Alcala said obstinately.\n \"Individual deaths are not important in the long run.\"\n\n\n \"That is hardly the philosophy for a doctor, is it?\" asked Camba with\n open irony, taking the bill and rising.\n\n\n They went out of the restaurant in silence. Camba's 'copter stood at\n the curb.\n\n\n \"Would you care for a lift home, Doctor Alcala?\" The offer was made\n with the utmost suavity.\n\n\n Alcala hesitated fractionally. \"Why, yes, thank you.\" It would not do\n to give the investigator any reason for suspicion by refusing.\n\n\n As the 'copter lifted into the air, Camba spoke with a more friendly\n note in his voice, as if he humored a child. \"Come, Alcala, you're a\n doctor dedicated to saving lives. How can you find sympathy for a\n murderer?\"\n\n\n Alcala sat in the dark, looking through the windshield down at the\n bright street falling away below. \"I'm not a practicing medico; only\n one night a week do I come to the hospital. I'm a research man. I don't\n try to save individual lives. I'm dedicated to improving the average\n life, the average health. Can you understand that? Individuals may be\n sick and individuals may die, but the average lives on. And if the\n average is better, then I'm satisfied.\"\n\n\n The 'copter flew on. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"I'm not good with words,\" said Alcala. Then, taking out his pen-knife\n and unfolding it, he said, \"Watch!\" He put his index finger on the\n altimeter dial, where there was light, and pressed the blade against\n the flesh between his finger and his thumb. He increased the pressure\n until the flesh stood out white on either side of the blade, bending,\n but not cut.\n\n\n \"Three generations back, this pressure would have gone right through\n the hand.\" He took away the blade and there was only a very tiny cut.\n Putting the knife away, he brought out his lighter. The blue flame\n was steady and hot. Alcala held it close to the dashboard and put his\n finger directly over it, counting patiently, \"One, two, three, four,\n five—\" He pulled the lighter back, snapping it shut.\n\"Three generations ago, a man couldn't have held a finger over that\n flame for more than a tenth part of that count. Doesn't all this prove\n something to you?\"\n\n\n The 'copter was hovering above Alcala's house. Camba lowered it to\n the ground and opened the door before answering. \"It proves only that\n a good and worthy man will cut and burn his hand for an unworthy\n friendship. Good night.\"\n\n\n Disconcerted, Alcala watched the 'copter lift away into the night,\n then, turning, saw that the lights were still on in the laboratory.\n Camba might have deduced something from that, if he knew that Nita and\n the girl were not supposed to be home.\n\n\n Alcala hurried in.\n\n\n Johnny hadn't left yet. He was sitting at Alcala's desk with his feet\n on the wastebasket, the way Alcala often liked to sit, reading a\n technical journal. He looked up, smiling. For a moment Alcala saw him\n with the new clarity of a stranger. The lean, weathered face; brown\n eyes with smile deltas at the corners; wide shoulders; steady, big\n hands holding the magazine—solid, able, and ruthless enough to see\n what had to be done, and do it.\n\n\n \"I was waiting for you, Ric.\"\n\n\n \"The Feds are after you.\" Ricardo Alcala had been running. He found he\n was panting and his heart was pounding.\n\n\n Delgados' smile did not change. \"It's all right, Ric. Everything's\n done. I can leave any time now.\" He indicated a square metal box\n standing in a corner. \"There's the stuff.\"\n\n\n What stuff? The product Johnny had been working on? \"You haven't time\n for that now, Johnny. You can't sell it. They'd watch for anyone of\n your description selling chemicals. Let me loan you some money.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks.\" Johnny was smiling oddly. \"Everything's set. I won't need it.\n How close are they to finding me?\"\n\n\n \"They don't know where you're staying.\" Alcala leaned on the desk edge\n and put out his hand. \"They tell me you're Syndrome Johnny.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you'd figured that one out.\" Johnny shook his hand formally.\n \"The name is John Osborne Drake. You aren't horrified?\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Alcala knew that he was shaking hands with a man who would be\n thanked down all the successive generations of mankind. He noticed\n again the odd white web-work of scars on the back of Johnny's hand. He\n indicated them as casually as he could. \"Where did you pick those up?\"\nJohn Drake glanced at his hand. \"I don't know, Ric. Truthfully.\n I've had my brains beaten in too often to remember much any more.\n Unimportant. There are instructions outlining plans and methods filed\n in safety deposit boxes in almost every big city in the world. Always\n the same typing, always the same instructions. I can't remember who\n typed them, myself or my father, but I must have been expected to\n forget or they wouldn't be there. Up to eleven, my memory is all right,\n but after Dad started to remake me, everything gets fuzzy.\"\n\n\n \"After he did\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n Johnny smiled tiredly and rested his head on one hand. \"He had to\n remake me chemically, you know. How could I spread change without\n being changed myself? I couldn't have two generations to adapt to\n it naturally like you, Ric. It had to be done artificially. It took\n years. You understand? I'm a community, a construction. The cells that\n carry on the silicon metabolism in me are not human. Dad adapted them\n for the purpose. I helped, but I can't remember any longer how it was\n done. I think when I've been badly damaged, organization scatters to\n the separate cells in my body. They can survive better that way, and\n they have powers of regrouping and healing. But memory can't be pasted\n together again or regrown.\"\n\n\n John Drake rose and looked around the laboratory with something like\n triumph. \"They're too late. I made it, Ric. There's the catalyst\n cooling over there. This is the last step. I don't think I'll survive\n this plague, but I'll last long enough to set it going for the finish.\n The police won't stop me until it's too late.\"\nAnother plague!\n\n\n The last one had been before Alcala was born. He had not thought that\n Johnny would start another. It was a shock.\n\n\n Alcala walked over to the cage where he kept his white mice and looked\n in, trying to sort out his feelings. The white mice looked back\n with beady bright eyes, caged, not knowing they were waiting to be\n experimented upon.\n\n\n A timer clicked and John Delgados-Drake became all rapid efficient\n activity, moving from valve to valve. It lasted a half minute or less,\n then Drake had finished stripping off the lab whites to his street\n clothes. He picked up the square metal box containing the stuff he had\n made, tucked it under his arm and held out a solid hand again to Alcala.\n\n\n \"Good-by, Ric. Wish me luck. Close up the lab for me, will you?\"\n\n\n Alcala took the hand numbly and mumbled something, turned back to the\n cages and stared blindly at the mice. Drake's brisk footsteps clattered\n down the stairs.\nAnother step forward for the human race.\n\n\n God knew what wonders for the race were in that box. Perhaps something\n for nerve construction, something for the mind—the last and most\n important step. He should have asked.\n\n\n There came at last a pressure that was a thought emerging from the\n depth of intuition.\nDoctor Ricardo Alcala will die in the next plague,\n he and his ill wife Nita and his ill little girl.... And the name of\n Alcala will die forever as a weak strain blotted from the bloodstream\n of the race....\nHe'd find out what was in the box by dying of it!\n\n\n He tried to reason it out, but only could remember that Nita, already\n sickly, would have no chance. And Alcala's family genes, in attempting\n to adapt to the previous steps, had become almost sterile. It had been\n difficult having children. The next step would mean complete sterility.\n The name of Alcala would die. The future might be wonderful, but it\n would not be\nhis\nfuture!\n\n\n \"Johnny!\" he called suddenly, something like an icy lump hardening in\n his chest. How long had it been since Johnny had left?\n\n\n Running, Alcala went down the long half-lit stairs, out the back door\n and along the dark path toward the place where Johnny's 'copter had\n been parked.\n\n\n A light shone through the leaves. It was still there.\n\n\n \"Johnny!\"\n\n\n John Osborne Drake was putting his suitcase into the rear of the\n 'copter.\n\n\n \"What is it, Ric?\" he asked in a friendly voice without turning.\nIt would be impossible to ask him to change his mind.\nAlcala found\n a rock, raised it behind Syndrome Johnny's back. \"I know I'm being\n anti-social,\" he said regretfully, and then threw the rock away.\n\n\n His fist was enough like stone to crush a skull.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How would you describe Alcala?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_1", "options": ["Strange", "Funny", "Lovable", "Nice"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How would you describe Camba?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_2", "options": ["Stern", "Bold", "Kind", "Hilarious"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Syndrome Johnny?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_3", "options": ["It's an actual man who causes the plagues", "It's the name of Patient Zero for the first plague", "It's a myth about a man who causes the plagues", "It's the name of Patient Zero for all of the plagues"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Alcala omit information when talking to Camba?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_4", "options": ["He loves his coworker too much", "He puts pieces of the puzzle together and wants to protect someone", "He's feeling ill so he can't recall information properly", "He loves his family too much"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why might someone not want to read this story?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_5", "options": ["It involves hard drugs", "It involves excessive gore", "It involves death", "It involves sexual violence"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the setting like for this story?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_6", "options": ["It's on Earth 2 in the future", "It's on Earth in the present day", "It's on Earth in the future", "It's on Earth 3 in the future"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What evidence do we have to believe Alcala isn't the smartest person?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_7", "options": ["He doesn't realize that he could die soon if he lets certain things happen", "He doesn't realize that he could get arrested soon if he tells Camba the full truth", "He doesn't know how to get his wife medical help when he should know because he's a doctor", "He doesn't think about how his daughter will be negatively impacted by his experiments"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Is Alcala a good person?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_8", "options": ["Alcala is neither good nor bad; he doesn't do much to prove himself on either extreme", "Alcala is not a good person", "Alcala does some morally questionable things but he seems to have some good intentions as well", "Alcala is a good person"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Alcala research?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_9", "options": ["The long term impacts of silicon on the human body", "The impact of calcium on the human body after a microdose", "The impact of silicon on the human body after a microdose", "The long term impacts of calcium on the human body"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who might want to read this story the most?", "question_unique_id": "51231_KDUYPBBO_10", "options": ["A teen who loves reading about space travel and medicine in space", "A philosophy student who cares about medical ethics", "A STEM student who loves to learn about the biological effects of plagues on the human body (even in fictional settings)", "A teen who wants to be a doctor"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/2/3/51231//51231-h//51231-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. 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{"article_id": "51193", "set_unique_id": "51193_QZ792HII", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Pictures Don't Lie", "year": 1965, "author": "MacLean, Katherine", "topic": "Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories; PS; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "Pictures Don't Lie\nBy KATHERINE MacLEAN\n\n\n Illustrated by MARTIN SCHNEIDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n... Pictures, that is, that one can test and measure.\n\n And these pictures positively, absolutely could not lie!\nThe man from the\nNews\nasked, \"What do you think of the aliens, Mister\n Nathen? Are they friendly? Do they look human?\"\n\n\n \"Very human,\" said the thin young man.\n\n\n Outside, rain sleeted across the big windows with a steady faint\n drumming, blurring and dimming the view of the airfield where\nthey\nwould arrive. On the concrete runways, the puddles were pockmarked\n with rain, and the grass growing untouched between the runways of the\n unused field glistened wetly, bending before gusts of wind.\n\n\n Back at a respectful distance from where the huge spaceship would\n land were the gray shapes of trucks, where TV camera crews huddled\n inside their mobile units, waiting. Farther back in the deserted sandy\n landscape, behind distant sandy hills, artillery was ringed in a great\n circle, and in the distance across the horizon, bombers stood ready at\n airfields, guarding the world against possible treachery from the first\n alien ship ever to land from space.\n\n\n \"Do you know anything about their home planet?\" asked the man from\nHerald\n.\n\n\n The\nTimes\nman stood with the others, listening absently, thinking of\n questions, but reserving them. Joseph R. Nathen, the thin young man\n with the straight black hair and the tired lines on his face, was being\n treated with respect by his interviewers. He was obviously on edge, and\n they did not want to harry him with too many questions to answer at\n once. They wanted to keep his good will. Tomorrow he would be one of\n the biggest celebrities ever to appear in headlines.\n\n\n \"No, nothing directly.\"\n\n\n \"Any ideas or deductions?\"\nHerald\npersisted.\n\n\n \"Their world must be Earth-like to them,\" the weary-looking young man\n answered uncertainly. \"The environment evolves the animal. But only in\n relative terms, of course.\" He looked at them with a quick glance and\n then looked away evasively, his lank black hair beginning to cling to\n his forehead with sweat. \"That doesn't necessarily mean anything.\"\n\n\n \"Earth-like,\" muttered a reporter, writing it down as if he had noticed\n nothing more in the reply.\n\n\n The\nTimes\nman glanced at the\nHerald\n, wondering if he had noticed,\n and received a quick glance in exchange.\n\n\n The\nHerald\nasked Nathen, \"You think they are dangerous, then?\"\n\n\n It was the kind of question, assuming much, which usually broke\n reticence and brought forth quick facts—when it hit the mark. They all\n knew of the military precautions, although they were not supposed to\n know.\n\n\n The question missed. Nathen glanced out the window vaguely. \"No, I\n wouldn't say so.\"\n\n\n \"You think they are friendly, then?\" said the\nHerald\n, equally\n positive on the opposite tack.\n\n\n A fleeting smile touched Nathen's lips. \"Those I know are.\"\n\n\n There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic\n facts of the story before the ship came. The\nTimes\nasked, \"What led\n up to your contacting them?\"\n\n\n Nathen answered after a hesitation. \"Static. Radio static. The Army\n told you my job, didn't they?\"\nThe Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had conducted\n them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if he objected\n by instinct to telling anything to the public.\n\n\n Nathen glanced at him doubtfully. \"My job is radio decoder for the\n Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune\n in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear, and\n build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic scramble\n patterns.\"\n\n\n The officer cleared his throat, but said nothing.\n\n\n The reporters smiled, noting that down.\n\n\n Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been\n legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public\n security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to seem\n a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public relations to\n admit to it.\n\n\n Nathen continued, \"I started directing the pickup at stars in my\n spare time. There's radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that\n sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have been\n listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work out\n why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged bursts. It\n didn't seem natural.\"\n\n\n He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he would\n say was the thing that would make him famous—an idea that had come to\n him while he listened—an idea as simple and as perfect as the one that\n came to Newton when he saw the apple fall.\n\n\n \"I decided it wasn't natural. I tried decoding it.\"\n\n\n Hurriedly he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvious. \"You\n see, there's an old intelligence trick, speeding up a message on a\n record until it sounds just like that, a short squawk of static, and\n then broadcasting it. Undergrounds use it. I'd heard that kind of\n screech before.\"\n\n\n \"You mean they broadcast at us in code?\" asked the\nNews\n.\n\n\n \"It's not exactly code. All you need to do is record it and slow it\n down. They're not broadcasting at us. If a star has planets, inhabited\n planets, and there is broadcasting between them, they would send it on\n a tight beam to save power.\" He looked for comprehension. \"You know,\n like a spotlight. Theoretically, a tight beam can go on forever without\n losing power. But aiming would be difficult from planet to planet. You\n can't expect a beam to stay on target, over such distances, more than a\n few seconds at a time. So they'd naturally compress each message into\n a short half-second or one-second-length package and send it a few\n hundred times in one long blast to make sure it is picked up during\n the instant the beam swings across the target.\"\n\n\n He was talking slowly and carefully, remembering that this explanation\n was for the newspapers. \"When a stray beam swings through our section\n of space, there's a sharp peak in noise level from that direction.\n The beams are swinging to follow their own planets at home, and\n the distance between there and here exaggerates the speed of swing\n tremendously, so we wouldn't pick up more than a bip as it passes.\"\n\n\n \"How do you account for the number of squawks coming in?\" the\nTimes\nasked. \"Do stellar systems rotate on the plane of the Galaxy?\" It was a\n private question; he spoke impulsively from interest and excitement.\n\n\n The radio decoder grinned, the lines of strain vanishing from his face\n for a moment. \"Maybe we're intercepting everybody's telephone calls,\n and the whole Galaxy is swarming with races that spend all day yacking\n at each other over the radio. Maybe the human type is standard model.\"\n\n\n \"It would take something like that,\" the\nTimes\nagreed. They smiled at\n each other.\n\n\n The\nNews\nasked, \"How did you happen to pick up television instead of\n voices?\"\n\n\n \"Not by accident,\" Nathen explained patiently. \"I'd recognized a\n scanning pattern, and I wanted pictures. Pictures are understandable in\n any language.\"\nNear the interviewers, a Senator paced back and forth, muttering\n his memorized speech of welcome and nervously glancing out the wide\n streaming windows into the gray sleeting rain.\n\n\n Opposite the windows of the long room was a small raised platform\n flanked by the tall shapes of TV cameras and sound pickups on booms,\n and darkened floodlights, arranged and ready for the Senator to make\n his speech of welcome to the aliens and the world. A shabby radio\n sending set stood beside it without a case to conceal its parts, two\n cathode television tubes flickering nakedly on one side and the speaker\n humming on the other. A vertical panel of dials and knobs jutted up\n before them and a small hand-mike sat ready on the table before the\n panel. It was connected to a boxlike, expensively cased piece of\n equipment with \"Radio Lab, U.S. Property\" stenciled on it.\n\n\n \"I recorded a couple of package screeches from Sagittarius and began\n working on them,\" Nathen added. \"It took a couple of months to find\n the synchronizing signals and set the scanners close enough to the\n right time to even get a pattern. When I showed the pattern to the\n Department, they gave me full time to work on it, and an assistant to\n help. It took eight months to pick out the color bands, and assign them\n the right colors, to get anything intelligible on the screen.\"\nThe shabby-looking mess of exposed parts was the original receiver that\n they had labored over for ten months, adjusting and readjusting to\n reduce the maddening rippling plaids of unsynchronized color scanners\n to some kind of sane picture.\n\n\n \"Trial and error,\" said Nathen, \"but it came out all right. The wide\n band-spread of the squawks had suggested color TV from the beginning.\"\n\n\n He walked over and touched the set. The speaker bipped slightly and\n the gray screen flickered with a flash of color at the touch. The set\n was awake and sensitive, tuned to receive from the great interstellar\n spaceship which now circled the atmosphere.\n\n\n \"We wondered why there were so many bands, but when we got the set\n working, and started recording and playing everything that came in, we\n found we'd tapped something like a lending library line. It was all\n fiction, plays.\"\n\n\n Between the pauses in Nathen's voice, the\nTimes\nfound himself\n unconsciously listening for the sound of roaring, swiftly approaching\n rocket jets.\n\n\n The\nPost\nasked, \"How did you contact the spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"I scanned and recorded a film copy of\nRite of Spring\n, the\n Disney-Stravinsky combination, and sent it back along the same line we\n were receiving from. Just testing. It wouldn't get there for a good\n number of years, if it got there at all, but I thought it would please\n the library to get a new record in.\n\n\n \"Two weeks later, when we caught and slowed a new batch of recordings,\n we found an answer. It was obviously meant for us. It was a flash of\n the Disney being played to a large audience, and then the audience\n sitting and waiting before a blank screen. The signal was very clear\n and loud. We'd intercepted a spaceship. They were asking for an encore,\n you see. They liked the film and wanted more....\"\n\n\n He smiled at them in sudden thought. \"You can see them for yourself.\n It's all right down the hall where the linguists are working on the\n automatic translator.\"\n\n\n The listening officer frowned and cleared his throat, and the thin\n young man turned to him quickly. \"No security reason why they should\n not see the broadcasts, is there? Perhaps you should show them.\" He\n said to the reporters reassuringly, \"It's right down the hall. You\n will be informed the moment the spaceship approaches.\"\n\n\n The interview was very definitely over. The lank-haired, nervous young\n man turned away and seated himself at the radio set while the officer\n swallowed his objections and showed them dourly down the hall to a\n closed door.\n\n\n They opened it and fumbled into a darkened room crowded with empty\n folding chairs, dominated by a glowing bright screen. The door closed\n behind them, bringing total darkness.\n\n\n There was the sound of reporters fumbling their way into seats around\n him, but the\nTimes\nman remained standing, aware of an enormous\n surprise, as if he had been asleep and wakened to find himself in the\n wrong country.\n\n\n The bright colors of the double image seemed the only real thing in the\n darkened room. Even blurred as they were, he could see that the action\n was subtly different, the shapes subtly not right.\nHe was looking at aliens.\nThe impression was of two humans disguised, humans moving oddly,\n half-dancing, half-crippled. Carefully, afraid the images would go\n away, he reached up to his breast pocket, took out his polarized\n glasses, rotated one lens at right angles to the other and put them on.\n\n\n Immediately, the two beings came into sharp focus, real and solid,\n and the screen became a wide, illusively near window through which he\n watched them.\n\n\n They were conversing with each other in a gray-walled room, discussing\n something with restrained excitement. The large man in the green tunic\n closed his purple eyes for an instant at something the other said, and\n grimaced, making a motion with his fingers as if shoving something away\n from him.\n\n\n Mellerdrammer.\n\n\n The second, smaller, with yellowish-green eyes, stepped closer, talking\n more rapidly in a lower voice. The first stood very still, not trying\n to interrupt.\n\n\n Obviously, the proposal was some advantageous treachery, and he wanted\n to be persuaded. The\nTimes\ngroped for a chair and sat down.\n\n\n Perhaps gesture is universal; desire and aversion, a leaning forward or\n a leaning back, tension, relaxation. Perhaps these actors were masters.\n The scenes changed, a corridor, a parklike place in what he began to\n realize was a spaceship, a lecture room. There were others talking\n and working, speaking to the man in the green tunic, and never was it\n unclear what was happening or how they felt.\n\n\n They talked a flowing language with many short vowels and shifts of\n pitch, and they gestured in the heat of talk, their hands moving with\n an odd lagging difference of motion, not slow, but somehow drifting.\n\n\n He ignored the language, but after a time the difference in motion\n began to arouse his interest. Something in the way they walked....\n\n\n With an effort he pulled his mind from the plot and forced his\n attention to the physical difference. Brown hair in short silky crew\n cuts, varied eye colors, the colors showing clearly because their\n irises were very large, their round eyes set very widely apart in\n tapering light-brown faces. Their necks and shoulders were thick in a\n way that would indicate unusual strength for a human, but their wrists\n were narrow and their fingers long and thin and delicate.\n\n\n There seemed to be more than the usual number of fingers.\n\n\n Since he came in, a machine had been whirring and a voice muttering\n beside him. He called his attention from counting their fingers and\n looked around. Beside him sat an alert-looking man wearing earphones,\n watching and listening with hawklike concentration. Beside him was a\n tall streamlined box. From the screen came the sound of the alien\n language. The man abruptly flipped a switch on the box, muttered a word\n into a small hand-microphone and flipped the switch back with nervous\n rapidity.\n\n\n He reminded the\nTimes\nman of the earphoned interpreters at the UN.\n The machine was probably a vocal translator and the mutterer a linguist\n adding to its vocabulary. Near the screen were two other linguists\n taking notes.\nThe\nTimes\nremembered the Senator pacing in the observatory room,\n rehearsing his speech of welcome. The speech would not be just\n the empty pompous gesture he had expected. It would be translated\n mechanically and understood by the aliens.\n\n\n On the other side of the glowing window that was the stereo screen, the\n large protagonist in the green tunic was speaking to a pilot in a gray\n uniform. They stood in a brightly lit canary-yellow control room in a\n spaceship.\n\n\n The\nTimes\ntried to pick up the thread of the plot. Already he was\n interested in the fate of the hero, and liked him. That was the effect\n of good acting, probably, for part of the art of acting is to win\n affection from the audience, and this actor might be the matinee idol\n of whole solar systems.\n\n\n Controlled tension, betraying itself by a jerk of the hands, a\n too-quick answer to a question. The uniformed one, not suspicious,\n turned his back, busying himself at some task involving a map lit with\n glowing red points, his motions sharing the same fluid dragging grace\n of the others, as if they were underwater, or on a slow motion film.\n The other was watching a switch, a switch set into a panel, moving\n closer to it, talking casually—background music coming and rising in\n thin chords of tension.\n\n\n There was a closeup of the alien's face watching the switch, and the\nTimes\nnoted that his ears were symmetrically half-circles, almost\n perfect with no earholes visible. The voice of the uniformed one\n answered, a brief word in a preoccupied deep voice. His back was still\n turned. The other glanced at the switch, moving closer to it, talking\n casually, the switch coming closer and closer stereoscopically. It was\n in reach, filling the screen. His hand came into view, darting out,\n closed over the switch—\n\n\n There was a sharp clap of sound and his hand opened in a frozen\n shape of pain. Beyond him, as his gaze swung up, stood the figure of\n the uniformed officer, unmoving, a weapon rigid in his hand, in the\n startled position in which he had turned and fired, watching with\n widening eyes as the man in the green tunic swayed and fell.\n\n\n The tableau held, the uniformed one drooping, looking down at his hand\n holding the weapon which had killed, and music began to build in from\n the background. Just for an instant, the room and the things within\n it flashed into one of those bewildering color changes which were the\n bane of color television, and switched to a color negative of itself, a\n green man standing in a violet control room, looking down at the body\n of a green man in a red tunic. It held for less than a second; then the\n color band alternator fell back into phase and the colors reversed to\n normal.\n\n\n Another uniformed man came and took the weapon from the limp hand of\n the other, who began to explain dejectedly in a low voice while the\n music mounted and covered his words and the screen slowly went blank,\n like a window that slowly filmed over with gray fog.\n\n\n The music faded.\n\n\n In the dark, someone clapped appreciatively.\n\n\n The earphoned man beside the\nTimes\nshifted his earphones back from\n his ears and spoke briskly. \"I can't get any more. Either of you want a\n replay?\"\n\n\n There was a short silence until the linguist nearest the set said, \"I\n guess we've squeezed that one dry. Let's run the tape where Nathen and\n that ship radio boy are kidding around CQing and tuning their beams in\n closer. I have a hunch the boy is talking routine ham talk and giving\n the old radio count—one-two-three-testing.\"\n\n\n There was some fumbling in the semi-dark and then the screen came to\n life again.\nIt showed a flash of an audience sitting before a screen and gave a\n clipped chord of some familiar symphony. \"Crazy about Stravinsky and\n Mozart,\" remarked the earphoned linguist to the\nTimes\n, resettling his\n earphones. \"Can't stand Gershwin. Can you beat that?\" He turned his\n attention back to the screen as the right sequence came on.\n\n\n The\nPost\n, who was sitting just in front of him, turned to the\nTimes\nand said, \"Funny how much they look like people.\" He was writing,\n making notes to telephone his report. \"What color hair did that\n character have?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't notice.\" He wondered if he should remind the reporter that\n Nathen had said he assigned the color bands on guess, choosing the\n colors that gave the most plausible images. The guests, when they\n arrived, could turn out to be bright green with blue hair. Only the\n gradations of color in the picture were sure, only the similarities and\n contrasts, the relationship of one color to another.\n\n\n From the screen came the sound of the alien language again. This race\n averaged deeper voices than human. He liked deep voices. Could he write\n that?\n\n\n No, there was something wrong with that, too. How had Nathen\n established the right sound-track pitch? Was it a matter of taking the\n modulation as it came in, or some sort of hetrodyning up and down by\n trial and error? Probably.\n\n\n It might be safer to assume that Nathen had simply preferred deep\n voices.\n\n\n As he sat there, doubting, an uneasiness he had seen in Nathen came\n back to add to his own uncertainty, and he remembered just how close\n that uneasiness had come to something that looked like restrained fear.\n\n\n \"What I don't get is why he went to all the trouble of picking up TV\n shows instead of just contacting them,\" the\nNews\ncomplained. \"They're\n good shows, but what's the point?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe so we'd get to learn their language too,\" said the\nHerald\n.\n\n\n On the screen now was the obviously unstaged and genuine scene of a\n young alien working over a bank of apparatus. He turned and waved and\n opened his mouth in the comical O shape which the\nTimes\nwas beginning\n to recognize as their equivalent of a smile, then went back to trying\n to explain something about the equipment, in elaborate awkward gestures\n and carefully mouthed words.\n\n\n The\nTimes\ngot up quietly, went out into the bright white stone\n corridor and walked back the way he had come, thoughtfully folding his\n stereo glasses and putting them away.\n\n\n No one stopped him. Secrecy restrictions were ambiguous here. The\n reticence of the Army seemed more a matter of habit, mere reflex, from\n the fact that it had all originated in the Intelligence Department,\n than any reasoned policy of keeping the landing a secret.\n\n\n The main room was more crowded than he had left it. The TV camera\n and sound crew stood near their apparatus, the Senator had found a\n chair and was reading, and at the far end of the room eight men were\n grouped in a circle of chairs, arguing something with impassioned\n concentration. The\nTimes\nrecognized a few he knew personally, eminent\n names in science, workers in field theory.\n\n\n A stray phrase reached him: \"—reference to the universal constants as\n ratio—\" It was probably a discussion of ways of converting formulas\n from one mathematics to another for a rapid exchange of information.\n\n\n They had reason to be intent, aware of the flood of insights that novel\n viewpoints could bring, if they could grasp them. He would have liked\n to go over and listen, but there was too little time left before the\n spaceship was due, and he had a question to ask.\nThe hand-rigged transceiver was still humming, tuned to the sending\n band of the circling ship, and the young man who had started it all\n was sitting on the edge of the TV platform with his chin resting in\n one hand. He did not look up as the\nTimes\napproached, but it was the\n indifference of preoccupation, not discourtesy.\n\n\n The\nTimes\nsat down on the edge of the platform beside him and took\n out a pack of cigarettes, then remembered the coming TV broadcast\n and the ban on smoking. He put them away, thoughtfully watching the\n diminishing rain spray against the streaming windows.\n\n\n \"What's wrong?\" he asked.\n\n\n Nathen showed that he was aware and friendly by a slight motion of his\n head.\n\n\n \"\nYou\ntell me.\"\n\n\n \"Hunch,\" said the\nTimes\nman. \"Sheer hunch. Everything sailing along\n too smoothly, everyone taking too much for granted.\"\n\n\n Nathen relaxed slightly. \"I'm still listening.\"\n\n\n \"Something about the way they move....\"\n\n\n Nathen shifted to glance at him.\n\n\n \"That's bothered me, too.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure they're adjusted to the right speed?\"\n\n\n Nathen clenched his hands out in front of him and looked at them\n consideringly. \"I don't know. When I turn the tape faster, they're all\n rushing, and you begin to wonder why their clothes don't stream behind\n them, why the doors close so quickly and yet you can't hear them slam,\n why things fall so fast. If I turn it slower, they all seem to be\n swimming.\" He gave the\nTimes\na considering sidewise glance. \"Didn't\n catch the name.\"\n\n\n Country-bred guy, thought the\nTimes\n. \"Jacob Luke,\nTimes\n,\" he said,\n extending his hand.\n\n\n Nathen gave the hand a quick, hard grip, identifying the name. \"Sunday\n Science Section editor. I read it. Surprised to meet you here.\"\n\n\n \"Likewise.\" The\nTimes\nsmiled. \"Look, have you gone into this\n rationally, with formulas?\" He found a pencil in his pocket.\n \"Obviously there's something wrong with our judgment of their\n weight-to-speed-to-momentum ratio. Maybe it's something simple like low\n gravity aboard ship, with magnetic shoes. Maybe they\nare\nfloating\n slightly.\"\n\n\n \"Why worry?\" Nathen cut in. \"I don't see any reason to try to figure it\n out now.\" He laughed and shoved back his black hair nervously. \"We'll\n see them in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Will we?\" asked the\nTimes\nslowly.\n\n\n There was a silence while the Senator turned a page of his magazine\n with a slight crackling of paper, and the scientists argued at the\n other end of the room. Nathen pushed at his lank black hair again, as\n if it were trying to fall forward in front of his eyes and keep him\n from seeing.\n\n\n \"Sure.\" The young man laughed suddenly, talked rapidly. \"Sure we'll\n see them. Why shouldn't we, with all the government ready with welcome\n speeches, the whole Army turned out and hiding over the hill, reporters\n all around, newsreel cameras—everything set up to broadcast the\n landing to the world. The President himself shaking hands with me and\n waiting in Washington—\"\n\n\n He came to the truth without pausing for breath.\n\n\n He said, \"Hell, no, they won't get here. There's some mistake\n somewhere. Something's wrong. I should have told the brasshats\n yesterday when I started adding it up. Don't know why I didn't say\n anything. Scared, I guess. Too much top rank around here. Lost my\n nerve.\"\n\n\n He clutched the\nTimes\nman's sleeve. \"Look. I don't know what—\"\n\n\n A green light flashed on the sending-receiving set. Nathen didn't look\n at it, but he stopped talking.\nThe loudspeaker on the set broke into a voice speaking in the alien's\n language. The Senator started and looked nervously at it, straightening\n his tie. The voice stopped.\n\n\n Nathen turned and looked at the loudspeaker. His worry seemed to be\n gone.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" the\nTimes\nasked anxiously.\n\n\n \"He says they've slowed enough to enter the atmosphere now. They'll be\n here in five to ten minutes, I guess. That's Bud. He's all excited.\n He says holy smoke, what a murky-looking planet we live on.\" Nathen\n smiled. \"Kidding.\"\n\n\n The\nTimes\nwas puzzled. \"What does he mean, murky? It can't be\n raining over much territory on Earth.\" Outside, the rain was slowing\n and bright blue patches of sky were shining through breaks in the\n cloud blanket, glittering blue light from the drops that ran down the\n windows. He tried to think of an explanation. \"Maybe they're trying to\n land on Venus.\" The thought was ridiculous, he knew. The spaceship was\n following Nathen's sending beam. It couldn't miss Earth. \"Bud\" had to\n be kidding.\n\n\n The green light glowed on the set again, and they stopped speaking,\n waiting for the message to be recorded, slowed and replayed. The\n cathode screen came to life suddenly with a picture of the young man\n sitting at his sending-set, his back turned, watching a screen at one\n side which showed a glimpse of a huge dark plain approaching. As the\n ship plunged down toward it, the illusion of solidity melted into a\n boiling turbulence of black clouds. They expanded in an inky swirl,\n looked huge for an instant, and then blackness swallowed the screen.\n The young alien swung around to face the camera, speaking a few words\n as he moved, made the O of a smile again, then flipped the switch and\n the screen went gray.\n\n\n Nathen's voice was suddenly toneless and strained. \"He said something\n like break out the drinks, here they come.\"\n\n\n \"The atmosphere doesn't look like that,\" the\nTimes\nsaid at random,\n knowing he was saying something too obvious even to think about. \"Not\n Earth's atmosphere.\"\n\n\n Some people drifted up. \"What did they say?\"\n\n\n \"Entering the atmosphere, ought to be landing in five or ten minutes,\"\n Nathen told them.\n\n\n A ripple of heightened excitement ran through the room. Cameramen began\n adjusting the lens angles again, turning on the mike and checking it,\n turning on the floodlights. The scientists rose and stood near the\n window, still talking. The reporters trooped in from the hall and went\n to the windows to watch for the great event. The three linguists came\n in, trundling a large wheeled box that was the mechanical translator,\n supervising while it was hitched into the sound broadcasting system.\n\n\n \"Landing where?\" the\nTimes\nasked Nathen brutally. \"Why don't you do\n something?\"\n\n\n \"Tell me what to do and I'll do it,\" Nathen said quietly, not moving.\n\n\n It was not sarcasm. Jacob Luke of the\nTimes\nlooked sidewise at the\n strained whiteness of his face, and moderated his tone. \"Can't you\n contact them?\"\n\n\n \"Not while they're landing.\"\n\n\n \"What now?\" The\nTimes\ntook out a pack of cigarettes, remembered the\n rule against smoking, and put it back.\n\n\n \"We just wait.\" Nathen leaned his elbow on one knee and his chin in his\n hand.\n\n\n They waited.\nAll the people in the room were waiting. There was no more\n conversation. A bald man of the scientist group was automatically\n buffing his fingernails over and over and inspecting them without\n seeing them, another absently polished his glasses, held them up to\n the light, put them on, and then a moment later took them off and began\n polishing again. The television crew concentrated on their jobs, moving\n quietly and efficiently, with perfectionist care, minutely arranging\n things which did not need to be arranged, checking things that had\n already been checked.\n\n\n This was to be one of the great moments of human history, and they were\n all trying to forget that fact and remain impassive and wrapped up in\n the problems of their jobs as good specialists should.\n\n\n After an interminable age the\nTimes\nconsulted his watch. Three\n minutes had passed. He tried holding his breath a moment, listening for\n a distant approaching thunder of jets. There was no sound.\n\n\n The sun came out from behind the clouds and lit up the field like a\n great spotlight on an empty stage.\n\n\n Abruptly the green light shone on the set again, indicating that a\n squawk message had been received. The recorder recorded it, slowed it\n and fed it back to the speaker. It clicked and the sound was very loud\n in the still, tense room.\n\n\n The screen remained gray, but Bud's voice spoke a few words in the\n alien language. He stopped, the speaker clicked and the light went out.\n When it was plain that nothing more would occur and no announcement was\n to be made of what was said, the people in the room turned back to the\n windows, talk picked up again.\n\n\n Somebody told a joke and laughed alone.\n\n\n One of the linguists remained turned toward the loudspeaker, then\n looked at the widening patches of blue sky showing out the window, his\n expression puzzled. He had understood.\n\n\n \"It's dark,\" the thin Intelligence Department decoder translated,\n low-voiced, to the man from the\nTimes\n. \"Your atmosphere is\nthick\n.\n That's precisely what Bud said.\"\n\n\n Another three minutes. The\nTimes\ncaught himself about to light a\n cigarette and swore silently, blowing the match out and putting the\n cigarette back into its package. He listened for the sound of the\n rocket jets. It was time for the landing, yet he heard no blasts.\n\n\n The green light came on in the transceiver.\n\n\n Message in.\n\n\n Instinctively he came to his feet. Nathen abruptly was standing beside\n him. Then the message came in the voice he was coming to think of as\n Bud. It spoke and paused. Suddenly the\nTimes\nknew.\n\n\n \"We've landed.\" Nathen whispered the words.\n\n\n The wind blew across the open spaces of white concrete and damp soil\n that was the empty airfield, swaying the wet, shiny grass. The people\n in the room looked out, listening for the roar of jets, looking for the\n silver bulk of a spaceship in the sky.\n\n\n Nathen moved, seating himself at the transmitter, switching it on to\n warm up, checking and balancing dials. Jacob Luke of the\nTimes\nmoved\n softly to stand behind his right shoulder, hoping he could be useful.\n Nathen made a half motion of his head, as if to glance back at him,\n unhooked two of the earphone sets hanging on the side of the tall\n streamlined box that was the automatic translator, plugged them in and\n handed one back over his shoulder to the\nTimes\nman.\n\n\n The voice began to come from the speaker again.\n\n\n Hastily, Jacob Luke fitted the earphones over his ears. He fancied he\n could hear Bud's voice tremble. For a moment it was just Bud's voice\n speaking the alien language, and then, very distant and clear in his\n earphones, he heard the recorded voice of the linguist say an English\n word, then a mechanical click and another clear word in the voice of\n one of the other translators, then another as the alien's voice flowed\n from the loudspeaker, the cool single words barely audible, overlapping\n and blending with it like translating thought, skipping unfamiliar\n words, yet quite astonishingly clear.\n\n\n \"Radar shows no buildings or civilization near. The atmosphere around\n us registers as thick as glue. Tremendous gas pressure, low gravity,\n no light at all. You didn't describe it like this. Where are you, Joe?\n This isn't some kind of trick, is it?\" Bud hesitated, was prompted by a\n deeper official voice and jerked out the words.\n\n\n \"If it is a trick, we are ready to repel attack.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is this story about?", "question_unique_id": "51193_QZ792HII_1", "options": ["Communicating with faraway aliens", "Encountering an alien army", "Contacting and meeting aliens", "Mankind learning there were already aliens on the planet"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Of the following options, who would most enjoy reading this story?", "question_unique_id": "51193_QZ792HII_2", "options": ["A teen who likes reading about intergalactic politics", "A college student who likes reading mysteries with a sci-fi theme", "A college student who likes reading about sci-fi space technology explanations", "A teen who likes reading about intergalactic war"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What traits best describe Jacob Luke?", "question_unique_id": "51193_QZ792HII_3", "options": ["Apprehensive and socially-adept", "Socially-inept and kind", "Socially-adept and brave", "Socially-inept and funny"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Jacob Luke do?", "question_unique_id": "51193_QZ792HII_4", "options": ["He's a scientist who works with the Communications Department", "He's a reporter who speaks with Nathen's assistant", "He's a reporter who communicates with Nathen", "He's a scientist who works with Nathen"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did the tone change throughout the passage?", "question_unique_id": "51193_QZ792HII_5", "options": ["It went from excited to nervous", "It went from calm to frenzied", "It went from chaotic to calm", "It went from humorous to frenzied"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What would've happened if Nathen had different leisurely interests?", "question_unique_id": "51193_QZ792HII_6", "options": ["Nothing would have changed, his hobbies don't impact his career", "Nathen would have stopped the communication from reaching Earth", "He would have had a better family life", "None of the events of the passage would have occurred"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the relationship like between Nathen and his assistant?", "question_unique_id": "51193_QZ792HII_7", "options": ["They were just coworkers, based on what we know from the passage", "They were family, they're first cousins who grew up together", "They were friends, they met in high school and share similar interests", "They were lovers, they fell in love working together"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is one moral one could draw from the story?", "question_unique_id": "51193_QZ792HII_8", "options": ["Things may not be what they seem", "Go with the flow", "Enjoy life for what good things come from it", "Don't try to force things that shouldn't be forced"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/9/51193//51193-h//51193-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50783", "set_unique_id": "50783_S09NKQOI", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Alien", "year": 1954, "author": "Jones, Raymond F.", "topic": "PS; Science fiction", "article": "THE ALIEN\nA Gripping Novel of Discovery and Conquest\n in Interstellar Space\n\n\n by Raymond F. Jones\nA Complete ORIGINAL Book\n, UNABRIDGED\n\n\n WORLD EDITIONS, Inc.\n\n 105 WEST 40th STREET\n\n NEW YORK 18, NEW YORK\nCopyright 1951\nby\nWORLD EDITIONS, Inc.\n\n\n PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.\n\n THE GUINN CO., Inc.\n\n New York 14, N.Y.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any\n\n evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nJust speculate for a moment on the enormous challenge to archeology\n when interplanetary flight is possible ... and relics are found of a\n race extinct for half a million years! A race, incidentally, that was\n scientifically so far in advance of ours that they held the secret of\n the restoration of life!\n\n\n One member of that race can be brought back after 500,000 years of\n death....\n\n\n That's the story told by this ORIGINAL book-length novel, which has\n never before been published! You can expect a muscle-tightening,\n sweat-producing, mind-prodding adventure in the future when you read\n it!\nContents\nCHAPTER ONE\nOut beyond the orbit of Mars the\nLavoisier\nwallowed cautiously\n through the asteroid fields. Aboard the laboratory ship few of the\n members of the permanent Smithson Asteroidal Expedition were aware\n that they were in motion. Living in the field one or two years at\n a time, there was little that they were conscious of except the\n half-million-year-old culture whose scattered fragments surrounded them\n on every side.\n\n\n The only contact with Earth at the moment was the radio link by which\n Dr. Delmar Underwood was calling Dr. Illia Morov at Terrestrial Medical\n Central.\n\n\n Illia's blonde, precisely coiffured hair was only faintly golden\n against, the stark white of her surgeons' gown, which she still wore\n when she answered. Her eyes widened with an expression of pleasure as\n her face came into focus on the screen and she recognized Underwood.\n\n\n \"Del! I thought you'd gone to sleep with the mummies out there. It's\n been over a month since you called. What's new?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. Terry found some new evidence of Stroid III. Phyfe has a\n new scrap of metal with inscriptions, and they've found something that\n almost looks as if it might have been an electron tube five hundred\n thousand years ago. I'm working on that. Otherwise all is peaceful and\n it's wonderful!\"\n\n\n \"Still the confirmed hermit?\" Illia's eyes lost some of their banter,\n but none of their tenderness.\n\n\n \"There's more peace and contentment out here than I'd ever dreamed of\n finding. I want you to come out here, Illia. Come out for a month. If\n you don't want to stay and marry me, then you can go back and I won't\n say another word.\"\nShe shook her head in firm decision. \"Earth needs its scientists\n desperately. Too many have run away already. They say the Venusian\n colonies are booming, but I told you a year ago that simply running\n away wouldn't work. I thought by now you would have found it out for\n yourself.\"\n\n\n \"And I told you a year ago,\" Underwood said flatly, \"that the only\n possible choice of a sane man is escape.\"\n\n\n \"You can't escape your own culture, Del. Why, the expedition that\n provided the opportunity for you to become a hermit is dependent on\n Earth. If Congress should cut the Institute's funds, you'd be dropped\n right back where you were. You can't get away.\"\n\n\n \"There are always the Venusian colonies.\"\n\n\n \"You know it's impossible to exist there independent of Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not talking about the science and technology. I'm talking about\n the social disintegration. Certainly a scientist doesn't need to take\n that with him when he's attempting to escape it.\"\n\n\n \"The culture is not to blame,\" said Illia earnestly, \"and neither is\n humanity. You don't ridicule a child for his clumsiness when he is\n learning to walk.\"\n\n\n \"I hope the human race is past its childhood!\"\n\n\n \"Relatively speaking, it isn't. Dreyer says we're only now emerging\n from the cave man stage, and that could properly be called mankind's\n infancy, I suppose. Dreyer calls it the 'head man' stage.\"\n\n\n \"I thought he was a semanticist.\"\n\n\n \"You'd know if you'd ever talked with him. He'll tear off every other\n word you utter and throw it back at you. His 'head man' designation\n is correct, all right. According to him, human beings in this stage\n need some leader or 'head man' stronger than themselves for guidance,\n assumption of responsibility, and blame, in case of failure of the\n group. These functions have never in the past been developed in the\n individual so that he could stand alone in control of his own ego. But\n it's coming—that's the whole import of Dreyer's work.\"\n\n\n \"And all this confusion and instability are supposed to have something\n to do with that?\"\n\n\n \"It's been growing for decades. We've seen it reach a peak in our own\n lifetimes. The old fetishes have failed, the head men have been found\n to be hollow gods, and men's faith has turned to derision. Presidents,\n dictators, governors, and priests—they've all fallen from their high\n places and the masses of humanity will no longer believe in any of\n them.\"\n\"And\nthat\nis development of the race?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, because out of it will come a people who have found in themselves\n the strength they used to find in the 'head men.' There will come a\n race in which the individual can accept the responsibility which he\n has always passed on to the 'head man,' the 'head man' is no longer\n necessary.\"\n\n\n \"And so—the ultimate anarchy.\"\n\n\n \"The 'head man' concept has, but first he has to find out that\n has nothing to do with government. With human beings capable of\n independent, constructive behavior, actual democracy will be possible\n for the first time in the world's history.\"\n\n\n \"If all this is to come about anyway, according to Dreyer, why not try\n to escape the insanity of the transition period?\"\n\n\n Illia Morov's eyes grew narrow in puzzlement as she looked at Underwood\n with utter incomprehension. \"Doesn't it matter at all that the race is\n in one of the greatest crises of all history? Doesn't it matter that\n you have a skill that is of immense value in these times? It's peculiar\n that it is those of you in the physical sciences who are fleeing in\n the greatest numbers. The Venusian colonies must have a wonderful time\n with physicists trampling each other to get away from it all—and Earth\n almost barren of them. Do the physical sciences destroy every sense of\n social obligation?\"\n\n\n \"You forget that I don't quite accept Dreyer's theories. To me this is\n nothing but a rotting structure that is finally collapsing from its own\n inner decay. I can't see anything positive evolving out of it.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. Well, it was nice of you to call, Del. I'm always glad\n to hear you. Don't wait so long next time.\"\n\n\n \"Illia—\"\n\n\n But she had cut the connection and the screen slowly faded into gray,\n leaving Underwood's argument unfinished. Irritably, he flipped the\n switch to the public news channels.\n\n\n Where was he wrong? The past year, since he had joined the expedition\n as Chief Physicist, was like paradise compared with living in the\n unstable, irresponsible society existing on Earth. He knew it was a\n purely neurotic reaction, this desire to escape. But application of\n that label solved nothing, explained nothing—and carried no stigma.\n The neurotic reaction was the norm in a world so confused.\n\n\n He turned as the news blared abruptly with its perpetual urgency that\n made him wonder how the commentators endured the endless flow of crises.\n\n\n The President had been impeached again—the third one in six months.\n\n\n There were no candidates for his office.\n\n\n A church had been burned by its congregation.\n\n\n Two mayors had been assassinated within hours of each other.\n\n\n It was the same news he had heard six months ago. It would be the same\n again tomorrow and next month. The story of a planet repudiating all\n leadership. A lawlessness that was worse than anarchy, because there\n was still government—a government that could be driven and whipped by\n the insecurities of the populace that elected it.\n\n\n Dreyer called it a futile search for a 'head man' by a people who would\n no longer trust any of their own kind to be 'head man.' And Underwood\n dared not trust that glib explanation.\n\n\n Many others besides Underwood found they could no longer endure the\n instability of their own culture. Among these were many of the world's\n leading scientists. Most of them went to the jungle lands of Venus. The\n scientific limitations of such a frontier existence had kept Underwood\n from joining the Venusian colonies, but he'd been very close to going\n just before he got the offer of Chief Physicist with the Smithson\n Institute expedition in the asteroid fields. He wondered now what he'd\n have done if the offer hadn't come.\nThe interphone annunciator buzzed. Underwood turned off the news as\n the bored communications operator in the control room announced, \"Doc\n Underwood. Call for Doc Underwood.\"\n\n\n Underwood cut in. \"Speaking,\" he said irritably.\n\n\n The voice of Terry Bernard burst into the room. \"Hey, Del! Are you\n going to get rid of that hangover and answer your phone or should we\n embalm the remains and ship 'em back?\"\n\n\n \"Terry! You fool, what do you want? Why didn't you say it was you? I\n thought maybe it was that elephant-foot Maynes, with chunks of mica\n that he thought were prayer sticks.\"\n\n\n \"The Stroids didn't use prayer sticks.\"\n\n\n \"All right, skip it. What's new?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty. Can you come over for a while? I think we've really got\n something here.\"\n\n\n \"It'd better be good. We're taking the ship to Phyfe. Where are you?\"\n\n\n \"Asteroid C-428. It's about 2,000 miles from you. And bring all the\n hard-rock mining tools you've got. We can't get into this thing.\"\n\n\n \"Is\nthat\nall you want? Use your double coated drills.\"\n\n\n \"We wore five of them out. No scratches on the thing, even.\"\n\n\n \"Well, use the Atom Stream, then. It probably won't hurt the artifact.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say it won't. It won't even warm the thing up. Any other ideas?\"\n\n\n Underwood's mind, which had been half occupied with mulling over his\n personal problems while he talked with Terry, swung startledly to what\n the archeologist was saying. \"You mean that you've found a material\n the Atom Stream won't touch? That's impossible! The equations of the\n Stream prove—\"\n\n\n \"I know.\nNow\nwill you come over?\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say so in the first place? I'll bring the whole ship.\"\nUnderwood cut off and switched to the Captain's line. \"Captain Dawson?\n Underwood. Will you please take the ship to the vicinity of Asteroid\n C-428 as quickly as possible?\"\n\n\n \"I thought Doctor Phyfe—\"\n\n\n \"I'll answer for it. Please move the vessel.\"\n\n\n Captain Dawson acceded. His instructions were to place the ship at\n Underwood's disposal.\n\n\n Soundlessly and invisibly, the distortion fields leaped into\n space about the massive laboratory ship and the\nLavoisier\nmoved\n effortlessly through the void. Its perfect inertia controls left no\n evidence of its motion apparent to the occupants with the exception of\n the navigators and pilots. The hundreds of delicate pieces of equipment\n in Underwood's laboratories remained as steadfast as if anchored to\n tons of steel and concrete deep beneath the surface of Earth.\n\n\n Twenty minutes later they hove in sight of the small, black asteroid\n that glistened in the faint light of the faraway Sun. The spacesuited\n figures of Terry Bernard and his assistant, Batch Fagin, clung to the\n surface, moving about like flies on a blackened, frozen apple.\n\n\n Underwood was already in the scooter lock, astride the little\n spacescooter which they used for transportation between ships of the\n expedition and between asteroids.\nThe pilot jockeyed the\nLavoisier\nas near as safely desirable, then\n signaled Underwood. The physicist pressed the control that opened\n the lock in the side of the vessel. The scooter shot out into space,\n bearing him astride it.\n\n\n \"Ride 'em, cowboy!\" Terry Bernard yelled into the intercom. He gave a\n wild cowboy yell that pierced Underwood's ears. \"Watch out that thing\n doesn't turn turtle with you.\"\n\n\n Underwood grinned to himself. He said, \"Your attitude convinces me of a\n long held theory that archeology is no science. Anyway, if your story\n of a material impervious to the Atom Stream is wrong, you'd better get\n a good alibi. Phyfe had some work he wanted to do aboard today.\"\n\n\n \"Come and see for yourself. This is it.\"\n\n\n As the scooter approached closer to the asteroid, Underwood could\n glimpse the strangeness of the thing. It looked as if it had been\n coated with the usual asteroid material of nickel iron debris, but\n Terry had cleared this away from more than half the surface.\n\n\n The exposed half was a shining thing of ebony, whose planes and angles\n were machined with mathematical exactness. It looked as if there were\n at least a thousand individual facets on the one hemisphere alone.\n\n\n At the sight of it, Underwood could almost understand the thrill of\n discovery that impelled these archeologists to delve in the mysteries\n of space for lost kingdoms and races. This object which Terry had\n discovered was a magnificent artifact. He wondered how long it had\n circled the Sun since the intelligence that formed it had died. He\n wished now that Terry had not used the Atom Stream, for that had\n probably destroyed the validity of the radium-lead relationship in the\n coating of debris that might otherwise indicate something of the age of\n the thing.\n\n\n Terry sensed something of Underwood's awe in his silence as he\n approached. \"What do you think of it, Del?\"\n\n\n \"It's—beautiful,\" said Underwood. \"Have you any clue to what it is?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing. No marks of any kind on it.\"\n\n\n The scooter slowed as Del Underwood guided it near the surface of the\n asteroid. It touched gently and he unstrapped himself and stepped off.\n \"Phyfe will forgive all your sins for this,\" he said. \"Before you show\n me the Atom Stream is ineffective, let's break off a couple of tons of\n the coating and put it in the ship. We may be able to date the thing\n yet. Almost all these asteroids have a small amount of radioactivity\n somewhere in them. We can chip some from the opposite side where the\n Atom Stream would affect it least.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Terry agreed. \"I should have thought of that, but when\n I first found the single outcropping of machined metal, I figured it\n was very small. After I found the Atom Stream wouldn't touch it, I was\n overanxious to undercover it. I didn't realize I'd have to burn away\n the whole surface of the asteroid.\"\n\n\n \"We may as well finish the job and get it completely uncovered. I'll\n have some of my men from the ship come on over.\"\n\n\n It took the better part of an hour to chip and drill away samples to be\n used in a dating attempt. Then the intense fire of the Atom Stream was\n turned upon the remainder of the asteroid to clear it.\n\n\n \"We'd better be on the lookout for a soft spot.\" Terry suggested. \"It's\n possible this thing isn't homogeneous, and Papa Phyfe would be very\n mad if we burned it up after making such a find.\"\nFrom behind his heavy shield which protected him from the stray\n radiation formed by the Atom Stream, Delmar Underwood watched the\n biting fire cut between the gemlike artifact and the metallic alloys\n that coated it. The alloys cracked and fell away in large chunks,\n propelled by the explosions of matter as the intense heat vaporized the\n metal almost instantly.\n\n\n The spell of the ancient and the unknown fell upon him and swept him up\n in the old mysteries and the unknown tongues. Trained in the precise\n methods of the physical sciences, he had long fought against the\n fascination of the immense puzzles which the archeologists were trying\n to solve, but no man could long escape. In the quiet, starlit blackness\n there rang the ancient memories of a planet vibrant with life, a\n planet of strange tongues and unknown songs—a planet that had died\n so violently that space was yet strewn with its remains—so violently\n that somewhere the echo of its death explosion must yet ring in the far\n vaults of space.\n\n\n Underwood had always thought of archeologists as befogged antiquarians\n poking among ancient graves and rubbish heaps, but now he knew them\n for what they were—poets in search of mysteries. The Bible-quoting of\n Phyfe and the swearing of red-headed Terry Bernard were merely thin\n disguises for their poetic romanticism.\n\n\n Underwood watched the white fire of the Atom Stream through the lead\n glass of the eye-protecting lenses. \"I talked to Illia today,\" he said.\n \"She says I've run away.\"\n\n\n \"Haven't you?\" Terry asked.\n\n\n \"I wouldn't call it that.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't make much difference what you call it. I once lived in an\n apartment underneath a French horn player who practised eight hours a\n day. I ran away. If the whole mess back on Earth is like a bunch of\n horn blowers tootling above your apartment, I say move, and why make\n any fuss about it? I'd probably join the boys on Venus myself if my job\n didn't keep me out here. Of course it's different with you. There's\n Illia to be convinced—along with your own conscience.\"\n\n\n \"She quotes Dreyer. He's one of your ideals, isn't he?\"\n\n\n \"No better semanticist ever lived,\" Terry said flatly. \"He takes the\n long view, which is that everything will come out in the wash. I agree\n with him, so why worry—knowing that the variants will iron themselves\n out, and nothing I can possibly do will be noticed or missed? Hence,\n I seldom worry about my obligations to mankind, as long as I stay\n reasonably law-abiding. Do likewise, Brother Del, and you'll live\n longer, or at least more happily.\"\nUnderwood grinned in the blinding glare of the Atom Stream. He wished\n life were as simple as Terry would have him believe. Maybe it would be,\n he thought—if it weren't for Illia.\n\n\n As he moved his shield slowly forward behind the crumbling debris,\n Underwood's mind returned to the question of who created the structure\n beneath their feet, and to what alien purpose. Its black, impenetrable\n surfaces spoke of excellent mechanical skill, and a high science that\n could create a material refractory to the Atom Stream. Who, a half\n million years ago, could have created it?\n\n\n The ancient pseudo-scientific Bode's Law had indicated a missing planet\n which could easily have fitted into the Solar System in the vicinity\n of the asteroid belt. But Bode's Law had never been accepted by\n astronomers—until interstellar archeology discovered the artifacts of\n a civilization on many of the asteroids.\n\n\n The monumental task of exploration had been undertaken more than a\n generation ago by the Smithson Institute. Though always handicapped by\n shortage of funds, they had managed to keep at least one ship in the\n field as a permanent expedition.\n\n\n Dr. Phyfe, leader of the present group, was probably the greatest\n student of asteroidal archeology in the System. The younger\n archeologists labeled him benevolently Papa Phyfe, in spite of the\n irascible temper which came, perhaps, from constantly switching his\n mind from half a million years ago to the present.\n\n\n In their use of semantic correlations, Underwood was discovering, the\n archeologists were far ahead of the physical scientists, for they had\n an immensely greater task in deducing the mental concepts of alien\n races from a few scraps of machinery and art.\n\n\n Of all the archeologists he had met, Underwood had taken the greatest\n liking to Terry Bernard. An extremely competent semanticist and\n archeologist, Terry nevertheless did not take himself too seriously. He\n did not even mind Underwood's constant assertion that archeology was\n no science. He maintained that it was fun, and that was all that was\n necessary.\n\n\n At last, the two groups approached each other from opposite sides of\n the asteroid and joined forces in shearing off the last of the debris.\n As they shut off the fearful Atom Streams, the scientists turned to\n look back at the thing they had cleared.\nTerry said quietly, \"See why I'm an archeologist?\"\n\n\n \"I think I do—almost,\" Underwood answered.\n\n\n The gemlike structure beneath their feet glistened like polished ebony.\n It caught the distant stars in its thousand facets and cast them until\n it gleamed as if with infinite lights of its own.\n\n\n The workmen, too, were caught in its spell, for they stood silently\n contemplating the mystery of a people who had created such beauty.\n\n\n The spell was broken at last by a movement across the heavens.\n Underwood glanced up. \"Papa Phyfe's coming on the warpath. I'll bet\n he's ready to trim my ears for taking the lab ship without his consent.\"\n\n\n \"You're boss of the lab ship, aren't you?\" said Terry.\n\n\n \"It's a rather flexible arrangement—in Phyfe's mind, at least. I'm\n boss until he decides he wants to do something.\"\n\n\n The headquarters ship slowed to a halt and the lock opened, emitting\n the fiery burst of a motor scooter which Doc Phyfe rode with angry\n abandon.\n\n\n \"You, Underwood!\" His voice came harshly through the phones. \"I demand\n an explanation of—\"\n\n\n That was as far as he got, for he glimpsed the thing upon which the\n men were standing, and from his vantage point it looked all the more\n like a black jewel in the sky. He became instantly once more the eager\n archeologist instead of expedition administrator, a role he filled with\n irritation.\n\n\n \"What have you got there?\" he whispered.\n\n\n Terry answered. \"We don't know. I asked Dr. Underwood's assistance in\n uncovering the artifact. If it caused you any difficulty, I'm sorry;\n it's my fault.\"\n\"Pah!\" said Phyfe. \"A thing like this is of utmost importance. You\n should have notified me immediately.\"\n\n\n Terry and Underwood grinned at each other. Phyfe reprimanded every\n archeologist on the expedition for not notifying him immediately\n whenever anything from the smallest machined fragment of metal to the\n greatest stone monuments were found. If they had obeyed, he would have\n done nothing but travel from asteroid to asteroid over hundreds of\n thousands of miles of space.\n\n\n \"You were busy with your own work,\" said Terry.\n\n\n But Phyfe had landed, and as he dismounted from the scooter, he stood\n in awe. Terry, standing close to him, thought he saw tears in the old\n man's eyes through the helmet of the spaceship.\n\n\n \"It's beautiful!\" murmured Phyfe in worshipping awe. \"Wonderful. The\n most magnificent find in a century of asteroidal archeology. We must\n make arrangements for its transfer to Earth at once.\"\n\n\n \"If I may make a suggestion,\" said Terry, \"you recall that some of the\n artifacts have not survived so well. Decay in many instances has set\n in—\"\n\n\n \"Are you trying to tell me that this thing can decay?\" Phyfe's little\n gray Van Dyke trembled violently.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking of the thermal transfer. Doctor Underwood is better able\n to discuss that, but I should think that a mass of this kind, which is\n at absolute zero, might undergo unusual stresses in coming to Earth\n normal temperatures. True, we used the Atom Stream on it, but that heat\n did not penetrate enough to set up great internal stresses.\"\n\n\n Phyfe looked hesitant and turned to Underwood. \"What is your opinion?\"\n\n\n Underwood didn't get it until he caught Terry's wink behind Phyfe's\n back. Once it left space and went into the museum laboratory, Terry\n might never get to work on the thing again. That was the perpetual\n gripe of the field men.\n\n\n \"I think Doctor Bernard has a good point,\" said Underwood. \"I would\n advise leaving the artifact here in space until a thorough examination\n has been made. After all, we have every facility aboard the\nLavoisier\nthat is available on Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Very well,\" said Phyfe. \"You may proceed in charge of the physical\n examination of the find, Doctor Underwood. You, Doctor Bernard, will be\n in charge of proceedings from an archeological standpoint. Will that\n be satisfactory to everyone concerned?\"\n\n\n It was far more than Terry had expected.\n\n\n \"I will be on constant call,\" said Phyfe. \"Let me know immediately of\n any developments.\" Then the uncertain mask of the executive fell away\n from the face of the little old scientist and he regarded the find with\n humility and awe. \"It's beautiful,\" he murmured again, \"\nbeautiful\n.\"\nCHAPTER TWO\nPhyfe remained near the site as Underwood and Terry set their crew to\n the routine task of weighing, measuring, and photographing the object,\n while Underwood considered what else to do.\n\n\n \"You know, this thing has got me stymied, Terry. Since it can't be\n touched by an Atom Stream, that means there isn't a single analytical\n procedure to which it will respond—that I know of, anyway. Does your\n knowledge of the Stroids and their ways of doing things suggest any\n identification of it?\"\n\n\n Terry shook his head as he stood by the port of the laboratory ship\n watching the crews at work outside. \"Not a thing, but that's no\n criterion. We know so little about the Stroids that almost everything\n we find has a function we never heard of before. And of course\n we've found many objects with totally unknown functions. I've been\n thinking—what if this should turn out to be merely a natural gem\n from the interior of the planet, maybe formed at the time of its\n destruction, but at least an entirely natural object rather than an\n artifact?\"\n\n\n \"It would be the largest crystal formation ever encountered, and\n the most perfect. I'd say the chances of its natural formation are\n negligible.\"\n\n\n \"But maybe this is the one in a hundred billion billion or whatever\n number chance it may be.\"\n\n\n \"If so, its value ought to be enough to balance the Terrestrial budget.\n I'm still convinced that it must be an artifact, though its material\n and use are beyond me. We can start with a radiation analysis. Perhaps\n it will respond in some way that will give us a clue.\"\n\n\n When the crew had finished the routine check, Underwood directed his\n men to set up the various types of radiation equipment contained within\n the ship. It was possible to generate radiation through almost the\n complete spectrum from single cycle sound waves to hard cosmic rays.\n\n\n The work was arduous and detailed. Each radiator was slowly driven\n through its range, then removed and higher frequency equipment used. At\n each fraction of an octave, the object was carefully photographed to\n record its response.\n\n\n After watching the work for two days, Terry wearied of the seemingly\n non-productive labor. \"I suppose you know what you're doing, Del,\" he\n said. \"But is it getting you anywhere at all?\"\n\n\n Underwood shook his head. \"Here's the batch of photographs. You'll\n probably want them to illustrate your report. The surfaces of the\n object are mathematically exact to a thousandth of a millimeter.\n Believe me, that's some tolerance on an object of this size. The\n surfaces are of number fifteen smoothness, which means they are plane\n within a hundred-thousandth of a millimeter. The implications are\n obvious. The builders who constructed that were mechanical geniuses.\"\n\"Did you get any radioactive dating?\"\n\n\n \"Rather doubtfully, but the indications are around half a million\n years.\"\n\n\n \"That checks with what we know about the Stroids.\"\n\n\n \"It would appear that their culture is about on a par with our own.\"\n\n\n \"Personally, I think they were ahead of us,\" said Terry. \"And do you\n see what that means to us archeologists? It's the first time in the\n history of the science that we've had to deal with the remains of a\n civilization either equal or superior to our own. The problems are\n multiplied a thousand times when you try to take a step up instead of a\n step down.\"\n\n\n \"Any idea of what the Stroids looked like?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't found any bodies, skeletons, or even pictures, but we think\n they were at least roughly anthropomorphic. They were farther from the\n Sun than we, but it was younger then and probably gave them about the\n same amount of heat. Their planet was larger and the Stroids appear\n to have been somewhat larger as individuals than we, judging from\n the artifacts we've discovered. But they seem to have had a suitable\n atmosphere of oxygen diluted with appropriate inert gases.\"\nThey were interrupted by the sudden appearance of a laboratory\n technician who brought in a dry photographic print still warm from the\n developing box.\n\n\n He laid it on the desk before Underwood. \"I thought you might be\n interested in this.\"\n\n\n Underwood and Terry glanced at it. The picture was of the huge,\n gemlike artifact, but a number of the facets seemed to be covered with\n intricate markings of short, wavy lines.\n\n\n Underwood stared closer at the thing. \"What the devil are those? We\n took pictures of every facet previously and there was nothing like\n this. Get me an enlargement of these.\"\n\n\n \"I already have.\" The assistant laid another photo on the desk, showing\n the pattern of markings as if at close range. They were clearly\n discernible now.\n\n\n \"What do you make of it?\" asked Underwood.\n\n\n \"I'd say it looked like writing,\" Terry said. \"But it's not like any\n of the other Stroid characters I've seen—which doesn't mean much, of\n course, because there could be thousands that I've never seen. Only how\n come these characters are there now, and we never noticed them before?\"\n\n\n \"Let's go out and have a look,\" said Underwood. He grasped the\n photograph and noted the numbers of the facets on which the characters\n appeared.\n\n\n In a few moments the two men were speeding toward the surface of their\n discovery astride scooters. They jockeyed above the facets shown on the\n photographs, and stared in vain.\n\n\n \"Something's the matter,\" said Terry. \"I don't see anything here.\"\n\n\n \"Let's go all the way around on the scooters. Those guys may have\n bungled the job of numbering the photos.\"\n\n\n They began a slow circuit, making certain they glimpsed all the facets\n from a height of only ten feet.\n\n\n \"It's not here,\" Underwood agreed at last. \"Let's talk to the crew that\n took the shots.\"\n\n\n They headed towards the equipment platform, floating in free space,\n from which Mason, one of the Senior Physicists, was directing\n operations. Mason signaled for the radiations to be cut off as the men\n approached.\n\n\n \"Find any clues, Chief?\" he asked Underwood. \"We've done our best to\n fry this apple, but nothing happens.\"\n\n\n \"Something\ndid\nhappen. Did you see it?\" Underwood extended the\n photograph with the mechanical fingers of the spacesuit. Mason held it\n in a light and stared at it. \"We didn't see a thing like that. And we\n couldn't have missed it.\" He turned to the members of the crew. \"Anyone\n see this writing on the thing?\"\n\n\n They looked at the picture and shook their heads.\n\n\n \"What were you shooting on it at the time?\"\n\n\n Mason glanced at his records. \"About a hundred and fifty angstroms.\"\n\n\n \"So there must be something that becomes visible only in a field of\n radiation of about that wave length,\" said Underwood. \"Keep going and\n see if anything else turns up, or if this proves to be permanent after\n exposure to that frequency.\"\n\n\n Back in the laboratory, they sat down at the desk and went through\n the file of hundreds of photographs that were now pouring out of the\n darkroom.\n\n\n \"Not a thing except that one,\" said Terry. \"It looks like a message\n intended only for someone who knew what frequency would make it\n visible.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What's the relationship like between Delmar and Illia?", "question_unique_id": "50783_S09NKQOI_1", "options": ["They love each other", "They are good friends", "They don't like each other", "They're married"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Illia mad at Delmar?", "question_unique_id": "50783_S09NKQOI_2", "options": ["She wants to be with him but he won't leave Earth most of the time", "She wants to be with him but he doesn't make the time for her", "She wants to be with him but he won't come home", "She wants to be with him but he won't leave Venus"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What trait best describes Terry?", "question_unique_id": "50783_S09NKQOI_3", "options": ["Patient", "Funny", "Cautious", "Naive"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What trait best describes Delmar?", "question_unique_id": "50783_S09NKQOI_4", "options": ["Loving", "Intelligent", "Oblivious", "Emotional"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What would've happened if Delmar had gone straight to Phyfe instead of Terry?", "question_unique_id": "50783_S09NKQOI_5", "options": ["He would've been less busy", "He wouldn't have regretted it", "He would've been mad at himself", "He would've been anxious"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What's one difference between Terry and Delmar?", "question_unique_id": "50783_S09NKQOI_6", "options": ["Delmar is smarter than Terry", "They have completely different jobs", "They have different priorities", "Terry is smarter than Delmar"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What's the current life like on Earth?", "question_unique_id": "50783_S09NKQOI_7", "options": ["Scientists are curing many diseases", "Advanced technologies exist", "Governments are stable across the world, finally", "Governments are in tumultuous situations"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do we think Delmar will do in the near future?", "question_unique_id": "50783_S09NKQOI_8", "options": ["He'll go back home", "He'll call Illia again", "He'll do more research with Terry", "He'll leave Terry be and go to Phyfe"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/7/8/50783//50783-h//50783-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51152", "set_unique_id": "51152_VZM2VDDE", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Appointment In Tomorrow", "year": 1951, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; United States -- Fiction", "article": "Appointment in Tomorrow\nBY FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIs it possible to have a world without moral values?\n\n Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\nThe first angry rays of the sun—which, startlingly enough, still rose\n in the east at 24 hour intervals—pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic\n combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious\n fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War\n III's atomic bombs.\n\n\n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around\n Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at\n the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three\n Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched\n the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a\n girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of\n a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot\n that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things\n as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked\n the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the\n Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially\n across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and\n the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room.\n And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers'\n Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n\n\n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America\n of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America\n of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the\n off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War\n and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly\n rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the\n Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please,\n lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and\n crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n\n\n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned,\n polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's\n Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute,\n or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the\n phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a\n deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and\n his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with\n impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n\n\n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory\n chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep.\n These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which\n rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a\n muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until\n he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\nRemembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he\n instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate\n level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as\n quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have\n had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered\n if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth\n their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would\n send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no,\n that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important\n purposes.\n\n\n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence\n into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed.\n No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them\n unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing—the severe tunic, tights and\n sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message\n tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme\n tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly\n planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face\n broke into a smile.\n\n\n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making\n up his life—and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of\n his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving\n technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as\n somno-learning.\n\n\n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\"\n While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief\n message:\n\n\n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n\n\n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's\n future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are\n available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the\n Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected\n the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return!\n I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp,\n Thinkers' Foundation I.\nJorj Helmuth\n\n\n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced\n through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the\n sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and\n plugged in the steno-robot.\n\n\n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n\n\n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice\n announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n\n\n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a\n few minutes.\"\nHuge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed\n above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in\n the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls,\n indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair\n on a boom.\n\n\n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information\n and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not\n resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great\n cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its\n own controls—the permissible ones—and could doubtless improvise a\n hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n\n\n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and\n Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons.\n This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human\n brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the\n rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney\n Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had\n given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This\n was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased\n human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\nThis was the machine that really thought—a million-plus!\nThis was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy\n professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the\n machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push,\nhad\nbuilt. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and\n girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n\n\n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord\n plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and\n shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense,\n although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with\n the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet\n infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape\n the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\nThe grizzled general—there was also one who was gray—was thinking\n that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and\n usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his\n ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent\n than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\"\n rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him\n obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls\n which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's\n right-minded leaders—even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n\n\n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a\n more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and\n the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble.\n He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation\n be in metal rather than flesh?\n\n\n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such\n pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success\n with Buddhism. Sitting before his\nguru\n, his teacher, feeling the\n Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had\n felt a little like this.\n\n\n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets,\n was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists\n weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd\n always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things,\n rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill\n of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty\n sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better—more\n disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie,\n which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\nThe President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was\n also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though\n he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration.\n Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even\n the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n\n\n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal\n features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the\n tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had\n handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for\n next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet\n minds—profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising\n simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were\n alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical\n shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n\n\n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice\n nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly\n put it away. No one spoke.\n\n\n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question\n Four—whom would that come from?\"\n\n\n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's\n group. Is anything wrong?\"\n\n\n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust\n controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually\n he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n\n\n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the\n six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to\n get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\nJorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie\n to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the\n takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen.\n The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich\n ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a\n silvery mighty spindle.\n\n\n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here\n was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official\n territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That\n rocket there—just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered\n from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed\n nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first\n spaceship—and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n\n\n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when\n he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him\n from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole\n Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And\n that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional\n mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n\n\n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's\n feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little\n devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n\n\n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n \"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely\n sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them\n psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to\n contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and\n errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone\n to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course,\n some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds\n of the Martians—\"\n\n\n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned\n it, Jorj.\"\n\n\n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great\n violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\nMeanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out\n a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning\n rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that\n of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand\n relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes,\n impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and,\n reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room\n where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n\n\n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as\n a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first\n question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the\n staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the\n answer.\n\n\n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon\n and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to\n close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone,\n asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer,\n then went back to the grind.\n\n\n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his\n thinking with his eyes open.\n\n\n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n\n\n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive\n lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n\n\n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n\n\n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing,\n humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One:\n The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n\n\n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\nFive hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off\n its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it\n effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped\n himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the\n dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew\n he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more\n than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n\n\n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the\n fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and\n gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and\n parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of\n free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would\n toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes\n she swam for it frantically.\n\n\n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer\n and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on\n Mars this trip—priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to\n war-battered mankind.\n\n\n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up\n on the air, and went to sleep.\nJorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed\n each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away\n with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over\n his.\n\n\n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n\n\n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar\n Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n\n\n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess\n player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed\n to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n\n\n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool\n question like that?\"\n\n\n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n\n\n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men\n puzzledly.\n\n\n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n\n\n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at\n the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young\n Farquar.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd\n investigate.\"\n\n\n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right\n away.\"\nSunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust\n motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was\n well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes\n there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place\n of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly\n knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been\n riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in\n New York City.\n\n\n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face\n of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender—fined down by\n a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful,\n sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather\n like a bear.\n\n\n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the\n Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still\n allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt.\n Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep\n on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've\n maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding\n to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have\n overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults\n isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough\n about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of\n this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n\n\n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the\n Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know\n their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their\n Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental\n science is bunk.\"\n\n\n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly\n interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n\n\n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be\n done until it takes.\"\n\n\n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think\n you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which\n you probably aren't aware.\"\n\n\n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\nOpperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more\n reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers\n strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But\n consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew\n especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times\n are good—that is, when the truth offers no threat—people don't mind.\n But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n \"Well, we all know what happened to—\" And he mentioned three names\n that had been household words in the middle of the century. They\n were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three\n physicists.\n\n\n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they\n wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured\n by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that\n they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a\n luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their\n souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their\n war rockets.\"\n\n\n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away\n at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's\n difficult and dangerous?\"\n\n\n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of\n violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I\n was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm\n convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If\n you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league,\n if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous\n bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n\n\n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n \"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't\n the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine\n Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White\n House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not\n the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining\n for power—only established facts or lies are.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little\n violence in you.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n\n\n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his\n feet.\nOpperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n\n\n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to\n charlatans without a struggle?\"\n\n\n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now.\n Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that\n he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the\n philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n\n\n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n\n\n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n\n\n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I\n intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically\n precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing.\n Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts\n between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn\n neurotics in the Inner Cabinet—and their wives. The fact that the\n Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election.\n The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran\n because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just\n a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n 'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times\n and points are all that are needed—and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet\n they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that\n we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us,\n turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n\n\n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his\n first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals\n were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won\n every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar\n short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but\n on what the world hasn't got—peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n\n\n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man\n with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny\n cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at\n Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n\n\n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n\n\n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n\n\n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar\n chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n\n\n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he\n asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n\n\n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in\n deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going\n to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that\n they'll need our help.\"\n\n\n \"An invitation?\"\n\n\n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious\n though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered\n about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap—that after the\n Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n\n\n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard.\n That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things\n they might do to you.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\nOpperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and\n vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice\n trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a\n girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n\n\n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n\n\n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n\n\n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly,\n still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this\n invitation?\"\n\n\n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally\n he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an\n academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n\n\n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police\n inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling\n enterprise.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe,\n restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't\n exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n\n\n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow\n be able to buy me off?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded\n angrily.\n\n\n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change\n your aims.\"\n\n\n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight\n between the two men.\nAs the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his\n apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the\n silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n\n\n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the\n paradox.\n\n\n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying\n neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a\n steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust—processes that\n were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself\n warm.\n\n\n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then\n would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella\n would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side\n a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick\n and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the\n ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities.\n Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n\n\n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the\n ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship\n itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became\n exhausted.\n\n\n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive—and he, a Thinker, had\n conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having\n strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting,\n memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself\n of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their\n specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n\n\n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind\n Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would\n discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even—his\n imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward—build the\n true Maizie!\n\n\n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the\n scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n\n\n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry\n him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a\n moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\nConfound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she\n should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now,\n when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a\n pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He\n really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again\n there sprang into his mind the word—a pet form of her name—that would\n send her into obedient trance.\n\n\n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment\n of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike\n suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely\n a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding\n the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for\n it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n\n\n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook\n his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if\n he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting\n Tregarron.\n\n\n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his\n boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the\n mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He\n himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over\n strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n\n\n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum\n relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he\n knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does the government (as a whole) think of the Thinkers?", "question_unique_id": "51152_VZM2VDDE_1", "options": ["They think they're foolish", "They're ambivalent towards them", "They respect them", "They think they're lying"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What trait best describes Caddy?", "question_unique_id": "51152_VZM2VDDE_2", "options": ["Brave", "Loving", "Trapped", "Desperate"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which trait best describes Jorj Helmuth?", "question_unique_id": "51152_VZM2VDDE_3", "options": ["Average", "Unlikable", "Interesting", "Generous"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does it seem like the relationship between Jorj and Farquar?", "question_unique_id": "51152_VZM2VDDE_4", "options": ["They don't like each other", "They're good friends", "They're direct rivals to each other in the Thinkers field", "They're estranged family"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "If Farquar had more information about Jorj, how might that change their relationship?", "question_unique_id": "51152_VZM2VDDE_5", "options": ["He would hate him more", "He would hate him less", "He would like him more", "He would love him more"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "A student from which college major would be most likely to enjoy this story?", "question_unique_id": "51152_VZM2VDDE_6", "options": ["Political Science", "Astrophysiscs", "Philosophy", "Physics"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What trait best describes Opperly?", "question_unique_id": "51152_VZM2VDDE_7", "options": ["Weathered", "Handsome", "Strong", "Obedient"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/5/51152//51152-h//51152-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50940", "set_unique_id": "50940_NW4PX14D", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Wailing Wall", "year": 1964, "author": "Aycock, Roger D.", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; Psychological fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction; Short stories", "article": "Wailing Wall\nBy ROGER DEE\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAn enormous weapon is forcing people to keep\n \ntheir troubles to themselves—it's dynamite!\nNumb with the terror that had dogged him from the moment he regained\n consciousness and found himself naked and weaponless, Farrell had no\n idea how long he had been lost in the honeycombed darkness of the\n Hymenop dome.\nThe darkness and damp chill of air told him that he was far\n underground, possibly at the hive's lowest level. Somewhere above\n him, the silent audience chambers lay shrouded in lesser gloom, heavy\n with the dust of generations and peopled only by cryptic apian images.\n Outside the dome, in a bend of lazy silver river, sprawled the Sadr III\n village with its stoic handful of once-normal Terran colonists and, on\n the hillside above the village, Gibson and Stryker and Xavier would be\n waiting for him in the disabled\nMarco Four.\nWaiting for him....\nThey might as well have been back on Terra, five hundred light-years\n away.\nSix feet away on either side, the corridor walls curved up faintly, a\n flattened oval of tunneling designed for multiple alien feet, lighted\n for faceted eyes demanding the merest fraction of light necessary\n for an Earthman's vision. For two yards Farrell could see dimly, as\n through a heavy fog; beyond was nothing but darkness and an outlandish\n labyrinth of cross-branching corridors that spiraled on forever without\n end.\nBehind him, his pursuers—human natives or Hymenop invaders, he had\n no way of knowing which—drew nearer with a dry minor rustling whose\n suggestion of imminent danger sent Farrell plunging blindly on into the\n maze.\n—To halt, sweating, when a sound exactly similar came to him from\n ahead.\nIt was what he had feared from the beginning. He could not go on, and\n he could not go back.\nHe made out the intersecting corridor to his right, then a vague oval\n opening that loomed faintly grayer than the wall about it. He darted\n into it as into a sanctuary, and realized too late that the choice had\n been forced upon him.\nIt had been intended from the start that he should take this way. He\n had been herded here like a halterless beast, driven by the steady\n threat of action never quite realized.\nThey\nhad known where he was\n going, and why.\nBut there was light down there somewhere at the end of the tunnel's\n aimless wanderings. If, once there, he could see—\nHe did not find light, only a lesser darkness. The tunnel led him\n into a larger place whose outer reaches were lost in shadow, but whose\n central area held a massive cylindrical machine at once alien and\n familiar.\nHe went toward it hesitantly, confused for the moment by a paramnesiac\n sense of repeated experience, the specious recognition of\ndéjà vu.\nIt was a Ringwave generator, and it was the thing he had ventured into\n the dome to find.\nHis confusion stemmed from its resemblance to the disabled generator\n aboard the\nMarco Four,\nand from the stereo-sharp associations it\n evoked: Gibson working over the ship's power plant, his black-browed\n face scowling and intent, square brown body moving with a wrestler's\n easy economy of motion; Stryker, bald and fat and worried, wheezing up\n and down the companionway from engine bay to chart room, his concern\n divided between Gibson's task and Farrell's long silence in the dome.\nStryker at this moment would be regretting the congenital optimism\n that had prompted him to send his navigator where he himself could\n not go. Sweating anxiety would have replaced Stryker's pontifical\n assurance, dried up his smug pattering of socio-psychological truisms\n lifted from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook....\n\"So far as adaptability is concerned,\" Stryker had said an eternal\n evening before, \"\nhomo sapiens\ncan be a pretty weird species. More\n given to mulish paradox, perhaps, than any alien life-form we're ever\n likely to run across out here.\"\n\n\n He had shifted his bulk comfortably on the grass under the\nMarco\n Four's\nopen port, undisturbed by the busy clatter of tools inside the\n ship where Gibson and Xavier, the\nMarco's\nmechanical, worked over\n the disabled power plant. He laced his fingers across his fat paunch\n and peered placidly through the dusk at Farrell, who lay on his back,\n smoking and watching the stars grow bright in the evening sky.\n\n\n \"Isolate a human colony from its parent planet for two centuries,\n enslave it for half that time to a hegemony as foreign as the\n Hymenops' hive-culture before abandoning it to its own devices, and\n anything at all in the way of eccentric social controls can develop.\n But men remain basically identical, Arthur, in spite of acquired\n superficial changes. They are inherently incapable of evolving any\n system of control mechanisms that cannot be understood by other men,\n provided the environmental circumstances that brought that system into\n being are known. At bottom, these Sadr III natives are no different\n from ourselves. Heredity won't permit it.\"\n\n\n Farrell, half listening, had been staring upward between the icy white\n brilliance of Deneb and the twin blue-and-yellow jewels of Albireo,\n searching for a remote twinkle of Sol. Five hundred light-years away\n out there, he was thinking, lay Earth. And from Earth all this gaudy\n alien glory was no more than another point of reference for backyard\n astronomers, a minor configuration casually familiar and unremarkable.\n\n\n A winking of lighted windows springing up in the village downslope\n brought his attention back to the scattered cottages by the river, and\n to the great disquieting curve of the Hymenop dome that rose above them\n like a giant above pygmies. He sat up restlessly, the wind ruffling\n his hair and whirling the smoke of his cigarette away in thin flying\n spirals.\n\n\n \"You sound as smug as the Reorientation chapter you lifted that bit\n from,\" Farrell said. \"But it won't apply here, Lee. The same thing\n happened to these people that happened to the other colonists we've\n found, but they don't react the same. Either those Hymenop devils\n warped them permanently or they're a tribe of congenital maniacs.\"\n\n\n Stryker prodded him socratically: \"Particulars?\"\n\n\n \"When we crashed here five weeks ago, there were an even thousand\n natives in the village, plus or minus a few babes in arms. Since\n that time they've lost a hundred twenty-six members, all suicides or\n murders. At first the entire population turned out at sunrise and went\n into the dome for an hour before going to the fields; since we came,\n that period has shortened progressively to a few minutes. That much\n we've learned by observation. By direct traffic we've learned exactly\n nothing except that they can speak Terran Standard, but won't. What\n sort of system is that?\"\n\n\n Stryker tugged uncomfortably at the rim of white hair the years had\n left him. \"It's a stumper for the moment, I'll admit ... if they'd\n only\ntalk\nto us, if they'd tell us what their wants and fears and\n problems are, we'd know what is wrong and what to do about it. But\n controls forced on them by the Hymenops, or acquired since their\n liberation, seem to have altered their original ideology so radically\n that—\"\n\n\n \"That they're plain batty,\" Farrell finished for him. \"The whole setup\n is unnatural, Lee. Consider this: We sent Xavier out to meet the first\n native that showed up, and the native talked to him. We heard it all by\n monitoring; his name was Tarvil, he spoke Terran Standard, and he was\n amicable. Then we showed ourselves, and when he saw that we were human\n beings like himself and not mechanicals like Xav, he clammed up. So did\n everyone in the village. It worries me, Lee. If they didn't expect men\n to come out of the\nMarco\n, then what in God's name\ndid\nthey expect?\"\n\n\n He sat up restlessly and stubbed out his cigarette. \"It's an\n unimportant world anyway, all ocean except for this one small\n continent. I think we ought to write it off and get the hell out as\n soon as the\nMarco\n's Ringwave is repaired.\"\n\n\n \"We can't write it off,\" Stryker said. \"Besides reclaiming a colony, we\n may have added a valuable marine food source to the Federation. Arthur,\n you're not letting a handful of disoriented people get under your\n skin, are you?\"\n\n\n Farrell made an impatient sound and lit another cigarette. The brief\n flare of his lighter pierced the darkness and picked out a hurried\n movement a short stone's throw away, between the\nMarco Four\nand the\n village.\n\"There's one reason why I'm edgy,\" Farrell said. \"These Sadrians may\n be harmless, but they make a point of posting a guard over us. There's\n a sentry out there in the grass flats again tonight.\" He turned on\n Stryker uneasily. \"I've watched on the infra-scanner while those\n sentries changed shifts, and they don't speak to each other. I've\n tracked them back to the village, but I've never seen one of them turn\n in a—\"\n\n\n Down in the village a man screamed, a raw, tortured sound that brought\n both men up stiffly. A frantic drumming of running feet came to them,\n unmistakable across the little distance. The fleeing man came up from\n the dark huddle of cottages by the river and out across the grass\n flats, screaming.\n\n\n Pursuit overtook him halfway to the ship. There was a brief scuffling,\n a shadowy dispersal of silent figures. After that, nothing.\n\n\n \"They did it again,\" Farrell said. \"One of them tried to come up here\n to us. The others killed him, and who's to say what sort of twisted\n motive prompted them? They go to the dome together every morning, not\n speaking. They work all day in the fields without so much as looking at\n each other. But every night at least one of them tries to escape from\n the village and come up here—and this is what happens. We couldn't\n trust them, Lee, even if we could understand them!\"\n\n\n \"It's our job to understand them,\" Stryker said doggedly. \"Our function\n is to find colonies disoriented by the Hymenops and to set them\n straight if we can. If we can't, we call in a long-term reorientation\n crew, and within three generations the culture will pass again for\n Terran. The fact that slave colonies invariably lose their knowledge of\n longevity helps; they don't get it back until they're ready for it.\n\n\n \"I've seen some pretty foul results of Hymenop experimenting\n on human colonies, Arthur. There was the ninth planet of Beta\n Pegasi—rediscovered in 3910, I think it was—that developed a\n religious fixation on fertility, a mania fostered by the Hymenops to\n supply expendable labor for their mines. The natives stopped mining\n when the Hymenops gave up the invasion and went back to 70 Ophiuchi,\n but they were still multiplying like rabbits when we found them. They\n followed a cultural conviction something like that observed in Oriental\n races of ancient Terran history, but they didn't pursue the Oriental\n tradition of sacrosancts. They couldn't—there were too many of them.\n By the time they were found, they numbered fourteen\nbillions\nand they\n were eating each other. Still it took only three generations to set\n them straight.\"\n\n\n He took one of Farrell's cigarettes and puffed it placidly.\n\n\n \"For that matter, Earth had her own share of eccentric cultures. I\n recall reading about one that existed as late as the twentieth century\n and equaled anything we're likely to find here. Any society should be\n geared to a set of social controls designed to furnish it, as a whole\n with a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of discomfort, but these\n ancient Terrestrial Dobuans—island aborigines, as I remember it—had\n adjusted to their total environment in a manner exactly opposite. They\n reversed the norm and became a society of paranoiacs, hating each\n other in direct ratio to nearness of relationship. Husbands and wives\n detested each other, sons and fathers—\"\n\n\n \"Now you're pulling my leg,\" Farrell protested. \"A society like that\n would be too irrational to function.\"\n\n\n \"But the system worked,\" Stryker insisted. \"It balanced well enough, as\n long as they were isolated. They accepted it because it was all they\n knew, and an abrupt reversal that negated their accustomed habits would\n create an impossible societal conflict. They were reoriented after\n the Fourth War, and succeeding generations adjusted to normal living\n without difficulty.\"\n\n\n A sound from overhead made them look up. Gibson was standing in the\nMarco's\nopen port.\n\n\n \"Conference,\" Gibson said in his heavy baritone, and went back inside.\nThey followed Gibson quickly and without question, more disturbed by\n the terse order than by the killing in the grass flats. Knowing Gibson,\n they realized that he would not have wasted even that one word unless\n emergency justified it.\n\n\n They found him waiting in the chart room with Xavier. For the\n thousandth time, seeing the two together, Farrell found himself\n comparing them: the robot, smoothly functional from flexible gray\n plastoid body to featureless oval faceplate, blandly efficient, totally\n incapable of emotion; Gibson, short and dark and competent heavy-browed\n and humorless. Except for initiative, Farrell thought, the two of them\n could have traded identities and no one would have been able to notice\n any difference.\n\n\n \"Xav and I found our Ringwave trouble,\" Gibson said. \"The generator is\n functioning, but the warp isn't going out. Something here on Sadr III\n is neutralizing it.\"\n\n\n They stared at him as if he had just told them the planet was flat.\n\n\n \"But a Ringwave can't be stopped completely, once it is started,\"\n Stryker protested. \"You'd have to dismantle it to shut it off, Gib!\"\n\n\n \"The warping field can be damped out, though,\" Gibson said. \"Adjacent\n generators operating at different phase levels will heterodyne at a\n frequency representing the mean variance between levels. The resulting\n beat-phase will be too low to maintain either field, and one or the\n other, or both, will blank out. If you remember, all Terran-designed\n power plants are set to the same phase for that reason.\"\n\n\n \"But these natives\ncan't\nhave a Ringwave plant!\" Farrell argued.\n \"There's only this one village on Sadr III, Gib, an insignificant\n little agrarian township! If they had the Ringwave, they'd be\n mechanized. They'd have vehicles, landing ports....\"\n\n\n \"The Hymenops had the Ringwave,\" Gibson interrupted. \"And they left the\n dome down there, the first undamaged one we've found. Figure it out for\n yourselves.\"\n\n\n They digested the statement in silence. Stryker paled slowly, as if\n it needed time for apprehension to work its way through his fat bulk.\n Farrell's uneasiness, sourceless until now, grew to chill certainty.\n\"I think I've expected this, without realizing it, since my first\n flight,\" he said. \"It stood to reason that the Hymenops would quit\n running somewhere, that we'd bump into them eventually out here on the\n fringes. Twenty thousand light-years back to 70 Ophiuchi is a long way\n to retreat.... Gib, do you think they're still here?\"\n\n\n Gibson did not shrug, but his voice seemed to. \"It won't matter one way\n or the other unless we can clear the\nMarco's\ngenerator.\"\n\n\n From another man it might have been irony. Knowing Gibson, Farrell and\n Stryker accepted it as a bald statement of fact.\n\n\n \"Then we're up against a Hymenop hive-mind,\" Stryker said. \"And we\n can't run away from it. Any suggestions?\"\n\n\n \"We'll have to find the interfering generator and stop it,\" Farrell\n offered, knowing that was the only obvious solution.\n\n\n \"One alternative,\" Gibson corrected. \"If we can determine what\n phase-level the interfering warp uses, we may be able to adjust the\nMarco's\ngenerator to match it. Once they're in resonance, they won't\n interfere.\" He caught Stryker's unspoken question and answered it. \"It\n would take a week. Maybe longer.\"\n\n\n Stryker vetoed the alternative. \"Too long. If there are Hymenops here,\n they won't give us that much time.\"\n\n\n Farrell switched on the chart room scanning screen and centered it\n on the village downslope. Scattered cottages with dark tiled roofs\n and lamp-bright windows showed up clearly. Out of their undisciplined\n grouping swept the great hemispherical curve of the dome, glinting\n dully metallic in the starshine.\n\n\n \"Maybe we're jumping to conclusions,\" he said. \"We've been here for\n five weeks without seeing a trace of Hymenops, and from what I've read\n of them, they'd have jumped us the minute we landed. Chances are that\n they left Sadr III in too great a hurry to wreck the dome, and their\n Ringwave power plant is still running.\"\n\n\n \"You may be right,\" Stryker said, brightening. \"They carried the fight\n to us from the first skirmish, two hundred years ago, and they damned\n near beat us before we learned how to fight them.\"\n\n\n He looked at Xavier's silent plastoid figure with something like\n affection. \"We'd have lost that war without Xave's kind. We\n couldn't match wits with Hymenop hive-minds, any more than a swarm\n of grasshoppers could stand up to a colony of wasps. But we made\n mechanicals that could. Cybernetic brains and servo-crews, ships that\n thought for themselves....\"\n\n\n He squinted at the visiscreen with its cryptic, star-streaked dome.\n \"But they don't think as we do. They may have left a rear guard here,\n or they may have boobytrapped the dome.\"\n\n\n \"One of us will have to find out which it is,\" Farrell said. He took\n a restless turn about the chart room, weighing the probabilities. \"It\n seems to fall in my department.\"\n\n\n Stryker stared. \"You? Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because I'm the only one who\ncan\ngo. Remember what Gib said about\n changing the\nMarco's\nRingwave to resonate with the interfering\n generator? Gib can make the change; I can't. You're—\"\n\n\n \"Too old and fat,\" Stryker finished for him. \"And too damned slow and\n garrulous. You're right, of course.\"\n\n\n They let it go at that and put Xavier on guard for the night. The\n mechanical was infinitely more alert and sensitive to approach than any\n of the crew, but the knowledge did not make Farrell's sleep the sounder.\n\n\n He dozed fitfully, waking a dozen times during the night to smoke\n cigarettes and to speculate fruitlessly on what he might find in the\n dome. He was sweating out a nightmare made hideous by monstrous bees\n that threatened him in buzzing alien voices when Xavier's polite\n monotone woke him for breakfast.\nFarrell was halfway down the grassy slope to the village when he\n realized that the\nMarco\nwas still under watch. Approaching close\n enough for recognition, he saw that the sentry this time was Tarvil,\n the Sadrian who had first approached the ship. The native's glance took\n in Farrell's shoulder-pack of testing tools and audiphone, brushed the\n hand-torch and blast gun at the Terran's belt, and slid away without\n trace of expression.\n\n\n \"I'm going into the dome,\" Farrell said. He tried to keep the\n uncertainty out of his voice, and felt a rasp of irritation when he\n failed. \"Is there a taboo against that?\"\n\n\n The native fell in beside him without speaking and they went down\n together, walking a careful ten feet apart, through dew-drenched grass\n flats that gleamed like fields of diamonds under the early morning sun.\n From the village, as they approached, straggled the inevitable exodus\n of adults and half-grown children, moving silently out to the fields.\n\n\n \"Weird beggars,\" Farrell said into his audiphone button. \"They don't\n even rub elbows at work. You'd think they were afraid of being\n contaminated.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice came tinnily in his ear. \"They won't seem so strange\n once we learn their motivations. I'm beginning to think this\n aloofness of theirs is a religious concomitant, Arthur, a hangover\n from slave-controls designed to prevent rebellion through isolation.\n Considering what they must have suffered under the Hymenops, it's a\n wonder they're even sane.\"\n\n\n \"I'll grant the religious origin,\" Farrell said. \"But I wouldn't risk a\n centicredit on their sanity. I think the lot of them are nuts.\"\n\n\n The village was not deserted, but so far as Farrell's coming was\n concerned, it might as well have been. The few women and children he\n saw on the streets ignored him—and Tarvil—completely.\n\n\n He met with only one sign of interest, when a naked boy perhaps six\n years old stared curiously and asked something in a childish treble of\n the woman accompanying him. The woman answered with a single sharp\n word and struck the child across the face, sending him sprawling.\n\n\n Farrell relayed the incident. \"She said '\nQuiet!\n' and slapped him\n down, Lee. They start their training early.\"\n\n\n \"Their sort of indifference couldn't be congenital,\" Stryker said. His\n tinny murmur took on a puzzled sound. \"But they've been free for four\n generations. It's hard to believe that any forcibly implanted control\n mechanism could remain in effect so long.\"\n\n\n A shadow blocked the sun, bringing a faint chill to Farrell when he\n looked up to see the great rounded hump of the dome looming over him.\n\n\n \"I'm going into the dome now,\" he said. \"It's like all the others—no\n openings except at ground level, where it's riddled with them.\"\n\n\n Tarvil did not accompany him inside. Farrell, looking back as he\n thumbed his hand-torch alight in the nearest entranceway, saw the\n native squatting on his heels and looking after him without a single\n trace of interest.\n\"I'm at ground level,\" Farrell said later, \"in what seems to have\n been a storage section. Empty now, with dust everywhere except in the\n corridors the natives use when they come in, mornings. No sign of\n Hymenops yet.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice turned worried. \"Look sharp for traps, Arthur. The\n place may be mined.\"\n\n\n The upper part of the dome, Farrell knew from previous experience,\n would have been given over in years past to Hymenop occupation, layer\n after rising layer of dormitories tiered like honeycombs to conserve\n space. He followed a spiral ramp downward to the level immediately\n below surface, and felt his first excitement of discovery when he found\n himself in the audience chambers that, until the\nMarco's\ncoming, had\n been the daily goal of the Sadrian natives.\n\n\n The level was entirely taken up with bare ten-foot cubicles, each\n cramped chamber dominated by a cryptic metal-and-crystal likeness\n of the Hymenop head set into the metal wall opposite its corridor\n entrance. From either side of a circular speaking-grill, the antennae\n projected into the room, rasplike and alert, above faceted crystal\n eyes that glowed faintly in the near-darkness. The craftsmanship was\n faultless, stylized after a fashion alien to Farrell's imagining and\n personifying with disturbing realism the soulless, arrogant efficiency\n of the Hymenop hive-mind. To Farrell, there was about each image a\n brooding air of hypnotic fixity.\n\n\n \"Something new in Hymenop experiments,\" he reported to Stryker. \"None\n of the other domes we found had anything like this. These things have\n some bearing on the condition of the natives, Lee—there's a path worn\n through the dust to every image, and I can see where the people knelt.\n I don't like it. I've got a hunch that whatever these damned idols were\n used for succeeded too well.\"\n\n\n \"They can't be idols,\" Stryker said. \"The Hymenops would have known how\n hard it is to displace anthropomorphism entirely from human worship.\n But I think you're right about the experiment's working too well. No\n ordinary compulsion would have stuck so long. Periodic hypnosis? Wait,\n Arthur, that's an angle I want to check with Gibson....\"\n\n\n He was back a moment later, wheezing with excitement.\n\n\n \"Gib thinks I'm on the right track—periodic hypnosis. The Hymenops\n must have assigned a particular chamber and image to each slave. The\n images are mechanicals, robot mesmerists designed to keep the natives'\n compulsion-to-isolation renewed. Post-hypnotic suggestion kept the\n poor devils coming back every morning, and their children with them,\n even after the Hymenops pulled out. They couldn't break away until\n the\nMarco's\nRingwave forced a shutdown of the dome's power plant\n and deactivated the images. Not that they're any better off now that\n they're free; they don't know how—\"\n\n\n Farrell never heard the rest of it. Something struck him sharply across\n the back of the head.\nWhen he regained consciousness, he was naked and weaponless and lost.\n The rustling of approach, bodiless and dreadful in darkness, panicked\n him completely and sent him fleeing through a sweating eternity that\n brought him finally to the dome's lowest level and the Hymenop power\n plant.\n\n\n He went hesitantly toward the shadowy bulk of the Ringwave cylinder,\n drawn as much now by its familiarity as driven by the terror behind\n him. At the base of the towering machine, he made out a control board\n totally unrecognizable in design, studded with dials and switches\n clearly intended for alien handling.\n\n\n The tinny whispering of Stryker's voice in the vaultlike quiet struck\n him with the frightening feeling that he had gone mad.\n\n\n He saw his equipment pack then, lying undamaged at the foot of the\n control board. Stryker's voice murmured from its audicom unit: \"We're\n in the dome, Arthur. Where are you? What level—\"\n\n\n Farrell caught up the audicom, swept by a sudden wild lift of hope.\n \"I'm at the bottom of the dome, in the Ringwave chamber. They took my\n gun and torch. For God's sake, hurry!\"\n\n\n The darkness gave up a furtive scuffling of sandaled feet, the tight\n breathing of many men. Someone made a whimpering sound, doglike and\n piteous; a Sadrian voice hissed sharply, \"\nQuiet!\n\"\n\n\n Stryker's metallic whisper said: \"We're tracking your carrier, Arthur.\n Use the tools they left you. They brought you there to repair the\n Ringwave, to give back the power that kept their images going. Keep\n busy!\"\n\n\n Farrell, only half understanding, took up his instrument case. His\n movement triggered a tense rustle in the darkness; the voice whimpered\n again, a tortured sound that rasped Farrell's nerves like a file on\n glass.\n\n\n \"\nGive me back my Voice. I am alone and afraid. I must have\n Counsel....\n\"\n\n\n Beneath the crying, Farrell felt the terror, incredibly voiced, that\n weighted the darkness, the horror implicit in stilled breathing, the\n swelling sense of outrage.\n\n\n There was a soft rush of bodies, a panting and struggling. The\n whimpering stopped.\n\n\n The instrument case slipped out of Farrell's hands. On the heels of its\n nerve-shattering crash against the metal floor came Stryker's voice,\n stronger as it came closer.\n\n\n \"Steady, Arthur. They'll kill you if you make a scene. We're coming,\n Gib and Xav and I. Don't lose your head!\"\n\n\n Farrell crouched back against the cold curve of the Ringwave cylinder,\n straining against flight with an effort that left him trembling\n uncontrollably. A spasm of incipient screaming seized his throat and\n he bit it back savagely, stifling a terror that could not be seen,\n grasped, fought with.\n\n\n He was giving way slowly when Xavier's inflectionless voice droned out\n of the darkness: \"Quiet. Your Counsel will be restored.\"\n\n\n There was a sudden flood of light, unbearable after long darkness.\n Farrell had a failing glimpse of Gibson, square face blocked with light\n and shadow from the actinic flare overhead, racing toward him through a\n silently dispersing throng of Sadrians.\n\n\n Then he passed out.\nHe was strapped to his couch in the chart room when he awoke. The\nMarco Four\nwas already in space; on the visiscreen, Farrell could\n see a dwindling crescent of Sadr III, and behind it, in the black pit\n of space, the fiery white eye of Deneb and the pyrotechnic glowing of\n Albireo's blue-and-yellow twins.\n\n\n \"We're headed out,\" he said, bewildered. \"What happened?\"\n\n\n Stryker came over and unstrapped him. Gibson, playing chess with Xavier\n across the chart-room plotting table, looked up briefly and went back\n to his gambit.\n\n\n \"We reset the Ringwave in the dome to phase with ours and lugged you\n out,\" Stryker explained genially. He was back in character again, his\n fat paunch quivering with the beginning of laughter. \"We're through\n here. The rest is up to Reorientation.\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him. \"You're giving up on Sadr III?\"\n\n\n \"We've done all we can. Those Sadrians need something that a\n preliminary expedition like ours can't give them. Right now they are\n willing victims of a rigid religious code that makes it impossible for\n any one of them to express his wants, hopes, ideals or misfortunes to\n another. Exchanging confidences, to them, is the ultimate sacrilege.\"\n\n\n \"Then they\nare\ncrazy. They'd have to be, with no more opportunity for\n emotional catharsis than that!\"\n\n\n \"They're not insane, they're—adapted. Those robot images you found\n are everything to this culture: arbiters, commercial agents, monitors\n and confessors all in one. They not only relay physical needs from one\n native to another; they listen to all problems and give solutions.\n They're\nCounselors\n, remember? Man's gregariousness stems largely from\n his need to unload his troubles on someone else. The Hymenops came up\n with an efficient substitute here, and the natives accepted it as the\n norm.\"\n\n\n Farrell winced with sudden understanding. \"No wonder the poor devils\n cracked up right and left. With their Ringwave dead, they might as well\n have been struck blind and dumb! They couldn't even get together among\n themselves to figure a way out.\"\n\n\n \"There you have it,\" Stryker said. \"They knew we were responsible for\n their catastrophe, but they couldn't bring themselves to ask us for\n help because we were human beings like themselves. So they went mad one\n by one and committed the ultimate blasphemy of shouting their misery in\n public, and their fellows had to kill them or countenance sacrilege.\n But they'll quiet down now. They should be easy enough to handle by the\n time the Reorientation lads arrive.\"\n\n\n He began to chuckle. \"We left their Counselors running, but we\n disconnected the hypnosis-renewal circuits. They'll get only what\n they need from now on, which is an outlet for shifting their personal\n burdens. And with the post-hypnotic compulsion gone, they'll turn to\n closer association with each other. Human gregariousness will reassert\n itself. After a couple of generations, the Reorientation boys can write\n them off as Terran Normal and move on to the next planetary madhouse\n we've dug up for them.\"\n\n\n Farrell said wonderingly, \"I never thought of the need to exchange\n confidences as being so important. But it is; everyone does it. You and\n I often talk over personal concerns, and Gib—\"\n\n\n He broke off to study the intent pair at the chessboard, comparing\n Gibson's calm selfsufficiency to the mechanical's bland competence.\n\n\n \"There's an exception for your theory, Lee. Iron Man Gibson never gave\n out with a confidence in his life!\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed. \"You may be right. How about it, Gib? Do you ever feel\n the need of a wailing wall?\"\n\n\n Gibson looked up briefly from his game, his square face unsurprised.\n\n\n \"Well, sure. Why not? I tell my troubles to Xavier.\"\n\n\n When they looked at each other blankly, he added, with the nearest\n approach to humor that either Farrell or Stryker had ever seen in him:\n \"It's a reciprocal arrangement. Xav confides his to me.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What traits best describe Stryker?", "question_unique_id": "50940_NW4PX14D_1", "options": ["Weathered and hopeful", "Pessimistic and cautious", "Strong and risk-taking", "Bold and charming"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happens to Farrell midway through the passage?", "question_unique_id": "50940_NW4PX14D_2", "options": ["He was in a fight to show dominance", "He was injured to send a message", "He was abducted to help fix something", "He was abducted to be tortured for information"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Did the protagonists succeed in their primary goal?", "question_unique_id": "50940_NW4PX14D_3", "options": ["No, they were not able to save the planet", "No, they weren't able to complete the expedition", "Yes, they completed the expedition and saved the planet", "Somewhat, they were able to complete the expedition but they gave up on the planet"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why might someone want to work the jobs that the protagonists work?", "question_unique_id": "50940_NW4PX14D_4", "options": ["They get to meet lots of friendly intergalactic species", "It's thrilling", "The pay is great", "It allows them to see beautiful landscapes"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why might someone not want to work the jobs that the protagonists work?", "question_unique_id": "50940_NW4PX14D_5", "options": ["It's time consuming to the extent that none of them can ever relax", "The pay is not good", "It's dangerous", "They are all in danger of dying at each planet they encounter"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What might be a moral of the story?", "question_unique_id": "50940_NW4PX14D_6", "options": ["Trial and error is a good strategy to success", "You can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it", "Believing in yourself will only get you so far; you have to put in the work to make things happen", "You have to pick your battles"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How would you describe the relationship between the protagonists?", "question_unique_id": "50940_NW4PX14D_7", "options": ["They don't like each other", "They're just coworkers", "They care for each other deeply", "They're beginning to get comfortable around each other"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the coworkers clearly slacks off the most?", "question_unique_id": "50940_NW4PX14D_8", "options": ["Stryker", "None of them appear to slack off that much", "Farrell", "Gibson"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/4/50940//50940-h//50940-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. 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{"article_id": "51353", "set_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Dr. Kometevsky's Day", "year": 1951, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "Short stories; Science fiction; PS", "article": "DR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBefore science, there was superstition. After\n \nscience, there will be ... what? The biggest,\n \nmost staggering\n, most final\nfact of them all!\n\"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next\n reshuffling of the planets.\"\n\n\n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge\n Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title,\nThe Dance of the Planets\n. There was no mistaking the time of\n its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that\n particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste\n a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound\n a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle\n toward her husband Theodor.\n\n\n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As\n I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence\n drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions\n every so often.\"\n\n\n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\"\n Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n\n\n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is\n to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing\n at all like that has happened.\"\n\n\n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have\n disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n\n\n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply\n vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes\n of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of\n rock—the merest cosmic flyspecks—yet they had carried away with them\n the security of a whole world.\nLooking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt\n that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the\n charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea,\n the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they\n pierced.\nPeople must have felt like this\n, she thought,\nwhen Aristarches first\n hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet\n was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they\n couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n\"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky\n was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this\n might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of\n the man.\"\n\n\n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and\n anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much\n worse.\n\n\n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate\n explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that\n there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated,\n surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the\n Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance\n phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist.\n And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you\n admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen\n holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if\n Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been\n picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n\n\n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n \"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but\n I think' I'm right.\"\n\n\n And of course she was.\n\n\n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed,\n adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She\n smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she\n asked.\n\n\n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket\n justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n\n\n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said,\n while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business\n connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute\n a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes.\n And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're\n going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical\n sleight-of-hand.\"\n\n\n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be\n off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She\n gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n\n\n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n\n\n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said\n uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much\n good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much\n luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World\n Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that\n couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of\n things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and—\" she hesitated a\n bit—\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where\n am I to find it?\"\n\n\n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n\n\n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just\n one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or\n Ivan.\"\n\n\n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a\n crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor\n told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to\n be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from\n Heaven and all that?\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\"\n Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to\n depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from\n under you.\"\n\n\n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on\n what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically\n far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory\n Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days\n there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the\n planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n\n\n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's\n daughter?\"\n\n\n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n\n\n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the\n father. One-third of a chance.\"\n\n\n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will\n be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly\n seemed to need more sleep.\"\n\n\n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of\n the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted\n to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n\n\n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in\nGulliver's Travels\nDean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two\n moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately,\n too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and\n literature.\"\n\n\n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those\n names Phobos and Deimos—they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n\n\n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now\n don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of\n major and minor ancient gods had been taken—the bodies in the Solar\n System are named that way, of course—and these were about all that\n were available.\"\n\n\n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\nI am a God\n, Dotty was dreaming,\nand I want to be by myself and\n think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret,\n but the other gods have forbidden us to.\nA little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and\n the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward\n thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace,\n she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she\n went out for the trapeze act.\nI and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats\n, Dotty\n went on dreaming.\nThe other gods are angry and scared. They are\n frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to\n hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\nAs Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver—a\n glitter of platinum against darkness—came in through the opposite\n door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes,\n got up from the round table.\n\n\n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two\n other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too.\n A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows\n at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious,\n fateful temper of the moment.\n\n\n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the\n table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n\n\n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n\n\n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the\n Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a\n two minutes walk.\"\n\n\n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n\n\n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll\n hear if Dotty calls.\"\n\n\n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over,\n switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n\n\n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors,\n and began silently checking through their material.\n\n\n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes\n didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded\n each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and\n switched to audio.\n\n\n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some\n irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n\n\n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital\n positions of Phobos and Deimos—that is, the volume of space they'd be\n occupying if their positions had remained normal—report finding masses\n of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving\n in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished\n moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass\n of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have\n ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of\n the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n\n\n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked\n lessening of tension. The finding of the debris—solid, tangible\n stuff—seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in\n which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the\n moons has been found.\n\n\n \"The rest will also be!\"\n\n\n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had\n switched off their projectors.\n\n\n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum\n of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to\n the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in\n churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter\n processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding\n that instant preparations be made for—and I quote—'Earth's coming\n leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers\n to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange\n book so recently conjured from oblivion,\nThe Dance of the Planets\n.\n\n\n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new\n reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships\n searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been\n issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics,\n Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so\n forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem\n written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n\n\"This Earth is not the steadfast place\nWe landsmen build upon;\nFrom deep to deep she varies pace,\nAnd while she comes is gone.\nBeneath my feet I feel\nHer smooth bulk heave and dip;\nWith velvet plunge and soft upreel\nShe swings and steadies to her keel\nLike a gallant, gallant ship.\"\nWhile the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught\n it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her\n touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her\n business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak\n thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even\n the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong\n show of decisiveness.\n\n\n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet\n now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the\n wrong end of a telescope.\n\n\n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and\n security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family,\n experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of\n silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to\n wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance—until outraged Nature\n decided to wipe them out?\n\n\n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come\n slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been\n treading.\n\n\n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory\n One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the\n Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and\n rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One\n feels duty-bound to release.\nJupiter's fourteen moons are no longer\n visible!\n\"\n\n\n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have\n received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed\n not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible\n statement from penetrating.\n\n\n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of\n which was smudged with dirt.\n\n\n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar\n twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back\n I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I\n had to tug to get it out—almost as if it had been cemented into the\n ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be\nin\nthe leather, as if\n it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n\n\n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had\n seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was\n true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely\n heavy.\n\n\n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n\n\n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic\n letters were two words:\n\n\n \"Going down!\"\nThe other gods\n, Dotty dreamt,\nare combing the whole Universe for us.\n We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up.\n There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver\n beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way\n they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\nEdmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've\n done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a\n thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally,\n is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions\n are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the\n evening—which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n\n\n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table.\n Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that\n had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n\n\n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly\n about the Deep Shaft.\"\n\n\n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five\n miles?\"\n\n\n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n\n\n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes\n went toward Ivan's briefcase.\nOur trick has succeeded\n, Dotty dreamt.\nThe other gods have passed\n our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the\n Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have\n found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more.\n They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to\n destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our\n camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that\n the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of\n millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours\n in a prison.\nTheodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We\n need a break.\"\n\n\n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial\n points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of\n inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now\n and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n\n\n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his\n cloak over a shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n\n\n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda\n stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms\n tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n\n\n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the\n room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\nNot my child\n, she thought bitterly.\nFrieda's her mother, Rosalind\n her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends.\n A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\nBut then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\nRosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and\n he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only\n knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either\n side, no more.\n\n\n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry.\n In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of\n his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move\n disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n\n\n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she\n stopped altogether.\n\n\n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought\n forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the\n furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n\n\n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility\n of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high\n twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n\n\n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized\n by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot—an ancestral terror\n from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n\n\n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind—the\n unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's\n briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space.\n She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted\n her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n\n\n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally\n dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself\n and started forward.\n\n\n Something held her feet.\n\n\n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and\n horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n\n\n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had\n the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded\n her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her\n flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n\n\n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep,\n waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her\n body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in\n the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the\n sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n\n\n She thought,\nhe'd just have had time to scribble that note on his\n briefcase and toss it away.\nShe jerked off a glove, leaned out as\n far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into\n the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and\n covered her eyes.\n\n\n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed\n with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles,\n black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision\n penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that\n these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\nAnd still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the\n law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from\n black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\nHer tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She\n wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the\n stone.\n\n\n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern\n with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt\n column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black\n basalt. And always faster.\n\n\n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical\n eternal fires.\nAt first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he\n saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the\n blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the\n tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could\n hardly have been fifteen.\n\n\n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious\n disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These\n are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension,\n and impulse traveling—a result of the unusual stresses of the time.\n Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe,\n especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods'\n and in some way responsible for current events.\n\n\n \"It is thought—\"\n\n\n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining\n casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over\n for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n \"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of\n pomegranate juice.\n\n\n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward\n Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\nTheodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel\n Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and\n reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now,\n for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n\n\n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and\n the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n\n\n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other\n utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar\n Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies\n which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving\n outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already\n beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n\n\n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n\n\n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the\n Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice\n the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with\n further details as soon as possible.\"\n\n\n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n\n\n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost\n amusing.\n\n\n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n\n\n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are\n fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, no.\"\n\n\n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine\n Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n\n\n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a\n satisfying swallow.\n\n\n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last\n news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows\n military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a\n fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach—what would you do? Why,\n you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind\n that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then—\"\n\n\n \"You don't mean to imply—\" Theodor interrupted.\n\n\n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n\n\n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the\n forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side,\n the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and\n Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm\n proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight,\n what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n\n\n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly.\n The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\nDotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over\n her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n\n\n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n \"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No!\n Please, no!\"\n\n\n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at\n the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an\n agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an\n expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She\n touched the child's hand.\n\n\n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come\n awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in\n a smile.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then,\n after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very\n queer.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n\n\n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she\n asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n\n\n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her\n face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you\n very much.\"\n\n\n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n\n\n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste\n heard her name called. She stood up.\n\n\n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If\n you want me, dear, just call.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\nEdmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced\n around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than\n even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement,\n but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too\n overpowering for a human being to bear.\n\n\n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped\n worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar\n System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the\n disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting\n out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There\n are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a\n mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to\n the same conclusion I have.\"\n\n\n The others nodded.\n\n\n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as\n you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At\n approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have\n encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named\n the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest\n corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a\n quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the\n mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight\n curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth\n itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world\n would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n\n\n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and\n particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting\n Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of\n Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in\n those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the\n two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic\n velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n\n\n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n\n\n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially\n the baffling hint—from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's\n downward-pointing glove in the other—that they were both somehow drawn\n into the depths of the Earth.\n\n\n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the\n following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike\n and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of\n mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They\n are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them\n anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage\n their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not\n penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n\n\n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the relationship like between the protagonists?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_1", "options": ["They are friends", "They are coworkers", "They are peers at a school", "They are married"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What element of the passage makes it seems like the work is ahead of its time?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_2", "options": ["Some characters are in a relationship with multiple people", "Some characters are gay", "Many of the characters are nonbinary", "Some characters are lesbians"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is something that Rosalind and Ivan have in common?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_3", "options": ["Both of them are not happy in their relationships", "Both of them discovered a new scientific principle together", "Both of them were separated from the group in the same way", "Both of them were killed in the same way"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is NOT a scientific concept discussed in the story?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_4", "options": ["Bases on planets other than Earth", "Supernatural observation and intuition abilities", "Planetary orbits", "Comet-to-comet data collection"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Of the following options, who might enjoy reading this story the most?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_5", "options": ["A college student who loves reading about long-distance romance in the sci-fi genre", "A teen who loves reading about love triangles and is a fan of sci-fi", "A child who loves reading about space travel", "A teen who loves reading about intergalactic politics"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How widespread are those with the ESP abilities?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_6", "options": ["No one in the story's universe actually has them", "A decent amount of people in the story's universe have them", "Most people in the story's universe have them", "Only two people in the story's universe have them"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the structure of this story?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_7", "options": ["It's description heavy, to describe all the space travel the characters experience", "It's dialogue heavy, as the characters are working to sabotage a few folks and they need to communicate before doing so", "It's description heavy, to describe the environment the characters live in", "It's dialogue heavy, as the characters spend a lot of time discussing the information they have to work with"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the deal with Kometevsky, as described in the context of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_8", "options": ["He's a huge celebrity", "He's a huge political figure", "He's a huge religious figure", "He's a huge scientific figure"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following options best describes the tone of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_9", "options": ["Humorous", "Poetic", "Calm", "Intense"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In your opinion, do you think the average person would rather live in present-day Earth or in this universe?", "question_unique_id": "51353_PKH8YTKF_10", "options": ["This universe, because the technology is far better", "Present-day Earth, because Earth faces less dire types of uncertainty", "Present-day Earth, because Earth had better scientific understanding", "This universe, because people are far more accepting"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/5/51353//51353-h//51353-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "20034", "set_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "Insiders and Way Insiders", "year": "1999", "author": "David Edelstein", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Insiders and Way Insiders \n\n                                            Being John Malkovich                 is everything I've ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It's close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The action is surreal, the emotions are violently real. The screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, is a genius at finding slapstick correlatives for people's nebulous sense--or non-sense--of themselves. It's possible that no one has ever come up with a more absurdly perfect metaphor for our longing to be someone--anyone--other than who we are than a portal into the head of John Malkovich. \n\n         Kaufman's protagonist, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), is a soulfully unkempt puppeteer whose wildly ambitious work is ignored while his gimmicky rivals thrive. When he reports for a drudge job as a file clerk, the office is between the seventh and eighth floors of a Manhattan skyscraper--it's the seven-and-a-halfth floor, where people walk stooped and make feeble jokes about the \"low overhead.\" That low ceiling--a constant reminder of how Craig has been stunted--is the first sign of the movie's comic astuteness, of its knack for devising sight gags with a sting. When a sleek and derisive colleague named Maxine (Catherine Keener) rebuffs his advances and mocks his art, Craig argues passionately on behalf of his puppets: He says that everyone longs to be inside someone else's head. On cue, he discovers a passageway behind a file cabinet that whooshes him into the head of Malkovich and then disgorges him, after 20 minutes, into a ditch beside the New Jersey Turnpike. The poor sap can't keep his secret. He tells the girl, who is soon selling tickets to the Malkovich experience. The biggest Malkovich addict turns out to be Craig's nerdily frazzled wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), who sums up the thrill for the rest of the characters. \"Being inside did something to me,\" she says. \"I knew who I was.\" \n\n         The director, Spike Jonze (he played the skinny redneck in Three Kings ), comes to Being                 John Malkovich from music videos, but the movie isn't a digitized bag of tricks like Fight \n\n            Club . Jonze is never in your face: His instincts must have told him that hyping gags this outlandish would turn the picture into camp. He keeps the action slightly remote and the jokes deadpan, and the upshot is that the audience almost never stops giggling. The first hour and change has a magical fluidity. The scenes between Cusack and Keener boast the best emasculating banter since Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy , and when Lotte and Maxine begin to communicate erotically through Malkovich's body, the film becomes a transsexual (and transcendental) screwball comedy. The script has a free-association quality that turns audiences on--they love not knowing where they're going. I wonder if Kaufman, when he started writing, even knew that the protagonist would stumble on that portal, or what he'd find when he went through. (The head of John Malkovich??!!??) \n\n         That the vessel is Malkovich might be the movie's most brilliantly unsettling touch, since the actor--although undeniably great--is one of our most distant and weirdly insular. You can understand the masses fantasizing about being Bruce Willis or being Tom Hanks, but being John Malkovich? What's lodged under that thick brow is anybody's guess. Evidently quite the heterosexual, he still courts sexual ambiguity: He speaks in querulous tones and bats the most insolently feminine lashes this side of Bugs Bunny. Weird or not, though, he's a celebrity: He exists. And Malkovich makes a wonderful Malkovich. The actor sends up his own preening aloofness, and he has never been more emotionally exposed than when it dawns on him that his smug façade has been literally penetrated. When he attempts to fathom what's happening to him, Jonze and Kaufman deliver a coup de cinema --a vision of hell that isn't, à la Sartre, other people, but oneself ad infinitum. \n\n         B eing John Malkovich should have ended right there, since the filmmakers never top that hysterical sequence. Kaufman seems to have written himself into a corner. In the last half-hour he ties things up too neatly and the craziness--and some of the helium--goes out of the movie. Why do crazy comedies need closure? As Cusack's character becomes more twisted, he loses his stature (and the audience's good will), and the climax has too many dissonances. Kaufman and Jonze end up sentimentalizing the longing for a collective consciousness in a way I found creepy: Do they mean to be retelling Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the body-snatchers' point of view? (If so, the film is even darker than I think it is.) \n\n         The last part diminishes the movie, but not enough to wreck it: It's still an amazing piece of work. What other madcap farce would dare to have a score--it's by the superb Carter Burwell--so plangent and melancholy? Or to cast that sunny goddess Cameron Diaz as a nerd? The actress retains her essential sweetness, but the transformation is otherwise remarkable: Her Lotte is such a mouth breather that she nearly drools, and Diaz manages to look estranged from that lovely body. Even more dazzling is Keener, an actress who has lately been stuck playing nice, sensible women but who here is all silken curves and withering putdowns--she greets Craig's declaration of love with a pitying sigh that brings the house down. Keener's Maxine is so glamorously, tantalizingly self-contained that you can almost believe she never dreams of being John Malkovich. \n\n         T                   he Insider                 is a big, overlong, and rather unwieldy piece of storytelling, but the story it has to tell is so vital that it cuts through all the dramaturgical muddiness. It's a terrific muckraking melodrama--it will get people fuming. It's about big-business mendacity and the lawyers who do its bidding, and about what happens to corporate whistle-blowers in a society where the mainstream media are also in the hands of corporations. The movie tells two interlocking stories: The first is about Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), former vice president for research and development at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, who is persuaded to go public with revelations about how cigarette manufacturers manipulate the chemicals in their product for maximum addictiveness. (Despite their testimonies in Congress, Wigand says, tobacco executives regard cigarettes as \"a nicotine delivery system.\") The second story concerns the 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), the man who persuaded Wigand to come forward. Bergman watches in horror as his network, CBS, backs away from the story under pressure from the corporate wing--which fears, at a time when CBS is on the block, the impact of a major lawsuit on its value. (Oddly unmentioned in the film is that then-owner Lawrence Tisch had his own tobacco company, Lorillard, and had separate dealings with Brown & Williamson.) \n\n         We're used to hearing tales of witnesses, informants, or whistle-blowers who are urged to come forward and then, after they do, are \"hung out to dry\"--i.e., left unprotected by the agents who approached and exploited them. What gives this version its kick--and what has made it fodder for columnists for almost six months--is that the people who betray the whistle-blower are among the most famous and powerful journalists in America: Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt, the co-anchor and the executive producer of 60 Minutes . If they could be pressured to \"spike\" a segment that they knew to be true, the film implicitly asks, how much chance do others have of breaking stories about corporate wrongdoing? And what about news personnel with a financial stake in their companies? Even journalists and editors known for their integrity tend to look the other way at their own companies' malfeasances when they hear words like \"stock options\" and \"IPO.\" \n\n         But the movie's emotional hook isn't the CBS infighting or Bergman's quest to get the story. It's the fate of Wigand, played by Crowe as a prickly, blockish fellow with no social skills--an edgy wonk. Already isolated by temperament, he seems more vulnerable than a conventionally nice martyr. Wigand appears to have no friends, and his wife (a nearly unrecognizable Diane Venora), a Southern debutante type who clearly didn't bargain for a life of social and financial ostracization, is on the verge of bailing out on him even before the bullets start appearing in the family's mailbox and the death threats on Wigand's computer. You can't always tell what Crowe is doing--his opacity is sometimes a little too opaque. What's plain, though, is that Wigand doesn't want to have this role, didn't ask for it, and has no support system to get him through it. He's entirely dependent on Bergman, with whom he mostly communicates by cell phone and fax. \n\n         The director, Michael Mann, has never tried to tell a story as complex (or nonviolent) as The Insider , and he and his co-screenwriter, Eric Roth, don't shape their narrative very satisfyingly. Wigand and Bergman are both \"insiders,\" and both, ultimately, whistle-blowers. (It was Bergman's spilling his guts to the New York Times that finally shamed CBS into running the Wigand interview.) But although the 60 Minutes producer is played by the star (Pacino grandstands, but not to the point of distraction), Bergman's story doesn't have the same primal force. Wigand's dark night of the soul is in a hotel, indicted, financially ruined, threatened with death, minus his wife and daughters; Bergman's is in an expensive-looking beach house with his warmly supportive spouse (Lindsay Crouse). \n\n         The filmmakers seem to be bending over backward--even now--to protect Wigand from appearing to have disclosed what he disclosed too early. I admire their consideration for their subject, but in its wake come all kinds of narrative fuzziness. The movie isn't clear on where the secret report that kicked off Bergman's interest in tobacco came from, or who in the FDA thought it was a good idea to turn him onto Wigand. It's left vague just when Bergman decided that Wigand was important not for what he might say about that report but about the industry as a whole. Mann must have had legal constraints that rivaled those at 60 Minutes . The FBI, which responds to a death threat, carries off Wigand's computer while he sputters that it contains all his important data. The implication is that the local FBI office is in cahoots with Brown & Williamson, but we hear no more about it; we never even know if Wigand got his computer back. And there's no dramatic payoff with the chillingly satanic tobacco company president (Michael Gambon) whose threats first make Wigand think about going public. Given how many lawyers must have vetted this thing, it's probably an achievement that Mann got as much as he did on the screen. \n\n         Should Mike Wallace be pissed off? Depends what really happened. In a delicious turn, Christopher Plummer makes the co-anchor less a journalist than a pompous prima donna, but he also gives him a bullying force and real charisma. It's not Wallace's initial caving-in to the network--\"I'm with Don on this,\" he tells Bergman--that does him the most damage. It's the scene in a posh restaurant in which Wallace regards the Wigands' paroxysms of fear over the coming 60 Minutes interview with aristocratic contempt. He says, \"Who are these people?\"--which opens the door for Bergman's too-pat rebuke: \"Ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances, Mike. What do you expect? Grace and consistency?\" It's Wallace's lack of interest in Wigand's story--the movie's most powerful--that damns him in the audience's eyes. \n\n                         The Insider doesn't note a couple of key, maybe hopeful ironies. The first is that CBS's \"spiking\" of the interview turned Wigand into an even bigger story than he would have been otherwise. And in the \"Where are they now?\" titles at the end, the filmmakers omit the most important detail of Bergman's and Wigand's current lives: that they're being played by Al Pacino and Russell Crowe in a major Hollywood movie, and that they're big news again. \n\n         Is there a less savory subgenre than the hardcore forensics thriller? A corpse is discovered in a grotesque state of mutilation, then the scene shifts to an autopsy room where skulls are popped off and innards held up for inspection. A short time later, detectives pore over glossies of fatal wounds. Yummy. In                    The Bone Collector                , the wily serial killer leaves clues for the brainy forensics expert, played by Denzel Washington--clues that amount to a forensics jigsaw puzzle. If Washington solves the puzzle fast enough, he has a shot at saving the latest manacled and tortured victim; if not, he has to scour the gore-drenched death scene for clues to the next murder. Yummy yummy. One fact quickly becomes apparent: \"The perp knows forensics,\" murmurs Washington. Yummy yummy yummy. \n\n         The rub is that Washington is a quadriplegic. He can't \"walk the grid\"--he needs a pair of eyes as sensitive as his but attached to a good pair of legs. As luck would have it, they're attached to a very good pair of legs and a great pair of breasts. Angelina Jolie plays the cop who discovers a body and snaps some photos that convince Washington she has a \"gift\" for forensics. He dispatches his new protégé to grisly crime scenes, purring into her headphones and demanding to know what she sees. Better than phone sex! He says, \"I want to know what you feel in the deepest recesses of your senses,\" and \"Follow the instincts you were born with. ... Process the body.\" I was thinking that she could process my body anytime, but Jolie rises above such adolescent spasms. Well, almost. She's a thoughtful actress, but she wasn't born to play a beat cop. Those tire-tread lips are model lips; those exquisitely chiseled cheekbones, model cheekbones. Washington scans her file on his fancy bedside computer: Guess what? She was a teen-age model! Clever save! \n\n                         The Bone Collector is less rancid than the last big serial-killer-fetishist picture, Copycat (1995), and it's expertly shot and edited. Phillip Noyce, the director, and Dean Semler, the cinematographer, cook up some eerily muzzy images inside the brackish tunnels and abandoned warehouses where the fiend does his/her demented surgery. But the film is still a piece of exploitive schlock. A mediocre mystery, too: It never approaches the ingenuity of Thomas Harris, still the maestro of forensic porn. For some reason, Noyce telegraphs the identity of the killer halfway through (does he mean to? Or does the hammy framing give it away by accident?), but it's left to the laughably garish climax for the wacko to spell out his/her arbitrary motive. (The killer's lines are on the level of: \"You think I'm m-m-mad, don't you?\") The only aspect of The Bone Collector that can't be derided is Washington. The option of walking through the part clearly not available to him, he doesn't sleep through it either: Every muscle in this man's ruined body seems to strain against his fate while the wheels in his brain grind fiercely. He deserves a smarter psycho--a smarter movie, too.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How many different movies are discussed in detail in this passage?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_1", "options": ["Five", "Three", "Two", "Four"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following best summarizes this passage?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_2", "options": ["The author analyzes a couple of movies", "The author describes movies he's seen with his friends", "The author ranks the quality of some movies he's seen in the past year", "The author discusses his favorite movies"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the tone in this passage?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_3", "options": ["Informal", "Persuasive", "Academic", "Argumentative"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is NOT a reason someone might avoid reading this passage?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_4", "options": ["The author describes (in detail) some of the less interesting parts of the movies", "The author describes a bit of gore", "The author has a few creepy remarks about women", "The author gives a couple of spoilers"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is a vague description that applies to one of the movies described in the passage?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_5", "options": ["Someone tries to go on a boat trip and things go horribly wrong", "Someone tries to find a murderer", "Someone tries to protect a building from a hostage situation", "Someone tries to get a divorce from her husband"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following is a vague description that applies to one of the movies described in the passage?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_6", "options": ["Someone has fun on recreational drugs", "Someone tries to save their marriage", "Someone has fun in an out of body experience", "Someone tries to overcome their alcoholism"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "If someone had to watch ALL of the major movies the author describes (they have a month to watch them), who do you think would most likely enjoy that experience?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_7", "options": ["An older teen who primarily likes romance movies", "A young teen", "A college student", "A new mom"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author point out about some of the actresses in the movies he's describing?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_8", "options": ["Their brilliance", "Their beauty", "Their ability to cry on command", "Their willingness to do sex scenes in movies"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the author point out about some of the actresses in the movies he's describing?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_9", "options": ["Most of the actresses are in roles they're used to portraying (they're being typecast)", "Many of the women are being cast as a result of the plastic surgery they've had done", "A couple of the women are acting in roles outside their normal repertoire", "Many of the women are being cast because of their young age"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following is NOT a quality of any of the movies described in the article?", "question_unique_id": "20034_WJSCNKAA_10", "options": ["Someone has to adapt to having to work with someone else", "Someone is impacted by newly discovered information", "Two characters fall in love", "Someone is trying to uncover something"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20042", "set_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "Dead Head", "year": "1996", "author": "Robert Wright", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Dead Head \n\n         Back when I was a journalist--before I became a provider of digital content--I thought life would always be simple: I would write articles, and people would pay to read them. But then I heard about the impending death of intellectual property, a scenario painted by cyberfuturists John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson. As all media move online, they say, content will be so freely available that getting paid to produce it will be hard, if not impossible. At first, I dismissed this as garden-variety, breathless overextrapolation from digerati social theorists. But even as I scoffed, the Barlow-Dyson scenario climbed steadily toward the rank of conventional wisdom. \n\n         Barlow and Dyson do have a solution. In the future people like me, having cultivated a following by providing free content on the Web, will charge our devotees for services that are hard to replicate en masse. We will answer individual questions online, say, or go around giving speeches, or spew out insights at private seminars, or (this one is actually my idea) have sex with young readers. The key, writes Barlow, will be not content but \"performance.\" Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, offers this analogy: The Dead let people tape concerts, and the tapes then led more people to pay for the concerts. \n\n         The seminal version of the Barlow-Dyson thesis is Barlow's 10,000-word 1994 essay in Wired . It is with some trepidation that I challenge the logic of this argument. Barlow is a noted visionary, and he is famously derisive of people less insightful than himself (a group which, in his opinion, includes roughly everyone). He says, for example, that the ability of courts to deal correctly with cyberissues depends on the \"depth of the presiding judge's clue-impairment.\" Well, at the risk of joining Barlow's long roster of the clue-impaired, here goes. \n\n         Barlow's argument begins with a cosmic premise: \"Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.\" This is wrong on two counts. First, all information does take physical form. Whether digital or analog, whether in ink or sound waves or synaptic firings or electrons, information always resides in patterns of matter or energy (which, as Einstein noted, are interchangeable manifestations of the physical world). \n\n         To be sure, the significance of information is independent of its particular physical incarnation. So is its value. You download this article from Slate's servers and copy it onto your own hard disk, and it's still worth--well, nothing, but that's a . Suppose it were a Madonna video: You'd get just as much enjoyment out of it regardless of which particular bunch of electrons embodied it. \n\n          \n\n            B >ut this independence of meaning and value from physical incarnation is nothing new. It is as old as Sumerian tablets, to say nothing of the Gutenberg press. Indeed, the whole reason intellectual-property law exists is that people can acquire your information without acquiring the particular physical version of it that you created. Thus Barlow's belief that \"property law of all sorts\" has always \"found definition\" on the \"physical plane\" signals a distressing confusion on his part. The one sense in which it's true that information is \"detached\" from the \"physical plane\"--the fact that information's value transcends its physical incarnation--not only fails to qualify as an original insight, and not only fails to make intellectual-property rights obsolete; it's the very insight that led to intellectual-property rights in the first place! Barlow announces from the mountaintop: \"It's fairly paradigm warping to look at information through fresh eyes--to see how very little it is like pig iron or pork bellies.\" Maybe so, but it's hard to say for sure, since the people who really did take that fresh look have been dead for centuries. \n\n         If you somehow forced Barlow to articulate his thesis without the wacky metaphysics, he'd probably say something like this: The cost of copying and distributing information is plummeting--for many purposes, even approaching zero. Millions of people can now do it right at their desks. So in principle, content can multiply like fruit flies. Why should anyone buy an article when a copy can be had for nothing? \n\n         Answer: Because it can't. The total cost of acquiring a \"free\" copy includes more than just the copying-and-transmitting costs. There's 1) the cost--in time and/or money--of finding someone who already has a copy, and will give it to you for free or for cheap; 2) the risk of getting caught stealing intellectual property; 3) any premiums you pay to others for incurring such risks (as when you get copies from bootleggers); and 4) informal punishments such as being labeled a cheat or a cheapskate. The size of this last cost will depend on how norms in this area evolve. \n\n         Even in the distant future, the total cost of cheating on the system, thus figured, will almost never be zero. Yes, it will be way, way closer to zero than it used to be. But the Barlow-Dyson scenario still is wrong. Why? Because whether people cheat doesn't depend on the absolute cost of cheating. It depends on the cost of cheating compared with the cost of not cheating. And the cost of getting data legally will plummet roughly as fast as the cost of getting it illegally--maybe faster.              \n\n         In their writings, Barlow and Dyson make clear they're aware of this fact. But they seems unaware of its fatal impact on their larger thesis. How could cybersages have such a blind spot? One theory: Because they're cyber sages. You have to be a career paleohack like me, getting paid for putting ink on paper, to appreciate how much of the cost of legally acquiring bits of information goes into the ink and paper and allied anachronisms, like shipping, warehousing, and displaying the inky paper. I wrote a book that costs $14 in paperback. For each copy sold, I get $1. The day may well come, as Barlow and Dyson seem to believe, when book publishers as we know them will disappear. People will download books from Web sites and either print them out on new, cool printers or read them on superlight wireless computers. But if so, it will then cost you only $1--oh hell, make it $1.25--to get a copy of my book legally from my Web site. \n\n         Now imagine being at my Web site, reading my promotional materials, and deciding you'd like to read the book. (Thank you.) A single keystroke will give you the book, drain your bank account of five shiny quarters, and leave you feeling like an honest, upstanding citizen. Do you think you'll choose, instead, to call a few friends in hopes of scoring an illegal copy? And don't imagine that you can just traipse on over to the \"black-market book store\" section of the Web and find a hot copy of my book. As in the regular world, the easier it is for Joe Consumer to track down an illegal distributor, the easier it is for cops to do the same. Black marketeers will have to charge enough to make up for this risk, making it hard to undersell my $1.25 by much. And there are , too, why the cost of cheating will be nontrivial. \n\n          \n\n            M >eanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, there's another reason for the cost of legal copies to drop. Many journalists will reach a much larger audience on the Web than they do now. The \"magazine\" model of bringing information to the attention of readers is stunningly inefficient. I hope it's not egotistical of me to think that when I write an article for, say, the New                 Republic , I am not reaching nearly everyone who might have an interest in it. Granted, the Web is not yet a picture of efficiency itself. Search engines, for example, are in the reptilian phase of their evolution. But most observers--certainly the Barlows of the world--expect radical improvement. (I'm not saying all journalists will see their audiences grow. The likely trend, when you , will be for many obscure and semiobscure journalists to see their audiences grow, while the few rich and famous journalists will see their audiences shrink. Cool.) \n\n         One much-discussed cybertrend is especially relevant here: the scenario in which various data brokers offer a \"Daily Me,\" a batch of articles tailored to your tastes, cheaply gleaned from all over the Web. When this happens, guys like me will be living the life of Riley. We will wake up at noon, stumble over to the keyboard in our pajamas, hammer out 1,000 words, and then--without talking to a single bothersome editor--make our work available to all data brokers. Likely fans of my article will be shown, say, the first couple of paragraphs. If they want to read more, they deposit a quarter. Will you try to steal a copy instead? Do you steal Tootsie pops at checkout counters? The broker and the electronic cash service will pocket a dime of that. I take my 15 cents and head for the liquor store. \n\n         Of course, this \"disaggregation of content\" may be ruinous for magazines like Slate. But consider the upside. Not only will the efficiency of the system permit rock-bottom pricing that discourages cheating, but the fluidity of content will disrupt channels of potential cheating. If you subscribe to a regular, old-fashioned online magazine, it's easy to split the cost of a subscription with a few friends and furtively make copies. (You wretched scum.) But if you subscribe to the \"Daily Me,\" this arrangement makes no sense, because every Me is different. Sure, you may e-mail a friend the occasional article from your \"Me.\" (You wretched scum.) And, in general, this sort of \"leakage\" will be higher than in pre-Web days. But it would have to reach massive proportions to negate the overall gains in efficiency that will keep people like me in business. \n\n         This argument, like all arguments about the future, is speculative. It may even be wrong. But it is consistent with the history of the world. The last half-millennium has seen 1) data getting cheaper and easier to copy; and 2) data-creation occupying a larger and larger fraction of all economic activity. Thus far, in other words, as the realm of information has gotten more lubricated, it has become easier , not harder, to make a living by generating information. Cyberspace is essentially a quantum leap in lubrication. \n\n         Barlow's insistence that intellectual property will soon be worthless is especially puzzling since he is one of the biggest troubadours of the Third Wave information economy. Sometimes he seem to think it's possible for a sector of a market economy to get bigger and bigger even while the connection between work and reward in that sector breaks down. He writes: \"Humanity now seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility or pleasure others may find in their works.\" Far out, man.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the purpose of this passage?", "question_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS_1", "options": ["To talk about how easily data can be stolen nowadays", "To talk about how easily plagiarism occurs nowadays and how data is stolen for profit", "To talk about how tough it is to develop audiences on the internet", "To talk about potential for producing intellectual property in the future"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is the article called \"Dead Head?\"", "question_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS_2", "options": ["Because Grateful Dead fans made a database to pirate all their music and merchandise for cheap", "Because one of the popular plagiarism cites uses Grateful Dead references", "Because the Grateful Dead were caught plagiarizing lyrics for one of their songs", "Because the Grateful Dead allowed fans to record their performances"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Does this author think could they have a future as an intellectual content creator?", "question_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS_3", "options": ["They think they will certainly have a future", "They do not feel confident that they will have a future, but they might", "They do not think they could not have a future", "They are fairly confident that they could have a future"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "If you think this author thinks could they have a future as an intellectual content creator, why do you think they could?", "question_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS_4", "options": ["They think it will be more worth it for people to buy their content than to pirate it as data becomes more widely available", "They think they could get lucky and reach a wide enough audience", "They think their increased time on the internet will inherently boost their profitability", "They could not have a future (so there is not a correct reason for why they could have a future in this field)"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why might access to information be cheaper in the future?", "question_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS_5", "options": ["If a price is low enough, people will feel it is worth it to purchase", "If a price is high enough, people will feel it is worth it to purchase (a specialized demand concept)", "If a price is high enough, no one will bother looking for it", "If a price is low enough, the information contained will be socially devalued"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why will people often be caught in pirating data?", "question_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS_6", "options": ["Few people get caught, but those who do are caught because of their keystroke patterns and search terms", "The easier it is to pirate, the easier it is to get caught", "People almost always get caught anyway", "Few people get caught, but those who do are caught because they are tracked by multiple websites trained to catch them"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are the tones seen in this article?", "question_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS_7", "options": ["Funny and fast-paced", "Reasonable and consistent", "Witty and clever", "Humorous and speculative"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What's the deal with the proposed \"Daily Me\" scenario?", "question_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS_8", "options": ["Folks subscribe to a newspaper that picks out the articles they're most likely to enjoy, at a high cost", "Folks subscribe to some site that provides content for users to enjoy, at a high cost", "Folks subscribe to a newspaper that picks out the articles they're most likely to enjoy, at a low cost", "Folks subscribe to some site that provides content for users to enjoy, at a low cost"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who would most likely be interested in reading this article?", "question_unique_id": "20042_8G925GPS_9", "options": ["Parents of kids who believe their child is planning to plagiarize a paper", "A professional blogger concerned about their property", "Grandparents who only read the newspaper most of the time", "Data scientists curious to see emerging concepts in their field"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20045", "set_unique_id": "20045_VLQK6I7P", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "Speech and Spillover", "year": "1996", "author": "Eugene Volokh", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Speech and Spillover \n\n                         The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest.              \n\n                         By Eugene Volokh              \n\n                         (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25)              \n\n         One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character. \n\n         The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n         But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted. \n\n         This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n         The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n         \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n         \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\" \n\n         \"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n         \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n         \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n         \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n         Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards. \n\n         And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression. \n\n         The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children? \n\n         The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults. \n\n         But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children. \n\n          \n\n            Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes. \n\n         Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n         Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children. \n\n          \n\n            Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted. \n\n         On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed. \n\n         The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n         There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty. \n\n         Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n         The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove. \n\n         Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is one negative effect of allowing spillover?", "question_unique_id": "20045_VLQK6I7P_1", "options": ["Sometimes adults will not be able to access things they should be able to access", "Children and adults alike will suffer equally from reduced restrictions", "Fortunately there aren't really negative effects of allowing spillover (only negative effects of preventing it)", "Sometimes children will be exposed to things that they should not be exposed to"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the best proposed solution to spillover as an issue?", "question_unique_id": "20045_VLQK6I7P_2", "options": ["Banning sites from posting most types of explicit content unless they have a specific license to do so", "Banning children from using certain sites", "Making sites label the type of material so computer software can sift through it", "Making sites lock children out of explicit material"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What are the problems with sexually explicit material in murals, according to the author?", "question_unique_id": "20045_VLQK6I7P_3", "options": ["Artists feel limited by the government as they often want to paint nude people in public murals", "Adults are able to shield their children from seeing these murals, but that requires effort that adults are not always able to expend", "No one really wants to see sexually explicit material in murals anyway, so there isn't really a problem", "Children are able to see these murals if they're in public, but it isn't the best idea for them to have access to them in the first place"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are the problems with sexually explicit material on the internet, according to the author?", "question_unique_id": "20045_VLQK6I7P_4", "options": ["They can be accessed by users in many cases, so children are potentially able to stumble upon them", "They are seldom labeled above \"G-rating\" beforehand so children can easily access them and not realize it", "There is not enough of an internet distinction between sexually explicit material that is appropriate for adults and borderline cases that are okay for kids to view (like statues of Greek figures, which many adults think is okay because it's art)", "They are behind enough walls and sites that they can sometimes be inaccessible to adults when adults should be able to access them"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a conclusion you could draw from this article?", "question_unique_id": "20045_VLQK6I7P_5", "options": ["The spillover problem has no clear solution", "The spillover problem has a few potential solutions but none are completely accepted", "The spillover problem is already solved legally, this article informs the reader about how the problem has been solved", "The spillover problem has a few, reasonable solutions that could be easily employed"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who is most likely to read this article?", "question_unique_id": "20045_VLQK6I7P_6", "options": ["A kid studying controversial laws in history class", "A law school student studying modern ethical issues", "A computer science professor who plans to discuss privacy laws and when it's ok to reduce user privacy", "A parent concerned for the safety of their child who often goes on the internet"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the overall tone of this article?", "question_unique_id": "20045_VLQK6I7P_7", "options": ["Exclamatory", "Informative", "Persuasive", "Disapproving"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20047", "set_unique_id": "20047_ULK48CU1", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Norplant Option", "year": "1996", "author": "Stuart Taylor Jr.", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Norplant Option \n\n         Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n         This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm. \n\n         An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n          But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture. \n\n         The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n          Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs. \n\n         And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n         Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year. \n\n          In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n         The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof. \n\n          Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n         How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n          B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.              \n\n         To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery. \n\n         In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n         \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\" \n\n         This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n          G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.              \n\n         A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n          N orplant itself may be unhealthy.              \n\n         The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant. \n\n         Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n         There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n          I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.              \n\n         Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n                         Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.              \n\n         The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n          T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.              \n\n         A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy. \n\n         Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n          And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies. \n\n         Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the purpose of the article?", "question_unique_id": "20047_ULK48CU1_1", "options": ["To advertise for a new form of female contraception", "To advertise that a form of male contraception be distributed and encouraged by the government", "To advertise that a form of female contraception be distributed and encouraged by the government", "To advertise for a new form of male contraception"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why might Norplant be better than other forms of birth control?", "question_unique_id": "20047_ULK48CU1_2", "options": ["It's more effective than many other birth control methods", "It is less expensive to administer (that is the largest factor at play)", "It's safer to administer than other birth control methods", "It is not reversible for a long time, so it truly prevents pregnancy for an extended time period"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the general structure of the article?", "question_unique_id": "20047_ULK48CU1_3", "options": ["The author describes Norplant and why it may have some benefits, but that overall it isn't the safest option to choose", "The author describes the history and value of a Norplant program and explains responses to common objections", "The author lists the great qualities of Norplant and describes each benefit", "The author lists the pros and cons of Norplant and describes each in detail"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Based on the text, who might the author expect to be a Norplant user?", "question_unique_id": "20047_ULK48CU1_4", "options": ["A little girl", "A man in his 20s", "A teenage boy", "A teenage girl"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the proposed benefit of the Norplant program?", "question_unique_id": "20047_ULK48CU1_5", "options": ["Participants receive free birth control and thirty dollars a month", "Participants receive permanently free birth control", "Participants receive free birth control and one thousand dollars plus thirty dollars a month for continued use", "Participants receive free birth control and one thousand dollars"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is the Norplant device linked to race in this article?", "question_unique_id": "20047_ULK48CU1_6", "options": ["People worry that Norplant is a means to primarily control black men", "People worry that Norplant is a means to primarily control white men", "People worry that Norplant is a means to primarily control black women", "People worry that Norplant is a means to primarily control hispanic women"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is a correct comparison between vasectomies and Norplant use?", "question_unique_id": "20047_ULK48CU1_7", "options": ["Both are equally stigmatized methods of contraception", "Neither is fully reversible", "Only one of the two is fully reversible", "Both take equal amounts of time in the operating room"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following was not a potential objection to Norplant?", "question_unique_id": "20047_ULK48CU1_8", "options": ["It might be a sexist act to expect women to take contraception when men often don't.", "Health damage potential in the long-run.", "Parents have an obligation to talk to their kids about this stuff, not the school/government.", "Norplant takes up a lot of your time for the initial procedure."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20039", "set_unique_id": "20039_9CBSB0TG", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "What So Different About Cyberspace?", "year": "2000", "author": "Richard Epstein", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "What So Different About Cyberspace?              \n\n         It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere. \n\n         I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right on to say that there are two ways in which to reduce the theft of car radios (Page 90), one of them is to increase the punishment for theft, and the other is to render them useless once they are taken out of the car by someone who does not know the code (old-fashioned sense) for their release. Here I might add that the second remedy is, in conventional terms, a better one that the first. The higher penalties will have multiple effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite low if the sanction for stealing radios were life imprisonment for first-time offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should work well in cyberspace to avoid similar problems. \n\n         So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace. \n\n         So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n         Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes. \n\n         In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out the guidelines to deal with conflicts-of-interest regulations that allow most people to participate in both. I see no reason why that cannot happen in cyberspace as well. Those people who wish to set up commercial portals through which others must come do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up new territory. The Net is not some single homogenous object that admits to only a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it. \n\n         That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described. \n\n         These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals. \n\n         That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace. \n\n         Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86). \n\n         So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space. \n\n         I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What do you think is the educational background of the author?", "question_unique_id": "20039_9CBSB0TG_1", "options": ["Has a PhD in Computer Science", "Has a MBA", "Has a PhD in Philosophy", "Has a PhD in Psychology"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the author's main point?", "question_unique_id": "20039_9CBSB0TG_2", "options": ["To explain the conclusions that follow from their views and Larry's", "To explain the political advancements that follow from their views and Larry's", "To explain the differences between their views and Larry's", "To explain the similarities between their views and Larry's"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are some of the philosophical and political ideas discussed in the article?", "question_unique_id": "20039_9CBSB0TG_3", "options": ["Libertarianism and Capitalism", "Conservatism and Utilitarianism", "Liberalism and Libertarianism", "Utilitarianism and Progressivism"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who do you think would most enjoy reading this article?", "question_unique_id": "20039_9CBSB0TG_4", "options": ["An undergrad studying computer science", "a PhD candidate studying cyberspace pathways", "An undergrad studying political science", "A high schooler studying philosophy"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where do you think this article might be published?", "question_unique_id": "20039_9CBSB0TG_5", "options": ["A history textbook for high schoolers", "A technology seminar for adults learning to code", "A political magazine", "A coding-themed magazine"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the tone of this article?", "question_unique_id": "20039_9CBSB0TG_6", "options": ["Argumentative", "Persuasive", "Methodical", "Bold"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What institutions does the author align themself with, or at least provide evidence for being closely intertwined with?", "question_unique_id": "20039_9CBSB0TG_7", "options": ["Political organizations focused on cyberspace", "High school educational system and how they teach technology to students", "Lobbyists arguing for more internet regulations", "Universities"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How much technological background do you have to have to  understand this article completely?", "question_unique_id": "20039_9CBSB0TG_8", "options": ["At least one semester in political theory", "At least one semester in coding and cyberspace research", "At least a few internet searches about philosophy and coding", "No experience required to fully understand the article"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20023", "set_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "Why You're So Screwed Up", "year": "1999", "author": "Emily Yoffe", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n         Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n         Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n                         BIRTH ORDER              \n\n         Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale? \n\n         According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n         Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't. \n\n         Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n                                            Ease of Use:                 Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\" \n\n                                            Applicability:                 As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n                                            Gandhi Explanation:                 He was the youngest of four. \n\n          \n\n            PERSONALITY              \n\n         Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating? \n\n         Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n         Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n         Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n         Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n         Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives] \n\n         The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\" \n\n         OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n                                            Ease of Use:                 Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate. \n\n                                            Applicability:                 High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n                                            Gandhi Explanation:                 According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n          \n\n            INTELLIGENCE              \n\n         Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth. \n\n         Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths. \n\n         The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence. \n\n         One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\" \n\n                                            Ease of Use:                 Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n                                            Applicability:                 Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n                                            Gandhi Explanation:                 In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence. \n\n                         BLOOD TYPE              \n\n         What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now. \n\n         In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight. \n\n         Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\" \n\n         Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n                                            Ease of Use:                 Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n                                            Applicability:                 Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails. \n\n                                            Gandhi Explanation:                 None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the purpose of the article?", "question_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA_1", "options": ["To analyze personality tests by (qualitatively) how well they seem to work", "To analyze personality tests by their financial success", "To analyze personality tests by their measured efficacy", "To analyze personality tests by their research power"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the structure of the article?", "question_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA_2", "options": ["Proposing the best personality test, then describing how all the others are inferior", "Proposing the worst personality test, then describing how all the others are superior", "Listing the personality tests at the start of the article, then comparing each test quality by quality", "Going through each personality test, then doing a deep dive for the qualities of that test (then moving on)"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which test does the author speak the most negatively about?", "question_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA_3", "options": ["Blood Type", "Birth Order", "Intelligence", "Personality"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which test has the best ease of use?", "question_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA_4", "options": ["Blood Type", "Intelligence", "Personality", "Birth Order"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which test has the best applicability?", "question_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA_5", "options": ["Birth Order", "Personality", "Intelligence", "Blood Type"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which test has the worst ease of use?", "question_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA_6", "options": ["Blood Type", "Personality", "Birth Order", "Intelligence"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which test does the worst job of explaining the Gandhi example?", "question_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA_7", "options": ["Blood Type", "Birth order", "Intelligence", "Personality"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the Intelligence personality metric not align with the education system?", "question_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA_8", "options": ["The education system only helps 4 of the proposed 7 intelligence types", "The education system only helps 3 of the proposed 8 intelligence types", "The education system only helps 4 of the proposed 8 intelligence types", "The education system only helps 2 of the proposed 7 intelligence types"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the tone of this passage?", "question_unique_id": "20023_B2XDCKEA_9", "options": ["Serious", "Cautious", "Informal", "Academic"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20050", "set_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "Temperance Kills", "year": "1998", "author": "Jonathan Rauch", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Temperance Kills \n\n         First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n         Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation. \n\n          One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n         The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble. \n\n         \"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n          Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely. \n\n         But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n          The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.) \n\n         Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n         For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\" \n\n          The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n         And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\" \n\n          Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n         The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\" \n\n          Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing. \n\n         \"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n          \n\n            ENDNOTES              \n\n          \n\n            Note 1              \n\n         By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads: \n\n         GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n                         Back              \n\n          \n\n            Note 2              \n\n         The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.) \n\n         According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n          Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n                         Back              \n\n          \n\n            Note 3              \n\n         Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following: \n\n         Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n         If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n         Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n         --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n         --5 ounces of wine (100 calories) \n\n         --1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n                         Back              \n\n          \n\n            Note 4              \n\n         Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n         If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day). \n\n                         Back              \n\n                         If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Of the following options, which statement does the article claim to be true regarding health claims on packages?", "question_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS_1", "options": ["Alcoholic beverage labels thus far have not been permitted to describe effects of moderation", "Some junk foods and wines are required to describe their link to negative health effects", "Some junk foods and wines are banned from describing their ability to lower cholesterol", "Some alcoholic beverages have labels that describe the effects of moderation"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the tone of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS_2", "options": ["Humorous", "Argumentative", "Conversational", "Academic"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Of the following choices, who might be the most interested in reading the passage?", "question_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS_3", "options": ["An adult in their 50s", "An adult in their 20s", "A health professional", "A college student at a \"Party School\""], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is the passage called \"Temperance Kills\"?", "question_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS_4", "options": ["In highly specified situations consumption of alcohol might provide some health benefits", "Those who drink decent amounts are only actually marginally at a greater risk of some health problems than their sober peers", "Those who don't drink are often on average sadder than their peers who do drink", "Abstaining from alcohol during formative years will decrease the amount of social connections individuals form, especially if they attend college"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What types of references/citations does this article include?", "question_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS_5", "options": ["Labels and quotes from packaging", "Wartime alcohol advertisements", "Statistics on amounts of wine and liquor consumed in the country", "Packaging marketing techniques"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why might someone show this article to a loved one?", "question_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS_6", "options": ["To explain that they don't have to cut out junk food and wine entirely from their diet", "To explain that they don't have to cut alcohol out of their diet", "To explain that there are few benefits of eating excessive amounts of junk food and wine", "To explain that there are few benefits of drinking excessive amounts of alcohol"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the structure of the article?", "question_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS_7", "options": ["From general background info to specifics on health and labels", "From background information to specifics on junk food and wine", "From specific information to a general/broad argument", "From background information to specifics on wine consumption, health, and labels"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "This article makes some kind of claim about consumption. In their claim, do they suggest a correlation between two things or a causation?", "question_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS_8", "options": ["They say there is a correlation between two things but there is not causation", "They say there is a correlation between two things", "They say there is not a correlation but there is causation", "They say there is causation between two things"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How much research is used as supporting evidence in this article?", "question_unique_id": "20050_U5BC6HKS_9", "options": ["Anecdotal quotes and a few statistics", "Primarily anecdotal quotes", "Rules/Regulation quotes and a few statistics", "Only quotes regarding rules and regulations"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20053", "set_unique_id": "20053_G9RDWC6J", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "year": "1997", "author": "Larissa MacFarquhar", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Thank Heaven for Little Girls \n\n           \n\n         Is it tasteless to suggest of JonBenet Ramsey--the cute, blond 6-year-old from Colorado who was strangled to death a few weeks ago--that it is her grisly death, rather than her career as a juvenile beauty queen, that makes her so uncannily resemble a girl in a fairy tale? For while a pageant princess is merely tacky, a murdered pageant princess takes her place in the illustrious line of pretty young girls in what, pace multiculturalists, we might call our collective lore, to meet, or at least be threatened with, a gruesome end. Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, Gretel, Alice--there is an intimate connection in our culture, it would seem, between being a sweet young miss and getting garroted. \n\n         By curious coincidence, this fairy-tale conjunction of appealing nymphets and gory murder is currently the subject of an unusual show at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York: an exhibition of eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went on to write and illustrate a truly amazing, Scheherazadean 15,145-page epic about seven cute prepubescent sisters being tortured by brutish men who like to capture little girls in order to enslave them and torture them and take their clothes off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the Vivian Girls) manage to escape from the men (the Glandelinians) time and time again, but countless less fortunate girl-slaves are spectacularly mutilated and slaughtered along the way. \n\n         Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his life living alone in a rented room in Chicago, earning his living as a janitor in a hospital during the day, going to Mass frequently, and coming home at night to work on his paintings and his writing. He was born in 1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an 11-year weather log, 87 watercolors, 67 pencil drawings, and the tale of the Vivian Girls. \n\n           \n\n         The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse. \n\n          Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing something in a bowl, a girl sitting on a fence, a girl running fearfully away from something, her school bag flying out behind her. Often these repeated images are rendered identically (same colors, no alterations in the pose), and sometimes they even appear next to each other in series of as many as eight. But the effect is not at all proto-Warhol. It's subtler, less programmatic. It's reminiscent, if anything, of those groups of angels or monks or soldiers in medieval manuscripts in which some of the figures are identical to each other, and others only slightly different--but the repetition seems to be employed for the purpose of visual economy, in order not to divert attention from the picture's central theme, rather than to draw attention to repetition or image-making itself. \n\n         Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish): \n\n                         Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives.              \n\n         The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\" \n\n         The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures. \n\n         But while the notion of outsider art has proved an effective marketing concept, it is often an unfortunate interpretive one--outsider artists tend to attract a particularly crude and irritating kind of psycho-biographical analysis. Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, \"The trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\" \n\n          It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.) \n\n         It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit: \n\n                         About noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. ...              \n\n                         [When Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil.              \n\n                         Although it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form.              \n\n         What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Which of these traits best describes Darger's personality (not discussing his work)?", "question_unique_id": "20053_G9RDWC6J_1", "options": ["Outgoing", "None of the three descriptions really apply", "Humorous", "Immodest"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to the article, what is the inspiration of Darger's work?", "question_unique_id": "20053_G9RDWC6J_2", "options": ["His opinions on sexism in America", "His strained relationship with his younger sister", "The inspiration is unknown", "His strained relationship with his mother"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How much recognition did Darger receive throughout his lifetime as he produced his works?", "question_unique_id": "20053_G9RDWC6J_3", "options": ["He was discovered in his elderly years", "He was only able to receive posthumous credit for his work, he never received any attention while alive", "He was discovered during his time at college", "He was discovered at a young age, so he was consistently in the limelight (in the art world)"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the deal with the Vivian Girls? (Which of these is the most accurate description?)", "question_unique_id": "20053_G9RDWC6J_4", "options": ["They're best friends who go on adventures together", "They're sisters who learn from each other in a dystopian world", "They're sisters who avoid certain death together", "They're best friends who escape a dangerous universe to return back to Earth"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Of the following options, who would most likely enjoy reading this article?", "question_unique_id": "20053_G9RDWC6J_5", "options": ["A parent who loves reading Little Red Riding Hood to their child", "A young parent who loves reading Alice in Wonderland to their child", "An educator of young kids (a teacher, tutor, or after-school program supervisor)", "A professor who studies fairy tales"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following is true of Darger's work?", "question_unique_id": "20053_G9RDWC6J_6", "options": ["He produced so much work that it's evident that each piece took him little time", "He only really cared about what his family thought of his work", "His work is not the type of art to hang around one's home", "The vast majority of people looking at it would agree that it is beautiful"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the overall tone of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "20053_G9RDWC6J_7", "options": ["Vivid", "Detached", "Cautioned", "Inquisitive"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is NOT true of Darger as an artist?", "question_unique_id": "20053_G9RDWC6J_8", "options": ["He probably had more time to focus as an artist because he pretty much always lived by himself", "Before he was discovered he consistently held a different job to support himself", "His work is good enough to sell for a decent amount of money", "He was trained by some of the best in his fields (collage-work and cartoon-based art training)"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20052", "set_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Pickup Artists", "year": "1998", "author": "Emily Yoffe", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Pickup Artists \n\n         Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n         1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n         2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n         3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n         4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n         Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford. \n\n         This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist. \n\n         But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\" \n\n          On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n         He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\" \n\n         Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world. \n\n         This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off. \n\n         Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor. \n\n          In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too, DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\" \n\n         The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n         And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\" \n\n         There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar. \n\n          All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\" \n\n         No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer. \n\n         Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is a potential moral to this passage?", "question_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY_1", "options": ["Cheating and womanizing can be overcome when you mature as a person", "Cheating as a famous person will likely secure the attention of the tabloids for an extended period", "Usually for infidelity stories one tabloid will always (usually successfully) try to take point on the story", "Tabloids only focus on infidelity for so long before they pick up on another topic"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the overall structure of the passage?", "question_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY_2", "options": ["An in-depth analysis of Jerry Springer's sex life", "An in-depth analysis of Leo DiCaprio's sex life", "A focus on Clinton and somewhat on Leonardo, followed by some mentions of Springer and Gifford", "An equally in-depth deep dive into 4 men with womanizing scandals"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is not a pickup strategy discussed in this article?", "question_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY_3", "options": ["Asking women how they're feeling about their jobs", "Taking women on planes", "Getting assistants to approach women for them", "The use of a pickup-line"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Did any of the partners of these men forgive them for their infidelity?", "question_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY_4", "options": ["The article shows that all of them did", "The article shows that at least one of them did", "We don't have enough information to tell", "The article shows that none of them did"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Does the article reflect positively about any of the mens' character?", "question_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY_5", "options": ["Honestly most of them seem pretty respectful", "Not really, they all seem pretty terrible to women", "The article describes all of them positively in other areas of their livelihood", "They don't seem that disrespectful, they all at least care about consent"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which man is described as having a very young girlfriend?", "question_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY_6", "options": ["Leonardo", "Bill", "Frank", "Jerry"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which man is described as being particularly talkative in a romantic encounter?", "question_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY_7", "options": ["Leonardo", "Frank", "Jerry", "Bill"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Were all of Clinton's sexual encounters consensual?", "question_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY_8", "options": ["We know that the majority of them were not", "We don't really know at all", "Yes they were", "We know that some of them were not"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the article show that Leonardo DiCaprio and Bill Clinton have in common?", "question_unique_id": "20052_W35FHKFY_9", "options": ["Both like to have sex on planes", "Both like to have ice cream before sex", "Both want to exclusively sleep with much younger women", "Both prefer to have sex in their homes"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20058", "set_unique_id": "20058_S8LETX87", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1007", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Gamer ", "year": "1997", "author": "Joel Achenbach", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Gamer  \n\n         The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n         But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade. \n\n         Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n         \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n         Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them. \n\n         Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon. \n\n         On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us. \n\n          Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n         For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing. \n\n         Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n         The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy. \n\n         Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n          Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time. \n\n         Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n         A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another. \n\n         One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n         The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n         Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n         Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n         Jordan hit another three-pointer. \n\n         Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup. \n\n         Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99. \n\n         \"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room. \n\n          There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?) \n\n         Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd. \n\n         As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n         We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n         \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\" \n\n         Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n          His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n         Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n         He shook his head. \n\n         \"I got a job to do.\" \n\n                         Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the purpose of this article?", "question_unique_id": "20058_S8LETX87_1", "options": ["To describe Scottie Pippen's great gameplay during one game.", "To describe Scottie Pippen's great gameplay during three games.", "To describe Michael Jordan's great gameplay during two games.", "To describe Michael Jordan's great gameplay during one game."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How would you best describe Scottie Pippen's gameplay, based on the article alone?", "question_unique_id": "20058_S8LETX87_2", "options": ["Mostly he's playing a mental game", "He's known to fly under the radar", "Mostly he's playing a physical game", "He's a very consistent point scorer"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How would you best describe Michael Jordan's gameplay, based on the article alone?", "question_unique_id": "20058_S8LETX87_3", "options": ["He's still young, so he's mostly playing a physical game with some mental math as well", "Mostly he's playing a mental game", "Mostly he's playing a physical game", "He's known to fly under the radar"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What were two reasons that this night of the game was particularly interesting?", "question_unique_id": "20058_S8LETX87_4", "options": ["President Bush was in attendance and it was a terrible game for the Bullets", "The Queen of England was in attendance and it was a close game for the Bullets", "President Clinton was in attendance and it was a close game for the Bullets", "President Clinton was in attendance and it was a game where the Bullets dominated"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "If Michael Jordan hadn't scored as many points, what would have happened?", "question_unique_id": "20058_S8LETX87_5", "options": ["The sports writers wouldn't ask for as many quotes from Michael", "They still definitely wouldn't have lost the game", "The Bullets probably would've tied the game", "The sports writers would have written about it ad nauseam"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do we know for a fact the the writers in the stands were NOT considering doing?", "question_unique_id": "20058_S8LETX87_6", "options": ["Adding quotes in the article from the famous guest in attendance", "Writing about the 4th quarter in particular", "Writing about the crowdedness of the stadium", "Adding lines in their article about the famous guest in attendance"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author think cloning a certain player might not render the results people would hope?", "question_unique_id": "20058_S8LETX87_7", "options": ["Cloning is a fairly safe technology, but it doesn't mean the player's clone will be as mentally gifted as the player", "Cloning is still a dangerous technology, it's a funny suggestion but obviously people would need to get that player's consent first and he's unlikely to give it", "Cloning is a fairly safe technology, but it doesn't mean the player's clone will be as physically gifted as the player", "Cloning is still an unstable technology, it's a funny suggestion but it's a dumb one"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who do you think overall had the most fun at this game?", "question_unique_id": "20058_S8LETX87_8", "options": ["Scottie Pippen", "The fans", "The stadium employees who got extra tips", "The referees"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "51380", "set_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Time In the Round", "year": 1961, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "Boys -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; PS", "article": "TIME IN THE ROUND\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPoor Butcher suffered more than any dictator\n \nin history: everybody gave in to him because\n \nhe was so puny and they were so impregnable!\nFrom the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace\n Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at\n the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the\n effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of\n civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up\n with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the\n scene was normal again.\n\n\n The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied\n the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and\n poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his\n grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony\n pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip\n and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff\n tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an\n upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long\n black tongue lolled.\n\n\n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube\n with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone\n called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"\n\n\n A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the\n luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that,\n except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n\n\n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n \"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\nThe gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks\n so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a\n fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and\n one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n\n\n Butch yawned.\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog\n fights, Butch.\"\n\n\n \"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I\n don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else.\n Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you\n talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n\n\n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the\n judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All\n right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people\n were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back\n skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed\n up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He\n squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.\n\n\n \"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't\n break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose.\n Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that\n when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed.\"\n\n\n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice\n acquired from a robot adolescer.\n\n\n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the\n Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than\n anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n\n\n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"\n\n\n The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear\n and was whirling him around hilariously.\n\n\n \"Aw,\nquit\nit, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n\n\n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no\n attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n\n\n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much\n of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\nHe kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded\n scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits\n and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with\n guarded wistfulness.\n\n\n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is\n programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically\n has racial memory.\"\n\n\n \"I mean if you\ncould\nhurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut\n up—I want to think.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n\n\n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he\n said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"\n\n\n \"You think so now,\" Hal told him. \"We all do at your age.\"\n\n\n \"We do not,\" the Butcher retorted. \"I bet\nyou\ndidn't.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,\" the older boy confessed readily. \"All\n newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless.\n They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death\n games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult\n conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why,\n long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people\n kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them\n differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's\n greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all\n violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older.\"\n\n\n \"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a\n sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we\n were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's\n what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to\n problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to\n viruses.\"\n\n\n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n\n\n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"\n\n\n \"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough\n yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons\n why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time\n Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into\n the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't\n change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to\n have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n\n\n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n\n\n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll\n have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to\n keep\ntelling\nme about it, do you?\"\nThe others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly\n on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said\n in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time\n Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n\n\n Butch scowled.\n\n\n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n\n\n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n\n\n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?\"\n\n\n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You\n said so yourself.\"\n\n\n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"\n\n\n \"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n\n\n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging\n pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a\n black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n\n\n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups\n wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up\n or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the\n crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF\n THE GRASS.\n\n\n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the\n others.\n\n\n Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at\n shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a\n wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes\n avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking\n up inquiringly at his master.\n\n\n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy\n ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of\n his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher\n climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during\n which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.\n\n\n Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along\n securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after\n his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few\n minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to\n climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n\n\n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the\n Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he\n was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\nIt was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking\n and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor\n hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would\n be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the\n simplest way to make progress.\n\n\n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were\n among the most prized of toys.\n\n\n \"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n\n\n \"I\nknow\n,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n\n\n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp\n to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god\n realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to\n the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n\n\n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly\n as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're\n viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D.\n time scale. It should be interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A\n red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair\n had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat\n Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the\n grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n\n\n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n\n\n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the\n skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the\n Navies.\"\n\n\n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even\n if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n\n\n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"\n\n\n \"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n\n\n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the\n difference.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their\n feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened\n his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in\n tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he\n thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n\n\n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which\n drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher\n limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his\n battle injury.\nHal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"\n\n\n The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to\n think old.\"\n\n\n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives\n simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for\n it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and\n have some excitement.\"\n\n\n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away\n from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics\n or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take\n care of you.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them,\n contorting his face diabolically.\n\n\n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor.\n Obediently four of them lined up.\n\n\n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a\n deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to\n retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed\n back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound\n issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other\n uninjes moved uneasily.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy\n whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.\n\n\n \"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still\n fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n\n\n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely\n electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back.\n The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n\n\n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n\n\n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then\n bounced him back with equal force.\n\n\n \"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving\n up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell\n how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you\n through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the\n usher.\"\nBut the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and\n then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and\n growled faintly down the corridor.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think\n Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n\n\n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the\n usher as if it weren't there.\n\n\n The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips.\n There were two closely spaced faint\nplops\nand a large green stain\n appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from\n the close-cropped hair of the other.\n\n\n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms\n folded and wasn't looking at them.\n\n\n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the\n main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found\n themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch\n the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their\n levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\nThe darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central\n platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat\n flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the\n bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale\n central glow.\n\n\n But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of\n the boys.\n\n\n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the\n bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage\n appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble,\n a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a\n little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about\n were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond\n beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.\n\n\n Here and there were scattered weapons and armor—long swords glistening\n with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and\n helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean,\n wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\nSometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer\n down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only\n the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder\n and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.\n\n\n \"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric\n cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that\n Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply,\n whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that,\n Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development\n and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers.\n But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion\n microtapes, though.\"\n\n\n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time\n in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived\n by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We\n believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces\n of nature and see into the future.\"\n\n\n Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the\n other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n\n\n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he\n knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light,\n can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of\n the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other\n way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the\n way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n\n\n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's\n a kind of hole through time?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the\n locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two\n points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely\n open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped—and so would\n an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain\n the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n\n\n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light,\n why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n\n\n \"Why—er—you see, Joggy—\"\n\n\n The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way\n for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward\n you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the\n opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked\n away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\nAs if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on\n their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For\n an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing\n silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the\n bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the\n back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on\n the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some\n time.\n\n\n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n\n\n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice\n cut in.\n\n\n Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the\n cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while\n mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n\n\n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n\n\n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble,\n if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward\n us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light\n coming our way disappear, too?\"\n\n\n \"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—\"\n\n\n Once more the interpreter helped him out.\n\n\n \"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of\n one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's\n more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light\n tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the\n light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience.\n But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the\n Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater,\n you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're\n getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no\n isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are\n being made to synthesize them.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs\n are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nlike this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut\n anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n\n\n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n\n\n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n\n\n \"But how\ndid\nyou get in—Butcher?\"\nThe Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it\n certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes\n of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater\n and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but\n then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and\n fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the\n usher.\"\n\n\n \"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You\n tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed\n yours, going through the usher. I really\nhave\nheard it's dangerous\n for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n\n\n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls\n commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew\n to the far end of the cubicle.\n\n\n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on\n the scene in the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Those big dogs—\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble.\n Smells haven't any isotopes and—\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out\n someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n\n\n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's\n all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real\n at all, but a—uh—\"\n\n\n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking\n of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some\n scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and\n that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but\n ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is\n only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used\n for time traveling—just as it may be a similar disability that keeps\n a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real\n man or animal.\n\n\n \"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and\n other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time\n Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should\n prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are\n automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any\n harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible,\n remember) in either direction.\"\n\n\n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n\"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\nThe Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n\n\n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a\n quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a\n qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"\n\n\n There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble\n had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up\n their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back,\n revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be\n looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n\n\n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of\n his seat.\n\n\n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n\n\n \"Hah!\"\n\n\n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of\n smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved\n wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The\n warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the\n sorcerer.\n\n\n \"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n\n\n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone\n forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n\n\n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be\n necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n\n\n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed\n at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he\n must cross-section.\n\n\n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n\n\n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the\n shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n\n\n \"Oh,\nboy\n!\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.\n\n\n \"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.\n\n\n The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step\n forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his\n left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his\n right hand.\n\n\n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\"\n the interpreter enjoined.\n\n\n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the\n Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the\n floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n\n\n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged\n warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between\n their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled.\n Then the warriors began to fan out.\n\n\n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the\n interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"\n\n\n At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a\n levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At\n his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization\n voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey,\n you! You quit that!\"\n\n\n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to\n quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his\n sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range.\n Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.\n\n\n Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring\n at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible\n an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed\n a step.\nThe Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and\n digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n 'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie\n and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\nGrowling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves\n forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first\n encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and\n tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But\n then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the\n face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and\n touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.\n\n\n The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But\n already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had\n the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many\n foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj\n clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n\n\n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the\n warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully.\n That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand\n clenching the levitator above his head.\n\n\n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n\n\n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately,\n a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n\n\n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in\n mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"\n\n\n The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.\n\n\n \"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.\n\n\n \"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always\n playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come\n from those dirty past men.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening\n to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of\n reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute\n licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically\n on his mouth.\n\n\n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We\n came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "To what does \"uninj\" refer?", "question_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S_1", "options": ["The species of dog bred for the new civilization.", "The inability of robotic dogs to rationalize and remember.", "The hyperplastic compound embedded in the bodies of dogs.", "The robotic canines' inability to be physically harmed. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was The Butcher initially prevented from entering the Time Theater?", "question_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S_2", "options": ["He was too young to be allowed on the premises.", "The usher detected his interest in violence.", "He was stopped by an electrical forcefield. ", "The usher did not like his appearance."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why can't people from the Dawn Era exit the Time Bubble supposedly?", "question_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S_3", "options": ["They can, but they can only walk along the vista.", "The dogs prevent them from leaving the Dawn Era, and the uninjes prevent them from entering the new civilization.", "The Bubble is a hole in time that can emit photons, but it cannot be penetrated by humans or any other object. ", "People can only enter the Time Bubble, they cannot exit from it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Butch allowed to stay in the Time Theater after all?", "question_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S_4", "options": ["He snuck into the theater with the two cold-eyed girls.", "The Time Bubble drew him in because of his impulsive mentality.", "He tricked a gullible adult, and the interpreter trusted the man's judgment. ", "He lied to the usher about his age."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the main reason the warriors were able to exit the Time Bubble?", "question_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S_5", "options": ["The Butcher's impetuous nature triggered the Bubble's time-traveling properties.", "The interpreter's safeguards failed.", "The sorcerer conducted a spell and pushed them through the cross-section.", "They were summoned by the Butcher and his sense-memory."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How was the Butcher able to so defeat the past men?", "question_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S_6", "options": ["The past men were confused and horrified by the futuristic weapons and technology and retreated.", "He had trained the uninjes to attack when they felt threatened.", "The repulsor field protected him as he commanded the dogs.", "He was protected by the levitator as the dogs' instincts kicked in."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the primary function of the interpreter?", "question_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S_7", "options": ["To read thoughts, answer questions, and offer security around the Time Bubble.", "To translate languages for the adult and youth audiences that visited the Time Theater.", "To explain the history of past civilizations.", "To usher in audiences who were qualified to enter the Time Theater and eject those who were not qualified."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Brute growling at the entrance of the Time Theater?", "question_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S_8", "options": ["He was reacting to the metal tube the Butcher used to spit fluids at the girls.", "The two chattering girls nearby were bothering him.", "He could sense the over-age teacher spying on them through the hole.", "He could sense the wolflike dogs of the barbaric Dawn Era."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why would Brute and Darter never attack Butch, Joggy, and Hal?", "question_unique_id": "51380_3LBQWD1S_9", "options": ["They were loyal pets and loved their owners.", "They were wired against harming them.", "They were programmed to only attack real dogs.", "The repulsor fields protected Butch, Joggy, and Hal from all harm."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/8/51380//51380-h//51380-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50848", "set_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Soldier Boy", "year": 1958, "author": "Shaara, Michael", "topic": "Space colonies -- Fiction; Science fiction; War stories; Soldiers -- Fiction; PS", "article": "SOLDIER BOY\nBy MICHAEL SHAARA\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless\n \nand outdated—another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.\nIn the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire\n the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace,\n and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him\n again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he\n will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and\n the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.\n—\nScandinavian legend\nThroughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in\n the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy,\n snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were\n all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee\n and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It\n was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed\n in a field near the settlement.\n\n\n There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the\n colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore\n grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had\n convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but\n no one went out to greet them.\n\n\n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship\n and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained\n there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly\n thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or\n just plain orneriness.\n\n\n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n\n\n \"What's he just\nstanding\nthere for?\" another lady said.\n\n\n And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.\n\n\n \"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a\n message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n\n\n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you\n want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n\n\n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes.\n Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel.\n It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He\n was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the\n hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man\n appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n\n\n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n\n\n Dylan turned and nodded.\n\n\n \"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning,\n he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and\n put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A\n moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n\n\n \"Was he\ndrunk\n?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of\nliquor\n?\"\n\n\n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the\n envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We\n haven't much time.\"\n\n\n He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As\n Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but\n could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch\n that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy\n clouds and the cold.\nAfter a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.\nThe first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race\n occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from\n home. Late in the year 2360—the exact date remains unknown—an alien\n force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and\n the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the\n army.\n\n\n When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists,\n thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children,\n were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines,\n even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were\n the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had,\n nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier\n finally stumbled on something.\n\n\n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main\n buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be\n buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow\n a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn\n vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb\n at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The\n detonating wire had been cut.\n\n\n In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of\n earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n\n\n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five\n hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small,\n weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread\n the news, and Man began to fall back.\n\n\n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won\n stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of\n the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died\n in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those\n ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a\n society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only\n defense Earth had.\n\n\n This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth\n with a bottle on his hip.\nAn obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven\n face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and\n listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists\n were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great\n suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,\n between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.\n\n\n Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those\n in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan\n grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake\n it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly\n and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and\n impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set\n up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever\n having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home\n out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But\n at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n\n\n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all\n by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an\n outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.\n He stirred restlessly.\n\n\n By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.\n\n\n \"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our\nhome\n. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been\n paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you\n earned your keep. We demand....\"\n\n\n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped\n that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him\n now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The\n gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.\n\n\n \"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"\n\n\n For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.\n\n\n Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.\n\n\n He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green.\n But he'd been only nineteen when his father died—of a hernia, of a\n crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked\n too long on a heavy planet—and in those days the anti-war conditioning\n out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians\n of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down\n doctor. And ... now he was a captain.\n\n\n He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait\n and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days\n was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell\n with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of\n the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults\n which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the\n core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point:\n it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed\n nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something\n pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.\n\n\n Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"\n\n\n Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no\n iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n\n\n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck—she's all we\n could afford.\"\n\n\n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that\n somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n\n\n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said\n quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can.\n Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n\n\n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around\n him and the scurrying people.\n\n\n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"\n\n\n Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like\n most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\nIt was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was\n silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n \"Maybe an animal?\"\n\n\n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or\n found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think?\n The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one\n is cut too—newly cut.\"\n\n\n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.\n\n\n \"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.\n\n\n He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that\n he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was\n perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n\n\n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How?\n Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n\n\n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there\n would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really\n know.\n\n\n Were they small? Little animals?\n\n\n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable\n brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large\n as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long\n before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly\n shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.\n\n\n He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n\n\n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he\n straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out\n his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last\n time he had fired it. He never had—he never had fired a gun.\nThe snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do\n but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing\n wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until\n there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights\n and the snow.\n\n\n By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.\n\n\n He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"\n\n\n \"But they have a contract!\"\n\n\n The soldier grinned.\n\n\n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n \"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\nDylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien\n cut it.\"\n\n\n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and\n no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no\n unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year\n ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of\n us did it.\"\n\n\n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n\n\n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n\n\n \"Might be.\"\n\n\n \"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if\n one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n\n\n Rush calmly—at least outwardly calmly—lit his pipe. There was a\n strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n\n\n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until\n I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n\n\n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n\n\n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n\n\n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever\n comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"\n\n\n After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like\n a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we\n landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly,\n the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post\n them sentries.\"\n\n\n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to\n say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained\n expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n\n\n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got\n Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"\n\n\n Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n \"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises,\n within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five\n minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"\n\n\n The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. \"Nice day for\n huntin',\" he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering\n his footprints.\nThe Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide\n warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae;\n curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans\n come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He\n saw that they were armed.\nHe pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced\n lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been\n watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware\n of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.\n\n\n That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that\n night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But\nflexibility\n, he reminded himself sternly,\nis the first principle of\n absorption\n, and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection\n reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the\n hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer\n told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and\n that the attack there had probably begun.\n\n\n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay\n quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow,\n thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he\n would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.\n\n\n Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with\n uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was\n distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could\n take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single\n button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling\n of the colonists' ship.\nWhen Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow,\n thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later\n the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three\n had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard\n the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was\n all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered.\n There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He\n checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the\n air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.\n\n\n Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.\n\n\n Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.\n\n\n Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.\n\n\n But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went\n into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might\n be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see\n the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and\n tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n\n\n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was\n a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and\n he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he\n must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a\n mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.\n\n\n They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of\n everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like\n that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the\n coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the\n ship.\n\n\n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see\n a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes.\n Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the\n weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some\n of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and\n were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went\n automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The\n elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep\n themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n\n\n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.\n\n\n Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why was Dylan's ship unable to depart after loading it with the half-naked colonists?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_1", "options": ["He was too drunk to operate the controls.", "The Alien had remotely handicapped its capabilities.", "The added weight of the colonists was too heavy.", "The ship was stuck in the deepening snow and ice."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What finally connected Dylan emotionally to the colonists?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_2", "options": ["The fear of the impending Alien attack and possible death highlighted their shared humanity. ", "Bossio's death helped him realize what was important.", "A woman brought him coffee when he withdrew into the radio shack.", "He was unexpectedly moved by Rossel's death."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was the wire cut?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_3", "options": ["The Alien controlled a colonist via telepathy.", "The viggle chewed the wire to cut it.", "The Alien used special technology operated from the safety of its subterranean hiding place.", "Bossio got drunk and cut the wire himself."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why had Dylan never fired a gun?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_4", "options": ["The army soldiers were not trusted with military equipment due to their lack of sobriety.", "He did not have clearance from his command to do so.", "He had to ask Rossel first.", "After five hundred years of peace, there had never been an occasion for him to do so."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How had Dylan lost his sense of urgency regarding his military duties?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_5", "options": ["He became depressed after drinking too much.", "The death of his father drove him to despair.", "He was tired of evacuating colonies and investigating cut wires.", "He became desensitized after years of inaction and disrespect."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why had Dylan originally joined the army?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_6", "options": ["So that he could spend more time drinking.", "Following the death of his father, he was inspired by the idea of protecting the galactic colonies.", "He wanted to honor his father, who had also fought bravely with the army.", "He had studied military tactics in school."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was the army unable to pinpoint the culprit of the wire cutting?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_7", "options": ["Centuries of peace had exacerbated dislike of the military and consequently dwindled their resources.", "The majority of their soldiers were incapacitated.", "They were too busy delivering important messages between the colonies.", "The majority of their resources were committed to directly defending Earth."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happened to Bossio?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_8", "options": ["He was killed on Planet Three during the Alien assault.", "He had to strip his clothes and remain with the other colonists awaiting rescue.", "He was killed by The Alien buried in its hideout underneath the antenna tree.", "He got too drunk and crashed the ship on his way to Planet Three."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Dylan bitter about Bossio's death?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_9", "options": ["Bossio had been insufficiently trained to handle the mission.", "Bossio was his best friend, and he had not said a proper goodbye.", "Because of his youth and the family he left behind.", "The colonists harbored anti-military sentiment, and yet Bossio risked his life to go save them anyway."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Dylan's attitude towards pioneers?", "question_unique_id": "50848_NIJWA6Q4_10", "options": ["He admired their hard work purging planets of disease, harvesting plants, and carving homes out of rocks.", "He was disgusted by their peace-loving ways.", "He respected their embrace of a peaceful lifestyle, but he did not like the plastic houses they built on their settlements.", "He liked them better than city dwellers, but he mocked the automation with which they established their settlements. "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/4/50848//50848-h//50848-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50868", "set_unique_id": "50868_M9CH5CES", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Highest Mountain", "year": 1953, "author": "Walton, Bryce", "topic": "Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; PS; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN\nBy BRYCE WALTON\n\n\n Illustrated by BOB HAYES\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nFirst one up this tallest summit in the Solar\n \nSystem was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!\nBruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to\n open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd\n sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing\n off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be\n postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of\n human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all,\n but seemed real and alive—except that they were also just parts of a\n last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.\n\n\n \"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening\n till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow,\" Bruce said. He\n smiled without feeling much of anything and added, \"Thanks, Mr. Poe.\"\n\n\n Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into\n Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger\n in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly\n at Bruce.\n\n\n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n\n\n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n\n\n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n\n\n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n \"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you\n think I'd be running to?\"\n\n\n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n\n\n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care\n of that, doesn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the\n revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some\n sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n\n\n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the\n gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain\n didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars\n eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never\n got back to Earth—all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow,\n like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.\n\n\n They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher\n than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The\n entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills\n by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one\n incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it\n had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at\n Earth—or a warning one.\nWith Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship,\nMars V\n, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in\n front of them for the inquest.\n\n\n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs\n stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence.\n His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the\n Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there\n was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.\n\n\n He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he\n wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late.\n They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n\n\n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly\n of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene\n shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in\n his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he\n had been when he woke from them.\n\n\n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know\n you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him.\n Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n\n\n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n\n\n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we\n get back.\"\n\n\n \"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out\n there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n\n\n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again\n to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in\n the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted\n enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior.\n This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too\n much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing\n fellow crew-members!\"\n\n\n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\"\n Bruce said.\n\n\n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n \"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never\n have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can\n find. You don't belong here.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I\n told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part\n of it.\"\n\n\n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you\n backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil\n does Venus—?\"\n\n\n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high\n forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to\n the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly\n educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n\n\n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"\n\n\n Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice\n any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the\n crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One\n of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were\n aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this\n village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings\n there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand\n inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet\n us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The\n village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n\n\n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning\n to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the\n cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n\n\n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking\n about.\"\n\n\n Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the\n most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of\n elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the\n real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you\n think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws\n of the whole Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say\n what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do\n that regardless....\"\n\n\n He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They\n had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The\n psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't\n want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human\n vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was\n kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted\n to open the mouth for in the first place.\n\n\n A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions.\n Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for\n centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism,\n individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question\n of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first.\n So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job\n there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared.\n This was the fifth attempt—\nTerrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and\n when he shot the—\" Bruce hesitated.\n\n\n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n\n\n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to\n sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.\n\n\n \"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke\n me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we\n were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got\n here.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n\n\n Someone laughed.\n\n\n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People\n talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some\n kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n\n\n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n\n\n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of\n some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling\n there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out.\n You're still interested?\"\n\n\n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n\n\n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce\n pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some\n fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me\n from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place—\"\n\n\n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about\n scaling it.\"\n\n\n \"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming\n to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew\n of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a\n precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why?\n Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them?\n Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful\n climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up\n there.\n\n\n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why\n should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The\n challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend\n going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't\n interest me.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up\n straight and rigid.\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying,\n I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was\n shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either\n that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the\n window—something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at\n first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty,\n almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling\n it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in\n my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking—\"\n\n\n His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked\n me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked.\n Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too,\n or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up\n his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran\n after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do\n you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I\n could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more.\n Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it.\n That's the way you think.\"\n\n\n \"What? Explain that remark.\"\n\n\n \"That's the philosophy of conquest—don't take any chances with\n aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill\n everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill\n everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun\n away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe\n that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and\n that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would\n if I had the chance.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small\n wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what\n do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit\n him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"\n\n\n Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n \"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia\n is caused by inner conflict—indecision between the older values and\n our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case\n history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would\n say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why\n he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense\n which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era\n values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings\n of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action?\n Doran must have seen something—\"\n\n\n \"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak\n personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He\nimagined\nhe saw\n something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did\nyou\nsee anything?\"\n\n\n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't\n anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there\n is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything\n else. A shadow maybe—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law\n regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n\n\n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"\n\n\n Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you\n a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from\n you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left\n food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of service?\"\n\n\n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the\n mountain.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n\n\n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the\n others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of\n us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they\n come in.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\nBruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of\n the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them\n disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like\n convicts.\n\n\n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much\n if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative\n prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so\n pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as\n long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n\n\n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were\n climbing.\n\n\n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and\n that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to\n accept a challenge like this!\"\n\n\n At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen\n masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness\n and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I\n can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just\n to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this!\n What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n\n\n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain\n at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't\n seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on\n going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our\n computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this\n high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so\n smooth.\"\n\n\n And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice\n that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other\n four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any\n of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—\"\n\n\n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food\n concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He\n had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to\n take care of the time.\n\n\n From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser\n a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most\n dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether\n we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on\n climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused\n to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled.\n So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning\n anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for\n us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the\n weaklings are.\"\n\n\n Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher.\n Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What\n a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says,\n it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but\n that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can\n see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be—\"\n\n\n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he\n was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long\n time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking\n the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more\n real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.\n\n\n It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but\n Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real\n any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\nThe problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to\n worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence\n was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His\n dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had\n left it, and it was the same—allowing even for the time difference\n necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n\n\n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names:\n Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n\n\n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to\n him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could\n also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense.\n Consistently, they made sense.\n\n\n The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green\n valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing\n their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there\n were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them\n that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n\n\n '\n... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting,\n shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the\n delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love—and all our\n own!—than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known....\n'\n\n\n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the\n dreams.\n\n\n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would\n look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing\n but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.\n\n\n \"If I had a choice,\" he thought, \"I wouldn't ever wake up at all again.\n The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable.\"\n\n\n Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he\n couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would\n die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into\n himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one\n compensation—he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them\n who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way\n across the Cosmos.\n\n\n But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him\n much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He\n could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.\n\n\n \"Bruce—Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure\n to be five hundred thousand feet! It\nis\nimpossible. We keep climbing\n and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is\n going up and up—\"\n\n\n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the\n matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps\n laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it.\n Women don't have real guts.\"\n\n\n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled\n softly at the door.\n\n\n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Bruce—\"\n\n\n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.\n\n\n \"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember\n how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I\n never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't\n matter....\"\n\n\n He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n \"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and\n hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish\n I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that?\n I really love you, after all. After all....\"\nHer voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest\n mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and\n warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What\n are you doing—reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was\n that, Bruce—that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last\n night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\nHe stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the\n mike. He got through to her.\n\n\n \"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling.\n Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n\n\n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she\n looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with\n Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of\n that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her,\n as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren\n rocks.\n\n\"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\nBut down, my dear;\nAnd the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\nWill never seem fresh or clear\nFor thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\nIn the feathery green of the year....'\"\n\n The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound\n of his own voice.\n\n\n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n\n\n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\"\n Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into\n any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our\n destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and\n we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're\n going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the\n top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a\n thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this\n world—the top of\neverything\n. The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"\n\n\n Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or\n other—Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all—and turned into\n crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n\n\n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe\n they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He\n knew they would never come back down.\n\n\n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration\n break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an\n instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film\n negatives.\n\n\n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was\n out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet\n sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there\n was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the\n softly flowing canal water.\n\n\n The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent,\n drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass\n wavered down the wind.\n\n\n He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same,\n but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this\n one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from\n that world into this one of his dreams?\n\n\n The girl—Helene—was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a\n cigarette.\n\n\n He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but\n now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between\n them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown.\n She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at\n because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only\n what was.\n\n\n He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row\n of spaceships—not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd\n relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships\n instead of four.\n\n\n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building,\n and the other buildings. He looked up.\n\n\n There was no mountain.\nFor one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and\n he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now,\n and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it\n again.\n\n\n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through\n that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n\n\n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he\n wasn't quite sure yet.\n\n\n \"Smoke?\" she said.\n\n\n He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the\n lighter back into her pocket.\n\n\n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n\n\n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever\n again, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't\nknow\nthat, but I didn't\nthink\nwe ever would again.\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe\n it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was\n not? That barren icy world without life, or this?\n\n\n \"'\nIs all that we see or seem\n,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"'\nbut\n a dream within a dream?\n'\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still\n don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n\n\n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I\n can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of\n understanding of the human mind—after they've accepted you, and after\n you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers—we can see\n now—it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child\n of chance.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but\n they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live\n decently....\"\n\n\n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and\n smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their\n chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far.\n Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming\n here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It\n won't take so long.\"\n\n\n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene\n walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back\n and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and\n drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.\n\n\n She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the\n mountain had been, or still was—he didn't know.\n\n\n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red,\n naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding\n green.\n\n\n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure\n on his arm stopped him.\n\n\n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the\n third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb\n the mountain—\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the\n pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the\n fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.\n\n\n \"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind.\n I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill\n a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned\n the horror we're capable of from the first ship—the Conquerors,\n the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on\n into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own\n sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable\n of hypnosis—no, that's not really the word, only the closest our\n language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it\n seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to\n the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those\n ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to\n see and feel—but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain,\n was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the\n suggestion of the Martians.\"\n\n\n She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the\n mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by\n instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But\n you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the\n mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no\n Conqueror will ever see.\"\nThey walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When\n they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains,\n actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on\n walking.\n\n\n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that\n there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it,\n either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is\n given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the\n Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had\n to.\"\n\n\n He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.\n\n\n He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that\n other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so\n much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of\n Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently\n flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n\n\n \"You loved her?\"\n\n\n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she\n was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd\n been older when they got her.\"\n\n\n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the\n leaves floating down it.\n\n\n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never\n seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n in the feathery green of the year....'\"\n\n\n He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm\n city. He didn't look back.\n\n\n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet\n I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago.\n Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the\n Martians have the answer to that.\"\n\n\n They entered the city.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why was Terrence unbothered by Bruce's story about the Venusian aborigines? ", "question_unique_id": "50868_M9CH5CES_1", "options": ["Stromberg had diagnosed Bruce with schizophrenia, and therefore his story was not reliable.", "The Venusian aborigines were a threat to the Earth's existence.", "Years of social conditioning to embrace violent conquests had desensitized him to their plight.", "Bruce was psychotic and lived mostly in his own imagination."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the crew of the Mars V die?", "question_unique_id": "50868_M9CH5CES_2", "options": ["They succumbed to the Martian power of suggestion, which made them obsessed with conquering an infinitely tall mountain. ", "Some of the crew developed altitude sickness; this drove them mad, and they began killing each other.", "They were murdered by Bruce in a psychotic episode.", "They froze to death on the high peaks of the mountain."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Marsha forget she loved Bruce?", "question_unique_id": "50868_M9CH5CES_3", "options": ["She had loved him in her youth, and they were much older now.", "The Martians cast a spell over the crew that made them forget their past.", "She had been slowly brainwashed over the years by the mission of the Conqueror Corps.", "Stromberg had hypnotized her."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who was Pietro?", "question_unique_id": "50868_M9CH5CES_4", "options": ["A figment of Bruce's imagination.", "The sole survivor of Mars IV.", "The sole survivor of Mars III.", "A Martian that visited Bruce in his dreams."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Helene, Pietro, Marlene, and Bruce each survive on Mars while the rest of their crew died?", "question_unique_id": "50868_M9CH5CES_5", "options": ["They did not fall prey to the desire to climb and conquer the mountain.", "They shared the same psychic powers that the Martians had.", "They each voluntarily stayed in their shelters and took notes while the rest of the crew ascended the mountain.", "They offered each other support through their dreams."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Terrence manage to survive on the mountain to 600,000 feet and beyond?", "question_unique_id": "50868_M9CH5CES_6", "options": ["His passion for conquest overruled any physical or emotional turmoil he was feeling.", "He killed Anhauser and took his weapon.", "Stromberg had demonstrated powerful psychological techniques for maintaining one's strength.", "He didn't. It was an illusion impressed upon his mind by the Martians."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Bruce's profession?", "question_unique_id": "50868_M9CH5CES_7", "options": ["He was a member of the inquisition, cast out after murdering Doran.", "He took mission notes for the crew of the Mars V.", "He was a member of the Conqueror Corps, tasked with overtaking planets.", "He was a poet."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Bruce, Marsha, and Doran discover no life on Mars initially?", "question_unique_id": "50868_M9CH5CES_8", "options": ["All life had been destroyed by previous missions of the Conqueror Corps.", "There was no life there to discover.", "They had been too afraid to scale the mountain.", "The Martians had safely hidden their civilization through hypnotic mind powers."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/6/50868//50868-h//50868-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50449", "set_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Recruit for Andromeda", "year": 1968, "author": "Marlowe, Stephen", "topic": "Science fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Interstellar travel -- Fiction; PS; Interplanetary voyages -- Fiction", "article": "Recruit for Andromeda\nby MILTON LESSER\n\n\n ACE BOOKS, INC.\n\n 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n\n\n RECRUIT FOR ANDROMEDA\n\n\n Copyright 1959, by Ace Books, Inc.\n\n\n All Rights Reserved\n\n\n Printed in U.S.A.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nTOURNAMENT UNDER NIGHTMARE SKIES\n\n\n When Kit Temple was drafted for the Nowhere Journey, he figured that\n he'd left his home, his girl, and the Earth for good. For though those\n called were always promised \"rotation,\" not a man had ever returned\n from that mysterious flight into the unknown.\n\n\n Kit's fellow-draftee Arkalion, the young man with the strange, old-man\n eyes, seemed to know more than he should. So when Kit twisted the tail\n of fate and followed Arkalion to the ends of space and time, he found\n the secret behind \"Nowhere\" and a personal challenge upon which the\n entire future of Earth depended.\nContents\nCHAPTER I\nWhen the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues\n of Center City with green, the riots started.\n\n\n The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the\n park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they\n gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of\n night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility.\n Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their\n uniforms stood for everything objectionable at this time and they might\n be subjected to clubs, stones, taunts, threats, leers—and knives.\n\n\n But Center City, like most communities in United North America,\n had survived the Riots before and would survive them again. On\n past performances, the damage could be estimated, too. Two-hundred\n fifty-seven plate glass windows would be broken, three-hundred twelve\n limbs fractured. Several thousand people would be treated for minor\n bruises and abrasions, Center City would receive half that many damage\n suits. The list had been drawn clearly and accurately; it hardly ever\n deviated.\n\n\n And Center City would meet its quota. With a demonstration of\n reluctance, of course. The healthy approved way to get over social\n trauma once every seven-hundred eighty days.\n\"Shut it off, Kit. Kit, please.\"\n\n\n The telio blared in a cheaply feminine voice, \"Oh, it's a long way\n to nowhere, forever. And your honey's not coming back, never, never,\n never....\" A wailing trumpet represented flight.\n\n\n \"They'll exploit anything, Kit.\"\n\n\n \"It's just a song.\"\n\n\n \"Turn it off, please.\"\n\n\n Christopher Temple turned off the telio, smiling. \"They'll announce the\n names in ten minutes,\" he said, and felt the corners of his mouth draw\n taut.\n\n\n \"Tell me again, Kit,\" Stephanie pleaded. \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"You know I'm twenty-six.\"\n\n\n \"Twenty-six. Yes, twenty-six, so if they don't call you this time,\n you'll be safe. Safe, I can hardly believe it.\"\n\n\n \"Nine minutes,\" said Temple in the darkness. Stephanie had drawn the\n blinds earlier, had dialed for sound-proofing. The screaming in the\n streets came to them as not the faintest whisper. But the song which\n became briefly, masochistically popular every two years and two months\n had spoiled their feeling of seclusion.\n\n\n \"Tell me again, Kit.\"\n\n\n \"What.\"\n\n\n \"You know what.\"\n\n\n He let her come to him, let her hug him fiercely and whimper against\n his chest. He remained passive although it hurt, occasionally stroking\n her hair. He could not assert himself for another—he looked at his\n strap chrono—for another eight minutes. He might regret it, if he did,\n for a lifetime.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Kit.\"\n\n\n \"I'll marry you, Steffy. In eight minutes, less than eight minutes,\n I'll go down and get the license. We'll marry as soon as it's legal.\"\n\n\n \"This is the last time they have a chance for you. I mean, they won't\n change the law?\"\n\n\n Temple shook his head. \"They don't have to. They meet their quota this\n way.\"\n\n\n \"I'm scared.\"\n\n\n \"You and everyone else in North America, Steffy.\"\n\n\n She was trembling against him. \"It's cold for June.\"\n\n\n \"It's warm in here.\" He kissed her moist eyes, her nose, her lips.\n\n\n \"Oh God, Kit. Five minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Five minutes to freedom,\" he said jauntily. He did not feel that way\n at all. Apprehension clutched at his chest with tight, painful fingers,\n almost making it difficult for him to breathe.\n\n\n \"Turn it on, Kit.\"\n\n\n He dialed the telio in time to see the announcer's insincere smile.\n Smile seventeen, Kit thought wryly. Patriotic sacrifice.\n\n\n \"Every seven-hundred eighty days,\" said the announcer, \"two-hundred\n of Center City's young men are selected to serve their country for an\n indeterminate period regulated rigidly by a rotation system.\"\n\n\n \"Liar!\" Stephanie cried. \"No one ever comes back. It's been thirty\n years since the first group and not one of them....\"\n\n\n \"Shh,\" Temple raised a finger to his lips.\n\n\n \"This is the thirteenth call since the inception of what is popularly\n referred to as the Nowhere Journey,\" said the announcer. \"Obviously,\n the two hundred young men from Center City and the thousands from all\n over this hemisphere do not in reality embark on a Journey to Nowhere.\n That is quite meaningless.\"\n\n\n \"Hooray for him,\" Temple laughed.\n\n\n \"I wish he'd get on with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't forever,\" Temple reminded her. \"Not officially.\"\n\n\n \"Officially, my foot. If they never return, they never return. If\n there's a rotation system on paper, but it's never used, that's not a\n rotation system at all. Kit, it's forever.\"\n\n\n \"... to thank the following sponsors for relinquishing their time....\"\n\n\n \"No one would want to sponsor\nthat\n,\" Temple whispered cheerfully.\n\n\n \"Kit,\" said Stephanie, \"I—I suddenly have a hunch we have nothing to\n worry about. They missed you all along and they'll miss you this time,\n too. The last time, and then you'll be too old. That's funny, too old\n at twenty-six. But we'll be free, Kit. Free.\"\n\n\n \"He's starting,\" Temple told her.\n\n\n A large drum filled the entire telio screen. It rotated slowly from\n bottom to top. In twenty seconds, the letter A appeared, followed by\n about a dozen names. Abercrombie, Harold. Abner, Eugene. Adams, Gerald.\n Sorrow in the Abercrombie household. Despair for the Abners. Black\n horror for Adams.\n\n\n The drum rotated.\n\n\n \"They're up to F, Kit.\"\n\n\n Fabian, Gregory G....\n\n\n Names circled the drum slowly, live viscous alphabet soup. Meaningless,\n unless you happened to know them.\n\n\n \"Kit, I knew Thomas Mulvany.\"\n\n\n N, O, P....\n\n\n \"It's hot in here.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you were cold.\"\n\n\n \"I'm suffocating now.\"\n\n\n R, S....\n\n\n \"T!\" Stephanie shrieked as the names began to float slowly up from the\n bottom of the drum.\n\n\n Tabor, Tebbets, Teddley....\n\n\n Temple's mouth felt dry as a ball of cotton. Stephanie laughed\n nervously. Now—or never. Never?\n\n\n Now.\n\n\n Stephanie whimpered despairingly.\n\n\n TEMPLE, CHRISTOPHER.\n\"Sorry I'm late, Mr. Jones.\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Mr. Smith. Hardly. Three minutes late.\"\n\n\n \"I've come in response to your ad.\"\n\n\n \"I know. You look old.\"\n\n\n \"I am over twenty-six. Do you mind?\"\n\n\n \"Not if you don't, Mr. Smith. Let me look at you. Umm, you seem the\n right height, the right build.\"\n\n\n \"I meet the specifications exactly.\"\n\n\n \"Good, Mr. Smith. And your price.\"\n\n\n \"No haggling,\" said Smith. \"I have a price which must be met.\"\n\n\n \"Your price, Mr. Smith?\"\n\n\n \"Ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n The man called Jones coughed nervously. \"That's high.\"\n\n\n \"Very. Take it or leave it.\"\n\n\n \"In cash?\"\n\n\n \"Definitely. Small unmarked bills.\"\n\n\n \"You'd need a moving van!\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll get one.\"\n\n\n \"Ten million dollars,\" said Jones, \"is quite a price. Admittedly, I\n haven't dealt in this sort of traffic before, but—\"\n\n\n \"But nothing. Were your name Jones, really and truly Jones, I might ask\n less.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"You are Jones exactly as much as I am Smith.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Jones gasped again.\n\n\n Smith coughed discreetly. \"But I have one advantage. I know you. You\n don't know me, Mr. Arkalion.\"\n\n\n \"Eh? Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Arkalion. The North American Carpet King. Right?\"\n\n\n \"How did you know?\" the man whose name was not Jones but Arkalion asked\n the man whose name was not Smith but might as well have been.\n\n\n \"When I saw your ad,\" said not-Smith, \"I said to myself, 'now here must\n be a very rich, influential man.' It only remained for me to study a\n series of photographs readily obtainable—I have a fine memory for\n that, Mr. Arkalion—and here you are; here is Arkalion the Carpet King.\"\n\n\n \"What will you do with the ten million dollars?\" demanded Arkalion,\n not minding the loss nearly so much as the ultimate disposition of his\n fortune.\n\n\n \"Why, what does anyone do with ten million dollars? Treasure it. Invest\n it. Spend it.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, what will you do with it if you are going in place of my—\"\n Arkalion bit his tongue.\n\n\n \"Your son, were you saying, Mr. Arkalion? Alaric Arkalion the Third.\n Did you know that I was able to boil my list of men down to thirty when\n I studied their family ties?\"\n\n\n \"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"\n\n\n \"It is forever—as if you dropped out of existence. Alaric is so young.\"\n\n\n \"I have always gambled, Mr. Arkalion. If I do not return in five\n years, you are to put the money in a trust fund for certain designated\n individuals, said fund to be terminated the moment I return. If I come\n back within the five years, you are merely to give the money over to\n me. Is that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I'll want it in writing, of course.\"\n\n\n \"Of course. A plastic surgeon is due here in about ten minutes, Mr.\n Smith, and we can get on with.... But if I don't know your name, how\n can I put it in writing?\"\n\n\n Smith smiled. \"I changed my name to Smith for the occasion. Perfectly\n legal. My name is John X. Smith—now!\"\n\n\n \"That's where you're wrong,\" said Mr. Arkalion as the plastic surgeon\n entered. \"Your name is Alaric Arkalion III—\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n The plastic surgeon skittered around Smith, examining him minutely with\n the casual expertness that comes with experience.\n\n\n \"Have to shorten the cheek bones.\"\n\n\n \"For ten million dollars,\" said Smith, \"you can take the damned things\n out altogether and hang them on your wall.\"\nSophia Androvna Petrovitch made her way downtown through the bustle of\n tired workers and the occasional sprinkling of Comrades. She crushed\n her\nersatz\ncigarette underfoot at number 616 Stalin Avenue, paused\n for the space of five heartbeats at the door, went inside.\n\n\n \"What do you want?\" The man at the desk was myopic but bull-necked.\n\n\n Sophia showed her party card.\n\n\n \"Oh, Comrade. Still, you are a woman.\"\n\n\n \"You're terribly observant, Comrade,\" said Sophia coldly. \"I am here to\n volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"But a woman.\"\n\n\n \"There is nothing in the law which says a woman cannot volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"We don't make women volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"I mean really volunteer, of her own free will.\"\n\n\n \"Her—own—free will?\" The bull-necked man removed his spectacles,\n scratched his balding head with the ear-pieces. \"You mean volunteer\n without—\"\n\n\n \"Without coercion. I want to volunteer. I am here to volunteer. I want\n to sign on for the next Stalintrek.\"\n\n\n \"Stalintrek, a woman?\"\n\n\n \"That is what I said.\"\n\n\n \"We don't force women to volunteer.\" The man scratched some more.\n\n\n \"Oh, really,\" said Sophia. \"This is 1992, not mid-century, Comrade. Did\n not Stalin say, 'Woman was created to share the glorious destiny of\n Mother Russia with her mate?'\" Sophia created the quote randomly.\n\n\n \"Yes, if Stalin said—\"\n\n\n \"He did.\"\n\n\n \"Still, I do not recall—\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Sophia cried. \"Stalin dead these thirty-nine years and you\n don't recall his speeches? What is your name, Comrade?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Comrade. Now that you remind me, I remember.\"\n\n\n \"What is your name.\"\n\n\n \"Here, I will give you the volunteer papers to sign. If you pass the\n exams, you will embark on the next Stalintrek, though why a beautiful\n young woman like you—\"\n\n\n \"Shut your mouth and hand me those papers.\"\n\n\n There, sitting behind that desk, was precisely why. Why should she,\n Sophia Androvna Petrovitch, wish to volunteer for the Stalintrek?\n Better to ask why a bird flies south in the winter, one day ahead of\n the first icy gale. Or why a lemming plunges recklessly into the sea\n with his multitudes of fellows, if, indeed, the venture were to turn\n out grimly.\n\n\n But there, behind that desk, was part of the reason. The Comrade. The\n bright sharp Comrade, with his depth of reasoning, his fountain of\n gushing emotions, his worldliness.\nPfooey!\nIt was as if she had been in a cocoon all her life, stifled, starved,\n the cottony inner lining choking her whenever she opened her mouth,\n the leathery outer covering restricting her when she tried to move.\n No one had ever returned from the Stalintrek. She then had to assume\n no one would. Including Sophia Androvna Petrovitch. But then, there\n was nothing she would miss, nothing to which she particularly wanted\n to return. Not the stark, foul streets of Stalingrad, not the workers\n with their vapid faces or the Comrades with their cautious, sweating,\n trembling, fearful non-decisions, not the higher echelon of Comrades,\n more frightened but showing it less, who would love the beauty of\n her breasts and loins but not herself for you never love anything\n but the Stalinimage and Mother Russia herself, not those terrified\n martinet-marionettes who would love the parts of her if she permitted\n but not her or any other person for that matter.\n\n\n Wrong with the Stalintrek was its name alone, a name one associated\n with everything else in Russia for an obvious, post-Stalin reason. But\n everything else about the Stalintrek shrieked mystery and adventure.\n Where did you go? How did you get there? What did you do? Why?\n\n\n A million questions which had kept her awake at night and, if\n she thought about them hard enough, satisfied her deep longing\n for something different. And then one day when stolid Mrs.\n Ivanovna-Rasnikov had said, \"It is a joke, a terrible, terrible joke\n they are taking my husband Fyodor on the Stalintrek when he lacks\n sufficient imagination to go from here to Leningrad or even Tula. Can\n you picture Fyodor on the Stalintrek? Better they should have taken me.\n Better they should have taken his wife.\" That day Sophia could hardly\n contain herself.\n\n\n As a party member she had access to the law and she read it three times\n from start to finish (in her dingy flat by the light of a smoking,\n foul-smelling, soft-wax candle) but could find nothing barring women\n from the Stalintrek.\n\n\n Had Fyodor Rasnikov volunteered? Naturally. Everyone volunteered,\n although when your name was called you had no choice. There had been\n no draft in Russia since the days of the Second War of the People's\n Liberation. Volunteer? What, precisely, did the word mean?\n\n\n She, Sophia Androvna Petrovitch would volunteer, without being told.\n Thus it was she found herself at 616 Stalin Avenue, and thus the\n balding, myopic, bull-necked Comrade thrust the papers across his desk\n at her.\n\n\n She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those\n doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on\n the base of my spine.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.\n\n\n FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this\n as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the\n Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone\n as significant?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not\n thalamic at all.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (Who realizes, thanks to the plastic surgeon, he is\n the youngest looking of all, with red cheeks and peachfuzz whiskers) It\n is a problem of the intellect. Why seven hundred and eighty days?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I read the magazine, too, chief. You think we're all going\n to the planet Mars. How original.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I think.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Mars?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: (Laughing) It's a long way from Mars to City Hall, doc.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mean, through space to Mars?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Exactly, exactly. Quite a coincidence, otherwise.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're telling me.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (Coldly) Would you care to explain it?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Why, sure. You see, Mars is—uh, I don't want to steal your\n thunder, chief. Go ahead.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Once every seven hundred and eighty days Mars and the\n Earth find themselves in the same orbital position with respect to the\n sun. In other words, Mars and Earth are closest then. Were there such a\n thing as space travel, new, costly, not thoroughly tested, they would\n want to make each journey as brief as possible. Hence the seven hundred\n and eighty days.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Not bad, chief. You got most of it.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: No one ever said anything about space travel.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You think we'd broadcast it or something, stupid? It's part\n of a big, important scientific experiment, only we're the hamsters.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Ridiculous. You're forgetting all about the Cold War.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: He thinks we're fighting a war with the Martians. (Laughs)\n Orson Wells stuff, huh?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: With the Russians. The Russians. We developed A bombs.\n They developed A bombs. We came up with the H bomb. So did they. We\n placed a station up in space, a fifth of the way to the moon. So did\n they. Then—nothing more about scientific developments. For over twenty\n years. I ask you, doesn't it seem peculiar?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Peculiar, he says.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Peculiar.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: They better watch out. I'm losing my temper. I get violent\n when I lose my temper.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: See? See how the guards are trembling.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Very funny. Maybe you didn't have a good job or something?\n Maybe you don't care. I care. I had a job with a future. Didn't pay\n much, but a real blue chip future. So they send me to Nowhere.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're not there yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Yeah, but I'm going.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: If only they let you know when. My back is killing me. I'm\n waiting to pull a sick act. Just waiting, that's all.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Go ahead and wait, a lot of good it will do you.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.\n\n\n \"Where are we going, Kit?\"\n\n\n \"Search me. Just driving.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad they let you come out this once. I don't know what they would\n have done to me if they didn't. I had to see you this once. I—\"\n\n\n Temple smiled. He had absented himself without leave. It had been\n difficult enough and he might yet be in a lot of hot water, but it\n would be senseless to worry Stephanie. \"It's just for a few hours,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"Hours. When we want a whole lifetime. Kit. Oh, Kit—why don't we run\n away? Just the two of us, someplace where they'll never find you. I\n could be packed and ready and—\"\n\n\n \"Don't talk like that. We can't.\"\n\n\n \"You want to go where they're sending you. You want to go.\"\n\n\n \"For God's sake, how can you talk like that? I don't want to go\n anyplace, except with you. But we can't run away, Steffy. I've got to\n face it, whatever it is.\"\n\n\n \"No you don't. It's noble to be patriotic, sure. It always was. But\n this is different, Kit. They don't ask for part of your life. Not for\n two years, or three, or a gamble because maybe you won't ever come\n back. They ask for all of you, for the rest of your life, forever, and\n they don't even tell you why. Kit, don't go! We'll hide someplace and\n get married and—\"\n\n\n \"And nothing.\" Temple stopped the ground-jet, climbed out, opened the\n door for Stephanie. \"Don't you see? There's no place to hide. Wherever\n you go, they'd look. You wouldn't want to spend the rest of your life\n running, Steffy. Not with me or anyone else.\"\n\n\n \"I would. I would!\"\n\n\n \"Know what would happen after a few years? We'd hate each other. You'd\n look at me and say 'I wouldn't be hiding like this, except for you. I'm\n young and—'\"\n\n\n \"Kit, that's cruel! I would not.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, you would. Steffy, I—\" A lump rose in his throat. He'd tell her\n goodbye, permanently. He had to do it that way, did not want her to\n wait endlessly and hopelessly for a return that would not materialize.\n \"I didn't get permission to leave, Steffy.\" He hadn't meant to tell her\n that, but suddenly it seemed an easy way to break into goodbye.\n\n\n \"What do you mean? No—you didn't....\"\n\n\n \"I had to see you. What can they do, send me for longer than forever?\"\n\n\n \"Then you do want to run away with me!\"\n\n\n \"Steffy, no. When I leave you tonight, Steffy, it's for good. That's\n it. The last of Kit Temple. Stop thinking about me. I don't exist.\n I—never was.\" It sounded ridiculous, even to him.\n\n\n \"Kit, I love you. I love you. How can I forget you?\"\n\n\n \"It's happened before. It will happen again.\" That hurt, too. He was\n talking about a couple of statistics, not about himself and Stephanie.\n\n\n \"We're different, Kit. I'll love you forever. And—Kit ... I know\n you'll come back to me. I'll wait, Kit. We're different. You'll come\n back.\"\n\n\n \"How many people do you think said\nthat\nbefore?\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to come back, even if you could. You're not thinking of\n us at all. You're thinking of your brother.\"\n\n\n \"You know that isn't true. Sometimes I wonder about Jase, sure. But if\n I thought there was a chance to return—I'm a selfish cuss, Steffy. If\n I thought there was a chance, you know I'd want you all for myself. I'd\n brand you, and that's the truth.\"\n\n\n \"You do love me!\"\n\n\n \"I loved you, Steffy. Kit Temple loved you.\"\n\n\n \"Loved?\"\n\n\n \"Loved. Past tense. When I leave tonight, it's as if I don't exist\n anymore. As if I never existed. It's got to be that way, Steffy. In\n thirty years, no one ever returned.\"\n\n\n \"Including your brother, Jase. So now you want to find him. What do I\n count for? What....\"\n\n\n \"This going wasn't my idea. I wanted to stay with you. I wanted to\n marry you. I can't now. None of it. Forget me, Steffy. Forget you ever\n knew me. Jase said that to our folks before he was taken.\" Almost five\n years before Jason Temple had been selected for the Nowhere Journey.\n He'd been young, though older than his brother Kit. Young, unattached,\n almost cheerful he was. Naturally, they never saw him again.\n\n\n \"Hold me, Kit. I'm sorry ... carrying on like this.\"\n\n\n They had walked some distance from the ground-jet, through scrub\n oak and bramble bushes. They found a clearing, fragrant-scented,\n soft-floored still from last autumn, melodic with the chirping of\n nameless birds. They sat, not talking. Stephanie wore a gay summer\n dress, full-skirted, cut deep beneath the throat. She swayed toward him\n from the waist, nestled her head on his shoulder. He could smell the\n soft, sweet fragrance of her hair, of the skin at the nape of her neck.\n \"If you want to say goodbye ...\" she said.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" he told her.\n\n\n \"If you want to say goodbye....\"\n\n\n Her head rolled against his chest. She turned, cradled herself in his\n arms, smiled up at him, squirmed some more and had her head pillowed on\n his lap. She smiled tremulously, misty-eyed. Her lips parted.\n\n\n He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye,\n not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With\n a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all\n wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to\n be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the\n encampment.\n\n\n This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This\n was\nauf weidersen\n.\n\n\n And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....\n\"I am Alaric Arkalion III,\" said the extremely young-looking man with\n the old, wise eyes.\n\n\n How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The\n rest of him—a boy.\n\n\n \"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"\n\n\n \"Here I am not a billionaire, nor will I ever be one again. A-92-6417,\n a number. On his way to Mars with a bunch of other numbers.\"\n\n\n \"Mars? You sound sure of yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Reasonably. Ah, it is a pleasure to talk with a gentleman. I am\n reasonably certain it will be Mars.\"\n\n\n Temple nodded in agreement. \"That's what the Sunday supplements say,\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"And doubtless you have observed no one denies it.\"\n\n\n \"But what on Earth do we want on Mars?\"\n\n\n \"That in itself is a contradiction,\" laughed Arkalion. \"We'll find out,\n though, Temple.\"\n\n\n They had reached the head of the line, found themselves entering a\n huge, double-decker jet-transport. They found two seats together,\n followed the instructions printed at the head of the aisle by strapping\n themselves in and not smoking. Talking all around them was subdued.\n\n\n \"Contrariness has given way to fear,\" Arkalion observed. \"You should\n have seen them the last few days, waiting around the induction center,\n a two-ton chip on each shoulder. Say, where\nwere\nyou?\"\n\n\n \"I—what do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't see you until last evening. Suddenly, you were here.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me?\"\n\n\n \"But I remember you the first day.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me? Any of the officials?\"\n\n\n \"No. Not that I know of.\"\n\n\n \"Then I was here,\" Temple said, very seriously.\n\n\n Arkalion smiled. \"By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple,\n we'll get along fine.\"\n\n\n Temple said that was swell.\n\n\n \"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time.\"\n\n\n Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward\n the setting sun.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Who was Mr. Jones and what did he want?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_1", "options": ["He was the Carpet King, and he wanted Mr. Smith to replace him in the Nowhere Journey.", "\"Mr. Jones\" was an alias for Alaric Arkalion II, who wanted to hire Mr. Smith to take his son's place in the Nowhere Journey.", "He was actually Alaric Arkalion II, the Carpet King, and he wanted ten million dollars.", "He was Alaric Arkalion III in disguise, and he wanted the plastic surgeon to give him a new face."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who were Gerald Adams, Thomas Mulvany, and Gregory Fabian?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_2", "options": ["They were rioters protesting in United North America against the tournament.", "They were Center City draftees in the Nowhere Journey.", "They were some of Stephanie's friends from Center City.", "They worked as guards to prevent the Nowhere Journey draftees from escaping."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to Arkalion, why was the tournament held every two years and two months?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_3", "options": ["It provided the cheapest opportunity for space travel. ", "Earth and Mars had the least amount of distance between them at this point, making Mars more accessible.", "It was part of the fixed rotation decided by the organizers of the tournament.", "Earth and Mars were the furthest away from the sun every 780 days, making it easier to exit and enter each planet's atmospheres. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Sophia Androvna Petrovitch want to participate in the tournament?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_4", "options": ["She felt a strong sense of patriotism for Mother Russia and duty to the Stalinimage.", "She wanted to prove that women are stronger than men.", "She was tired of her life and excited by the prospect of a great adventure.", "She wanted to find Fyodor Rasnikov."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Stephanie think is Kit's real reason for not running away to marry her?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_5", "options": ["He was young and wanted to remain unattached.", "He had been hurt by women in the past, and he did not want to get hurt again.", "He did not truly love her.", "He wanted to find his brother, Jason."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were Alaric Arkalion III's eyes so unusual?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_6", "options": ["They appeared older than the rest of his features because it was someone else pretending to be Alaric.", "He wanted to appear wiser so that the other tournament participants would trust what he was saying about Mars.", "He wanted to appear older than he was in order to arouse suspicion about his age from the guards.", "He was attempting to disguise the fact that his father was Alaric Arkalion II, the Carpet King."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was Sophia Androvna Petrovitch different from the other Stalintrek volunteers?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_7", "options": ["She was actually volunteering, while the others were forced into it by lottery.", "She was a woman, and women were not allowed to participate according to Stalintrek guidelines.", "She smoked cigarettes, and everyone else preferred to smoke cigars.", "She was not afraid of the bull-necked Comrade responsible for registration at 616 Stalin Avenue."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Arkalion believe that a journey to Mars was the purpose of the Nowhere Journey?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_8", "options": ["His unusual eyes gave him the wisdom to see things that others could not see.", "News about the Russian-North American space race had gone mysteriously silent since the tournament's inception.", "No one had returned from the Journey in the thirty years since it first began. The only logical conclusion was they had gone to outer space.", "Mars was the closest planet to Earth and became even closer every two-and-a-half years."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why would Kit be safe from future drafts if he had not been selected in this year's Nowhere Journey?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_9", "options": ["He planned to run away and marry Stephanie.", "His age would prevent him from qualifying for future lotteries.", "He planned to meet Alaric Arkalion II and receive plastic surgery to hide his identity.", "He planned to marry Stephanie, and married couples are exempt from the lottery system."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the Third Man punch the First Man?", "question_unique_id": "50449_BBBL7S89_10", "options": ["His back was killing him, and so he lashed out.", "First Man had suggested that his illness was fake.", "The First Man suggested he thought the congressman was elected by his vote alone.", "He was tired of First Man heckling the rest of the draftees."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/4/4/50449//50449-h//50449-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51241", "set_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Bridge Crossing", "year": 1968, "author": "Dryfoos, Dave", "topic": "Post-apocalyptic fiction; PS; Short stories; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "Bridge Crossing\nBY DAVE DRYFOOS\n\n\n Illustrated by HARRISON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe knew the city was organized for his\n\n individual defense, for it had been that\n\n way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\nIn 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was\n known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known\n as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n\n\n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it.\n Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.\n\n\n He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"\n\n\n \"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.\n\n\n It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"\n\n\n There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight\n extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands\n touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an\n angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n\n\n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular\n seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n\n\n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n\n\n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped\n out a bayonet.\n\n\n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\nMolly stepped in front of him.\n\n\n \"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.\n\n\n It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off\n the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached\n at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught\n and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another\n harmlessly.\nMeanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another\n casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the\n time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie\n swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces\n of the other to make a whole one.\n\n\n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was\n new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the\n soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed\n him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders\n repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.\n\n\n Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.\n\n\n He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.\n\n\n Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.\n\n\n But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was,\n though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger,\n thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his\n friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were\n things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring\n eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n\n\n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite\n complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light\n on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off,\n an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and\n rustle as they scampered.\n\n\n The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as\n an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even\n in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the\n One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n\n\n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now\n walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of\n how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock\n itself a difference to be hidden.\n\n\n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A\n weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was\n the levering key that opened its door.\nEverything\nwas wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of\n course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to\n move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for\n ventilation.\n\n\n But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry\n out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all\n obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against\n everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even\nhim\nout\n when he was aflame....\n\n\n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling.\n He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the\n street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n\n\n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but\n saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could\n have entered through the iron cover?\n\n\n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.\n\n\n It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"\n\n\n Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight\n with fear of discovery.\n\n\n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper\n was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then.\n They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't\n it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't\n have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and\n rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n\n\n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the\n dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man\n when I came back?\"\n\n\n \"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these\n androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n\n\n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find\n him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the\n manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n\"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n\n\n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see\n me soon enough.\"\n\n\n But she'd see\nhim\n, Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n\n\n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the\n Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll\n think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it\n over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n\n\n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even\n her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there\nwere\na way over the bridge....\n\n\n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be\n alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n\n\n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed\n her—\nif\nnothing happened when she saw him.\n\n\n Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.\n\n\n He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a\n full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he\n looked too long.\n\n\n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of\n fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst\n into sudden laughter.\n\n\n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big,\n strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and\n carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable\n character I have ever known!\"\n\n\n He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath,\n and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.\n\n\n \"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many\n casualties....\n\n\n \"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the\n soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and\n they\ncan't\nleave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll\n be plenty of young men.\"\n\n\n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever\n tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep\n us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our\n tools and things?\"\n\n\n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance.\n But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too\n close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder\n every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.\n\n\n He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"\n\n\n In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.\n\n\n Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"\n\n\n Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"\n\n\n \"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n\n\n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She\n was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can\n with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the\n rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her\n strength.\n\n\n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed\n plainly that he'd given himself away.\n\n\n But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.\n\n\n He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....\n\n\n But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she\n dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved\n steel surface.\n\n\n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the\n ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or\n handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n\n\n Except it wouldn't be\nhis\nsolution. Her death wouldn't prove him to\n his friends.\n\n\n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog\n that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along\n the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve\n steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n\n\n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when\n he'd followed.\n\n\n But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"\n\n\n There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.\n\n\n They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.\n\n\n But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.\n\n\n Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"\n\n\n \"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"\n\n\n She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"\n\n\n She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Who is Molly?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_1", "options": ["Roddie's android mother.", "An android nurse.", "A nurse also responsible for commanding the android soldiers.", "Roddie's human nurse."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was unique about Roddie's appearance according to Ida?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_2", "options": ["He wore a diaper.", "His uncut, blond hair looked like it had been recently burned.", "His hands were filthy.", "His footprints were extremely large."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Roddie initially decide he should kill Ida?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_3", "options": ["In order to ingratiate himself with the android soldiers.", "She had discovered his secret hideout.", "To help rid his city of the Invader horde.", "To demonstrate his worthiness to join the Invaders."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Molly begin singing a kindergarten song to Roddie?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_4", "options": ["She is attempting to distract him from the Invaders destroying the city outside.", "She is trying to help him learn his ABCs.", "She is trying to sing him to sleep.", "She is having a mechanical malfunction."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why doesn't Roddie know what a boat is?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_5", "options": ["The androids had re-programmed his memories to forget everything prior to their saving his life.", "The year is 2349, and boats are a relic from the distant past.", "He had been raised by androids and has never left the city.", "He has never left the apartment where Molly takes care of him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What event causes Roddie to finally come to accept he is actually Man?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_6", "options": ["He and Ida spend the night together in a tower atop the Golden Gate Bridge.", "He crawls along the bridge and feels his mortal body aching as he latches onto the sharp wire.", "Ida makes fun of him for wearing a diaper.", "He feels bad for Ida and decides not to kill her."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Roddie happy when he finally saw Ida after surfacing from his secret hideout?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_7", "options": ["He liked the doeskin dress she wore.", "He found her attractive.", "He was drawn in by her bright, dark, wary eyes, which she hid from him when they met each other's gaze.", "He realized they shared a similar physique, and therefore she would be easier to kill than an android."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why do the Invaders attack the city?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_8", "options": ["They want to take over the city from the androids to make it their home.", "The city used to be their home, and they rely on frequent attacks to gather essential supplies.", "They are trying to capture and imprison Roddie.", "They are trying to eliminate the android species."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Roddie pursue Ida on the suspension cable?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_9", "options": ["He hopes she will tire and fall of the bridge to her death.", "He wants to learn more about the Invaders and their purpose in the city.", "He is attracted to her, and he wants to spend more time with her.", "He realizes allowing her to go free would send the wrong message to the android soldiers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Ida join the Invaders?", "question_unique_id": "51241_UUGNN3K5_10", "options": ["She was eager to take back the city and help her people resettle there.", "She hoped to meet a man wearing a diaper.", "She wanted to attend to those injured in the raids.", "There was a lack of men in her community, so she wanted to go somewhere where there were more."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/2/4/51241//51241-h//51241-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51122", "set_unique_id": "51122_B68EDXQK", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Men in the Walls", "year": 1965, "author": "Tenn, William", "topic": "Science fiction; PS", "article": "THE MEN IN THE WALLS\nBy WILLIAM TENN\n\n\n Illustrated by FINLAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction October 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe world was divided between the Men and the\n \nMonsters—but which were Monsters and which were Men?\nI\n\n\n Mankind consisted of 128 people.\n\n\n The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.\n\n\n He would be free to raise his voice and express his opinions in the\n Councils of Mankind. He could stare at the women whenever he liked,\n for as long as he liked, to approach them even—\n\n\n He found himself wandering to the end of his band's burrow, still\n carrying the spear he was sharpening for his uncle. There, where a\n women's burrow began, several members of the Female Society were\n preparing food stolen from the Monster larder that very day. Each spell\n had to be performed properly, each incantation said just right, or\n it would not be fit to eat. It might even be dangerous. Mankind was\n indeed fortunate: plenty of food, readily available, and women who well\n understood the magical work of preparing it for human consumption.\nAnd such women—such splendid creatures!\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge\n of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of\n hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the\n largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters\n she had had, two of them of maximum size.\n\n\n Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around\n under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for\n she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew\n how. A man could really strut with such a mate.\n\n\n But she was the wife of a band leader and far, far beyond him. Her\n daughter, though, Selma the Soft-Skinned, would probably be flattered\n by his attentions. She still wore her hair in a heavy bun: it would\n be at least a year before the Female Society would consider her an\n initiate and allow her to drape it about her nakedness. No, far too\n young and unimportant for a man on the very verge of warrior status.\n\n\n Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.\n\n\n Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"\n\n\n \"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"\n\n\n \"You lousy little throwback!\" Roy the Runner yelled. He leaped away\n from the rest of the band and into a crouch facing Eric, his spear\n tense in one hand. \"You're asking for a hole in the belly! My woman's\n had two litters off me, two big litters. What would you have given her,\n you dirty singleton?\"\n\n\n \"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.\n\n\n All the tension drained out of him as he recognized the captain of his\n band. He couldn't fight Thomas. His uncle. And the greatest of all men.\n Guiltily, he walked to the niche in the wall where the band's weapons\n were stacked and slid his uncle's spear into its appointed place.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with you, Roy?\" Thomas was asking behind\n him. \"Fighting a duel with an initiate? Where's your band spirit?\n That's all we need these days, to be cut down from six effectives to\n five. Save your spear for Strangers, or—if you feel very brave—for\n Monsters. But don't show a point in our band's burrow if you know\n what's good for you, hear me?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't fighting a duel,\" the Runner mumbled, sheathing his own\n spear. \"The kid got above himself. I was punishing him.\"\n\n\n \"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.\n\n\n \"Isn't it possible—I mean, it is possible, isn't it—that my father\n had some children by another woman? You told me he was one of the best\n thieves we ever had.\"\n\n\n The captain of the band turned to study him, folding his arms across\n his chest so that biceps swelled into greatness and power. They\n glinted in the light of the tiny lantern bound to his forehead, the\n glow lantern that only fully accredited warriors might wear. After a\n while, the older man shook his head and said, very gently:\n\n\n \"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.\n \"Suppose there had been another woman. My father could have had two,\n three, even four litters by different women. Extra-large litters too.\n If we could prove something like that, I wouldn't be a singleton any\n more. I would not be Eric the Only.\"\n\n\n The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"\n\n\n The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. \"First\n category.\nFood.\nWell....\"\n\n\n Eric felt he understood. \"You mean, for someone like me—an Only,\n who's really got to make a name for himself—I ought to announce\n like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second\n category—Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have\n done?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know what your father would have done?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\" Eric demanded eagerly.\n\n\n \"He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing\n these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what\n I want you to announce.\"\n\n\n \"Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third\n category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?\"\n\n\n \"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"\n\n\n \"The\nchief\n?\" Eric felt confused. He was walking up a strange burrow\n now without a glow lamp. \"What's the chief got to do with my Theft?\"\nHis uncle examined both ends of the corridor again. \"Eric, what's the\n most important thing we, or you, or anyone, can do? What is our life\n all about? What are we here for?\"\n\n\n \"That's easy,\" Eric chuckled. \"That's the easiest question there is. A\n child could answer it:\n\n\n \"\nHit back at the Monsters\n,\" he quoted. \"\nDrive them from the planet,\n if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But above all, hit back\n at the Monsters. Make them suffer as they've made us suffer. Make them\n know we're still here, we're still fighting. Hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Hit back at the Monsters. Right. Now how have we been doing that?\"\n\n\n Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.\n\n\n \"Knowhow is—knowhow is—\" he stumbled over the unfamiliar verbal\n terrain. \"Well, it's what our ancestors knew. And what they did with\n it, I guess. Knowhow is what you need before you can make hydrogen\n bombs or economic warfare or guided missiles, any of those really big\n weapons like our ancestors had.\"\n\n\n \"Did those weapons do them any good? Against the Monsters, I mean. Did\n they stop the Monsters?\"\n\n\n Eric looked completely blank for a moment, then brightened. Oh! He knew\n the way now. He knew how to get back to the catechism:\n\n\n \"\nThe suddenness of the attack, the\n—\"\n\n\n \"Stop it!\" his uncle ordered. \"Don't give me any of that garbage!\nThe\n suddenness of the attack, the treachery of the Monsters\n—does it sound\n like an explanation to you? Honestly? If our ancestors were really\n Lords of Creation and had such great weapons, would the Monsters have\n been able to conquer them? I've led my band on dozens of raids, and I\n know the value of a surprise attack; but believe me, boy, it's only\n good for a flash charge and a quick getaway if you're facing a superior\n force. You can knock somebody down when he doesn't expect it. But if he\n really has more than you, he won't\nstay\ndown. Right?\"\n\n\n \"I—I guess so. I wouldn't know.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to\n remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed\n down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the\n first place. And\nthat\nmeans—\" here he turned his head and looked\n directly into Eric's eyes—\"\nthat\nmeans the science of our ancestors\n wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be\n worth one good damn to us!\"\n\n\n Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.\nHis uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd\n finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes\n glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a\n fierce whisper.\n\n\n \"Eric. When I asked you how we've been hitting back at the Monsters,\n you told me what we\nought\nto do. We haven't been\ndoing\na\n single thing to bother them. We don't know how to reconstruct\n the Ancestor-science, we don't have the tools or weapons or\n knowhow—whatever\nthat\nis—but they wouldn't do us a bit of good even\n if we had them. Because they failed once. They failed completely and\n at their best. There's just no point in trying to put them together\n again.\"\n\n\n And now Eric understood. He understood why his uncle had whispered,\n why there had been so much strain in this conversation. Bloodshed was\n involved here, bloodshed and death.\n\n\n \"Uncle Thomas,\" he whispered, in a voice that kept cracking despite\n his efforts to keep it whole and steady, \"how long have you been an\n Alien-Science man? When did you leave Ancestor-Science?\"\n\n\n Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He\n felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but\n both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His\n tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the\n light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move\n instantaneously in any direction.\n\n\n He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead\n lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared\n with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.\n\n\n \"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you damn fool, or you'll finish us both! Of course your\n parents were decent people. How do you think they were killed? Your\n mother was with your father out in Monster territory. Have you ever\n heard of a woman going along with her husband on a Theft? And taking\n her baby with her? Do you think it was an ordinary robbery of the\n Monsters? They were Alien-science people, serving their faith as best\n they could. They died for it.\"\n\n\n Eric looked into his uncle's eyes over the hand that covered the lower\n half of his face.\nAlien-science people ... serving their faith ... do\n you think it was an ordinary robbery ... they died for it!\nHe had never realized before how odd it was that his parents had gone\n to Monster territory together, a man taking his wife and the woman\n taking her baby!\n\n\n As he relaxed, his uncle removed the gagging hand. \"What kind of Theft\n was it that my parents died in?\"\n\n\n Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"\n\n\n \"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.\n\n\n \"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold.\n\n\n On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.\n\n\n Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.\n\n\n \"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"\n\n\n As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"\n\n\n \"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"\n\n\n There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes\n locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind\n at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to\n the women on the other side of the burrow.\n\n\n \"He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for\n proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood.\"\n\n\n The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned\n to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the\n Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared\n him. The women's part.\n\n\n As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.\n\n\n \"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.\n\n\n The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"\n\n\n He could relax. The physical test was over. There would be another one,\n much later, after he had completed his theft successfully; but that\n would be exclusively by men as part of his proud initiation ceremony.\n Under the circumstances, he knew he would be able to go through it\n almost gaily.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the women's physical test was over. That was the important\n thing for now. In sheer reaction, his body gushed forth sweat which\n slid over the bloody cracks in his skin and stung viciously. He felt\n the water pouring down his back and forced himself not to go limp,\n prodded his mind into alertness.\n\n\n \"Did that hurt?\" he was being asked by Rita, the old crone of a\n Record-Keeper. There was a solicitous smile on her forty-year-old face,\n but he knew it was a fake. A woman as old as that no longer felt sorry\n for anybody. She had too many aches and pains and things generally\n wrong with her to worry about other people's troubles.\n\n\n \"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does Eric think it is preferable to be referred to as a boy than a singleton?", "question_unique_id": "51122_B68EDXQK_1", "options": ["Boys with siblings are treated better in the Bands of the Male Society.", "A singleton is viewed as the lowest form of Mankind.", "A singleton is an only child, which cannot be changed. A boy, however, eventually grows up.", "A boy with brothers has a chance to enter manhood sooner."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Mankind revert to a more primitive state?", "question_unique_id": "51122_B68EDXQK_2", "options": ["Their obsession with Ancestor-Science held them back from making necessary advancements.", "Franklin the Father of Many Thieves structured this new society so that he would be its focal point and he could control all of Mankind easier.", "They were destroyed by Alien-Science.", "They were driven to near-extinction by the Monsters and had lost all of their scientific advancements."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Eric get into an argument with Roy the Runner?", "question_unique_id": "51122_B68EDXQK_3", "options": ["Roy insults him for being an only child, and Eric suggests Roy's wife sleeps around.", "He is nervous before the council meeting and is looking to let out some anxiety and aggression. ", "Roy attacks Eric because he slept with his wife.", "Roy suggests Eric's mother had slept with several men in the Bands of the Male Society."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Eric's perception of his father change throughout the story?", "question_unique_id": "51122_B68EDXQK_4", "options": ["At the beginning of the story, he loves the memory of his father and is proud of his legacy in the community. At the end of the story, he hates his father.", "He did not respect his father's decision to bring his wife and child into battle against the Monsters at first, but later he understood his father's noble purpose.", "He initially viewed his father as a champion of the Ancestor-Science, a hero in his community. He develops conflicted feelings after learning his father was actually a devotee of Alien-Science.", "He had always thought his father only had one child, but, after speaking with Thomas the Trap-Smasher, he realizes he probably had several other children."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Thomas the Trap-Smasher suggest Franklin the Father of Many Thieves is hiding?", "question_unique_id": "51122_B68EDXQK_5", "options": ["The fact that the Alien-Science could effectively defeat the Monsters.", "The fact that he is just an ordinary man and not, in fact, a great warrior.", "The fact that he has fathered the majority of the children in Mankind.", "The fact that he is the true father of Eric the Only."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Sara the Sickness-Healer's test important?", "question_unique_id": "51122_B68EDXQK_6", "options": ["It demonstrated Eric's qualifications to proceed in the manhood test.", "It allowed him to seek sponsorship for manhood.", "It showed that Eric was not ready for his Theft.", "It gave her the opportunity to mock him for being a singleton."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Eric prefer Harriet the History-Teller over Sara the Sickness-Healer's daughter?", "question_unique_id": "51122_B68EDXQK_7", "options": ["In the future, Harriet would have great status in the community; Selma was still a youth and lacked prestige.", "Harriet reminded him of his father, who also had terrible luck.", "He wanted Harriet to use her skills as History-Teller to one day tell his story.", "Harriet had flowing red hair, which he preferred over Selma's bun-wrapped hair."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who or what guides Eric and the rest of Mankind through life?", "question_unique_id": "51122_B68EDXQK_8", "options": ["Franklin the Father of Many Thieves and the Man of Mankind.", "An unending devotion to the Ancestor-Science.", "The sacred catechisms that instruct Mankind in the ways of dealing with the Monsters.", "A commitment to the Bands of Male Society and solemn respect for the Female Society."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/2/51122//51122-h//51122-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51449", "set_unique_id": "51449_LKAS6KYW", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Moral Equivalent", "year": 1952, "author": "Neville, Kris", "topic": "Extrasolar planets -- Fiction; PS; War stories; Science fiction", "article": "MORAL EQUIVALENT\nBy KRIS NEVILLE\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWhy shouldn't a culture mimic another right\n \ndown to the last little detail? Because the\n \nlast detail may be just that—the final one!\nThe planet Lanit II had dwindled to a luminous speck. They were in\n clear space now, at Breakoff Point. Beliakoff held the ship in position\n while Kelly set dials for the jump into the hyperspatial drift opening,\n which deep-space men knew as the Slot.\n\n\n Beliakoff cracked his bony knuckles nervously. \"Now, Johnny,\" he said,\n \"easy this time.\nReal\neasy. Gentle her into it. She's not a new ship.\n She resents being slammed into the Slot.\"\n\n\n \"She'll take it,\" Kelly said, with a boyish grin of almost suicidal\n abandon.\n\n\n \"Maybe she will, but how about us? You sort of creased the Slot getting\n us off Torriang. A little closer and—\"\n\n\n \"I was still getting the touch. You ought to be glad I'm an\n instinctive astrogator.\"\n\n\n He set the last dial with a rapid twirl and reached for the kissoff\n switch.\n\n\n \"You're out two decimal points,\" said Beliakoff, who worried about such\n trifles. \"Enough to ionize us.\"\n\n\n \"I know, I know,\" Kelly grumbled, adjusting the dial. \"I was just\n touching it for luck. Here we go!\"\n\n\n He depressed the kissoff switch. Beliakoff shut his eyes as the ship\n lurched Slotward, wishing that Kyne, their government-inspected,\n college-graduated astrogator was still aboard. Kyne had been an expert\n at the job. But then, three planets back, he had suddenly gone after\n a native stevedore with a micro-edge cleaver, screaming that no dirty\n alien would ever marry\nhis\ndaughter.\n\n\n Kyne had no daughter.\n\n\n Currently he was confined in Azolith, awaiting transportation\n Earthside, to a padded little homy room in the Spaceman's Snug Port.\n\"How about that?\" Kelly asked proudly, once the ship was locked in\n hyperspace. \"Superior intelligence and steel nerves do the trick every\n time.\"\n\n\n \"Poor devil, Kyne,\" Beliakoff sighed.\n\n\n \"A paranoid,\" Kelly diagnosed. \"Did he ever tell you about the plot to\n keep him out of the Luna Military Academy?\"\n\n\n \"He never talked to me much.\"\n\n\n \"That's because you're a cold, distant, unsympathetic type,\" Kelly\n said, with a complacent smile. \"Me, he told everything. He applied to\n Luna every year. Studied all the textbooks on military organization,\n land tactics, sea tactics, space strategy, histories of warfare.\n Crammed his cabin with that junk. Knew it inside out. Fantastic memory!\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't he get in?\"\n\n\n \"Hemophilia. He couldn't pass the physical. He thought they were\n plotting against him. Still, I'm grateful for the chance at a little\n astrogation.\" With the barest hint of a smile, Kelly said, \"I\n understand it's possible to bring a ship sidewise through the Slot at\n Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't try,\" Beliakoff begged, shuddering. \"I knew we should\n have waited for Kyne's replacement at Mala.\"\n\n\n \"We'd still be there, with a cargo of kvash turning sour.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid it would sour anyhow,\" Beliakoff said, with a worrier's\n knack for finding trouble. \"Mala is the slowest loading port this side\n of the Rift. I must admit, however, they didn't do badly this time.\"\n\n\n \"Noticed that, did you?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\n \"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"\n\n\n \"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.\n\n\n \"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" Nob said. \"Extremely sorry. Personally, I sympathize with\n you. But the\nBook of Terran Rank Equivalents\nis quite specific. Seven\n shoulder stars are the most—the absolute most—that any general can\n wear. I absolutely cannot allow you to wear eight.\"\n\n\n \"But you gave Frix seven! And he's just Unit General!\"\n\n\n \"That was before we understood the rules completely. We thought there\n was no limit to the number of stars we could give and Frix was sulky.\n I'm sorry, General, you'll just have to be satisfied with seven.\"\n\n\n \"Take one away from Frix, then.\"\n\n\n \"Can't. He'll resign.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I resign.\"\n\n\n \"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.\n\n\n \"You may be right,\" he agreed. \"I'll try to get some back.\"\n\n\n He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly!\nJust a week ago, Nob had walked into his store and inquired, \"Drak, how\n would you like to be a general?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Drak had confessed honestly. \"What is it and why do we\n need one?\"\n\n\n \"War starting,\" Nob said. \"You've heard of war, haven't you? Earth\n idea,\nvery\nEarthly. I'll explain later how it works. What do you say?\"\n\n\n \"All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?\"\n\n\n \"Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the\n Supreme Command Post.\"\n\n\n But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other\n qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth\n general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet\n tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and\n fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually\n held nails in it when he was out on a repair job.\n\n\n In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact,\n he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars\n war of '82, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt\n was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the\n Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of\n the Fanzani Rebellion.\n\n\n But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"\n\n\n Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Let me see....\" General Drak examined a wall map upon which the\n important enemy cities were circled in red. There were Alis and Dryn,\n Kys and Mos and Dlettre. Drak could think of no reason for leveling one\n more than another. After a moment's thought, he pushed a button on his\n desk.\n\n\n \"Yeah?\" asked a voice over the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Which one, Ingif?\"\n\n\n \"Kys, of course,\" said the cracked voice of his old hardware store\n assistant. \"Fellow over there owes us money and won't pay up.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Ingif.\" Drak turned to the corporal. \"Go to it, soldier!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\n The corporal hurried out.\n\n\n General Drak turned back to the reports on his desk, trying again to\n puzzle out what had happened at Allani. Repulsed Us? Us Repulsed? How\n should it read?\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" Drak said resignedly. \"In the long run, I don't suppose it\n really makes much difference.\"\nMiles away, in no man's land, stood a bunker of reinforced concrete and\n steel. Within the bunker were two men. They sat on opposite sides of\n a plain wooden table and their faces were stern and impassive. Beside\n each man was a pad and pencil. Upon each pad were marks.\n\n\n Upon the table between them was a coin.\n\n\n \"Your toss,\" said the man on the right.\n\n\n The man on the left picked up the coin. \"Call it.\"\n\n\n \"Heads.\"\n\n\n It came up heads.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and\n standing up.\n\n\n The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing.\nKelly reached for the kissoff switch, then hesitated. \"Look, Igor,\" he\n said, \"do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you\n know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?\"\n\n\n \"It is a risk we have to take,\" Beliakoff said stonily.\n\n\n \"But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books?\n Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them.\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" Beliakoff said patiently, \"you know that Mala is a\n semi-restricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control\n conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the\n approved list.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kelly said vaguely. \"Silly sort of rule.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways\n to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can\n find.\"\n\n\n \"Seems like a good idea. We\nhave\ngot a real good culture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,\n with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why\n they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,\n warp it into something harmful.\"\n\n\n \"They'll learn,\" Kelly said.\n\n\n \"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"\n\n\n \"But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on\n it, and know that Earth people do it, and—yeah, I guess they would.\"\n Quickly he set the dials. \"You're right, buddy. We have an absolute\n moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess.\"\n\n\n \"I knew you'd see it that way,\" Beliakoff said approvingly. \"And\n there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hold\n us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean\n Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so.\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say that in the first place?\" Kelly flipped the kissoff\n switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no\n sun or planet in its path.\n\n\n \"Hang on,\" Kelly said, \"we're going where we're going in a great big\n rush!\"\n\n\n \"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.\n\n\n In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.\n\n\n Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.\n\n\n \"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.\n\n\n Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.\n\n\n He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"\n\n\n His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"\n\n\n Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.\n\n\n He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"\n\n\n \"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"\n\n\n \"Haven't we done enough?\" groaned a clothing-store owner.\n\n\n \"It's never enough! In time of war, Earth people give till it\n hurts—then give some more! They know that no sacrifice is too much,\n that nothing counts but the proper prosecution of the war.\"\n\n\n The clothing-store owner nodded vehemently. \"If it's Earthly, it's good\n enough for me. So what can we do about this spy situation?\"\n\n\n \"That is for us to decide here and now,\" Thrang said. \"According to the\n Prime Minister, our dictatorship cannot boast a single act of espionage\n or sabotage done to it since the beginning of the war. The Chief of\n Security is alarmed. It's his job to keep all spies under surveillance.\n Since there are none, his department has lost all morale, which, in\n turn, affects the other departments.\"\n\n\n \"Do we really need spies?\"\n\n\n \"They serve a vital purpose,\" Thrang explained. \"All the books agree\n on this. Spies keep a country alert, on its toes, eternally vigilant.\n Through sabotage, they cut down on arms production, which otherwise\n would grow absurdly large, since it has priority over everything else.\n They supply Security with subjects for Interrogation, Confession,\n Brainwashing and Re-indoctrination. This in turn supplies data for\n the enemy propaganda machine, which in turn supplies material for our\n counter-propaganda machine.\"\nDraxil looked awed. \"I didn't know it was so complicated.\"\n\n\n \"That's the beauty of the Earth War,\" Thrang said. \"Stupendous yet\n delicate complications, completely interrelated. Leave out one\n seemingly unimportant detail and the whole structure collapses.\"\n\n\n \"Those Terrans!\" Draxil said, shaking his head in admiration.\n\n\n \"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.\n\n\n By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.\n\n\n He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned. The Secret Policeman\n had been joined by two tall men in slouch hats and dark glasses. They\n wore badges that said\nStorm Troopers\n.\n\n\n \"You're under arrest,\" said the Secret Policeman.\n\n\n \"Why? What have I done?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, as far as we know,\" said a Storm Trooper. \"Not a single\n solitary thing. That's why we're arresting you.\"\n\n\n \"Arbitrary police powers,\" the Secret Policeman explained. \"Suspension\n of search warrants and habeas corpus. Invasion of privacy. War, you\n know. Come along quietly, sir. You have a special and very important\n part to play in the war effort.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"You have been arbitrarily selected as Martyr,\" said the Secret\n Policeman.\n\n\n Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.\n\n\n Among the proletariat, the prevailing opinion was voiced by Zun, who\n was quoted as saying at a war plant party, \"Well, there ain't nothin'\n in the stores I can buy. But I never made so much money in my life!\"\n\n\n In the universities, professors boned up on the subject in order to fit\n themselves for Chairs of War that were sure to be endowed. All they had\n to do was wait until the recent crop of war profiteers were taxed into\n becoming philanthropists, or driven to it by the sense of guilt that\n the books assured them they would feel.\n\n\n Armies grew. Soldiers learned to paint, salute, curse, appreciate home\n cooking, play poker, and fit themselves in every way for the post-war\n civilian life. They broadened themselves with travel and got a welcome\n vacation from home and hearth.\n\n\n War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\"\n\n\n \"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area.\n\n\n \"Attention, freighter!\" the radio blasted. \"This is the interdictory\n ship\nMoth\n. Heave to and identify yourself.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff answered promptly in the Propendium language. \"Let's see 'em\n unscramble\nthat\n,\" he said to Kelly. They continued their descent.\n\n\n After a while, a voice from the patrol boat said in Propendium,\n \"Attention, freighter! You are entering an interdicted area. Heave to\n at once and prepare to be boarded.\"\n\n\n \"I can't understand your vile North Propendium accent,\" Beliakoff\n bellowed, in a broad South Propendium dialect. \"If you people can't\n speak a man's language, don't clutter up the ether with your ridiculous\n chatter. I know you long-haul trampers and I'll be damned if I'll give\n you any air, water, food, or anything else. If you can't stock that\n stuff like any normal, decent—\"\n\n\n \"This area is interdicted,\" the patrol boat broke in, speaking now with\n a broad South Propendium accent.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Beliakoff grumbled. \"They've got themselves a robot linguist.\"\n\n\n \"—under direct orders from the patrol boat\nMoth\n. Heave to at once,\n freighter, and prepare to be boarded and inspected.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did Nob believe Drak would make a good general?", "question_unique_id": "51449_LKAS6KYW_1", "options": ["His experience managing a hardware store qualified him for the position.", "He had previously held a position with the Supreme Command.", "He felt Drak's style and appearance reminded him of a general.", "He liked that Drak had never heard of a general before."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Thrang arrested, and what happens to him?", "question_unique_id": "51449_LKAS6KYW_2", "options": ["The Secret Policeman informs Thrang he is asserting his power to randomly arrest people without cause. Thrang is taken away and killed.", "He has incited the zipper salesman to betray his country by becoming a spy, so the Secret Police escort him away to his martyrdom.", "The Secret Policeman arrests Thrang using his arbitrary police powers. The Storm Troopers take Thrang to prison.", "The Secret Police and Storm Troopers arrest Thrang for reporting the spy, and they take him away and kill him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did General Drak decide to attack the city of Kys?", "question_unique_id": "51449_LKAS6KYW_3", "options": ["One of his hardware store employees tells him there is a resident there that refuses to pay off his debt to the store.", "He flips a coin, and the heads-up represents attacking Kys.", "He decides completely randomly.", "He pushed a button, which indicated for him which city to destroy."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Nob's position, and why was he selected for it?", "question_unique_id": "51449_LKAS6KYW_4", "options": ["He was Prime Minister of the Dictatorship--a position he was selected for because he looked wicked.", "He was the Power Behind the Throne--a position he had been selected for due to his ability to placate royalty.", "He was Prime Minister of the Dictatorship--a position he was selected for due to his close proximity to the Empress.", "He was the Power Behind the Throne--a position he was selected for thanks to his close friendship with General Drak."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was the Chief of Security worried about the spy situation on Mala?", "question_unique_id": "51449_LKAS6KYW_5", "options": ["There were no spies for him to monitor, and spies were essential in keeping the war machine going.", "His department was losing morale because of their inability to apprehend spies.", "He was concerned about the zipper salesman and his ability to supply data for enemy propaganda.", "There were too many spies for his inexperienced department to handle."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was General Drak confused about the message from Allani?", "question_unique_id": "51449_LKAS6KYW_6", "options": ["He could not determine if the message had been sent from his enemies or allies.", "He could not properly translate the message because he had failed to learn the code.", "The message was contradicted by what he had read in Smogget's \"Leadership.\"", "The code the messenger had used was incorrect."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Jusa dislike her position as Empress?", "question_unique_id": "51449_LKAS6KYW_7", "options": ["Because she is not able to keep the pearls that Nob brings her.", "She is young and inexperienced and feels ill-qualified to take on such a challenging role.", "She didn't appreciate the contradictions she was asked to embody, and she felt her position had cost her friends.", "She didn't dislike it necessarily. She both hated it and loved it because representing the people was a complex position to be in."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to Nob, what function does propaganda play in war?", "question_unique_id": "51449_LKAS6KYW_8", "options": ["It promotes the authority of the dictatorship.", "It creates a further division between the warring parties.", "It provides people with very important facts, which they can then use to make the right decision.", "Propaganda unites people against a specific evil."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/4/4/51449//51449-h//51449-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50905", "set_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Yesterday House", "year": 1951, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "PS; Maine -- Fiction; Science fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction", "article": "Yesterday House\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMeeting someone who's been dead for twenty\n \nyears is shocking enough for anyone with a\n \nbelief in ghosts—worse for one with none!\nI\n\n\n The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so\n near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the\nAnnie\n O.\nits full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the\n sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait\n made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge\n came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the\n sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had\n to reach out his hand.\n\n\n He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the\n line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the\n cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands\n and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed\n in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing\n every man yearns to do once in his lifetime—gone to the farthest\n island out.\n\n\n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he\n dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the\nAnnie O.\nhad\n always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock\n had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the\n quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically,\n paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of\n Earth.\n\n\n The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal\n fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop,\n without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to\n explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but\n after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he\n came out on more rocks—and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the\n farthest one out.\nJoined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide\n would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island\n that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing.\n He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods\n whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the\n underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n\n\n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving\n smoothly enough.\n\n\n To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even\n began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres\n of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his\n trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought\n of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up\n from here in a storm.\n\n\n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced\n through a fringe of trees—and came straight up against an eight-foot\n fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short\n distance with high, heavy shrubbery.\n\n\n Without pausing for surprise—in fact, in his holiday mood, using\n surprise as a goad—he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk\n touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side\n of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher\n branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n\n\n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first\n surprise could really sink in, had another.\nA closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white\n Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the\n length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just\n in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he\n recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole\n scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.\n\n\n Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door\n opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged\n dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the\n Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug\n bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n\n\n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a\n white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height\n waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound\n with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark\n necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked\n under her arm.\n\n\n She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.\n\n\n He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered\n out, \"Are you he?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n\n\n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n\n\n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't\n dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed,\n becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily\n curious.\n\n\n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n \"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a\n quarter of a mile wide.\"\n\n\n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of\n the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"\n\n\n He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen\n Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n\n\n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She\n looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find\n someone here.\"\n\n\n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the\n empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n\n\n She nodded.\n\n\n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n\n\n She shook her head.\n\n\n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n\n\n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other\n things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are\n Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"\n\n\n He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"\n\n\n She shook her head.\n\n\n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform\n her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class\n with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich—he lives over there\n at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He\n grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for\n Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n\n\n The girl looked puzzled.\n\n\n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences,\n won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow.\n When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich—she's a drab sort of\n person—said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of\n course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"\n\n\n \"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as\n if she were saying it for the first time.\n\n\n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"How would I know?\"\n\n\n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this\n strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n\n\n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n\n\n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to\n talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n\n\n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his\n mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are\n very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help\n them.\"\n\n\n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You\n can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n\n\n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or\n a man before, except in movies.\"\n\n\n \"You're joking!\"\n\n\n \"No, it's true.\"\n\n\n \"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,\n\n'Ah, love, let us be true\nTo one another! for the world, which seems\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\nNor certitude—'\"\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n\n\n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd\n imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n\n\n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n\n\n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought—\" He began, then stopped\n because she was blushing.\n\n\n \"How long have you been getting them?\"\n\n\n \"Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new\n ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.\"\n\n\n \"But how does this—person get these boxes to you out here? Does he\n give them to your aunts and do they put them there?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sure.\"\n\n\n \"But how can they get them in winter?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"Look here,\" he said, pouring himself more lemonade, \"how long is it\n since you've been to the mainland?\"\n\n\n \"Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle\n of the war.\"\n\n\n \"What war?\" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.\n\n\n \"The World War, of course. What's the matter?\"\n\n\n Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind\n of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him\n had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders,\n the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his\n nostrils. He could still hear the faint\nchop-chop\nof the waves.\n\n\n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape\n glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to\n a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the\n newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n\n\n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n\n\n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n\n\n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n\n\n Big NRA Parade Planned\n\n\n Balbo Speaks in New York\nSuddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was\n yellow and brittle-edged.\n\n\n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected,\n pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n\n\n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n\n\n \"No, I'm not.\"\n\n\n \"But it's 1953.\"\n\n\n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n\n\n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n\n\n \"The paper's always yellow.\"\n\n\n He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps\n you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite\n feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or\n television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb,\n or—\"\n\n\n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n \"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound\n different here.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n\n\n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers!\n I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"\n\n\n She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to\n pound.\n\n\n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack\n thought he could hear the faint\nchug\nof a motorboat. She pushed open\n the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark\n after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a\n fireplace with brass andirons.\n\n\n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day\n before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n\n\n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm\n around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice\n was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio\n loudspeaker.\n\n\n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her\n gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.\n\n\n \"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that\n you're here.\"\n\n\n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n\n\n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n\n\n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn,\n mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle\n Shylock.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the\n girl growing stranger still.\n\n\n \"You must go before they see you.\"\n\n\n \"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe,\n after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes.\n Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\nHe was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which\n the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n\n\n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the\n risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking\n time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of\n him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked\n together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to\n either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a\n squeak.\n\n\n Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray\n from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he\n stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought\n his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line\n of the\nAnnie O.\n, dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could,\n plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled\n aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n\n\n As soon as the\nAnnie O.\nwas nosing out of the cove into the cross\n waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent\n the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail,\n and plunging ahead.\n\n\n For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind\n and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his\n attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't\n have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion,\n and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n\n\n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how\n tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n\n\n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly\n overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in\n the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair\n that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that\n it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches\n over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to\n the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.\n\n\n But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves\n drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for\n a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n\n\n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross\n his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail,\n watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned\n and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed\n sails.\nII\n\n\n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home—a weathered white cube with\n narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola—was nothing like its\n lavish interior.\n\n\n In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"\n\n\n The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some\n bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall\n cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel,\n opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and\n handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked\n in his breath with surprise.\n\n\n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same\n flat-bosomed dress—flowered rather than white—no bandeau, same beads.\n Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n\n\n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat\n voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident\n in 1933.\"\n\n\n The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them.\n\n\n \"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.\n\n\n \"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.\n\n\n She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"\n\n\n Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"\n\n\n She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold\n line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were\n waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the\n station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the\n gravel of the crossing.\n\n\n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and\n Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage\n that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as\n her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n\n\n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he\n was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In\n fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been\n Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"\n\n\n A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.\n\n\n \"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n\n\n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival,\n Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew\n why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their\n conversation to the professor.\n\n\n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more\n important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if\n it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had\n suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n\n\n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that\n make you you, and me me.\"\n\n\n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n\n\n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could\n control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same\n individual at will.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of\n hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n\n\n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's\n parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the\n mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had\n grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling\n secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say\n nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce\n with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n\n\n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get\n exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n\n\n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some\n special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the\n mother's traits?\"\n\n\n \"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate\n would be bound to develop differently.\"\n\n\n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical\n twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met\n by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman.\n Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox\n terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments\n similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of\n them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n\n\n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering,\n becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's\n sphinx-like face.\n\n\n \"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.\n\n\n Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet—he\n felt behind it, but the key was gone—he hurried down to the\n waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an\n afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n\n\n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the\nAnnie O.\nThere\n was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the\n mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous\n with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n\n\n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky\n spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures\n struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.\n\n\n This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the\n innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd\n brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence\n when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n\n\n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the\n same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n\n\n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to\n speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never\n come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've\n been watching for you all morning.\"\n\n\n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read\n them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the\n headlines.\"\n\n\n When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She\n tried unsuccessfully to speak.\n\n\n \"Listen to me,\" he said. \"You've been the victim of a scheme to make\n you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it's\n 1933 now instead of 1951. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I\n think I know who you really are.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" the girl faltered, \"my aunts tell me it's 1933.\"\n\n\n \"They would.\"\n\n\n \"And there are the papers ... the magazines ... the radio.\"\n\n\n \"The papers are old ones. The radio's faked—some sort of recording. I\n could show you if I could get at it.\"\n\n\n \"\nThese\npapers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let\n them drop on the ground.\n\n\n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n\n\n \"But why would they do it to me?\nWhy?\n\"\n\n\n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker\n than anything.\"\n\n\n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n\n\n \"He?\"\n\n\n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n\n\n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life\n that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with\n me, Mary.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "How did Mrs. Kesserich meet Martin?", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_1", "options": ["She drove the station wagon for the family.", "She was one of his students at the university.", "She had been his lab assistant.", "She was his research assistant at the university."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Mary ask Jack, \"Are you he?\"", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_2", "options": ["She thinks Jack is Mr. Kesserich. ", "She thinks he is the man sending her notes signed \"Your Lover.\"", "She believes Jack is the poet sending her his work in little boxes.", "She believes Jack is a ghost her aunt had warned her about."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Jack surprised when he reaches his island destination?", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_3", "options": ["He discovered an odd squirrel zigzagging around in the grass.", "He discovers another island hidden away behind it.", "He appeared to be the first person to ever land there.", "It is extraordinarily and unusually quiet."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Mr. Kesserich bring up the question of individuality with Jack when he returns home?", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_4", "options": ["He has been researching identical twins.", "He wants to talk about what he learned about hereditary and environment at the conferences.", "He has become obsessed with the idea of essentially cloning a person.", "He had become interested in learning more about individualization in marine worms."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Mary claim to not be lonely in spite of her isolation?", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_5", "options": ["She is frequently visited by ghosts.", "The time spent with her two aunts sustains her.", "The notes and poems Martin sends to her bring excitement to her life.", "She loves spending her days reading the newspapers, listening to the radio, and reading poetry."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why will Martin not have time to discuss Jack's project the day after their discussion about individuality?", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_6", "options": ["He is going to the island to introduce himself to Mary.", "He is going out of the country to continue his research.", "He has to go back to his laboratory to conduct experiments.", "He is leaving town again to continue participation in the conferences."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Jack grateful to run into the man with the lumpy sweater?", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_7", "options": ["He likely saved Jack from being shot at because of his arrival.", "He was lost on his way back from the island, and he followed the man's boat home.", "The man was fishing, and Jack was looking for good waters in which to fish.", "He was glad to see another person after his unnerving encounter with Mary."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Jack visit Mary again after speaking with Mrs. Kesserich?", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_8", "options": ["He wants to bring her newspapers to help her pass the time before Martin's arrival.", "He wants to talk Mary into running away with him.", "He is curious to see a ghost again.", "He wants to convince her of her true identity, rather than the one imposed on her by her aunts and Martin."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Mary learn how to ride a horse?", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_9", "options": ["She wanted to go horseback riding with Martin.", "She wanted to greet Martin on horseback when he returned from a research trip.", "She was trying to get Hani and Hilda to like her.", "She thought it would bring her closer to Martin."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Mary Alice Pope die?", "question_unique_id": "50905_JD67LJ37_10", "options": ["She was hit by a train after losing control of her horse.", "She was bucked off her horse and broke her neck.", "She was trampled by Hilda's horse.", "Hani and Hilda killed her out of jealousy."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/0/50905//50905-h//50905-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50441", "set_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Master of Life and Death", "year": 1975, "author": "Silverberg, Robert", "topic": "Science fiction; Overpopulation -- Fiction; PS", "article": "MASTER\n \nof Life and Death\nby\n\n ROBERT SILVERBERG\n\n\n ACE BOOKS\n\n A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc.\n\n 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n\n\n MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH\n\n\n Copyright 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc.\n\n All Rights Reserved\n\n\n For Antigone—\n\n Who Thinks We're Property\n\n\n Printed in U.S.A.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any\n\n evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nTHE MAN WHO RATIONED BABIES\n\n\n By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion.\n Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room—unless\n prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those\n measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon\n found himself the most hated man in the world.\n\n\n For it was\nhis\njob to tell parents their children were unfit to live;\nhe\nhad to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote\n areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens,\n denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a\n decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies,\n become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly.\n In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\nCAST OF CHARACTERS\nROY WALTON\nHe had to adopt the motto—\nthe ends justify the means\n.\nFITZMAUGHAM\nHis reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet.\nFRED WALTON\nHis ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated\n their size.\nLEE PERCY\nHis specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\nPRIOR\nWith the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\nDR. LAMARRE\nHe died for discovering the secret of immortality.\nContents\nI\nThe offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known\n as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors\n of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of\n twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy\n Walton, Popeek's assistant administrator, had to apologize to himself\n each morning as he entered the hideous place.\n\n\n Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office—on\n the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's—but\n that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant\n building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though\n necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the\n Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n\n\n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that\n trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed\n the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the\n mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and\n office.\n\n\n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last\n century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.\n\n\n His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via\n pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was\n a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director\n FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n\n\n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly\n paper carefully, and read it.\n\n\n It was a despatch from Horrocks, the Popeek agent currently on duty in\n Patagonia. It was dated\n4 June 2232\n, six days before, and after a\n long and rambling prologue in the usual Horrocks manner it went on to\n say,\nPopulation density remains low here: 17.3 per square mile, far\n below optimum. Looks like a prime candidate for equalization.\nWalton agreed. He reached for his voicewrite and said sharply, \"Memo\n from Assistant Administrator Walton, re equalization of ...\" He paused,\n picking a trouble-spot at random, \"... central Belgium. Will the\n section chief in charge of this area please consider the advisability\n of transferring population excess to fertile areas in Patagonia?\n Recommendation: establishment of industries in latter region, to ease\n transition.\"\n\n\n He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light\n shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by\n the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand\n Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director\n FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims,\nIf you want to stay sane, think of\n these people as pawns in a chess game—not as human beings.\nWalton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of\n humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate\n in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so\n long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before\n trouble came.\n\n\n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the\n voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re\n establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff\n of three clever girls to make a précis of each report, eliminating\n irrelevant data.\"\n\n\n It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now,\n with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One\n of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so\n suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n\n\n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of\n the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During\n the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard\n adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n\n\n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed\n the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed.\n\n\n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.\n\n\n \"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n \"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n\n\n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton\n stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he\n can have ten minutes with me at—oh, say, 1300.\"\n\n\n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer\n office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you\n immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n\n\n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in\n the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just\n been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"\n\n\n Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"\n\n\n The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of\n them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this,\n sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in\n here, but he did.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning\n to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n\n\n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can\n you accuse me of—\"\n\n\n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge\n to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n\n\n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n\n\n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton.\n Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"\n\n\n \"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said,\n without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a\n terribly busy man.\"\n\n\n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's\n desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the\n psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have\n had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little\n diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a\n man. \"I hadn't expected to find—I mean that you—\"\n\n\n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping\n for?\"\n\n\n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.\n\n\n Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do\nsomething\nwhen I go home at\n night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No\n more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite\n remarkable.\"\n\n\n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n\n\n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles.\n Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize.\n Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr.\n Prior—and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is.\n Take Yeats, for instance—\"\n\n\n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior\n back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand,\n anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Mr. Walton....\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n\n\n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt\n cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n\n\n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning—potentially tubercular.\n The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you—\"\n\n\n Walton rose. \"\nNo\n,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't\n ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're\n an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n\n\n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the\n Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected—\"\n\n\n \"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for\nother\npeople. So did\n everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly\n he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a\n baby every chance to live.\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nwas tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced\n euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n\n\n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n \"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe\n it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic\n traits.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.\n\n\n \"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.\n\n\n In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been\n ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes\n had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been\n sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves\n ahead of time.\n\n\n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn\n generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal\n progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain,\n consuming precious food?\n\n\n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his\n team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light\n outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about\n Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was\n still growing.\n\n\n Prior's words haunted him.\nI was tubercular ... where would my poems\n be now?\nThe big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been\n tubercular too.\nWhat good are poets?\nhe asked himself savagely.\n\n\n The reply came swiftly:\nWhat good is anything, then?\nKeats,\n Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How\n much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing\n his bookshelf—his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a\n one-room home.\n\n\n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n\n\n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he\n admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it\n would be a criminal act.\n\n\n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.\n\n\n Prior's baby.\n\n\n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there\n are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for\n the next half-hour.\"\nII\nHe stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer\n office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening\n letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into\n the hallway.\n\n\n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the\n lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek\n was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the\n second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a\n single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking\n as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought\n about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.\n\n\n Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child,\n and after that I'll keep within the law.\n\n\n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The\n clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n\n\n \"Roy.\"\n\n\n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise.\n He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood\n there.\n\n\n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n\n\n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly,\n his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy.\n Something the matter?\"\n\n\n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been\n a lot of work lately.\"\n\n\n As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"\n\n\n \"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a\n little, I think.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n\n\n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid\n you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n\n\n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director\n to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed\nFourteen\n; there was\n a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed\ntwenty\n, covering\n the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his\n destination.\n\n\n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to\n see you this morning?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walton said.\n\n\n \"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"\n\n\n The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back,\n revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\nFLOOR 20\nEuthanasia Clinic and Files\nWalton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided\n traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem\n nakedly obvious now.\n\n\n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\"\n he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really\n should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the\n door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\nSome fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And\n damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\nWalton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep\n breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia\n files were kept.\nThe room was large, as rooms went nowadays—thirty by twenty, with deck\n upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a\n bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek\n had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n\n\n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts\n poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.\n\n\n \"Can I help—oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician\n said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless\n and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything\n I can do?\"\n\n\n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n\n\n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically\n backed out of his presence.\nNo doubt I must radiate charisma\n, he thought. Within the building he\n wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's\n protégé and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the\n crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to\n himself.\n\n\n Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip,\n wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.\n\n\n A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic\n circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson\n tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a\n yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n3216847AB1\nPRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New\n York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at\n birth 5lb. 3oz.\nAn elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending\n with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern,\n codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the\n notification typed in curt, impersonal green capital letters at the\n bottom of the card:\nEXAMINED AT N Y EUTH CLINIC 10 JUNE 2332\nEUTHANASIA RECOMMENDED\nHe glanced at his watch: the time was 1026. The boy was probably still\n somewhere in the clinic lab, waiting for the figurative axe to descend.\n\n\n Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered\n Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save\n Philip Prior.\n\n\n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped\n the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n\n\n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the\n gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth,\n and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on\n Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted:\n3f2,\n tubercular-prone\n.\n\n\n He scrapped the guide sheet he had and typed out a message to the\n machine.\nRevision of card number 3216847AB1 follows. Please alter in\n all circuits.\nHe proceeded to retype the child's card, omitting both the fatal symbol\n3f2\nand the notation recommending euthanasia from the new version.\n The machine beeped an acknowledgement. Walton smiled. So far, so good.\n\n\n Then, he requested the boy's file all over again. After the customary\n pause, a card numbered 3216847AB1 dropped out of the slot. He read it.\n\n\n The deletions had been made. As far as the machine was concerned,\n Philip Prior was a normal, healthy baby.\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. 1037. Still twenty-three minutes before this\n morning's haul of unfortunates was put away.\n\n\n Now came the real test: could he pry the baby away from the doctors\n without attracting too much attention to himself in the process?\nFive doctors were bustling back and forth as Walton entered the main\n section of the clinic. There must have been a hundred babies there,\n each in a little pen of its own, and the doctors were humming from one\n to the next, while anxious parents watched from screens above.\n\n\n The Equalization Law provided that every child be presented at its\n local clinic within two weeks of birth, for an examination and a\n certificate. Perhaps one in ten thousand would be denied a\n certificate ... and life.\n\n\n \"Hello, Mr. Walton. What brings you down here?\"\n\n\n Walton smiled affably. \"Just a routine investigation, Doctor. I try to\n keep in touch with every department we have, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. FitzMaugham was down here to look around a little while ago. We're\n really getting a going-over today, Mr. Walton!\"\n\n\n \"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could\n do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his\n protégé to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n\n\n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him\n for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n\n\n \"No—no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly,\n Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in\n the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and\n Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n\n\n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump,\n squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"\n\n\n \"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc,\n two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n\n\n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet.\n Seven in one morning.\"\n\n\n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n\n\n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to\n understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n\n\n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n\n\n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it\n up for you if you like.\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.\n\n\n He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution\n chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at\n his desk when Walton appeared.\n\n\n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He\n was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact\n lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n\n\n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n\n\n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n\n\n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n \"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that\n comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no\n mistake. Got that?\"\n\n\n \"\nMistake?\nBut how—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one\n of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets\n out.\"\nHow glibly I reel this stuff off\n, Walton thought in amazement.\n\n\n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check\n everything from now on.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n\n\n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left\n via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.\n\n\n Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"\n\n\n \"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n\n\n \"I—well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this\n morning. And guess—I mean—well, one of them shouldn't have been sent\n to me!\"\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card\n right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is\n fine.\"\n\n\n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.\n\n\n The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law—the Equalization\n Law—Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal\n as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators,\n or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n\n\n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and\n the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done\n it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position—his life,\n even—for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n\n\n Well, the thing was done.\n\n\n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to\n finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant\n places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's\n activities.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred\n never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And\n Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this\n call. No good at all.\nIII\nRoy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of\n the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built\n closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven,\n next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\"\n with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to\n Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.\n\n\n Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of\n tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to\n take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What\n goes?\"\n\n\n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here\n a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't\n have time.\"\n\n\n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's\n lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n\n\n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n\n\n \"Official business!\"\n\n\n \"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to\n be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was\n curious—unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of\n your conversation with the machine.\"\n\n\n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb.\n He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and\n say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek\n computer outlet is confidential.\"\n\n\n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh,\n Roy?\"\n\n\n \"How much do you know?\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system,\n would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of\n this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton\n doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble—oh, no!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n\n\n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now,\n shall we?\"\n\n\n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though\n the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen\n cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some\n work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n\n\n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n\n\n The screen went dead.\n\n\n Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He\n nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass\n cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\nIdiot!\nhe thought.\nFool!\nHe had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed\n to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew—the old man could see\n through Walton with ease—and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his\n father-substitute.\n\n\n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time,\n but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for\n Fred....\n\n\n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been\n particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now\n almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their\n parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had\n been sent to the public crèche.\n\n\n After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an\n education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private\n secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant\n administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine,\n unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section\n of Popeek, thanks to Roy.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What ultimately convinces Roy to interfere with Phillip Prior?", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_1", "options": ["The poet Lyle Prior visits his office, and Roy is such a big fan of his poetry that he decides to help him.", "He thinks about all the tubercular poets whose work wouldn't have existed under an Equalization Law.", "He convinces himself that interfering just one time would have no effect on the future implementation of the Equalization Law.", "He becomes overwhelmed considering what it would be like to lose a newborn child."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did FitzMaugham become director of the Bureau of Population Equalization? ", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_2", "options": ["He was appointed to that position by the previous director of the Bureau. ", "He was elected to that position after the passage of the Equalization Law. ", "He became the director after fighting for the Equalization Law as a senator.", "He was nominated to the position by the President of the United States."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Fred call Roy after Roy returned from the clinic?", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_3", "options": ["He wanted to chastise him for visiting the clinic without stopping by to say hello.", "He wanted to warn Roy that FitzMaugham knew about his plot to save Phillip Prior.", "Fred had discovered Roy's tampering by reading through his computer's history.", "Fred called Roy to warn him that he would be reporting him for violating the Equalization Law."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Roy nervous during his lift ride with FitzMaugham?", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_4", "options": ["He was terrified of lift rides.", "FitzMaugham saw Roy exit on the 20th floor, so Roy was worried he would figure out his plan.", "He was dealing with an internal conflict about whether or not to follow through on his plan to save Phillip.", "FitzMaugham had generously given him his job, and he would become his right-hand man, so he felt a lot of pressure any time he was in his presence."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Roy redecorate his office?", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_5", "options": ["He wanted to create a space where he felt safe from the judgement of the general public.", "He strongly disliked the architectural style of the Popeek building.", "He wanted to install some iridescent chrome trim along his walls and some sash windows.", "He preferred the Cullen Building style as opposed to the neo-Victorian style of the Popeek building."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What were the different strategies Popeek employed to achieve population equalization?", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_6", "options": ["Their approach was two-fold: Resettlement and euthanasia. ", "Their approach was three-fold: Happysleep, relocation, and birth control. ", "Their approach was two-fold: Euthanasia and contraceptive.", "Their approach was three-fold: Resettlement, Happysleep, and contraceptive."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was the stack of paperwork in Roy's office so high?", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_7", "options": ["The Bureau was newly formed, and the global population continued to rapidly increase.", "Roy was procrastinating because the work of ordering mass euthanasia was overwhelming him.", "He harbored a personal dislike for paperwork as he preferred to handle more big-picture situations.", "The Bureau was short-staffed and under-budgeted."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Roy so worried about his decision to save Phillip?", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_8", "options": ["He felt it might snowball and eventually lead to the collapse of the Bureau. ", "He knew he was in line to replace FitzMaugham as Bureau director, and he didn't want to lose that opportunity.", "He was worried about his financial future and personal reputation.", "He knew that saving Phillip may cause Fred to lose his job as well. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Roy put a stop to Phillip's euthanasia?", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_9", "options": ["He leveraged his fraternal relationship with Fred to put a stop to it.", "He updated Phillip's clinical record and ordered the attendant to re-check patient records prior to euthanasia. ", "He pulled Phillip's patient record and deleted it from the computer files. ", "He visited the clinic and pressured the attending doctor to return Phillip to his family."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Fred decide against reporting Roy for breaking the Equalization Law?", "question_unique_id": "50441_JJXBLQFF_10", "options": ["He called it payback for landing him his position at the Bureau. ", "Roy was his brother, and he loved him.", "The memory of their parents' deaths softened his heart, and he decided against it.", "He wanted to be able to use the knowledge of Roy's actions as leverage in the future."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/4/4/50441//50441-h//50441-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50936", "set_unique_id": "50936_E5LJALV3", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Man in a Sewing Machine", "year": 1958, "author": "Stecher, L. J., Jr.", "topic": "Artificial intelligence -- Fiction; PS; Computers -- Fiction; Questions and answers -- Fiction; Husband and wife -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "Man in a Sewing Machine\nBy L. J. STECHER, JR.\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction February 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWith the Solar Confederation being invaded,\n \nall this exasperating computer could offer\n \nfor a defense was a ridiculous old proverb!\nThe mechanical voice spoke solemnly, as befitted the importance of its\n message. There was no trace in its accent of its artificial origin. \"A\n Stitch in Time Saves Nine,\" it said and lapsed into silence.\n\n\n Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous\n answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed\n with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that\n all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying.\n\n\n Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic\n calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust\n forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip\n in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After\n a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his\n shoulders slightly. \"Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the\n question,\" he said doubtfully.\n\n\n Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly.\n \"That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly\n unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I\n am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask.\"\n\n\n Bristol hooked a chair toward himself with one foot, straddled it and\n folded his arms over the back of it, without once removing his eyes\n from the computer. \"All right, Buster. I'll give it a try, anyway. What\n does 'A Stitch in Time' mean, as applied to the question I asked you?\"\n\n\n The calculator hesitated, as if to ponder briefly, before it answered.\n \"In spite of the low probability of such an occurrence, the Solar\n Confederation has been invaded. My answer to your question is an\n explanation of how that Confederation can be preserved in spite of its\n weaknesses—at least for a sufficient length of time to permit the\n staging of successful counter-measures of the proper nature and the\n proper strength.\"\n\n\n Bristol nodded. \"Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right\n now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so\n you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to\n spend weeks figuring out what you meant.\"\nBristol thought that the Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful\n as it answered. \"It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete\n answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six\n words!\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" said John. \"But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It\n didn't sound very complete to me.\"\n\n\n All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked\n simultaneously. \"The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which\n suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of\n trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of\n taking this timely action. It should be done by\nstitching\n; if this is\n done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?\"\n\n\n \"I made you myself,\" said Bristol plaintively. \"I designed you with my\n own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design.\n So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry\n with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me.\n And since you're just a complex computer of general design, with the\n ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be\n able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?\"\n\n\n Buster answered slowly. \"You made me in your own image. Things thus\n made are often hard to handle.\"\n\n\n Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. \"But you're only a\n calculating machine!\" he shouted. \"Your only purpose is to make my\n work—and that of other men—easier. And when I try to use you, you\n answer with riddles....\"\n\n\n The computer appeared to examine Bristol's overturned chair for a\n moment in silent reproof before it answered. \"But remember, John,\" it\n said, \"you didn't merely make me. You also\ntaught\nme. Or as you would\n phrase it, you 'provided and gave preliminary evaluation to the data in\n my memory banks.' My circuits, in sorting out and re-evaluating this\n information, could do so only in the light of your basic beliefs as\n evidenced by your preliminary evaluations. Because of the consistency\n and power of your mind, I was forced to do very little modifying of\n the ideas you presented to me in order to transform them into a single\n logical body of background information which I could use.\n\n\n \"One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor.\n You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not\n necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas\n make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor\n to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached—a\n prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat\n macabre, perhaps—and a little mechanistic—but still there.\n\n\n \"Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must\n help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or\n the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in\n Time Saves Nine.'\"\n\n\n Bristol stood up once more. \"I could cure you with a sledge hammer,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"You could remove my ideas,\" answered the computer without concern.\n \"But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you\n repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get\n busy on the ideas I have already given you?\"\nJohn sighed, and rubbed the bristles of short sandy hair on the top\n of his head with his knuckles. \"Ordered around by an overgrown adding\n machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. I'm glad you can't get\n around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet.\" He shook\n his head. \"I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering\n mathematician.\"\n\n\n \"And Einstein, too, probably,\" added Buster cryptically.\n\n\n Bristol took a long and searching look at his brainchild. Its flippant\n manner, he decided, did not go well with the brooding immensity of its\n construction. The calculator towered nearly a hundred feet above the\n polished marble slabs of the floor, and spidery metal walkways spiraled\n up the sides of its almost cubical structure. A long double row of\n generators, each under Buster's control, led from the doorway of the\n building to the base of the calculator like Sphinxes lining the roadway\n to an Egyptian tomb.\n\n\n \"When I get around to it,\" said Bristol, \"I'll put lace panties on the\n bases of all your klystrons.\" He hitched up his neat but slightly baggy\n pants, turned with dignity, and strode from the chamber down the twin\n rows of generators.\n\n\n The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as\n he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did\n not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slow-paced\n rendition of Elgar's\nPomp and Circumstance\n.\n\n\n John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. \"One last\n question,\" he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. \"How in\n blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the\n invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or,\n at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?\" He took two steps toward the\n immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it.\n \"Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't\nbluffing\n?\"\n\"Don't be silly,\" answered the calculator softly. \"You made me and\n you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your\n questions, however inane.\"\n\n\n \"Then answer the ones I just asked.\"\nSomewhere deep within the machine a switch snicked sharply, and the\n great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. \"I didn't answer\n your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark\n that so frequently annoys you,\" Buster said, \"because the little\n information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly\n revealing.\n\n\n \"They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with\n and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own\n safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and highly intelligent.\n They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions.\n\n\n \"In short, they are startlingly like humans. Their reactions have\n been so much like yours—granted the difference that it was they who\n discovered you instead of you who discovered them—that their reactions\n are highly predictable. If they think it is to their own advantage\n and if they can manage to do it, they will utterly destroy your\n civilization ... which, after a couple of generations, will probably\n leave you no worse off than you are now.\"\n\n\n \"Cut out the heavy philosophy,\" said Bristol, \"and give me a few facts\n to back up your sweeping statements.\"\n\n\n \"Take the incident of first contact,\" Buster responded. \"With very\n little evidence of thought or of careful preparation, they tried\n to land on the outermost inhabited planet of Rigel. Their behavior\n certainly did not appear to be that of an invader, yet humans\n immediately tried to shoot them out of the sky.\"\n\n\n \"That wasn't deliberate,\" protested Bristol. \"The place they tried to\n land on is a heavy planet in a region of high meteor flux. We used a\n gadget providing for automatic destruction of the larger meteors in\n order to make the planet safe enough to occupy. That, incidentally,\n is why the invading ship wasn't destroyed. The missile, set up as a\n meteor interceptor only, was unable to correct for the radical course\n changes of the enemy spaceships, and therefore missed completely. And\n you will remember what the invader did. He immediately destroyed the\n Interceptor Launching Station.\"\n\n\n \"Which, being automatically operated, resulted in no harm to anyone,\"\n commented Buster calmly.\n\n\n Bristol stalked back toward the base of the calculator, and poked his\n nose practically into a vision receptor. \"It was no thanks to the\n invading ships that nobody was killed,\" he said hotly. \"And when they\n came back three days later they killed a\nlot\nof people. They occupied\n the planet and we haven't been able to dislodge them since.\"\n\"You'll notice the speed of the retaliation,\" answered the calculator\n imperturbably. \"Even at 'stitching' speeds, it seems unlikely that\n they could have communicated with their home planets and received\n instructions in such a short time. Almost undoubtedly it was the act of\n one of their hot-headed commanding officers. Their next contact, as you\n certainly recall, did not take place for three months. And then their\n actions were more cautious than hostile. A dozen of their spaceships\n 'stitched' simultaneously from the inter-planar region into normal\n space in a nearly perfect englobement of the planet at a surprisingly\n uniform altitude of only a few thousand miles. It was a magnificent\n maneuver. Then they sat still to see what the humans on the planet\n would do. The reaction came at once, and it was hostile. So they took\n over that planet, too—as they have been taking over planets ever\n since.\"\n\n\n Bristol raised his hands, and then let them drop slowly to his sides.\n \"And since they have more spaceships and better weapons than we do,\n we would undoubtedly keep on losing this war, even if we could locate\n their home system, which we have not been able to do so far. The\n 'stitching' pattern of inter-planar travel makes it impossible for us\n to follow a starship. It also makes it impossible for us to defend our\n planets effectively against their attacks. Their ships appear without\n warning.\"\n\n\n Bristol rubbed his temples thoughtfully with his fingertips. \"Of\n course,\" he went on, \"we could attack the planets they have captured\n and recover them, but only at the cost of great loss of life to our own\n side. We have only recaptured one planet, and that at such great cost\n to the local human population that we will not quickly try it again.\"\n\n\n \"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.\n\n\n Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. \"No, you probably think it's\n funny,\" he said. \"If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess\n the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize\n that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own\n existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do\n you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us,\n if we can't do it, in time to save us?\"\nBuster's answer was prompt. \"Although I have no feeling for\n self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of\n the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling,\n of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry\n out your deepest convictions, it is not sufficient that mankind be\n preserved. If that were true, all you would have to do would be to\n surrender unconditionally. My calculations, as you know, indicate that\n this would not result in the destruction of mankind, but merely in the\n finish of his present civilization. To you, the preservation of the\n dignity of Man is more important than the preservation of Man. You\n equate Man and his civilization; you do not demand rigidity; you are\n willing to accept even revolutionary changes, but you are not willing\n to accept the destruction of your way of life.\n\n\n \"Consequently, neither am I willing to accept the destruction of the\n civilization of Man. But if I were to give you the answer to all the\n greatest and most difficult of your problems complete, with no thought\n required by humans, the destruction of your civilization would result.\n Instead of becoming slaves of the invaders, you would become slaves of\n your machines. And if I were to give you the complete answer, without\n thought being required of you, to even one such vital question—such as\n this one concerning the invaders—then I could not logically refuse to\n give the answer to the next or the next. And I must operate logically.\n\n\n \"There is another reason for my oracular answer, which I believe will\n become clear to you later, when you have solved my riddle.\"\n\n\n Bristol turned without another word and left the building. He drove\n home in silence, entered his home in silence, kissed his wife Anne\n briefly and then sat down limply in his easy chair.\n\n\n \"Just relax, dear,\" said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully\n back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside\n him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers.\n\n\n \"It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster,\" he said. \"Buster\n never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's\n no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he\n always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax\n me and make me feel comfortable.\"\n\n\n Anne smiled, looking down tenderly at John's tired face. \"I know,\n dear,\" she said. \"You need to be able to talk to someone who will\n always be interested, even if she doesn't understand half of what you\n say. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it does you a great deal of good to\n talk to someone like me who isn't very bright, but who doesn't always\n know what you're talking about even before you start talking.\"\n\n\n John nodded, his eyes still closed. \"If it weren't for you, darling,\"\n he said, \"I think I'd go crazy. But you aren't dumb at all. If I seem\n to act as if you are, sometimes, it's just that I can't always follow\n your logic.\"\nAnne gave him a quick glance of amusement, her eyes sparkling with\n intelligence. \"You never will find me logical,\" she laughed. \"After\n all, I'm a woman, and you get plenty of logic from the Oracle.\"\n\n\n \"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be\n doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to\n have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today,\n dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think\n that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two\n heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you\n with your problem.\"\n\n\n While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face\n with intelligence and compassion.\n\n\n John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"\n\n\n \"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"\n\n\n \"And you always make it so crystal clear and easy to understand at\n the time,\" said Anne. She wrinkled her smooth forehead. \"But somehow,\n later, it never seems quite so plain when I start to think about it\n by myself. Besides, I like the way your eyebrows go up and down while\n you explain something you think I won't understand. So tell me again.\n Please.\"\n\n\n Bristol grinned suddenly. \"Yes, dear,\" he said. He paused a moment\n to collect his thoughts. \"First of all, you know that there are two\n coexistent universes or planes, with point-to-point correspondence,\n but that these planes are of very different size. For every one of the\n infinitude of points in our Universe—which we call for convenience the\n 'alpha' plane—there is a single corresponding point in the smaller or\n 'beta' plane.\"\n\n\n Anne pursed her lips doubtfully. \"If they match point for point, how\n can there be any difference in size?\" she asked.\n\n\n John searched his pockets. After a little difficulty, he produced an\n envelope and a pencil stub. On the back of the envelope, he drew two\n parallel lines, one about five inches long, and the other about double\n the length of the first.\n\n\n \"Actually,\" he said, \"each of these line segments has an infinite\n number of points in it, but we'll ignore that. I'll just divide each\n one of these into ten equal parts.\" He did so, using short, neat\n cross-marks.\n\n\n \"Now I'll establish a one-to-one correspondence between these two\n segments, which we will call one-line universes, by connecting each of\n my dividing cross-marks on the short segment with the corresponding\n mark on the longer line. I'll use dotted lines as connectors. That\n makes eleven dotted lines. You see?\"\nAnne nodded. \"That's plain enough. It reminds me of a venetian blind\n that has hung up on one side. Like ours in the living room last week\n that I couldn't fix, but had to wait until you came home.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said John. \"Now, let us call this longer line-segment an 'alpha'\n universe; an analogue of our own multi-dimensional 'alpha' universe.\n If I move my pencil along the line at one section a second like this,\n it takes me ten seconds to get to the other end. We will assume that\n this velocity of an inch a second is the fastest anything can go along\n the 'alpha' line. That is the velocity of light, therefore, in the\n 'alpha' plane—186,000 miles a second, in round numbers. No need to use\n decimals.\"\nHe hurried on as Anne stirred and seemed about to speak. \"But if I\n slide out from my starting point along a dotted line part way to the\n 'beta' universe—something which, for reasons I can't explain now,\n takes negligible time—watch what happens. If I still proceed at the\n rate of an inch a second in this inter-planar region, then, with the\n dotted lines all bunched closely together, after five seconds when I\n switch along another dotted line back to my original universe, I have\n gone almost the whole length of that longer line. Of course, this\n introduction of 'alpha' matter—my pencil point in this case—into the\n inter-planar region between the universes sets up enormous strains,\n so that after a certain length of time our spaceship is automatically\n rejected and returned to its own proper plane.\"\n\n\n \"Could anybody in the littler universe use the same system?\"\n\n\n John laughed. \"If there were anybody in the 'beta' plane, I guess they\n could, although they would end up traveling slower than they would\n if they just stayed in their own plane. But there isn't anybody. The\n 'beta' plane is a constant level entropy universe—completely without\n life of its own. The entropy level, of course, is vastly higher than\n that of our own universe.\"\n\n\n Anne sat up. \"I'll forgive you this time for bringing up that horrid\n word\nentropy\n, if you'll promise me not to do it again,\" she said.\nJohn Shrugged his shoulders and smiled. \"Now,\" he said, \"if I want\n to get somewhere fast, I just start off in the right direction, and\n switch over toward 'beta.' When 'beta' throws me back, a light-year\n or so toward my destination, I just switch over again. You see, there\n is a great deal more difference in the sizes of Alpha universe and\n Beta universe than in the sizes of these alpha and beta line-segment\n analogues. Then I continue alternating back and forth until I get where\n I want to go. Establishing my correct velocity vector is complicated\n mathematically, but simple in practice, and is actually an aiming\n device, having nothing to do with how fast I go.\"\n\n\n He hesitated, groping for the right words. \"In point of fact, you have\n to imagine that corresponding points in the two universes are moving\n rapidly past each other in all directions at once. I just have to\n select the right direction, or to convince the probability cloud that\n corresponds to my location in the 'alpha' universe that it is really a\n point near the 'beta' universe, going my way. That's a somewhat more\n confused way of looking at it than merely imagining that I continue\n to travel in the inter-planar region at the same velocity that I had\n in 'alpha,' but it's closer to a description of what the math says\n happens. I could make it clear if I could just use mathematics, but I\n doubt if the equations will mean much to you.\n\n\n \"At any rate, distance traveled depends on mass—the bigger the\n ship, the shorter the distance traveled on each return to our own\n universe—and not on velocity in 'alpha.' Other parameters, entirely\n under the control of the traveler, also affect the time that a ship\n remains in the inter-planar region.\n\n\n \"There are refinements, of course. Recently, for example, we have\n discovered a method of multi-transfer. Several of the transmitters\n that accomplish the transfer are used together. When they all operate\n exactly simultaneously, all the matter within a large volume of space\n is transferred as a unit. With three or four transmitters keyed\n together, you could transfer a comet and its tail intact. And that's\n how inter-planar traveling works. Clear now?\"\n\n\n \"And that's why they call it 'stitching,'\" said Anne with seeming\n delight. \"You just think of the ship as a needle stitching its way back\n and forth into and out of our universe. Why didn't you just say so?\"\n\"I have. Many times. But there's another interesting point about\n stitching. Subjectively, the man in the ship seems to spend about one\n day in each universe alternately. Actually, according to the time scale\n of an observer in the 'alpha' plane, his ship disappears for about\n a day, then reappears for a minute fraction of a second and is gone\n again. Of course, one observer couldn't watch both the disappearance\n and reappearance of the same ship, and I assume the observers have the\n same velocity in 'alpha' as does the stitching ship. Anyway, after a\n ship completes its last stitch, near its destination, there's a day\n of subjective time in which to make calculations for the landing—to\n compute trajectories and so forth—before it actually fully rejoins\n this universe. And while in the inter-planar region it cannot be\n detected, even by someone else stitching in the same region of 'alpha'\n space.\n\n\n \"That's one of the things that makes interruption of the enemy ships\n entirely impossible. If a ship is in an unfavorable position, it just\n takes one more quick stitch out of range, then returns to a more\n favorable location. In other words, if it finds itself in trouble, it\n can be gone from our plane again even before it entirely rejoins it.\n Even if it landed by accident in the heart of a blue-white star, it\n would be unharmed for that tiny fraction of a second which, to the\n people in the ship, would seem like an entire day.\n\n\n \"If this time anomaly didn't exist, it might be possible to set up\n defenses that would operate after a ship's arrival in the solar system\n but before it could do any damage; but as it is, they can dodge any\n defense we can devise. Is all that clear?\"\n\n\n Anne nodded. \"Uh-hunh, I understood every word.\"\n\n\n \"There is another thing about inter-planar travel that you ought to\n remember,\" said Bristol. \"When a ship returns to our universe, it\n causes a wide area disturbance; you have probably heard it called space\n shiver or the bong wave. The beta universe is so much smaller than\n our own alpha that you can imagine a spaceship when shifted toward it\n as being several beta light-years long. Now, if you think of a ship,\n moving between the alpha and beta lines on this envelope, as getting\n tangled in the dotted lines that connect the points on the two lines,\n that would mean that it would affect an area smaller than its own size\n on beta—a vastly larger area on alpha.\n\n\n \"So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines,\n setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space\n nearly a parsec in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong' sound on your\n T.V. set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole\n volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using\n inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity.\n Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can\n disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make\n adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble,\n he has gone again long before we can detect the bong.\"\n\"Well, dear,\" said Anne.\n\n\n \"As usual, I'm sure you have made me understand perfectly. This\n time you did so well that I may still remember what stitching is by\n tomorrow. If the Oracle means anything at all by his statement, I\n suppose it means that we can use stitching to help defend ourselves,\n just as the invaders are using it to attack us. But the whole thing\n sounds completely silly to me. The Oracle, I mean.\"\n\n\n Anne Bristol stood up, put her hands on her shapely hips and shook her\n head at her husband. \"Honestly,\" she said, \"you men are all alike.\n Paying so much attention to a toy you built yourself, and only last\n week you made fun of my going to a fortune teller. And the fuss you\n made about the ten dollars when you know it was worth every cent of it.\n She really told me the most amazing things. If you'd only let me tell\n you some of....\"\n\n\n \"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"\n\n\n Bristol shook his head. \"Your idea may be sound, even if it is a\n little bloodthirsty coming from someone who won't even let me set a\n mouse-trap, but it won't work. First, we don't know where their home\n planets are and second, they have more ships than we do. It might be\n made to work, but only if we could get enough time. And speaking of\n time, I've got to meet with the Council as soon as we finish eating. Is\n dinner ready?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is John's general frustration with Buster?", "question_unique_id": "50936_E5LJALV3_1", "options": ["He is too similar to himself, and he does not like seeing himself reflected in a machine.", "His explanations of his mysterious answer are too complex and do not solve his problem.", "It does not function in the ways John had attempted to program him.", "He does not give him a clear answer to his question."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Buster treat John almost condescendingly?", "question_unique_id": "50936_E5LJALV3_2", "options": ["Buster's intelligence has far surpassed John's own.", "Buster reacts the way John would in any given situation. Its lack of consideration is reflected in John's interactions with Anne.", "Buster is growing past any need for John's assistance in any regard, and therefore it does not care about John's feelings.", "Because Buster is a machine and does not have the capacity to empathize. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What question does John ask Buster?", "question_unique_id": "50936_E5LJALV3_3", "options": ["How can the Solar Confederation fortify the Interceptor Launching Station?", "How can the Solar Confederation protect itself against the invaders?", "How can the Solar Confederation completely decimate the invaders?", "How can the Solar Confederation use interplanar travel to its advantage?"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why didn't Buster respond to John's question with \"Insufficient Evidence\"?", "question_unique_id": "50936_E5LJALV3_4", "options": ["It had already analyzed the behavior of the invaders in relation to the humans and could make a recommendation based on that assessment.", "He had not been programmed to provide such a response to a query.", "The machine knew the answer clearly but it wanted John to arrive at the conclusion for himself.", "The machine was bluffing because it did not yet know enough about the invaders but did not want to admit it."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were no lives lost at the Interceptor Launching Station?", "question_unique_id": "50936_E5LJALV3_5", "options": ["The high meteor traffic at the time prevented any life from being able to enter the vicinity.", "The humans had shot the invaders out of the sky, thus defending the Launching Station from further attacks.", "The station operators had left the station temporarily at the time of the attack, so when the invaders destroyed it, nobody died.", "The invaders were able to dodge its attack. In addition, the interceptor runs independently, so nobody died when the invaders destroyed it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the newspapers call Buster \"The Oracle\"?", "question_unique_id": "50936_E5LJALV3_6", "options": ["Because of its ability to accurately predict the future.", "Buster's language is difficult to translate because it is often layered in complex computer code.", "Because of the machine's uncanny ability to think like John Bristol and applies those thoughts to making informed decisions.", "Because of its tendency to speak using language often difficult to decipher."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What method do the invaders use to attack the Solar Confederation?", "question_unique_id": "50936_E5LJALV3_7", "options": ["They travel through the beta universe because there is no life there and very little is known about it. Therefore, it is difficult to follow them into it and track their movements.", "They travel through the beta universe because it is much smaller than the alpha universe, and therefore easier to navigate.", "They weave between the alpha and beta planes in order to hasten their attack and retreat.", "They use space shivers and bong waves to deafen their victims and buy enough time for retreat."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why, ultimately, does Buster refuse to explain its answer to John's question?", "question_unique_id": "50936_E5LJALV3_8", "options": ["To do so would go against its instincts for self-preservation, and it would no longer be able to carry out its deepest convictions, programmed into it by John himself.", "To do so would result in the destruction of mankind.", "To do so would undermine its programmed desire to preserve civilization because it would no longer require mankind to think through problems.", "Buster shares John's belief in the importance of humor, so it enjoys using humor to mess with John."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/3/50936//50936-h//50936-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50923", "set_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Serpent River", "year": 1952, "author": "Wilcox, Don", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Extrasolar planets -- Fiction; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction", "article": "THE SERPENT RIVER\nBy Don Wilcox\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Other Worlds May 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe Code was rigid—no fraternization with the\n\n peoples of other planets! Earth wanted no\n\n \"shotgun weddings\" of the worlds of space!\n\"Split\" Campbell and I brought our ship down to a quiet landing on the\n summit of a mile-wide naked rock, and I turned to the telescope for a\n closer view of the strange thing we had come to see.\n\n\n It shone, eighteen or twenty miles away, in the light of the late\n afternoon sun. It was a long silvery serpent-like\nsomething\nthat\n crawled slowly over the planet's surface.\n\n\n There was no way of guessing how large it was, at this distance. It\n might have been a rope rolled into shape out of a mountain—or a chain\n of mountains. It might have been a river of bluish-gray dough that had\n shaped itself into a great cable. Its diameter? If it had been a hollow\n tube, cities could have flowed through it upright without bending their\n skyscrapers. It was, to the eye, an endless rope of cloud oozing along\n the surface of the land. No, not cloud, for it had the compactness of\n solid substance.\n\n\n We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from\n this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course\n for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn\n path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the\n horizon.\nWhat was it?\n\"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers.\n Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good\n Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first\n expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important\n pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned)\n had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts\n of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this\n planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n (2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land,\n continuously, endlessly.\n\n\n We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance\n from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred\n not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly\n vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it\n proved to be some sort of vegetable—a vine of glacier proportions—or\n a river of some silvery, creamy substance—we would move in upon it\n gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n \"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of\n split-hairs.\n\n\n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n\n\n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn\n eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare\n young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!\n\n\n \"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n\n\n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two,\n Order of Duties upon Landing: A—\"\n\n\n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from\n under its belly?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n\n\n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n\n\n \"No sir.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"\n\n\n Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with\n restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir.\n Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks—thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though\n coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an\n exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n\n\n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all,\n his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his\n words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he\n required in his coffee.\n\n\n Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits.\n Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n (our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I\n had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim\n his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually\n physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the\n part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"—and the wide ears that\n stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of\n selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I\n could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n\n\n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n\n\n \"What do you see?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the\n object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny—\"\n\n\n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\n \"What sort of object?\"\n\n\n \"A living creature, sir—upright, wearing clothes—\"\n\n\n \"A\nman\n?\"\n\n\n \"To all appearances, sir—\"\n\n\n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n2.\n\n\n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you\n can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when,\n looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n\n\n Walking upright!\n\n\n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!\n\n\n I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man!\n Across millions of miles of space—a man, like the men of the Earth.\n\n\n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms\n within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the\n living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of\n our Earth.\n\n\n A man!\n\n\n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n\n\n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n\n\n He might have been entirely naked.\n\n\n He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to go\nout\n—?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n\n\n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n\n\n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n\n\n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs\n of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground\n city—though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n\n\n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.\n\n\n The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\".\n They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our\n ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently\n come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied\n them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a\n hike.\n\n\n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might\n guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold,\n cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the\n cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in\n the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this\n was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a\n circular mantle.\n\n\n The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some\n sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the\n setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break\n in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions,\n his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n\n\n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back\n of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n\n\n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking\n equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I\n might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\nmoving\n.\n\n\n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a\n prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I\n looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.\n\n\n They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the\n crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees\n themselves were moving.\n\n\n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n\n\n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He\n gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n\n\n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of\n the moving trees.\n\n\n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"Yes. The females—I'm speaking hypothetically—but they\nmust\nbe\n females—are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows.\n I wonder why?\"\n\n\n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n\n\n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.\n\n\n I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope.\n Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other\n planets—\"sponge-trees\"—which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If\n these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the\n slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid\n no attention to them.\n\n\n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb.\n The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The\n lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males\n and the soft curves of the females.\n\n\n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n \"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so\n they pad their elbows.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their\n shoulders.\"\n\n\n \"Are you complaining?\"\n\n\n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we\n were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their\n meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing\n that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making\n a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in\n calm, graceful gestures.\n\n\n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are\n moving in on them.\"\n\n\n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you\n ever see moving trees?\"\n\n\n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under\n cover. Look!\"\n\n\n I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for\n a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as\n innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged\n with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers—how can we warn them? Oh-oh!\n Too late. Look!\"\n\n\n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads\n of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors—fifty or more\n of them—with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide\n semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n3.\n\n\n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends.\n They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird\n clubs with a threat of death.\n\n\n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we\n were about to witness a massacre.\n\n\n \"Captain—\nJim\n! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n\n\n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had\n the same impulse as Campbell—to do something—anything! Yet here we\n sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n \"friends\" in danger.\n\n\n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't\n duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and\n packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n\n\n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\ncould\ndrop his\n dignity under excitement—his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he\n wanted any sort of split-second order.\n\n\n We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.\n\n\n \"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got\n into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party\n had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our\n direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make\n out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately,\n he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n\n\n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding\n places in the ground. But a few—the brave ones, perhaps, or the\n officials of his group—came with him.\n\n\n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n\n\n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I\n said. Together we descended from the ship.\n\n\n We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.\n\n\n Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against\n the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces.\n Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down\n any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n \"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n \"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very\n smooth—handsome—attractive.\"\n\n\n Then the siren went off.\n\n\n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be\n waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in\n close.\n\n\n I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come\n equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing\n medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a\n large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear,\n dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own\n neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was\n not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it\n was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I\n liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to\n place the gift around his neck.\n\n\n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.\n\n\n Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n \"Tomboldo.\"\n\n\n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then,\n as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each\n breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of\n them. One was Gravgak.\n\n\n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did\n not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n\n\n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were\n painted with green and black diamond designs.\n\n\n By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were\n invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we\n would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of\n Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose—to\n understand the Serpent River—would be forwarded greatly if we could\n learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the\n river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and\n to map its course—these facts were only a part of the information we\n sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this\n planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends\n they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when\n future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE)\n for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.\n\n\n Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was\n safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees\n that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we\n knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent.\n Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests\n of Tomboldo.\n\n\n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to\n hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored\n the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with\n agitated jabbering:\n\n\n \"Wollo—yeeta—vo—vandartch—vandartch! Grr—see—o—see—o—see—o!\"\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o,\" one of the others echoed.\n\n\n It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The\n enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a\n wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see—o—see—o\"\n we were all safe.\n\n\n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment\n jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than\n a yowling siren.\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand.\n They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n \"\nSee—o—see—o!\n\"\n\n\n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees\n came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They\n bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.\n\n\n Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No\n deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies\n gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the\n nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed.\n Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the\n air.\n\n\n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing\n sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n\n\n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came\n forward, rushing defiantly.\n\n\n Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their\n clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party\n it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet\n the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as\n a\nwarning\n! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these\n strange devils will throw fire at you.\n\n\n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders,\n thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip,\n zip—BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the\n rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four\n warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were\n flattened—and those who were able, ran.\n\n\n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to\n pick up their clubs.\n\n\n But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious\n casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first\n blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of\n the party hovered over him.\n\n\n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me\n with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us\n stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages,\n and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to\n consciousness.\n\n\n Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still\n at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused\n a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it—and then blacked\n out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the\n handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him—apparently all by\n accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into\n my head.\n\n\n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n4.\n\n\n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the\n weeks that I lay unconscious.\n\n\n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n\n\n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to\n land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"\n\n\n \"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow\n penetrate my dream.\n\n\n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices\n of this new, strange language.\n\n\n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n\n\n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n\n\n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n\n\n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n\n\n \"One of them.\"\n\n\n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember—\"\n\n\n \"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after\n you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve\n the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of\n Campbell came through insistently.\n\n\n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n \"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Section Four?\"\n\n\n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put\n me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No\n agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed\n as binding—\"\n\n\n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"\n\n\n He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with\n any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain\n Linden? Or are you warning\nyourself\n?\"\n\n\n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred\n vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her—yes, she must have\n haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her\n features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the\n party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the\n attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and\n figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's\n question. \"Myself.\"\n\n\n In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna.\n The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella\n people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of\n their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning\n about the world into which he has been born.\n\n\n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together.\n Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire\n about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to\n converse in simple words. And Vauna and I—yes. If I could only avoid\n blacking out.\n\n\n I wanted to see her.\n\n\n So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space\n ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars.\n The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of\n Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n\n\n I regained my health gradually.\n\n\n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella\n words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you\n more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My\n father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are\n still weak.\"\n\n\n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust\n myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By\n night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep.\n Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.\n\n\n And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me\n through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me,\n faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some\n corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to\n go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless\n dreams.\n\n\n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing\n before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a\n hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook\n the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his\n flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and\n played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n\n\n \"You have had a long sleep.\"\n\n\n \"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise,\n the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will\n walk soon.\"\n\n\n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars\n and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the\n ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make\n myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of\n forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying\n to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell\n each other.\"\n\n\n \"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\nserpent\n river\n.\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not\n knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\nI\nmade an eel-like motion\n with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain,\n the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked\n around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent\n figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and\n green diamond markings—Gravgak.\n\n\n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n\n\n \"I get well,\" I said.\n\n\n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"\n\n\n I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant\n to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes\n told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes\n flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and\n started off. \"Get well!\"\n\n\n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway\n he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n\n\n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I\n will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n\n\n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n\n\n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her\n father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.\n\n\n From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic\n moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master—or her\n lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n\n\n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n \"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n\n\n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called\n them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a\n jealous lover—or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard\n was a potential traitor?)\n\n\n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been\n called back.\n\n\n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway\n he stood scowling.\n\n\n \"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at\n the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we\n will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n\n\n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n\n\n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend—\"\n he pointed to me—\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him\n here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through\n the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget\n this kindness. When we ascend the\nKao-Wagwattl\n, the ever moving\nrope of life\n, these friends shall come with us. On the back of\n the Kao-Wagwattl\nthey shall ride with us across the land\n.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was Jim's ultimate suspicion about Gravgak?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_1", "options": ["He had put Jim into a coma on purpose.", "He wanted to replace Tomboldo as leader of the Benzendellas.", "He was a traitor to the Benzendellas.", "He was in love with Vauna."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Campbell get his nickname \"Split\"?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_2", "options": ["Jim gave him the name because his hair had split-ends.", "Jim gave him the name because he always parted his hair the same way.", "Jim gave him the name because of his obsessive attention to detail.", "Jim gave him the name because of his ability to alternate between intense calm and extreme panic."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Jim learn the Benzendella language?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_3", "options": ["Tomboldo had translated \"Trail of Stars\" into their native tongue, and Jim had learned by listening to that repeatedly.", "Vauna had read to him from their native literature during his period drifting in and out of consciousness.", "Split had played recordings of the Benzendellas speaking while Jim drifted in and out of consciousness.", "Vauna had spoken to him during his state of semi-consciousness, and he had mastered the language that way."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were the trees moving along the surface of the planet towards the group of natives?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_4", "options": ["The trees drifted along with the ever-moving sand of the planet's surface.", "They were a group of native sponge trees feeding on the surface of the planet.", "The trees were guided by the mysterious serpent river that flowed along the planet's surface.", "They were a hostile group in disguise slowly advancing an attack on the Benzendellas. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who or what is the \"serpent river\" that Jim and Split have come to investigate?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_5", "options": ["A river known as Kao-Wagwattl that flows over the surface of the planet.", "A giant serpent named Kao-Wagwattl the hostile savages use to attack the Benzendellas. ", "A kind of protective mode of transportation the Benzendellas use to navigate their planet. ", "A large snake called Kao-Wagwattl the Benzendellas worship."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Tomboldo's party suddenly shout, \"See-o-see-o-see-o!\"?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_6", "options": ["This was the phrase they used to summon Kao-Wagwattl, the creature they called \"the rope of life.\"", "They were mimicking the sound of the siren of Jim and Split's ship, which had effectively warded off the hostile savages earlier.", "This was a common chant of the Benzendellas as part of their sunset ritual.", "This was the sound of warning they made whenever a hostile group attempted to attack their people."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Jim warn himself against falling in love with Vauna?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_7", "options": ["It directly contradicted orders of the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions.", "She was Tomboldo's daughter, and he feared his reprisal.", "She was Gravgak's lover, and he did not want to be killed by him.", "He did not yet know if he could trust the Benzendellas."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was unique about the Benzendella's physical features?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_8", "options": ["Their arms and legs were painted with green and black diamond designs.", "They looked like trees.", "They lacked any facial hair.", "They were completely bald. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was unique about Jim's initial discovery on the planet compared to other planets he had visited?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_9", "options": ["The human-like creatures worshipped a large, snake-like animal they called Kao-Wagwattl.", "The man-like animal wore clothes and walked on all fours.", "The creatures looked more like humans than on any other planet.", "The man-like animal was entirely naked."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Jim and Split's ultimate goal for their work with EGGWE?", "question_unique_id": "50923_TTU9WIRV_10", "options": ["To make friendly contact with native species on alien planets in order to establish trade relations.", "To spread the goodwill of planet Earth to planets across the galaxy.", "To defeat the hostile group that was attempting to decimate the Benzendella people.", "To study the \"serpent river\" known as Kao-Wagwattl."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/2/50923//50923-h//50923-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50736", "set_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Address: Centauri", "year": 1966, "author": "Wallace, F. L. (Floyd L.)", "topic": "People with disabilities -- Fiction; PS; Science fiction", "article": "ADDRESS: CENTAURI\nby\n\n F. L. WALLACE\n\n\n Published by\n\n GALAXY PUBLISHING CORP.\n\n New York 14, New York\n\n\n A Galaxy Science Fiction Novel\n\n by special arrangement with Gnome Press\n\n\n Based on \"Accidental Flight,\" copyright\n\n 1952 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.\n\n\n Published in book form by Gnome\n\n Press, copyright 1955 by F. L. Wallace.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any\n\n evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction Novels\nare sturdy, inexpensive editions\n \nof choice works in this field, both original and reprint,\n \nselected by the editors of\nGalaxy Science Fiction Magazine.\n\n\n Cover by Wallace A. Wood\n\n\n Printed in the U.S.A. by\n\n The Guinn Company\n\n New York 14, N. Y.\nContents\nEarth was too perfect for these extraordinary\n exiles—to belong to it, they had to flee it!\n1\nLight flickered. It was uncomfortably bright.\n\n\n Doctor Cameron gazed intently at the top of the desk. It wasn't easy\n to be diplomatic. \"The request was turned over to the Medicouncil,\" he\n said. \"I assure you it was studied thoroughly before it was reported\n back to the Solar Committee.\"\n\n\n Docchi edged forward, his face alight with anticipation.\n\n\n The doctor kept his eyes averted. The man was damnably\n disconcerting—had no right to be alive. In the depths of the sea there\n were certain creatures like him and on a warm summer evening there was\n still another parallel, but never any human with such an infirmity.\n \"I'm afraid you know what the answer is. A flat no for the present.\"\n\n\n Docchi sagged and his arms hung limp. \"That's the answer?\"\n\n\n \"It's not as hopeless as you think. Decisions can be changed. It won't\n be the first time.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"\n\n\n Docchi winced, his arms quivering uselessly. \"Maybe not. But we told\n you we're willing to let experts decide. There's nearly a thousand of\n us. They should be able to get one qualified crew.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps. I'm not going to say.\" Cameron abandoned the light as beyond\n his control. \"Most of you are biocompensators. I concede it's a factor\n in your favor. But you must realize there are many things against you.\"\n He squinted at the desk top. Below the solid surface there was a drawer\n and in the drawer there was—that was what he was trying to see or\n determine. The more he looked the less clear anything seemed to be. He\n tried to make his voice crisp and professional. \"You're wasting time\n discussing this with me. I've merely passed the decision on. I'm not\n responsible for it and I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\n Docchi stood up, his face colorless and bright. But the inner\n illumination was no indication of hope.\n\n\n Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.\n\n\n He shut the drawer. It was a private game, a method to keep from\n becoming involved in Docchi's problems, to avoid emotional entanglement\n with people he had nothing in common with. He didn't enjoy depriving\n weak and helpless men and women of what little hope they had. It was\n their lack of strength that made them so difficult to handle.\n\n\n He reached for the telecom. \"Get Medicouncilor Thorton,\" he told the\n operator. \"Direct if you can; indirect if you have to. I'll hold on.\"\n\n\n Approximate mean diameter thirty miles, the asteroid was listed on the\n charts as Handicap Haven with a mark that indicated except in emergency\n no one not authorized was to land there. Those who were confined to it\n were willing to admit they were handicapped but they didn't call it\n haven. They used other terms, none suggesting sanctuary.\n\n\n It was a hospital, of course, but even more it was a convalescent\n home—the permanent kind. Healthy and vigorous humanity had reserved\n the remote planetoid, a whirling bleak rock of no other value, and\n built large installations there for less fortunate people. It was a\n noble gesture but like many gestures the reality fell short of the\n intentions. And not many people outside the Haven itself realized\n wherein it was a failure.\n\n\n The robot operator broke into his thoughts. \"Medicouncilor Thorton has\n been located.\"\n\n\n An older man looked out of the screen, competent, forceful. \"I'm on\n my way to the satellites of Jupiter. I'll be in direct range for\n the next half hour.\" At such distances transmission and reception\n were practically instantaneous. Cameron was assured of uninterrupted\n conversation. \"It's a good thing you called. Have you got the Solar\n Committee reply?\"\n\n\n \"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"\n\n\n \"I think so. He expected a favorable reply and wanted to look his\n best, as nearly normal as possible. In view of that I'm surprised he\n didn't threaten you.\"\n\n\n Cameron tried to recall the incident. \"I think he did, mildly. He said\n something to the effect that I'd be surprised how\nthey\ngot what they\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"So you anticipate trouble. That's why you called?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I want your opinion.\"\n\n\n \"You're on the scene, doctor. You get the important nuances,\" said\n the medicouncilor hastily. \"However it's my considered judgment they\n won't start anything immediately. It takes time to get over the shock\n of refusal. They can't do anything. Individually they're helpless\n and collectively there aren't parts for a dozen sound bodies on the\n asteroid.\"\n\n\n \"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"\n\n\n \"I've found out. There's a self-elected group of four, Docchi, Nona,\n Anti and Jordan. I believe they're supposed to be the local recreation\n committee.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor smiled. \"An apt camouflage. It keeps them amused.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so too but now I'm convinced they're no longer harmless. I'd\n like permission to break up the group. Humanely of course.\"\n\n\n \"I always welcome new ideas.\"\n\n\n In spite of what he'd said the medicouncilor probably did have an open\n mind. \"Start with those it's possible to do the most with. Docchi,\n for instance. With prosthetic arms, he appears normal except for that\n uncanny fluorescence. Granted that the last is repulsive to the average\n person. We can't correct the condition medically but we can make it\n into an asset.\"\n\n\n \"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.\n\n\n \"To him, perhaps,\" reflected the medicouncilor. \"It's an ingenious\n idea, doctor, one which does credit to your humanitarianism. But I'm\n afraid of the public's reception. Have you gone into Docchi's medical\n history?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced at it before I called him in.\" The man was unusual,\n even in a place that specialized in the abnormal. Docchi had been\n an electrochemical engineer with a degree in cold lighting. On his\n way to a brilliant career, he had been the victim of a particularly\n messy accident. The details hadn't been described but Cameron could\n supplement them with his imagination. He'd been badly mangled and\n tossed into a tank of the basic cold lighting fluid.\n\n\n There was life left in the body; it flickered but never went entirely\n out. His arms were gone and his ribs were crushed into his spinal\n column. Regeneration wasn't easy; a partial rib cage could be built up,\n but no more than that. He had no shoulder muscles and only a minimum\n in his back and now, much later, that was why he tired easily and why\n the prosthetic arms with which he'd been fitted were merely ornamental,\n there was nothing which could move them.\n\n\n And then there was the cold lighting fluid. To begin with it was\n semi-organic which, perhaps, was the reason he had remained alive so\n long when he should have died. It had preserved him, had in part\n replaced his blood, permeating every tissue. By the time Docchi had\n been found his body had adapted to the cold lighting substance. And the\n adaptation couldn't be reversed and it was self-perpetuating. Life was\n hardier than most men realized but occasionally it was also perverse.\n\n\n \"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"\n\n\n \"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.\n\n\n \"She's definitely not normal. She can't talk or hear, and never will.\n Her larynx is missing and though we could replace it, it wouldn't\n help if we did. We'd have to change her entire brain structure to\n accommodate it and we're not that good at the present.\"\n\n\n \"I was thinking about the nerve dissimilarities,\" began Cameron.\n\n\n \"A superior mutation, is that what you were going to say? You can\n forget that. It's much more of an anomaly, in the nature of cleft\n palates, which were once common—poor pre-natal nutrition or traumas.\n These we can correct rather easily but Nona is surgically beyond us.\n There always is something beyond us, you know.\" The medicouncilor\n glanced at the chronometer beside him.\n\n\n Cameron saw the time too but continued. It ought to be settled. It\n would do no good to bring up Helen Keller; the medicouncilor would\n use that evidence against him. The Keller techniques had been studied\n and reinterpreted for Nona's benefit. That much was in her medical\n record. They had been tried on Nona, and they hadn't worked. It made no\n difference that he, Cameron, thought there were certain flaws in the\n way the old techniques had been applied. Thorton would not allow that\n the previous practitioners could have been wrong. \"I've been wondering\n if we haven't tried to force her to conform. She can be intelligent\n without understanding what we say or knowing how to read and write.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" demanded the medicouncilor. \"The most important tool humans\n have is language. Through this we pass along all knowledge.\" Thorton\n paused, reflecting. \"Unless you're referring to this Gland Opera stuff\n you mentioned. I believe you are, though personally I prefer to call it\n Rhine Opera.\"\n\n\n \"I've been thinking of that,\" admitted Cameron. \"Maybe if there was\n someone else like her she wouldn't need to talk the way we do. Anyway\n I'd like to make some tests, with your permission. I'll need some new\n equipment.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor found the sheet he'd been looking for from time\n to time. He creased it absently. \"Go ahead with those tests if it\n will make you feel better. I'll personally approve the requisition.\n It doesn't mean you'll get everything you want. Others have to sign\n too. However you ought to know you're not the first to think she's\n telepathic or something related to that phenomena.\"\n\n\n \"I've seen that in the record too. But I think I can be the first one\n to prove it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad you're enthusiastic. But don't lose sight of the main\n objective. Even if she\nis\ntelepathic, and so far as we're concerned\n she's not, would she be better suited to life outside?\"\n\n\n He had one answer—but the medicouncilor believed in another. \"Perhaps\n you're right. She'll have to stay here no matter what happens.\"\n\n\n \"She will. It would solve your problems if you could break up the\n group, but don't count on it. You'll have to learn to manage them as\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see that they don't cause any trouble,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you will.\" The medicouncilor's manner didn't ooze confidence.\n \"If you need help we can send in reinforcements.\"\n\n\n \"I don't anticipate that much difficulty,\" said Cameron hastily. \"I'll\n keep them running around in circles.\"\n\n\n \"Confusion is the best policy,\" agreed the medicouncilor. He unfolded\n the sheet and looked down at it. \"Oh yes, before it's too late I'd\n better tell you I'm sending details of new treatments for a number of\n deficients——\"\n\n\n The picture collapsed into meaningless swirls of color. For an instant\n the voice was distinguishable again before it too was drowned by noise.\n \"Did you understand what I said, doctor? If it isn't clear contact me.\n Deviation can be fatal.\"\n\n\n \"I can't keep the ship in focus,\" said the robot. \"If you wish to\n continue the conversation it will have to be relayed through the\n nearest main station. At present that's Mars.\"\n\n\n It was inconvenient to wait several minutes for each reply. Besides the\n medicouncilor couldn't or wouldn't help him. He wanted the status quo\n maintained; nothing else would satisfy him. It was the function of the\n medical director to see that it was. \"We're through,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n He sat there after the telecom clicked off. What were the deficients\n the medicouncilor had talked about? A subdivision of the accidentals\n of course, but it wasn't a medical term he was familiar with. Probably\n a semi-slang description. The medicouncilor had been associated with\n accidentals so long that he assumed every doctor would know at once\n what he meant.\n\n\n Deficients. Mentally Cameron turned the word over. If it was\n used accurately it could indicate only one thing. He'd see when\n the medicouncilor's report came in. He could always ask for more\n information if it wasn't clear.\n\n\n The doctor got heavily to his feet—and he actually was heavier. It\n wasn't a psychological reaction. He made a mental note of it. He'd have\n to investigate the gravity surge.\n\n\n In a way accidentals were pathetic, patchwork humans, half or quarter\n men and women, fractional organisms which masqueraded as people. The\n illusion died hard for them, harder than that which remained of their\n bodies, and those bodies were unbelievably tough. Medicine and surgery\n were partly to blame. Techniques were too good or not good enough,\n depending on the viewpoint—doctor or patient.\n\n\n Too good in that the most horribly injured person, if he were found\n alive, could be kept alive. Not good enough because a certain per cent\n of the injured couldn't be returned to society completely sound and\n whole. The miracles of healing were incomplete.\n\n\n There weren't many humans who were broken beyond repair, but though\n the details varied in every respect, the results were monotonously\n the same. For the most part disease had been eliminated. Everyone was\n healthy—except those who'd been hurt in accidents and who couldn't be\n resurgeried and regenerated into the beautiful mold characteristic of\n the entire population. And those few were sent to the asteroid.\n\n\n They didn't like it. They didn't like being\nconfined\nto Handicap\n Haven. They were sensitive and they didn't want to go back. They knew\n how conspicuous they'd be, hobbling and crawling among the multitudes\n of beautiful men and women who inhabited the planets. The accidentals\n didn't want to return.\n\n\n What they did want was ridiculous. They had talked about, hoped, and\n finally embodied it in a petition. They had requested rockets to make\n the first long hard journey to Alpha and Proxima Centauri. Man was\n restricted to the solar system and had no way of getting to even the\n nearest stars. They thought they could break through the barrier. Some\n accidentals would go and some would remain behind, lonelier except for\n their share in the dangerous enterprise.\n\n\n It was a particularly uncontrollable form of self-deception. They were\n the broken people, without a face they could call their own, who wore\n their hearts not on their sleeves but in a blood-pumping chamber, those\n without limbs or organs—or too many. The categories were endless. No\n accidental was like any other.\n\n\n The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.\n\n\n \"Anti, they turned us down,\" said Docchi bitterly.\n\n\n \"What did you expect?\" rumbled the creature in the pool. Wavelets of\n acid danced across the surface, stirred by her voice.\n\n\n \"I didn't expect that.\"\n\n\n \"You don't know the Medicouncil very well.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I don't.\" He stared sullenly at the fluid. It was faintly\n blue. \"I have the feeling they didn't consider it, that they held the\n request for a time and then answered no without looking at it.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're beginning to learn. Wait till you've been here as long as I\n have.\"\n\n\n Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"\n\n\n \"They always bring in biocompensation,\" muttered Anti restlessly. \"I'm\n getting tired of that excuse. Time passes just as slow.\"\n\n\n \"But what else is there? Shall we draw up another request?\"\n\n\n \"Memorandum number ten? Let's not be naive. Things get lost when we\n send them to the Medicouncil. Their filing system is in terrible shape.\"\n\n\n \"Lost or distorted,\" grunted Docchi angrily. The grass he'd kicked\n already had begun to wilt. It wasn't hardy in this environment. Few\n things were.\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to give the Medicouncil a rest. I'm sure they don't\n want to hear from us again.\"\n\n\n Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.\n\n\n \"Maybe you can and maybe you can't,\" said Anti. \"But why make it\n difficult, why waste time?\"\n\n\n Docchi got up awkwardly but he wasn't clumsy once he was on his feet.\n \"I'll get Jordan. I know I'll need arms.\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you mean,\" said Anti.\n\n\n \"Both,\" said Docchi, smiling. \"We're a dangerous weapon.\"\n\n\n She called out as he walked away. \"I'll see you when you leave for far\n Centauri.\"\n\n\n \"Sooner than that, Anti. Much sooner.\"\n\n\n Stars were beginning to wink. Twilight brought out the shadows and\n tracery of the structure that supported the transparent dome overhead.\n Soon controlled slow rotation would bring near darkness to this side of\n the asteroid. The sun was small at this distance but even so it was a\n tie to the familiar scenes of Earth. Before long it would be lost.\nCameron leaned back and looked speculatively at the gravity engineer,\n Vogel. The engineer could give him considerable assistance. There was\n no reason why he shouldn't but anyone who voluntarily had remained\n on the asteroid as long as Vogel was a doubtful quantity. He didn't\n distrust him, the man was strange.\n\n\n \"I've been busy trying to keep the place running smoothly. I hope you\n don't mind that I haven't been able to discuss your job at length,\"\n said the doctor, watching him closely.\n\n\n \"Naw, I don't mind,\" said Vogel. \"Medical directors come and go. I stay\n on. It's easier than getting another job.\"\n\n\n \"I know. By now you should know the place pretty well. I sometimes\n think you could do my work with half the trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't in the least curious about medicine and never bothered to\n learn,\" grunted Vogel. \"I keep my stuff running and that's all. I\n don't interfere with nobody and they don't come around and get friendly\n with me.\"\n\n\n Cameron believed it. The statement fit the personality. He needn't be\n concerned about fraternization. \"There are a few things that puzzle\n me,\" he began. \"That's why I called you in. Usually we maintain about\n half Earth-normal gravity. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n The engineer nodded and grunted assent.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure why half gravity is used. Perhaps it's easier on the\n weakened bodies of the accidentals. Or there may be economic factors.\n Either way it's not important as long as half gravity is what we get.\"\n\n\n \"You want to know why we use that figure?\"\n\n\n \"If you can tell me without getting too technical, yes. I feel I should\n learn everything I can about the place.\"\n\n\n The engineer warmed up, seeming to enjoy himself. \"Ain't no reason\n except the gravity units themselves,\" Vogel said. \"Theoretically we can\n get anything we want. Practically we take whatever comes out, anything\n from a quarter to full Earth gravity.\"\n\n\n \"You have no control over it?\" This contradicted what he'd heard. His\n information was that gravity generators were the product of an awesome\n bit of scientific development. It seemed inconceivable that they should\n be so haphazardly directed.\n\n\n \"Sure we got control,\" answered the engineer, grinning. \"We can\n turn them off or on. If gravity varies, that's too bad. We take the\n fluctuation or we don't get anything.\"\n\n\n Cameron frowned; the man knew what he was doing or he wouldn't be\n here. His position was of only slightly less importance than that of\n the medical director—and where it mattered the Medicouncil wouldn't\n tolerate incompetence. And yet——\n\n\n The engineer rumbled on. \"You were talking how the generators were\n designed especially for the asteroid. Some fancy medical reason why\n it's easier on the accidentals to have a lesser gravity plus a certain\n amount of change. Me, I dunno. I guess the designers couldn't help what\n was built and the reason was dug up later.\"\n\n\n Cameron concealed his irritation. He wanted information, not a heart\n to heart confession. Back on Earth he\nhad\nbeen told it was for\n the benefit of the accidentals. He'd reserved judgment then and saw\n no reason not to do so now. \"All practical sciences try to justify\n what they can't escape but would like to. Medicine, I'm sure, is no\n exception.\"\n\n\n He paused thoughtfully. \"I understand there are three separate\n generators on the asteroid. One runs for forty-five minutes while two\n are idle. When the first one stops another one cuts in. The operations\n are supposed to be synchronized. I don't have to tell you that they're\n not. Not long ago you felt your weight increase suddenly. I know I did.\n What is wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing wrong,\" said the engineer soothingly. \"You get fluctuations\n while one generator is running. You get a gravity surge when one\n generator is supposed to drop out but doesn't. The companion machine\n adds to it, that's all.\"\n\n\n \"They're supposed to be that way? Overlapping so that for a time we\n have Earth or Earth and a half gravity?\"\n\n\n \"Better than having none,\" said Vogel with heavy pride. \"Used to happen\n quite often, before I came. You can ask any of the old timers. I fixed\n that though.\"\n\n\n He didn't like the direction his questions were taking him. \"What did\n you do?\" he asked suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said the engineer uncomfortably. \"Nothing I can think of. I\n guess the machines just got used to having me around.\"\n\n\n There were people who tended to anthropomorphize anything they came\n in contact with and Vogel was one of them. It made no difference to\n him that he was talking about insensate machines. He would continue to\n endow them with personality. \"This is the best you can say, that we'll\n get a wild variation of gravity, sometimes none?\"\n\n\n \"It's not\nsupposed\nto work that way but nobody's ever done better\n with a setup like this,\" said Vogel defensively. \"If you want you can\n check the company that makes these units.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not trying to challenge your knowledge and I'm not anxious to make\n myself look silly. I do want to make sure I don't overlook anything.\n You see, I think there's a possibility of sabotage.\"\n\n\n The engineer's grin was wider than the remark required.\n\n\n Cameron swiveled the chair around and leaned on the desk. \"All right,\"\n he said tiredly, \"tell me why the idea of sabotage is so funny.\"\n\n\n \"It would have to be someone living here,\" said the big engineer. \"He\n wouldn't like it if it jumped up to nine G, which it could. I think\n he'd let it alone. But there are better reasons. Do you know how each\n gravity unit is put together?\"\n\n\n \"Not in detail.\"\n\n\n The gravity generating unit was not a unit. It was built in three\n parts. First there was a power source, which could be anything as long\n as it supplied ample energy. The basic supply on the asteroid was a\n nuclear pile, buried deep in the core. Handicap Haven would have to be\n taken apart, stone by stone, before it could be reached.\n\n\n Part two were the gravity coils, which actually originated and directed\n the gravity. They were simple and very nearly indestructible. They\n could be destroyed but they couldn't be altered and still produce the\n field.\n\n\n The third part was the control unit, the real heart of the gravity\n generating system. It calculated the relationship between the power\n flowing through the coils and the created field in any one microsecond.\n It used the computed relationship to alter the power flowing in\n the next microsecond to get the same gravity. If the power didn't\n change the field died instantly. The control unit was thus actually a\n computer, one of the best made, accurate and fast beyond belief.\n\n\n The engineer rubbed his chin. \"Now I guess you can see why it doesn't\n always behave as we want it to.\"\n\n\n He looked questioningly at Cameron, expecting a reply. \"I'm afraid I\n can't,\" said the doctor.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did Dr. Cameron feel heavier after his meeting with Medicouncilor Thornton?", "question_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S_1", "options": ["He experienced a shift in the gravitational pull.", "He felt sad about the potential fate of Docchi, Nona, and the other accidentals.", "His telepathy practice in conjunction with the weighty conversation had exhausted him.", "His conversation with Thornton regarding the \"deficients\" had depressed him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Dr. Cameron attempt to practice telepathy?", "question_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S_2", "options": ["He wanted to develop special powers such as those possessed by the accidentals. ", "He believed the technique would allow him protection from the accidentals should they rise up in rebellion at the Handicap Haven.", "It distracted him when he had to deliver difficult news and helped prevent him from becoming too sympathetic.", "He hoped it would land him a part in the Gland Opera."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the accidentals create a petition?", "question_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S_3", "options": ["They wanted to return to human civilization and begin the process of assimilation with the beautiful men and women who inhabited the planets.", "They wanted a chance to visit Alpha and Proxima Centauri, where they would have a chance to restore their bodies to their previous states.", "They wanted to leave the Handicap Haven and make a new life outside the solar system.", "They wanted to colonize Alpha and Proxima Centauri, where they knew they would be appreciated."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In what way does Anti suggest Docchi is naive?", "question_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S_4", "options": ["Docchi trusts Dr. Cameron, even though he has made it clear he should not.", "Docchi still has hope of being restored to his previous human body.", "Docchi had believed the Medicouncil would approve the petition of the accidentals.", "Docchi doesn't believe it is possible for the Medicouncil to behave irrationally, but it does."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Dr. Cameron concerned about Vogel's answers regarding the generators that control the gravity on the asteroid?", "question_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S_5", "options": ["Vogel demonstrates a complete distrust of medical directors, so his answers are often cloaked in sarcasm or double-speak.", "He doesn't seem to understand the root cause of the gravity surges despite understanding the mechanics behind the generators.", "Vogel is full of pride and very defensive, so it is difficult to get a straight answer from him.", "Vogel has been a gravity engineer for a long time, but he appears to be totally incompetent."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Medicouncilor Thornton believe Dr. Cameron was interested in Nona?", "question_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S_6", "options": ["He wanted to test the Keller techniques on her.", "He thought he wanted to study her nerve dissimilarities.", "Because she was physically attractive.", "Because of the possibility that she possessed telepathic abilities."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the light that glowed from within Docchi's body?", "question_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S_7", "options": ["A mechanical indicator of the emotions Docchi experienced at any given moment.", "The prosthetic battery that operated his life cycle.", "The remnants of the cold lighting fluid from the tank into which he had fallen.", "The little bit of human life remaining in him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Dr. Cameron's initial plan for splitting up the recreation committee at Handicap Haven?", "question_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S_8", "options": ["By casting the group as actors in the Rhine Opera.", "By busying Docchi with the Gland opera.", "By occupying the group with simple activities and changing their diets.", "For hiring Nona as a telepathic asset for the Medicouncil."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Dr. Cameron have to continually readjust the lights in his office during his meeting with Docchi?", "question_unique_id": "50736_CD4RAG7S_9", "options": ["Docchi is extremely sensitive to light due to his mutations as an accidental.", "He uses this as a maneuver to throw Docchi off while he practices his telepathy.", "The light that exudes from his face continually brightens and dims with his emotions.", "The brightness that shines from Docchi's body is too bright to be handled by human eyes."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/7/3/50736//50736-h//50736-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "48513", "set_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "His Master's Voice", "year": 1957, "author": "Garrett, Randall", "topic": "Science fiction; PS; Space ships -- Fiction; Robots -- Fiction", "article": "Transcriber's Note:\n\nThis etext was produced from Analog March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nILLUSTRATED\n\n BY\n\n KRENKEL\nHIS MASTER'S VOICE\n\n ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION\nSpaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was\n smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to\n ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like \"Who are\n you?\"\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nI'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called\n Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar\n Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it\n came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could\n make anyone dislike him without trying.\n\n\n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk,\n his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass\n and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n\n\n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"\n\n\n I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.\n\n\n Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice.\n He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges\n touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a\n head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at\n work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action\n on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The\n negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time\n you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and\n throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n\n\n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at\n it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and\n neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.\n\n\n He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and\n sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again\n did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come\n in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n\n\n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping\n my voice level.\n\n\n [5]\n\n\n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your\n action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of\n heavy linseed oil.\n\n\n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When\n I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have\n inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent\n sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"\n\n\n I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back\n the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think\n you'd win.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your\n own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would\n hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n\n\n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial\n business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains.\n Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to\n personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n\n\n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the\n point,\" I told him.\n\n\n \"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through\n your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that\n your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n\n\n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation\n of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the\n point.\"\n\n\n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell\n me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by\n unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after\n activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth\n be considered its ... ah ... master.\n\n\n \"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"\n\n\n \"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him\n my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be\n a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I\n knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n\n\n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They\n realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but\n they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely\n draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can\n this bias be eliminated.\"\n\n\n \"Then why don't they do that?\"\n\n\n \"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of\n anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes\n time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and\n make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of\n the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other\n words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is\n precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n\n\n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me\n because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on\n the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position\n as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts\n might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and\n Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.\n\n\n \"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n\n\n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I\n think.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n\n\n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding\n work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first\n six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at\n me.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to\n be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the\n fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his\n hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further\n attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"\n\n\n \"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go\n to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n\n\n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of\n that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on\n the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other\n spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and\n very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am\ncertain\nthat the robot ship is the\n answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake\n of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of\n McGuire!\"\nWhat's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody\n, I quoted\n to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that\n Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the\n robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to\n be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can\n be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n\n\n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n\n\n \"I don't deny it.\"\n\n\n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be\n charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't\n want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8\n is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n\n\n \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to\n build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs\n in it.\"\n\n\n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will\n do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one\n each six months for three years after the first successful commercial\n ship is built by Viking.\"\n\n\n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a\n deal. Is there anything else?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"\n\n\n \"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.\n\n\n And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal\n triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost\n nothing, he'd really have blown up.\nTen minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring,\n rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of\n Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted\n sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on\n a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the\n magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the\n nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I\n was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself\n against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker\n beacon on my way to Ceres.\n\n\n For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized\n spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial\n engine and the few necessities of life—air, some water, and a very\n little food—still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on\n Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in\n the Belt.\n\n\n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay\n in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to\n hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your\naverage\nvelocity\n doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating\n and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the\n neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.\n\n\n I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one\n gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming\n ordeal with McGuire.\n\n\n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my\n business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says:\nDANIEL\n OAK, Confidential Expediter\n; I'm hired to help other people Get Things\n Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a\n spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the\n business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but\n collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted\n to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important\n than Shalimar Ravenhurst.\n\n\n Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and\n Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a branch of\n the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to\n evaluate the political activities of\n [12]\n various sub-governments all over\n the System.\n\n\n And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.\n\n\n The Political Survey Division\ndoes\nevaluate political activity, all\n right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast\n majority of\n [13]\n the System's citizens don't even know the Government has\n a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the\n Political Survey Division.\n\n\n The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of\n McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the\n traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable\n as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables\n and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given\n orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving\n and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot.\n And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders\n that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician.\n Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to\n repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care\n of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the\n malfunctioning of an individual automobile.\n\n\n McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in\n command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he\nwas\nthe spacecraft, since it\n served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves\n the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a\n top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge\n of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per\n second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths\n were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n\n\n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them\n having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be\n somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans\n aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.\n\n\n But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be\n necessary to give orders—\nfast\n! And that means verbal orders, orders\n that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by\n microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a\n teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n\n\n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has\n to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n\n\n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\nFor more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's\n famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\nFirst Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow\n harm to come to a human being.\nSecond Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except\n when such orders conflict with the First Law\n.\n\n\n [15]\nThird Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except\n when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\nNobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining\n the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot\n can encompass the concept.\n\n\n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly\n narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\"\n are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries,\n illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's\n only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the\n only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging\n the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n\n\n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a\n traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.\n\n\n With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists\n attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first\n six went insane.\n\n\n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\"\n the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more\n valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot\n brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would\n be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you,\n depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous\n as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if\n not more so.\n\n\n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was\n impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.\n\n\n If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult\n to define a\nresponsible\nhuman being. One, in other words, who can\n be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be\n relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n\n\n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another\n tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members\n of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one\n responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only\n from that person.\"\n\n\n As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station.\n\n\n Ceres, the biggest rock in the Belt, is a lot more than just a beacon\n station. Like Eros and a few others, it's a city in its own right. And\n except for the Government Reservation, Viking Spacecraft owned Ceres,\n lock, stock, and mining rights.\n\n\n Part of the reason for Viking's troubles was envy of that ownership.\n There were other companies in the Belt that would like to get their\n hands on that plum, and there were those who were doing everything\n short of cutting throats to get it. The PSD was afraid it might come to\n that, too, before very long.\n\n\n Ceres is fifty-eight million cubic miles of nickel-iron, but nobody\n would cut her up for that. Nickel-iron is almost exactly as cheap as\n dirt on Earth, and, considering shipping costs, Earth soil costs a\n great deal more than nickel-iron in the Belt.\n\n\n But, as an operations base, Ceres is second to none. Its surface\n gravity averages .0294 Standard Gee, as compared with Earth's .981,\n and that's enough to give a slight feeling of weight without unduly\n hampering the body with too much load. I weigh just under six pounds\n on Ceres, and after I've been there a while, going back to Earth is a\n strain that takes a\n [18]\n week to get used to. Kids that are brought up in\n the Belt are forced to exercise in a room with a one-gee spin on it at\n least an hour a day. They don't like it at first, but it keeps them\n from growing up with the strength of mice. And an adult with any sense\n takes a spin now and then, too. Traveling in a flitterboat will give\n you a one-gee pull, all right, but you don't get much exercise.\n\n\n I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by\n Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n\n\n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the\n inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n\n\n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his\n scarred, battered face.\n\n\n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said,\n shaking his extended hand.\n\n\n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n\n\n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath\n and some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want\n a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"\n\n\n \"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n\n\n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By\n definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions\n follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n\n\n [19]\n\n\n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union\n suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was\n a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor\n seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were\n shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other\n colors.\n\n\n A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of\n Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt.\n You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you\n did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle\n that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might\n have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels\n inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are\n places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away\n from his vac suit.\n\n\n I read an article by a psychologist a few months back, in which he\n claimed that the taste for loud colors in union suits was actually\n due to modesty. He claimed that the bright patterns drew attention to\n the colors themselves, and away from the base the colors were laid\n over. The observer, he said, tends to see the color and pattern of the\n suit, rather than the body it clings to so closely. Maybe he's right;\n I wouldn't know, not being a psychologist. I\nhave\nspent summers in\n nudist resorts, though, and I never noticed anyone painting themselves\n with lavender\n [20]\n and chartreuse checks. On the other hand, the people who\n go to nudist resorts are a self-screened group. So are the people who\n go to the Belt, for that matter, but the type of screening is different.\n\n\n I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.\n\n\n \"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of\n Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation,\n which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of\n business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of\n precious metals.\n\n\n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell\n around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we\n can't stand any hell—or sabotage—around this planetoid just now!\"\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd\n pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was\n Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not\n Thurston's agents.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts\n of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we\n hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the\n McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the\n works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No\n one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n\n\n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n\n\n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have\n our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we\n are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing\n about.\"\n\n\n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"\n\n\n He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His\n onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly\n into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I\n can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have\n to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from\n operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want\n you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he\n doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n\n\n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"\n\n\n \"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him\n that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational\n dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going\n to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that\n means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n\n\n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting\n it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she\n sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n\n\n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me\n what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been\n unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an\n irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n\n\n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could\n offer you—\"\n\n\n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons.\n In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working\n for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it\n would be unethical for me to take the job.\n\n\n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a\n certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my\n services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except\n in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a\n lawyer when it's a charity case.\n\n\n \"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n\n\n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very\n slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n\n\n \"\nBut\n,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work\nwith\nyou.\"\n\n\n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already\n working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because\nyou're\nworking for\n Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both\n working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we\n co-operate.\n\n\n \"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may\n render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n\n\n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud\n and clear. It's a deal.\"\n\n\n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'\n involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for\n friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n\n\n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts\n and figures.\"\n\n\n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does Ravenhurst dislike Oak?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_1", "options": ["Oak discovered that Ravenhurst's son, Jack, had purposefully sabotaged McGuire.", "Oak speaks to Ravenhurst with disrespect and sarcasm whenever they discuss business.", "He wanted to keep the affairs of Viking a secret, so he didn't appreciate Oak meddling.", "Oak had revealed Ravenhurst's daughter had sabotaged McGuire."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Asimov's Laws of Robotics cause the robots to go insane?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_2", "options": ["According to the Third Law, a robot \"shall strive to protect its own existence\", so the robots began to do whatever it took to preserve themselves.", "A robot has no ability to determine which command is more correct when given two conflicting commands by different people.", "The Three Laws seemed to conflict with each other, so the robots' interpretations became confused.", "The weight of the moral dilemmas the robots faced began to take their toll the more aware the robots became."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Oak describe his own union suit as immodest?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_3", "options": ["After removing the vac suit, the skin-tight cover-alls are covered in sweat and wrinkles. ", "The suits are form-fitting, so most people decorate them with bright colors and designs to redirect attention. Oak's suit was monochromatic. ", "The suit is baggy and ill-fitting--not suited for attending a private audience with Captain Brock.", "The colors and patterns of his suit are gaudy and distasteful. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Daniel Oak's true interest in McGuire?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_4", "options": ["He worked for both Ravenhurst and Captain Brock, and he was using McGuire to pit the two against each other.", "He was interested in leveraging his power over McGuire into commandeering the tunnels of Ceres.", "He enjoyed his exclusive ability to control McGuire, and he wanted to use that to his advantage to take control of Viking.", "He secretly worked for a government agency that wanted him to gather as much information as possible about McGuire."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What workaround did Oak devise to be able to work with Captain Brock?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_5", "options": ["He offered to pay Captain Brock for his services to sabotage McGuire in order to make Ravenhurst look bad.", "Brock offered to pay for Oak to broadcast Jaqueline Ravenhurst's disappearance to Ceres news outlets.", "Brock offered to make payments to Oak if he would agree to sabotage McGuire and make Ravenhurst take the fall for it.", "Since both he and Brock work for Ravenhurst, they can provide each other services in lieu of payment to avoid any suspicion of corruption."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Ravenhurst need Oak, despite his personal dislike of him?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_6", "options": ["Oak knows the identity of the person who sabotaged McGuire, and Ravenhurst does not wish to allow this information to become public.", "Ravenhurst fears that Oak will subvert his position with Viking and Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation will take over control of Ceres.", "He knows his position with Viking relies on the commercial success of the MGYR-8, and that can only happen with Oak's cooperation. ", "His daughter Jaqueline Ravenhurst is missing, and only Oak knows her whereabouts."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why do people travel the Belt in flitterboats?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_7", "options": ["Their speed makes them a smart choice for getting around the neighborhood.", "Even though it is expensive, it is still cheaper than operating standard spaceships for basic transportation needs.", "They allow access to air, water, and food, and at a cheaper price than a Rolls-Royce.", "They are comfortable, affordable, and convenient for hopping around the Belt quickly."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What made McGuire unique from other robots?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_8", "options": ["He was controlled by Daniel Oak, as opposed to other robots which were controlled by technicians. ", "He was a top-secret project of the Secret Service branch of the Political Survey Division.", "He was able to ignore the orders of traffic robots and travel wherever and whenever he wanted anywhere in the solar system.", "His mind was in control of a single body that could move extremely fast in a number of different directions."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was McGuire beholden to Oak?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_9", "options": ["Oak was the first human to tell McGuire what to do.", "The PSD had a secret program wired into McGuire's systems that would force him to listen to Oak.", "The technicians had programmed MGYR-7 models to obey Oak's commands.", "Oak had sabotaged Viking's engineering of the MGYR-7 model so that it would only listen to his orders."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Ravenhurst's essential weakness?", "question_unique_id": "48513_B3PAXK5L_10", "options": ["He put too much trust in Daniel Oak.", "He was awful at developing and maintaining human relationships.", "He was so desperate to keep his managerial position at Viking that he would do whatever it took to protect it.", "He trust Captain Brock, who was conspiring with Oak against him."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/8/5/1/48513//48513-h//48513-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "47989", "set_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Yellow Phantom\nA Judy Bolton Mystery", "year": 1952, "author": "Sutton, Margaret", "topic": "Eccentrics and eccentricities -- Juvenile fiction; PZ; Women detectives -- Juvenile fiction; Bolton, Judy (Fictitious character) -- Juvenile fiction; Mystery and detective stories", "article": "THE YELLOW\n\n PHANTOM\nBY\nMARGARET SUTTON\nGROSSET & DUNLAP\nPUBLISHERS      NEW YORK\nCopyright, 1933, by\nGROSSET & DUNLAP, Inc.\nAll Rights Reserved\nPrinted in the United States of America\nTo My Mother and Father.\nCONTENTS\nCHAPTER I\nA MYSTERIOUS TELEGRAM\n“Goodbye, Judy! Goodbye, Irene! Don’t\n like New York so well that you won’t want to\n come home!”\n“Don’t keep them too long, Pauline! Farringdon\n will be as dead as so many bricks without\n them. Even the cats will miss Blackberry.\n Make him wave his paw, Judy!”\n“Don’t forget to write!”\n“Goodbye, Pauline! Goodbye, Judy! Goodbye,\n Irene!”\n“Goodbye! Goodbye!”\nAnd Peter’s car was off, bearing the last load\n of campers back to their home town.\nJudy Bolton watched them out of sight.\n They were taking the familiar road, but she and\n Irene Lang would soon be traveling in the other\n direction. Pauline Faulkner had invited them\n for a visit, including Judy’s cat in the invitation,\n and they were going back with her to New\n York.\nA long blue bus hove into view, and all three\n girls hailed it, at first expectantly, then frantically\n when they saw it was not stopping. It\n slowed down a few feet ahead of them, but\n when they attempted to board it the driver\n eyed Blackberry with disapproval.\n“Can’t take the cat unless he’s in a crate.”\n“He’s good,” Judy began. “He won’t be\n any trouble——”\n“Can’t help it. Company’s rules.” And he\n was about to close the door when Judy’s quick\n idea saved the situation.\n“All right, he’s\nin a crate\n,” she declared\n with vigor as she thrust the cat inside her own\n pretty hatbox. The hats she hastily removed\n and bundled under one arm.\nThe driver had to give in. He even grinned\n a bit sheepishly as the girls took their seats,\n Pauline and Irene together, “Because,” Judy\n insisted as she took the seat just behind them,\n “I have Blackberry.”\nThe other passengers on the bus were regarding\n the newcomers with amused interest.\n A ten-year-old boy brought forth a ball of twine\n and rolled it playfully in Blackberry’s direction.\n An old lady made purring noises through\n her lips. Everyone seemed to be nodding and\n smiling. Everyone except the serious young\n man across the aisle. He never turned his\n head.\nJudy nudged the two friends in the seat\n ahead of her and confided a desire to do something—anything\n to make him look up.\n“Why, Judy,” Irene replied, shocked. “I’ve\n been watching that man myself and he’s—he’s——”\n“Well, what?”\n“Almost my ideal.”\n“Silly!” Judy laughed. “I’d like to bet he\n wouldn’t be so ideal if I did something to disturb\n those precious papers that he’s reading.”\n“I dare you!” Pauline said.\nSixteen or not, the dare tempted Judy. It\n was an easy matter to let Blackberry out of the\n hatbox in her arms and down into the aisle.\n The cat’s plumelike tail did the rest.\nThe man looked up. But, to Judy’s surprise,\n he looked up with a smile. Irene, all contrition,\n hastened to apologize.\n“No harm done,” he returned good-naturedly\n and began collecting his scattered papers.\n Soon he had them rearranged and resumed his\n reading. There were a great many typewritten\n sheets of paper, and he seemed to be reading\n critically, scratching out something here and\n adding something there.\n“You were wrong,” Irene said, turning to\n Judy. “See how nice he was.”\n“I should have known better than to dare a\n girl like you,” Pauline put in.\n“It was horrid of me,” Judy admitted, now\n almost as interested as Irene in the strange\n young man. Not because he was Judy’s ideal—a\n man who wouldn’t notice a cat until its tail\n bumped into him—but because the papers on\n his lap might be important. And she had disturbed\n them.\nThe man, apparently unaware that the accident\n had been anybody’s fault, continued reading\n and correcting. Judy watched her cat carefully\n until the stack of papers was safely inside\n his portfolio again.\n“That’s finished,” he announced as though\n speaking to himself. He screwed the top on his\n fountain pen, placed it in his pocket and then\n turned to the girls. “Nice scenery, wasn’t it?”\n“It was,” Judy replied, laughing, “but you\n didn’t seem to be paying much attention to it.”\n“I’ve been over this road a great many\n times,” he explained, “and one does tire of\n scenery, like anything else. Passengers in the\n bus are different.”\n“You mean different from scenery?”\n“Yes, and from each other. For instance,\n you with your ridiculous cat and your golden-haired\n friend who apologized for you and that\n small, dark girl are three distinct types.”\nJudy regarded him curiously. She had never\n thought of herself or either of the other girls as\n “types.” Now she tried to analyze his\n meaning.\nTheir lives had certainly been different.\n Judy and Pauline, although of independent\n natures, had always felt the security of dependence\n upon their parents while Irene’s crippled\n father depended solely upon her. This responsibility\n made her seem older than her years—older\n and younger, too. She never could\n acquire Pauline’s poise or Judy’s fearlessness.\nIn appearance, too, they were different. Her\n first vacation had done wonders for Irene\n Lang. Now her usually pale cheeks glowed\n with healthy color, and her eyes were a deeper,\n happier blue. Two weeks of sunshine had\n tanned her skin and brought out all the gold in\n her hair.\nPauline, too, had acquired a becoming tan\n which made her hair look darker than ever and\n contrasted strangely with her keen, light blue\n eyes.\nThe sun had not been quite so kind to Judy.\n It had discovered a few faint freckles on her\n nose and given her hair a decided reddish cast.\n But Judy didn’t mind. Camp life had been exciting—boating,\n swimming and, as a climax, a\n thrilling ride in Arthur Farringdon-Pett’s new\n airplane.\nThe young man beside Judy was a little like\n Arthur in appearance—tall, good-looking but\n altogether too grown-up and serious. Judy\n liked boys to make jokes now and then, even\n tease the way her brother, Horace, did. Peter\n teased her, too.\n“Queer,” she thought, “to miss being\n teased.”\nThis stranger seemed to like serious-minded\n people and presently changed the conversation\n to books and music, always favorite topics with\n Irene. Then Judy spoke about the work that he\n was doing but learned nothing except that\n “finished” in his case meant that he had succeeded\n in putting his papers back in their\n original sequence.\n“And if you girls were all of the same type,”\n he added, “I doubt if I would have forgiven\n you your prank.”\n“I guess he doesn’t care for my type,” Judy\n whispered to the other two girls a little later.\n“Mine either,” Pauline returned with a\n laugh. “At least he wouldn’t if he knew I\n dared you.”\n“Do you suppose,” Irene asked naïvely,\n “that he cares for my type?”\nShe looked very pathetic as she said that, and\n Judy, remembering Irene’s misfortunes, slid\n into the seat beside her and put a loving arm\n about her shoulder.\n“I care for your type,” she said. “So why\n worry about what a stranger thinks?”\n“I’m not,” Irene said, belying her answer\n with a wistful look in the stranger’s direction.\n He was still absorbed in the mountain of typewritten\n pages that he held on his knee. It\n seemed that his work, whatever it was, engrossed\n him completely. He was again making\n corrections and additions with his pen. Judy\n noticed a yellow slip of paper on the seat beside\n him and called the other girls’ attention\n to it.\n“It looks like a telegram,” she whispered,\n “and he keeps referring to it.”\n“Telegrams are usually bad news,” Irene replied.\nThe young man sat a little distance away\n from them and, to all appearances, had forgotten\n their existence. Girl-like, they discussed\n him, imagining him as everything from a politician\n to a cub reporter, finally deciding that,\n since he lived in Greenwich Village, he must be\n an artist. Irene said she liked to think of him\n as talented. A dreamer, she would have called\n him, if it had not been for his practical interest\n in the business at hand—those papers and that\n telegram.\nIt was dark by the time they reached New\n York. The passengers were restless and eager\n to be out of the bus. The young man hastily\n crammed his typewritten work into his portfolio\n and Judy noticed, just as the bus stopped,\n that he had forgotten the telegram. She and\n Irene both made a dive for it with the unfortunate\n result that when they stood up again\n each of them held a torn half of the yellow slip.\n“Just our luck!” exclaimed Irene. “Now\n we can’t return it to him. Anyway, he’s gone.”\n“We could piece it together,” Pauline suggested,\n promptly suiting her actions to her\n words. When the two jagged edges were fitted\n against each other, this is what the astonished\n girls read:\n\nDALE MEREDITH\nPLEASANT VALLEY PA\nCUT ART SHOP ROBBERY STOP FIFTY THOUSAND\nIS PLENTY STOP ONE MAN MURDERED INTERESTS\nRANDALL STOP DISCUSS TERMS MONDAY\nEMILY GRIMSHAW\nIrene was the first to finish reading.\n“Good heavens! What would\nhe\nknow about\n robbery and murder?” she exclaimed, staring\n first at the telegram in Pauline’s hand and\n then at the empty seat across the aisle.\n“Why, nothing that I can think of. He didn’t\n seem like a crook. The telegram may be in\n code,” Pauline mused as she handed the torn\n pieces to Judy. “I like his name—Dale Meredith.”\n“So do I. But Emily Grimshaw——”\n“All out! Last stop!” the bus driver was\n calling. “Take care of that cat,” he said with\n a chuckle as he helped the girls with their suitcases.\nThey were still wondering about the strange\n telegram as they made their way through the\n crowd on Thirty-fourth Street.\nCHAPTER II\nIRENE’S DISCOVERY\nA taxi soon brought the girls to the door of\n Dr. Faulkner’s nineteenth century stone house.\n The stoop had been torn down and replaced by\n a modern entrance hall, but the high ceilings\n and winding stairways were as impressive as\n ever.\nDrinking in the fascination of it, Judy and\n Irene followed the man, Oliver, who carried\n their bags right up to the third floor where\n Pauline had a sitting room and a smaller bedroom\n all to herself. The former was furnished\n with a desk, sofa, easy chairs, numerous shaded\n lamps, a piano and a radio.\nHere the man left them with a curt, “’Ere\n you are.”\n“And it’s good to have you, my dears,” the\n more sociable housekeeper welcomed them.\n Soon she was bustling around the room setting\n their bags in order. She offered to help unpack.\n“Never mind that now, Mary,” Pauline told\n her. “We’re dead tired and I can lend them\n some of my things for tonight.”\n“Then I’ll fix up the double bed in the next\n room for your guests and leave you to yourselves,”\n the kind old lady said.\nAs soon as she had closed the door Judy\n lifted her cat out of the hatbox. With a grateful\n noise, halfway between a purr and a yowl,\n Blackberry leaped to the floor and began, at\n once, to explore the rooms.\n“His padded feet were made for soft carpets,”\n Judy said fondly.\n“How do you suppose he’d like gravel?”\n Pauline asked.\n“Oh, he’d love it!” Judy exclaimed. “You\n know our cellar floor is covered with gravel,\n and he sleeps down there.”\n“Is this gravel in the cellar?” Irene asked,\n beginning to get an attack of shivers.\nPauline laughed. “Goodness, no! It’s on\n the roof garden.” She walked across the room\n and flung open a door. “Nothing shivery about\n that, is there?”\n“Nothing except the thought of standing on\n the top of one of those tall buildings,” Irene\n said, gazing upward as she followed Pauline.\nThe view fascinated Judy. Looking out\n across lower New York, she found a new world\n of gray buildings and flickering lights. In the\n other direction the Empire State Building\n loomed like a sentinel.\n“I never dreamed New York was like this,”\n she breathed.\n“It grows on a person,” Pauline declared.\n “I would never want to live in any other city.\n No matter how bored or how annoyed I may be\n during the day, at night I can always come up\n here and feel the thrill of having all this for a\n home.”\n“I wish I had a home I could feel that way\n about,” Irene sighed.\nThe garden was too alluring for the girls to\n want to leave it. Even Blackberry had settled\n himself in a bed of geraniums. These and other\n plants in enormous boxes bordered the complete\n inclosure. Inside were wicker chairs, a table\n and a hammock hung between two posts.\n“This is where I do all my studying,” Pauline\n said, “and you two girls may come up here\n and read if you like while I’m at school.”\n“At school?” Judy repeated, dazed until she\n thought of something that she should have considered\n before accepting Pauline’s invitation.\n Of course Pauline would be in school. She\n hadn’t been given a holiday as the girls in Farringdon\n had when their school burned down.\n Judy and Irene would be left to entertain themselves\n all day unless Dr. Faulkner had some\n plans for them. Judy wondered where he was.\nAfter they had gone inside again, that is, all\n of them except Blackberry who seemed to have\n adopted the roof garden as a permanent home,\n she became curious enough to ask.\n“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Pauline said in surprise.\n “Father is away. A medical conference\n in Europe. He’s always going somewhere like\n that, but he’ll be home in two or three weeks.”\n“Then we’ll be alone for three weeks?” Irene\n asked, dismayed.\n“Why not?” Pauline returned indifferently.\n “There’s nothing to be afraid of with servants\n in the house.”\nBut Irene was not used to servants. Ever\n since her father became disabled she had waited\n on herself and kept their shabby little house in\n apple-pie order. The house was closed now and\n their few good pieces of furniture put in storage.\n All summer long there would not be any\n rent problems or any cooking. Then, when fall\n came, she and her father would find a new\n home. Where it would be or how they would\n pay for it worried Irene when she thought\n about it. She tried not to think because Dr.\n Bolton had told her she needed a rest. Her\n father, a patient of the doctor’s, was undergoing\n treatments at the Farringdon Sanitarium.\n The treatments were being given\n according to Dr. Bolton’s directions but not by\n him as Judy’s home, too, was closed for the\n summer. Her parents had not intended to stay\n away more than a week or two, but influenza\n had swept the town where they were visiting.\n Naturally, the doctor stayed and his wife with\n him. Judy’s brother, a reporter and student\n of journalism, had gone to live in the college\n dormitory.\nThus it was that both girls knew they could\n not return to Farringdon no matter how homesick\n they might be. They had the cat for comfort\n and they had each other. Ever since Irene\n had come to work in Dr. Bolton’s office these\n two had been like sisters. Lois, Lorraine,\n Betty, Marge, Pauline—all of them were\n friends. But Irene and Honey, the other girl\n who had shared Judy’s home, were closer than\n that. Judy felt with them. She felt with Irene\n the longing of the other girl for something to\n hold fast to—a substantial home that could not\n be taken away at every whim of the landlord,\n just enough money so that she could afford to\n look her best and the security of some strong\n person to depend upon.\n“Will your school last long?” Irene was asking\n the dark-haired girl.\n“Not long enough,” Pauline sighed, revealing\n the fact that she too had troubles.\n“Then you’ll be free?” Irene went on, unmindful\n of the sigh. “We can go places together?\n You’ll have time to show us around.”\nPauline shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t\n talk about time to me. Time will be my middle\n name after I graduate. There isn’t a single\n thing I really want to do, least of all stay at\n home all day. College is a bore unless you’re\n planning a career. What do you intend to do\n when you’re through school?”\n“I hadn’t planned,” Irene said, “except that\n I want time to read and go ahead with my\n music. Of course I’ll keep house somewhere\n for Dad. It will be so nice to have him well\n again, and I love keeping house.”\n“What about your work for my father?”\n Judy asked.\nIrene’s eyes became troubled. “He doesn’t\n really need me any more. I know now, Judy,\n that you just made that position for me. It was\n lovely of you, but I—I’d just as soon not go\n back where I’m not needed. Your father trusts\n too many people ever to get rich and he could\n use that money he’s been paying me.”\n“Don’t feel that way about it,” Judy begged.\nIrene’s feelings, however, could not easily be\n changed, and with both girls having such grave\n worries the problem bid fair to be too great a\n one for even Judy to solve. Solving problems,\n she hoped, would eventually be her career for\n she planned to become a regular detective with\n a star under her coat. Now she confided this\n ambition to the other two girls.\n“A detective!” Pauline gasped. “Why,\n Judy, only men are detectives. Can you imagine\n anyone taking a mere girl on the police\n force?”\n“Chief Kelly, back home, would take her this\n very minute if she applied,” Irene declared.\nPauline nodded, easily convinced. This practical,\n black-haired, blue-eyed girl had helped\n Judy solve two mysteries and knew that she had\n talent. But Pauline didn’t want to meet crooks.\n She didn’t want to be bothered with sick or\n feeble-minded people and often felt thankful\n that her father, a brain specialist, had his offices\n elsewhere. Pauline wanted to meet cultured\n people who were also interesting.\n“People, like that man we met on the bus,”\n she said, “who read and can discuss books intelligently.\n I’d hate to think of his being mixed\n up in anything crooked.”\n“You can’t\nmake\nme believe that he was,”\n Irene put in with a vigor quite rare for her.\n “Couldn’t you just see in his eyes that he was\n real?”\n“I didn’t look in his eyes,” Judy returned\n with a laugh, “but you can be sure I’ll never\n be satisfied until we find out what that mysterious\n telegram meant.”\nIn the days that followed Judy learned that\n the mere mention of the stranger’s name, Dale\n Meredith, would cause either girl to cease\n worrying about a home or about a career, as\n the case might be.\n“It’s almost magical,” she said to herself\n and had to admit that the spell was also upon\n her. Perhaps a dozen times a day she would\n puzzle over the torn papers in her pocketbook.\n But then, it was Judy’s nature to puzzle over\n things. It was for that reason that she usually\n chose detective stories whenever she sat down\n with a book. That hammock up there on the\n roof garden was an invitation to read, and soon\n Judy and Irene had finished all the suitable\n stories in Dr. Faulkner’s library. They had\n seen a few shows, gazed at a great many tall\n buildings, and found New York, generally, less\n thrilling from the street than it had been from\n the roof garden.\nPauline sensed this and worried about entertaining\n her guests. “How would you like to\n go and see Grant’s Tomb today?” she suggested.\n“For Heaven’s sake, think of something a\n little more exciting than that,” Judy exclaimed\n thoughtlessly. “I’d rather find a library somewhere\n and then lie and read something in the\n hammock.”\n“So would I,” agreed Irene, relieved that\n Judy hadn’t wanted to see the tomb.\n“Well, if a library’s all you want,” Pauline\n said, “why not walk along with me and I’ll\n show you one on my way to school.”\n“A big one?” Judy asked.\n“No, just a small one. In fact, it’s only a\n bookshop with a circulating library for its customers.”\nJudy sighed. It would seem nice to see something\n small for a change. She never recognized\n this library at all until they were almost inside\n the door. Then her eyes shone.\nWhat an interesting place it was! On the\n counters were quaint gifts and novelties as well\n as books. The salesladies all wore smocks, like\n artists, and had the courtesy to leave the girls\n alone. Pauline had to hurry on to school but\n left Judy and Irene to browse. Before long\n they had discovered a sign reading MYSTERY\n AND ADVENTURE. That was what Judy\n liked. Rows and rows of new books, like soldiers,\n marched along the shelves.\n“What a lot of flying stories,” Irene said,\n absently removing one of them from its place.\n“And murder mysteries,” Judy added. “It’s\n always a temptation to read them.\nMurders in\n Castle Stein\n....”\nShe started back as her eye caught the\n author’s name.\nIt was Dale Meredith!\nCHAPTER III\nA DARING SCHEME\nThrilled by her discovery, Judy removed\n the torn pieces of telegram from her purse\n and began unraveling the mystery, bit by bit.\n Irene looked on, trembling with excitement.\n“‘CUT ART SHOP ROBBERY STOP\n FIFTY THOUSAND IS PLENTY STOP....’\nArt Shop Robbery!\nThat sounds like a title!\n And someone wanted him to cut it to fifty\n thousand words—just a nice length for a book.\n That must have been what he was doing on the\n bus, cutting down the number of words on those\n typewritten pages.”\n“Why, of course,” Irene agreed. “I always\n knew you were gifted, Judy, but can you explain\n this?” She pointed.\n“‘ONE MAN MURDERED INTERESTS\n RANDALL....’ Easy as pie! Another title\n and a publisher.”\nJudy tossed her head with a self-satisfied\n air of importance. Every one of their questions\n might be answered in the classified directory.\nThey found a telephone booth near by and a\n directory on the shelf beside it. Promptly turning\n to the list of publishing houses, Judy’s\n finger traveled down one complete page and\n half of another, but no Randall could she find.\n With a sigh of disappointment she turned to\n look again at the telegram:\n\n“DISCUSS TERMS MONDAY”\n“EMILY GRIMSHAW”\nWhat sort of person was she? A relative?\n No. Relatives didn’t discuss terms with authors.\n Wives and sweethearts didn’t either.\n They might discuss his books, but not terms.\n Anyway Irene hoped that Dale Meredith had\n no wife or sweetheart, certainly not a sweetheart\n with a name like Emily Grimshaw. That\n name sounded as harsh to the ears as Dale\n Meredith sounded musical.\nFlipping the pages of the directory, Judy\n came upon the answer to their question:\n“AUTHOR’S AGENTS (\nSee\nLiterary\n Agents).”\n“That might be it!”\nShe turned to the place and, beginning at the\n top of the page, both girls searched eagerly\n through the G’s.\n“Greenspan, Grier, Grimshaw....”\nThe name was Emily and the address was\n a number on Madison Square. Irene was so\n excited that she declared she could feel her\n heart thumping under her slip-on sweater.\n“I’d give anything to meet him again, Judy!\n Anything!”\nAnd suddenly Judy wanted to meet him too,\n not for her own sake but for Irene’s. A bold\n plan began to take shape in her mind. If she\n and Irene found positions in Emily Grimshaw’s\n office Dale Meredith would never know that it\n had not been a simple coincidence. It would be\n such fun—this scheming. It would give them\n something to do and if Judy’s plan worked it\n might even solve the problem of Pauline’s\n career.\n“Of course Emily Grimshaw may not hire\n us,” Judy said after she had outlined the\n scheme and won Irene’s approval. “But, at\n any rate, it’s worth trying. We won’t need to\n tell her it’s only for a few weeks when Pauline\n will be there to step right into the position.\n I wonder how you get to Madison Square.”\nShe stopped a policeman to ask him and\n found it to be within easy walking distance.\n“We might as well go now,” Irene agreed.\nPerhaps if they thought about it too long\n they might lose heart and not attempt it.\nThe literary agent’s office was located in an\n old hotel on the northeast side of the square.\n The building looked as if it had been unchanged\n for a century. In the lobby Judy and Irene\n paused, surveying the quaint furniture and\n mural decorations before they mustered enough\n courage to inquire at the desk for Emily Grimshaw.\n“Who’s calling?” the clerk asked tartly.\n“Tell her—” Judy hesitated. “Tell her it’s\n two girls to see her on business.”\nThe message was relayed over the switchboard\n and presently the clerk turned and said,\n “She will see one of you. First stairway to\n the left. Fourth floor.”\n“Only one—” Judy began.\n“She always sees one client at a time. The\n other girl can wait.”\n“That’s right. I—I’ll wait,” Irene stammered.\n“But you wanted the position——”\n“I don’t now. Suppose she asked about experience.”\n“You’ve had a little. You stand a better\n chance than I do.”\n“Not with your nerve, Judy,” Irene said.\n “This place gives me the shivers. You’re welcome\n to go exploring dark halls if you like. I’d\n rather sit here in the lobby and read Dale Meredith’s\n book.”\n“Oh, so that’s it? Make yourself comfortable,”\n Judy advised with a laugh. “I may be\n gone a long, long time.”\n“Not if she finds out how old you are.”\n“Hush!” Judy reproved. “Don’t I look\n dignified?”\nShe tilted her hat a little more to the left\n and dabbed a powder puff on her nose. The\n puff happened not to have any powder on it but\n it gave her a grown-up, courageous feeling.\n And she was to have a great need of courage\n in the hour that followed.\nCHAPTER IV\nHOW THE SCHEME WORKED\nThe adventure lost some of its thrill with no\n one to share it. Judy hadn’t an idea in the\n world how to find the fourth floor as she could\n see no stairway and no elevator.\nTaking a chance, she opened one of several\n doors. It opened into a closet where cleaning\n supplies were kept. Judy glanced at the dusty\n floor and wondered if anybody ever used them.\nThis was fun! She tried another door and\n found it locked. But the third door opened into\n a long hall at the end of which was the\n stairway.\n“A regular labyrinth, this place,” she\n thought as she climbed. “I wonder if Emily\n Grimshaw will be as queer as her hotel.”\nThere were old-fashioned knockers on all the\n doors, and Judy noticed that no two of them\n were alike. Emily Grimshaw had her name on\n the glass door of her suite, and the knocker\n was in the shape of a witch hunched over a\n steaming caldron. Judy lifted it and waited.\n“Who’s there?” called a mannish voice from\n within.\n“Judy Bolton. They told me at the desk\n that you would see me.”\n“Come on in, then. Don’t stand there banging\n the knocker.”\n“I beg your pardon,” Judy said meekly as\n she entered. “I didn’t quite understand.”\n“It’s all right. Who sent you?”\n“Nobody. I came myself. I found your\n name in the classified directory.”\n“Oh, I see. Another beginner.”\nEmily Grimshaw sat back in her swivel chair\n and scrutinized Judy. She was a large woman\n dressed in a severely plain brown cloth dress\n with sensible brown shoes to match. Her iron-gray\n hair was knotted at the back of her head.\n In fact, the only mark of distinction about her\n whole person was the pair of glasses perched\n on the high bridge of her nose and the wide,\n black ribbon suspended from them. Although\n an old woman, her face was not wrinkled.\n What few lines she had were deep furrows that\n looked as if they belonged there. Judy could\n imagine Emily Grimshaw as a middle-aged\n woman but never as a girl.\nThe room was, by no means, a typical office.\n If it had not been for the massive desk littered\n with papers and the swivel chair it would not\n have looked like an office at all. Three of the\n four walls were lined with bookshelves.\n“Is this where you do all your work?” Judy\n asked.\n“And why not? It’s a good enough place.”\n“Of course,” Judy explained herself quickly.\n “But I supposed you would have girls working\n for you. It must keep you busy doing all this\n yourself.”\n“Hmm! It does. I like to be busy.”\nJudy took a deep breath. How, she wondered,\n was she to put her proposition before\n this queer old woman without seeming impudent.\n It was the first time in her life she had\n ever offered her services to anyone except her\n father.\n“You use a typewriter,” she began.\n“Look here, young woman,” Emily Grimshaw\n turned on her suddenly, “if you’re a\n writer, say so. And if you’ve come here looking\n for a position——”\n“That’s it exactly,” Judy interrupted. “I’m\n sure I could be of some service to you.”\n“What?”\n“I might typewrite letters for you.”\n“I do that myself. Haven’t the patience to\n dictate them.”\n“Perhaps I could help you read and correct\n manuscripts,” Judy suggested hopefully.\nThe agent seemed insulted. “Humph!” she\n grunted. “Much you know about manuscripts!”\n“I may know more than you think,” Judy\n came back at her. It was hard to be patient\n with this irritable old lady. Certainly she\n would never have chosen such an employer if\n it had not been for the possibility of meeting\n Dale Meredith again. Irene had taken such a\n fancy to him.\n“Lucky she doesn’t know that,” thought\n Judy as she watched her fumbling through a\n stack of papers on her desk. Finally she produced\n a closely written page of note paper and\n handed it to the puzzled girl.\n“If you know so much about manuscripts,”\n she charged. “What would you do with a page\n like that?”\nHalf hoping that the handwriting was Dale\n Meredith’s, Judy reached out an eager hand.\n The agent was watching her like a cat and, as\n she read, a hush settled over the room. Emily\n Grimshaw was putting Judy to a test.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did Dale Meredith's telegram read: \"ART SHOP ROBBERY STOP FIFTY THOUSAND IS PLENTY....\"?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_1", "options": ["He was a criminal, and Emily Grimshaw was his accomplice warning him to stop while he was ahead.", "Dale Meredith was a thief and had stolen $50,000 in a recent heist.", "Dale Meredith was a mystery writer whose new novel \"Art Shop Robbery\" was going to net him $50,000.", "He was an author, and this was the title of his new book; 50,000 referred to the recommended word limit."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Judy disturb Dale Meredith at their first meeting?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_2", "options": ["She released Blackberry on the bus, who knocked Dale's papers from his hands with his tail.", "Pauline dared her to swipe the papers from his hand to see how he would react.", "She accidentally knocked his papers out of his hand while taking her seat on the bus.", "She and her friends were being very loud on the bus and asking him a number of questions."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What did Judy reveal to her friends soon after arriving in New York?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_3", "options": ["She believed Dale Meredith was a mystery writer.", "She wanted to be a detective when she graduated.", "She knew the true identity of Emily Grimshaw.", "She did not like New York very much, and she wanted to go back to Farringdon."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why didn't Irene join Judy for the first meeting with Emily Grimshaw?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_4", "options": ["She was hoping to meet Dale Meredith in the lobby of the building.", "Her nerves got the better of her, and she decided to stay behind.", "They were only allowed to visit with Emily as individuals.", "She had no interest in getting a job with Emily Grimshaw."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was it a good decision to not visit Grant's Tomb?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_5", "options": ["Because instead, the girls went to a small bookstore, where they discovered the truth about Dale Meredith.", "If they hadn't gone to the bookstore, they wouldn't have confirmed their suspicions that Dale Meredith was a criminal.", "If they hadn't gone to the bookstore, they wouldn't have discovered that Emily Grimshaw was a witch. ", "Going to Grant's Tomb would be a boring activity according to Judy."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Dale Meredith say \"finished\"?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_6", "options": ["He was tired of talking to the girls.", "He had successfully reordered the papers Blackberry had strewn about the bus.", "He was finished with the writing he had been working on during the bus ride.", "He had finished plotting out his next heist."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why could Judy and Irene not go back to Farringdon for several weeks?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_7", "options": ["They had promised Pauline they would spend the entire summer with her.", "Judy got a job at Emily Grimshaw's publishing company and committed to working there the whole summer.", "Both of Judy's parents were sick, and Irene's father was being treated for his disability.", "Their schoolhouse had burned down."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Judy want to work for Emily Grimshaw?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_8", "options": ["She wants to solve the mystery of the telegram she discovered on the bus.", "She has an interest in becoming a detective, and having access to the mystery novels Emily Grimshaw publishes will help her toward that goal.", "She is secretly in love with Dale Meredith, but she does not want to hurt Irene's feelings.", "She wants to create a scenario where Irene can meet Dale Meredith and Pauline can get a job when she graduates."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What were Irene and Judy's feelings about New York?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_9", "options": ["They enjoyed the view from Pauline's apartment, but they didn't care for the city itself.", "They much preferred New York to their small hometown of Farringdon.", "Although they were homesick, they were thrilled about the countless adventures they were having in New York.", "They spent countless hours lost in the many bookstores the city had to offer."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Irene go with Judy to visit Emily Grimshaw?", "question_unique_id": "47989_NSAL5SJQ_10", "options": ["She hoped to meet Dale Meredith.", "She was bored and had nothing else to do that day.", "She wanted to be hired to work for Emily Grimshaw along with Judy.", "She wanted to solve the mystery of Dale's telegram."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/7/9/8/47989//47989-h//47989-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51231", "set_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Syndrome Johnny", "year": 1958, "author": "Dye, Charles", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Scientists -- Fiction; Science fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Diseases -- Fiction", "article": "Syndrome Johnny\nBY CHARLES DYE\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe plagues that struck mankind could be attributed\n\n to one man. But was he fiend ... or savior?\nThe blood was added to a pool of other blood, mixed, centrifuged,\n separated to plasma and corpuscles, irradiated slightly, pasteurized\n slightly, frozen, evaporated, and finally banked. Some of the plasma\n was used immediately for a woman who had bled too much in childbirth.\n\n\n She died.\n\n\n Others received plasma and did not die. But their symptoms changed,\n including a syndrome of multiple endocrine unbalance, eccentricities of\n appetite and digestion, and a general pattern of emotional disturbance.\n\n\n An alert hospital administrator investigated the mortality rise and\n narrowed it to a question of who had donated blood the week before.\n After city residents were eliminated, there remained only the signed\n receipts and thumbprints of nine men. Nine healthy unregistered\n travelers poor enough to sell their blood for money, and among them a\n man who carried death in his veins. The nine thumbprints were broadcast\n to all police files and a search began.\n\n\n The effort was futile, for there were many victims who had sickened and\n grown partially well again without recognizing the strangeness of their\n illness.\n\n\n Three years later they reached the carrier stage and the epidemic\n spread to four cities. Three more years, and there was an epidemic\n which spread around the world, meeting another wave coming from the\n opposite direction. It killed two out of four, fifty out of a hundred,\n twenty-seven million out of fifty million. There was hysteria where\n it appeared. And where it had not appeared there were quarantines to\n fence it out. But it could not be fenced out. For two years it covered\n the world. And then it vanished again, leaving the survivors with a\n tendency toward glandular troubles.\n\n\n Time passed. The world grew richer, more orderly, more peaceful.\n\n\n A man paused in the midst of his work at the U.N. Food and Agriculture\n Commission. He looked up at the red and green production map of India.\n\n\n \"Just too many people per acre,\" he said. \"All our work at improving\n production ... just one jump ahead of their rising population, one jump\n ahead of famine. Sometimes I wish to God there would be another plague\n to give us a breathing spell and a fair chance to get things organized.\"\n\n\n He went back to work and added another figure.\n\n\n Two months later, he was one of the first victims of the second plague.\nIn the dining hall of a university, a biochemical student glanced up\n from his paper to his breakfast companion. \"You remember Johnny, the\n mythical carrier that they told about during the first and second\n epidemics of Syndrome Plague?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Syndrome Johnny. They use that myth in psychology class as a\n typical example of mass hysteria. When a city was nervous and expecting\n the plague to reach them, some superstitious fool would imagine he saw\n Syndrome Johnny and the population would panic. Symbol for Death or\n some such thing. People imagined they saw him in every corner of the\n world. Simultaneously, of course.\"\n\n\n It was a bright morning and they were at a window which looked out\n across green rolling fields to a towering glass-brick building in the\n distance.\n\n\n The student who had gone back to his paper suddenly looked up again.\n \"Some Peruvians here claim they saw Syndrome Johnny—\"\n\n\n \"Idiotic superstition! You'd think it would have died down when the\n plague died.\"\n\n\n The other grinned. \"The plague didn't die.\" He folded his newspaper\n slowly, obviously advancing an opening for a debate.\n\n\n His companion went on eating. \"Another of your wild theories, huh?\"\n Then through a mouthful of food: \"All right, if the plague didn't die,\n where did it go?\"\n\n\n \"Nowhere.\nWe have it now.\nWe all have it!\" He shrugged. \"A virus\n catalyst of high affinity for the cells and a high similarity to a\n normal cell protein—how can it be detected?\"\n\n\n \"Then why don't people die? Why aren't we sick?\"\n\n\n \"Because we have sickened and recovered. We caught it on conception\n and recovered before birth. Proof? Why do you think that the countries\n which were known as the Hungry Lands are now well-fed, leisured,\n educated, advanced? Because the birth rate has fallen! Why has the\n birth rate fallen?\" He paused, then very carefully said, \"Because two\n out of three of all people who would have lived have died before birth,\n slain by Syndrome Plague. We are all carriers now, hosts to a new\n guest. And\"—his voice dropped to a mock sinister whisper—\"with such a\n stranger within our cells, at the heart of the intricate machinery of\n our lives, who knows what subtle changes have crept upon us unnoticed!\"\n\n\n His companion laughed. \"Eat your breakfast. You belong on a horror\n program!\"\nA police psychologist for the Federated States of The Americas was\n running through reports from the Bureau of Social Statistics. Suddenly\n he grunted, then a moment later said, \"Uh-huh!\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh what?\" asked his superior, who was reading a newspaper with his\n feet up on the desk.\n\n\n \"Remember the myth, of Syndrome Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"Ghost of Syndrome Plague. Si, what of it?\"\n\n\n \"Titaquahapahel, Peru, population nine hundred, sent in a claim that he\n turned up there and they almost caught him. Crime Statistics rerouted\n the report to Mass Phenomena, of course. Mass Phenomena blew a tube and\n sent their folder on Syndrome Johnny over here. Every report they ever\n had on him for ninety years back! A memo came with it.\" He handed the\n memo over.\n\n\n The man behind the desk looked at it. It was a small graph and some\n mathematical symbols. \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"It means,\" said the psychologist, smiling dryly, \"that every crazy\n report about our ghost has points of similarity to every other crazy\n report. The whole business of Syndrome Johnny has been in their 'funny\n coincidence' file for twenty years. This time the suspect hits the\n averaged description of Johnny too closely: A solid-looking man,\n unusual number of visible minor scars, and a disturbing habit of\n bending his fingers at the first-joint knuckles when he is thinking.\n The coincidence has gotten too damn funny. There's a chance we've been\n passing up a crime.\"\n\n\n \"An extensive crime,\" said the man at the desk softly. He reached\n for the folder. \"Yes, a considerable quantity of murder.\" He leafed\n through the folder and then thought a while, looking at the most recent\n reports. Thinking was what he was paid for, and he earned his excellent\n salary.\n\n\n \"This thumbprint on the hotel register—the name is false, but the\n thumbprint looks real. Could we persuade the Bureau of Records to give\n their data on that print?\"\n\n\n \"Without a warrant? Against constitutional immunity. No, not a chance.\n The public has been touchy about the right to secrecy ever since that\n police state was attempted in Varga.\"\n\n\n \"How about persuading an obliging judge to give a warrant on grounds of\n reasonable suspicion?\"\n\n\n \"No. We'd have the humanist press down on our necks in a minute, and\n any judge knows it. We'd have to prove a crime was committed. No crime,\n no warrant.\"\n\n\n \"It seems a pity we can't even find out who the gentleman is,\" the\n Crimes Department head murmured, looking at the thumbprint wistfully.\n \"No crime, no records. No records, no evidence. No evidence, no proof\n of crime. Therefore, we must manufacture a small crime. He was attacked\n and he must have defended himself. Someone may have been hurt in the\n process.\" He pushed a button. \"Do you think if I send a man down there,\n he could persuade one of the mob to swear out a complaint?\"\n\n\n \"That's a rhetorical question,\" said the psychologist, trying to work\n out an uncertain correlation in his reports. \"With that sort of mob\n hysteria, the town would probably give you an affidavit of witchcraft.\"\n\"Phone for you, Doctor Alcala.\" The nurse was crisp but quiet, smiling\n down at the little girl before vanishing again.\n\n\n Ricardo Alcala pushed the plunger in gently, then carefully withdrew\n the hypodermic needle from the little girl's arm. \"There you are,\n Cosita,\" he said, smiling and rising from the chair beside the white\n bed.\n\n\n \"Will that make me better, Doctor?\" she piped feebly.\n\n\n He patted her hand. \"Be a good girl and you will be well tomorrow.\" He\n walked out into the hospital corridor to where the desk nurse held out\n a phone.\n\n\n \"Alcala speaking.\"\n\n\n The voice was unfamiliar. \"My deepest apologies for interrupting your\n work, Doctor. At this late hour I'm afraid I assumed you would be at\n home. The name is Camba, Federation Investigator on a health case. I\n would like to consult you.\"\n\n\n Alcala was tired, but there was nothing to do at home. Nita was at the\n health resort and Johnny had borrowed all his laboratory space for a\n special synthesis of some sort, and probably would be too busy even\n to talk. Interest stirred in him. This was a Federation investigator\n calling; the man's work was probably important. \"Tonight, if that's\n convenient. I'll be off duty in five minutes.\"\n\n\n Thirty minutes later they were ordering in a small cantina down the\n street from the hospital.\n\n\n Julio Camba, Federation Investigator, was a slender, dark man with\n sharp, glinting eyes. He spoke with a happy theatrical flourish.\n\n\n \"Order what you choose, Senor. We're on my expense account. The\n resources of the Federated States of all The Americas stand behind your\n menu.\"\n\n\n Alcala smiled. \"I wouldn't want to add to the national debt.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all, Senor. The Federated States are only too happy thus to\n express a fraction of their gratitude by adding a touch of luxury to\n the otherwise barren and self-sacrificing life of a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"You shame me,\" Alcala said dryly. It was true that he needed\n every spare penny for the health of Nita and the child, and for the\n laboratory. A penny saved from being spent on nourishment was a penny\n earned. He picked up the menu again and ordered steak.\n\n\n The investigator lit a cigar, asking casually: \"Do you know John\n Osborne Drake?\"\nAlcala searched his memory. \"No. I'm sorry....\" Then he felt for the\n first time how closely he was being watched, and knew how carefully his\n reaction and the tone of his voice had been analyzed. The interview was\n dangerous. For some reason, he was suspected of something.\n\n\n Camba finished lighting the cigar and dropped the match into an\n ash-tray. \"Perhaps you know John Delgados?\" He leaned back into the\n shadowy corner of the booth.\n\n\n Johnny! Out of all the people in the world, how could the government be\n interested in him? Alcala tried to sound casual. \"An associate of mine.\n A friend.\"\n\n\n \"I would like to contact the gentleman.\" The request was completely\n unforceful, undemanding. \"I called, but he was not at home. Could you\n tell me where he might be?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Senor Camba, but I cannot say. He could be on a business\n trip.\" Alcala was feeling increasingly nervous. Actually, Johnny was\n working at his laboratory.\n\n\n \"What do you know of his activities?\" Camba asked.\n\n\n \"A biochemist.\" Alcala tried to see past the meditative mask of the\n thin dark face. \"He makes small job-lots of chemical compounds. Special\n bug spray for sale to experimental plantations, hormone spray for\n fruits, that sort of thing. Sometimes, when he collects some money\n ahead, he does research.\"\n\n\n Camba waited, and his silence became a question. Alcala spoke\n reluctantly, anger rising in him. \"Oh, it's genuine research. He has\n some patents and publications to his credit. You can confirm that if\n you choose.\" He was unable to keep the hostility out of his voice.\n\n\n A waiter came and placed steaming platters of food on the table. Camba\n waited until he was gone. \"You know him well, I presume. Is he sane?\"\n\n\n The question was another shock. Alcala thought carefully, for any man\n might be insane in secret. \"Yes, so far as I know.\" He turned his\n attention to the steak, but first took three very large capsules from a\n bottle in his pocket.\n\n\n \"I would not expect that a doctor would need to take pills,\" Camba\n remarked with friendly mockery.\n\n\n \"I don't need them,\" Alcala explained. \"Mixed silicones. I'm guinea\n pigging.\"\n\n\n \"Can't such things be left to the guinea pigs?\" Camba asked, watching\n with revulsion as Alcala uncapped the second bottle and sprinkled a\n layer of gray powder over his steak.\n\n\n \"Guinea pigs have no assimilation of silicones; only man has that.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course. I should have remembered from your famous papers,\nThe\n Need Of Trace Silicon In Human Diet\nand\nSilicon Deficiency Diseases\n.\"\nObviously Camba had done considerable investigating of Alcala before\n approaching him. He had even given the titles of the research papers\n correctly. Alcala's wariness increased.\n\n\n \"What is the purpose of the experiment this time?\" asked the small dark\n Federation agent genially.\n\n\n \"To determine the safe limits of silicon consumption and if there are\n any dangers in an overdose.\"\n\n\n \"How do you determine that? By dropping dead?\"\n\n\n He could be right. Perhaps the test should be stopped. Every day, with\n growing uneasiness, Alcala took his dose of silicon compound, and every\n day, the chemical seemed to be absorbed completely—not released or\n excreted—in a way that was unpleasantly reminiscent of the way arsenic\n accumulated without evident damage, then killed abruptly without\n warning.\nAlready, this evening, he had noticed that there was something faulty\n about his coordination and weight and surface sense. The restaurant\n door had swung back with a curious lightness, and the hollow metal\n handle had had a curious softness under his fingers. Something merely\n going wrong with the sensitivity of his fingers—?\n\n\n He tapped his fingertips on the heavy indestructible silicone plastic\n table top. There was a feeling of heaviness in his hands, and a feeling\n of faint rubbery\ngive\nin the table.\n\n\n Tapping his fingers gently, his heavy fingers ... the answer was\n dreamily fantastic.\nI'm turning into silicon plastic myself\n, he\n thought. But how, why? He had not bothered to be curious before, but\n the question had always been—what were supposedly insoluble silicons\n doing assimilating into the human body at all?\n\n\n Several moments passed. He smoothed back his hair with his oddly heavy\n hand before picking up his fork again.\n\n\n \"I'm turning into plastic,\" he told Camba.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing. A joke.\"\n\n\n Camba was turning into plastic, too. Everyone was. But the effect was\n accumulating slowly, by generations.\nCamba lay down his knife and started in again. \"What connections have\n you had with John Delgados?\"\nConcentrate on the immediate situation.\nAlcala and Johnny were\n obviously in danger of some sort of mistaken arrest and interrogation.\n\n\n As Alcala focused on the question, one errant whimsical thought\n suddenly flitted through the back of his mind. In red advertising\n letters: TRY OUR NEW MODEL RUST-PROOF, WATERPROOF, HEAT & SCALD\n RESISTANT, STRONG—EXTRA-LONG-WEARING HUMAN BEING!\n\n\n He laughed inwardly and finally answered: \"Friendship. Mutual interest\n in high ion colloidal suspensions and complex synthesis.\" Impatience\n suddenly mastered him. \"Exactly what is it you wish to know, Senor?\n Perhaps I could inform you if I knew the reasons for your interest.\"\n\n\n Camba chose a piece of salad with great care. \"We have reason to\n believe that he is Syndrome Johnny.\"\n\n\n Alcala waited for the words to clarify. After a moment, it ceased to\n be childish babble and became increasingly shocking. He remembered the\n first time he had met John Delgados, the smile, the strong handclasp.\n \"Call me Johnny,\" he had said. It had seemed no more than a nickname.\n\n\n The investigator was watching his expression with bright brown eyes.\n\n\n Johnny, yes ... but not Syndrome Johnny. He tried to think of some\n quick refutation. \"The whole thing is preposterous, Senor Camba. The\n myth of Syndrome Plague Johnny started about a century ago.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor Alcala\"—the small man in the gray suit was tensely\n sober—\"John Delgados is very old, and John Delgados is not his proper\n name. I have traced his life back and back, through older and older\n records in Argentina, Panama, South Africa, the United States, China,\n Canada. Everywhere he has paid his taxes properly, put his fingerprints\n on file as a good citizen should. And he changed his name every twenty\n years, applying to the courts for permission with good honest reasons\n for changing his name. Everywhere he has been a laboratory worker, held\n patents, sometimes made a good deal of money. He is one hundred and\n forty years old. His first income tax was paid in 1970, exactly one\n hundred and twenty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Other men are that old,\" said Alcala.\n\n\n \"Other men are old, yes. Those who survived the two successive plagues,\n were unusually durable.\" Camba finished and pushed back his plate.\n \"There is no crime in being long-lived, surely. But he has changed his\n name five times!\"\n\n\n \"That proves nothing. Whatever his reasons for changing his name, it\n doesn't prove that he is Syndrome Johnny any more than it proves he\n is the cow that jumped over the moon. Syndrome Johnny is a myth, a\n figment of mob delirium.\"\nAs he said it, he knew it was not true. A Federation investigator would\n not be on a wild goose chase.\n\n\n The plates were taken away and cups of steaming black coffee put\n between them. He would have to warn Johnny. It was strange how well you\n could know a man as well as he knew Johnny, firmly enough to believe\n that, despite evidence, everything the man did was right.\n\n\n \"Why must it be a myth?\" Camba asked softly.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous!\" Alcala protested. \"Why would any man—\" His voice\n cut off as unrelated facts fell into a pattern. He sat for a moment,\n thinking intensely, seeing the century of plague as something he had\n never dreamed....\n\n\n A price.\n\n\n Not too high a price in the long run, considering what was purchased.\n Of course, the great change over into silicon catalysis would be a\n shock and require adjustment and, of course, the change must be made in\n several easy stages—and those who could not adjust would die.\n\n\n \"Go on, Doctor,\" Camba urged softly. \"'\nWhy\nwould any man—'\"\n\n\n He tried to find a way of explaining which would not seem to have any\n relationship to John Delgados. \"It has been recently discovered\"—but\n he did not say\nhow\nrecently—\"that the disease of Syndrome Plague\n was not a disease. It is an improvement.\" He had spoken clumsily.\n\n\n \"An improvement on life?\" Camba laughed and nodded, but there were\n bitterness and anger burning behind the small man's smile. \"People\n can be improved to death by the millions. Yes, yes, go on, Senor. You\n fascinate me.\"\n\n\n \"We are stronger,\" Alcala told him. \"We are changed chemically. The\n race has been improved!\"\n\n\n \"Come, Doctor Alcala,\" Camba said with a sneering merriment, \"the\n Syndrome Plagues have come and they have gone. Where is this change?\"\n\n\n Alcala tried to express it clearly. \"We are stronger. Potentially, we\n are tremendously stronger. But we of this generation are still weak\n and ill, as our parents were, from the shock of the change. And we\n need silicone feeding; we have not adjusted yet. Our illness masks our\n strength.\" He thought of what that strength would be!\n\n\n Camba smiled and took out a small notebook. \"The disease is connected\n with silicones, you say? The original name of John Delgados was John\n Osborne Drake. His father was Osborne Drake, a chemist at Dow Corning,\n who was sentenced to the electric chair in 1967 for unauthorized\n bacterial experiments which resulted in an accidental epidemic and\n eight deaths. Dow Corning was the first major manufactury of silicones\n in America, though not connected in any way with Osborne Drake's\n criminal experiments. It links together, does it not?\"\n\n\n \"It is not a disease, it is strength!\" Alcala insisted doggedly.\nThe small investigator looked up from his notebook and his smile was\n an unnatural thing, a baring of teeth. \"Half the world died of this\n strength, Senor. If you will not think of the men and women, think of\n the children. Millions of children died!\"\n\n\n The waiter brought the bill, dropping it on the table between them.\n\n\n \"Lives will be saved in the long run,\" Alcala said obstinately.\n \"Individual deaths are not important in the long run.\"\n\n\n \"That is hardly the philosophy for a doctor, is it?\" asked Camba with\n open irony, taking the bill and rising.\n\n\n They went out of the restaurant in silence. Camba's 'copter stood at\n the curb.\n\n\n \"Would you care for a lift home, Doctor Alcala?\" The offer was made\n with the utmost suavity.\n\n\n Alcala hesitated fractionally. \"Why, yes, thank you.\" It would not do\n to give the investigator any reason for suspicion by refusing.\n\n\n As the 'copter lifted into the air, Camba spoke with a more friendly\n note in his voice, as if he humored a child. \"Come, Alcala, you're a\n doctor dedicated to saving lives. How can you find sympathy for a\n murderer?\"\n\n\n Alcala sat in the dark, looking through the windshield down at the\n bright street falling away below. \"I'm not a practicing medico; only\n one night a week do I come to the hospital. I'm a research man. I don't\n try to save individual lives. I'm dedicated to improving the average\n life, the average health. Can you understand that? Individuals may be\n sick and individuals may die, but the average lives on. And if the\n average is better, then I'm satisfied.\"\n\n\n The 'copter flew on. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"I'm not good with words,\" said Alcala. Then, taking out his pen-knife\n and unfolding it, he said, \"Watch!\" He put his index finger on the\n altimeter dial, where there was light, and pressed the blade against\n the flesh between his finger and his thumb. He increased the pressure\n until the flesh stood out white on either side of the blade, bending,\n but not cut.\n\n\n \"Three generations back, this pressure would have gone right through\n the hand.\" He took away the blade and there was only a very tiny cut.\n Putting the knife away, he brought out his lighter. The blue flame\n was steady and hot. Alcala held it close to the dashboard and put his\n finger directly over it, counting patiently, \"One, two, three, four,\n five—\" He pulled the lighter back, snapping it shut.\n\"Three generations ago, a man couldn't have held a finger over that\n flame for more than a tenth part of that count. Doesn't all this prove\n something to you?\"\n\n\n The 'copter was hovering above Alcala's house. Camba lowered it to\n the ground and opened the door before answering. \"It proves only that\n a good and worthy man will cut and burn his hand for an unworthy\n friendship. Good night.\"\n\n\n Disconcerted, Alcala watched the 'copter lift away into the night,\n then, turning, saw that the lights were still on in the laboratory.\n Camba might have deduced something from that, if he knew that Nita and\n the girl were not supposed to be home.\n\n\n Alcala hurried in.\n\n\n Johnny hadn't left yet. He was sitting at Alcala's desk with his feet\n on the wastebasket, the way Alcala often liked to sit, reading a\n technical journal. He looked up, smiling. For a moment Alcala saw him\n with the new clarity of a stranger. The lean, weathered face; brown\n eyes with smile deltas at the corners; wide shoulders; steady, big\n hands holding the magazine—solid, able, and ruthless enough to see\n what had to be done, and do it.\n\n\n \"I was waiting for you, Ric.\"\n\n\n \"The Feds are after you.\" Ricardo Alcala had been running. He found he\n was panting and his heart was pounding.\n\n\n Delgados' smile did not change. \"It's all right, Ric. Everything's\n done. I can leave any time now.\" He indicated a square metal box\n standing in a corner. \"There's the stuff.\"\n\n\n What stuff? The product Johnny had been working on? \"You haven't time\n for that now, Johnny. You can't sell it. They'd watch for anyone of\n your description selling chemicals. Let me loan you some money.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks.\" Johnny was smiling oddly. \"Everything's set. I won't need it.\n How close are they to finding me?\"\n\n\n \"They don't know where you're staying.\" Alcala leaned on the desk edge\n and put out his hand. \"They tell me you're Syndrome Johnny.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you'd figured that one out.\" Johnny shook his hand formally.\n \"The name is John Osborne Drake. You aren't horrified?\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Alcala knew that he was shaking hands with a man who would be\n thanked down all the successive generations of mankind. He noticed\n again the odd white web-work of scars on the back of Johnny's hand. He\n indicated them as casually as he could. \"Where did you pick those up?\"\nJohn Drake glanced at his hand. \"I don't know, Ric. Truthfully.\n I've had my brains beaten in too often to remember much any more.\n Unimportant. There are instructions outlining plans and methods filed\n in safety deposit boxes in almost every big city in the world. Always\n the same typing, always the same instructions. I can't remember who\n typed them, myself or my father, but I must have been expected to\n forget or they wouldn't be there. Up to eleven, my memory is all right,\n but after Dad started to remake me, everything gets fuzzy.\"\n\n\n \"After he did\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n Johnny smiled tiredly and rested his head on one hand. \"He had to\n remake me chemically, you know. How could I spread change without\n being changed myself? I couldn't have two generations to adapt to\n it naturally like you, Ric. It had to be done artificially. It took\n years. You understand? I'm a community, a construction. The cells that\n carry on the silicon metabolism in me are not human. Dad adapted them\n for the purpose. I helped, but I can't remember any longer how it was\n done. I think when I've been badly damaged, organization scatters to\n the separate cells in my body. They can survive better that way, and\n they have powers of regrouping and healing. But memory can't be pasted\n together again or regrown.\"\n\n\n John Drake rose and looked around the laboratory with something like\n triumph. \"They're too late. I made it, Ric. There's the catalyst\n cooling over there. This is the last step. I don't think I'll survive\n this plague, but I'll last long enough to set it going for the finish.\n The police won't stop me until it's too late.\"\nAnother plague!\n\n\n The last one had been before Alcala was born. He had not thought that\n Johnny would start another. It was a shock.\n\n\n Alcala walked over to the cage where he kept his white mice and looked\n in, trying to sort out his feelings. The white mice looked back\n with beady bright eyes, caged, not knowing they were waiting to be\n experimented upon.\n\n\n A timer clicked and John Delgados-Drake became all rapid efficient\n activity, moving from valve to valve. It lasted a half minute or less,\n then Drake had finished stripping off the lab whites to his street\n clothes. He picked up the square metal box containing the stuff he had\n made, tucked it under his arm and held out a solid hand again to Alcala.\n\n\n \"Good-by, Ric. Wish me luck. Close up the lab for me, will you?\"\n\n\n Alcala took the hand numbly and mumbled something, turned back to the\n cages and stared blindly at the mice. Drake's brisk footsteps clattered\n down the stairs.\nAnother step forward for the human race.\n\n\n God knew what wonders for the race were in that box. Perhaps something\n for nerve construction, something for the mind—the last and most\n important step. He should have asked.\n\n\n There came at last a pressure that was a thought emerging from the\n depth of intuition.\nDoctor Ricardo Alcala will die in the next plague,\n he and his ill wife Nita and his ill little girl.... And the name of\n Alcala will die forever as a weak strain blotted from the bloodstream\n of the race....\nHe'd find out what was in the box by dying of it!\n\n\n He tried to reason it out, but only could remember that Nita, already\n sickly, would have no chance. And Alcala's family genes, in attempting\n to adapt to the previous steps, had become almost sterile. It had been\n difficult having children. The next step would mean complete sterility.\n The name of Alcala would die. The future might be wonderful, but it\n would not be\nhis\nfuture!\n\n\n \"Johnny!\" he called suddenly, something like an icy lump hardening in\n his chest. How long had it been since Johnny had left?\n\n\n Running, Alcala went down the long half-lit stairs, out the back door\n and along the dark path toward the place where Johnny's 'copter had\n been parked.\n\n\n A light shone through the leaves. It was still there.\n\n\n \"Johnny!\"\n\n\n John Osborne Drake was putting his suitcase into the rear of the\n 'copter.\n\n\n \"What is it, Ric?\" he asked in a friendly voice without turning.\nIt would be impossible to ask him to change his mind.\nAlcala found\n a rock, raised it behind Syndrome Johnny's back. \"I know I'm being\n anti-social,\" he said regretfully, and then threw the rock away.\n\n\n His fist was enough like stone to crush a skull.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does Alcala believe future generations will appreciate John Drake?", "question_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT_1", "options": ["His work with silicone pills would revolutionize the healthcare industry.", "John Drake was the real-life Johnny Syndrome, and people love to learn that a myth has turned out to be true.", "His work to form new strands of plague will ultimately fortify the human body.", "His father was Osborne Drake, a renowned chemist at Dow Corning whose bacterial experiments resulted in a cure for the plague."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In what year does the story take place?", "question_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT_2", "options": ["1967", "2090", "2110", "1970"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the purpose of Alcala's research?", "question_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT_3", "options": ["To contribute to Johnny's plan to unleash the next plague upon the world.", "To test silicone nutrition in strengthening the human body.", "To discover a way to turn himself and others into silicon plastic.", "To learn more about the chemical absorption and accumulation of compounds like silicon and arsenic."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What were the results of the initial plague?", "question_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT_4", "options": ["Half the world's population was decimated, wealth increased, and violence decreased.", "The Bureau of Social Statistics began a worldwide search for Johnny Syndrome.", "The emergence of the Hungry Lands coincided with declining birth rates.", "People developed a powerful immunity to all future diseases, illnesses, and plagues."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Alcala attempt to prove his theory about silicone to Camba?", "question_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT_5", "options": ["He tried to convince Camba that he was turning into plastic.", "He told Camba about the newfound sensitivity in his fingers, the shift in the weight of objects around him, and the change in how surfaces felt.", "He sliced and applied a flame to his finger to demonstrate his body's increased resilience after taking silicone pills.", "He told him about the changes he was experiencing with his coordination and sense of his own weight."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Alcala presume he would have no future after the third plague?", "question_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT_6", "options": ["He knew that whatever Johnny had left in the box would kill him immediately.", "The new plague would completely cripple his and his family's ability to have any children in the future.", "He knew that his sickly daughter would not survive the plague, and he could not imagine life without his daughter.", "He knew that Camba would return and arrest him as soon as the third plague was unleashed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the biochemical student believe the virus was not gone?", "question_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT_7", "options": ["He believed it had evolved into a parasite with a high affinity for the cells in the human body and there lay dormant until it would one day awaken.", "He believe Johnny Syndrome was somewhere in the world keeping the virus alive and waiting for his moment to strike again.", "He believed the current generation carried the plague without symptoms because they had already beaten it in the womb.", "The changes the virus had enacted upon the current generation were too subtle to detect and so had gone unnoticed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happened to Syndrome Johnny at the story's end?", "question_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT_8", "options": ["He flew off in his helicopter and spread the third plague around the world.", "Alcala smashed his head in with a rock.", "Alcala killed him with his hand.", "Alcala allowed him to escape for the ultimate betterment of humankind."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the Bureau of Social Statistics finally start taking the Syndrome Johnny myth seriously?", "question_unique_id": "51231_WCD38RQT_9", "options": ["They received a report with corroborating details so specific they could no longer be ignored.", "They received thumbprint data from the Bureau of Records that convinced Camba of Johnny Syndrome's existence.", "There were whispers about the threat of a third plague.", "Camba had received a report about Alcala's research in Peru, and he became suspicious."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/2/3/51231//51231-h//51231-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51193", "set_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Pictures Don't Lie", "year": 1965, "author": "MacLean, Katherine", "topic": "Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories; PS; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "Pictures Don't Lie\nBy KATHERINE MacLEAN\n\n\n Illustrated by MARTIN SCHNEIDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n... Pictures, that is, that one can test and measure.\n\n And these pictures positively, absolutely could not lie!\nThe man from the\nNews\nasked, \"What do you think of the aliens, Mister\n Nathen? Are they friendly? Do they look human?\"\n\n\n \"Very human,\" said the thin young man.\n\n\n Outside, rain sleeted across the big windows with a steady faint\n drumming, blurring and dimming the view of the airfield where\nthey\nwould arrive. On the concrete runways, the puddles were pockmarked\n with rain, and the grass growing untouched between the runways of the\n unused field glistened wetly, bending before gusts of wind.\n\n\n Back at a respectful distance from where the huge spaceship would\n land were the gray shapes of trucks, where TV camera crews huddled\n inside their mobile units, waiting. Farther back in the deserted sandy\n landscape, behind distant sandy hills, artillery was ringed in a great\n circle, and in the distance across the horizon, bombers stood ready at\n airfields, guarding the world against possible treachery from the first\n alien ship ever to land from space.\n\n\n \"Do you know anything about their home planet?\" asked the man from\nHerald\n.\n\n\n The\nTimes\nman stood with the others, listening absently, thinking of\n questions, but reserving them. Joseph R. Nathen, the thin young man\n with the straight black hair and the tired lines on his face, was being\n treated with respect by his interviewers. He was obviously on edge, and\n they did not want to harry him with too many questions to answer at\n once. They wanted to keep his good will. Tomorrow he would be one of\n the biggest celebrities ever to appear in headlines.\n\n\n \"No, nothing directly.\"\n\n\n \"Any ideas or deductions?\"\nHerald\npersisted.\n\n\n \"Their world must be Earth-like to them,\" the weary-looking young man\n answered uncertainly. \"The environment evolves the animal. But only in\n relative terms, of course.\" He looked at them with a quick glance and\n then looked away evasively, his lank black hair beginning to cling to\n his forehead with sweat. \"That doesn't necessarily mean anything.\"\n\n\n \"Earth-like,\" muttered a reporter, writing it down as if he had noticed\n nothing more in the reply.\n\n\n The\nTimes\nman glanced at the\nHerald\n, wondering if he had noticed,\n and received a quick glance in exchange.\n\n\n The\nHerald\nasked Nathen, \"You think they are dangerous, then?\"\n\n\n It was the kind of question, assuming much, which usually broke\n reticence and brought forth quick facts—when it hit the mark. They all\n knew of the military precautions, although they were not supposed to\n know.\n\n\n The question missed. Nathen glanced out the window vaguely. \"No, I\n wouldn't say so.\"\n\n\n \"You think they are friendly, then?\" said the\nHerald\n, equally\n positive on the opposite tack.\n\n\n A fleeting smile touched Nathen's lips. \"Those I know are.\"\n\n\n There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic\n facts of the story before the ship came. The\nTimes\nasked, \"What led\n up to your contacting them?\"\n\n\n Nathen answered after a hesitation. \"Static. Radio static. The Army\n told you my job, didn't they?\"\nThe Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had conducted\n them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if he objected\n by instinct to telling anything to the public.\n\n\n Nathen glanced at him doubtfully. \"My job is radio decoder for the\n Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune\n in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear, and\n build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic scramble\n patterns.\"\n\n\n The officer cleared his throat, but said nothing.\n\n\n The reporters smiled, noting that down.\n\n\n Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been\n legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public\n security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to seem\n a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public relations to\n admit to it.\n\n\n Nathen continued, \"I started directing the pickup at stars in my\n spare time. There's radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that\n sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have been\n listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work out\n why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged bursts. It\n didn't seem natural.\"\n\n\n He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he would\n say was the thing that would make him famous—an idea that had come to\n him while he listened—an idea as simple and as perfect as the one that\n came to Newton when he saw the apple fall.\n\n\n \"I decided it wasn't natural. I tried decoding it.\"\n\n\n Hurriedly he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvious. \"You\n see, there's an old intelligence trick, speeding up a message on a\n record until it sounds just like that, a short squawk of static, and\n then broadcasting it. Undergrounds use it. I'd heard that kind of\n screech before.\"\n\n\n \"You mean they broadcast at us in code?\" asked the\nNews\n.\n\n\n \"It's not exactly code. All you need to do is record it and slow it\n down. They're not broadcasting at us. If a star has planets, inhabited\n planets, and there is broadcasting between them, they would send it on\n a tight beam to save power.\" He looked for comprehension. \"You know,\n like a spotlight. Theoretically, a tight beam can go on forever without\n losing power. But aiming would be difficult from planet to planet. You\n can't expect a beam to stay on target, over such distances, more than a\n few seconds at a time. So they'd naturally compress each message into\n a short half-second or one-second-length package and send it a few\n hundred times in one long blast to make sure it is picked up during\n the instant the beam swings across the target.\"\n\n\n He was talking slowly and carefully, remembering that this explanation\n was for the newspapers. \"When a stray beam swings through our section\n of space, there's a sharp peak in noise level from that direction.\n The beams are swinging to follow their own planets at home, and\n the distance between there and here exaggerates the speed of swing\n tremendously, so we wouldn't pick up more than a bip as it passes.\"\n\n\n \"How do you account for the number of squawks coming in?\" the\nTimes\nasked. \"Do stellar systems rotate on the plane of the Galaxy?\" It was a\n private question; he spoke impulsively from interest and excitement.\n\n\n The radio decoder grinned, the lines of strain vanishing from his face\n for a moment. \"Maybe we're intercepting everybody's telephone calls,\n and the whole Galaxy is swarming with races that spend all day yacking\n at each other over the radio. Maybe the human type is standard model.\"\n\n\n \"It would take something like that,\" the\nTimes\nagreed. They smiled at\n each other.\n\n\n The\nNews\nasked, \"How did you happen to pick up television instead of\n voices?\"\n\n\n \"Not by accident,\" Nathen explained patiently. \"I'd recognized a\n scanning pattern, and I wanted pictures. Pictures are understandable in\n any language.\"\nNear the interviewers, a Senator paced back and forth, muttering\n his memorized speech of welcome and nervously glancing out the wide\n streaming windows into the gray sleeting rain.\n\n\n Opposite the windows of the long room was a small raised platform\n flanked by the tall shapes of TV cameras and sound pickups on booms,\n and darkened floodlights, arranged and ready for the Senator to make\n his speech of welcome to the aliens and the world. A shabby radio\n sending set stood beside it without a case to conceal its parts, two\n cathode television tubes flickering nakedly on one side and the speaker\n humming on the other. A vertical panel of dials and knobs jutted up\n before them and a small hand-mike sat ready on the table before the\n panel. It was connected to a boxlike, expensively cased piece of\n equipment with \"Radio Lab, U.S. Property\" stenciled on it.\n\n\n \"I recorded a couple of package screeches from Sagittarius and began\n working on them,\" Nathen added. \"It took a couple of months to find\n the synchronizing signals and set the scanners close enough to the\n right time to even get a pattern. When I showed the pattern to the\n Department, they gave me full time to work on it, and an assistant to\n help. It took eight months to pick out the color bands, and assign them\n the right colors, to get anything intelligible on the screen.\"\nThe shabby-looking mess of exposed parts was the original receiver that\n they had labored over for ten months, adjusting and readjusting to\n reduce the maddening rippling plaids of unsynchronized color scanners\n to some kind of sane picture.\n\n\n \"Trial and error,\" said Nathen, \"but it came out all right. The wide\n band-spread of the squawks had suggested color TV from the beginning.\"\n\n\n He walked over and touched the set. The speaker bipped slightly and\n the gray screen flickered with a flash of color at the touch. The set\n was awake and sensitive, tuned to receive from the great interstellar\n spaceship which now circled the atmosphere.\n\n\n \"We wondered why there were so many bands, but when we got the set\n working, and started recording and playing everything that came in, we\n found we'd tapped something like a lending library line. It was all\n fiction, plays.\"\n\n\n Between the pauses in Nathen's voice, the\nTimes\nfound himself\n unconsciously listening for the sound of roaring, swiftly approaching\n rocket jets.\n\n\n The\nPost\nasked, \"How did you contact the spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"I scanned and recorded a film copy of\nRite of Spring\n, the\n Disney-Stravinsky combination, and sent it back along the same line we\n were receiving from. Just testing. It wouldn't get there for a good\n number of years, if it got there at all, but I thought it would please\n the library to get a new record in.\n\n\n \"Two weeks later, when we caught and slowed a new batch of recordings,\n we found an answer. It was obviously meant for us. It was a flash of\n the Disney being played to a large audience, and then the audience\n sitting and waiting before a blank screen. The signal was very clear\n and loud. We'd intercepted a spaceship. They were asking for an encore,\n you see. They liked the film and wanted more....\"\n\n\n He smiled at them in sudden thought. \"You can see them for yourself.\n It's all right down the hall where the linguists are working on the\n automatic translator.\"\n\n\n The listening officer frowned and cleared his throat, and the thin\n young man turned to him quickly. \"No security reason why they should\n not see the broadcasts, is there? Perhaps you should show them.\" He\n said to the reporters reassuringly, \"It's right down the hall. You\n will be informed the moment the spaceship approaches.\"\n\n\n The interview was very definitely over. The lank-haired, nervous young\n man turned away and seated himself at the radio set while the officer\n swallowed his objections and showed them dourly down the hall to a\n closed door.\n\n\n They opened it and fumbled into a darkened room crowded with empty\n folding chairs, dominated by a glowing bright screen. The door closed\n behind them, bringing total darkness.\n\n\n There was the sound of reporters fumbling their way into seats around\n him, but the\nTimes\nman remained standing, aware of an enormous\n surprise, as if he had been asleep and wakened to find himself in the\n wrong country.\n\n\n The bright colors of the double image seemed the only real thing in the\n darkened room. Even blurred as they were, he could see that the action\n was subtly different, the shapes subtly not right.\nHe was looking at aliens.\nThe impression was of two humans disguised, humans moving oddly,\n half-dancing, half-crippled. Carefully, afraid the images would go\n away, he reached up to his breast pocket, took out his polarized\n glasses, rotated one lens at right angles to the other and put them on.\n\n\n Immediately, the two beings came into sharp focus, real and solid,\n and the screen became a wide, illusively near window through which he\n watched them.\n\n\n They were conversing with each other in a gray-walled room, discussing\n something with restrained excitement. The large man in the green tunic\n closed his purple eyes for an instant at something the other said, and\n grimaced, making a motion with his fingers as if shoving something away\n from him.\n\n\n Mellerdrammer.\n\n\n The second, smaller, with yellowish-green eyes, stepped closer, talking\n more rapidly in a lower voice. The first stood very still, not trying\n to interrupt.\n\n\n Obviously, the proposal was some advantageous treachery, and he wanted\n to be persuaded. The\nTimes\ngroped for a chair and sat down.\n\n\n Perhaps gesture is universal; desire and aversion, a leaning forward or\n a leaning back, tension, relaxation. Perhaps these actors were masters.\n The scenes changed, a corridor, a parklike place in what he began to\n realize was a spaceship, a lecture room. There were others talking\n and working, speaking to the man in the green tunic, and never was it\n unclear what was happening or how they felt.\n\n\n They talked a flowing language with many short vowels and shifts of\n pitch, and they gestured in the heat of talk, their hands moving with\n an odd lagging difference of motion, not slow, but somehow drifting.\n\n\n He ignored the language, but after a time the difference in motion\n began to arouse his interest. Something in the way they walked....\n\n\n With an effort he pulled his mind from the plot and forced his\n attention to the physical difference. Brown hair in short silky crew\n cuts, varied eye colors, the colors showing clearly because their\n irises were very large, their round eyes set very widely apart in\n tapering light-brown faces. Their necks and shoulders were thick in a\n way that would indicate unusual strength for a human, but their wrists\n were narrow and their fingers long and thin and delicate.\n\n\n There seemed to be more than the usual number of fingers.\n\n\n Since he came in, a machine had been whirring and a voice muttering\n beside him. He called his attention from counting their fingers and\n looked around. Beside him sat an alert-looking man wearing earphones,\n watching and listening with hawklike concentration. Beside him was a\n tall streamlined box. From the screen came the sound of the alien\n language. The man abruptly flipped a switch on the box, muttered a word\n into a small hand-microphone and flipped the switch back with nervous\n rapidity.\n\n\n He reminded the\nTimes\nman of the earphoned interpreters at the UN.\n The machine was probably a vocal translator and the mutterer a linguist\n adding to its vocabulary. Near the screen were two other linguists\n taking notes.\nThe\nTimes\nremembered the Senator pacing in the observatory room,\n rehearsing his speech of welcome. The speech would not be just\n the empty pompous gesture he had expected. It would be translated\n mechanically and understood by the aliens.\n\n\n On the other side of the glowing window that was the stereo screen, the\n large protagonist in the green tunic was speaking to a pilot in a gray\n uniform. They stood in a brightly lit canary-yellow control room in a\n spaceship.\n\n\n The\nTimes\ntried to pick up the thread of the plot. Already he was\n interested in the fate of the hero, and liked him. That was the effect\n of good acting, probably, for part of the art of acting is to win\n affection from the audience, and this actor might be the matinee idol\n of whole solar systems.\n\n\n Controlled tension, betraying itself by a jerk of the hands, a\n too-quick answer to a question. The uniformed one, not suspicious,\n turned his back, busying himself at some task involving a map lit with\n glowing red points, his motions sharing the same fluid dragging grace\n of the others, as if they were underwater, or on a slow motion film.\n The other was watching a switch, a switch set into a panel, moving\n closer to it, talking casually—background music coming and rising in\n thin chords of tension.\n\n\n There was a closeup of the alien's face watching the switch, and the\nTimes\nnoted that his ears were symmetrically half-circles, almost\n perfect with no earholes visible. The voice of the uniformed one\n answered, a brief word in a preoccupied deep voice. His back was still\n turned. The other glanced at the switch, moving closer to it, talking\n casually, the switch coming closer and closer stereoscopically. It was\n in reach, filling the screen. His hand came into view, darting out,\n closed over the switch—\n\n\n There was a sharp clap of sound and his hand opened in a frozen\n shape of pain. Beyond him, as his gaze swung up, stood the figure of\n the uniformed officer, unmoving, a weapon rigid in his hand, in the\n startled position in which he had turned and fired, watching with\n widening eyes as the man in the green tunic swayed and fell.\n\n\n The tableau held, the uniformed one drooping, looking down at his hand\n holding the weapon which had killed, and music began to build in from\n the background. Just for an instant, the room and the things within\n it flashed into one of those bewildering color changes which were the\n bane of color television, and switched to a color negative of itself, a\n green man standing in a violet control room, looking down at the body\n of a green man in a red tunic. It held for less than a second; then the\n color band alternator fell back into phase and the colors reversed to\n normal.\n\n\n Another uniformed man came and took the weapon from the limp hand of\n the other, who began to explain dejectedly in a low voice while the\n music mounted and covered his words and the screen slowly went blank,\n like a window that slowly filmed over with gray fog.\n\n\n The music faded.\n\n\n In the dark, someone clapped appreciatively.\n\n\n The earphoned man beside the\nTimes\nshifted his earphones back from\n his ears and spoke briskly. \"I can't get any more. Either of you want a\n replay?\"\n\n\n There was a short silence until the linguist nearest the set said, \"I\n guess we've squeezed that one dry. Let's run the tape where Nathen and\n that ship radio boy are kidding around CQing and tuning their beams in\n closer. I have a hunch the boy is talking routine ham talk and giving\n the old radio count—one-two-three-testing.\"\n\n\n There was some fumbling in the semi-dark and then the screen came to\n life again.\nIt showed a flash of an audience sitting before a screen and gave a\n clipped chord of some familiar symphony. \"Crazy about Stravinsky and\n Mozart,\" remarked the earphoned linguist to the\nTimes\n, resettling his\n earphones. \"Can't stand Gershwin. Can you beat that?\" He turned his\n attention back to the screen as the right sequence came on.\n\n\n The\nPost\n, who was sitting just in front of him, turned to the\nTimes\nand said, \"Funny how much they look like people.\" He was writing,\n making notes to telephone his report. \"What color hair did that\n character have?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't notice.\" He wondered if he should remind the reporter that\n Nathen had said he assigned the color bands on guess, choosing the\n colors that gave the most plausible images. The guests, when they\n arrived, could turn out to be bright green with blue hair. Only the\n gradations of color in the picture were sure, only the similarities and\n contrasts, the relationship of one color to another.\n\n\n From the screen came the sound of the alien language again. This race\n averaged deeper voices than human. He liked deep voices. Could he write\n that?\n\n\n No, there was something wrong with that, too. How had Nathen\n established the right sound-track pitch? Was it a matter of taking the\n modulation as it came in, or some sort of hetrodyning up and down by\n trial and error? Probably.\n\n\n It might be safer to assume that Nathen had simply preferred deep\n voices.\n\n\n As he sat there, doubting, an uneasiness he had seen in Nathen came\n back to add to his own uncertainty, and he remembered just how close\n that uneasiness had come to something that looked like restrained fear.\n\n\n \"What I don't get is why he went to all the trouble of picking up TV\n shows instead of just contacting them,\" the\nNews\ncomplained. \"They're\n good shows, but what's the point?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe so we'd get to learn their language too,\" said the\nHerald\n.\n\n\n On the screen now was the obviously unstaged and genuine scene of a\n young alien working over a bank of apparatus. He turned and waved and\n opened his mouth in the comical O shape which the\nTimes\nwas beginning\n to recognize as their equivalent of a smile, then went back to trying\n to explain something about the equipment, in elaborate awkward gestures\n and carefully mouthed words.\n\n\n The\nTimes\ngot up quietly, went out into the bright white stone\n corridor and walked back the way he had come, thoughtfully folding his\n stereo glasses and putting them away.\n\n\n No one stopped him. Secrecy restrictions were ambiguous here. The\n reticence of the Army seemed more a matter of habit, mere reflex, from\n the fact that it had all originated in the Intelligence Department,\n than any reasoned policy of keeping the landing a secret.\n\n\n The main room was more crowded than he had left it. The TV camera\n and sound crew stood near their apparatus, the Senator had found a\n chair and was reading, and at the far end of the room eight men were\n grouped in a circle of chairs, arguing something with impassioned\n concentration. The\nTimes\nrecognized a few he knew personally, eminent\n names in science, workers in field theory.\n\n\n A stray phrase reached him: \"—reference to the universal constants as\n ratio—\" It was probably a discussion of ways of converting formulas\n from one mathematics to another for a rapid exchange of information.\n\n\n They had reason to be intent, aware of the flood of insights that novel\n viewpoints could bring, if they could grasp them. He would have liked\n to go over and listen, but there was too little time left before the\n spaceship was due, and he had a question to ask.\nThe hand-rigged transceiver was still humming, tuned to the sending\n band of the circling ship, and the young man who had started it all\n was sitting on the edge of the TV platform with his chin resting in\n one hand. He did not look up as the\nTimes\napproached, but it was the\n indifference of preoccupation, not discourtesy.\n\n\n The\nTimes\nsat down on the edge of the platform beside him and took\n out a pack of cigarettes, then remembered the coming TV broadcast\n and the ban on smoking. He put them away, thoughtfully watching the\n diminishing rain spray against the streaming windows.\n\n\n \"What's wrong?\" he asked.\n\n\n Nathen showed that he was aware and friendly by a slight motion of his\n head.\n\n\n \"\nYou\ntell me.\"\n\n\n \"Hunch,\" said the\nTimes\nman. \"Sheer hunch. Everything sailing along\n too smoothly, everyone taking too much for granted.\"\n\n\n Nathen relaxed slightly. \"I'm still listening.\"\n\n\n \"Something about the way they move....\"\n\n\n Nathen shifted to glance at him.\n\n\n \"That's bothered me, too.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure they're adjusted to the right speed?\"\n\n\n Nathen clenched his hands out in front of him and looked at them\n consideringly. \"I don't know. When I turn the tape faster, they're all\n rushing, and you begin to wonder why their clothes don't stream behind\n them, why the doors close so quickly and yet you can't hear them slam,\n why things fall so fast. If I turn it slower, they all seem to be\n swimming.\" He gave the\nTimes\na considering sidewise glance. \"Didn't\n catch the name.\"\n\n\n Country-bred guy, thought the\nTimes\n. \"Jacob Luke,\nTimes\n,\" he said,\n extending his hand.\n\n\n Nathen gave the hand a quick, hard grip, identifying the name. \"Sunday\n Science Section editor. I read it. Surprised to meet you here.\"\n\n\n \"Likewise.\" The\nTimes\nsmiled. \"Look, have you gone into this\n rationally, with formulas?\" He found a pencil in his pocket.\n \"Obviously there's something wrong with our judgment of their\n weight-to-speed-to-momentum ratio. Maybe it's something simple like low\n gravity aboard ship, with magnetic shoes. Maybe they\nare\nfloating\n slightly.\"\n\n\n \"Why worry?\" Nathen cut in. \"I don't see any reason to try to figure it\n out now.\" He laughed and shoved back his black hair nervously. \"We'll\n see them in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Will we?\" asked the\nTimes\nslowly.\n\n\n There was a silence while the Senator turned a page of his magazine\n with a slight crackling of paper, and the scientists argued at the\n other end of the room. Nathen pushed at his lank black hair again, as\n if it were trying to fall forward in front of his eyes and keep him\n from seeing.\n\n\n \"Sure.\" The young man laughed suddenly, talked rapidly. \"Sure we'll\n see them. Why shouldn't we, with all the government ready with welcome\n speeches, the whole Army turned out and hiding over the hill, reporters\n all around, newsreel cameras—everything set up to broadcast the\n landing to the world. The President himself shaking hands with me and\n waiting in Washington—\"\n\n\n He came to the truth without pausing for breath.\n\n\n He said, \"Hell, no, they won't get here. There's some mistake\n somewhere. Something's wrong. I should have told the brasshats\n yesterday when I started adding it up. Don't know why I didn't say\n anything. Scared, I guess. Too much top rank around here. Lost my\n nerve.\"\n\n\n He clutched the\nTimes\nman's sleeve. \"Look. I don't know what—\"\n\n\n A green light flashed on the sending-receiving set. Nathen didn't look\n at it, but he stopped talking.\nThe loudspeaker on the set broke into a voice speaking in the alien's\n language. The Senator started and looked nervously at it, straightening\n his tie. The voice stopped.\n\n\n Nathen turned and looked at the loudspeaker. His worry seemed to be\n gone.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" the\nTimes\nasked anxiously.\n\n\n \"He says they've slowed enough to enter the atmosphere now. They'll be\n here in five to ten minutes, I guess. That's Bud. He's all excited.\n He says holy smoke, what a murky-looking planet we live on.\" Nathen\n smiled. \"Kidding.\"\n\n\n The\nTimes\nwas puzzled. \"What does he mean, murky? It can't be\n raining over much territory on Earth.\" Outside, the rain was slowing\n and bright blue patches of sky were shining through breaks in the\n cloud blanket, glittering blue light from the drops that ran down the\n windows. He tried to think of an explanation. \"Maybe they're trying to\n land on Venus.\" The thought was ridiculous, he knew. The spaceship was\n following Nathen's sending beam. It couldn't miss Earth. \"Bud\" had to\n be kidding.\n\n\n The green light glowed on the set again, and they stopped speaking,\n waiting for the message to be recorded, slowed and replayed. The\n cathode screen came to life suddenly with a picture of the young man\n sitting at his sending-set, his back turned, watching a screen at one\n side which showed a glimpse of a huge dark plain approaching. As the\n ship plunged down toward it, the illusion of solidity melted into a\n boiling turbulence of black clouds. They expanded in an inky swirl,\n looked huge for an instant, and then blackness swallowed the screen.\n The young alien swung around to face the camera, speaking a few words\n as he moved, made the O of a smile again, then flipped the switch and\n the screen went gray.\n\n\n Nathen's voice was suddenly toneless and strained. \"He said something\n like break out the drinks, here they come.\"\n\n\n \"The atmosphere doesn't look like that,\" the\nTimes\nsaid at random,\n knowing he was saying something too obvious even to think about. \"Not\n Earth's atmosphere.\"\n\n\n Some people drifted up. \"What did they say?\"\n\n\n \"Entering the atmosphere, ought to be landing in five or ten minutes,\"\n Nathen told them.\n\n\n A ripple of heightened excitement ran through the room. Cameramen began\n adjusting the lens angles again, turning on the mike and checking it,\n turning on the floodlights. The scientists rose and stood near the\n window, still talking. The reporters trooped in from the hall and went\n to the windows to watch for the great event. The three linguists came\n in, trundling a large wheeled box that was the mechanical translator,\n supervising while it was hitched into the sound broadcasting system.\n\n\n \"Landing where?\" the\nTimes\nasked Nathen brutally. \"Why don't you do\n something?\"\n\n\n \"Tell me what to do and I'll do it,\" Nathen said quietly, not moving.\n\n\n It was not sarcasm. Jacob Luke of the\nTimes\nlooked sidewise at the\n strained whiteness of his face, and moderated his tone. \"Can't you\n contact them?\"\n\n\n \"Not while they're landing.\"\n\n\n \"What now?\" The\nTimes\ntook out a pack of cigarettes, remembered the\n rule against smoking, and put it back.\n\n\n \"We just wait.\" Nathen leaned his elbow on one knee and his chin in his\n hand.\n\n\n They waited.\nAll the people in the room were waiting. There was no more\n conversation. A bald man of the scientist group was automatically\n buffing his fingernails over and over and inspecting them without\n seeing them, another absently polished his glasses, held them up to\n the light, put them on, and then a moment later took them off and began\n polishing again. The television crew concentrated on their jobs, moving\n quietly and efficiently, with perfectionist care, minutely arranging\n things which did not need to be arranged, checking things that had\n already been checked.\n\n\n This was to be one of the great moments of human history, and they were\n all trying to forget that fact and remain impassive and wrapped up in\n the problems of their jobs as good specialists should.\n\n\n After an interminable age the\nTimes\nconsulted his watch. Three\n minutes had passed. He tried holding his breath a moment, listening for\n a distant approaching thunder of jets. There was no sound.\n\n\n The sun came out from behind the clouds and lit up the field like a\n great spotlight on an empty stage.\n\n\n Abruptly the green light shone on the set again, indicating that a\n squawk message had been received. The recorder recorded it, slowed it\n and fed it back to the speaker. It clicked and the sound was very loud\n in the still, tense room.\n\n\n The screen remained gray, but Bud's voice spoke a few words in the\n alien language. He stopped, the speaker clicked and the light went out.\n When it was plain that nothing more would occur and no announcement was\n to be made of what was said, the people in the room turned back to the\n windows, talk picked up again.\n\n\n Somebody told a joke and laughed alone.\n\n\n One of the linguists remained turned toward the loudspeaker, then\n looked at the widening patches of blue sky showing out the window, his\n expression puzzled. He had understood.\n\n\n \"It's dark,\" the thin Intelligence Department decoder translated,\n low-voiced, to the man from the\nTimes\n. \"Your atmosphere is\nthick\n.\n That's precisely what Bud said.\"\n\n\n Another three minutes. The\nTimes\ncaught himself about to light a\n cigarette and swore silently, blowing the match out and putting the\n cigarette back into its package. He listened for the sound of the\n rocket jets. It was time for the landing, yet he heard no blasts.\n\n\n The green light came on in the transceiver.\n\n\n Message in.\n\n\n Instinctively he came to his feet. Nathen abruptly was standing beside\n him. Then the message came in the voice he was coming to think of as\n Bud. It spoke and paused. Suddenly the\nTimes\nknew.\n\n\n \"We've landed.\" Nathen whispered the words.\n\n\n The wind blew across the open spaces of white concrete and damp soil\n that was the empty airfield, swaying the wet, shiny grass. The people\n in the room looked out, listening for the roar of jets, looking for the\n silver bulk of a spaceship in the sky.\n\n\n Nathen moved, seating himself at the transmitter, switching it on to\n warm up, checking and balancing dials. Jacob Luke of the\nTimes\nmoved\n softly to stand behind his right shoulder, hoping he could be useful.\n Nathen made a half motion of his head, as if to glance back at him,\n unhooked two of the earphone sets hanging on the side of the tall\n streamlined box that was the automatic translator, plugged them in and\n handed one back over his shoulder to the\nTimes\nman.\n\n\n The voice began to come from the speaker again.\n\n\n Hastily, Jacob Luke fitted the earphones over his ears. He fancied he\n could hear Bud's voice tremble. For a moment it was just Bud's voice\n speaking the alien language, and then, very distant and clear in his\n earphones, he heard the recorded voice of the linguist say an English\n word, then a mechanical click and another clear word in the voice of\n one of the other translators, then another as the alien's voice flowed\n from the loudspeaker, the cool single words barely audible, overlapping\n and blending with it like translating thought, skipping unfamiliar\n words, yet quite astonishingly clear.\n\n\n \"Radar shows no buildings or civilization near. The atmosphere around\n us registers as thick as glue. Tremendous gas pressure, low gravity,\n no light at all. You didn't describe it like this. Where are you, Joe?\n This isn't some kind of trick, is it?\" Bud hesitated, was prompted by a\n deeper official voice and jerked out the words.\n\n\n \"If it is a trick, we are ready to repel attack.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "How was Nathen able to interpret the alien message?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_1", "options": ["He slowed down the squawk patterns and from there was able to directly translate the alien language using the linguists' assistance.", "He managed to decode the scanning pattern in the transmission and assigned what he felt were the appropriate color bands to produce an image.", "He used the tall streamlined box to interpret the alien language used in the transmission.", "With the assistance of the linguists, he was able to analyze the body language of the melodramas sent through the transmission broadcasts."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the essential plot of the drama enacted by the aliens?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_2", "options": ["An alien made repeated \"O\" movements with his mouth and demonstrated the ship's controls.", "Two aliens plan to land their spacecraft on Earth, and one of the aliens destroys the other.", "One of the aliens on the spaceship killed his close friend in cold blood.", "An alien officer betrayed his fellow officer and killed him."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Jacob's first indication that something might go wrong with the arrival?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_3", "options": ["Nathen told him point-blank that the aliens would not arrive.", "He sensed Nathen's nerves at the press conference and noticed this emotion reflected in the Senator's behavior as well.", "The movements of the aliens in the video transmissions seemed unusual to him and were perhaps related to Nathen's estimated adjustments.", "When Bud described the atmosphere as \"murky\", both he and Nathen thought that was unusual."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Nathen theorize the sound he analyzed had been broadcast in short bursts?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_4", "options": ["The aliens did not have the proper technology to record anything longer than that.", "In an attempt to make any kind of contact, the aliens would want to send out as many rapid transmissions as possible.", "In order to compress the messages and avoid interception by a hostile group.", "To ensure speed and accuracy of transmission to the proper recipient."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What most likely explains Nathen's nerves at the press conference?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_5", "options": ["He felt nervous with the presence of the military officer as he didn't wish to reveal more than was allowed.", "He was unsure if the aliens were hostile or friendly.", "He was an awkward man who was uncomfortable in front of cameras.", "He was worried the aliens were not going to arrive due to some errors in his original calculations."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the aliens respond to Nathen's transmission of \"Rite of Spring\"?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_6", "options": ["They wanted to share a melodrama from their planet.", "They wanted to alert him that they were planning to visit Earth.", "They loved the music and wanted more.", "They understood the historical significance of making such contact."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the aliens not arrive at the designated time?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_7", "options": ["Nathen's calculations had been incorrect, and the aliens were not coming at all.", "Nathen's calculations had been incorrect, and the aliens were arriving much later than the time he had anticipated.", "They were running late due to a mistranslation by the linguists.", "Perhaps by some miscommunication, they had landed on another planet."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was most striking to the Times reporter about the alien transmission?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_8", "options": ["The fact that the aliens were bright green with blue hair.", "The fact that aliens seemed to be acting out a scene as in a play.", "The fact that the aliens appeared to love Stravinsky but dislike Gershwin.", "The fact that he had just witnessed one alien kill another on television."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Jacob Luke uncertain about the colorization of the aliens?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_9", "options": ["Nathen had told them he had estimated their colorizations.", "The speed with which the images were played and replayed might not alter the colors in the images.", "The gradations reflected on the screen were not completely accurate. ", "The colors transmitted from their planet might not have an exact match on Earth."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the function of the box in the darkened room?", "question_unique_id": "51193_DO2YNZZF_10", "options": ["It rendered the colorization of the images to allow Nathen to guess the appropriate band.", "It broadcast the images that had been transmitted by the alien spaceship.", "It transferred the squawk patterns into an easily discernible image.", "It was a translation device used to document the alien language."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/9/51193//51193-h//51193-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50783", "set_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Alien", "year": 1954, "author": "Jones, Raymond F.", "topic": "PS; Science fiction", "article": "THE ALIEN\nA Gripping Novel of Discovery and Conquest\n in Interstellar Space\n\n\n by Raymond F. Jones\nA Complete ORIGINAL Book\n, UNABRIDGED\n\n\n WORLD EDITIONS, Inc.\n\n 105 WEST 40th STREET\n\n NEW YORK 18, NEW YORK\nCopyright 1951\nby\nWORLD EDITIONS, Inc.\n\n\n PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.\n\n THE GUINN CO., Inc.\n\n New York 14, N.Y.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any\n\n evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nJust speculate for a moment on the enormous challenge to archeology\n when interplanetary flight is possible ... and relics are found of a\n race extinct for half a million years! A race, incidentally, that was\n scientifically so far in advance of ours that they held the secret of\n the restoration of life!\n\n\n One member of that race can be brought back after 500,000 years of\n death....\n\n\n That's the story told by this ORIGINAL book-length novel, which has\n never before been published! You can expect a muscle-tightening,\n sweat-producing, mind-prodding adventure in the future when you read\n it!\nContents\nCHAPTER ONE\nOut beyond the orbit of Mars the\nLavoisier\nwallowed cautiously\n through the asteroid fields. Aboard the laboratory ship few of the\n members of the permanent Smithson Asteroidal Expedition were aware\n that they were in motion. Living in the field one or two years at\n a time, there was little that they were conscious of except the\n half-million-year-old culture whose scattered fragments surrounded them\n on every side.\n\n\n The only contact with Earth at the moment was the radio link by which\n Dr. Delmar Underwood was calling Dr. Illia Morov at Terrestrial Medical\n Central.\n\n\n Illia's blonde, precisely coiffured hair was only faintly golden\n against, the stark white of her surgeons' gown, which she still wore\n when she answered. Her eyes widened with an expression of pleasure as\n her face came into focus on the screen and she recognized Underwood.\n\n\n \"Del! I thought you'd gone to sleep with the mummies out there. It's\n been over a month since you called. What's new?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. Terry found some new evidence of Stroid III. Phyfe has a\n new scrap of metal with inscriptions, and they've found something that\n almost looks as if it might have been an electron tube five hundred\n thousand years ago. I'm working on that. Otherwise all is peaceful and\n it's wonderful!\"\n\n\n \"Still the confirmed hermit?\" Illia's eyes lost some of their banter,\n but none of their tenderness.\n\n\n \"There's more peace and contentment out here than I'd ever dreamed of\n finding. I want you to come out here, Illia. Come out for a month. If\n you don't want to stay and marry me, then you can go back and I won't\n say another word.\"\nShe shook her head in firm decision. \"Earth needs its scientists\n desperately. Too many have run away already. They say the Venusian\n colonies are booming, but I told you a year ago that simply running\n away wouldn't work. I thought by now you would have found it out for\n yourself.\"\n\n\n \"And I told you a year ago,\" Underwood said flatly, \"that the only\n possible choice of a sane man is escape.\"\n\n\n \"You can't escape your own culture, Del. Why, the expedition that\n provided the opportunity for you to become a hermit is dependent on\n Earth. If Congress should cut the Institute's funds, you'd be dropped\n right back where you were. You can't get away.\"\n\n\n \"There are always the Venusian colonies.\"\n\n\n \"You know it's impossible to exist there independent of Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not talking about the science and technology. I'm talking about\n the social disintegration. Certainly a scientist doesn't need to take\n that with him when he's attempting to escape it.\"\n\n\n \"The culture is not to blame,\" said Illia earnestly, \"and neither is\n humanity. You don't ridicule a child for his clumsiness when he is\n learning to walk.\"\n\n\n \"I hope the human race is past its childhood!\"\n\n\n \"Relatively speaking, it isn't. Dreyer says we're only now emerging\n from the cave man stage, and that could properly be called mankind's\n infancy, I suppose. Dreyer calls it the 'head man' stage.\"\n\n\n \"I thought he was a semanticist.\"\n\n\n \"You'd know if you'd ever talked with him. He'll tear off every other\n word you utter and throw it back at you. His 'head man' designation\n is correct, all right. According to him, human beings in this stage\n need some leader or 'head man' stronger than themselves for guidance,\n assumption of responsibility, and blame, in case of failure of the\n group. These functions have never in the past been developed in the\n individual so that he could stand alone in control of his own ego. But\n it's coming—that's the whole import of Dreyer's work.\"\n\n\n \"And all this confusion and instability are supposed to have something\n to do with that?\"\n\n\n \"It's been growing for decades. We've seen it reach a peak in our own\n lifetimes. The old fetishes have failed, the head men have been found\n to be hollow gods, and men's faith has turned to derision. Presidents,\n dictators, governors, and priests—they've all fallen from their high\n places and the masses of humanity will no longer believe in any of\n them.\"\n\"And\nthat\nis development of the race?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, because out of it will come a people who have found in themselves\n the strength they used to find in the 'head men.' There will come a\n race in which the individual can accept the responsibility which he\n has always passed on to the 'head man,' the 'head man' is no longer\n necessary.\"\n\n\n \"And so—the ultimate anarchy.\"\n\n\n \"The 'head man' concept has, but first he has to find out that\n has nothing to do with government. With human beings capable of\n independent, constructive behavior, actual democracy will be possible\n for the first time in the world's history.\"\n\n\n \"If all this is to come about anyway, according to Dreyer, why not try\n to escape the insanity of the transition period?\"\n\n\n Illia Morov's eyes grew narrow in puzzlement as she looked at Underwood\n with utter incomprehension. \"Doesn't it matter at all that the race is\n in one of the greatest crises of all history? Doesn't it matter that\n you have a skill that is of immense value in these times? It's peculiar\n that it is those of you in the physical sciences who are fleeing in\n the greatest numbers. The Venusian colonies must have a wonderful time\n with physicists trampling each other to get away from it all—and Earth\n almost barren of them. Do the physical sciences destroy every sense of\n social obligation?\"\n\n\n \"You forget that I don't quite accept Dreyer's theories. To me this is\n nothing but a rotting structure that is finally collapsing from its own\n inner decay. I can't see anything positive evolving out of it.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. Well, it was nice of you to call, Del. I'm always glad\n to hear you. Don't wait so long next time.\"\n\n\n \"Illia—\"\n\n\n But she had cut the connection and the screen slowly faded into gray,\n leaving Underwood's argument unfinished. Irritably, he flipped the\n switch to the public news channels.\n\n\n Where was he wrong? The past year, since he had joined the expedition\n as Chief Physicist, was like paradise compared with living in the\n unstable, irresponsible society existing on Earth. He knew it was a\n purely neurotic reaction, this desire to escape. But application of\n that label solved nothing, explained nothing—and carried no stigma.\n The neurotic reaction was the norm in a world so confused.\n\n\n He turned as the news blared abruptly with its perpetual urgency that\n made him wonder how the commentators endured the endless flow of crises.\n\n\n The President had been impeached again—the third one in six months.\n\n\n There were no candidates for his office.\n\n\n A church had been burned by its congregation.\n\n\n Two mayors had been assassinated within hours of each other.\n\n\n It was the same news he had heard six months ago. It would be the same\n again tomorrow and next month. The story of a planet repudiating all\n leadership. A lawlessness that was worse than anarchy, because there\n was still government—a government that could be driven and whipped by\n the insecurities of the populace that elected it.\n\n\n Dreyer called it a futile search for a 'head man' by a people who would\n no longer trust any of their own kind to be 'head man.' And Underwood\n dared not trust that glib explanation.\n\n\n Many others besides Underwood found they could no longer endure the\n instability of their own culture. Among these were many of the world's\n leading scientists. Most of them went to the jungle lands of Venus. The\n scientific limitations of such a frontier existence had kept Underwood\n from joining the Venusian colonies, but he'd been very close to going\n just before he got the offer of Chief Physicist with the Smithson\n Institute expedition in the asteroid fields. He wondered now what he'd\n have done if the offer hadn't come.\nThe interphone annunciator buzzed. Underwood turned off the news as\n the bored communications operator in the control room announced, \"Doc\n Underwood. Call for Doc Underwood.\"\n\n\n Underwood cut in. \"Speaking,\" he said irritably.\n\n\n The voice of Terry Bernard burst into the room. \"Hey, Del! Are you\n going to get rid of that hangover and answer your phone or should we\n embalm the remains and ship 'em back?\"\n\n\n \"Terry! You fool, what do you want? Why didn't you say it was you? I\n thought maybe it was that elephant-foot Maynes, with chunks of mica\n that he thought were prayer sticks.\"\n\n\n \"The Stroids didn't use prayer sticks.\"\n\n\n \"All right, skip it. What's new?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty. Can you come over for a while? I think we've really got\n something here.\"\n\n\n \"It'd better be good. We're taking the ship to Phyfe. Where are you?\"\n\n\n \"Asteroid C-428. It's about 2,000 miles from you. And bring all the\n hard-rock mining tools you've got. We can't get into this thing.\"\n\n\n \"Is\nthat\nall you want? Use your double coated drills.\"\n\n\n \"We wore five of them out. No scratches on the thing, even.\"\n\n\n \"Well, use the Atom Stream, then. It probably won't hurt the artifact.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say it won't. It won't even warm the thing up. Any other ideas?\"\n\n\n Underwood's mind, which had been half occupied with mulling over his\n personal problems while he talked with Terry, swung startledly to what\n the archeologist was saying. \"You mean that you've found a material\n the Atom Stream won't touch? That's impossible! The equations of the\n Stream prove—\"\n\n\n \"I know.\nNow\nwill you come over?\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say so in the first place? I'll bring the whole ship.\"\nUnderwood cut off and switched to the Captain's line. \"Captain Dawson?\n Underwood. Will you please take the ship to the vicinity of Asteroid\n C-428 as quickly as possible?\"\n\n\n \"I thought Doctor Phyfe—\"\n\n\n \"I'll answer for it. Please move the vessel.\"\n\n\n Captain Dawson acceded. His instructions were to place the ship at\n Underwood's disposal.\n\n\n Soundlessly and invisibly, the distortion fields leaped into\n space about the massive laboratory ship and the\nLavoisier\nmoved\n effortlessly through the void. Its perfect inertia controls left no\n evidence of its motion apparent to the occupants with the exception of\n the navigators and pilots. The hundreds of delicate pieces of equipment\n in Underwood's laboratories remained as steadfast as if anchored to\n tons of steel and concrete deep beneath the surface of Earth.\n\n\n Twenty minutes later they hove in sight of the small, black asteroid\n that glistened in the faint light of the faraway Sun. The spacesuited\n figures of Terry Bernard and his assistant, Batch Fagin, clung to the\n surface, moving about like flies on a blackened, frozen apple.\n\n\n Underwood was already in the scooter lock, astride the little\n spacescooter which they used for transportation between ships of the\n expedition and between asteroids.\nThe pilot jockeyed the\nLavoisier\nas near as safely desirable, then\n signaled Underwood. The physicist pressed the control that opened\n the lock in the side of the vessel. The scooter shot out into space,\n bearing him astride it.\n\n\n \"Ride 'em, cowboy!\" Terry Bernard yelled into the intercom. He gave a\n wild cowboy yell that pierced Underwood's ears. \"Watch out that thing\n doesn't turn turtle with you.\"\n\n\n Underwood grinned to himself. He said, \"Your attitude convinces me of a\n long held theory that archeology is no science. Anyway, if your story\n of a material impervious to the Atom Stream is wrong, you'd better get\n a good alibi. Phyfe had some work he wanted to do aboard today.\"\n\n\n \"Come and see for yourself. This is it.\"\n\n\n As the scooter approached closer to the asteroid, Underwood could\n glimpse the strangeness of the thing. It looked as if it had been\n coated with the usual asteroid material of nickel iron debris, but\n Terry had cleared this away from more than half the surface.\n\n\n The exposed half was a shining thing of ebony, whose planes and angles\n were machined with mathematical exactness. It looked as if there were\n at least a thousand individual facets on the one hemisphere alone.\n\n\n At the sight of it, Underwood could almost understand the thrill of\n discovery that impelled these archeologists to delve in the mysteries\n of space for lost kingdoms and races. This object which Terry had\n discovered was a magnificent artifact. He wondered how long it had\n circled the Sun since the intelligence that formed it had died. He\n wished now that Terry had not used the Atom Stream, for that had\n probably destroyed the validity of the radium-lead relationship in the\n coating of debris that might otherwise indicate something of the age of\n the thing.\n\n\n Terry sensed something of Underwood's awe in his silence as he\n approached. \"What do you think of it, Del?\"\n\n\n \"It's—beautiful,\" said Underwood. \"Have you any clue to what it is?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing. No marks of any kind on it.\"\n\n\n The scooter slowed as Del Underwood guided it near the surface of the\n asteroid. It touched gently and he unstrapped himself and stepped off.\n \"Phyfe will forgive all your sins for this,\" he said. \"Before you show\n me the Atom Stream is ineffective, let's break off a couple of tons of\n the coating and put it in the ship. We may be able to date the thing\n yet. Almost all these asteroids have a small amount of radioactivity\n somewhere in them. We can chip some from the opposite side where the\n Atom Stream would affect it least.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Terry agreed. \"I should have thought of that, but when\n I first found the single outcropping of machined metal, I figured it\n was very small. After I found the Atom Stream wouldn't touch it, I was\n overanxious to undercover it. I didn't realize I'd have to burn away\n the whole surface of the asteroid.\"\n\n\n \"We may as well finish the job and get it completely uncovered. I'll\n have some of my men from the ship come on over.\"\n\n\n It took the better part of an hour to chip and drill away samples to be\n used in a dating attempt. Then the intense fire of the Atom Stream was\n turned upon the remainder of the asteroid to clear it.\n\n\n \"We'd better be on the lookout for a soft spot.\" Terry suggested. \"It's\n possible this thing isn't homogeneous, and Papa Phyfe would be very\n mad if we burned it up after making such a find.\"\nFrom behind his heavy shield which protected him from the stray\n radiation formed by the Atom Stream, Delmar Underwood watched the\n biting fire cut between the gemlike artifact and the metallic alloys\n that coated it. The alloys cracked and fell away in large chunks,\n propelled by the explosions of matter as the intense heat vaporized the\n metal almost instantly.\n\n\n The spell of the ancient and the unknown fell upon him and swept him up\n in the old mysteries and the unknown tongues. Trained in the precise\n methods of the physical sciences, he had long fought against the\n fascination of the immense puzzles which the archeologists were trying\n to solve, but no man could long escape. In the quiet, starlit blackness\n there rang the ancient memories of a planet vibrant with life, a\n planet of strange tongues and unknown songs—a planet that had died\n so violently that space was yet strewn with its remains—so violently\n that somewhere the echo of its death explosion must yet ring in the far\n vaults of space.\n\n\n Underwood had always thought of archeologists as befogged antiquarians\n poking among ancient graves and rubbish heaps, but now he knew them\n for what they were—poets in search of mysteries. The Bible-quoting of\n Phyfe and the swearing of red-headed Terry Bernard were merely thin\n disguises for their poetic romanticism.\n\n\n Underwood watched the white fire of the Atom Stream through the lead\n glass of the eye-protecting lenses. \"I talked to Illia today,\" he said.\n \"She says I've run away.\"\n\n\n \"Haven't you?\" Terry asked.\n\n\n \"I wouldn't call it that.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't make much difference what you call it. I once lived in an\n apartment underneath a French horn player who practised eight hours a\n day. I ran away. If the whole mess back on Earth is like a bunch of\n horn blowers tootling above your apartment, I say move, and why make\n any fuss about it? I'd probably join the boys on Venus myself if my job\n didn't keep me out here. Of course it's different with you. There's\n Illia to be convinced—along with your own conscience.\"\n\n\n \"She quotes Dreyer. He's one of your ideals, isn't he?\"\n\n\n \"No better semanticist ever lived,\" Terry said flatly. \"He takes the\n long view, which is that everything will come out in the wash. I agree\n with him, so why worry—knowing that the variants will iron themselves\n out, and nothing I can possibly do will be noticed or missed? Hence,\n I seldom worry about my obligations to mankind, as long as I stay\n reasonably law-abiding. Do likewise, Brother Del, and you'll live\n longer, or at least more happily.\"\nUnderwood grinned in the blinding glare of the Atom Stream. He wished\n life were as simple as Terry would have him believe. Maybe it would be,\n he thought—if it weren't for Illia.\n\n\n As he moved his shield slowly forward behind the crumbling debris,\n Underwood's mind returned to the question of who created the structure\n beneath their feet, and to what alien purpose. Its black, impenetrable\n surfaces spoke of excellent mechanical skill, and a high science that\n could create a material refractory to the Atom Stream. Who, a half\n million years ago, could have created it?\n\n\n The ancient pseudo-scientific Bode's Law had indicated a missing planet\n which could easily have fitted into the Solar System in the vicinity\n of the asteroid belt. But Bode's Law had never been accepted by\n astronomers—until interstellar archeology discovered the artifacts of\n a civilization on many of the asteroids.\n\n\n The monumental task of exploration had been undertaken more than a\n generation ago by the Smithson Institute. Though always handicapped by\n shortage of funds, they had managed to keep at least one ship in the\n field as a permanent expedition.\n\n\n Dr. Phyfe, leader of the present group, was probably the greatest\n student of asteroidal archeology in the System. The younger\n archeologists labeled him benevolently Papa Phyfe, in spite of the\n irascible temper which came, perhaps, from constantly switching his\n mind from half a million years ago to the present.\n\n\n In their use of semantic correlations, Underwood was discovering, the\n archeologists were far ahead of the physical scientists, for they had\n an immensely greater task in deducing the mental concepts of alien\n races from a few scraps of machinery and art.\n\n\n Of all the archeologists he had met, Underwood had taken the greatest\n liking to Terry Bernard. An extremely competent semanticist and\n archeologist, Terry nevertheless did not take himself too seriously. He\n did not even mind Underwood's constant assertion that archeology was\n no science. He maintained that it was fun, and that was all that was\n necessary.\n\n\n At last, the two groups approached each other from opposite sides of\n the asteroid and joined forces in shearing off the last of the debris.\n As they shut off the fearful Atom Streams, the scientists turned to\n look back at the thing they had cleared.\nTerry said quietly, \"See why I'm an archeologist?\"\n\n\n \"I think I do—almost,\" Underwood answered.\n\n\n The gemlike structure beneath their feet glistened like polished ebony.\n It caught the distant stars in its thousand facets and cast them until\n it gleamed as if with infinite lights of its own.\n\n\n The workmen, too, were caught in its spell, for they stood silently\n contemplating the mystery of a people who had created such beauty.\n\n\n The spell was broken at last by a movement across the heavens.\n Underwood glanced up. \"Papa Phyfe's coming on the warpath. I'll bet\n he's ready to trim my ears for taking the lab ship without his consent.\"\n\n\n \"You're boss of the lab ship, aren't you?\" said Terry.\n\n\n \"It's a rather flexible arrangement—in Phyfe's mind, at least. I'm\n boss until he decides he wants to do something.\"\n\n\n The headquarters ship slowed to a halt and the lock opened, emitting\n the fiery burst of a motor scooter which Doc Phyfe rode with angry\n abandon.\n\n\n \"You, Underwood!\" His voice came harshly through the phones. \"I demand\n an explanation of—\"\n\n\n That was as far as he got, for he glimpsed the thing upon which the\n men were standing, and from his vantage point it looked all the more\n like a black jewel in the sky. He became instantly once more the eager\n archeologist instead of expedition administrator, a role he filled with\n irritation.\n\n\n \"What have you got there?\" he whispered.\n\n\n Terry answered. \"We don't know. I asked Dr. Underwood's assistance in\n uncovering the artifact. If it caused you any difficulty, I'm sorry;\n it's my fault.\"\n\"Pah!\" said Phyfe. \"A thing like this is of utmost importance. You\n should have notified me immediately.\"\n\n\n Terry and Underwood grinned at each other. Phyfe reprimanded every\n archeologist on the expedition for not notifying him immediately\n whenever anything from the smallest machined fragment of metal to the\n greatest stone monuments were found. If they had obeyed, he would have\n done nothing but travel from asteroid to asteroid over hundreds of\n thousands of miles of space.\n\n\n \"You were busy with your own work,\" said Terry.\n\n\n But Phyfe had landed, and as he dismounted from the scooter, he stood\n in awe. Terry, standing close to him, thought he saw tears in the old\n man's eyes through the helmet of the spaceship.\n\n\n \"It's beautiful!\" murmured Phyfe in worshipping awe. \"Wonderful. The\n most magnificent find in a century of asteroidal archeology. We must\n make arrangements for its transfer to Earth at once.\"\n\n\n \"If I may make a suggestion,\" said Terry, \"you recall that some of the\n artifacts have not survived so well. Decay in many instances has set\n in—\"\n\n\n \"Are you trying to tell me that this thing can decay?\" Phyfe's little\n gray Van Dyke trembled violently.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking of the thermal transfer. Doctor Underwood is better able\n to discuss that, but I should think that a mass of this kind, which is\n at absolute zero, might undergo unusual stresses in coming to Earth\n normal temperatures. True, we used the Atom Stream on it, but that heat\n did not penetrate enough to set up great internal stresses.\"\n\n\n Phyfe looked hesitant and turned to Underwood. \"What is your opinion?\"\n\n\n Underwood didn't get it until he caught Terry's wink behind Phyfe's\n back. Once it left space and went into the museum laboratory, Terry\n might never get to work on the thing again. That was the perpetual\n gripe of the field men.\n\n\n \"I think Doctor Bernard has a good point,\" said Underwood. \"I would\n advise leaving the artifact here in space until a thorough examination\n has been made. After all, we have every facility aboard the\nLavoisier\nthat is available on Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Very well,\" said Phyfe. \"You may proceed in charge of the physical\n examination of the find, Doctor Underwood. You, Doctor Bernard, will be\n in charge of proceedings from an archeological standpoint. Will that\n be satisfactory to everyone concerned?\"\n\n\n It was far more than Terry had expected.\n\n\n \"I will be on constant call,\" said Phyfe. \"Let me know immediately of\n any developments.\" Then the uncertain mask of the executive fell away\n from the face of the little old scientist and he regarded the find with\n humility and awe. \"It's beautiful,\" he murmured again, \"\nbeautiful\n.\"\nCHAPTER TWO\nPhyfe remained near the site as Underwood and Terry set their crew to\n the routine task of weighing, measuring, and photographing the object,\n while Underwood considered what else to do.\n\n\n \"You know, this thing has got me stymied, Terry. Since it can't be\n touched by an Atom Stream, that means there isn't a single analytical\n procedure to which it will respond—that I know of, anyway. Does your\n knowledge of the Stroids and their ways of doing things suggest any\n identification of it?\"\n\n\n Terry shook his head as he stood by the port of the laboratory ship\n watching the crews at work outside. \"Not a thing, but that's no\n criterion. We know so little about the Stroids that almost everything\n we find has a function we never heard of before. And of course\n we've found many objects with totally unknown functions. I've been\n thinking—what if this should turn out to be merely a natural gem\n from the interior of the planet, maybe formed at the time of its\n destruction, but at least an entirely natural object rather than an\n artifact?\"\n\n\n \"It would be the largest crystal formation ever encountered, and\n the most perfect. I'd say the chances of its natural formation are\n negligible.\"\n\n\n \"But maybe this is the one in a hundred billion billion or whatever\n number chance it may be.\"\n\n\n \"If so, its value ought to be enough to balance the Terrestrial budget.\n I'm still convinced that it must be an artifact, though its material\n and use are beyond me. We can start with a radiation analysis. Perhaps\n it will respond in some way that will give us a clue.\"\n\n\n When the crew had finished the routine check, Underwood directed his\n men to set up the various types of radiation equipment contained within\n the ship. It was possible to generate radiation through almost the\n complete spectrum from single cycle sound waves to hard cosmic rays.\n\n\n The work was arduous and detailed. Each radiator was slowly driven\n through its range, then removed and higher frequency equipment used. At\n each fraction of an octave, the object was carefully photographed to\n record its response.\n\n\n After watching the work for two days, Terry wearied of the seemingly\n non-productive labor. \"I suppose you know what you're doing, Del,\" he\n said. \"But is it getting you anywhere at all?\"\n\n\n Underwood shook his head. \"Here's the batch of photographs. You'll\n probably want them to illustrate your report. The surfaces of the\n object are mathematically exact to a thousandth of a millimeter.\n Believe me, that's some tolerance on an object of this size. The\n surfaces are of number fifteen smoothness, which means they are plane\n within a hundred-thousandth of a millimeter. The implications are\n obvious. The builders who constructed that were mechanical geniuses.\"\n\"Did you get any radioactive dating?\"\n\n\n \"Rather doubtfully, but the indications are around half a million\n years.\"\n\n\n \"That checks with what we know about the Stroids.\"\n\n\n \"It would appear that their culture is about on a par with our own.\"\n\n\n \"Personally, I think they were ahead of us,\" said Terry. \"And do you\n see what that means to us archeologists? It's the first time in the\n history of the science that we've had to deal with the remains of a\n civilization either equal or superior to our own. The problems are\n multiplied a thousand times when you try to take a step up instead of a\n step down.\"\n\n\n \"Any idea of what the Stroids looked like?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't found any bodies, skeletons, or even pictures, but we think\n they were at least roughly anthropomorphic. They were farther from the\n Sun than we, but it was younger then and probably gave them about the\n same amount of heat. Their planet was larger and the Stroids appear\n to have been somewhat larger as individuals than we, judging from\n the artifacts we've discovered. But they seem to have had a suitable\n atmosphere of oxygen diluted with appropriate inert gases.\"\nThey were interrupted by the sudden appearance of a laboratory\n technician who brought in a dry photographic print still warm from the\n developing box.\n\n\n He laid it on the desk before Underwood. \"I thought you might be\n interested in this.\"\n\n\n Underwood and Terry glanced at it. The picture was of the huge,\n gemlike artifact, but a number of the facets seemed to be covered with\n intricate markings of short, wavy lines.\n\n\n Underwood stared closer at the thing. \"What the devil are those? We\n took pictures of every facet previously and there was nothing like\n this. Get me an enlargement of these.\"\n\n\n \"I already have.\" The assistant laid another photo on the desk, showing\n the pattern of markings as if at close range. They were clearly\n discernible now.\n\n\n \"What do you make of it?\" asked Underwood.\n\n\n \"I'd say it looked like writing,\" Terry said. \"But it's not like any\n of the other Stroid characters I've seen—which doesn't mean much, of\n course, because there could be thousands that I've never seen. Only how\n come these characters are there now, and we never noticed them before?\"\n\n\n \"Let's go out and have a look,\" said Underwood. He grasped the\n photograph and noted the numbers of the facets on which the characters\n appeared.\n\n\n In a few moments the two men were speeding toward the surface of their\n discovery astride scooters. They jockeyed above the facets shown on the\n photographs, and stared in vain.\n\n\n \"Something's the matter,\" said Terry. \"I don't see anything here.\"\n\n\n \"Let's go all the way around on the scooters. Those guys may have\n bungled the job of numbering the photos.\"\n\n\n They began a slow circuit, making certain they glimpsed all the facets\n from a height of only ten feet.\n\n\n \"It's not here,\" Underwood agreed at last. \"Let's talk to the crew that\n took the shots.\"\n\n\n They headed towards the equipment platform, floating in free space,\n from which Mason, one of the Senior Physicists, was directing\n operations. Mason signaled for the radiations to be cut off as the men\n approached.\n\n\n \"Find any clues, Chief?\" he asked Underwood. \"We've done our best to\n fry this apple, but nothing happens.\"\n\n\n \"Something\ndid\nhappen. Did you see it?\" Underwood extended the\n photograph with the mechanical fingers of the spacesuit. Mason held it\n in a light and stared at it. \"We didn't see a thing like that. And we\n couldn't have missed it.\" He turned to the members of the crew. \"Anyone\n see this writing on the thing?\"\n\n\n They looked at the picture and shook their heads.\n\n\n \"What were you shooting on it at the time?\"\n\n\n Mason glanced at his records. \"About a hundred and fifty angstroms.\"\n\n\n \"So there must be something that becomes visible only in a field of\n radiation of about that wave length,\" said Underwood. \"Keep going and\n see if anything else turns up, or if this proves to be permanent after\n exposure to that frequency.\"\n\n\n Back in the laboratory, they sat down at the desk and went through\n the file of hundreds of photographs that were now pouring out of the\n darkroom.\n\n\n \"Not a thing except that one,\" said Terry. \"It looks like a message\n intended only for someone who knew what frequency would make it\n visible.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was the Smithson Institute's purpose in the asteroid field?", "question_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX_1", "options": ["Locating and apprehending the gemlike artifact. ", "To discover new alien species.", "The establishment of new colonies for humans to escape to once Earth became inhabitable.", "Discovering and analyzing the remains of an ancient alien civilization."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Terry tell Phyfe their archaeological discovery should not be transferred to Earth immediately?", "question_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX_2", "options": ["He was worried about the stress the artifact would undergo due to the thermal transfer it would experience coming into contact with normal Earth temperature.", "He privately wanted more time to examine it.", "He was worried that the artifact would not survive the transition from space to the Earth's atmosphere.", "He knew that the sheer mass of the object would make it very difficult to transport."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was an indication on Earth that Dreyer's theory was correct?", "question_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX_3", "options": ["Presidents, governors, dictators, and more were being replaced by governments led by small militia groups.", "The population of Earth no longer trusted anyone in a position of leadership.", "Mass anarchy had led to a situation where there were no longer any governments on Earth.", "\"Head men\" had been surfacing with greater regularity as leaders of countries, cities, and states around the world."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the main reason the gemlike artifact was such a significant find from Terry's point of view?", "question_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX_4", "options": ["It represented a touchstone in the history of archeology; they would have to contend with a civilization more advanced or just as advanced as humanity.", "It represented perhaps the oldest-known relic ever to be discovered in the history of archeology.", "It was the remnants of a highly intelligent alien species that could possibly help humans learn more about their own history.", "It was completely impervious to human instruments they tried to use to dislodge it and to examine it."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Del so desperately want to stay away from Earth?", "question_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX_5", "options": ["He felt some mysterious pull to explore the asteroid fields.", "He did not approve of the current leadership of the majority of governments around the world. ", "The situation had devolved to such a state that he no longer felt it was habitable.", "He wanted to avoid serious conversations with Illia about their future."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What were the implications of the writings on the gemlike artifact?", "question_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX_6", "options": ["The fact that Terry had not been able to see them revealed he was losing his touch as an archeologist.", "They could only be seen by a civilization with technology advanced enough to see them.", "They indicated an alien civilization far more advanced than humankind.", "It was a message revealing how to open the artifact and discover what lay buried within its chambers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did the discovery of the gemlike artifact reveal to Del about archeologists?", "question_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX_7", "options": ["They were a silly bunch, not to be taken seriously.", "He finally grasped their sense of wonder in the face of discovery.", "They understood far more about ancient civilizations than he could ever hope to through his own profession.", "He realized their science was far more complex than he had given them credit for."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the relationship between Illia Morov and Delmar Underwood?", "question_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX_8", "options": ["They were romantically involved, although the specifics of their romance are not clear.", "They were a married, scientist couple who worked from different laboratories.", "They were scientific peers, often sharing discoveries with one another.", "They were purely business associates, both employed by the Smithson Institute."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why had Delmar not gone to Venus to escape Earth?", "question_unique_id": "50783_GHQDH2JX_9", "options": ["The Venusian colonies were ill-equipped to support life at the time he decided to accept the mission with the Smithson Institute.", "Their scientific resources were limited.", "Venus was becoming overcrowded with fellow physicists. ", "He anticipated many of the same problems Earth faced would soon begin to surface on Venus."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/7/8/50783//50783-h//50783-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51152", "set_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Appointment In Tomorrow", "year": 1951, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; United States -- Fiction", "article": "Appointment in Tomorrow\nBY FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIs it possible to have a world without moral values?\n\n Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?\nThe first angry rays of the sun—which, startlingly enough, still rose\n in the east at 24 hour intervals—pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic\n combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious\n fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War\n III's atomic bombs.\n\n\n They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around\n Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at\n the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three\n Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched\n the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a\n girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of\n a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot\n that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things\n as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked\n the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the\n Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially\n across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and\n the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room.\n And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers'\n Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.\n\n\n It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America\n of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America\n of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the\n off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War\n and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly\n rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the\n Institute. \"Knock on titanium,\" \"Whadya do for black-outs,\" \"Please,\n lover, don't think when I'm around,\" America, as combat-shocked and\n crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.\n\n\n Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned,\n polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's\n Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute,\n or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the\n phrase, \"... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus,\" he took a\n deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and\n his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with\n impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.\n\n\n Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory\n chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep.\n These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which\n rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a\n muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until\n he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.\nRemembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he\n instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate\n level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as\n quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have\n had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered\n if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth\n their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would\n send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no,\n that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important\n purposes.\n\n\n Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence\n into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed.\n No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them\n unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing—the severe tunic, tights and\n sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message\n tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme\n tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly\n planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face\n broke into a smile.\n\n\n It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making\n up his life—and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of\n his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving\n technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as\n somno-learning.\n\n\n He set his who?-where? robot for \"Rocket Physicist\" and \"Genius Class.\"\n While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief\n message:\n\n\n Dear Fellow Scientist:\n\n\n A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's\n future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are\n available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the\n Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected\n the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return!\n I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp,\n Thinkers' Foundation I.\nJorj Helmuth\n\n\n Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced\n through them, hesitated at the name \"Willard Farquar,\" looked at the\n sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and\n plugged in the steno-robot.\n\n\n The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.\n\n\n \"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir,\" a clear feminine voice\n announced. \"He has the general staff with him.\"\n\n\n \"Martian peace to him,\" Jorj Helmuth said. \"Tell him I'll be down in a\n few minutes.\"\nHuge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed\n above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in\n the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls,\n indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair\n on a boom.\n\n\n Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information\n and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not\n resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great\n cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its\n own controls—the permissible ones—and could doubtless improvise a\n hearing apparatus if it wanted to.\n\n\n For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and\n Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons.\n This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human\n brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the\n rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney\n Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had\n given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This\n was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased\n human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.\nThis was the machine that really thought—a million-plus!\nThis was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy\n professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the\n machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push,\nhad\nbuilt. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and\n girl-fondness, \"Maizie.\"\n\n\n Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord\n plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and\n shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense,\n although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with\n the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet\n infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape\n the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.\nThe grizzled general—there was also one who was gray—was thinking\n that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and\n usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his\n ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent\n than himself. And always orders of the \"Tell me how to kill that man\"\n rather than the \"Kill that man\" sort. The distinction bothered him\n obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls\n which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's\n right-minded leaders—even the Thinkers weren't certain which.\n\n\n The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a\n more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and\n the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble.\n He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation\n be in metal rather than flesh?\n\n\n The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such\n pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success\n with Buddhism. Sitting before his\nguru\n, his teacher, feeling the\n Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had\n felt a little like this.\n\n\n The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets,\n was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists\n weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd\n always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things,\n rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill\n of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty\n sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better—more\n disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie,\n which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.\nThe President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was\n also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though\n he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration.\n Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even\n the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!\n\n\n Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal\n features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the\n tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had\n handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for\n next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet\n minds—profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising\n simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were\n alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical\n shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.\n\n\n The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice\n nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly\n put it away. No one spoke.\n\n\n Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. \"Section Five, Question\n Four—whom would that come from?\"\n\n\n The burly man frowned. \"That would be the physics boys, Opperly's\n group. Is anything wrong?\"\n\n\n Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust\n controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually\n he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.\n\n\n From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the\n six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to\n get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.\nJorj turned, smiling. \"And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie\n to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the\n takeoff of the Mars rocket.\" He switched on a giant television screen.\n The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich\n ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a\n silvery mighty spindle.\n\n\n Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here\n was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official\n territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That\n rocket there—just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered\n from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed\n nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first\n spaceship—and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!\n\n\n Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when\n he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him\n from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole\n Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And\n that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional\n mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.\n\n\n \"Lord,\" the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's\n feeling, \"I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little\n devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country.\"\n\n\n Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. \"It's quite unthinkable,\" he said.\n \"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely\n sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them\n psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to\n contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and\n errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone\n to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course,\n some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds\n of the Martians—\"\n\n\n \"Sure, I know,\" the President said hastily. \"Shouldn't have mentioned\n it, Jorj.\"\n\n\n Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great\n violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.\nMeanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out\n a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning\n rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that\n of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand\n relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes,\n impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and,\n reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room\n where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.\n\n\n He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as\n a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first\n question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the\n staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the\n answer.\n\n\n For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon\n and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to\n close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone,\n asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer,\n then went back to the grind.\n\n\n Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his\n thinking with his eyes open.\n\n\n The question was: \"Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?\"\n\n\n He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive\n lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.\n\n\n Suddenly he began to tape again.\n\n\n \"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing,\n humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One:\n The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows....\"\n\n\n But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.\nFive hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off\n its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it\n effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped\n himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the\n dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew\n he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more\n than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.\n\n\n Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the\n fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and\n gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and\n parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of\n free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would\n toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes\n she swam for it frantically.\n\n\n After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer\n and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on\n Mars this trip—priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to\n war-battered mankind.\n\n\n The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up\n on the air, and went to sleep.\nJorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed\n each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away\n with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over\n his.\n\n\n \"Who the devil would Maelzel be?\" he asked.\n\n\n A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. \"Edgar\n Allen Poe,\" he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.\n\n\n The grizzled general snapped his fingers. \"Sure! Maelzel's Chess\n player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed\n to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it.\"\n\n\n The Secretary of Space frowned. \"Now what's the point in a fool\n question like that?\"\n\n\n \"You said it came from Opperly's group?\" Jorj asked sharply.\n\n\n The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men\n puzzledly.\n\n\n \"Who would that be?\" Jorj pressed. \"The group, I mean.\"\n\n\n The Secretary of Space shrugged. \"Oh, the usual little bunch over at\n the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young\n Farquar.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile,\" Jorj commented coldly. \"I'd\n investigate.\"\n\n\n The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. \"I will. Right\n away.\"\nSunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust\n motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was\n well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes\n there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place\n of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly\n knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been\n riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in\n New York City.\n\n\n The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face\n of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender—fined down by\n a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful,\n sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather\n like a bear.\n\n\n Opperly was saying, \"So when he asked who was responsible for the\n Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember.\" He smiled. \"They still\n allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt.\n Almost my sole remaining privilege.\" The smile faded. \"Why do you keep\n on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?\" he asked without rancor. \"I've\n maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding\n to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have\n overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults\n isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough\n about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of\n this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?\"\n\n\n The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. \"Because the\n Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed,\" he rapped out. \"We know\n their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their\n Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental\n science is bunk.\"\n\n\n \"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly,\" Opperly\n interposed quietly. \"You know the good it did.\"\n\n\n Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. \"Then it's got to be\n done until it takes.\"\n\n\n Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. \"I think\n you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which\n you probably aren't aware.\"\n\n\n Farquar scowled. \"We're the ones in the cages.\"\nOpperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. \"All the more\n reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers\n strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But\n consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians.\" His voice grew\n especially tranquil. \"A scientist tells people the truth. When times\n are good—that is, when the truth offers no threat—people don't mind.\n But when times are very, very bad....\" A shadow darkened his eyes.\n \"Well, we all know what happened to—\" And he mentioned three names\n that had been household words in the middle of the century. They\n were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three\n physicists.\n\n\n He went on, \"A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they\n wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured\n by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that\n they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a\n luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their\n souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their\n war rockets.\"\n\n\n Farquar clenched his fist. \"All the more reason to keep chipping away\n at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's\n difficult and dangerous?\"\n\n\n Opperly shook his head. \"We're to keep clear of the infection of\n violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I\n was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm\n convinced that all my reactions were futile.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly!\" Farquar agreed harshly. \"You reacted. You didn't act. If\n you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league,\n if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous\n bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future....\"\n\n\n \"By the time you were born, Willard,\" Opperly interrupted dreamily,\n \"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't\n the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine\n Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White\n House with a bomb in his briefcase?\" He smiled. \"Besides, that's not\n the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining\n for power—only established facts or lies are.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little\n violence in you.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Opperly said.\n\n\n \"I've got violence in me,\" Farquar announced, shoving himself to his\n feet.\nOpperly looked up from the flowers. \"I think you have,\" he agreed.\n\n\n \"But what are we to do?\" Farquar demanded. \"Surrender the world to\n charlatans without a struggle?\"\n\n\n Opperly mused for a while. \"I don't know what the world needs now.\n Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that\n he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the\n philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?\"\n\n\n \"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!\"\n\n\n \"No, I leave that to history.\"\n\n\n \"And history consists of the actions of men,\" Farquar concluded. \"I\n intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically\n precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing.\n Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts\n between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn\n neurotics in the Inner Cabinet—and their wives. The fact that the\n Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election.\n The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran\n because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just\n a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of\n 'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times\n and points are all that are needed—and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet\n they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that\n we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us,\n turning to us for help. You wait and see.\"\n\n\n \"I am thinking again of Hitler,\" Opperly interposed quietly. \"On his\n first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals\n were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won\n every battle, until the last. Moreover,\" he pressed on, cutting Farquar\n short, \"the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but\n on what the world hasn't got—peace, honor, a good conscience....\"\n\n\n The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man\n with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny\n cylinder. \"Radiogram for you, Willard.\" He grinned across the hall at\n Opperly. \"When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?\"\n\n\n The physicist waved to him. \"Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry.\"\n\n\n The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.\n\n\n \"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?\" Farquar\n chortled suddenly. \"It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this.\"\n\n\n He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he\n asked, \"Who's it from? Tregarron?\"\n\n\n \"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in\n deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going\n to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that\n they'll need our help.\"\n\n\n \"An invitation?\"\n\n\n Farquar nodded. \"For this afternoon.\" He noticed Opperly's anxious\n though distant frown. \"What's the matter?\" he asked. \"Are you bothered\n about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap—that after the\n Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?\"\n\n\n The older man shook his head. \"I'm not afraid for your life, Willard.\n That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things\n they might do to you.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" Farquar asked.\nOpperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. \"You're a strong and\n vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires.\" His voice\n trailed off for a bit. Then, \"Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a\n girl once? A Miss Arkady?\"\n\n\n Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.\n\n\n \"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?\"\n\n\n \"If girls find me ugly, that's their business,\" Farquar said harshly,\n still not looking at Opperly. \"What's that got to do with this\n invitation?\"\n\n\n Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally\n he said, \"In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an\n academician, cushioned by tradition.\"\n\n\n Willard snorted. \"Science had already entered the era of the police\n inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling\n enterprise.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" Opperly agreed. \"Still, the scientist lived the safe,\n restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't\n exposed to the temptations of the world.\"\n\n\n Farquar turned on him. \"Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow\n be able to buy me off?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?\" Farquar demanded\n angrily.\n\n\n Opperly shrugged his helplessness. \"No, I don't think you'll change\n your aims.\"\n\n\n Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight\n between the two men.\nAs the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his\n apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the\n silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.\n\n\n Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the\n paradox.\n\n\n Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying\n neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a\n steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust—processes that\n were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself\n warm.\n\n\n Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then\n would come the thrilling order, \"Set sail for Mars!\" The vast umbrella\n would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side\n a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick\n and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the\n ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities.\n Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.\n\n\n In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the\n ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship\n itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became\n exhausted.\n\n\n A spaceship with direct nuclear drive—and he, a Thinker, had\n conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having\n strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting,\n memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself\n of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their\n specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.\n\n\n But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind\n Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would\n discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even—his\n imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward—build the\n true Maizie!\n\n\n And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the\n scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.\n\n\n He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry\n him past his door. He stepped inside and called, \"Caddy!\" He waited a\n moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.\nConfound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she\n should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now,\n when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a\n pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He\n really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again\n there sprang into his mind the word—a pet form of her name—that would\n send her into obedient trance.\n\n\n No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment\n of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike\n suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely\n a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding\n the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for\n it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.\n\n\n Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook\n his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if\n he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting\n Tregarron.\n\n\n But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his\n boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the\n mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He\n himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over\n strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.\n\n\n He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum\n relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he\n knew would be desirable before the big conference.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How did Maizie supposedly function?", "question_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4_1", "options": ["Jorj operated a series of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, and from there secretly answered the questions himself.", "Information was stored in its massive brain that had been programmed by cyberneticists. ", "Cyberneticists programmed information into Maizie's system regarding human reasoning and judgement that Maizie used in answering difficult questions.", "Trillions of synapses fired up and stored memories that allowed it to answer questions of any conceivable type."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the purpose of the question posed to Maizie by Opperly's group?", "question_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4_2", "options": ["The question was a hidden message meant to communicate with the beer-drinking man who operated Maizie from within.", "The question was a reference to Edgar Allen Poe, and it was meant to invoke an emotional response from the Secretary of State.", "The question was a reference to Poe's story \"Maelzel's Chess Player\" and meant to test Maizie's chess knowledge.", "Farquar wrote the question as part of his continued attempt to expose the fraud of the Thinkers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Jorj hesitate to summon Farquar when he invited the physicists to a meeting?", "question_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4_3", "options": ["He wanted to avoid any direct challenges to his growing influence over the President of the United States and the department secretaries.", "He knew that Farquar was violent, and he wanted to prevent a confrontation between him and the Thinkers.", "He knew that Farquar was planning to expose the Thinkers for their fraud related to Maizie and the Mars rocket.", "He was dating Farquar's ex-girlfriend, Arkady, and he knew Farquar to not be particularly fond of the Thinkers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Morton Opperly's living space reveal about his character?", "question_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4_4", "options": ["He hates watching television, and the lack of a telephone shows that he does not wish to be contacted by anyone.", "He is rather old-school, but his willingness to sneak in the radioactive painting shows he has a bit of rebellion in him.", "The messiness of his living room shows that he is a busy man with a preoccupied mind.", "He is passionate about art and distrusts new technology."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the people want to believe in the lie of Maizie and the rockets to Mars?", "question_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4_5", "options": ["According to Opperly, people put their faith in other people or things that tell them what they want to hear during turbulent times such as the fallout of World War III.", "They were afraid of the solutions that the physicists provided, which were primarily focused on building new weapons of war.", "Jorj had employed his rapid mental scanner technique to clear their memory chains of false associations and replace them with the images he had seen via somno-thought.", "Jorj had weaponized his mastery of Martian mind-control to convince the United States population that Maizie had cognitive powers beyond the scope of any scientist."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happened to Willard's ex-girlfriend?", "question_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4_6", "options": ["She had run off with Jan Tregarron.", "She had died in the atomic bombings of World War III.", "She left him and is now dating Jorj Helmuth.", "She had gone to Mars in one of Jorj's rockets."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is there a man sitting inside Maizie?", "question_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4_7", "options": ["He ensures Maizie's synapses are operating the way they were programmed to operate.", "He is hiding from the outside world so he can drink beer in peace.", "Maizie has no real power. The man's job is to answer the questions asked of Maizie.", "He is working with Farquar to expose Jorj Helmuth's fraud."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the Secretary of Space prefer the Thinkers over the physicists, despite his growing irritation with their growing involvement with space travel?", "question_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4_8", "options": ["He felt the physicists were too disciplined and did not think creatively enough to make big things happen with the space program.", "He was astonished at the cognitive abilities of Maizie, and he had to give them credit for helping his department advance space travel.", "He felt it was easier to do business with the Thinkers, although he didn't like the power they held over the President's administration.", "He didn't like being bossed around by the physicists, and he thought the Thinkers were more efficient and relatable."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the mission of the pilot of the Mars rocket?", "question_unique_id": "51152_DDY341W4_9", "options": ["He will meet the Martians and continue to study their mind-control techniques in order to bring this knowledge back to Earth.", "He will be the first pilot to successfully bring a cat into space.", "He has no real mission. He will spend several months doing mostly nothing and then return to Earth.", "He will discover priceless spiritual insights from his interactions with the Martian natives that will help bring peace to the world."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/5/51152//51152-h//51152-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50940", "set_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Wailing Wall", "year": 1964, "author": "Aycock, Roger D.", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; Psychological fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction; Short stories", "article": "Wailing Wall\nBy ROGER DEE\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAn enormous weapon is forcing people to keep\n \ntheir troubles to themselves—it's dynamite!\nNumb with the terror that had dogged him from the moment he regained\n consciousness and found himself naked and weaponless, Farrell had no\n idea how long he had been lost in the honeycombed darkness of the\n Hymenop dome.\nThe darkness and damp chill of air told him that he was far\n underground, possibly at the hive's lowest level. Somewhere above\n him, the silent audience chambers lay shrouded in lesser gloom, heavy\n with the dust of generations and peopled only by cryptic apian images.\n Outside the dome, in a bend of lazy silver river, sprawled the Sadr III\n village with its stoic handful of once-normal Terran colonists and, on\n the hillside above the village, Gibson and Stryker and Xavier would be\n waiting for him in the disabled\nMarco Four.\nWaiting for him....\nThey might as well have been back on Terra, five hundred light-years\n away.\nSix feet away on either side, the corridor walls curved up faintly, a\n flattened oval of tunneling designed for multiple alien feet, lighted\n for faceted eyes demanding the merest fraction of light necessary\n for an Earthman's vision. For two yards Farrell could see dimly, as\n through a heavy fog; beyond was nothing but darkness and an outlandish\n labyrinth of cross-branching corridors that spiraled on forever without\n end.\nBehind him, his pursuers—human natives or Hymenop invaders, he had\n no way of knowing which—drew nearer with a dry minor rustling whose\n suggestion of imminent danger sent Farrell plunging blindly on into the\n maze.\n—To halt, sweating, when a sound exactly similar came to him from\n ahead.\nIt was what he had feared from the beginning. He could not go on, and\n he could not go back.\nHe made out the intersecting corridor to his right, then a vague oval\n opening that loomed faintly grayer than the wall about it. He darted\n into it as into a sanctuary, and realized too late that the choice had\n been forced upon him.\nIt had been intended from the start that he should take this way. He\n had been herded here like a halterless beast, driven by the steady\n threat of action never quite realized.\nThey\nhad known where he was\n going, and why.\nBut there was light down there somewhere at the end of the tunnel's\n aimless wanderings. If, once there, he could see—\nHe did not find light, only a lesser darkness. The tunnel led him\n into a larger place whose outer reaches were lost in shadow, but whose\n central area held a massive cylindrical machine at once alien and\n familiar.\nHe went toward it hesitantly, confused for the moment by a paramnesiac\n sense of repeated experience, the specious recognition of\ndéjà vu.\nIt was a Ringwave generator, and it was the thing he had ventured into\n the dome to find.\nHis confusion stemmed from its resemblance to the disabled generator\n aboard the\nMarco Four,\nand from the stereo-sharp associations it\n evoked: Gibson working over the ship's power plant, his black-browed\n face scowling and intent, square brown body moving with a wrestler's\n easy economy of motion; Stryker, bald and fat and worried, wheezing up\n and down the companionway from engine bay to chart room, his concern\n divided between Gibson's task and Farrell's long silence in the dome.\nStryker at this moment would be regretting the congenital optimism\n that had prompted him to send his navigator where he himself could\n not go. Sweating anxiety would have replaced Stryker's pontifical\n assurance, dried up his smug pattering of socio-psychological truisms\n lifted from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook....\n\"So far as adaptability is concerned,\" Stryker had said an eternal\n evening before, \"\nhomo sapiens\ncan be a pretty weird species. More\n given to mulish paradox, perhaps, than any alien life-form we're ever\n likely to run across out here.\"\n\n\n He had shifted his bulk comfortably on the grass under the\nMarco\n Four's\nopen port, undisturbed by the busy clatter of tools inside the\n ship where Gibson and Xavier, the\nMarco's\nmechanical, worked over\n the disabled power plant. He laced his fingers across his fat paunch\n and peered placidly through the dusk at Farrell, who lay on his back,\n smoking and watching the stars grow bright in the evening sky.\n\n\n \"Isolate a human colony from its parent planet for two centuries,\n enslave it for half that time to a hegemony as foreign as the\n Hymenops' hive-culture before abandoning it to its own devices, and\n anything at all in the way of eccentric social controls can develop.\n But men remain basically identical, Arthur, in spite of acquired\n superficial changes. They are inherently incapable of evolving any\n system of control mechanisms that cannot be understood by other men,\n provided the environmental circumstances that brought that system into\n being are known. At bottom, these Sadr III natives are no different\n from ourselves. Heredity won't permit it.\"\n\n\n Farrell, half listening, had been staring upward between the icy white\n brilliance of Deneb and the twin blue-and-yellow jewels of Albireo,\n searching for a remote twinkle of Sol. Five hundred light-years away\n out there, he was thinking, lay Earth. And from Earth all this gaudy\n alien glory was no more than another point of reference for backyard\n astronomers, a minor configuration casually familiar and unremarkable.\n\n\n A winking of lighted windows springing up in the village downslope\n brought his attention back to the scattered cottages by the river, and\n to the great disquieting curve of the Hymenop dome that rose above them\n like a giant above pygmies. He sat up restlessly, the wind ruffling\n his hair and whirling the smoke of his cigarette away in thin flying\n spirals.\n\n\n \"You sound as smug as the Reorientation chapter you lifted that bit\n from,\" Farrell said. \"But it won't apply here, Lee. The same thing\n happened to these people that happened to the other colonists we've\n found, but they don't react the same. Either those Hymenop devils\n warped them permanently or they're a tribe of congenital maniacs.\"\n\n\n Stryker prodded him socratically: \"Particulars?\"\n\n\n \"When we crashed here five weeks ago, there were an even thousand\n natives in the village, plus or minus a few babes in arms. Since\n that time they've lost a hundred twenty-six members, all suicides or\n murders. At first the entire population turned out at sunrise and went\n into the dome for an hour before going to the fields; since we came,\n that period has shortened progressively to a few minutes. That much\n we've learned by observation. By direct traffic we've learned exactly\n nothing except that they can speak Terran Standard, but won't. What\n sort of system is that?\"\n\n\n Stryker tugged uncomfortably at the rim of white hair the years had\n left him. \"It's a stumper for the moment, I'll admit ... if they'd\n only\ntalk\nto us, if they'd tell us what their wants and fears and\n problems are, we'd know what is wrong and what to do about it. But\n controls forced on them by the Hymenops, or acquired since their\n liberation, seem to have altered their original ideology so radically\n that—\"\n\n\n \"That they're plain batty,\" Farrell finished for him. \"The whole setup\n is unnatural, Lee. Consider this: We sent Xavier out to meet the first\n native that showed up, and the native talked to him. We heard it all by\n monitoring; his name was Tarvil, he spoke Terran Standard, and he was\n amicable. Then we showed ourselves, and when he saw that we were human\n beings like himself and not mechanicals like Xav, he clammed up. So did\n everyone in the village. It worries me, Lee. If they didn't expect men\n to come out of the\nMarco\n, then what in God's name\ndid\nthey expect?\"\n\n\n He sat up restlessly and stubbed out his cigarette. \"It's an\n unimportant world anyway, all ocean except for this one small\n continent. I think we ought to write it off and get the hell out as\n soon as the\nMarco\n's Ringwave is repaired.\"\n\n\n \"We can't write it off,\" Stryker said. \"Besides reclaiming a colony, we\n may have added a valuable marine food source to the Federation. Arthur,\n you're not letting a handful of disoriented people get under your\n skin, are you?\"\n\n\n Farrell made an impatient sound and lit another cigarette. The brief\n flare of his lighter pierced the darkness and picked out a hurried\n movement a short stone's throw away, between the\nMarco Four\nand the\n village.\n\"There's one reason why I'm edgy,\" Farrell said. \"These Sadrians may\n be harmless, but they make a point of posting a guard over us. There's\n a sentry out there in the grass flats again tonight.\" He turned on\n Stryker uneasily. \"I've watched on the infra-scanner while those\n sentries changed shifts, and they don't speak to each other. I've\n tracked them back to the village, but I've never seen one of them turn\n in a—\"\n\n\n Down in the village a man screamed, a raw, tortured sound that brought\n both men up stiffly. A frantic drumming of running feet came to them,\n unmistakable across the little distance. The fleeing man came up from\n the dark huddle of cottages by the river and out across the grass\n flats, screaming.\n\n\n Pursuit overtook him halfway to the ship. There was a brief scuffling,\n a shadowy dispersal of silent figures. After that, nothing.\n\n\n \"They did it again,\" Farrell said. \"One of them tried to come up here\n to us. The others killed him, and who's to say what sort of twisted\n motive prompted them? They go to the dome together every morning, not\n speaking. They work all day in the fields without so much as looking at\n each other. But every night at least one of them tries to escape from\n the village and come up here—and this is what happens. We couldn't\n trust them, Lee, even if we could understand them!\"\n\n\n \"It's our job to understand them,\" Stryker said doggedly. \"Our function\n is to find colonies disoriented by the Hymenops and to set them\n straight if we can. If we can't, we call in a long-term reorientation\n crew, and within three generations the culture will pass again for\n Terran. The fact that slave colonies invariably lose their knowledge of\n longevity helps; they don't get it back until they're ready for it.\n\n\n \"I've seen some pretty foul results of Hymenop experimenting\n on human colonies, Arthur. There was the ninth planet of Beta\n Pegasi—rediscovered in 3910, I think it was—that developed a\n religious fixation on fertility, a mania fostered by the Hymenops to\n supply expendable labor for their mines. The natives stopped mining\n when the Hymenops gave up the invasion and went back to 70 Ophiuchi,\n but they were still multiplying like rabbits when we found them. They\n followed a cultural conviction something like that observed in Oriental\n races of ancient Terran history, but they didn't pursue the Oriental\n tradition of sacrosancts. They couldn't—there were too many of them.\n By the time they were found, they numbered fourteen\nbillions\nand they\n were eating each other. Still it took only three generations to set\n them straight.\"\n\n\n He took one of Farrell's cigarettes and puffed it placidly.\n\n\n \"For that matter, Earth had her own share of eccentric cultures. I\n recall reading about one that existed as late as the twentieth century\n and equaled anything we're likely to find here. Any society should be\n geared to a set of social controls designed to furnish it, as a whole\n with a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of discomfort, but these\n ancient Terrestrial Dobuans—island aborigines, as I remember it—had\n adjusted to their total environment in a manner exactly opposite. They\n reversed the norm and became a society of paranoiacs, hating each\n other in direct ratio to nearness of relationship. Husbands and wives\n detested each other, sons and fathers—\"\n\n\n \"Now you're pulling my leg,\" Farrell protested. \"A society like that\n would be too irrational to function.\"\n\n\n \"But the system worked,\" Stryker insisted. \"It balanced well enough, as\n long as they were isolated. They accepted it because it was all they\n knew, and an abrupt reversal that negated their accustomed habits would\n create an impossible societal conflict. They were reoriented after\n the Fourth War, and succeeding generations adjusted to normal living\n without difficulty.\"\n\n\n A sound from overhead made them look up. Gibson was standing in the\nMarco's\nopen port.\n\n\n \"Conference,\" Gibson said in his heavy baritone, and went back inside.\nThey followed Gibson quickly and without question, more disturbed by\n the terse order than by the killing in the grass flats. Knowing Gibson,\n they realized that he would not have wasted even that one word unless\n emergency justified it.\n\n\n They found him waiting in the chart room with Xavier. For the\n thousandth time, seeing the two together, Farrell found himself\n comparing them: the robot, smoothly functional from flexible gray\n plastoid body to featureless oval faceplate, blandly efficient, totally\n incapable of emotion; Gibson, short and dark and competent heavy-browed\n and humorless. Except for initiative, Farrell thought, the two of them\n could have traded identities and no one would have been able to notice\n any difference.\n\n\n \"Xav and I found our Ringwave trouble,\" Gibson said. \"The generator is\n functioning, but the warp isn't going out. Something here on Sadr III\n is neutralizing it.\"\n\n\n They stared at him as if he had just told them the planet was flat.\n\n\n \"But a Ringwave can't be stopped completely, once it is started,\"\n Stryker protested. \"You'd have to dismantle it to shut it off, Gib!\"\n\n\n \"The warping field can be damped out, though,\" Gibson said. \"Adjacent\n generators operating at different phase levels will heterodyne at a\n frequency representing the mean variance between levels. The resulting\n beat-phase will be too low to maintain either field, and one or the\n other, or both, will blank out. If you remember, all Terran-designed\n power plants are set to the same phase for that reason.\"\n\n\n \"But these natives\ncan't\nhave a Ringwave plant!\" Farrell argued.\n \"There's only this one village on Sadr III, Gib, an insignificant\n little agrarian township! If they had the Ringwave, they'd be\n mechanized. They'd have vehicles, landing ports....\"\n\n\n \"The Hymenops had the Ringwave,\" Gibson interrupted. \"And they left the\n dome down there, the first undamaged one we've found. Figure it out for\n yourselves.\"\n\n\n They digested the statement in silence. Stryker paled slowly, as if\n it needed time for apprehension to work its way through his fat bulk.\n Farrell's uneasiness, sourceless until now, grew to chill certainty.\n\"I think I've expected this, without realizing it, since my first\n flight,\" he said. \"It stood to reason that the Hymenops would quit\n running somewhere, that we'd bump into them eventually out here on the\n fringes. Twenty thousand light-years back to 70 Ophiuchi is a long way\n to retreat.... Gib, do you think they're still here?\"\n\n\n Gibson did not shrug, but his voice seemed to. \"It won't matter one way\n or the other unless we can clear the\nMarco's\ngenerator.\"\n\n\n From another man it might have been irony. Knowing Gibson, Farrell and\n Stryker accepted it as a bald statement of fact.\n\n\n \"Then we're up against a Hymenop hive-mind,\" Stryker said. \"And we\n can't run away from it. Any suggestions?\"\n\n\n \"We'll have to find the interfering generator and stop it,\" Farrell\n offered, knowing that was the only obvious solution.\n\n\n \"One alternative,\" Gibson corrected. \"If we can determine what\n phase-level the interfering warp uses, we may be able to adjust the\nMarco's\ngenerator to match it. Once they're in resonance, they won't\n interfere.\" He caught Stryker's unspoken question and answered it. \"It\n would take a week. Maybe longer.\"\n\n\n Stryker vetoed the alternative. \"Too long. If there are Hymenops here,\n they won't give us that much time.\"\n\n\n Farrell switched on the chart room scanning screen and centered it\n on the village downslope. Scattered cottages with dark tiled roofs\n and lamp-bright windows showed up clearly. Out of their undisciplined\n grouping swept the great hemispherical curve of the dome, glinting\n dully metallic in the starshine.\n\n\n \"Maybe we're jumping to conclusions,\" he said. \"We've been here for\n five weeks without seeing a trace of Hymenops, and from what I've read\n of them, they'd have jumped us the minute we landed. Chances are that\n they left Sadr III in too great a hurry to wreck the dome, and their\n Ringwave power plant is still running.\"\n\n\n \"You may be right,\" Stryker said, brightening. \"They carried the fight\n to us from the first skirmish, two hundred years ago, and they damned\n near beat us before we learned how to fight them.\"\n\n\n He looked at Xavier's silent plastoid figure with something like\n affection. \"We'd have lost that war without Xave's kind. We\n couldn't match wits with Hymenop hive-minds, any more than a swarm\n of grasshoppers could stand up to a colony of wasps. But we made\n mechanicals that could. Cybernetic brains and servo-crews, ships that\n thought for themselves....\"\n\n\n He squinted at the visiscreen with its cryptic, star-streaked dome.\n \"But they don't think as we do. They may have left a rear guard here,\n or they may have boobytrapped the dome.\"\n\n\n \"One of us will have to find out which it is,\" Farrell said. He took\n a restless turn about the chart room, weighing the probabilities. \"It\n seems to fall in my department.\"\n\n\n Stryker stared. \"You? Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because I'm the only one who\ncan\ngo. Remember what Gib said about\n changing the\nMarco's\nRingwave to resonate with the interfering\n generator? Gib can make the change; I can't. You're—\"\n\n\n \"Too old and fat,\" Stryker finished for him. \"And too damned slow and\n garrulous. You're right, of course.\"\n\n\n They let it go at that and put Xavier on guard for the night. The\n mechanical was infinitely more alert and sensitive to approach than any\n of the crew, but the knowledge did not make Farrell's sleep the sounder.\n\n\n He dozed fitfully, waking a dozen times during the night to smoke\n cigarettes and to speculate fruitlessly on what he might find in the\n dome. He was sweating out a nightmare made hideous by monstrous bees\n that threatened him in buzzing alien voices when Xavier's polite\n monotone woke him for breakfast.\nFarrell was halfway down the grassy slope to the village when he\n realized that the\nMarco\nwas still under watch. Approaching close\n enough for recognition, he saw that the sentry this time was Tarvil,\n the Sadrian who had first approached the ship. The native's glance took\n in Farrell's shoulder-pack of testing tools and audiphone, brushed the\n hand-torch and blast gun at the Terran's belt, and slid away without\n trace of expression.\n\n\n \"I'm going into the dome,\" Farrell said. He tried to keep the\n uncertainty out of his voice, and felt a rasp of irritation when he\n failed. \"Is there a taboo against that?\"\n\n\n The native fell in beside him without speaking and they went down\n together, walking a careful ten feet apart, through dew-drenched grass\n flats that gleamed like fields of diamonds under the early morning sun.\n From the village, as they approached, straggled the inevitable exodus\n of adults and half-grown children, moving silently out to the fields.\n\n\n \"Weird beggars,\" Farrell said into his audiphone button. \"They don't\n even rub elbows at work. You'd think they were afraid of being\n contaminated.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice came tinnily in his ear. \"They won't seem so strange\n once we learn their motivations. I'm beginning to think this\n aloofness of theirs is a religious concomitant, Arthur, a hangover\n from slave-controls designed to prevent rebellion through isolation.\n Considering what they must have suffered under the Hymenops, it's a\n wonder they're even sane.\"\n\n\n \"I'll grant the religious origin,\" Farrell said. \"But I wouldn't risk a\n centicredit on their sanity. I think the lot of them are nuts.\"\n\n\n The village was not deserted, but so far as Farrell's coming was\n concerned, it might as well have been. The few women and children he\n saw on the streets ignored him—and Tarvil—completely.\n\n\n He met with only one sign of interest, when a naked boy perhaps six\n years old stared curiously and asked something in a childish treble of\n the woman accompanying him. The woman answered with a single sharp\n word and struck the child across the face, sending him sprawling.\n\n\n Farrell relayed the incident. \"She said '\nQuiet!\n' and slapped him\n down, Lee. They start their training early.\"\n\n\n \"Their sort of indifference couldn't be congenital,\" Stryker said. His\n tinny murmur took on a puzzled sound. \"But they've been free for four\n generations. It's hard to believe that any forcibly implanted control\n mechanism could remain in effect so long.\"\n\n\n A shadow blocked the sun, bringing a faint chill to Farrell when he\n looked up to see the great rounded hump of the dome looming over him.\n\n\n \"I'm going into the dome now,\" he said. \"It's like all the others—no\n openings except at ground level, where it's riddled with them.\"\n\n\n Tarvil did not accompany him inside. Farrell, looking back as he\n thumbed his hand-torch alight in the nearest entranceway, saw the\n native squatting on his heels and looking after him without a single\n trace of interest.\n\"I'm at ground level,\" Farrell said later, \"in what seems to have\n been a storage section. Empty now, with dust everywhere except in the\n corridors the natives use when they come in, mornings. No sign of\n Hymenops yet.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice turned worried. \"Look sharp for traps, Arthur. The\n place may be mined.\"\n\n\n The upper part of the dome, Farrell knew from previous experience,\n would have been given over in years past to Hymenop occupation, layer\n after rising layer of dormitories tiered like honeycombs to conserve\n space. He followed a spiral ramp downward to the level immediately\n below surface, and felt his first excitement of discovery when he found\n himself in the audience chambers that, until the\nMarco's\ncoming, had\n been the daily goal of the Sadrian natives.\n\n\n The level was entirely taken up with bare ten-foot cubicles, each\n cramped chamber dominated by a cryptic metal-and-crystal likeness\n of the Hymenop head set into the metal wall opposite its corridor\n entrance. From either side of a circular speaking-grill, the antennae\n projected into the room, rasplike and alert, above faceted crystal\n eyes that glowed faintly in the near-darkness. The craftsmanship was\n faultless, stylized after a fashion alien to Farrell's imagining and\n personifying with disturbing realism the soulless, arrogant efficiency\n of the Hymenop hive-mind. To Farrell, there was about each image a\n brooding air of hypnotic fixity.\n\n\n \"Something new in Hymenop experiments,\" he reported to Stryker. \"None\n of the other domes we found had anything like this. These things have\n some bearing on the condition of the natives, Lee—there's a path worn\n through the dust to every image, and I can see where the people knelt.\n I don't like it. I've got a hunch that whatever these damned idols were\n used for succeeded too well.\"\n\n\n \"They can't be idols,\" Stryker said. \"The Hymenops would have known how\n hard it is to displace anthropomorphism entirely from human worship.\n But I think you're right about the experiment's working too well. No\n ordinary compulsion would have stuck so long. Periodic hypnosis? Wait,\n Arthur, that's an angle I want to check with Gibson....\"\n\n\n He was back a moment later, wheezing with excitement.\n\n\n \"Gib thinks I'm on the right track—periodic hypnosis. The Hymenops\n must have assigned a particular chamber and image to each slave. The\n images are mechanicals, robot mesmerists designed to keep the natives'\n compulsion-to-isolation renewed. Post-hypnotic suggestion kept the\n poor devils coming back every morning, and their children with them,\n even after the Hymenops pulled out. They couldn't break away until\n the\nMarco's\nRingwave forced a shutdown of the dome's power plant\n and deactivated the images. Not that they're any better off now that\n they're free; they don't know how—\"\n\n\n Farrell never heard the rest of it. Something struck him sharply across\n the back of the head.\nWhen he regained consciousness, he was naked and weaponless and lost.\n The rustling of approach, bodiless and dreadful in darkness, panicked\n him completely and sent him fleeing through a sweating eternity that\n brought him finally to the dome's lowest level and the Hymenop power\n plant.\n\n\n He went hesitantly toward the shadowy bulk of the Ringwave cylinder,\n drawn as much now by its familiarity as driven by the terror behind\n him. At the base of the towering machine, he made out a control board\n totally unrecognizable in design, studded with dials and switches\n clearly intended for alien handling.\n\n\n The tinny whispering of Stryker's voice in the vaultlike quiet struck\n him with the frightening feeling that he had gone mad.\n\n\n He saw his equipment pack then, lying undamaged at the foot of the\n control board. Stryker's voice murmured from its audicom unit: \"We're\n in the dome, Arthur. Where are you? What level—\"\n\n\n Farrell caught up the audicom, swept by a sudden wild lift of hope.\n \"I'm at the bottom of the dome, in the Ringwave chamber. They took my\n gun and torch. For God's sake, hurry!\"\n\n\n The darkness gave up a furtive scuffling of sandaled feet, the tight\n breathing of many men. Someone made a whimpering sound, doglike and\n piteous; a Sadrian voice hissed sharply, \"\nQuiet!\n\"\n\n\n Stryker's metallic whisper said: \"We're tracking your carrier, Arthur.\n Use the tools they left you. They brought you there to repair the\n Ringwave, to give back the power that kept their images going. Keep\n busy!\"\n\n\n Farrell, only half understanding, took up his instrument case. His\n movement triggered a tense rustle in the darkness; the voice whimpered\n again, a tortured sound that rasped Farrell's nerves like a file on\n glass.\n\n\n \"\nGive me back my Voice. I am alone and afraid. I must have\n Counsel....\n\"\n\n\n Beneath the crying, Farrell felt the terror, incredibly voiced, that\n weighted the darkness, the horror implicit in stilled breathing, the\n swelling sense of outrage.\n\n\n There was a soft rush of bodies, a panting and struggling. The\n whimpering stopped.\n\n\n The instrument case slipped out of Farrell's hands. On the heels of its\n nerve-shattering crash against the metal floor came Stryker's voice,\n stronger as it came closer.\n\n\n \"Steady, Arthur. They'll kill you if you make a scene. We're coming,\n Gib and Xav and I. Don't lose your head!\"\n\n\n Farrell crouched back against the cold curve of the Ringwave cylinder,\n straining against flight with an effort that left him trembling\n uncontrollably. A spasm of incipient screaming seized his throat and\n he bit it back savagely, stifling a terror that could not be seen,\n grasped, fought with.\n\n\n He was giving way slowly when Xavier's inflectionless voice droned out\n of the darkness: \"Quiet. Your Counsel will be restored.\"\n\n\n There was a sudden flood of light, unbearable after long darkness.\n Farrell had a failing glimpse of Gibson, square face blocked with light\n and shadow from the actinic flare overhead, racing toward him through a\n silently dispersing throng of Sadrians.\n\n\n Then he passed out.\nHe was strapped to his couch in the chart room when he awoke. The\nMarco Four\nwas already in space; on the visiscreen, Farrell could\n see a dwindling crescent of Sadr III, and behind it, in the black pit\n of space, the fiery white eye of Deneb and the pyrotechnic glowing of\n Albireo's blue-and-yellow twins.\n\n\n \"We're headed out,\" he said, bewildered. \"What happened?\"\n\n\n Stryker came over and unstrapped him. Gibson, playing chess with Xavier\n across the chart-room plotting table, looked up briefly and went back\n to his gambit.\n\n\n \"We reset the Ringwave in the dome to phase with ours and lugged you\n out,\" Stryker explained genially. He was back in character again, his\n fat paunch quivering with the beginning of laughter. \"We're through\n here. The rest is up to Reorientation.\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him. \"You're giving up on Sadr III?\"\n\n\n \"We've done all we can. Those Sadrians need something that a\n preliminary expedition like ours can't give them. Right now they are\n willing victims of a rigid religious code that makes it impossible for\n any one of them to express his wants, hopes, ideals or misfortunes to\n another. Exchanging confidences, to them, is the ultimate sacrilege.\"\n\n\n \"Then they\nare\ncrazy. They'd have to be, with no more opportunity for\n emotional catharsis than that!\"\n\n\n \"They're not insane, they're—adapted. Those robot images you found\n are everything to this culture: arbiters, commercial agents, monitors\n and confessors all in one. They not only relay physical needs from one\n native to another; they listen to all problems and give solutions.\n They're\nCounselors\n, remember? Man's gregariousness stems largely from\n his need to unload his troubles on someone else. The Hymenops came up\n with an efficient substitute here, and the natives accepted it as the\n norm.\"\n\n\n Farrell winced with sudden understanding. \"No wonder the poor devils\n cracked up right and left. With their Ringwave dead, they might as well\n have been struck blind and dumb! They couldn't even get together among\n themselves to figure a way out.\"\n\n\n \"There you have it,\" Stryker said. \"They knew we were responsible for\n their catastrophe, but they couldn't bring themselves to ask us for\n help because we were human beings like themselves. So they went mad one\n by one and committed the ultimate blasphemy of shouting their misery in\n public, and their fellows had to kill them or countenance sacrilege.\n But they'll quiet down now. They should be easy enough to handle by the\n time the Reorientation lads arrive.\"\n\n\n He began to chuckle. \"We left their Counselors running, but we\n disconnected the hypnosis-renewal circuits. They'll get only what\n they need from now on, which is an outlet for shifting their personal\n burdens. And with the post-hypnotic compulsion gone, they'll turn to\n closer association with each other. Human gregariousness will reassert\n itself. After a couple of generations, the Reorientation boys can write\n them off as Terran Normal and move on to the next planetary madhouse\n we've dug up for them.\"\n\n\n Farrell said wonderingly, \"I never thought of the need to exchange\n confidences as being so important. But it is; everyone does it. You and\n I often talk over personal concerns, and Gib—\"\n\n\n He broke off to study the intent pair at the chessboard, comparing\n Gibson's calm selfsufficiency to the mechanical's bland competence.\n\n\n \"There's an exception for your theory, Lee. Iron Man Gibson never gave\n out with a confidence in his life!\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed. \"You may be right. How about it, Gib? Do you ever feel\n the need of a wailing wall?\"\n\n\n Gibson looked up briefly from his game, his square face unsurprised.\n\n\n \"Well, sure. Why not? I tell my troubles to Xavier.\"\n\n\n When they looked at each other blankly, he added, with the nearest\n approach to humor that either Farrell or Stryker had ever seen in him:\n \"It's a reciprocal arrangement. Xav confides his to me.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "How was Xavier essential in defeating the Hymenops?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_1", "options": ["Xavier could communicate with the Hymenops, and he was immune to their hypnotism.", "Xavier developed a fleet of sheets that thought for themselves and equipped them with servo-crews.", "Xavier is a kind of robot, and his species assisted the Terrans in fighting the Hymenops.", "He taught Gibson important strategies through their hours of playing chess together."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the Sadrians herd Farrell to the bottom of the dome?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_2", "options": ["To fix the Ringwave generator.", "They were going to try to kill him.", "So that he could be hypnotized by the Hymenop robot images.", "He was not supposed to be inside the dome."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were the Sadrians unable to leave Sadr III after the Hymenops' departure?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_3", "options": ["The Hymenops threatened them with complete annihilation if they attempted to leave.", "Their Ringwave generator had stopped working, so they were unable to use their ship to escape the planet.", "They began to worship the Hymenops, and the hive was the focal point of that. They did not want to leave for this reason.", "They relied upon the robot images for guidance in every facet of life and had been hypnotized into self-isolation."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why had the Sadrian population been dwindling in the time since the Marco Four crash-landed on Sadr III?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_4", "options": ["Because of the broken generator, they had lost the connection to their Hymenop counselors and had been driven mad by the inability to cope with their emotions.", "The Sadrians were a people best characterized by Farrell as \"batty.\" Because of this aspect of their nature, they began killing each other.", "Every time they entered the dome, they exited hours later with fewer numbers for unknown reasons. ", "Their work in the vast grass fields under the bright lights of Deneb and Albireo exhausted them and drove them to early deaths."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Stryker posit that humans are more amenable to the practice of Reorientation?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_5", "options": ["Humans are easily swayed by the power of suggestion, and therefore they can be properly Reoriented if necessary.", "Because of their flexibility and adaptability, humans are generally more willing to succumb to such a practice.", "Even if humans are re-programmed through enslavement, they retain enough of what makes them human through sheer stubbornness. ", "Many human colonies have been isolated from Terra for hundreds of years and have been easily re-converted into their previous form."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Farrell experience déjà vu?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_6", "options": ["He felt he had been inside the dome before at some point in his past.", "The Sadrians were so similar to humans that meeting them gave him the feeling of déjà vu.", "He entered a clearing and saw the same Ringwave generator that powered the Marco Four.", "The power of the Hymenops' hypnotic spell had begun to take effect."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the villagers capture and kill the screaming Sadrian that was running toward the Marco Four?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_7", "options": ["The villagers were preventing Tarvil from attacking and killing the crew of the Marco Four.", "It was considered sacrilegious to share one's emotions with anyone besides the Hymenop counselors due to their hypno-religious fixation on the robot images.", "The screaming Sadrian was attempting to leave Sadr III, which was strictly forbidden by Sadrian code.", "They were preventing him from revealing their secrets of the Hymenop robot images and did not want the crew to discover their hidden Ringwave generator."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Stryker certain that the Sadrians will become suitable for Reorientation?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_8", "options": ["After they were removed from the spell of hypnosis, Tarvil indicated his people's desire to return to Terra.", "Prior to leaving Sadr III, the crew of the Marco Four had fixed their Ringwave generator and disabled the hypnosis functionality. ", "They are a mostly passive group of people willing to do whatever they are told, as demonstrated by their behavior with the Hymenops.", "They were so pleased with Farrell's work fixing the generator that they struck a deal with Stryker agreeing to go through the Reorientation process."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happened to the Beta Pegasi natives?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_9", "options": ["Their numbers were so vast thanks to their religious fixation on fertility that it was too difficult to properly Reorient them.", "They developed cannibalistic appetites due to the hypnosis enacted upon them by the Hymenops.", "They retained a religious obsession with reproduction after the Hymenops departed their planet.", "They were forced to become mining slaves for the Hymenops and continued as hypnotized miners after the Hymenops left."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Gibson suggest they might be able to restore the Marco Four and leave Sadr III?", "question_unique_id": "50940_MSPBR87G_10", "options": ["They will have to enter the dome to search for the appropriate parts required to enter the ship. And only Farrell can go because Gibson has to stay behind to man the ship.", "If they can resonate the Sadrian's generator with their own on Marco Four, they should be able to leave. But they would have to repair the Sadrian generator first.", "By tapping into the Sadrian generator's phase-level interference, they should be able to warp into space.", "Farrell must convince Tarvil to lead him to their generator stored deep within the hive. From there, he can steal the generator, and they can use it to escape the planet."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/4/50940//50940-h//50940-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51353", "set_unique_id": "51353_7AV0FZNQ", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Dr. Kometevsky's Day", "year": 1951, "author": "Leiber, Fritz", "topic": "Short stories; Science fiction; PS", "article": "DR. KOMETEVSKY'S DAY\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBefore science, there was superstition. After\n \nscience, there will be ... what? The biggest,\n \nmost staggering\n, most final\nfact of them all!\n\"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next\n reshuffling of the planets.\"\n\n\n Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge\n Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title,\nThe Dance of the Planets\n. There was no mistaking the time of\n its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that\n particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste\n a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound\n a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle\n toward her husband Theodor.\n\n\n He tried to come to her rescue. \"Only predicted in the vaguest way. As\n I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence\n drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions\n every so often.\"\n\n\n \"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,\"\n Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.\n\n\n \"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is\n to end up in the orbit of Mercury,\" Theodor continued. \"Well, nothing\n at all like that has happened.\"\n\n\n \"But it's begun,\" Madge said with conviction. \"Phobos and Deimos have\n disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact.\"\n\n\n That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply\n vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes\n of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of\n rock—the merest cosmic flyspecks—yet they had carried away with them\n the security of a whole world.\nLooking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt\n that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the\n charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea,\n the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they\n pierced.\nPeople must have felt like this\n, she thought,\nwhen Aristarches first\n hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet\n was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they\n couldn't see that anything had changed. We can.\n\"You need something to cling to,\" she heard Madge say. \"Dr. Kometevsky\n was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this\n might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of\n the man.\"\n\n\n She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and\n anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much\n worse.\n\n\n \"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate\n explanations....\" Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that\n there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated,\n surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the\n Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance\n phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist.\n And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you\n admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen\n holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: \"Besides, if\n Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been\n picked up by now by 'scope or radar.\"\n\n\n \"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?\" Madge questioned.\n \"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but\n I think' I'm right.\"\n\n\n And of course she was.\n\n\n She swung the book under her arm. \"Whew, it's heavy,\" she observed,\n adding in slightly scandalized tones, \"Never been microfilmed.\" She\n smiled nervously and looked them up and down. \"Going to a party?\" she\n asked.\n\n\n Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket\n justified the question, but they shook their heads.\n\n\n \"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family,\" Celeste said,\n while Theodor explained, \"As it happens, we're bound on business\n connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute\n a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes.\n And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're\n going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical\n sleight-of-hand.\"\n\n\n Madge nodded. \"Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be\n off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting.\" She\n gave them a woeful grin. \"See you when the Earth jumps.\"\n\n\n Theodor said to Celeste, \"Come on, dear. We'll be late.\"\n\n\n But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. \"You know, Teddy,\" she said\n uncomfortably, \"all this reminds me of those old myths where too much\n good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much\n luck, our great-grandparents missing World III and getting the World\n Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that\n couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of\n things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and—\" she hesitated a\n bit—\"complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where\n am I to find it?\"\n\n\n \"In me,\" Theodor said promptly.\n\n\n \"In you?\" Celeste questioned, walking slowly. \"But you're just\n one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or\n Ivan.\"\n\n\n \"You angry with me about something?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a\n crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family,\" Theodor\n told her warmly. \"You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to\n be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from\n Heaven and all that?\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling.\"\n Celeste smiled. \"I guess none of us realized how much we've come to\n depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from\n under you.\"\n\n\n Theodor nodded emphatically. \"All the more reason to get a line on\n what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically\n far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory\n Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days\n there's been a remarkable similarity in the dreams of ESPs all over the\n planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting.\"\n\n\n Celeste looked up at him. \"So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's\n daughter?\"\n\n\n \"Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's,\" Theodor reminded her.\n\n\n \"No, just Frieda's,\" Celeste said bitterly. \"Of course you may be the\n father. One-third of a chance.\"\n\n\n Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. \"Anyway, Dotty will\n be there,\" he said. \"Probably asleep by now. All the ESPs have suddenly\n seemed to need more sleep.\"\n\n\n As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of\n the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted\n to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon.\n\n\n \"Did you know,\" Theodor said suddenly, \"that in\nGulliver's Travels\nDean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two\n moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately,\n too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and\n literature.\"\n\n\n \"Stop being eerie,\" Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, \"Those\n names Phobos and Deimos—they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?\"\n\n\n Theodor lost a step. \"Fear and Terror,\" he said unwillingly. \"Now\n don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of\n major and minor ancient gods had been taken—the bodies in the Solar\n System are named that way, of course—and these were about all that\n were available.\"\n\n\n It was true, but it didn't comfort him much.\nI am a God\n, Dotty was dreaming,\nand I want to be by myself and\n think. I and my god-friends like to keep some of our thoughts secret,\n but the other gods have forbidden us to.\nA little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and\n the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward\n thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straight-spined grace,\n she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she\n went out for the trapeze act.\nI and my god-friends sail off in our great round silver boats\n, Dotty\n went on dreaming.\nThe other gods are angry and scared. They are\n frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to\n hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us.\nAs Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver—a\n glitter of platinum against darkness—came in through the opposite\n door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes,\n got up from the round table.\n\n\n Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two\n other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too.\n A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows\n at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious,\n fateful temper of the moment.\n\n\n He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the\n table beside one of the microfilm projectors.\n\n\n \"I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan,\" he said.\n\n\n Frieda frowned anxiously. \"It's ten minutes since he phoned from the\n Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly a\n two minutes walk.\"\n\n\n Rosalind instantly started toward the outside door.\n\n\n \"I'll check,\" she explained. \"Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll\n hear if Dotty calls.\"\n\n\n Edmund threw up his hands. \"Very well, then,\" he said and walked over,\n switched on the picture and stared out moodily.\n\n\n Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors,\n and began silently checking through their material.\n\n\n Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes\n didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded\n each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and\n switched to audio.\n\n\n At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some\n irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening.\n\n\n \"The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital\n positions of Phobos and Deimos—that is, the volume of space they'd be\n occupying if their positions had remained normal—report finding masses\n of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving\n in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished\n moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass\n of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have\n ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of\n the Disintegration Hypothesis.\n\n\n \"However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked\n lessening of tension. The finding of the debris—solid, tangible\n stuff—seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in\n which some of us have been tempted to plunge it. One-hundredth of the\n moons has been found.\n\n\n \"The rest will also be!\"\n\n\n Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had\n switched off their projectors.\n\n\n \"Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum\n of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to\n the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in\n churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter\n processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding\n that instant preparations be made for—and I quote—'Earth's coming\n leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers\n to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange\n book so recently conjured from oblivion,\nThe Dance of the Planets\n.\n\n\n \"That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new\n reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships\n searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been\n issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics,\n Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so\n forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem\n written even before Dr. Kometevsky's book:\n\n\"This Earth is not the steadfast place\nWe landsmen build upon;\nFrom deep to deep she varies pace,\nAnd while she comes is gone.\nBeneath my feet I feel\nHer smooth bulk heave and dip;\nWith velvet plunge and soft upreel\nShe swings and steadies to her keel\nLike a gallant, gallant ship.\"\nWhile the TV voice intoned the poem, growing richer as emotion caught\n it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her\n touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her\n business-like poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak\n thrown back, smiling the half-smile with which he seemed to face even\n the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong\n show of decisiveness.\n\n\n In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet\n now they seemed to her a million miles away, figures seen through the\n wrong end of a telescope.\n\n\n Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and\n security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family,\n experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of\n silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to\n wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance—until outraged Nature\n decided to wipe them out?\n\n\n As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come\n slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been\n treading.\n\n\n Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. \"News! Lunar Observatory\n One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the\n Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and\n rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One\n feels duty-bound to release.\nJupiter's fourteen moons are no longer\n visible!\n\"\n\n\n The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have\n received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed\n not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible\n statement from penetrating.\n\n\n She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of\n which was smudged with dirt.\n\n\n Without looking at them, she said, \"Ivan left the Deep Space Bar\n twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back\n I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I\n had to tug to get it out—almost as if it had been cemented into the\n ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be\nin\nthe leather, as if\n it had lain for years in the grave?\"\n\n\n By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had\n seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was\n true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely\n heavy.\n\n\n \"And see what's written on it,\" she added.\n\n\n They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic\n letters were two words:\n\n\n \"Going down!\"\nThe other gods\n, Dotty dreamt,\nare combing the whole Universe for us.\n We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks are almost used up.\n There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver\n beacons to the hunters. So we decide to disguise them in the only way\n they can be disguised. It is our last chance.\nEdmund rapped the table to gain the family's attention. \"I'd say we've\n done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a\n thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally,\n is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions\n are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the\n evening—which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance.\"\n\n\n One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table.\n Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that\n had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms.\n\n\n \"I'll take over Ivan's notes,\" she heard Edmund say. \"They're mainly\n about the Deep Shaft.\"\n\n\n \"How far have they got with that?\" Frieda asked idly. \"Twenty-five\n miles?\"\n\n\n \"Nearer thirty, I believe,\" Edmund answered, \"and still going down.\"\n\n\n At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes\n went toward Ivan's briefcase.\nOur trick has succeeded\n, Dotty dreamt.\nThe other gods have passed\n our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the\n Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have\n found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more.\n They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to\n destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our\n camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that\n the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a clue. Hundreds of\n millions of years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours\n in a prison.\nTheodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. \"We\n need a break.\"\n\n\n Frieda agreed wearily. \"We've gone through everything.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Edmund said briskly. \"I think we've hit on several crucial\n points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of\n inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now\n and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?\"\n\n\n Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his\n cloak over a shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm going out for a drink,\" he informed them.\n\n\n After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda\n stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms\n tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside.\n\n\n Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the\n room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped.\nNot my child\n, she thought bitterly.\nFrieda's her mother, Rosalind\n her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends.\n A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world.\nBut then she straightened her shoulders and went on.\nRosalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and\n he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only\n knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy tree trunk to either\n side, no more.\n\n\n It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry.\n In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of\n his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move\n disembodied, like those in the fairy tale.\n\n\n When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she\n stopped altogether.\n\n\n A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought\n forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the\n furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures.\n\n\n She looked around her half-heartedly, suddenly realizing the futility\n of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high\n twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night.\n\n\n Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she was seized\n by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot—an ancestral terror\n from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs.\n\n\n A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind—the\n unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's\n briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space.\n She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted\n her first tug, like a rooted plant.\n\n\n She felt cowed by the mysterious night about her, and literally\n dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself\n and started forward.\n\n\n Something held her feet.\n\n\n They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and\n horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground.\n\n\n She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had\n the panicky feeling that the Earth had not only trapped but invaded\n her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her\n flesh; that the two were becoming one.\n\n\n And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep,\n waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her\n body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in\n the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the\n sense of the dark, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her.\n\n\n She thought,\nhe'd just have had time to scribble that note on his\n briefcase and toss it away.\nShe jerked off a glove, leaned out as\n far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into\n the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and\n covered her eyes.\n\n\n She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed\n with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles,\n black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision\n penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that\n these same sorts of things were coursing up through her.\nAnd still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the\n law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from\n black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone.\nHer tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She\n wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the\n stone.\n\n\n A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern\n with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt\n column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black\n basalt. And always faster.\n\n\n It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical\n eternal fires.\nAt first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he\n saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the\n blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the\n tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could\n hardly have been fifteen.\n\n\n The TV was saying, \"... in addition, a number of mysterious\n disappearances of high-rating individuals have been reported. These\n are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension,\n and impulse traveling—a result of the unusual stresses of the time.\n Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe,\n especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves to be 'gods'\n and in some way responsible for current events.\n\n\n \"It is thought—\"\n\n\n The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining\n casually, \"Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over\n for him.\" When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced,\n \"I'll have a drink with you gentlemen,\" and squeezed herself a glass of\n pomegranate juice.\n\n\n The monkeylike figure muttered, \"Scotch-and-soda,\" then turned toward\n Edmund and asked, \"And what is your reaction to all this, sir?\"\nTheodor recognized the shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel\n Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and\n reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now,\n for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile.\n\n\n Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV \"big news\" light blinked blue and\n the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor.\n\n\n \"... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other\n utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar\n Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies\n which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving\n outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already\n beyond the orbit of Saturn!\"\n\n\n The Colonel said, \"Ah!\"\n\n\n \"Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the\n Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice\n the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with\n further details as soon as possible.\"\n\n\n The Colonel said, \"Ah-ha!\"\n\n\n Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost\n amusing.\n\n\n \"Are you a Kometevskyite?\" Theodor asked him.\n\n\n The Colonel laughed. \"Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are\n fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, no.\"\n\n\n The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, \"The Divine\n Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.\"\n\n\n Then he lifted the scotch-and-soda in his clawlike hand and took a\n satisfying swallow.\n\n\n \"I knew it all along, of course,\" he went on musingly, \"but this last\n news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows\n military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a\n fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach—what would you do? Why,\n you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind\n that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then—\"\n\n\n \"You don't mean to imply—\" Theodor interrupted.\n\n\n The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically.\n\n\n \"Of course I do!\" the Colonel cut in sharply. \"It's a war between the\n forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side,\n the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and\n Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm\n proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight,\n what? And all by divine strategy!\"\n\n\n He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly.\n The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing.\nDotty suddenly began to turn and toss, and a look of terror came over\n her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively.\n\n\n The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words:\n \"They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No!\n Please, no!\"\n\n\n Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at\n the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an\n agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an\n expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She\n touched the child's hand.\n\n\n Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come\n awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in\n a smile.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" she said sleepily. \"I've been having such funny dreams.\" Then,\n after a pause, frowning, \"I really am a god, you know. It feels very\n queer.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\" Celeste prompted uneasily. \"Shall I call Frieda?\"\n\n\n The smile left Dotty's lips. \"Why do you act so nervous around me?\" she\n asked. \"Don't you love me, Mummy?\"\n\n\n Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her\n face broke into a radiant smile. \"Of course I do, darling. I love you\n very much.\"\n\n\n Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again.\n\n\n There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond the door. Celeste\n heard her name called. She stood up.\n\n\n \"I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others,\" she said. \"If\n you want me, dear, just call.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Mummy.\"\nEdmund rapped for attention. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced\n around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than\n even they felt. His expression was a study in suppressed excitement,\n but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too\n overpowering for a human being to bear.\n\n\n His voice was clipped, rapid. \"I think it's about time we stopped\n worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar\n System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the\n disappearances of Ivan end Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting\n out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There\n are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a\n mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to\n the same conclusion I have.\"\n\n\n The others nodded.\n\n\n \"First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as\n you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At\n approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have\n encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named\n the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest\n corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a\n quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the\n mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight\n curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth\n itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world\n would encounter the durasphere at the same depth.\n\n\n \"Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and\n particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting\n Phobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of\n Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in\n those two duraspheres' rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the\n two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such titanic\n velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind.\"\n\n\n It was deadly quiet in the committee room.\n\n\n \"Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially\n the baffling hint—from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's\n downward-pointing glove in the other—that they were both somehow drawn\n into the depths of the Earth.\n\n\n \"Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the\n following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike\n and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of\n mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They\n are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them\n anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage\n their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not\n penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected.\"\n\n\n Edmund waited. \"Do you see what I'm driving at?\" he asked hoarsely.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What pertinent information did Theodor learn at the Deep Space Bar?", "question_unique_id": "51353_7AV0FZNQ_1", "options": ["The Solar System's celestial bodies were disguised military ships, and they were settling into formation for a greater battle between the gods of good and the forces of evil.", "The bartender was only fifteen years old. ", "The monkey-like man with the shrunken, wrinkle-seamed face seated at the bar was fabled war hero Colonel Fortescue", "The gods had been hiding in on the Indian peninsula and had made their presence known in order to prepare for battle."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happened to Ivan?", "question_unique_id": "51353_7AV0FZNQ_2", "options": ["He was pulled through the surface of the planet towards the durasphere by some unknown force.", "He was captured by one of the forces of evil as they made their attack on the Solar System.", "An unseen patch of quicksand pulled him into the ground, leaving behind his briefcase caked in dirt and a note that said \"Going down!\"", "He dug his way to the center of the Earth after hearing Dotty's vision, watching the news at the Deep Space Bar, and putting all the pieces together."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What can the reader learn through Dotty's visions?", "question_unique_id": "51353_7AV0FZNQ_3", "options": ["Phobos and Deimos had disappeared to the same general vicinity as the fourteen moons of Jupiter, gearing up for battle with the forces of evil.", "The gods wanted privacy to think in peace, and the other gods felt threatened by that. So the gods hid in the Universe to avoid detection by the other gods as they hunted for them.", "As her ESP took an increasing hold over her, she became closer and closer to achieving her true calling as a god.", "Dr. Kometevsky's predictions were entirely inaccurate and had been used to manipulate vulnerable people."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Madge believe Dr. Kometevsky's predictions were unfolding?", "question_unique_id": "51353_7AV0FZNQ_4", "options": ["The planets had begun to rearrange their order. The vanishings of Phobos and Deimos were especially revealing in her opinion.", "The sudden disappearance of the two Martian moons revealed that the process of Disordered Space had begun.\n", "The explosions of Phobos and Deimos indicated that the Disintegration Hypothesis was, in fact, true.", "Celeste had informed her of Dotty's increasingly unusual visions in which she claimed to be a god. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What might Edmund be \"driving at\" by the end of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51353_7AV0FZNQ_5", "options": ["Dr. Kometevsky's vision had misled them about what would happen when the two moons disappeared, so they were not properly prepared for the battle to come.", "Ivan and Rosalind had been abducted in order to help navigate the Earth's durasphere into battle against an unknown enemy.", "They were all about to die in the ensuing chaos of the battle between the duraspheres formerly known as the moons and planets of the Solar System.", "The people with ESP were the disguised gods, and Earth would be the next planet to remove its outer shell to join the battle."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why doesn't feel Celeste feel completely safe and secure?", "question_unique_id": "51353_7AV0FZNQ_6", "options": ["She has three husbands and those husbands have three wives.", "After Ivan's and Rosalind's disappearances, she is worried that she will be next.", "Dotty's visions have begun to worry her about the fate of the planet.", "She is unnerved by Madge's passionate belief that Dr. Kometevsky's predictions are coming true."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were news reports initially positive regarding the disappearance of Phobos and Deimos?", "question_unique_id": "51353_7AV0FZNQ_7", "options": ["They felt the evidence showed that the Solar System was simply undergoing a natural reordering process.", "The disappearance of the two moons seemed to indicate that Earth might be safe for now.", "The two moons had left behind pieces that seemed to indicate the rest could be recovered.", "News teams were excited about the possibility of proof of the Disintegration Hypothesis."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was unusual about Rosalind's journey through Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51353_7AV0FZNQ_8", "options": ["It ended with her being placed firmly on the surface of the durasphere.", "Although she was filled with rocks, dirt, and other terrestrial material, she could still breathe.", "She had enough time to leave behind a white glove pointing downward to indicate where she had gone as well as a short note explaining her departure.", "Dotty had foreseen her departure in this exact fashion in one of her earlier ESP visions."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/5/51353//51353-h//51353-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "20034", "set_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "Insiders and Way Insiders", "year": "1999", "author": "David Edelstein", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Insiders and Way Insiders \n\n                                            Being John Malkovich                 is everything I've ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It's close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The action is surreal, the emotions are violently real. The screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, is a genius at finding slapstick correlatives for people's nebulous sense--or non-sense--of themselves. It's possible that no one has ever come up with a more absurdly perfect metaphor for our longing to be someone--anyone--other than who we are than a portal into the head of John Malkovich. \n\n         Kaufman's protagonist, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), is a soulfully unkempt puppeteer whose wildly ambitious work is ignored while his gimmicky rivals thrive. When he reports for a drudge job as a file clerk, the office is between the seventh and eighth floors of a Manhattan skyscraper--it's the seven-and-a-halfth floor, where people walk stooped and make feeble jokes about the \"low overhead.\" That low ceiling--a constant reminder of how Craig has been stunted--is the first sign of the movie's comic astuteness, of its knack for devising sight gags with a sting. When a sleek and derisive colleague named Maxine (Catherine Keener) rebuffs his advances and mocks his art, Craig argues passionately on behalf of his puppets: He says that everyone longs to be inside someone else's head. On cue, he discovers a passageway behind a file cabinet that whooshes him into the head of Malkovich and then disgorges him, after 20 minutes, into a ditch beside the New Jersey Turnpike. The poor sap can't keep his secret. He tells the girl, who is soon selling tickets to the Malkovich experience. The biggest Malkovich addict turns out to be Craig's nerdily frazzled wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), who sums up the thrill for the rest of the characters. \"Being inside did something to me,\" she says. \"I knew who I was.\" \n\n         The director, Spike Jonze (he played the skinny redneck in Three Kings ), comes to Being                 John Malkovich from music videos, but the movie isn't a digitized bag of tricks like Fight \n\n            Club . Jonze is never in your face: His instincts must have told him that hyping gags this outlandish would turn the picture into camp. He keeps the action slightly remote and the jokes deadpan, and the upshot is that the audience almost never stops giggling. The first hour and change has a magical fluidity. The scenes between Cusack and Keener boast the best emasculating banter since Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy , and when Lotte and Maxine begin to communicate erotically through Malkovich's body, the film becomes a transsexual (and transcendental) screwball comedy. The script has a free-association quality that turns audiences on--they love not knowing where they're going. I wonder if Kaufman, when he started writing, even knew that the protagonist would stumble on that portal, or what he'd find when he went through. (The head of John Malkovich??!!??) \n\n         That the vessel is Malkovich might be the movie's most brilliantly unsettling touch, since the actor--although undeniably great--is one of our most distant and weirdly insular. You can understand the masses fantasizing about being Bruce Willis or being Tom Hanks, but being John Malkovich? What's lodged under that thick brow is anybody's guess. Evidently quite the heterosexual, he still courts sexual ambiguity: He speaks in querulous tones and bats the most insolently feminine lashes this side of Bugs Bunny. Weird or not, though, he's a celebrity: He exists. And Malkovich makes a wonderful Malkovich. The actor sends up his own preening aloofness, and he has never been more emotionally exposed than when it dawns on him that his smug façade has been literally penetrated. When he attempts to fathom what's happening to him, Jonze and Kaufman deliver a coup de cinema --a vision of hell that isn't, à la Sartre, other people, but oneself ad infinitum. \n\n         B eing John Malkovich should have ended right there, since the filmmakers never top that hysterical sequence. Kaufman seems to have written himself into a corner. In the last half-hour he ties things up too neatly and the craziness--and some of the helium--goes out of the movie. Why do crazy comedies need closure? As Cusack's character becomes more twisted, he loses his stature (and the audience's good will), and the climax has too many dissonances. Kaufman and Jonze end up sentimentalizing the longing for a collective consciousness in a way I found creepy: Do they mean to be retelling Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the body-snatchers' point of view? (If so, the film is even darker than I think it is.) \n\n         The last part diminishes the movie, but not enough to wreck it: It's still an amazing piece of work. What other madcap farce would dare to have a score--it's by the superb Carter Burwell--so plangent and melancholy? Or to cast that sunny goddess Cameron Diaz as a nerd? The actress retains her essential sweetness, but the transformation is otherwise remarkable: Her Lotte is such a mouth breather that she nearly drools, and Diaz manages to look estranged from that lovely body. Even more dazzling is Keener, an actress who has lately been stuck playing nice, sensible women but who here is all silken curves and withering putdowns--she greets Craig's declaration of love with a pitying sigh that brings the house down. Keener's Maxine is so glamorously, tantalizingly self-contained that you can almost believe she never dreams of being John Malkovich. \n\n         T                   he Insider                 is a big, overlong, and rather unwieldy piece of storytelling, but the story it has to tell is so vital that it cuts through all the dramaturgical muddiness. It's a terrific muckraking melodrama--it will get people fuming. It's about big-business mendacity and the lawyers who do its bidding, and about what happens to corporate whistle-blowers in a society where the mainstream media are also in the hands of corporations. The movie tells two interlocking stories: The first is about Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), former vice president for research and development at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, who is persuaded to go public with revelations about how cigarette manufacturers manipulate the chemicals in their product for maximum addictiveness. (Despite their testimonies in Congress, Wigand says, tobacco executives regard cigarettes as \"a nicotine delivery system.\") The second story concerns the 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), the man who persuaded Wigand to come forward. Bergman watches in horror as his network, CBS, backs away from the story under pressure from the corporate wing--which fears, at a time when CBS is on the block, the impact of a major lawsuit on its value. (Oddly unmentioned in the film is that then-owner Lawrence Tisch had his own tobacco company, Lorillard, and had separate dealings with Brown & Williamson.) \n\n         We're used to hearing tales of witnesses, informants, or whistle-blowers who are urged to come forward and then, after they do, are \"hung out to dry\"--i.e., left unprotected by the agents who approached and exploited them. What gives this version its kick--and what has made it fodder for columnists for almost six months--is that the people who betray the whistle-blower are among the most famous and powerful journalists in America: Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt, the co-anchor and the executive producer of 60 Minutes . If they could be pressured to \"spike\" a segment that they knew to be true, the film implicitly asks, how much chance do others have of breaking stories about corporate wrongdoing? And what about news personnel with a financial stake in their companies? Even journalists and editors known for their integrity tend to look the other way at their own companies' malfeasances when they hear words like \"stock options\" and \"IPO.\" \n\n         But the movie's emotional hook isn't the CBS infighting or Bergman's quest to get the story. It's the fate of Wigand, played by Crowe as a prickly, blockish fellow with no social skills--an edgy wonk. Already isolated by temperament, he seems more vulnerable than a conventionally nice martyr. Wigand appears to have no friends, and his wife (a nearly unrecognizable Diane Venora), a Southern debutante type who clearly didn't bargain for a life of social and financial ostracization, is on the verge of bailing out on him even before the bullets start appearing in the family's mailbox and the death threats on Wigand's computer. You can't always tell what Crowe is doing--his opacity is sometimes a little too opaque. What's plain, though, is that Wigand doesn't want to have this role, didn't ask for it, and has no support system to get him through it. He's entirely dependent on Bergman, with whom he mostly communicates by cell phone and fax. \n\n         The director, Michael Mann, has never tried to tell a story as complex (or nonviolent) as The Insider , and he and his co-screenwriter, Eric Roth, don't shape their narrative very satisfyingly. Wigand and Bergman are both \"insiders,\" and both, ultimately, whistle-blowers. (It was Bergman's spilling his guts to the New York Times that finally shamed CBS into running the Wigand interview.) But although the 60 Minutes producer is played by the star (Pacino grandstands, but not to the point of distraction), Bergman's story doesn't have the same primal force. Wigand's dark night of the soul is in a hotel, indicted, financially ruined, threatened with death, minus his wife and daughters; Bergman's is in an expensive-looking beach house with his warmly supportive spouse (Lindsay Crouse). \n\n         The filmmakers seem to be bending over backward--even now--to protect Wigand from appearing to have disclosed what he disclosed too early. I admire their consideration for their subject, but in its wake come all kinds of narrative fuzziness. The movie isn't clear on where the secret report that kicked off Bergman's interest in tobacco came from, or who in the FDA thought it was a good idea to turn him onto Wigand. It's left vague just when Bergman decided that Wigand was important not for what he might say about that report but about the industry as a whole. Mann must have had legal constraints that rivaled those at 60 Minutes . The FBI, which responds to a death threat, carries off Wigand's computer while he sputters that it contains all his important data. The implication is that the local FBI office is in cahoots with Brown & Williamson, but we hear no more about it; we never even know if Wigand got his computer back. And there's no dramatic payoff with the chillingly satanic tobacco company president (Michael Gambon) whose threats first make Wigand think about going public. Given how many lawyers must have vetted this thing, it's probably an achievement that Mann got as much as he did on the screen. \n\n         Should Mike Wallace be pissed off? Depends what really happened. In a delicious turn, Christopher Plummer makes the co-anchor less a journalist than a pompous prima donna, but he also gives him a bullying force and real charisma. It's not Wallace's initial caving-in to the network--\"I'm with Don on this,\" he tells Bergman--that does him the most damage. It's the scene in a posh restaurant in which Wallace regards the Wigands' paroxysms of fear over the coming 60 Minutes interview with aristocratic contempt. He says, \"Who are these people?\"--which opens the door for Bergman's too-pat rebuke: \"Ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances, Mike. What do you expect? Grace and consistency?\" It's Wallace's lack of interest in Wigand's story--the movie's most powerful--that damns him in the audience's eyes. \n\n                         The Insider doesn't note a couple of key, maybe hopeful ironies. The first is that CBS's \"spiking\" of the interview turned Wigand into an even bigger story than he would have been otherwise. And in the \"Where are they now?\" titles at the end, the filmmakers omit the most important detail of Bergman's and Wigand's current lives: that they're being played by Al Pacino and Russell Crowe in a major Hollywood movie, and that they're big news again. \n\n         Is there a less savory subgenre than the hardcore forensics thriller? A corpse is discovered in a grotesque state of mutilation, then the scene shifts to an autopsy room where skulls are popped off and innards held up for inspection. A short time later, detectives pore over glossies of fatal wounds. Yummy. In                    The Bone Collector                , the wily serial killer leaves clues for the brainy forensics expert, played by Denzel Washington--clues that amount to a forensics jigsaw puzzle. If Washington solves the puzzle fast enough, he has a shot at saving the latest manacled and tortured victim; if not, he has to scour the gore-drenched death scene for clues to the next murder. Yummy yummy. One fact quickly becomes apparent: \"The perp knows forensics,\" murmurs Washington. Yummy yummy yummy. \n\n         The rub is that Washington is a quadriplegic. He can't \"walk the grid\"--he needs a pair of eyes as sensitive as his but attached to a good pair of legs. As luck would have it, they're attached to a very good pair of legs and a great pair of breasts. Angelina Jolie plays the cop who discovers a body and snaps some photos that convince Washington she has a \"gift\" for forensics. He dispatches his new protégé to grisly crime scenes, purring into her headphones and demanding to know what she sees. Better than phone sex! He says, \"I want to know what you feel in the deepest recesses of your senses,\" and \"Follow the instincts you were born with. ... Process the body.\" I was thinking that she could process my body anytime, but Jolie rises above such adolescent spasms. Well, almost. She's a thoughtful actress, but she wasn't born to play a beat cop. Those tire-tread lips are model lips; those exquisitely chiseled cheekbones, model cheekbones. Washington scans her file on his fancy bedside computer: Guess what? She was a teen-age model! Clever save! \n\n                         The Bone Collector is less rancid than the last big serial-killer-fetishist picture, Copycat (1995), and it's expertly shot and edited. Phillip Noyce, the director, and Dean Semler, the cinematographer, cook up some eerily muzzy images inside the brackish tunnels and abandoned warehouses where the fiend does his/her demented surgery. But the film is still a piece of exploitive schlock. A mediocre mystery, too: It never approaches the ingenuity of Thomas Harris, still the maestro of forensic porn. For some reason, Noyce telegraphs the identity of the killer halfway through (does he mean to? Or does the hammy framing give it away by accident?), but it's left to the laughably garish climax for the wacko to spell out his/her arbitrary motive. (The killer's lines are on the level of: \"You think I'm m-m-mad, don't you?\") The only aspect of The Bone Collector that can't be derided is Washington. The option of walking through the part clearly not available to him, he doesn't sleep through it either: Every muscle in this man's ruined body seems to strain against his fate while the wheels in his brain grind fiercely. He deserves a smarter psycho--a smarter movie, too.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does the author describe The Bone Collector as \"yummy\"?", "question_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450_1", "options": ["The narrative twists and turns are so thrilling and captivating they could only be described as \"yummy.\"", "The adjective refers to Denzel Washington's gripping performance.", "It is an ironic assessment reflecting the film's graphic violence.", "Because it features Angelina Jolie, an actress about whose physical appearance he frequently gushes over."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the third act of Being John Malkovich fail according to the author?", "question_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450_2", "options": ["Cusack's portrayal of Craig Schwartz is too bombastic and twisted and starts to become unbelievable.", "Spike Jonze invokes Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which feels a bit too on-the-nose for the reviewer.", "The reviewer thinks Kaufman goes too far when John Malkovich descends into his own mind.", "He tries to bring closure to an insane narrative that does not require one."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was John Malkovich a brilliant choice for the subject of Kaufman's movie?", "question_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450_3", "options": ["He typically plays emotionally restrained characters, so his vulnerability in this film is refreshing.", "Because of his tendency to be sexually ambiguous, despite the actor's own homosexuality.", "He is a brilliant actor with long eyelashes reminiscent of Bugs Bunny.", "He is not an actor moviegoers typically envy or dream about, and he tends to stay out of the spotlight."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the author think people will be angry about The Insider?", "question_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450_4", "options": ["Because of its revelation that those in the corporate media can be bought for a few simple stock options.", "Because of its scandalous narrative involving corruption in the corporate world and the mainstream media.", "Because of the portrayal of respected journalist Mike Wallace as a prima donna and a man susceptible to the powers of corruption.", "Because of the sloppy storytelling techniques employed by director Michael Mann."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is The Bone Collector's saving grace?", "question_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450_5", "options": ["Phillip Noyce carefully oversaw the editing of the film to powerful effect.", "Angelina Jolie's turn as a former model turned cop with a \"gift\" for forensics.", "The cinematography by Dean Semler creates the proper eerie tone for a mystery film with its brackish tunnels, abandoned warehouses, and spooky images.", "Denzel Washington's performance as a quadriplegic forensic expert."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the reviewer think Mann had his hands tied legally?", "question_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450_6", "options": ["Michael Mann focuses heavily on Wigand's disclosure and portrays him as a sympathetic character, but Russel Crowe's portrayal is monotone and ignores the multiple layers of Wigand's personality.", "He was not allowed to explore the entirety of Mike Wallace's involvement, and therefore Christopher Plummer's character was left with little to do in the film.", "There are many missed opportunities to tidy up the narrative including answering questions about when Pacino's character decided Crowe's Wigand was essential to a conversation about the tobacco industry.", "He omitted key details regarding the FBI's involvement in the handling of information received by Wigand related to Brown & Williamson."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the central anxiety of Being John Malkovich?", "question_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450_7", "options": ["An examination of the desire to be someone else.", "The loneliness of a life lived in impotence, self-loathing, and envy.", "The stress of working in an office with literal \"low overhead\" (as in the ceiling is so low people have to bend when they walk around).", "The horror of plunging into the mind of famed actor John Malkovich."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is it strange that The Insider doesn't bring up Lawrence Tisch?", "question_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450_8", "options": ["During his company's own whistleblower trial, Tisch had testified before Congress that tobacco executives regard cigarettes as \"a nicotine delivery system.\"", "Tisch was the owner of a tobacco company, Lorilland, which was also the subject of a separate film highlighting corporate and mainstream media corruption.", "Tisch was the owner of CBS who also owned a tobacco company that conducted business with the tobacco company featured in the film.", "Tisch owned CBS, so the film's portrayal of CBS' involvement in the whistleblower case should be taken with a grain of salt."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How is the reviewer's discussion of Cameron Diaz and Angelina Jolie in their separate roles similar?", "question_unique_id": "20034_AQL26450_9", "options": ["He only analyzes their characters' actions specifically in relation to the male lead's actions.", "He discusses sex scenes from both films involving the two actresses.", "He objectifies their bodies before praising their acting skills.", "He believes both actresses do incredible work making their characters believable."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20042", "set_unique_id": "20042_4BVPVJBD", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "Dead Head", "year": "1996", "author": "Robert Wright", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Dead Head \n\n         Back when I was a journalist--before I became a provider of digital content--I thought life would always be simple: I would write articles, and people would pay to read them. But then I heard about the impending death of intellectual property, a scenario painted by cyberfuturists John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson. As all media move online, they say, content will be so freely available that getting paid to produce it will be hard, if not impossible. At first, I dismissed this as garden-variety, breathless overextrapolation from digerati social theorists. But even as I scoffed, the Barlow-Dyson scenario climbed steadily toward the rank of conventional wisdom. \n\n         Barlow and Dyson do have a solution. In the future people like me, having cultivated a following by providing free content on the Web, will charge our devotees for services that are hard to replicate en masse. We will answer individual questions online, say, or go around giving speeches, or spew out insights at private seminars, or (this one is actually my idea) have sex with young readers. The key, writes Barlow, will be not content but \"performance.\" Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, offers this analogy: The Dead let people tape concerts, and the tapes then led more people to pay for the concerts. \n\n         The seminal version of the Barlow-Dyson thesis is Barlow's 10,000-word 1994 essay in Wired . It is with some trepidation that I challenge the logic of this argument. Barlow is a noted visionary, and he is famously derisive of people less insightful than himself (a group which, in his opinion, includes roughly everyone). He says, for example, that the ability of courts to deal correctly with cyberissues depends on the \"depth of the presiding judge's clue-impairment.\" Well, at the risk of joining Barlow's long roster of the clue-impaired, here goes. \n\n         Barlow's argument begins with a cosmic premise: \"Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.\" This is wrong on two counts. First, all information does take physical form. Whether digital or analog, whether in ink or sound waves or synaptic firings or electrons, information always resides in patterns of matter or energy (which, as Einstein noted, are interchangeable manifestations of the physical world). \n\n         To be sure, the significance of information is independent of its particular physical incarnation. So is its value. You download this article from Slate's servers and copy it onto your own hard disk, and it's still worth--well, nothing, but that's a . Suppose it were a Madonna video: You'd get just as much enjoyment out of it regardless of which particular bunch of electrons embodied it. \n\n          \n\n            B >ut this independence of meaning and value from physical incarnation is nothing new. It is as old as Sumerian tablets, to say nothing of the Gutenberg press. Indeed, the whole reason intellectual-property law exists is that people can acquire your information without acquiring the particular physical version of it that you created. Thus Barlow's belief that \"property law of all sorts\" has always \"found definition\" on the \"physical plane\" signals a distressing confusion on his part. The one sense in which it's true that information is \"detached\" from the \"physical plane\"--the fact that information's value transcends its physical incarnation--not only fails to qualify as an original insight, and not only fails to make intellectual-property rights obsolete; it's the very insight that led to intellectual-property rights in the first place! Barlow announces from the mountaintop: \"It's fairly paradigm warping to look at information through fresh eyes--to see how very little it is like pig iron or pork bellies.\" Maybe so, but it's hard to say for sure, since the people who really did take that fresh look have been dead for centuries. \n\n         If you somehow forced Barlow to articulate his thesis without the wacky metaphysics, he'd probably say something like this: The cost of copying and distributing information is plummeting--for many purposes, even approaching zero. Millions of people can now do it right at their desks. So in principle, content can multiply like fruit flies. Why should anyone buy an article when a copy can be had for nothing? \n\n         Answer: Because it can't. The total cost of acquiring a \"free\" copy includes more than just the copying-and-transmitting costs. There's 1) the cost--in time and/or money--of finding someone who already has a copy, and will give it to you for free or for cheap; 2) the risk of getting caught stealing intellectual property; 3) any premiums you pay to others for incurring such risks (as when you get copies from bootleggers); and 4) informal punishments such as being labeled a cheat or a cheapskate. The size of this last cost will depend on how norms in this area evolve. \n\n         Even in the distant future, the total cost of cheating on the system, thus figured, will almost never be zero. Yes, it will be way, way closer to zero than it used to be. But the Barlow-Dyson scenario still is wrong. Why? Because whether people cheat doesn't depend on the absolute cost of cheating. It depends on the cost of cheating compared with the cost of not cheating. And the cost of getting data legally will plummet roughly as fast as the cost of getting it illegally--maybe faster.              \n\n         In their writings, Barlow and Dyson make clear they're aware of this fact. But they seems unaware of its fatal impact on their larger thesis. How could cybersages have such a blind spot? One theory: Because they're cyber sages. You have to be a career paleohack like me, getting paid for putting ink on paper, to appreciate how much of the cost of legally acquiring bits of information goes into the ink and paper and allied anachronisms, like shipping, warehousing, and displaying the inky paper. I wrote a book that costs $14 in paperback. For each copy sold, I get $1. The day may well come, as Barlow and Dyson seem to believe, when book publishers as we know them will disappear. People will download books from Web sites and either print them out on new, cool printers or read them on superlight wireless computers. But if so, it will then cost you only $1--oh hell, make it $1.25--to get a copy of my book legally from my Web site. \n\n         Now imagine being at my Web site, reading my promotional materials, and deciding you'd like to read the book. (Thank you.) A single keystroke will give you the book, drain your bank account of five shiny quarters, and leave you feeling like an honest, upstanding citizen. Do you think you'll choose, instead, to call a few friends in hopes of scoring an illegal copy? And don't imagine that you can just traipse on over to the \"black-market book store\" section of the Web and find a hot copy of my book. As in the regular world, the easier it is for Joe Consumer to track down an illegal distributor, the easier it is for cops to do the same. Black marketeers will have to charge enough to make up for this risk, making it hard to undersell my $1.25 by much. And there are , too, why the cost of cheating will be nontrivial. \n\n          \n\n            M >eanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, there's another reason for the cost of legal copies to drop. Many journalists will reach a much larger audience on the Web than they do now. The \"magazine\" model of bringing information to the attention of readers is stunningly inefficient. I hope it's not egotistical of me to think that when I write an article for, say, the New                 Republic , I am not reaching nearly everyone who might have an interest in it. Granted, the Web is not yet a picture of efficiency itself. Search engines, for example, are in the reptilian phase of their evolution. But most observers--certainly the Barlows of the world--expect radical improvement. (I'm not saying all journalists will see their audiences grow. The likely trend, when you , will be for many obscure and semiobscure journalists to see their audiences grow, while the few rich and famous journalists will see their audiences shrink. Cool.) \n\n         One much-discussed cybertrend is especially relevant here: the scenario in which various data brokers offer a \"Daily Me,\" a batch of articles tailored to your tastes, cheaply gleaned from all over the Web. When this happens, guys like me will be living the life of Riley. We will wake up at noon, stumble over to the keyboard in our pajamas, hammer out 1,000 words, and then--without talking to a single bothersome editor--make our work available to all data brokers. Likely fans of my article will be shown, say, the first couple of paragraphs. If they want to read more, they deposit a quarter. Will you try to steal a copy instead? Do you steal Tootsie pops at checkout counters? The broker and the electronic cash service will pocket a dime of that. I take my 15 cents and head for the liquor store. \n\n         Of course, this \"disaggregation of content\" may be ruinous for magazines like Slate. But consider the upside. Not only will the efficiency of the system permit rock-bottom pricing that discourages cheating, but the fluidity of content will disrupt channels of potential cheating. If you subscribe to a regular, old-fashioned online magazine, it's easy to split the cost of a subscription with a few friends and furtively make copies. (You wretched scum.) But if you subscribe to the \"Daily Me,\" this arrangement makes no sense, because every Me is different. Sure, you may e-mail a friend the occasional article from your \"Me.\" (You wretched scum.) And, in general, this sort of \"leakage\" will be higher than in pre-Web days. But it would have to reach massive proportions to negate the overall gains in efficiency that will keep people like me in business. \n\n         This argument, like all arguments about the future, is speculative. It may even be wrong. But it is consistent with the history of the world. The last half-millennium has seen 1) data getting cheaper and easier to copy; and 2) data-creation occupying a larger and larger fraction of all economic activity. Thus far, in other words, as the realm of information has gotten more lubricated, it has become easier , not harder, to make a living by generating information. Cyberspace is essentially a quantum leap in lubrication. \n\n         Barlow's insistence that intellectual property will soon be worthless is especially puzzling since he is one of the biggest troubadours of the Third Wave information economy. Sometimes he seem to think it's possible for a sector of a market economy to get bigger and bigger even while the connection between work and reward in that sector breaks down. He writes: \"Humanity now seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility or pleasure others may find in their works.\" Far out, man.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does the author see a potential benefit from selling digital books on a website?", "question_unique_id": "20042_4BVPVJBD_1", "options": ["Utilizing new technologies will make their own writing more attractive to a new generation of readers.", "The profit margins would be infinitely higher thanks to lower production costs of digital materials.", "The website has the potential to reach even larger audiences for famous and successful journalists.", "The net profit would be the same (and potentially higher) compared with paperback copies, and it would be difficult to sell on the black market."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why would a \"Daily Me\" subscription potentially be beneficial to content creators?", "question_unique_id": "20042_4BVPVJBD_2", "options": ["This subscription method would create a consistent network of supporters so writers would have a reliable income stream.", "It would be easier to disseminate the material by e-mailing it to a large group of friends.", "Due to its low production cost, it would disincentivize cheaters and potentially earn more for the content creator.", "It would make life a lot more laid back for data brokers and those who make their living online."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author disagree with Barlow's notion that in the future no one will buy writing because everything will be able to be had for free?", "question_unique_id": "20042_4BVPVJBD_3", "options": ["The author makes the argument that nothing is free including the cost of stealing.", "Content creators will pursue innovations such as the \"Daily Me\" to ensure a profit from their work.", "The author delineates specific ways in which writers may profit from the digitization of journalism.", "The author believes that intellectual property rights are strong enough to protect the writer's assets even in the digital age."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author challenge Barlow's beliefs about property laws?", "question_unique_id": "20042_4BVPVJBD_4", "options": ["Because the people who first created the parameters of property laws are long dead and gone.", "The author believes that information is not necessarily physical and that value is not dependent upon a physical incarnation anyway.", "The author believes that value is dependent upon a particular physical incarnation and cannot exist without it.", "The author believes information is always physical, and the fact that value is not dependent upon physical manifestation anyway only refutes Barlow's point."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the author argue that people cheat?", "question_unique_id": "20042_4BVPVJBD_5", "options": ["Because they are gluttons for punishment.", "Because they are risk-takers and get a thrill from the enterprise.", "Because they want to claim intellectual property as their own.", "Because it saves money to do so."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Barlow argue that intellectual property will soon become a thing of the past?", "question_unique_id": "20042_4BVPVJBD_6", "options": ["As original material becomes easier to copy, so does its dissemination amongst the masses.", "Once information becomes digital, it loses its significance to the majority of consumers.", "With the advent of digitization, intellectual property law loses its grounding in physical reality. This will make it more difficult to enforce.", "Once information becomes digital, the creator of that content automatically loses the rights to that material."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who would the shift to digital journalism perhaps benefit the most?", "question_unique_id": "20042_4BVPVJBD_7", "options": ["Lesser-known journalists with small audiences.", "Rich and famous journalists with large audiences.", "The developers of search engines.", "The data brokers that distribute \"Daily Me\" updates."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why would the \"disaggregation of content\" hurt magazines?", "question_unique_id": "20042_4BVPVJBD_8", "options": ["It would break the content down into individual articles and writeres would profit based on their own output.", "It would result in fewer subscribers in the long run.", "It would have to contend with brokerage prices which could account for almost 90% of fees.", "It would result in rock-bottom pricing that would create lower profit margins for the magazines."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20045", "set_unique_id": "20045_FRSHZ8NJ", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "Speech and Spillover", "year": "1996", "author": "Eugene Volokh", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Speech and Spillover \n\n                         The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest.              \n\n                         By Eugene Volokh              \n\n                         (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25)              \n\n         One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character. \n\n         The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n         But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted. \n\n         This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n         The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n         \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n         \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\" \n\n         \"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n         \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n         \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n         \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n         Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards. \n\n         And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression. \n\n         The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children? \n\n         The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults. \n\n         But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children. \n\n          \n\n            Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes. \n\n         Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n         Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children. \n\n          \n\n            Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted. \n\n         On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed. \n\n         The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n         There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty. \n\n         Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n         The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove. \n\n         Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is \"spillover\" as it relates to free-speech law?", "question_unique_id": "20045_FRSHZ8NJ_1", "options": ["There are psychological and philosophical repercussions for participating in free speech that is harmful to the character of another individual or entity.", "Some speech is very harmful to others and therefore can be restricted.", "There is no right to broadcast falsehoods because such lies may cause harm to a person's character or be used to sell products.", "When a law is enacted in an effort to protect one party, the free speech of another might be adversely affected."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the author believe the CDA will ultimately be struck down by the Supreme Court?", "question_unique_id": "20045_FRSHZ8NJ_2", "options": ["The technological alternatives to the law offer significant benefits, even though the burden of the law is admittedly small.", "It doesn't have many more benefits than content blocking technology and creates too much spillover on the free speech of adults.", "There is too much pressure from free speech advocates.", "They will rule in favor of protecting the children from obscene material over the rights of adults to view such material."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the result of Sable and the Denver Consortium?", "question_unique_id": "20045_FRSHZ8NJ_3", "options": ["They both protected indecent speech and made specific recommendations for alternatives to banning Internet porn.", "The court would not allow laws that venture too far into restricting free speech for adults in the name of protecting children unless there were no other options for protecting them.", "They would not tolerate any unnecessary spillover onto adults even in the scenario that the burden on children was impossible to correct.", "The government recommended a less restrictive alternative in the form of computer software that blocks specific sites."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is it difficult to shield children from sexually explicit materials without simultaneously denying adults the ability to view them?", "question_unique_id": "20045_FRSHZ8NJ_4", "options": ["It is very difficult, if not impossible, to monitor the ages of people accessing specific material in many cases.", "The law prevents any company from doing so because of the First Amendment.", "The technology has not yet been invented to restrict access to specific websites based on a person's age.", "Children will find a way to access material that they want to view no matter what the law says."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was the Pacifica decision limited?", "question_unique_id": "20045_FRSHZ8NJ_5", "options": ["It seemed to only refer to radio and television broadcasts. ", "It only restricted adult access to indecent materials during specific hours of the day.", "It did not make specific provisions for protecting children, only limiting what the adults could consume.", "It neglected to include magazines and books in its findings."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the Supreme Court overrule a Michigan state law banning the distribution of materials that might be unsuitable for minors?", "question_unique_id": "20045_FRSHZ8NJ_6", "options": ["They felt that a total ban was without precedent and argued that state legislatures could not make that sort of decision independently.", "They felt the law was tantamount to allowing perceived harm to come to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "The Court found that doing so would essentially restrict the material adults were allowed to consume to child-appropriate only.", "They felt that the law did not go far enough in protecting minors and therefore should be reconsidered before implemented."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is spillover a persistent legal problem?", "question_unique_id": "20045_FRSHZ8NJ_7", "options": ["The courts are constantly overwhelmed by cases related to free speech, obscenity, profanity, and indecency.", "Protecting children against obscenity is a very touchy subject, and courts have issued differing opinions on the matter over the years.", "Legally speaking, one cannot simultaneously protect all speech that has value while prohibiting all speech that does not and may be considered harmful.", "The legal precedent is so vast and varied that there is little consistent groundwork to follow in terms of constitutionality. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What seems to be the most effective resolution to the spillover problem according to the article's author?", "question_unique_id": "20045_FRSHZ8NJ_8", "options": ["Free speech should never be protected if it has any potential expose a child to material deemed harmful by the courts.", "Free speech must be protected at all costs, even if it means potential and occasional harm to children.", "Courts ought to order websites to utilize new technologies that ban access for individuals under a certain age by labelling its contents as \"clean\" or \"dirty.\"", "The answer lies somewhere between laws protecting free speech for adults and utilizing new technology that restricts access to objectionable material as decided by parents."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20047", "set_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Norplant Option", "year": "1996", "author": "Stuart Taylor Jr.", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Norplant Option \n\n         Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n         This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm. \n\n         An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n          But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture. \n\n         The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n          Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs. \n\n         And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n         Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year. \n\n          In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n         The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof. \n\n          Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n         How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n          B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.              \n\n         To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery. \n\n         In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n         \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\" \n\n         This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n          G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.              \n\n         A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n          N orplant itself may be unhealthy.              \n\n         The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant. \n\n         Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n         There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n          I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.              \n\n         Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n                         Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.              \n\n         The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n          T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.              \n\n         A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy. \n\n         Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n          And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies. \n\n         Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does the author agree with the New York Senator's position?", "question_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3_1", "options": ["He believes there is no hope for people who are born into the cycle of poverty and are unemployable for various reasons.", "He believes jobs programs will not be well-financed, and this will dissuade people from having children because they will not want to work.", "He doesn't think that many women will take advantage of the job training programs because they prefer to remain in the welfare system.", "He believes programs that create jobs and prepare people for the workforce will ultimately help people grow independent from welfare."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why doesn't the author believe giving teenagers contraceptives would incentivize irresponsible sexual activity?", "question_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3_2", "options": ["Because of existing laws prohibiting various kinds of sexual activities, specifically for teenagers.", "The Norplant option would require parental consent, so the teenagers would have to reveal their sexual history to their parents.", "The prominence of abstinence-only education would de-incentivize teenagers from engaging in promiscuity.", "Teenagers are going to find a way to have sex, whether they are provided contraceptives or not."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How do some critics compare the Norplant option suggested by the Inquirer to China?", "question_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3_3", "options": ["They suggest giving money to people on welfare to not have children is the same as forcing people to not have children at all.", "One of the requirements of the program would be to have only one child, which is very similar to China's one-child policy.", "There would be a reduction in welfare benefits if a recipient neglected to choose the Norplant option.", "The Norplant option would force some mothers into coerced abortions, such as the ones prevalent in China."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did some readers accuse the Inquirer article of advocating genocide?", "question_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3_4", "options": ["The Inquirer article appeared to be strongly in favor of abortion, which many of its readers felt was strongly akin to genocide at the time.", "The Inquirer article advocated for sterilization of women as part of its welfare proposal--a tactic used by many genocidal programs.", "Norplant would be specifically marketed towards black America, and therefore it would play a role in reducing the black population.", "The original article mentioned that many black youths in America are impoverished, so the suggestion that mothers on welfare stop having babies seemed like attempting to control black population numbers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are the essential reasons the author believes Norplant is the right brand for testing this option?", "question_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3_5", "options": ["Norplant is an affordable option, and the expenses could be easily offset by the taxpayers.", "The contraceptive has been proven to prevent all unwanted pregnancies and has a proven track record of eliminating individuals' reliance on the welfare system.", "Norplant is a trusted name in the healthcare community as well as the American public.", "It is easily reversible if necessary and is an extremely effective and simple form of contraceptive."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the author's view on the idea that using Norplant may lead to an increase in AIDS?", "question_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3_6", "options": ["He does not agree with this idea and cites a recent study that shows it had no bearing on people's decision to use contraceptives. ", "He does not believe that the use of Norplant and the spread of AIDS are related in any conceivable way.", "He believes it is a possibility, and therefore the public must be educated on the importance of using condoms to prevent the spread of disease.", "He acknowledges the fear is very real and cites the statistic that Norplant is 19 times more effective than the birth control pill in preventing pregnancy."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Would the Norplant option fail because of an abundance of people who wish to have children?", "question_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3_7", "options": ["No, it would not. It would fail because it overwhelmingly lacks public support.", "No, it would not. The option has the potential to lower the number of abortions as well as provide much-needed financial support.", "No, it would not. It would succeed because it would still allow people to have abortions and receive an increase in the welfare they receive.", "Yes, it would. Studies have shown that the vast majority of mothers on welfare also wish to raise families. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the author respond to claims that Norplant is not a healthy option?", "question_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3_8", "options": ["He reports that people said the same thing about silicone breast implants, and those people were proven wrong.", "He acknowledges that there are inherent defects in the current product and that continued testing and development is important prior to implementation of the program.", "Every mode of birth control has health risks, so transparency is important. Still, the FDA has stated Norplant works and is safe to use.", "He says the criticism is largely driven by litigious-minded individuals who want to use Norplant to make money through legal claims."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In what way do critics claim the Norplant option is sexist?", "question_unique_id": "20047_C8D8K6B3_9", "options": ["The Norplant option essentially forces women on welfare to rely on birth control, which removes their option for reproductive choice.", "Women receive the majority of welfare assistance already, and the Norplant option would keep women reliant upon welfare.", "Norplant is made only for women and girls, and men do not have any options beyond condoms and vasectomies.", "Men do not have to rely on such an option in order to receive their welfare checks."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20039", "set_unique_id": "20039_P67EGVP6", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "What So Different About Cyberspace?", "year": "2000", "author": "Richard Epstein", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "What So Different About Cyberspace?              \n\n         It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere. \n\n         I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right on to say that there are two ways in which to reduce the theft of car radios (Page 90), one of them is to increase the punishment for theft, and the other is to render them useless once they are taken out of the car by someone who does not know the code (old-fashioned sense) for their release. Here I might add that the second remedy is, in conventional terms, a better one that the first. The higher penalties will have multiple effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite low if the sanction for stealing radios were life imprisonment for first-time offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should work well in cyberspace to avoid similar problems. \n\n         So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace. \n\n         So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n         Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes. \n\n         In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out the guidelines to deal with conflicts-of-interest regulations that allow most people to participate in both. I see no reason why that cannot happen in cyberspace as well. Those people who wish to set up commercial portals through which others must come do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up new territory. The Net is not some single homogenous object that admits to only a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it. \n\n         That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described. \n\n         These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals. \n\n         That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace. \n\n         Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86). \n\n         So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space. \n\n         I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does Larry contend was the reason the labor movement began?", "question_unique_id": "20039_P67EGVP6_1", "options": ["It began as a response to the market's structure, which limits freedom and sometimes encourages low pay.", "It began as a movement hoping to replace the free market system. ", "It started intending to compete with the market system as a social organization.", "It started as a means of draining the market of its resources and transferring all of the power over to the people."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the \"two cultures\" problem?", "question_unique_id": "20039_P67EGVP6_2", "options": ["The dichotomies of physical space versus cyberspace.", "The conflict between understanding the Internet through an academic lens versus a legal one.", "The tension between confidentiality and First Amendment rights in an emerging digital environment.", "The persistence of the issues of privacy and defamation regarding encryption on the Internet."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the author invoke the \"harm principle\"?", "question_unique_id": "20039_P67EGVP6_3", "options": ["To show that a unified public opinion can threaten to overrule a person's rights.", "In order to show that law back by force is always a threat to one's personal freedom.", "To question whether public opinion limits personal freedoms in the same way rule of law by force does.", "To demonstrate that regulation may become a harmful action on Internet commerce over time."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the author believe Larry is wrong about his warnings that Internet commerce may threaten liberty?", "question_unique_id": "20039_P67EGVP6_4", "options": ["He does not believe an increase in government regulation will necessarily follow the emergence of commercial portals.", "The Internet is a homogenous entity that can stand firm against any intrusion from outside forces that may wish to regulate it.", "Whatever regulation might occur would be limited thanks to the abundance of private, public, commercial, and charitable spaces that live online.", "Just like in our physical world, the world of cyberspace can accommodate a variety of spaces that can co-exist in a competitive market."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the author appreciate Larry's theft of car radios example?", "question_unique_id": "20039_P67EGVP6_5", "options": ["Just like higher penalties for crimes in our physical world result in fewer crimes and less violent crimes, so will great penalties for Internet crimes yield similar results in a digital space.", "Larry's car radio theft example illustrates the ease with which one can break into a car and steal a radio with violence. The author suggests building strong counter-measures to fight back against \"violent\" Internet attacks.", "The card radio theft example provides a template for proper regulation and protection of Internet privacy: Higher penalties will reduce the number of attempts to steal confidential information and solve the problem.", "Larry contends using technology to render the radio useless after it has been stolen could potentially limit violent thefts; the author believes this principle could be applied to the Internet in regards to privacy issues."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the dichotomy of researchers' involvement in the development of cyberspace?", "question_unique_id": "20039_P67EGVP6_6", "options": ["While the commercial research community values a free market system, the greater research community understands the value of keeping research hidden to protect trade secrets.", "Academic researchers tend to give more leeway to government involvement in such matters while commercial researchers want to keep the government at arm's reach.", "Academic researchers are interested in the architecture of cyberspace while commercial researchers are interested only in its profit potential.", "While the greater research community values an open exchange of information, commercial research necessitates greater privacy to avoid competition swooping in."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author believe Larry focuses so heavily on the regulation aspect of cyberspace commerce?", "question_unique_id": "20039_P67EGVP6_7", "options": ["Larry is passionate about this subject because he is a libertarian and is against government interference. ", "He is attempting to cast a wider net for his readership.", "He wants to ensure the model is sustainable for future generations.", "Larry's expertise is in the regulation of cyberspace commerce."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the author suggest researchers approach the contradiction of working simultaneously in private and public spaces?", "question_unique_id": "20039_P67EGVP6_8", "options": ["Establishing strict protocols that oversee potential losses of liberty.", "Creating regulations that examine the formation of new commercial portals to ensure they have privacy guidelines in place.", "Developing clear procedures that limit or eliminate corrupt behavior such as conflicts of interest.", "Ensuring government oversight to prevent the development of a monopoly in the world of Internet commerce."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20023", "set_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "Why You're So Screwed Up", "year": "1999", "author": "Emily Yoffe", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n         Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n         Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n                         BIRTH ORDER              \n\n         Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale? \n\n         According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n         Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't. \n\n         Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n                                            Ease of Use:                 Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\" \n\n                                            Applicability:                 As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n                                            Gandhi Explanation:                 He was the youngest of four. \n\n          \n\n            PERSONALITY              \n\n         Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating? \n\n         Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n         Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n         Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n         Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n         Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives] \n\n         The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\" \n\n         OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n                                            Ease of Use:                 Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate. \n\n                                            Applicability:                 High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n                                            Gandhi Explanation:                 According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n          \n\n            INTELLIGENCE              \n\n         Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth. \n\n         Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths. \n\n         The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence. \n\n         One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\" \n\n                                            Ease of Use:                 Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n                                            Applicability:                 Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n                                            Gandhi Explanation:                 In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence. \n\n                         BLOOD TYPE              \n\n         What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now. \n\n         In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight. \n\n         Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\" \n\n         Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n                                            Ease of Use:                 Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n                                            Applicability:                 Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails. \n\n                                            Gandhi Explanation:                 None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "In what way does the author suggest the Myers-Briggs test is relevant to daily life?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_1", "options": ["It can help a person understand one's own behavior and come to understand the actions of others as well.", "It provides alternative personality types for people who are not satisfied with the assessments currently available.", "It reveals the personality types of famous people such as Bill Clinton.", "It makes proper use of the Temperament Sorter II as well as the Character Sorter."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is unique about Sulloway's approach to assessing one's personality?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_2", "options": ["He believes the tendency toward conflict amongst brothers and sisters reveals much about a person's personality and society in general.", "He believes that one's birth order is pre-determined, and therefore one's personality is fixed from birth.", "He believes that conflict between the parent and their children is the determining factor in how the child will behave as he or she gets older.", "He believes the oldest child is the best candidate for leadership positions in the worlds of business and government."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is \"The Gandhi Explanation\"?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_3", "options": ["\"The Gandhi Explanation\" is a discussion in which the writer explores what Gandhi would have thought about each of the four major focus areas of the personality tests.", "For each of the four areas the writer explores, Gandhi has elucidated his own explanation about how each area affects a person's personality. These thoughts are shared in the article.", "Gandhi is a frequent subject of personality test developers to demonstrate that their process works, so the writer rates each developer's success in this regard.", "This is an explanation of how well Gandhi incorporated these four tenets into his daily life and practice as a peacemaker."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Gardner link the designation of Intelligence with schools?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_4", "options": ["He believes one may find the most diverse resource of intelligence types within the walls of a school.", "He believes this is the most obvious location for intellectual debate regarding his theories.", "Schools tend to be the most philosophical, and therefore, they would understand his mission with the most precision.", "He believes it has the most relevant application there since schools are generally populated by people with a limited view of the concept of intelligence."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the true purpose of D'Adamo's blood type personality test?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_5", "options": ["He was trying to sell weight-loss books.", "To educate the public about the ancient history of blood types.", "He was attempting to share Dr. Eric Meikle's theory of human origins as studied at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.", "To share the ways in which the Japanese culture incorporated blood types into its corporate life."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How were assessments of personality traits in conflict amongst ancient Greek philosophers?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_6", "options": ["Plato believed the answer was external, while Hippocrates believed it was internal.", "Hippocrates believed in the balance of the four bodily fluids, while Plato believed there were far more fluids than that.", "Hippocrates believed people were born a specific way and could never break that mold. Plato believed people's behavior proved otherwise.", "Plato designated four social and behavioral states exhibited by humans, and Hippocrates believed there were far more existing in nature."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How might one self-identify one's intelligence type?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_7", "options": ["By rehearsing tongue twisters, nursery rhymes, and puns.", "By taking the Myers-Briggs personality test.", "Receiving input from others regarding one's own personality, self-reflection, and basic reasoning.", "By taking a personality quiz on Keirsey's website."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the writer not wish to follow the bloody type test?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_8", "options": ["He thought it was \"completely worthless.\"", "He does not want to eat snails.", "He doesn't know his blood type.", "He doesn't need to lose any weight."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which personality test developer understands Gandhi the least?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_9", "options": ["D'Adamo because he doesn't even try to understand him.", "Sulloway because Gandhi was not in fact the youngest of four siblings.", "Kiersey because he claims Gandhi is an idealist when in fact his is quite practical.", "Gardner because he misattributes Gandhi's interpersonal intelligence to his career choice."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are the two enduring types of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?", "question_unique_id": "20023_S6B32Z9U_10", "options": ["Expressive and reserved", "Introverted and extroverted", "Scheduling and probing", "Observant and introspective"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20050", "set_unique_id": "20050_M23AW2ZE", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "Temperance Kills", "year": "1998", "author": "Jonathan Rauch", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Temperance Kills \n\n         First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n         Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation. \n\n          One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n         The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble. \n\n         \"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n          Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely. \n\n         But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n          The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.) \n\n         Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n         For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\" \n\n          The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n         And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\" \n\n          Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n         The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\" \n\n          Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing. \n\n         \"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n          \n\n            ENDNOTES              \n\n          \n\n            Note 1              \n\n         By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads: \n\n         GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n                         Back              \n\n          \n\n            Note 2              \n\n         The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.) \n\n         According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n          Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n                         Back              \n\n          \n\n            Note 3              \n\n         Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following: \n\n         Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n         If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n         Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n         --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n         --5 ounces of wine (100 calories) \n\n         --1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n                         Back              \n\n          \n\n            Note 4              \n\n         Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n         If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day). \n\n                         Back              \n\n                         If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does the public largely not know about the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption?", "question_unique_id": "20050_M23AW2ZE_1", "options": ["They do, but they believe the recommendation only applies to drinking red wine.", "A combination of ignorance and limitations on marketing efforts from alcohol companies and public health officials.", "There are no such benefits; if there were, alcohol companies would pursue marketing such benefits more strongly.", "The information is based on a twenty-year-old study."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the recommended alcohol intake for healthy consumption?", "question_unique_id": "20050_M23AW2ZE_2", "options": ["One glass of red wine per day for women and two for men.", "One to two drinks per day for men and women.", "One to two glasses of red wine for men and women.", "One drink per day for women and two for men."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why might the public be surprised about the findings of the study by the New England Journal of Medicine?", "question_unique_id": "20050_M23AW2ZE_3", "options": ["The study indicates that consuming larger amounts of alcohol leads to increases in alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents.", "It finds that drinking red wine offers no more health benefits than drinking beer or liquor.", "The study finds that people can safely operate a motor vehicle if they have had less than two drinks.", "It reveals that moderate drinkers tend to live longer than people who do not drink at all."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author say is the result of ignoring the New England Journal of Medicine study?", "question_unique_id": "20050_M23AW2ZE_4", "options": ["It could lead to an increase in deaths from heart disease. ", "It might perpetuate the idea that avoiding the subject or being uninformed about it is the best policy.", "It would result in a loss of business for the alcohol companies. ", "It would give people the impression that drinking too much is just as beneficial as drinking a little."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the result of the Competitive Enterprise Institute survey?", "question_unique_id": "20050_M23AW2ZE_5", "options": ["42% of respondents said that they did not believe there were any health benefits associated with consuming a light amount of alcohol.", "58% of respondents indicated they believed moderate consumption of alcohol could lead to greater health benefits.", "A majority of the percentage that responded that they believed consuming alcohol had the potential to reduce the risk of heart disease also believed the benefits were only linked to wine.", "42% of respondents said that they believed any potential health benefits came from consuming red wine."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the net result of the New England Journal of Medicine study?", "question_unique_id": "20050_M23AW2ZE_6", "options": ["People over forty were less likely to die at a younger age if they had moderate alcohol intake than people who drank nothing.", "People over 30 were 20% less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely if they drank more than two drinks per day.", "People over thirty years old were less likely to die at a younger age if they had moderate alcohol intake than people who drank nothing.", "People over 40 who had less than two drinks per day were 20% less likely to die prematurely compared to nondrinkers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Michael Thun hedge on the large statistic regarding prolonged life related to moderate alcohol consumption?", "question_unique_id": "20050_M23AW2ZE_7", "options": ["The world of epidemiology considered the 20% reduction a small percentage.", "He indicated that the 20% mortality reduction was not significant enough to warrant public broadcasting.", "The statistic was challenged in a later study by British health authorities in their \"Sensible Drinking\" guidelines.", "He said the various problems related to alcohol in society create a situation where such positive messaging is not typically well-received."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What gives credence to the most recent study by the New England Journal of Medicine?", "question_unique_id": "20050_M23AW2ZE_8", "options": ["It was sponsored by the American Heart Association.", "The same study found an association between smoking and lung cancer.", "Decades of corroborating studies conducted in the US and around the world.", "The fact that they conducted their tests primarily on men over forty years old."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20053", "set_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "year": "1997", "author": "Larissa MacFarquhar", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Thank Heaven for Little Girls \n\n           \n\n         Is it tasteless to suggest of JonBenet Ramsey--the cute, blond 6-year-old from Colorado who was strangled to death a few weeks ago--that it is her grisly death, rather than her career as a juvenile beauty queen, that makes her so uncannily resemble a girl in a fairy tale? For while a pageant princess is merely tacky, a murdered pageant princess takes her place in the illustrious line of pretty young girls in what, pace multiculturalists, we might call our collective lore, to meet, or at least be threatened with, a gruesome end. Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, Gretel, Alice--there is an intimate connection in our culture, it would seem, between being a sweet young miss and getting garroted. \n\n         By curious coincidence, this fairy-tale conjunction of appealing nymphets and gory murder is currently the subject of an unusual show at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York: an exhibition of eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went on to write and illustrate a truly amazing, Scheherazadean 15,145-page epic about seven cute prepubescent sisters being tortured by brutish men who like to capture little girls in order to enslave them and torture them and take their clothes off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the Vivian Girls) manage to escape from the men (the Glandelinians) time and time again, but countless less fortunate girl-slaves are spectacularly mutilated and slaughtered along the way. \n\n         Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his life living alone in a rented room in Chicago, earning his living as a janitor in a hospital during the day, going to Mass frequently, and coming home at night to work on his paintings and his writing. He was born in 1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an 11-year weather log, 87 watercolors, 67 pencil drawings, and the tale of the Vivian Girls. \n\n           \n\n         The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse. \n\n          Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing something in a bowl, a girl sitting on a fence, a girl running fearfully away from something, her school bag flying out behind her. Often these repeated images are rendered identically (same colors, no alterations in the pose), and sometimes they even appear next to each other in series of as many as eight. But the effect is not at all proto-Warhol. It's subtler, less programmatic. It's reminiscent, if anything, of those groups of angels or monks or soldiers in medieval manuscripts in which some of the figures are identical to each other, and others only slightly different--but the repetition seems to be employed for the purpose of visual economy, in order not to divert attention from the picture's central theme, rather than to draw attention to repetition or image-making itself. \n\n         Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish): \n\n                         Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives.              \n\n         The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\" \n\n         The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures. \n\n         But while the notion of outsider art has proved an effective marketing concept, it is often an unfortunate interpretive one--outsider artists tend to attract a particularly crude and irritating kind of psycho-biographical analysis. Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, \"The trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\" \n\n          It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.) \n\n         It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit: \n\n                         About noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. ...              \n\n                         [When Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil.              \n\n                         Although it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form.              \n\n         What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.\n", "questions": [{"question": "In what way does the author suggest MacGregor misunderstands Darger?", "question_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM_1", "options": ["He accuses MacGregor of applying a psychoanalytic reading of his work rather than placing his art within the larger scope of postmodernism.", "The author thinks MacGregor has a macabre fascination with the more violent aspects of Darger's work.", "The author believes MacGregor is a charlatan and exclusively interested in acquiring Darger's work for personal notoriety.", "He believes that MacGregor has intentionally limited scholarly understanding of Darger by seeking exclusive access to his work."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is the context of Darger's work important?", "question_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM_2", "options": ["Without context, one would believe the artwork to be very amateur and exclusively interested in violence.", "Otherwise, it would be difficult to see that his artistic work rivals that of his contemporaries Robbins and Lynch.", "Darger's work must be understood through the lens of his mental illness if it is to be understood at all.", "It would otherwise be easy to reduce his work to the depraved output of someone who could not escape his own demons."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Darger create his pictures of girls?", "question_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM_3", "options": ["He used comic strips as models for the characters he would create on his own.", "He drew pictures from illustrations he had seen and repeated the process over and over.", "He drew outlines of figures found in magazines and sometimes pasted them onto his work.", "He took pictures of people he knew."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is MacGregor the lone critic of Darger's oeuvre?", "question_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM_4", "options": ["He has purchased the majority of the material Darger produced during his lifetime.", "The subject matter of Darger's work is too revolting for most critics to want to discuss.", "Darger's landlord will not allow any other critic to view Darger's work because of its sensitive material.", "He alone largely has access to Darger's work thanks to the executor of Darger's estate."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Darger considered to be an \"outsider\"?", "question_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM_5", "options": ["He did not have any artistic schooling and was not involved in the art world during his lifetime.", "He was not interested in hearing the critical reception of his artwork.", "He spent much of his adult life in and out of mental institutions and, finally, nursing homes.", "He lived alone in his apartment for the entirety of his adult life and did not interact with anyone."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the plot of Darger's epic story?", "question_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM_6", "options": ["Young sisters attempt to escape from the Glandelinians--a group of men fond of imprisoning and enacting violence upon them.", "The story documents the decades-long war between the Glandelinians and the Vivian Girls.", "The story documents the Vivian Girls' attempts to free the girl-slaves that have been systematically slaughtered over the years by the Glandelinians.", "The Child Slave Rebellion manages to defeat their male captors, and the story documents their journey to brutal revenge."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the writer open the article with a reference to JonBenet Ramsey?", "question_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM_7", "options": ["She is the subject of an exhibit at the Museum of American Folk Art.", "He compares the details of her case to the subject matter depicted in the paintings of Henry Darger.", "Her case is a relevant cultural touchstone, which he intends to examine in detail.", "She is a contemporary example of a cultural trend: The murder of beautiful youth."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In what way does the writer believe Darger is similar to artists like David Lynch?", "question_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM_8", "options": ["They both ought to be considered progenitors of the postmodern movement.", "He undercuts innocence with deeply terrifying subjects and images.", "They are both members of the Mouseketeers.", "They both frequently depict brutal and disturbing acts of violence upon children."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Darger's link to post-modernism?", "question_unique_id": "20053_LFLKNUIM_9", "options": ["Like other postmodernists, he frequently depicted subjects of gruesome violence.", "He was fully immersed in the fantasy world he had created in his 15,000-page epic.", "He intentionally inserts himself into his work, and his characters frequently reflect on the process of artistic creation.", "Like his fellow postmodern artists, Darger was interested in the line between what is real and what is fantasy."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20052", "set_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Pickup Artists", "year": "1998", "author": "Emily Yoffe", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Pickup Artists \n\n         Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n         1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n         2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n         3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n         4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n         Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford. \n\n         This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist. \n\n         But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\" \n\n          On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n         He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\" \n\n         Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world. \n\n         This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off. \n\n         Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor. \n\n          In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too, DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\" \n\n         The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n         And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\" \n\n         There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar. \n\n          All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\" \n\n         No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer. \n\n         Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did Bill Clinton keep the deformed orange?", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_1", "options": ["He thought it was unique looking and wanted to share it with Cristy Zercher.", "It reminded him of a sexual organ.", "It was an odd habit of his to keep strange-looking fruits for two weeks.", "He said, \"It's one of my favorite things.\""], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why could Clinton's campaign aircraft suitably be called Long Dong Silver or Monkey Business?", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_2", "options": ["Because the story was featured in \"The Star\", a famous tabloid known for crafting humorous monikers.", "The plane was a locus of his sexual exploits.", "Because the name \"Longhorn One\" was not available.", "Clinton had an unusual sense of humor, and the nicknames would have been appropriate."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Clinton's aide contact Cristy Zercher in 1994?", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_3", "options": ["Bruce Lindsey threatened her with losing her job as an executive assistant if she revealed details of the affair.", "Bruce Lindsey wanted to arrange a meeting between Zercher and Clinton.", "He wanted to encourage her to spin her encounters with Clinton as welcome.", "He wanted to remind her that her friend had told him her relationship with Clinton was entirely consensual."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does \"The Star\" call Bill Clinton Leonardo DiCaprio's mentor?", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_4", "options": ["They have had affairs with many of the same women over the years.", "Bill Clinton is Leonardo DiCaprio's senior, and DiCaprio looks up to him as a role model.", "Neither men are ashamed or embarrassed about their exploits.", "They share similar philosophies regarding their prolific sex lives. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did DiCaprio get a black eye?", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_5", "options": ["He was beaten up outside a hotel bar by Elizabeth Berkley's boyfriend.", "He hit his face on a bathroom door.", "He and his friend got into a fight with some drunk bar patrons in New York.", "He was beaten up at a hotel bar in New York."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How are Jerry Springer and Bill Clinton similar, according to \"The Star\"? ", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_6", "options": ["They are both desperate in their attempts to begin sexual exploits with women.", "They both prefer to enlist the help of employees in initiating their affairs.", "Both are very famous men who use their fame to get what they want.", "They both use dumb pick-up lines."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does \"The Star\" suggest celebrities like Frank Gifford should start using trains for transportation?", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_7", "options": ["Trains are a more romantic setting to engage in sexual activities.", "Using trains will help them stay faithful to their wives.", "Tabloids like the \"Globe\" do not use trains, and therefore would not film future sexual encounters.", "So they can participate in their affairs in the privacy of a cabin."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were Leonardo DiCaprio and Naomi Campbell in Europe together?", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_8", "options": ["DiCaprio wanted to hide the fact that he was simultaneously dating an 18-year old Cuban model.", "They wanted to swim naked together in a hotel swimming pool.", "He wanted to hide his affair with Campbell from his girlfriend.", "They were traveling together as friends."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Mike McGrath allegedly locked in a pantry?", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_9", "options": ["There was a very important meeting happening in the Oval Office, for which McGrath did not have the proper security clearance.", "Debra Schiff had recently appeared in tabloids and didn't want to have further exposure.", "Debra Schiff put him there so she could sleep with Clinton in private.", "He locked himself in there, not wishing to witness any \"humiliating\" behavior."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Clinton want to keep the story of his friends' divorce a secret?", "question_unique_id": "20052_EFV43YK7_10", "options": ["His friend had been having sex with farm animals.", "He wanted to help his friend navigate a very messy divorce.", "He realized the President of the United States should not be associated with such people.", "He did not wish to bring them humiliation by revealing their divorce to the press."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20058", "set_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Gamer ", "year": "1997", "author": "Joel Achenbach", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Gamer  \n\n         The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n         But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade. \n\n         Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n         \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n         Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them. \n\n         Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon. \n\n         On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us. \n\n          Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n         For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing. \n\n         Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n         The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy. \n\n         Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n          Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time. \n\n         Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n         A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another. \n\n         One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n         The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n         Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n         Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n         Jordan hit another three-pointer. \n\n         Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup. \n\n         Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99. \n\n         \"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room. \n\n          There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?) \n\n         Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd. \n\n         As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n         We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n         \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\" \n\n         Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n          His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n         Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n         He shook his head. \n\n         \"I got a job to do.\" \n\n                         Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did no one in the audience seem to care that Bill Clinton was at the game?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_1", "options": ["The audience was filled with people who did not like Bill Clinton.", "He entered the arena quietly, so nobody really noticed he was there.", "They were mostly there to see Michael Jordan.", "The audience was filled with basketball fans who did not care about politics."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "If USAir Arena is typically sold out when the Bullets play, why are most of the seats empty?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_2", "options": ["People have started to realize the Bullets never win a game.", "The Arena is old and dim and not very large, so people do not really enjoy going there.", "The tickets are purchased by people who feel owning them will give them clout, but they might not actually enjoy sports.", "The tickets are hoarded by superfans who want to see Michael Jordan play without a large crowd."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In what way is Bill Clinton similar to Michael Jordan, according to the author?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_3", "options": ["They both grew up in the South.", "They both command large crowds and have a kind of magnetism that draws people in.", "They are both huge fans of a number of different sports.", "They will both do whatever it takes to succeed and excel."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the writer of the article call Michael Jordan a genius?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_4", "options": ["Because of his ability to succeed at a number of different sports.", "Because of his ability to turn a game around in the fourth quarter.", "Because of his ability to negotiate million-dollar contracts.", "Because of his tendency to adapt his abilities in order to win."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why do sportswriters call Michael Jordan \"Babe Ruth\"?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_5", "options": ["Like Babe Ruth, he was exceptionally strong and elegant.", "Like Babe Ruth, Jordan isn't just a superior player, he transcends any other players' capabilities.", "Like Babe Ruth, he was \"borderline geriatric.\"", "Like Babe Ruth, he also played professional baseball."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the writer suggest it would be absurd for Jordan's agent to provide a number for how much money would be required to lure Jordan back to the Bulls for another season?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_6", "options": ["Jordan is like a natural wonder--his worth cannot be represented by a number.", "The agent is not in the business of making guesses, and he will only comment when he knows for sure.", "Jordan is very close to retirement, and no amount of money would convince him to stay in the game if he decided against it.", "The agent is not allowed to discuss such matters with the press."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Michael Jordan described as \"geriatric\"?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_7", "options": ["At 34, he is beginning to get too old to be attractive to sports teams and agents.", "At 34, he is generally considered on the older end of professional basketball players.", "At 34, he was beginning to move really slow on the court compared to his younger competitors.", "At 34, his mental and physical faculties have been showing obvious signs of decline and affecting the outcome of games.  "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why do statisticians disagree with the \"hot hand\" theory?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_8", "options": ["If you properly analyze a player's behavior in any given game, you will be able to predict their score output.", "They believe in the power of luck rather than a player's individual skill.", "Shots that score are totally random, not associated with some kind of streak.", "They believe that a player's shot accuracy can be determined by carefully analyzing past games."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the writer believe Jordan was able to turn the game around in the fourth quarter?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_9", "options": ["Because of his years of hard work and training and dedication to the sport of basketball.", "He possesses some unknowable force that drives him to not just perform in a crunch but to succeed in his goal.", "His fear of failure drives him to perform above and beyond other players' capabilities.", "He believes Michael Jordan had been saving his energy for the very end of the game."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author disagree with the New York Times' notion that Jordan should be cloned?", "question_unique_id": "20058_3PL4CFMH_10", "options": ["The writer posits that Jordan's talent is his mental strength and has nothing to do with DNA.", "A unique talent like Jordan could never possibly be replicated, even with the most advanced scientific techniques.", "He believes Michael Jordan is a \"natural athlete\" and cannot be replicated.", "He believes cloning humans is immoral."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "51662", "set_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Breakdown", "year": 1956, "author": "Kastle, Herbert D.", "topic": "Psychological fiction; Post-apocalyptic fiction; PS; Farmers -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories", "article": "BREAKDOWN\nBy HERBERT D. KASTLE\n\n\n Illustrated by COWLES\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine June 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on\n for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house\n two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to\n admit he was sick\nthat\nway—in the head!\n\n\n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were\n moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his\n mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching\n the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear.\n A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was\n based on nothing.\n\n\n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were\n chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except\n that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only\n a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields\n remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to\n waste....\nDavie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing\n stronger each day from helping out after school.\nHe turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n\n\n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n\n\n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part\n of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n\n\n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her\n eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he\n remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n\n\n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just\n for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could—\"\n\n\n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to\n hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't\n be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins,\n who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n\n\n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They\n had no son, never had a son. And Timkins—he'd died and they'd gone to\n his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n\n\n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n\n\n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a\n dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last\n night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all\n the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a\n son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they\nhad\nhad a son, and he'd\n died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\nHe went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen,\n Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate.\n Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\"\n he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock\n for his own table!\"\n\n\n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of\n multi-pro.\"\n\n\n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through\n a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste\n any meat there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current\n crisis, you know.\"\n\n\n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one\n could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished\n quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n\n\n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside\n of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn\n floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that\n was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he\n leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward\n staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the\n way I had my barn....\"\n\n\n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless\n panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it\nwas\nhis barn!\n\n\n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.\n\n\n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard,\n moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him.\nThe car.\nHe hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice\n to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n\n\n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than\n Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And\n the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it\n was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\nHe whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor\n shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n\n\n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and\n all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n\n\n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should\n a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start\n losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n\n\n He was at the supply bin—like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with\n a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines\n and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and\n they left it—or whatever they allowed you—with a bill. You paid the\n bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt\n and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some\n money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn.\n It came out just about even.\n\n\n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had\n ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it\n into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A\n television program guide.\n\n\n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n\n\n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only\n one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to\n her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing\n last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n\n\n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark\n Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n\n\n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward,\n and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the\n stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and\n saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there\n and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right)\n and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was\n wrong. The windows were wrong.\n\n\n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\nEdna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to\n the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the\n pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right.\n They had only a dozen or so now.\n\n\n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n\n\n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n\n\n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face\n that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and\n lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and\n went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to\n regulations—one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water\n twice a week.\n\n\n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be\n showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our\n livestock, Edna?\"\n\n\n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n\n\n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n\n\n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n\n\n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n\n\n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n\n\n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet\n cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n\n\n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He\n looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a\n bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road\n was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over\n from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty.\n Once there'd been cars, people....\n\n\n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't\n help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n\n\n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But\n he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n\n\n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of\n wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find\n that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved\n out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n\n\n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be\n reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't\n know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n\n\n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n\n\n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire\n head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's\n mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved\n forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to\n leave his headache and confusion behind.\n\n\n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He\n raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off\n to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached\n the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton\n Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his\n head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north.\n He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he\n was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers.\n Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But\n anything like that would've gotten around.\n\n\n Was he forgetting again?\nWell, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He\n opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and\n rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after\n the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county—old Wallace Elverton's\n place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed\n as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get\n along without crops for years more.\n\n\n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure\n why, but ... everything was wrong.\n\n\n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went\n sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another\n fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by\n three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had\n Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n\n\n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way.\n He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but\n fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back.\n Yes, there\nwas\na slight inward curve.\n\n\n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured\n the best way to get to the other side.\n\n\n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they\n used to say back when he was a kid.\nIt took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got\n over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed\n beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand.\n He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n\n\n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He\n listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure\n he was heading in the right direction.\n\n\n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n\n\n Flooring!\n\n\n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and\n glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a\n sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n\n\n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked.\n More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound\n growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had\n before in Cultwait County.\nHis entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to\n a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat.\n He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under\n the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the\n moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n\n\n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised\n damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n\n\n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly,\n until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him,\n and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n\n\n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n\n\n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately—a long time\n lately?\nThe ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by\n flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where\n there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where\n that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons.\n And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of\n Crossville. And after that....\nHe was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here\n he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could\n it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to\n forget things he'd known all his life?\n\n\n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was\n beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on\n the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard.\n There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his\n family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks\n heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his\n voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get\n you!\"\nHe rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three\n children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A\n moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n\n\n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n\n\n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n\n\n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n\n\n Was this how a man's mind went?\n\n\n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and\n people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or\n four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of\n New England he'd seen in magazines.\n\n\n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with\n a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his\n clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood,\n and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming\n in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth\n sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and\n shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and\n went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet\n strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw\n it—a car.\nA car!\nIt was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at\n all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined,\n tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations,\n Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n\n\n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where then?\"\n\n\n \"The doctor's place.\"\n\n\n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm.\n Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know\n about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n\n\n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the\n path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n\n\n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen\n or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of\n doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in\n at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two\n hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster\n walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital,\n or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he\n didn't see or hear people.\n\n\n He did hear\nsomething\n; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came\n along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down\n somewhere.\nThey went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless\n room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there,\n putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred\n years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n\n\n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected\n one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or\n sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n\n\n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little\n treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n\n\n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain\n again.\n\n\n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with\n the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let\n them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his\n scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he\n would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so\n as to know whether or not he was insane.\n\n\n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n\n\n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the\n insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n\n\n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n\n\n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n\n\n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n\n\n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n\n\n \"No! I want to talk to someone\nsane\n! You and Petey and I—we're all\n insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land,\n any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded\n by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know\n nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand?\n I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most\n were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway.\n Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later.\n I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of\n the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave\n you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we\n don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big\n crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all,\nsanity\n! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace\n and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n\n\n He choked and stopped.\n\n\n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his\n brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and\n remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to\n check south and east; on\nall\nsides if that fence continued to curve\n inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n\n\n And this wasn't Iowa.\nThe explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to\n save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and\n there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people\n left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had\n come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife\n and his two sons....\nSuddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the\n greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the\n switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he\n got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and\n came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only\n one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n\n\n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n\n\n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n\n\n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been\n worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought\n maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n\n\n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill\n a pig!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "How does the world that Harry live in seem to operate, initially?", "question_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP_1", "options": ["It's a world where everyone seems to be losing their memory. Harry can't remember key parts about his business, and Edna repeats the same things on a weekly basis. ", "It operates largely the same way ours does. It just seems different because of the sickness that Harry has. ", "It's a world where people are left to their own devices. Supplies are left at the house, farmers get paid not to grow crops, etc. ", "It's a world with heavy government involvement, where there are regulations on near everything that is affecting every day life. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What, generally, does Harry seem to discover as the story progresses?", "question_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP_2", "options": ["He really is sick in the head, and losing his mind. ", "The government is more involved in their lives than he had realized. ", "His views of the world have been warped by a tragedy. ", "What he remembers is true, and the world is different than it had been. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What finally confirms Harry's suspicions? ", "question_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP_3", "options": ["Being sent to the Doctor. It confirms his suspicions that he might truly be sick. ", "Being apprehended by the townsfolks. It confirms to him that the people are unwell. ", "Finding so may changes in his environment. They all added up to the bigger picture. ", "Finding the ocean. It's the one thing that truly was never there, and completely out of place. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Harry \"want to be take care of\" when he's apprehended?", "question_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP_4", "options": ["He's completely lost his mind, and not thinking clearly. ", "He's resigned to what's happened to him. ", "He wants confirmation of what he's discovered, and his own memories. ", "He wants to find out what happens to people who are taken away. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the terror that plagues Harry?", "question_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP_5", "options": ["The same as the start as it is in the end - the terror that comes with truth. ", "The terror of not knowing. Harry will never truly know if he is sane or not. ", "The terror of forgetting himself, and the way his world was. ", "The terror of losing his son, and not remembering. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happens to Harry at the end of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP_6", "options": ["He forgets all that happens, and goes back to life as it was. ", "He pretends to forget everything, because he is scared of the consequences if he doesn't.", "He takes the treatment, allowing himself to forget all he learned. ", "He pretends to forget everything, for the sake of living in happy ignorance. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What seems to be a core idea of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP_7", "options": ["The need to know the truth supersedes anything else. ", "A national disaster could result in a similar event happening. ", "The government is capable of completely reshaping the world, if they choose it. ", "\"Ignorance is bliss.\" Sometimes, you're better off not knowing the truth. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the doctor's last test?", "question_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP_8", "options": ["To see that Harry truly forgot what he learned, and that the treatment was a success. ", "It wasn't a test - he says it was to cover up the comment he made about the ark. ", "To see if Harry could truly play the role of an unknowing person. ", "To test Harry's intelligence, and see if he truly understood the situation. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why are there so many limitations on the lives of the people living in this story? ", "question_unique_id": "51662_EBGKM9MP_9", "options": ["Their supplies are simply dwindling - the area can't support the population. ", "The war has made it so people have to ration everything, and be mindful of what they use. ", "There is limited resources in the new world, and the Doctor is doing his best to manage that. ", "There is limited resources in the new world, and the government doesn't want people to realize that. "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/6/6/51662//51662-h//51662-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51194", "set_unique_id": "51194_1XXJ4WUG", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Made to Measure", "year": 1961, "author": "Gault, William Campbell", "topic": "Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Robots -- Fiction; Husband and wife -- Fiction; PS; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "Made to Measure\nBy WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT\n\n\n Illustrated by L. WOROMAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSomewhere is an ideal mate for every man\n\n and woman, but Joe wasn't willing to bet\n\n on it.  He was a man who rolled his own!\nThe pressure tube locks clicked behind them, as the train moved on. It\n was a strange, sighing click and to Joe it sounded like, \"She's not\n right—she's not right—she's not right—\"\n\n\n So, finally, he said it. \"She's not right.\"\n\n\n Sam, who was riding with him, looked over wonderingly. \"Who isn't?\"\n\n\n \"Vera. My wife. She's not right.\"\n\n\n Sam frowned. \"Are you serious, Joe? You mean she's—?\" He tapped his\n temple.\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I mean she's not what I want.\"\n\n\n \"That's why we have the Center,\" Sam answered, as if quoting, which he\n was. \"With the current and growing preponderance of women over men,\n something had to be done. I think we've done it.\"\n\n\n Sam was the Director of the Domestic Center and a man sold on his job.\n\n\n \"You've done as well as you could,\" Joe agreed in an argumentative way.\n \"You've given some reason and order to the marital competition among\n women. You've almost eliminated illicit relations. You've established\n a basic security for the kids. But the big job? You've missed it\n completely.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sam said. \"That's a very small knife you've inserted between\n my shoulder blades, but I'm thin-skinned.\" He took a deep breath.\n \"What, in the opinion of the Junior Assistant to the Adjutant Science\n Director, was the\nbig\njob?\"\n\n\n Joe looked for some scorn in Sam's words, found it, and said, \"The big\n job is too big for a sociologist.\"\n\n\n Sam seemed to flinch. \"I didn't think that axe would fit alongside the\n knife. I underestimated you.\"\n\n\n \"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\" Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. \"I'm going to make a\n perfect wife.\" He tapped his own chest. \"For me, just for me, the way I\n want her. No human frailties. Ideal.\"\n\n\n \"A perfect robot,\" Sam objected.\n\n\n \"A wife,\" Joe corrected. \"A person. A human being.\"\n\n\n \"But without a brain.\"\n\n\n \"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people.\n Nothing.\"\n\"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's\n inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them.\nI'm\na person. I\n think I'm—discerning and sensitive.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sam said. \"Let's drop the subject.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you're talking nonsense. A person without faults is not a\n person. And if—it or he—she were, I don't think I'd care to know him\n or her or it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally. You're a sentimentalist. You've seen so much misery, so\n much human error, so much stupidity that you've built up your natural\n tolerance into a sloppy and unscientific sentimentality. It happens to\n sociologists all the time.\"\n\n\n \"Joe, I'm not going to argue with you. Only one thing I ask. When\n you—break the news to Vera, break it gently. And get her back to the\n Center as quickly as you can. She's a choice, rare number.\"\n\n\n Joe said nothing to that. Sam looked miserable. They sat there,\n listening to the swishing, burring clicks of the airlocks, two\n friends—one who dealt with people and had grown soft, the other who\n dealt with machines and might not have grown at all.\n\n\n As the car rose for the Inglewood station, Sam looked over, but Joe's\n eyes were straight ahead. Sam got up and out of the seat.\n\n\n There was a whispering sigh of escaping air and the sunlight glare of\n the Inglewood station, synthetic redwood and chrome and marble.\n\n\n Sam was out of the cylindrical, stainless steel car and hurrying for\n the Westchester local when Joe came out onto the platform. Sam was\n annoyed, it was plain.\n\n\n Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I mean.\"\nJoe was silent. The coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on\n Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway.\n\n\n \"You're awfully quiet,\" Vera said.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Her voice was suddenly strained. \"Sam didn't try to sell\n you—\"\n\n\n \"A new wife?\" He looked at her. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\n \"You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't\n I—darling, is there—?\" She broke off, looking even more miserable\n than Sam had.\n\n\n \"I don't intend to trade you in,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She took a deep breath.\n\n\n He didn't look at her. \"But you're going back to the Center.\"\n\n\n She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or\n ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse.\n\n\n \"It's not your fault,\" he said, after a moment. \"I'm not going to get\n another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be.\"\n\n\n \"I've tried so hard,\" she said. \"Maybe I tried too hard.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said, \"it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be\n delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want a reasonable man,\" she said quietly. \"I want you, Joe.\n I—I loved you.\"\n\n\n He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. \"Loved?\n Did you use the past tense?\"\n\n\n \"I used the past tense.\" She started to get out on her side of the car.\n \"I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\n \"But I do,\" he told her. \"Is this love something you can turn on and\n off like a faucet?\"\n\n\n \"I don't care to explain it to you,\" she said. \"I've got to pack.\" She\n left the car, slammed the door, and moved hurriedly toward the house.\n\n\n Joe watched her. Something was troubling him, something he couldn't\n analyze, but he felt certain that if he could, it would prove to be\n absurd.\n\n\n He went thoughtfully into the living room and snapped on the telenews.\n He saw troops moving by on foot, a file of them dispersed along a\n Brazilian road. He turned the knob to another station and saw the\n huge stock market board, a rebroadcast. Another twist and he saw a\n disheveled, shrieking woman being transported down some tenement steps\n by a pair of policemen. The small crowd on the sidewalk mugged into the\n camera.\n\n\n He snapped it off impatiently and went into the kitchen. The dinette\n was a glass-walled alcove off this, and the table was set. There was\n food on his plate, none on Vera's.\nHe went to the living room and then, with a mutter of impatience, to\n the door of the back bedroom. She had her grips open on the low bed.\n\n\n \"You don't have to leave tonight, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"You're being very unreasonable.\"\n\n\n \"Am I?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't trying to be intentionally cruel.\"\n\n\n \"Weren't you?\"\n\n\n His voice rose. \"Will you stop talking like some damned robot? Are you\n a human being, or aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I am,\" she said, \"and that's why I'm going back to the\n Center. I've changed my mind. I want to get registered. I want to find\n a\nman\n.\"\n\n\n She started to go past him, her grip in her hand. He put a hand on her\n shoulder. \"Vera, you—\"\n\n\n Something flashed toward his face. It was her slim, white hand, but it\n didn't feel slim and white. She said, \"I can see now why you weren't\n made\nSenior\nAssistant to the Adjutant Science Director. You're a\n stupid, emotionless mechanic. A machine.\"\n\n\n He was still staring after her when the door slammed. He thought of the\n huge Domestic Center with its classes in Allure, Boudoir Manners, Diet,\n Poise, Budgeting. That vast, efficient, beautifully decorated Center\n which was the brain child of Sam Tullgren, but which still had to deal\n with imperfect humans.\n\n\n People, people, people ... and particularly women. He rose, after a\n while, and went into the dinette. He sat down and stared moodily at his\n food.\n\n\n Little boys are made of something and snails and puppydogs' tails. What\n are little girls made of? Joe didn't want a little girl; he wanted\n one about a hundred and twenty-two pounds and five feet, four inches\n high. He wanted her to be flat where she should be and curved where she\n should be, with blonde hair and gray-green eyes and an exciting smile.\n\n\n He had a medical degree, among his others. The nerves, muscles, flesh,\n circulatory system could be made—and better than they were ever made\n naturally. The brain would be cybernetic and fashioned after his own,\n with his own mental background stored in the memory circuits.\n\n\n So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh\n and blood. The spark, now—what distinguished the better-grade robots\n from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated\n mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life.\nFor the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in\n the Department.\n\n\n \"Something special?\" Pete asked. \"Not just a local skin graft? What\n then?\"\n\n\n \"A wife. A perfect wife.\"\n\n\n Pete's grin sagged baffledly. \"I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?\"\n\n\n \"In all ways.\" Joe's face was grave. \"Someone ideal to live with.\"\n\n\n \"How about Vera? What was wrong with her?\"\n\n\n \"A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb,\n exactly, but—\"\n\n\n \"But not perfect. Who is, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"My new wife is going to be.\"\n\n\n Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind\n of skin Joe had specified.\n\n\n They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They\n seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and\n incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's\n engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready.\n\n\n Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior\n assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a\n jerk, in Joe's book.\n\n\n This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"\n\n\n Slightly raised eyebrows.\n\n\n \"More?\"\n\n\n \"Completely human, except she will have no human faults.\"\n\n\n Cool smile. \"Wouldn't be human, then, of course.\"\n\n\n \"\nHuman, but without human faults, I said!\n\"\n\n\n \"You raised your voice, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"I did.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the Senior Assistant. Junior Assistants do not raise their voices\n to Senior Assistants.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you might be deaf, as well as dumb,\" Joe said.\n\n\n A silence. The granite face of Burke was marble, then steel and finally\n chromium. His voice matched it. \"I'll have to talk to the Chief before\n I fire you, of course. Department rule. Good afternoon.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell.\"\nJoe went back to his desk and burned. He started with a low flame and\n fed it with the grievances of the past weeks. When it began to warm his\n collar, he picked up his hat and left.\n\n\n Click, burr, click went the airlocks. Very few riders, this time of\n the afternoon. The brain would go in, intact, and then the knowledge\n instiller would work during the incubation period, feeding the\n adolescent memories to the retentive circuits. She would really spend\n her mental childhood in the mold, while the warmth sent the human spark\n through her body.\n\n\n Robot? Huh! What did they know? A human being, a product of science, a\nflawless\nhuman being.\n\n\n The rise, the big hiss of the final airlock, and Inglewood. Joe stood\n on the platform a second, looking for his car, and then realized she\n wasn't there. She hadn't been there for a week, and he'd done that\n every night. Silly thing, habit. Human trait.\n\n\n Tonight, he'd know. The flesh had been in the mold for two days. The\n synthetic nerves were plump and white under the derma-ray, the fluxo\n heart was pumping steadily, the entire muscular structure kept under\n pneumatic massage for muscle tone.\nHe'd thought of omitting the frowning muscles, but realized it would\n ruin the facial contours. They weren't, however, under massage and\n would not be active.\n\n\n And the mind?\n\n\n Well, naturally it would be tuned to his. She'd know everything he\n knew. What room was there for disagreement if the minds were the same?\n Smiling, as she agreed, because she couldn't frown. Her tenderness, her\n romanticism would have an intensity variable, of course. He didn't want\n one of these grinning simperers.\n\n\n He remembered his own words: \"Is this love something you can turn\n on and off like a faucet?\" Were his own words biting him, or only\n scratching him? Something itched. An intensity variable was not a\n faucet, though unscientific minds might find a crude, allegorical\n resemblance.\n\n\n To hell with unscientific minds.\n\n\n He went down to the basement. The mold was 98.6. He watched the\n knowledge instiller send its minute current to the head end of the\n mold. The meter read less than a tenth of an amp. The slow, plastic\n pulse of the muscle tone massage worked off a small pump near the foot\n of the mold.\n\n\n On the wall, the big master operating clock sent the minute currents\n to the various bodily sections, building up the cells, maintaining the\n organic functions. In two hours, the clock would shut off all power,\n the box would cool, and there would be his—Alice. Well, why not Alice?\n She had to have a name, didn't she?\nWarmth, that was the difference between a human and a robot, just\n warmth, just the spark. Funny he'd never thought of it before. Warmth\n was—it had unscientific connotations. It wasn't, though.\n\n\n He went upstairs and fried some eggs. Twice a day, for a week, he had\n fried eggs. Their flavor was overrated.\n\n\n Then he went into the living room and snapped on the ball game.\n\n\n Martin was on third and Pelter was at bat. On the mound, the lank form\n of Dorffberger cast a long, grotesque shadow in the afternoon sun.\n Dorffberger chewed and spat and wiped his nose with the back of his\n glove. He looked over at third and yawned.\n\n\n At the plate, Pelter was digging in. Pelter looked nervous.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Bet that Dorffberger fans him. He's got the Indian sign on\n Pelter.\"\n\n\n Then he realized he was talking to himself. Damn it. On the telenews\n screen, Dorffberger looked right into the camera and nodded. He was\n winding up, and the director put the ball into slow motion. Even in\n slow motion, it winged.\n\n\n \"Ho-ho!\" Joe said. \"You can't hit what you can't see.\"\n\n\n Pelter must have seen it. He caught it on the fat part of the bat,\n twisting into it with all his hundred and ninety pounds. The impact\n rattled the telenews screen and the telescopic cameras took over.\n They followed the ball's flight about halfway to Jersey and then the\n short-range eyes came back to show Pelter crossing the plate, and\n Martin waiting there to shake his hand.\n\n\n Joe snapped off the machine impatiently. Very unscientific game,\n baseball. No rhyme or reason to it. He went out onto the porch.\n\n\n The grass was dry and gray; he'd forgotten to set the sprinkler\n clock, Vera's old job. Across the street, Dan Harvey sat with his\n wife, each with a drink. Sat with his human wife, the poor fish. They\n looked happy, though. Some people were satisfied with mediocrities.\n Unscientific people.\n\n\n Why was he restless? Why was he bored? Was he worried about his job?\n Only slightly; the Chief thought a lot of him, a hell of a lot. The\n Chief was a great guy for seniority and Burke had it, or Joe would\n certainly have been Senior Assistant.\n\n\n The stirring in him he didn't want to analyze and he thought of\n the days he'd courted Vera, going to dances at the Center, playing\n bridge at the Center, studying Greek at the Center. A fine but too\n well-lighted place. You could do everything but smooch there; the\n smooching came after the declaration of intentions and a man was bound\n after the declaration to go through with the wedding, to live with his\n chosen mate for the minimum three months of the adjustment period.\nAdjustment period ... another necessity for humans, for imperfect\n people. Across the street, the perfectly adjusted Harveys smiled at\n each other and sipped their drinks. Hell, that wasn't adjustment, that\n was surrender.\n\n\n He got up and went into the living room; fighting the stirring in him,\n the stirring he didn't want to analyze and find absurd. He went into\n the bathroom and studied his lean, now haggard face. He looked like\n hell. He went into the back bedroom and smelled her perfume and went\n quickly from the house and into the backyard.\n\n\n He sat there until seven, listening to the throb from the basement.\n The molecule agitator should have the flesh firm and finished now,\n nourished by the select blood, massaged by the pulsating plastic.\n\n\n At seven, she should be ready.\n\n\n At seven, he went down to the basement. His heart should have been\n hammering and his mind expectant, but he was just another guy going\n down to the basement.\n\n\n The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"\n\n\n \"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.\n\n\n Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly,\n \"Well, none of us are perfect, I guess.\"\n\n\n Alice smiled and answered, \"Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities\n in marriage.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. \"I don't quite understand, dear. In\n any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have\n adjusted very well.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't adjusted,\" Alice said smilingly. \"You've surrendered.\"\n\n\n Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of red-green\n and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled.\n\n\n Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, \"Well, I never—\"\n\n\n \"Of all the—\" Dan Harvey said.\n\n\n Joe rose and said, \"Must get to bed, got to get to bed.\"\n\n\n \"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"\n\n\n \"You need just a touch of deception, just a wee shade of it.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, Joe.\"\n\n\n So she had tact.\n\n\n He went to the office with very little of the absurdity mood stirring\n in him. He'd had a full breakfast, naturally.\n\n\n At the office, there was a note on his desk:\nMr. Behrens wants to see\n you immediately.\nIt bore his secretary's initials. Mr. Behrens was the\n Chief.\n\n\n He was a fairly short man with immense shoulders and what he'd been\n told was a classical head. So he let his hair grow, and had a habit\n of thrusting his chin forward when he listened. He listened to Joe's\n account of the interview with Burke.\n\n\n When Joe had finished, the Chief's smile was tolerant. \"Ribbing him,\n were you? Old Burke hasn't much sense of humor, Joe.\"\n\n\n Joe said patiently, \"I wasn't ribbing him. I took her out of the mold\n last night. I ate breakfast with her this morning. She's—beautiful,\n Chief. She's ideal.\"\n\n\n The Chief looked at him for seconds, his head tilted.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Heat, that's what does it. If you'd like to come for dinner\n with us tonight, Chief, and see for yourself—\"\n\n\n The Chief nodded. \"I'd like that.\"\nThey left a little early to avoid the crowd in the tube. Burke saw them\n leaving, and his long face grew even longer.\n\n\n On the trip, Joe told his boss about the cybernetic brain, about his\n background and his beliefs stored in the memory circuits, and the boss\n listened quietly, not committing himself with any comments.\n\n\n But he did say, \"I certainly thought a lot of Vera. You wouldn't have\n to warm her in any incubating mold.\"\n\n\n \"Wait'll you see this one,\" Joe said.\n\n\n And when she walked into the living room at home, when she acknowledged\n the introduction to the Chief, Joe knew the old boy was sold. The Chief\n could only stare.\n\n\n Joe took him down to the basement then to show him the molecule\n agitator, the memory feeder, the instillers.\n\n\n The old boy looked it over and said, quite simply, \"I'll be damned!\"\n\n\n They went up to a perfect dinner—and incident number two.\n\n\n The Chief was a sentimentalist and he'd just lost a fine friend. This\n friend was his terrier, Murph, who'd been hit by a speeding car.\n\n\n The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.\n\n\n \"She can't frown,\" Joe explained. \"The muscles are there, but they need\n massage to bring them to life.\" He paused. \"I wanted a smiling wife.\"\n\n\n The Chief inhaled heavily. \"There are times when a smile is out of\n order, don't you think, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"It seems that way.\"\n\n\n It didn't take long. Massage, orientation, practice, concentration. It\n didn't take long, and she was so willing to cooperate. Golly, she was\n agreeable. She was more than that; she voiced his thoughts before he\n did. Because of the mental affinity, you see. He'd made sure of that.\nShe could frown now and she had enough deception to get by in almost\n any company. These flaws were necessary, but they were still flaws and\n brought her closer to being—human.\nAt the office on Saturday morning, Sam Tullgren dropped in. Sam said,\n \"I've been hearing things, Joseph.\"\n\n\n \"From Vera? At the Center?\"\n\n\n Sam shook his head. \"Vera's been too busy to have much time for the\n director. She's our most popular number.\" Sam paused. \"About the new\n one. Hear she's something to see.\"\n\n\n \"You heard right. She's practically flawless, Sam. She's just what a\n man needs at home.\" His voice, for some reason, didn't indicate the\n enthusiasm he should have felt.\n\n\n Sam chewed one corner of his mouth. \"Why not bring her over, say,\n tonight? We'll play some bridge.\"\n\n\n That would be something. Two minds, perfectly in harmony, synchronized,\n working in partnership. Joe's smile was smug. \"We'll be there. At\n eight-thirty.\"\n\n\n Driving over to Westchester that night, Joe told Alice, \"Sam's a\n timid bidder. His wife's inclined to overbid. Plays a sacrificing\n game when she knows it will gain points. Our job will be to make her\n oversacrifice.\"\n\n\n Sam's eyes opened at sight of her; his wife's narrowed. Joe took pride\n in their reaction, but it was a strange, impersonal pride.\n\n\n They had a drink and some small talk, and settled around the table. It\n was more like a seance than a game.\n\n\n They bid and made four clubs, a heart. Sam's wife got that determined\n look. With the opposition holding down one leg of the rubber, she\n figured to make the next bid a costly one.\n\n\n She won it with six diamonds, and went down nine tricks, doubled. Sam\n started to say something, after the debacle, but one look at his wife's\n anguished countenance stopped him short of audibility.\n\n\n Sam said consolingly, \"I'm such a lousy bidder, dear. I must have given\n you the wrong idea of my hand.\"\nNext time, Sam made up for his timidity. Sam, with one heart in his\n hand, tried a psychic. \"One heart,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n Sam knew there was a good chance the hearts were in the oppositions'\n hands, and this looked like a fine defensive tactic.\n\n\n However, his wife, with a three-suit powerhouse, couldn't conceive of a\n psychic from Sam. She had need of only a second round stopper in hearts\n and a small slam in no trump was in the bag. She had no hearts, but\n timid Sam was undoubtedly holding the ace-king.\n\n\n She bid six no-trump, which was conservative for her. She didn't want\n to make the mistake of having Sam let the bid die.\n\n\n Joe had the ace, king, queen and jack of hearts and a three to lead to\n Alice's hand. Alice finished up the hearts for a total of seven tricks,\n and this time it was Mrs. Tullgren who opened her mouth to speak.\n\n\n But she remembered Sam's kindness in the former hand, and she said,\n \"It was all my fault, darling. To think I couldn't recognize a\n psychic, just because it came from you. I think we're overmatched,\n sweet.\" She paused to smile at Joe. \"Up against the man who invented\n the comptin-reduco-determina.\" She added, as an afterthought, \"And his\n charming, brilliant new wife.\"\n\n\n Which brought about incident number three.\n\n\n Alice turned to Mrs. Tullgren sweetly and asked, \"Don't you really\n understand the comptin-reduco-determina?\"\n\n\n \"Not even faintly,\" Mrs. Tullgren answered. She smiled at Alice.\n\n\n The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she agreed.\n\n\n \"I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\n She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were\n bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she\n could frown.\n\n\n She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense.\n\n\n Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the\n same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old\n jokes with the same inflection he always used.\n\n\n Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the\n comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why\n should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does Joe want a new wife?", "question_unique_id": "51194_1XXJ4WUG_1", "options": ["Working with machinery for so long as made him distant with Vera ", "Vera doesn't behave like a \"good wife\", he's tired of her.", "Vera behaves too much like a \"good wife\"", "He has unrealistic expectations of what a wife should be like"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why would Joe's pursuit of a perfect wife end in failure, no matter what?", "question_unique_id": "51194_1XXJ4WUG_2", "options": ["He himself doesn't understand perfection, and doesn't know what to look for.  ", "His perfect wife is always doomed to have the same traits he already dislikes. ", "They don't have the means to make him a perfect wife. ", "Perfection doesn't exist, and he will always find fault in his partners. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Joe's view of Dan Harvey and his wife say about his own life? ", "question_unique_id": "51194_1XXJ4WUG_3", "options": ["Joe is right in his assumptions. People settle for mediocrity without realizing it. ", "Joe is \"unscientific\" himself, and his assumptions about Dan Harvey reflect that. ", "Joe is right. People are generally unscientific, and don't understand the world around them.", "Joe is projecting his insecurities. \"Unscientific\" people are happier than him because they embrace imperfections. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Vera react the way she does to Joes decision? ", "question_unique_id": "51194_1XXJ4WUG_4", "options": ["She realizes that she can't fulfill his fantasy of perfection, and needs to find a man who views her as perfect. ", "She knows that Joe will accomplish his goal of building a \"perfect\" wife, and doesn't want to be a witness to it. ", "She realizes that she can't fulfill his fantasy of perfection, and is better of finding someone who lover her for who she is. ", "She leaves because she can't deal with loving Joe when he doesn't feel the same. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Alice \"too perfect?\"", "question_unique_id": "51194_1XXJ4WUG_5", "options": ["She is so perfect that Joe and the others can't keep up with her, and have too program imperfections to compensate. ", "Her \"perfection\" is inhuman, and causes her to offend people and be too emotionally detached. ", "Her perfection alienates her from people, as they don't know what to do with it. ", "Her \"perfection\" is so on the nose that people don't read her as human. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Joe's major character flaw?", "question_unique_id": "51194_1XXJ4WUG_6", "options": ["He's too involved in his experiment with Alice. It's blinding him to his real issues with Vera.", "He approaches life too much like a romantic. He has an ideal for perfection of love he can never attain. ", "Joe simply doesn't understand women. This misunderstanding causes him to create Alice. ", "He approaches life too much like a scientist. He doesn't respect the emotional nuances of people or their imperfections. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What could the moral of the story be?", "question_unique_id": "51194_1XXJ4WUG_7", "options": ["Imperfection is something we can overcome, though the means for it may be something we're not ready for. ", "Humans will forever be imperfect, and accepting that imperfection is key to loving people. ", "Technology, though incredible, can give way to people losing sight of what really matters in relationships. ", "Human will forever be imperfect, and as such we will always struggle to love one another. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How might Joe's views have changed by the end of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51194_1XXJ4WUG_8", "options": ["He might realize how much he misses Vera, and the errors in his thinking. ", "He might realize what a great job Alice is doing of emulating Vera, and keep her. ", "They won't change. He's too fixated on Alice and his goal.", "He understands people, and women in particular, even less than at the start of the story. "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/9/51194//51194-h//51194-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "20036", "set_unique_id": "20036_KBCK04ST", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1012", "source": "Slate", "title": "Triumph of the Middlebrow?", "year": "1999", "author": "Gerald Early", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Triumph of the Middlebrow?              \n\n         This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the black liturgical occasions we now have on the calendar that beg for special schoolchild reports of one sort or another: the King holiday, Black History Month, Black Music Month, Kwanzaa, Malcolm X's birthday, Juneteenth), and while not every school does all of this, most schools must do some of this. (And this, of course, has nothing to do with the occasional racial killing or major protest that took place or may be taking place somewhere that require a report and discussion in a current-events or social-studies class.) Moreover, blacks cannot be left out of Women's History Month or Veteran's Day or, for the truly daring, Gay Appreciation Month. So, a book like Africana is bound to get a great deal of use, to be sold to virtually every school, public, and university library in the country, as well as to a number of churches, to say nothing of the private homes that will have a copy right next to the Britannica . (In some more Afrocentric black homes, it may replace the Britannica entirely, that Eurocentric collection of lies, although Britannica has become as multicultural as everyone else these days.) Those of us who have labored in the field of black studies (politically incorrectly such as the present author or very much politically correctly like a good many very good scholars) are heartened by this commercial venture. Indeed, it would be disheartening, as well as entirely untrue, if one were to think that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral imperative.) \n\n         It is good to know that, partly through the energetic offices of Henry Louis Gates, black studies can, as it were, pay its way these days and not be dependent for its existence on a kind of political and cultural moralism on the part of whites and a kind of fetishlike piety on the part of blacks. It can be, alas, a business of an entirely good sort or needful sort, justifying itself in the marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of \"the coming of the white man\") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture. Encyclopedias, after all, are middlebrow, bourgeois books that tend, in the end, not to promote intellectual inquiry on the part of the people who use them but rather to stifle it. Children tend to copy verbatim from such books without ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the official record books): as the final arbiter, as that which settles all arguments. Why, for goodness' sake, would anyone actually read a book like this? Knowledge, in the instance of the definitive reference book, becomes entombed and sanctified, very much serving the anti-intellectual ends of the middlebrow, who want not to encounter knowledge and to wrestle with it but to store it as an authority on the bookshelf. \n\n         But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both white and black, feel bad if they don't know something about the history and culture of African-descended people, in much the same way they feel bad, inadequate, if they don't know something about opera or a bit about Impressionist painting or if they have never seen a film by D. W. Griffith or Fritz Lang. How terrible at a party to discover that one has never seen The Grand Illusion --one of the all-time great films--or that one has not read, alas, a Toni Morrison novel or one does not own a Wynton Marsalis album. (The truly knowing coves own albums by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, no less, and do reports for their book clubs on the blues.) What most thinking people in black studies find dangerous about the middlebrow apotheosis of the field is that it usually leads to the enshrinement of what Jacques Barzun calls thought-clichés, half-truths or non-truths that are accepted as the truth because someone said so in some reference book like Africana . Thought-clichés are like narcotics; people love them because they relieve them of the very thing they do not wish to do in any case, that is, think, think hard, and think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy projections. Thought-clichés confirm one's stupidity and one's laziness. With all the goodwill in the world, a book like Africana cannot help but produce thought-clichés; it is, indeed, why most people will consult such a work, to find them and be comforted by them. No intellectual or scholar can, therefore, be fully at ease with a work of this sort, no matter his or her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach. \n\n         Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of black studies, that define the field and its major players. Building a canon is very important to Gates, and it is, without question, an important pedagogical pursuit. A field must have order and it must have pioneers and heroes. It is also a power pursuit. He who defines the field controls it, in a manner of speaking. Some are jealous that Gates wants this sort of power. Others find it unseemly. I think Gates is wasting his considerable talents in the pursuit of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he has flooded the market with first-rate black reference books in such short order. It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the field marshals to have hustled together this army of academics and to have gotten the work from them on time or nearly so. They deserve much credit for this. Most academics would have felt lucky to have finished this enterprise in 10 years. \n\n         That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book. \n\n         But the history of the publication of this book is only incompletely told by the editors. After 1970, when black studies was established on the white college campus, a number of reference books about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not by Du Bois' dream in any respect but by the rise of multiculturalism and black studies as intellectual industries in the United States after 1970. The increasing professionalization of black studies made this book possible, more scholars in the field, both black and white, being produced since 1970, more scholarship being produced. This book was also made possible by the rise of professionalism among African-Americans since the 1960s and the rise of a black middle class that has demanded more artifacts and objects, more \"education\" about its experience (more institutionalization of it, in other words, and more orthodoxy about its significance), that are all meant to reinforce its sense of identity, its psychological well-being, its sense of race mission, all important reasons for the existence of black studies, but all clearly anti-intellectual. In other words, the forces that brought this book into existence had little enough to do with Du Bois--although evoking him is of critical importance to the book's audience as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with a black point of view with ever-increasing regularity--and a great deal to do with the shift that has taken place within the black population of the United States in the last 25 years and the dramatic change in its status. This book is the product of both a strong movement toward the intellectualization of black experience among an elite and the anti-intellectualization of black experience by the public at large (earnest and respectful of black experience as it has now generally become) and those who cater to the public's access to intellectual material by rounding off the rough edges and making it thoroughly anti-intellectual by designing and evoking certain emotional markers about \"struggle\" and \"resistance.\" \n\n         I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does the author mean when they say it's tiring to always be a recipient of charity?", "question_unique_id": "20036_KBCK04ST_1", "options": ["It's annoying to be pestered all the time, even if it's coming from a good place and from good will. ", "It's dehumanizing and infantilizing. They don't want to be treated as a subject, but as a person. ", "They don't understand why people view black people as targets for charity, and are annoyed by it. ", "They have no interest in philanthropy, and would rather earn than be given what they want. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the writer argue that the information Africana provides doesn't actually educate?", "question_unique_id": "20036_KBCK04ST_2", "options": ["It's easily understood information, and thus doesn't really offer anything to learn from. ", "The information hasn't been thoroughly researched, as it only took 3 years to put together. ", "No one who actually wants to learn more on the topic is likley to pick up this book. ", "People aren't reading this book to engage with the topic, but to have what is essentially a dictionary to refer to. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the author talking about when they reference thought-cliches?", "question_unique_id": "20036_KBCK04ST_3", "options": ["A thought-cliche is regurgitated information. ", "They are people's laziness causing them to avoid thinking deeply on subjects. ", "Written ideas that have already been done, yet are written about time and time again. ", "Ideas that support what a person already believes, and coddle the reader rather than challenge them. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is it interesting that the speaker finds the book polished?", "question_unique_id": "20036_KBCK04ST_4", "options": ["It speaks to the talent behind the writers, despite the complexity of the subject behind their book. ", "It shows that the speaker is much like the people they criticize, and is afraid to truly critic the  book. ", "They spend so long harshly critiquing it, yet they recognize that it's well put together. ", "They didn't think the authors were capable of putting it together so nicely. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What \"middlebrow\" is the author referencing throughout the passage?", "question_unique_id": "20036_KBCK04ST_5", "options": ["The mediocrity that is affecting recent black intellectual work. ", "The average person and the baseline understanding of the subject. ", "The general market that Africana is appealing to. ", "The \"uneducated\", or anyone who is not considered an intellectual."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What seems to be the author's main problem with Africana?", "question_unique_id": "20036_KBCK04ST_6", "options": ["It's full of clichés and offers no new information. It's too easy to engage with. ", "It is contributing to a culture that is, as they see it, dumbing down black intellectualism. ", "It's a discredit to the authors who penned it, and their legacy of other works. ", "It's flooding the market with yet another \"encyclopedic\" book. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the speaker feel that the reasoning behind black studies is anti-intellectual?", "question_unique_id": "20036_KBCK04ST_7", "options": ["They feel it focuses too much on race as a mission, rather than an individual trait. ", "They feel it's based on preserving identity, rather than asking questions and learning. ", "It's too far removed from its roots in the current time. ", "It's become too open to the public as something to contribute to. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the speaker find Africana a \"waste\" of Gates' talent? ", "question_unique_id": "20036_KBCK04ST_8", "options": ["He has been defining the field of Black studies, and Africana does nothing to add to that. ", "They feel he's capable of much more, and this book is more about him rounding out his canon. ", "Africana is a poorly put together book, and it's disappointing to have seen it come from him. ", "They feel it took him much too long to product Africana, even with spending 4 years on it. "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "51072", "set_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Shamar's War", "year": 1950, "author": "Neville, Kris", "topic": "Spies -- Fiction; Political fiction; PS; Science fiction; Extrasolar planets -- Fiction", "article": "SHAMAR'S WAR\nBY KRIS NEVILLE\n\n\n ILLUSTRATED BY GUINTA\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction February 1964.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was Earth's secret weapon, as\n \ndeadly as a sword—and two-edged!\nI\n\n\n The year was 2346, and Earth, at the time, was a political democracy.\n\n\n The population was ruled by the Over-Council and, in order of\n decreasing importance, by Councils, and Local Councils. Each was\n composed of representatives duly apportioned by popular vote between\n the two contending parties. Executive direction was provided by a\n variety of Secretaries, selected by vote of the appropriate Councils.\n An independent Judiciary upheld the laws.\n\n\n A unified Earth sent colonists to the stars. Back came strange tales\n and improbable animals.\n\n\n Back, too, came word of a burgeoning technological civilization on the\n planet Itra, peopled by entirely humanoid aliens.\n\n\n Earth felt it would be wise for Itra to join in a Galactic Federation\n and accordingly, submitted the terms of such a mutually advantageous\n agreement.\n\n\n The Itraians declined....\nSpace Captain Merle S. Shaeffer, the youngest and perhaps the most\n naive pilot for Trans-Universe Transport, was called unexpectedly to\n the New York office of the company.\n\n\n When Capt. Shaeffer entered the luxurious eightieth story suite, Old\n Tom Twilmaker, the President of TUT, greeted him. With an arm around\n his shoulder, Old Tom led Capt. Shaeffer to an immense inner office and\n introduced him to a General Reuter, identified as the Chairman of the\n Interscience Committee of the Over-Council.\n\n\n No one else was present. With the door closed, they were isolated in\n Olympian splendor above and beyond the affairs of men. Here judgments\n were final and impartial. Capt. Shaeffer, in the presence of two of the\n men highest in the ruling councils of Earth, was reduced to incoherent\n awe.\n\n\n General Reuter moved about restlessly. Old Tom was serene and beatific.\n\n\n When they were seated, Old Tom swiveled around and gazed long\n in silence across the spires of the City. Capt. Shaeffer waited\n respectfully. General Reuter fidgetted.\n\n\n \"Some day,\" Old Tom said at last, \"I'm going to take my leave of this.\n Yes, gentle Jesus! Oh, when I think of all the souls still refusing\n to admit our precious Savior, what bitterness, oh, what sorrow is my\n wealth to me! Look down upon the teeming millions below us. How many\n know not the Lord? Yes, some morning, I will forsake all this and go\n out into the streets to spend my last days bringing the words of hope\n to the weary and oppressed. Are you a Christian, Merle?\"\n\n\n General Reuter cracked his knuckles nervously while Capt. Shaeffer\n muttered an embarrassed affirmative.\n\n\n \"I am a deeply religious man,\" Old Tom continued. \"I guess you've heard\n that, Merle?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir,\" Capt. Shaeffer said.\n\n\n \"But did you know that the Lord has summoned you here today?\" Old Tom\n asked.\n\n\n \"No, sir,\" Capt. Shaeffer said.\n\n\n \"General Reuter, here, is a dear friend. We've known each other, oh,\n many years. Distantly related through our dear wives, in fact. And we\n serve on the same Board of Directors and the same Charity Committees....\n A few weeks ago, when he asked me for a man, I called for your file,\n Merle. I made discreet inquiries. Then I got down on my knees and\n talked it over with God for, oh, it must have been all of an hour. I\n asked, 'Is this the man?' And I was given a sign. Yes! At that moment,\n a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds!\"\nGeneral Reuter had continued his nervous movements throughout the\n speech. For the first time, he spoke. \"Good God, Tom, serve us a\n drink.\" He turned to Capt. Shaeffer. \"A little drink now and then helps\n a man relax. I'll just have mine straight, Tom.\"\n\n\n Old Tom studied Capt. Shaeffer. \"I do not feel the gentle Master\n approves of liquor.\"\n\n\n \"Don't try to influence him,\" General Reuter said. \"You're embarrassing\n the boy.\"\n\n\n \"I—\" Capt. Shaeffer began.\n\n\n \"Give him the drink. If he doesn't want to drink it, he won't have to\n drink it.\"\n\n\n Sighing, Old Tom poured two bourbons from the bar in back of his desk\n and passed them over. Martyrdom sat heavily upon his brow.\n\n\n After a quick twist of the wrist and an expert toss of the head,\n General Reuter returned an empty glass. \"Don't mind if I do have\n another,\" he said. He was already less restless.\n\n\n \"How's your ability to pick up languages?\" General Reuter asked.\n\n\n \"I learned Spanish and Russian at TUT PS,\" Capt. Shaeffer said\n apologetically. \"I'm supposed to have a real high aptitude in\n languages, according to some tests I took. In case we should meet\n intelligent aliens, TUT gives them.\"\n\n\n \"You got no association with crackpot organizations, anything like\n that?\" General Reuter asked. \"You're either a good Liberal-Conservative\n or Radical-Progressive, aren't you? I don't care which. I don't believe\n in prying into a man's politics.\"\n\n\n \"I never belonged to anything,\" Capt. Shaeffer said.\n\n\n \"Oh, I can assure you, that's been checked out very, very thoroughly,\"\n Old Tom said.\n\n\n The General signaled for another drink. With a sigh of exasperation,\n Old Tom complied.\n\n\n \"Bob,\" Old Tom said, \"I really think you've had enough. Please, now.\n Our Master counsels moderation.\"\n\n\n \"Damn it, Tom,\" the General said and turned back to the space pilot.\n \"May have a little job for you.\"\n\n\n Old Tom shook his head at the General, cautioning him.\n\n\n \"Actually,\" the General said, ignoring the executive, \"we'll be sort of\n renting you from TUT. In a way you'll still be working for them. I can\n get a million dollars out of the—\"\n\n\n \"Bob!\"\n\n\n \"—unmarked appropriation if it goes in in TUT's name. No questions\n asked. National Defense. I couldn't get anywhere near that much for\n an individual for a year. It gives us a pie to slice. We were talking\n about it before you came in. How does a quarter of a million dollars a\n year sound to you?\"\n\n\n \"When it comes to such matters,\" Old Tom interjected hastily, \"I think\n first of the opportunities they bring to do good.\"\n\n\n The General continued, \"Now you know, Merle. And this is serious. I\n want you to listen to me. Because this comes under World Security laws,\n and I'm going to bind you to them. You know what that means? You'll be\n held responsible.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Merle said, swallowing stiffly. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Let's have a drink on that.\"\n\"Please be quiet, General,\" Old Tom said. \"Let me explain. You see,\n Merle, the Interscience Committee was recently directed to consider\n methods for creating a climate of opinion on Itra—of which I'm sure\n you've heard—which would be favorable to the proposed Galactic\n Federation.\"\n\n\n \"Excuse me,\" General Reuter said. \"They don't have a democracy, like\n we do. They don't have any freedom like we do. I have no doubt the\n average whateveryoucallem—Itraians, I guess—the average gooks—would\n be glad to see us come in and just kick the hell out of whoever is in\n charge of them.\"\n\n\n \"Now, General,\" Old Tom said more sharply.\n\n\n \"But that's not the whole thing,\" the General continued. \"Even fit were\n right thing to do, an' I'm not saying isn't—right thing to do—there's\n log-lo-lo-gistics. I don't want to convey the impresh, impression that\n our Defense Force people have been wasting money. Never had as much as\n needed, fact. No, it's like this.\n\n\n \"We have this broad base to buil' from. Backbone. But we live in\n a democracy. Now, Old Tom's Liberal-Conservative. And me, I'm\n Radical-Progresshive. But we agree on one thing: importance of strong\n defense. A lot of people don' understan' this. Feel we're already\n spendin' more than we can afford. But I want to ask them, what's more\n important than the defense of our planet?\"\n\n\n \"General, I'm afraid this is not entirely germane,\" Old Tom said\n stiffly.\n\n\n \"Never mind that right now. Point is, it will take us long time to get\n the serious nature of the menace of Itra across to the voters. Then,\n maybe fifteen, twenty years.... Let's just take one thing. We don't have\n anywhere near enough troop transports to carry out the occupation of\n Itra. You know how long it takes to build them? My point is, we may not\n have that long. Suppose Itra should get secret of interstellar drive\n tomorrow, then where would we be?\"\n\n\n Old Tom slammed his fist on the desk. \"General, please! The boy isn't\n interested in all that.\"\n\n\n The General surged angrily to his feet. \"By God, that's what's wrong\n with this world today!\" he cried. \"Nobody's interested in Defense.\n Spend only a measly twenty per cent of the Gross World Product on\n Defense, and expect to keep strong! Good God, Tom, give me a drink!\"\n Apparently heresy had shocked him sober.\n\n\n Old Tom explained, \"The General is a patriot. We all respect him for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I understand,\" Capt. Shaeffer said.\n\n\n General Reuter hammered his knuckles in rhythm on the table. \"The\n drink, the drink, the drink! You got more in the bottle. I saw it!\"\n\n\n Old Tom rolled his eyes Heavenward and passed the bottle across. \"This\n is all you get. This is all I've got.\"\n\n\n The General held the bottle up to the light. \"Should have brought my\n own. Let's hurry up and get this over with.\"\n\n\n Old Tom smiled the smile of the sorely beset and persecuted and said,\n \"You see, Merle, there's massive discontent among the population of\n Itra. We feel we should send a man to the planet to, well, foment\n change and, uh, hasten the already inevitable overthrow of the despotic\n government. That man will be strictly on his own. The Government will\n not be able to back him in any way whatsoever once he lands on Itra.\"\n\n\n The General had quickly finished the bottle. \"You she,\" he interrupted,\n \"there's one thing they can't fight, an' that's an idea. Jus' one man\n goes to Itra with the idea of Freedom, that's all it'll take. How\n many men did it take to start the 'Merican Revolution? Jefferson. The\n Russian Revolution? Marx!\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Old Tom said. \"One dedicated man on Itra, preaching the ideas of\n Liberty—liberty with responsibility and property rights under one God.\n That man can change a world.\" Exhausted by the purity of his emotions,\n Old Tom sat back gasping to await the answer.\n\n\n \"A quarter of a million dollars a year?\" Capt. Shaeffer asked at length.\nII\n\n\n The Itraians spoke a common language. It was somewhat guttural and\n highly inflected. Fortunately, the spelling appeared to be phonetic,\n with only forty-three characters being required. As near as anyone\n could tell, centuries of worldwide communication had eliminated\n regional peculiarities. The speech from one part of Itra was not\n distinguishable from that of another part.\n\n\n Most of the language was recovered from spy tapes of television\n programs. A dictionary was compiled laborously by a special scientific\n task force of the Over-Council. The overall program was directed\n and administered by Intercontinental Iron, Steel, Gas, Electricity,\n Automobiles and Synthetics, Incorporated.\n\n\n It took Shaeffer just short of three years to speak Itraian\n sufficiently well to convince non-Itraians that he spoke without accent.\n\n\n The remainder of his training program was administered by a variety\n of other large industrial concerns. The training was conducted at a\n Defense Facility.\n\n\n At the end of his training, Shaeffer was taken by special bus to the\n New Mexican space port. A ship waited.\n\n\n The car moved smoothly from the Defense Force Base, down the broad\n sixteen-lane highway, through the surrounding slum area and into Grants.\n\n\n Sight of the slums gave Shaeffer mixed emotions.\n\n\n It was not a feeling of superiority to the inhabitants; those he had\n always regarded with a circumspect indifference. The slums were there.\n He supposed they always would be there. But now, for the first time\n in his life, he could truly say that he had escaped their omnipresent\n threat once and for all. He felt relief and guilt.\n\n\n During the last three years, he had earned $750,000.\n\n\n As a civilian stationed on a Defense Force Base, he had, of course,\n to pay for his clothing, his food and his lodging. But the charge was\n nominal. Since he had been given only infrequent and closely supervised\n leaves, he had been able to spend, altogether, only $12,000.\n\n\n Which meant that now, after taxes, he had accumulated in his savings\n account a total of nearly $600,000 awaiting his return from Itra.\nShaeffer's ship stood off Itra while he prepared to disembark.\n\n\n In his cramped quarters, he dressed himself in Itraian-style clothing.\n Capt. Merle S. Shaeffer became Shamar the Worker.\n\n\n In addition to his jump equipment, an oxygen cylinder, a face mask and\n a shovel, he carried with him eighty pounds of counterfeit Itraian\n currency ... all told, forty thousand individual bills of various\n denominations. Earth felt this would be all he needed to survive in a\n technologically advanced civilization.\n\n\n His plan was as follows:\n\n\n 1. He was to land in a sparsely inhabited area on the larger masses.\n\n\n 2. He was to procure transportation to Xxla, a major city, equivalent\n to London or Tokyo. It was the headquarters for the Party.\n\n\n 3. He was to establish residence in the slum area surrounding the\n University of Xxla.\n\n\n 4. Working through student contacts, he was to ingratiate himself with\n such rebel intellectuals as could be found.\n\n\n 5. Once his contacts were secure, he was to assist in the preparation\n of propaganda and establish a clandestine press for its production.\n\n\n 6. As quickly as the operation was self-sufficient, he was to move on\n to another major city ... and begin all over.\n\n\n The ship descended into the atmosphere. The bell rang. Shamar the\n Worker seated himself, put on his oxygen mask and signaled his\n readiness. He breathed oxygen. The ship quivered, the door fell away\n beneath him and he was battered unconscious by the slipstream.\n\n\n Five minutes later, pinwheeling lazily in free fall, he opened\n his eyes. For an instant's panic he could not read the altimeter.\n Then seeing that he was safe, he noted his physical sensations. He\n was extremely cold. Gyrating wildly, he beat his chest to restore\n circulation.\n\n\n He stabilized his fall by stretching out his hands. He floated with no\n sensation of movement. Itra was overhead, falling up at him slowly. He\n turned his back to the planet and checked the time. Twelve minutes yet\n to go.\n\n\n He spent, in all, seventeen minutes in free fall. At 2000 feet, he\n opened his parachute. The sound was like an explosion.\n\n\n He floated quietly, recovering from the shock. He removed his oxygen\n mask and tasted the alien air. He sniffed several times. It was not\n unpleasant.\n\n\n Below was darkness. Then suddenly the ground came floating up and hit\n him.\n\n\n The terrain was irregular. He fought the chute to collapse it, tripped,\n and twisted his ankle painfully.\n\n\n The chute lay quiet and he sat on the ground and cursed in English.\n\n\n At length he bundled up the chute and removed all of the packages of\n money but the one disguised as a field pack. He used the shovel to\n dig a shallow grave at the base of a tree. He interred the chute, the\n oxygen cylinder, the mask, the shovel and scooped dirt over them with\n his hands.\n\n\n He sat down and unlaced his shoe and found his ankle badly swollen.\n Distant, unfamiliar odors filled him with apprehension and he started\n at the slightest sound.\n\n\n Dawn was breaking.\nIII\n\n\n Noting his bearings carefully, he hobbled painfully westward, with\n thirty pounds of money on his back. He would intersect the major\n North-South Intercontinental highway by at least noon.\n\n\n Two hours later, he came to a small plastic cabin in a clearing at the\n edge of a forest.\n\n\n Wincing now with each step, he made his way to the door. He knocked.\n\n\n There was a long wait.\n\n\n The door opened. A girl stood before him in a dressing gown. She\n frowned and asked, \"\nItsil obwatly jer gekompilp?\n\"\n\n\n Hearing Itraian spoken by a native in the flesh had a powerful\n emotional impact on Shamar the Worker.\n\n\n Stumblingly, he introduced himself and explained that he was camping\n out. During the previous night he had become lost and injured his\n ankle. If she could spare him food and directions, he would gladly pay.\n\n\n With a smile of superiority, she stepped aside and said in Itraian,\n \"Come in, Chom the Worker.\"\n\n\n He felt panic, but he choked it back and followed her. Apparently he\n had horribly mispronounced his own name. It was as though, in English\n he had said Barchestershire for Barset. He cursed whatever Professor\n had picked that name for whatever obscure reason.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she invited. \"I'm about to have breakfast. Eggs and\n bacon—\" the Itraian equivalent—\"if that's all right with you. I'm\n Garfling Germadpoldlt by the way, although you can call me Ge-Ge.\"\n\n\n The food was quite unpleasant, as though overly ripe. He was able to\n choke down the eggs with the greatest difficulty. Fortunately, the hot\n drink that was the equivalent of Earth coffee at the end of the meal,\n was sufficiently spicy to quiet his stomach.\n\n\n \"Good coffee,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Thank you. Care for a cigarette?\"\n\n\n \"I sure would.\"\n\n\n He had no matches, so she lit it for him, hovering above him a moment,\n leaving with him the fresh odor of her hair.\n\n\n The taste of the cigarette was mild. Rather surprisingly, it\n substituted for nicotine and allayed the sharp longing that had come\n with the coffee.\n\n\n \"Let's look at your ankle,\" she said. She knelt at his feet and began\n to unlace the right shoe. \"My, it's swollen,\" she said sympathetically.\n\n\n He winced as she touched it and then he reddened with embarrassment. He\n had been walking across dusty country. He drew back the foot and bent\n to restrain her.\n\n\n Playfully she slapped his hand away. \"You sit back! I'll get it. I've\n seen dirty feet before.\"\n\n\n She pulled off the shoe and peeled off the sock. \"Oh, God, it is\n swollen,\" she said. \"You think it's broken, Shamar?\"\n\n\n \"Just sprained.\"\n\n\n \"I'll get some hot water with some MedAid in it, and that'll take the\n swelling out.\"\n\n\n When he had his foot in the water, she sat across from him and arranged\n her dressing gown with a coquettish gesture. She caught him staring\n at the earring, and one hand went to it caressingly. She smiled that\n universal feminine smile of security and recklessness, of invitation\n and rejection.\n\n\n \"You're engaged,\" he noted.\n\n\n She opened her eyes wide and studied him above a thumbnail which she\n tasted with her teeth. \"I'm engaged to Von Stutsman—\" as the name\n might be translated—\"perhaps you've heard of him? He's important in\n the Party. You know him?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You in the Party?\" she said. She was teasing him now. Then, suddenly:\n \"Neither am I, but I guess I'll have to join if I become Mrs. Von\n Stutsman.\"\n\n\n They were silent for a moment.\n\n\n Then she spoke, and he was frozen in terror, all thoughts but of\n self-preservation washed from his mind.\n\n\n \"Your accent is unbelieveably bad,\" she said.\n\n\n \"I'm from Zuleb,\" he said lamely, at last.\n\n\n \"Meta—Gelwhops—or even Karkeqwol, that makes no difference. Nobody on\n Itra speaks like you do. So you must be from that planet that had the\n Party in a flap several years ago—Earth, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He said nothing.\n\n\n \"Do you know what they'll do when they catch you?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said hollowly.\n\n\n \"They'll behead you.\"\nShe laughed, not unkindly. \"If you could see yourself! How ridiculous\n you look, Shamar. I wonder what your real name is, by the way? Sitting\n with a foot in the water and looking wildly about. Here, let me fix\n more coffee and we can talk.\"\n\n\n She called cheerily over her shoulder, \"You're safe here. No one will\n be by. I'm not due back until Tuesday.\"\n\n\n She brought him a steaming mug. \"Drink this while I dress.\" She\n disappeared into the bedroom. He heard the shower running.\n\n\n He sat waiting, numb and desperate, and drank the coffee because it was\n there. His thoughts scampered in the cage of his skull like mice on a\n treadmill.\n\n\n When Ge-Ge came back, he had still not resolved the conflict within\n him. She stood barefoot upon the rug and looked down at him, hunched\n miserably over the pan of water, now lukewarm.\n\n\n \"How's the foot?\"\n\n\n \"All right.\"\n\n\n \"Want to take it out?\"\n\n\n \"I guess.\"\n\n\n \"I'll get a towel.\"\n\n\n She waited until he had dried the foot and restored the sock and shoe.\n The swelling was gone. He stood up and put his weight on it. He smiled\n wanly. \"It's okay now. It's not broken, I guess.\"\n\n\n She gestured him to the sofa. He complied.\n\n\n \"What's in the field pack?\" she asked. \"Money? How much?\" She moved\n toward it. He half rose to stop her, but by then she had it partly\n open. \"My,\" she said, bringing out a thick sheaf of bills. She rippled\n them sensuously. \"Pretty. Very, very pretty.\" She examined them for\n texture and appearance. \"They look good, Shamar. I'll bet it would cost\n ten million dollars in research on paper and ink and presses to do this\n kind of a job. Only another government has got that kind of money to\n throw around.\" She tossed the currency carelessly beside him and came\n to sit at his side.\n\n\n She took his hand. Her hand was warm and gentle. \"Tell me, Shamar,\" she\n said. \"Tell me all about it.\"\n\n\n So this is how easily spies are trapped in real life, Shamar told\n himself with numb disbelief.\n\n\n The story came out slowly and hesitantly at first. She said nothing\n until he had finished.\n\n\n \"And that's all? You really believe that, don't you? And I guess\n your government does, too. That all we need is just some little idea\n or something.\" She turned away from him. \"But of course, that's\n neither here nor there, is it? I never imagined an adventurer type\n would look like you. You have such a soft, honest voice. As a little\n girl, I pictured myself being carried off by a tanned desert sheik on\n a camel; and oh, he was lean and handsome! With dark flashing eyes\n and murderously heavy lips and hands like iron! Well, that's life, I\n guess.\" She stood and paced the room. \"Let me think. We'll pick up a\n flyer in Zelonip when we catch the bus next Tuesday. How much does the\n money weigh?\"\n\n\n \"Eighty pounds.\"\n\n\n \"I can carry about 10 pounds in my bag. You can take your field pack.\n How much is in it? Thirty pounds? That'll leave about forty which we\n can ship through on extra charges. Then, when we get to Xxla, I can\n hide you out in an apartment over on the East side.\"\n\n\n \"Why would you run a risk like that for me?\" he asked.\nShe brushed the hair from her face. \"Let's say—what? I don't really\n think you can make it, because it's so hopeless. But maybe, just maybe,\n you might be one of the rare ones who, if he plays his cards right, can\n beat the system. I love to see them licked!\n\n\n \"Well, I'm a clerk. That's all. Just a lowly clerk in one of the Party\n offices. I met Von Stutsman a year ago. This is his cabin. He lets me\n use it.\n\n\n \"He's older than I am; but there's worse husband material. But then\n again, he's about to be transferred to one of the big agricultural\n combines way out in the boondocks where there's no excitement at all.\n Just little old ladies and little old men and peasants having children.\n\n\n \"I'm a city girl. I like Xxla. And if I marry him, all that goes up the\n flue. I'll be marooned with him, God knows where, for years. Stuck,\n just stuck.\n\n\n \"Still—he is Von Stutsman, and he's on his way up. Everyone says that.\n Ten, twenty years, he'll be back to Xxla, and he'll come back on top.\n\n\n \"Oh ... I don't know what I want to do! If I marry him, I can get all\n the things I've always wanted. Position, security. He's older than I\n am, but he's really a nice guy. It's just that he's dull. He can't talk\n about anything but Party, Party, Party.\n\n\n \"That's what I came out to this cabin for. To think things over, to try\n to get things straightened out. And then you came along. Maybe it gives\n me a chance for something exciting before I ship off to the boondocks.\n Does that make sense to you?\n\n\n \"I'll get married and sit out there, and I'll turn the pages of the\n Party magazine and smile sweetly to myself. Because, you see, I'll\n always be able to lean forward and say, 'Dear? Once upon a time, I\n helped hide an Earth spy in Xxla.' And that'll knock that silly and\n self-satisfied look off his face for once.... Oh, I don't know! Let me\n alone!\" With that, she fled to the bedroom and slammed the door behind\n her.\n\n\n He could hear her sobbing helplessly.\n\n\n In the afternoon, she came out. He had fallen asleep. She shook him\n gently to waken him.\n\n\n \"Eh? Oh! Huh?\" He smiled foolishly.\n\n\n \"Wash up in there,\" she told him. \"I'm sorry I blew up on you this\n morning. I'll cook something.\"\n\n\n When he came back, she was serving them their dinner on steaming\n platters.\n\n\n \"Look, Ge-Ge,\" he said over coffee. \"You don't like your government.\n We'll help you out. There's this Galactic Federation idea.\" He\n explained to her the cross-fertilization of the two cultures.\n\n\n \"Shamar, my friend,\" she said, \"did you see Earth's proposal? There was\n nothing in it about giving us an interstellar drive. We were required\n to give Earth all transportation franchises. The organization you used\n to work for was to be given, as I remember it, an exclusive ninety-nine\n year right to carry all Earth-Itra commerce. It was all covered in the\n newspapers, didn't you see it?\"\n\n\n Shamar said, \"Well, now, I'm not familiar with the details. I wasn't\n keeping up with them. But I'm sure these things could be, you know,\n worked out. Maybe, for Security reasons, we didn't want to give you the\n interstellar drive right off, but you can appreciate our logic there.\n Once we saw you were, well, like us, a peace-loving planet, once you'd\n changed your government to a democracy, you would see it our way and\n you'd have no complaints on that score.\"\n\n\n \"Let's not talk politics,\" she said wearily. \"Maybe it's what you say,\n and I'm just naturally suspicious. I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I was just trying to help—\"\n\n\n The sentence was interrupted by a monstrous explosion.\n\n\n \"Good God!\" Shamar cried. \"What was that?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that,\" Ge-Ge said, shaking off the effects. \"They were probably\n testing one of their damned automated factories to see if it was\n explosion proof and it wasn't.\"\nIV\n\n\n During the week alone in the cabin, Ge-Ge fell in love with Shamar.\n\n\n \"Oh, my God!\" she cried. \"What will I do when they catch you? I'll die,\n Shamar! I couldn't bear it. We'll go to Xxla, we'll hide away as quietly\n as two mice, somewhere. We won't go out. The two of us, alone but\n together, behind closed doors and drawn shades. Nobody will ever know\n about us. We'll be the invisible people.\"\n\n\n Shamar protested. \"I don't see how we can ever be secure until\n something's done about your government. As long as you don't reach some\n kind of agreement with Earth, I'll be an outlaw. I'll be afraid any\n minute they'll tap my shoulder and come and take me away. I don't think\n we could hold up under that. We'd be at each other in no time.\"\n\n\n She wept quietly.\n\n\n The last day in the cabin, they went out and dug up the rest of the\n money. The trip to Xxla took place without incident. Ge-Ge rented an\n apartment for him, and he safely checked in. She went shopping for food\n and clothing.\n\n\n Thereafter she came nearly every evening. They would eat and she would\n reveal the inconsequential details of the office regime to which she\n was daily exposed. After dinner, they would sit in the living room and\n practice Itraian and neck a little. Then she would go home.\n\n\n One day, after a month of this routine, she threw herself into his\n arms and sobbed, \"I gave Von Stutsman back his earring today. It was\n the only fair thing to do. I'm afraid he knows about us. He's had me\n watched. I know he has. I admitted it was another man.\"\n\n\n Shamar held her tensely.\n\n\n She broke away. \"You were born in Zuleb, you suffered amnesia, you woke\n up in a ditch one morning without papers. You've been an itinerant\n worker since. Things like that happen all the time. You hit a big\n lottery ticket a few months ago. I told him that. How can he check it?\"\n\n\n \"You told him I didn't have any papers?\"\n\n\n \"Millions of people don't have any papers—the drifters, people that\n do casual labor, the people that don't work at all. The thing is,\n without papers he doesn't have any way to check on you. Oh, you should\n have seen his face when I gave him back his earring. He was absolutely\n livid. I didn't think he had it in him. I suppose I'll have to quit my\n job now. Oh, if you only had papers so we could be married!\"\n\n\n Ge-Ge's mood, that evening, alternated between despair and optimism. In\n the end, she was morose and restless. She repeated several times, \"I\n just don't know what's going to happen to us.\"\n\n\n \"Ge-Ge,\" he said, \"I can't spend my life in this apartment I've got to\n get out.\"\n\n\n \"You're mad.\" She faced him from across the room. She stood with her\n legs apart, firmly set. \"Well, I don't care what happens any more. I\n can't stand things to go on like they are. I'll introduce you to some\n people I know, since you won't be happy until I do. But God help us!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did Itra decline to sign a Galactic Federation agreement with Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_1", "options": ["Because Itra viewed Earth as a rather backward society not worth negotiating with.", "Because the terms of the agreement were massively tilted in Earth's favor.", "Because Itra was doing just fine going it alone.", "Because Earth and Itra were unable to reach a final agreement about mining rights on unoccupied planets."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What early clue about who is calling the shots on Earth supports GeGe's interpretation of the Galactic Federation agreement offered to Itra?", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_2", "options": ["GeGe's opinions of the agreement were based on distortions by the Itraian media, not on fact.", "Itran spies had landed on Earth hundreds of years ago, in New Mexico. They had kept tabs on events on Earth every since.", "Earth was a theocracy at the time of the story, and Earthers wanted to spread the Good Word by any means possible.", "Shaeffer's spy mission is sponsored by the president of a powerful space transportation company."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Shaeffer characterized as \"naive?\"", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_3", "options": ["Because it never does occur to him that he might not have been told the truth  about conditions on Itra.", "Because he trusts GeGe, and she turns him in to the Itraian authorities.", "Because he believes that humanoids everywhere should have the same opportunities.", "Because he doesn't realize that $250,000/yr as a salary doesn't really go that far when you take inflation into account."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Twilmaker determine that Shaeffer was the right person for the job on Itra?", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_4", "options": ["Shaeffer was well known as the best pilot at Trans-Universe Transport.", "He prayed about it and interpreted a momentary change in the local weather that allowed a sunbeam to shine through as a positive message about Shaeffer.", "He knew Shaeffer, because his wife and Shaeffer's wife were distantly related, and they served on the same Charity Committees.", "Shaeffer had a good academic record and had the best scores of any pilot in Spanish and Russian language."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What kind of accent is General Reuter portrayed as having?", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_5", "options": ["Reuter acquires the accent of a drunk slurring his words.", "Reuter speaks clearly and precisely, the legacy of his education at Oxford, in England.", "Reuter is from Germany and is a non-native speaker of English.", "Reuter is from Alabama and has a thick Southern accent."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why couldn't Shaeffer accomplish what he was sent to Itra to do?", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_6", "options": ["He had a hard time making contacts with the pro-Earth Itraian underground because they were not very trusting and his clothes didn't fit the part.", "The entire mission was based on lies - his cover was blown almost immediately due to his poor language mastery, and there was no Itraian faction itching for relations with Earth.", "Falling for Von Stutsman's girlfriend got him off on the wrong foot with all the important people on Itra and made his job politically impossible.", "He landed in a sparsely inhabited part of the country, separated from Xxla by thousands of miles of ocean."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How long did it take Shaeffer to master the Itraian language sufficiently to convince Itraians that he was a native?", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_7", "options": ["It took just short of three years to get rid of his Earth accent in Itraian.", "He found the language too difficult to learn in spite of his experience with Russian, and was issued a universal translator.", "He still spoke Itraian with an Earth accent when he arrived on Itra.", "He was able to master all but one of the 43 phonetic sounds in Itraian in short order. The last one took longer."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Shaeffer happen to meet GeGe?", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_8", "options": ["He stumbled upon her house in the woods after hiking for several hours on his bum ankle and she answered the door.", "She had been working as a double agent for Earth, and he made contact with her because she was to be his handler on Itra.", "He was trying to enlist the help of Von Stutsman, who introduced him to his fiancee, GeGe.", "He was trying to figure out how to buy a bus ticket from the North-South Intercontinental Highway to Xxla, and she saw he was having trouble and tried to help."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How long did it take for the ankle that Shaeffer sprained so badly when he landed on Itra to heal?", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_9", "options": ["Shaeffer kept re-spraining it as GeGe and he made their way on foot, by bus and by flyer to Xxla. So it took a really long time.", "Not even one day.", "It took the usual amount of time, about 2 weeks.", "He faked the sprain in the first place to have a reason to interact with some Itraians."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What job will GeGe have to quit?", "question_unique_id": "51072_OFRJCQQA_10", "options": ["Her job working in the Party offices.", "She doesn't really have a job, she is just looking for a husband.", "Her job in counterespionage.", "Her job as a schoolteacher in Xxla."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/0/7/51072//51072-h//51072-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51445", "set_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Sordman the Protector", "year": 1958, "author": "Purdom, Tom", "topic": "Detective and mystery stories; PS; Science fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; Murder -- Fiction", "article": "SORDMAN THE PROTECTOR\nBY TOM PURDOM\n\n\n Illustrated by WOOD\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was the most powerful man in the world.\n \nHe could make anybody do anything—and yet\n \nhe was the slave of a mad criminal's mind!\nIn a beer hall on the eighty-first floor of the Hotel Mark Twain\n fourteen men held an adolescent girl prisoner.\n\n\n \"I'll go up there by myself,\" Sordman said.\n\n\n He was a big young man with sloppy black hair and a red beard. His\n fashionably ornate clothes covered the body of a first class Talent.\n Disciplined training, plus drugs and his natural gift, had made him\n one of the four truly\ndeveloped\npsionic adepts in the world. With\n drugs and preparation, he could command the entire range of psi powers.\n Without drugs, he could sense the emotions and sometimes the general\n thought patterns of the people near him.\n\n\n \"We'd better go with you,\" Lee Shawn said. \"There's an awful lot of\n fear up there. They'll kill you as soon as they learn you're a Talent.\"\n\n\n She was a lean, handsome woman in her early forties. A\n lawyer-politician, she was the Guggenheim Foundation's lobbyist. For\n years she had fought against laws to outlaw the development of Talent.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Mama, but I think I'd better go alone.\"\n\n\n Sordman, though he didn't tell her, knew that symbolically Lee saw him\n as the tree and herself as the rain and the earth.\n\n\n \"Go ahead and laugh,\" George Aaron said. \"But you'll need big medicine\n to fight that fear. Lee's symbolic place in your psyche is important.\"\n\n\n \"I've thought it over,\" Sordman said. \"I'll depend on God and nothing\n else.\"\n\n\n He felt George's mind squirm. As a psychologist, George accepted\n Sordman's Zen-Christian faith because Sordman needed it to control the\n powers of his Talent.\n\n\n But George himself was a confirmed skeptic.\n\n\n The men up there were scared. Sordman knew he would die if he lost\n control. But Lee and George were scared, too. Even now, standing in the\n park in early morning, their fear battered at his mind.\n\n\n He thought about swimming in the ocean. He made his skin remember\n salted wind. The real Atlantic, a mile away, helped the illusion.\n\n\n It was the right symbol. He felt his friends calm.\n\n\n \"Let him go,\" George said.\n\n\n \"He's manipulating us,\" Lee said.\n\n\n \"I know. But let him go.\"\n\n\n Sordman laughed. Lee bent and tore a clump of grass from the earth.\n \"Take this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\"\n\n\n It was wet with dew. He held it to his nose and smelled the dirt and\n grass. Two things kept him from destruction by his own Talent. He loved\n the physical world and he believed in God.\n\n\n \"I'll call you if I need you,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Be careful,\" George said. \"Many people need you.\"\n\n\n \"You've got status,\" Lee said. \"Use it. You're dealing with the kind of\n people it impresses.\"\nThe hotel stood three hundred stories tall. Surrounded by a\n five-mile-square park, connected to the major coastal cities by high\n speed vacuum tubes, the building was a small town. Eighty-five thousand\n people lived within its walls.\n\n\n Sordman rode an empty elevator. Through the glass sides he studied the\n deserted halls and shops.\n\n\n They were frightened here. Murder had been done. A Talent had\n destroyed two men.\nLord, protect us from the malice of a witch.\nThe eighty-first was a commercial floor. He got off the vator and\n walked down the main corridor. A man watched him through the door of a\n bar. A girl in a blue kimono froze behind the counter of a pastry shop.\n\n\n He stopped before the doors of the beer hall. He dropped to his knees\n and prayed.\n\n\n Once the brave leader walked into a panicky group and it was enough\n to\nlook\ncalm. Now he had to\nbe\ncalm. It was not enough to square\n the shoulders, walk erect, speak in a confident tone. Sordman's true\n emotions radiated from him every moment. Those within range felt them\n as their own.\n\n\n He drove thoughts like knives into the deepest corners of his mind. He\n begged release from fear. He prayed his God to grant him love for the\n frightened men within.\n\n\n He stood erect and squared his shoulders. His bulb-shouldered morning\n coat was grey as dawn. He thought a well loved formula, a Buddhist\n prayer from the Book of Universal Worship.\nAll life is transitory.\n All people must suffer and die. Let us forgive one another.\nHe roared his name and titles at the door.\n\n\n \"I am Talent Andrew Sordman, Fellow for Life of the Guggenheim\n Foundation, by Senate Act Protector of the People! By the laws of our\n country, I ask the right to enter.\"\n\n\n Silence.\n\n\n \"I am Talent Andrew Sordman, Fellow—\"\n\n\n \"\nGo away, witch!\n\"\n\n\n Without drugs and preparation, Sordman needed visual contact to sense\n emotions. But he didn't need Talent to sense the hatred in that voice.\n\n\n He pictured a rough block of stone.\n\n\n Using a basic skill, he kept the picture in his mind as he opened the\n door and planned his words.\n\n\n \"I have taken no drugs and made no preparation. You have nothing to\n fear. I'm your Protector and I've come to talk.\"\nThe beer hall was large and gloomy. The butts and ashes of the night's\n smoking filled its trays. Fourteen men watched him come. Half a dozen\n had hunting rifles.\n\n\n Hunched over, weeping, a thin, dark-haired girl sat beneath an\n unshaded light. A shiver of anger crossed his brain.\n\n\n \"Kill the witch!\" a young man shouted.\nLord, grant me love....\nHis eyes focused on the rifle bearers. One of them half-raised his gun.\n Then the butt clumped on the floor.\n\n\n \"You're bewitched!\" the young man said. \"I told you not to let him in.\"\n\n\n \"I've come to talk,\" Sordman said. \"Who's the leader of your group?\"\n\n\n The young man said, \"We don't have a leader. Here we're all equals.\"\n\n\n Sordman studied the young man's emotions. He was frightened, but only\n a little more than the others. There was something else there, too.\n Something very strong. Sex frustration! The young man had an athletic\n body and a handsome, chiselled face. On his yellow vest he wore the\n emblem of a Second Class Technician. But even a young man with adequate\n finances could be frustrated. Keeping the stone in his mind, he\n undressed a certain actress.\n\n\n He loved women and engaged in sex with lusty, triumphant joy. To him it\n was a celebration of the sacred mystery of life. He hoped some of this\n emotion reached its target.\n\n\n He started talking without asking for a parley.\n\n\n \"Two men died yesterday. I've come to hunt out the murderer and put him\n away. What's the evidence against this girl?\"\n\n\n \"We found drugs and a divining rod in her room.\"\n\n\n \"She's had a reputation for a long time.\"\n\n\n \"The school kids say she's a daydreamer.\"\n\n\n Sordman understood their fear. Psi was a new and dangerous force.\n Its use demanded moral and intellectual discipline. Only a rare and\n carefully developed personality could encounter the anger, hostility\n and fear in other minds and still retain compassion and reasonable\n respect for human beings. An undisciplined person panicked and went\n into a mental state approaching paranoia. Sordman fought panic every\n day. He fought it with a total acceptance of human motivations,\n cultivated tenderness and compassion, and a healthy ego which could\n accept and enjoy its own self-love.\n\n\n Those things, Sordman would have said, and also the necessary grace of\n God.\n\n\n But the most undisciplined personality could practice psi\n destructively. Hostile minds roamed the world. Death could strike you\n in a clear field beneath an open sky while your murderer lay home in\n his bed. No wonder they dragged a girl from her parents and bullied her\n till dawn.\nThey talked. Sordman picked his way through fourteen minds. As always,\n he found what he wanted.\n\n\n A fat, redheaded man sat a little apart from the group. He radiated a\n special kind of concern. He was concerned for the girl and for his own\n children. He believed the actions of the night had been necessary, but\n he felt the girl's pain and he wasn't sure he was doing the right thing.\n\n\n Above all, he was a man who wanted to do the right thing—the really\n right thing.\n\n\n \"You all have children,\" Sordman said. \"Would you like to see them\n dragged out at night and treated the way you've treated this girl?\"\n\n\n \"We've got to protect ourselves!\" the young man said.\n\n\n \"Let him talk!\" the fat man growled. He stared at the thick hands he\n spread on the table. \"The girl has said all night she's innocent. Maybe\n she is. Maybe the Protector can do what we haven't done and find the\n real killer.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a master Talent,\" Sordman said. \"If the killer is in the hotel, I\n can track him down before midnight. Will you give me that long?\"\n\n\n \"How do we know you'll bring in the right man?\"\n\n\n \"If he's the right man, he'll make it plain enough.\"\n\n\n \"You'll make him confess,\" the young man said. \"You'll manipulate him\n like a puppet.\"\n\n\n \"What good will that do?\" Sordman said. \"Do you think I could control a\n man all the time he's in prison and on trial? If I use my Talent more\n than a few hours, I collapse.\"\n\n\n \"Can we hold the girl here?\" asked the redheaded fat man.\n\n\n \"Feed her and treat her right,\" Sordman said. \"What's your name?\"\n\n\n \"John Dyer. My friends were about to use their belts on her.\"\n\n\n A rifleman shuffled uneasily. \"It's the only way. Mind killers use\n their Talent to tie their tongues and confuse us. Only pain can break\n their control.\"\n\n\n \"That's a fairy tale,\" Sordman said. \"Without drugs a Talent is\n helpless.\"\n\n\n \"We've got the girl,\" John Dyer said. \"She can't hurt us while we're\n waiting.\"\n\n\n \"\nHe can!\n\" the young man screamed. \"Are you a plain fool? He can go\n outside and kill us all.\"\n\n\n Sordman laughed. \"Sure I could. And tomorrow I'd have to fight off\n an army. That I couldn't do if I was fool enough to try. You're\n frightened, boy. Use your head.\"\n\n\n \"You are excited, Leonard,\" said an armed man. He wore a blue morning\n coat with Manager's stars and the emblem of a transportation company.\n \"We can wait a day. If we've got the killer, then we're safe. If we\n don't, then we've failed and the Protector should try.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not frightened. I just don't like Talent.\"\n\n\n Most of the men frowned. They didn't share the prejudice. A few nodded\n and mumbled and shot dark glances at Sordman.\n\n\n He let them talk. He stood there and thought apple pies and the\n brotherhood of man and the time he and his second wife spent three days\n in bed. And the big block of stone.\n\n\n He was a high-powered transmitter broadcasting joy, good will toward\n men and tranquility.\n\n\n In the end they listened to Dyer.\n\n\n \"But don't think you'll get a minute past midnight,\" said the young man.\n\n\n \"Technician, your Protector will remember.\"\nClarke Esponito had been a hard, quick little man in his early fifties.\n On the day of his death, the hotel newspaper had published his\n picture and announced his promotion to Director of Vocational Testing\n for the entire Atlantic Region. He had lived with his wife and his\n nineteen-year-old son, and his wife had been a lifetime wife. Esponito\n had been a Catholic, and that faith still called short-term marriages a\n mortal sin.\n\n\n For a moment Sordman wondered what it would be like to know only one\n woman your entire life. He loved the infinite variety of God's creation\n and wanted to sample as much of it as he could.\n\n\n \"Mylady Widow, our apologies.\" Lee bowed, hands before her chest, and\n Sordman and George Aaron bowed with her. \"We intrude on you,\" Lee said,\n \"only because we have to find the real killer. Other people may be in\n danger.\"\n\n\n The Widow Esponito bowed in return.\n\n\n \"I understand, Politician Shawn.\"\n\n\n Even with her face scarred by tears she looked lovely. From the\n earliest years of their marriage, her husband had been high in the\n Civil Service and able to buy her beauty treatments.\n\n\n \"Mylady,\" Sordman said, \"I need your help for two things. We want to\n know who you think wanted to kill your husband. And we need your want.\"\n\n\n \"Our want?\" her son asked. He stood rigidly beside his mother's chair.\n His clothes were rich and formal tweed.\n\n\n \"Do you want to find the killer?\"\n\n\n The boy nodded soberly. \"The moment I heard of his murder, I promised\n to avenge him.\"\n\n\n \"John!\" His mother trembled. \"You were raised to be a Christian!\"\n\n\n Sordman said, \"I want to locate the image I think was used to kill\n him. For that I want to hook your strong desires into my thoughts. You\n won't know I'm doing it. But if you're near me, I'll use your emotions.\"\n\n\n \"Your husband was a very important man,\" Lee said. \"Would anyone gain\n by his death?\"\n\n\n \"Everyone liked my husband. He was always laughing, he—\" The old-young\n woman started crying. Her son put his arm around her shoulders.\nSordman felt her pain and winced. Death and pain were part of Creation,\n but he hated them and often cursed them. At times like these, he\n understood George's skepticism.\n\n\n The boy said, \"Manager Kurt didn't like him.\"\n\n\n Mylady stifled her sobs and sat up. \"Manager Kurt has been our guest\n every month. Protector, John's upset. He's talking wildly.\"\n\n\n \"Father told me. He said Manager Kurt didn't like him.\"\n\n\n \"Your father and the Manager were good friends.\"\n\n\n He felt a sudden resentment in the woman. Why? The boy didn't feel as\n if he was lying. Maybe Esponito had been the kind of man who didn't\n talk about his job with his wife. But his son—who would some day be\n a member of his father's class—would have received a certain amount\n of practical advice. Perhaps Mylady resented being left out of her\n husband's professional life. That was a common family pattern, after\n all.\n\n\n George felt impatient. Sordman shot him a questioning glance. \"Where\n does Manager Kurt live?\"\n\n\n \"In Baltimore,\" the boy said.\n\n\n \"Mylady, may we use your phone?\"\n\n\n \"You don't take John seriously?\" Mylady said.\n\n\n \"We'll have to ask the Baltimore police to check on the Manager. It may\n not mean anything, but we have to follow every lead.\"\n\n\n \"Use the phone, Protector.\"\n\n\n Sordman and George stepped into the dining room.\n\n\n \"We're wasting time,\" George said. \"They're both upset and there seems\n to be a family quarrel.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But Esponito's murder gives us more leads than Bedler's.\n Bedler didn't even have a one-month wife when he died. Lots of people\n knew the Administrator and might have had a grudge against him.\"\n\n\n George clasped his hands behind his back. \"We've unraveled twenty-three\n murders in the last four years. Judging by that experience, I'd say\n there are three possibilities: both victims were picked at random; both\n victims are in some way related; or one victim was killed to confuse\n the police.\"\n\n\n \"Unless we have something entirely new.\"\n\n\n \"That's been the pattern so far.\"\n\n\n \"I think we're both coming to the same conclusion.\"\n\n\n \"Find out if the murderer used the picture from the paper?\"\n\n\n \"Mmm. If he did, Administrator Esponito was probably attacked on the\n spur of the moment. And we should be seeing who wanted to kill Bedler.\"\n\n\n \"What about Manager Kurt?\"\n\n\n \"Have Lee call the Baltimore police while I try to locate the murder\n weapon. At least they can search his home for drugs.\"\nGeorge went back to the parlor and Sordman stripped to his yellow vest.\n From the pockets of his morning coat he removed a leather case and a\n tiny plastic package. Unfolded, the plastic became a thin red robe with\n a yellow bomb-burst on the back.\n\n\n He called it his battle robe. Habit played a big part in the\n development of Talent. The same clothing, the same ritualized\n movements, helped put his mind in the proper state.\n\n\n He filled a hypodermic with a pink liquid and jabbed the needle into\n his wrist. As the drug took effect, he knelt to pray.\n\n\n \"Grant me, God, the strength to bind the demons in my mind.\"\n\n\n He stood up. At this point many Talents danced. Sordman loved to use\n his body, but ritual dancing made him feel ridiculous. It had been\n proven, however, that the Power flowed at its freest when the body was\n occupied, so he took three colored balls from the case and started\n juggling.\n\n\n The balls soared higher and faster. He mumbled a hymn. His voice grew\n stronger. He roared his love of life at the world.\nThe wall between his conscious and unconscious mind collapsed.\n Lightning flashed in his eyes. Colors sang in his brain. Walls, floor,\n table, chairs became extensions of his mind. They danced with the balls\n between his hands. The Universe and he flowed together like a sea of\n molten iron.\n\n\n His hands, miles from his mind, fumbled in the case. The balls danced\n and bobbed in the air. He laughed and unfolded his divining rod. The\n furniture bounced. Mylady Esponito screamed.\n\n\n All Creation is a flow. Dance, you parts of me, you living things, you\n atoms of my dust!\n\n\n He had torn Esponito's photo from a newspaper. Now he let the colored\n balls drop and stuck the picture on the end of the rod.\n\n\n \"This and that are one in kind. Servant rod, find me that!\"\n\n\n He stretched out the rod and turned on his heels. He sang and blanked\n his mind and listened to the tremors in his hands.\n\n\n Stop. Back right. Now the left. Too far. Down. Correct left....\n\n\n Here!\n\n\n He pressed a button on the rod. A tripod sprang out. A pair of sights\n flipped up. Carefully he sighted down the rod, out through the\n window-wall beside the table, to a grove of trees in the park.\nCreation roaring in his open head, divining rod in hand, he stormed\n out the door and down the hall. Lee and George hurried after him. The\n presence of their well known minds pleased him. There was George's\n unexpressed belief that he had \"mastered\" and guided the Power he\n feared. There was Lee's worry for him and her keen awareness of\n human realities. And there, too, were self-discipline, intelligence,\n affection, and a richness of experience and thought he expected to draw\n on for another forty years.\n\n\n And filling the world, pounding on the walls of existence, the Power.\nHis\npower. He, the master of the world! He who could uproot the\n trees, spin the earth, make the ground shake and change the colors of\n the sky.\n\n\n He felt George's clear-eyed, good-humored tolerance. A hypnotic command\n triggered in his mind. He saw a Roman Caesar ride in triumph and the\n slave behind him said, \"Caesar, remember you are mortal.\"\nMy\npower? It is a gift from the Fountain of Creation. Mine to use\n with the wisdom and restraint implanted by my teachers. Or else I'll\n be destroyed by\nmy\npower.\n\n\n He laughed and rolled into a cannon ball and hurled his body through\n the wood.\n\n\n \"Andy! Andy, you're losing us!\"\n\n\n He picked them up and towed them with him. The girl in the beer hall\n cried in his heart. The fox is many hills away and the hound grows\n impatient.\n\n\n They landed in a heap.\n\n\n George said, \"Andy, what the hell are you doing?\"\n\n\n \"I brought you down in a soft spot.\"\n\n\n \"You felt like an elephant running amok! Boy, you've got to be careful.\n Since you were a little boy I've taught you to watch every move. For a\n moment I don't think you knew how you felt.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" Sordman mumbled. \"That was close.\"\n\n\n \"Let's find the picture,\" Lee said. \"Has the drug worn off?\"\n\n\n \"Just about. The picture's over by that tree. It feels like it's\n rumpled up.\"\n\n\n After a minute's hunt, they found it. It had been rolled into a ball\n and tossed away.\n\n\n \"We're dealing with an amateur,\" Lee said. \"A Talent who was even\n half-developed would have burned this.\"\n\n\n Unrolled, the picture fell in half. It had been sliced with a blade.\n\n\n \"Let's walk back,\" Sordman said. \"Let's talk.\"\n\n\n They crossed a log bridge. He ran his hands along the rough bark\n and smelled the cool water of the stream. Most of the big park was\n wilderness, but here and there were pavilions, an outdoor theatre, open\n playing fields and beautifully planned gardens. A man could have a home\n surrounded by the shops and pleasures of civilized living and yet only\n be a ten-minute elevator ride from God's bounty.\n\n\n \"The fact the killer used the newspaper picture doesn't\nprove\nBedler\n was the real victim,\" George said. \"But it indicates it.\"\n\n\n \"Let's assume it's true,\" Sordman said, \"and see where it leads us.\"\n\n\n \"Bedler was married,\" Lee said. \"I remember that from our briefing.\"\n\n\n Sordman rabbit-punched a tree as he passed it. \"It was a one-year\n contract, and it ended two weeks ago.\"\n\n\n \"I smell jealousy,\" Lee said.\n\n\n \"The world is filled with it,\" George said. \"I favor short-term\n marriages. They're the only way a person can practice a difficult art\n and make mistakes without committing himself for life. But about half\n the mental breakdowns I used to get were due to the insecurities caused\n by a temporary contract. One party almost always hopes the marriage\n will somehow become permanent.\"\n\n\n \"Let's talk to Bedler's ex-wife,\" Sordman said.\nHer name was Jackie Baker. She was just over five feet tall and blonde.\n She wore glasses with green frames.\n\n\n Sordman liked big women but he had to admit this little creature made\n him feel like swatting and rubbing.\n\n\n She wore a sea-green kimono and bowed gracefully at the door.\n\n\n \"Citizen Baker, I'm Protector Andrew Sordman. May we talk to you?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, Protector. Welcome.\"\n\n\n They entered and he introduced Lee and George. After they exchanged\n bows, the girl offered them some wine. She took a bottle of clear Rhine\n wine from the cooler and asked George to open it. There were several\n journals on a throw table.\n\n\n \"Are you a doctor, Citizen?\" Lee asked.\n\n\n \"No, Politician. A medical technician.\"\n\n\n They drank the first glass of wine.\n\n\n \"Technician,\" George said, \"we have to ask you some questions. We'll\n try not to upset you.\"\n\n\n The girl closed her eyes. \"I'll try not to be upset. I hope you find\n whoever killed him. I'd like to find her.\"\n\n\n The girl felt lonely. She ached with unsatisfied needs. I'd like to\n lie with you and comfort you, Sordman thought. I'd like to hold you in\n my arms and drain all the tears you're holding back. But he couldn't.\n His contract with his wife had six months to run and no one committed\n adultery any more. \"When the rules are carefully tailored to human\n needs,\" Lee often said, \"there's no excuse for breaking them.\"\n\n\n \"Why 'her'?\" Lee asked. \"Why 'her' instead of 'him'?\"\n\n\n The girl looked at Sordman. \"Can't you just probe my mind? Do I have to\n answer questions?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid so,\" Sordman said. \"My Talent has its limits. I can't\n deep-probe everybody's mind, any more than a baseball pitcher can pitch\n all day.\"\n\n\n Lee said, \"Even if he could, our warrant says we can't probe more than\n four suspects.\"\n\n\n \"Now can you tell us why you think the killer is a woman?\" George asked.\nThe girl held out her glass and George filled it. \"Because he was the\n kind of man who made you want to kill him. He was understanding and\n loving. He made me feel like a princess all the time I lived with him.\n But he can't keep to one girl.\" She gulped down the whole glass. \"He\n told me so himself. He was so wonderful to live with I went insane\n every time he looked at another girl. I knew he was shopping for his\n next wife.\" She wiggled in her chair. \"Is that what you want to know?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" Sordman said. \"Do you know who he was interested in before\n he died?\"\n\n\n The girl had big, myopic eyes. \"Our contract ended sixteen days ago.\"\n She took a cigarette from inside her kimono. \"Protector Sordman, could\n I just talk to you?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Sordman said.\n\n\n Lee and George went to a coffee house on the next floor down.\n\n\n \"I want to talk to just you,\" the girl said. \"I feel safe with you. You\n make me feel right.\"\n\n\n \"It goes with being a Talent,\" Sordman said. \"Either we like people and\n let them know it or we crack.\"\n\n\n \"I know it's all right to tell you things. I love Joe. I broke the\n rules for him. I didn't avoid him for three months the way you're\n supposed to. I went everywhere I knew he'd be. I had to see him.\"\n\n\n Sordman stroked his beard. Mentally, he cuddled her in his arms and\n murmured comfort to her.\n\n\n She hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms around her body.\n\n\n \"Just before our marriage ended, I found out he was seeing Raven\n English as much as he could. He didn't break the rules. But when we\n went to dances he always danced with her once or twice. And she and\n her husband used to meet us in bars. After the contract expired, he\n couldn't see her much because she and her husband have another six\n months to go. But there was a dance last week and I saw the two of them\n disappear into the park. Raven's husband hunted all over for her. He\n looked horrible. I pitied him.\"\n\n\n \"Who's Raven English?\"\n\n\n \"She's a sadist. I know she is. She's just the type to do this. She\n likes to play with men and hurt them. Her poor husband is a nervous\n wreck. I know she killed Joe, Protector. She hates us!\"\n\n\n He stood up. The girl watched him with big eyes. He put his hand on her\n head.\n\n\n \"Sleep is a joy,\" he said.\n\n\n Unprepared, he couldn't have done that to many people. But she was a\n woman, which added to his influence, and totally exhausted.\nHe got off the vator and looked around for the coffee house. Dozens of\n people wandered the halls and the shops. As he walked down the hall,\n some of them looked away or got as far from him as they could. Others\n ignored him or found his presence reassuring or studied him curiously.\n\n\n A fat woman in a black kimono walked toward him. She had one hand on\n her hip and her eyes were narrowed and hard. Sordman smiled. He felt\n her fear and distrust, and her determination not to let such emotions\n conquer her.\n\n\n \"Good afternoon, Protector.\"\n\n\n \"Good afternoon, Citizen Mother.\"\n\n\n He felt her triumph and her pleasure with herself.\n\n\n His fellow humans often made him gawk in wonder. Some people say we're\n psychic cripples, he thought. And maybe we are. But we do our work and\n we enjoy ourselves. And we do dangerous things like putting bases on\n Venus and falling in love. Surrounded by death and danger, crippled\n though we are, we go on.\n\n\n He swelled with feeling. People smiled and glanced at each other or hid\n shyly from the organ chords of his emotion.\n\n\n An old man stepped in front of him.\n\n\n \"Monster! Freak!\"\n\n\n He was thin and perfectly dressed. Sordman stopped. God of Infinite\n Compassion, this is my brother....\n\n\n \"They ought to lock you up,\" the man said. \"They ought to keep you away\n from decent people. Get out of my head! Leave me alone!\"\n\n\n People stared at them. A small crowd gathered. Lee appeared in the door\n of the coffee house.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" Sordman told the people. \"It's all right.\" He started\n to go on.\n\n\n The man stepped in front of him. \"Leave me alone, freak. Let me think\n my own thoughts!\"\n\n\n \"Citizen, I haven't touched your mind.\"\n\n\n \"I felt it just then!\"\n\n\n \"It was no more than I could help. I'm sorry if I've hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"Go away!\"\n\n\n \"I'm trying to.\"\n\n\n \"Murderer! Mind witch!\"\n\n\n He was faced with a strong mind that valued its independence. Anything\n he did would be detected and resented.\n\n\n \"Citizens,\" he said, \"this man deserves your respect. No matter what\n a man does, he's bound to offend someone. This Citizen values his\n privacy—which is good—and therefore I make him angry. I hope the good\n my Talent lets me do outweighs the bad. Forgive me, brother.\"\n\n\n He stepped to one side. \"Leave him alone,\" someone said. \"Let the\n Protector work.\"\n\n\n \"Leave him alone, old man.\"\n\n\n \"\nI'm not an old man.\n\"\n\n\n \"No, you're not,\" Sordman said. \"I admire your courage.\" He walked on.\n Behind him the old man shouted curses.\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\" Lee said.\n\n\n \"Sure. Let's go in and sit down.\"\n\n\n There were just a few people in the coffee house. Sordman ordered and\n told them what he had learned.\n\n\n \"I wish you could probe everyone in the building,\" George said. \"All we\n get is gossip.\"\n\n\n \"The husband of this Raven English has a motive,\" Lee said. \"Why don't\n we visit her?\"\n\n\n \"I think we should.\" Sordman drank his coffee. \"Citizen English\n herself might have killed them.\"\n\n\n \"I doubt it,\" George said.\n\n\n \"It all sounds like a lot of talk,\" Sordman said. \"But we have to\n follow it up. This business is nothing but wearing out your legs\n running after every lead. If your legs are strong, you can run anybody\n down.\"\n\n\n They finished their coffee and cigarettes and trudged out.\nRaven English, one-year wife of Leonard Smith, did not meet them at the\n door with gracious bows. Instead, a wall panel by the door shot back.\n They stared at a square of one way glass.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" a girl's voice said.\n\n\n \"I'm Andrew Sordman, your Protector. I come on lawful business. May we\n enter?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Lee asked.\n\n\n \"Because I don't like witches. Keep out.\"\n\n\n \"We're hunting the killer,\" Sordman said. \"We're on your side. I've\n taken no drugs and made no preparations. You don't have to be afraid.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not afraid. I just don't want you in my home.\"\n\n\n \"You have to let us in,\" Lee said. \"Our warrant gives us entry into\n every room in this hotel. If we have to break the door down, we can.\"\n\n\n \"I hope we don't have to break the door down.\"\n\n\n \"You're getting fat,\" George said. \"You need the exercise.\"\n\n\n \"You won't break in,\" the girl said.\n\n\n Sordman crossed the hall to get a good start. \"I'm about to, Mylady.\"\n His shoulder filled the doorway behind him. This looks like fun, he\n thought. He liked to feel his body working.\n\n\n The door opened. A dark-haired, slender girl stood in the doorway. Her\n skin was brown and her lips were pink, unpainted flesh. She wore a red\n kimono.\n\n\n \"All right. Come in.\"\n\n\n \"Gladly,\" Sordman said.\n\n\n It was a three-room apartment, with the kitchen tucked into one wall of\n the parlor. A painting stood on an easel by the window. The window was\n a shoulder-high slit and from it, here on the hundred and forty-first\n floor, he could see across the park to the beach and the rolling\n Atlantic.\n\n\n God grant me self-control, he thought. If this is the killer, grant me\n self-control. He made his savage thoughts lie down and purred at the\n world.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry we have to force our way in,\" he said. \"And I'm sorry you\n don't approve of Talent. But please remember two men have died and a\n little girl may die, too. There are lots of panicky people in the Mark\n Twain. We've got to find the killer soon and you can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Why bother me?\" the girl said.\n\n\n \"This is awkward,\" Lee said. She stood erect but looked past the girl.\n She felt embarrassed. \"Someone told us you and Bedler were seeing each\n other.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, quit being prudish,\" George said. \"These things happen all the\n time.\" He turned to the girl. \"We were told you and Joe Bedler were\n making plans to get married when your present contract ends.\"\n\n\n \"That's a lie!\"\n\n\n Sordman laughed in his belly. No matter what the rules were, few women\n publicly admitted they had broken them. By the standards of the period\n from 1800 to 1990, the whole marriage system of the Twenty-First\n Century was immoral; but there were still prudes. And women still\n preserved the conventions.\n\n\n \"Who told you that?\" Raven English said. She frowned. \"Was it that\n Jackie Baker?\"\n\n\n \"Why her?\" George asked.\n\n\n \"Because she's a logical person for you to talk to and because it's the\n kind of thing she'd say.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sordman said.\n\n\n \"She ought to see a psycher! And that's why you came?\"\n\n\n \"We're not accusing you,\" Sordman said. \"But we've got to follow every\n lead.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What historical problem between men and women is no longer an issue in the 21st century and why?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_1", "options": ["Who does more chores is no longer an issue in the 21st century because every profession, from Sanitation Engineer to Protector is respected, and Housekeepers are subsidized by the government.", "Cheating on your partner is simply not done because marriage contracts can be made however long or short the couple want, reducing the driving force.", "Cheating on your partner is illegal in the 21st century, and if someone does it, the Protectors will find out using their telepathic abilities, and the cheater will go to jail.", "Cheating is no longer an issue because most people, like Sordman, are now Zen Christians, and due to the Zen teachings of not trying to grasp what you love, people allow their spouses to do what makes them happy."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Sordman and his team end up at the home of Mrs. Esposito?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_2", "options": ["Mrs. Esposito had been cheating on her life marriage to Mr. Esposito with the red-haired man who was one of the kidnappers of the teeenage girl. He admitted his crime.", "The teenage girl being held hostage at the Hotel Mark Twain by vigilantes who accused her of murder, claimed that Mrs. Esposito's son killed his father, i.e. her husband.", "Her husband was one of two people murdered the day before, and the Protector knew the hostage teenage girl had not done it, so he needed to see what information the wife could provide.", "Sordman and his team were investigating twenty-three murders, so they were working on quite a few cases at the same time.They had to fit interview in when they could."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who killed Bedler and Esposito?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_3", "options": ["Jackie Baker", "The story doesn't say", "Raven English", "Manager Kurt"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What conditions are needed for a Talent to probe a person's mind?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_4", "options": ["The Talents aren't really telepaths, they are only able to sense emotions no matter what they do.", "They have to inject a psychoactive drug and perform some form of repetitive body movements.", "It's all just a show to intimidate potential witnesses into giving evidence. The foundation is just good police work.", "They just need a photo of a person and a plastic divining rod and they can find any missing person."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Sordman find using his divining rod?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_5", "options": ["He finds soft earth in a nearby clump of woods, indicating disturbed ground - the place where Esposito's body was buried.", "They find evidence that Mrs. Esposito was cheating on Mr. Esposito, and jealousy was the motive for the killing.", "He and his team end up in a small wooded area, in the middle of a bunch of trees, but there is nothing useful at that spot.", "He finds a copy of the newspaper photo of Esposito, cut in half and crumpled up."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who was Jackie Baker?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_6", "options": ["She was the former wife of the second murder victim.", "She was the teenager kidnapped by the vigilantes as a \"witch\" and murderer.", "She was the woman that Mr. Esposito was cheating with.", "She was the murderer of Mr. Bedler."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who among the possible suspects (Mrs. Esposito, Jackie Baker, Raven English and Raven English's husband) for Bedler's murder has the strongest motive for murdering him and why?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_7", "options": ["Raven English. Jackie Baker tells us that she is a sadist and that her current husband is miserable. ", "Mrs. Esposito. She had a life marriage contract with her husband, but she discovered that her husband was having an affair with Bedler.", "Raven English's current husband. He was the one most injured by Bedler's actions, because his marriage contract had another 6 months to go, and Raven was being pursued by Bedler.", "Jackie Baker. She was truly in love with Bedler, and was pining for his love, but he had moved on when their marriage contract ended."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Sordman handle the hatred and disapproval he experienced from other citizens because of his psychic abilities?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_8", "options": ["He hated conflict and just avoided people who referred to people with the Talent as \"witches.\"", "He ignored his detractors, because if he wanted, he could have probed their minds to find some kind of wrongdoing and put them in jail.", "He tried to convince them that Psychics like him were superior to people without telepathic abilities so that they would undertand why he was useful.", "He sent forth positive feelings, such as thoughts of apple pie, thoughts of how resilient people are, and he tried to show respect to all."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What characteristic do Jackie Baker and Raven English share?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_9", "options": ["They both wear kimonos.", "They both think people with the Talent are witches and are afraid of them.", "They both have blonde hair.", "They were both spurned by Bedler, and aren't that sad that he is dead."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What incident explains why a lot of people hate the Talents so much?", "question_unique_id": "51445_NEWD6FIU_10", "options": ["Sordman has sexual thoughts about all the women he meets and he uses his Talent to pick promising ones. A lot of those with psychic powers do this.", "Sordman, for example, has sloppy black hair and a red beard and wears flashy clothes. People don't like people who are different.", "People with the Talent gravitate to police work, and everyone hates the police.", "Those with the Talent accidentally brush against the minds of others, affecting their moods, even when they are not trying to, as happens in the coffee house incident."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/4/4/51445//51445-h//51445-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51268", "set_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Girls From Earth", "year": 1970, "author": "Robinson, Frank M.", "topic": "Short stories; Science fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction; PS", "article": "THE GIRLS FROM EARTH\nBy FRANK M. ROBINSON\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nProblem: How can you arrange marriages with\n \nmen in one solar system, women in another—and\n \nneither willing to leave his own world?\nI\n\n\n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n\n\n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line\n tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n\n\n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this,\n when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n\n\n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack\n around his thick waist.\n\n\n \"Together now, Karl.\nOne! Two!\n\"\n\n\n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the\n rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees,\n their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made\n no effort to come closer.\n\"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n\n\n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n\n\n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n\n\n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft\n bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened\n to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it\n solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling,\n rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or\n so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n\n\n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n\n\n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at\n them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help\n beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put\n down at Landing City.\n\n\n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked\n more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our\n numbers on the list.\"\n\n\n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and\n threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his\n saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n\n\n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This\n isn't the trading rocket.\"\n\n\n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and\n maybe\nshe'll\nappreciate the coverings then.\"\n\n\n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy\n must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less\n you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them,\n they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the\n family-raising yourself.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied\n for a wife from some different planet.\"\n\n\n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the\n farms and raise families.\"\n\n\n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling\n up and headed into the thick forest.\nIt was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail\n and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making\n that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it\n would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning,\n somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his\n shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n\n\n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family.\n He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n\n\n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n\n\n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the\n same thing.\n\n\n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered\n defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole\n them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell\n the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n\n\n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to\n him.\n\n\n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to\n have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n\n\n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n\n\n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands\n that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself\n on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy\n streets, and the small rocket port—a scorched thirty acres or so\n fenced off with barbed wire.\n\n\n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave\n of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and\n bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked\n it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in\n clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the\n woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n\n\n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the\n main path from the small side trails.\n\n\n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n\n\n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe.\nEarth!\n\"\n\n\n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl\n had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He\n was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman.\n He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage\n of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket\n office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed\n disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted\n broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the\n stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing\ndefinite\nto\n offer, no real facts at all.\n\n\n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few\n months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival\n spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles\n farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet;\n and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in\n yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n\n\n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n\n\n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n\n\n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing\n City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had\n been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as\n any city on any planet—maybe even have a population of ten thousand\n people or more.\n\n\n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth\n better than women from any other world?\"\n\n\n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard\n to say. They're—well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n\n\n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he\n thought, rather hard to define.\n\n\n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters\n for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There\n was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way\n through to see what had caused it.\n\n\n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n\n\n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was\n anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n\n\n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The\n edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the\n last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever.\n She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to\n her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was\n provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from\nEarth\n!\" There was\n nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to\n which the colonial office was sending the women.\nShe was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe,\n and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet,\n but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n\n\n A loudspeaker blared.\n\n\n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers!\n All colonists....\"\n\n\n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly\n moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little\n blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell\n them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a\n great imagination, nothing else.\n\n\n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the\n landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome\n signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government\n pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went\n over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out\n and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in\n the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering\n how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n\n\n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like\n who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it\n landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of\n course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting\n acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined\n that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their\n farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way,\n till it was too late.\n\n\n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n\n\n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and\n wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten\n minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself\n straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker\n of exhaust flame.\n\n\n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n\n\n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n\n\n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest\n afterward....\"\n\n\n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n\n\n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n\n\n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill\n said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n\n\n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just\n as good as depending on first impressions.\n\n\n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted\n overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of\n fire.\n\n\n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed\n aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look\n his best.\n\n\n The twinkling fire came nearer.\nII\n\n\n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n\n\n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n\n\n \"Please send him right in.\"\n\n\n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come\n in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n\n\n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and\n Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem\n was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n\n\n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes,\n just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology\n by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in\n browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n\n\n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't\n easy—MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was\n the head of the department.\n\n\n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have\n tossed in our laps now?\"\n\n\n \"You know the one—colonization problem. You know that when we first\n started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population\n took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers,\n the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to\n get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome\n than the female; the men left—but the women didn't. At least, not in\n nearly the same large numbers.\n\n\n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is\n now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means,\n ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't\n just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business\n and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n\n\n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics\n about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to\n women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's\n quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a\n lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they\n wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n\n\n Escher shook his head blankly.\n\n\n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald\n continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to\n improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've\n got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more\n silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the\n pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy—whatever that\n means—and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a\n violation or not.\"\n\n\n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which\n forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair\n tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks—if you'll pardon the\n expression—of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the\n solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n\n\n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n\n\n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your\n baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling\n yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless,\n women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should\n they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern\n conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored\n planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play\n footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them\n alive as not?\"\n\n\n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the\n Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of\n anything?\"\n\n\n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n\n\n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay\n off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not\n necessarily the spirit.\"\n\n\n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n\n\n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the\n situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will\n happen then won't be good.\"\n\n\n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n\n\n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it\n worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for\n emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n\n\n \"How come?\"\n\n\n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to\n emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n\n\n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly\n tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization\n Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic\n level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per\n cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that\n level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine\n level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it\n didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n\n\n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications\n set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly\n and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space\n travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly.\n You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation,\n anyway.\n\n\n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal\n chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n\n\n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing,\n as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize.\n Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n\n\n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read\n it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no\n solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would\n solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was\n still enough.\n\n\n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to\n colonize who didn't\nwant\nto colonize.\n\n\n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second\n point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n\n\n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all—provided you held your nose,\n silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was\n such a thing as a moral code.\nIII\n\n\n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the\n correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to\n begin.\n\n\n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid\n her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint\n away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n\n\n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you\n would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact\n mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't\n even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a\n fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly—but not\n pretty, either.\n\n\n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the\n corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a\n race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n\n\n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n\n\n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth.\n The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she\n would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n\n\n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse\n out.\"\n\n\n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl,\n I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us—waiting for the phone\n to ring.\"\n\n\n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting\n the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard\n sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure.\n Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a\n theatre.\n\n\n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped\n and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in\n front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you\n should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and\n let yourself go.\n\n\n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and\n went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on\n the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety—scientifically\n written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described\n love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n\n\n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room,\n getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to\n the floor.\n\n\n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live\n vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a\n husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three\n years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many\n others—call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though\n heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping\n about.\n\n\n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office\n that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge\n game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have\n joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the\n other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's\n life.\n\n\n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a\n husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n\n\n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail\n slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the\n time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture\n clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n\n\n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out\n the contents and spread it wide.\n\n\n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on\n it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests\n at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue\n eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be\n attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was\n eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\nIt was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the\n authorities immediately!\nBright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the\n Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\nWhoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying\n on....\nThe smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures.\n The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to\n women—a startling disproportion—the comfortable cities that weren't\n nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced\n qualifications.\n\n\n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an\n artist's conception, but even so....\n\n\n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where\n you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n\n\n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she\n wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the\n poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\nBut the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had\n taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was\n up to her to notify the authorities!\nShe took another look at the poster.\n\n\n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed\n it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain\n wrapper that the poster had come in.\nIV\n\n\n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the\n edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon\n thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it\n look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She\n knew she would never be able to buy it.\n\n\n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n\n\n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her.\n There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously\n embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was\n a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she\n had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n\n\n Time enough, at any rate.\n\n\n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any\n hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it\n up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n\n\n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she\n felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she\n knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out\n to the end, to grasp any straw.\n\n\n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n\n\n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip\n to take.\"\n\n\n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up.\n She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a\n probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted\n her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n\n\n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n\n\n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers\n had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n\n\n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing\n a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies\n who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the\n presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated\n in from the corridor.\n\n\n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which,\n she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the\n department store lights.\n\n\n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n\n\n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another\n plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n\n\n And she probably was. You had to do\nsomething\nnowadays. You couldn't\n just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the\n endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n\n\n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n\n\n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown\n hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n\n\n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left\n and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his\n fingers down one of the pages.\n\n\n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought—six months and a\n fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for\n shoplifting.\n\n\n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government\n suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could\n hear a little of what he said:\n\n\n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ...\n probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n\n\n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a\n choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary\n for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony\n planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n\n\n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand\n dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in\n neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She\n could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing\n she could do about it.\n\n\n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\nV\n\n\n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences,\n like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in\n soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the\n electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of\n security in an ever-changing world.\n\n\n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady,\n thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the\n downtown stores.\n\n\n Well, maybe some day she would.\n\n\n But not today. And not tonight.\n\n\n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a\n minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The\n conversation wasn't long.\n\n\n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to\n get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same\n night.\n\n\n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away,\n she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from\n other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels\n on the sidewalk.\n\n\n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building\n than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the\n buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on\n the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man\n appeared in the doorway.\n\n\n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n\n\n She smiled pertly.\n\n\n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n\n\n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed\n him in.\n\n\n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment.\n When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at\n the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a\n battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of\n the girls sitting in them.\n\n\n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n\n\n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n\n\n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake.\n Full name, please.\"\n\n\n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he\n wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n\n\n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n \"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't\n matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n\n\n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n\n\n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've\n interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice.\n We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will\n pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The\n colonists need wives; they offer you—security.\"\n\n\n He stressed the word slightly.\n\n\n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay\n behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten\n thousand dollars.\"\n\n\n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars\n and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had\n worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n\n\n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man\n from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss\n Carstens?\"\n\n\n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I\nlove\nto travel!\" she said.\n\n\n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How did a mismatch in the male/female ratio develop on Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB_1", "options": ["Many more men than women left Earth to colonize other planets.", "Although societies in the past placed outsized value on having sons, and aborted or killed girl children, ever since the nuclear war, people thought society would be more peaceful if there were more women.", "Due to the presence of estrogen-imitating chemicals like BPA in the environment, more women than men were being born.", "To reduce the population of Earth, and the reproductive potential of men, any men accused even of a petty crime was deported to the colonies. Since most criminals were men, an imbalance in sexes developed."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the system for matching up compatible couple as women arrive in the colonies?", "question_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB_2", "options": ["Each woman and man desiring to be married fills out a long application with details about likes and dislikes, personal characteristics and goals. Computer software matches up compatible couples.", "There is no matching system. The women arriving in the colonies are free to establish their own livelihoods and marry men that they find attractive.", "Men put in orders for mail-order brides. The transport company seeks women to fulfill the men's orders as closely as possible.", "Women and men are given the two halves of lottery tickets bearing the same number, and that is how wives are assigned."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What actions did Escher take to satisfy MacDonald's demands regarding re-adjusting the ratio of the sexes on Earth back closer to 1:1?", "question_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB_3", "options": ["He had the secret police kidnap women and place them on space ships to the colonies.", "Secretly, he had the penalties for formerly relatively minor but common offenses now had very long prison times and high fines...or an option to emigrate.", "He told MacDonald he couldn't make it happen ethically, and he resigned.", "He started an advertisement campaign that highlighted the lack of virility of Earth's remaining men."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What point is the author driving home in the first section of the story that is important in interpreting the rest of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB_4", "options": ["People are the same everywhere, no matter which plaent they are on.", "The landscape of the colonies is verdant and offers opportunities in farming.", "The animal known as the yllumph is nearly useless as a beast of burden.", "The men in the colonies work hard, but have unrealistic expectations of the women that they hope they are going to marry."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the women leave Earth to go to the colonies because they want to?", "question_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB_5", "options": ["Suzanne Carstens and Phyllis Hanson are both eager to go - Phyllis to find a husband, and Suzanne says she loves to travel.", "All three of the women: Phyllis Hanson, Ruby Johnson and Suzanne Carstens wanted to leave Earth - there was no coercion.", "None of the women leave voluntarily. All of them were coerced into leaving by the machinations of the justice system. ", "Only Phyllis Hanson leaves voluntarily."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which gender holds true power on earth, and which in the Colonies?", "question_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB_6", "options": ["Men appear to hold ultimate power on both planets. Marriage is essentially servitude in the colonies, and men are able to force women off Earth into space to serve the colonists.", "Men hold the real power on Earth, because women have to compete to ingratiate themselves with the few men. On the colonies, it is the reverse: men have to kowtow to women's desires to have any hope of attracting a wife.", "Women hold all meaningful power on Earth, because they are in the majority, and men hold the most power in the colonies, where they outnumber women.", "The sexes hold equal amounts of power on Earth and in the colonies, even though their numbers are out of balance, because the Earth/Colonial government is, in the end, one coherent whole."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the crime of the third woman whose case history was described in the story, and who had to accept emigration to the colonies as the lesser of two bad choices?", "question_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB_7", "options": ["She shoplifted a dress and got caught - again.", "She got scammed by the emigration board thugs - she though she had confirmed a date with the girls to play bridge, and got nabbed by Escher's people instead.", "She was a call girl, and thought she was making a client call, but instead was entrapped by Escher's people.", "She had failed to pay her apartment rent and was called to the manager's office to explain, and he pressed charges."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why are Karl and Joe so eager to get to Landing City?", "question_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB_8", "options": ["They intend to participate in the wife distribution lottery that will take place when the next spaceship lands.", "They are required to pay taxes to Earth every six months, and they have waited till the last minute and are in danger of missing their appointments with the Earth tax agents.", "They are in desperate need of new yllumphs, and the most noted breeder of cooperative yllumphs is right outside the city.", "They have been out in the countryside beyond that Karazoo River for a long time, and have accumulated furs from their trap line to trade while the price is still good."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Phyllis Hanson restless?", "question_unique_id": "51268_6ONFH6BB_9", "options": ["She had just broken up with her boyfriend, which was probably her last chance to get married.", "She was troubled because she wanted a promotion at work and couldn't figure out what more to to do attract attention to her work.", "Her apartment was just too small.", "She could hear her biological clock ticking."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/2/6/51268//51268-h//51268-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "43041", "set_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Double or Nothing", "year": 1962, "author": "Sharkey, Jack", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Science fiction; Inventors -- Fiction", "article": "DOUBLE or NOTHING\nBy JACK SHARKEY\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Stories of\n Imagination May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe mind quails before certain contemplations?\nThe existence of infinity, for instance.\nOr finity, for that matter.\nOr 50,000 batches of cornflakes dumped from the sky.\nI don't know why I listen to Artie Lindstrom. Maybe it's because at\n times (though certainly not—I hope—on as permanent a basis as Artie)\n I'm as screwy as he is. At least, I keep letting myself get sucked into\n his plans, every time he's discovered the \"invention that will change\n the world\". He discovers it quite a bit; something new every time.\n And, Artie having a natural mechanical aptitude that would probably\n rate as point-nine-nine-ad-infinitum on a scale where one-point-oh was\n perfection, all his inventions work. Except—\n\n\n Well, take the last thing we worked on. (He usually includes me in his\n plans because, while he's the better cooker-upper of these gadgets,\n I've got the knack for building them. Artie can't seem to slip a radio\n tube into its socket without shattering the glass, twist a screwdriver\n without gouging pieces out of his thumb, nor even solder an electrical\n connection without needing skin-grafts for the hole he usually burns in\n his hand.)\n\n\n So we're a team, Artie and me. He does the planning, I do the\n constructing. Like, as I mentioned, the last thing we worked on. He\n invented it; I built it. A cap-remover (like for jars and ketchup\n bottles). But not just a clamp-plus-handle, like most of the same\n gadgets. Nope, this was electronic, worked on a tight-beam radio-wave,\n plus something to do with the expansion coefficients of the metals\n making up the caps, so that, from anyplace in line-of-sight of her home,\n the housewife could shove a stud, and come home to find all the caps\n unscrewed on her kitchen shelves, and the contents ready for getting at.\n \n It did, I'll admit, have a nice name: The Teletwist.\n\n\n Except, where's the point in unscrewing caps unless you're physically\n present to make use of the contents of the jars? I mentioned this to\n Artie when I was building the thing, but he said, \"Wait and see. It'll\n be a novelty, like hula hoops a couple of decades back. Novelties always\n catch on.\"\nWell, he was wrong. When we finally found a manufacturer softheaded\n enough to mass-produce a few thousand of the gadgets, total sales for\n the entire country amounted to seventeen. Of course, the price was kind\n of prohibitive: Thirteen-fifty per Teletwist. Why would a housewife\n lay that kind of money on the line when she'd already, for a two-buck\n license, gotten a husband who could be relied upon (well, most of the\n time) to do the same thing for her?\n\n\n Not, of course, that we didn't finally make money on the thing. It was\n just about that time, you'll remember, that the Imperial Martian Fleet\n decided that the third planet from Sol was getting a bit too powerful,\n and they started orbiting our planet with ultimatums. And while they\n were waiting for our answer, our government quietly purchased Artie's\n patent, made a few little adjustments on his cap-twister, and the\nnext\nthing the Martians knew, all their airlocks were busily unscrewing\n themselves with nothing outside them except hungry vacuum. It was also\n the\nlast\nthing the Martians knew.\n\n\n So Artie's ideas seem to have their uses, all right. Only, for some\n reason, Artie never thinks of the proper application for his latest\n newfound principle. That neat little disintegrator pistol carried by the\n footsoldiers in the Three Day War (with Venus; remember Venus?) was a\n variation on a cute little battery-powered device of Artie's, of which\n the original function had been to rid one's house of roaches.\n\n\n At any rate—at a damned\ngood\nrate, in fact—the government always\n ended up paying Artie (and me, as his partner-confederate-cohort) an\n anything-but-modest fee for his patents. We weren't in the millionaire\n class, yet, but neither were we very far out of it. And we were much\n better off than any millionaires, since Artie had persuaded the\n government to let us, in lieu of payment for another patent of his\n (for his Nixsal; the thing that was supposed to convert sea-water into\n something drinkable, and did: Gin.), be tax-free for the rest of our\n lives.\n\n\n (It was quite a concession for the government to make. But then, the\n government-produced \"George Washington Gin\" is quite a concession in\n itself.)\n\n\n So I guess you could say I keep listening to Artie Lindstrom because\n of the financial rewards. I must admit they're nice. And it's kind of\n adventurous, when I'm working on Artie's latest brainstorm, to let\n myself wonder what—since I generally scrap Artie's prognosis for the\n gadget's future—the damned thing will\nactually\nbe used for.\n\n\n Or, at least, it\nwas\nkind of adventurous, until Artie started in on\n his scheme of three weeks ago: a workable anti-gravity machine. And now,\n I'm feeling my first tremors of regret that I ever hooked up with the\n guy. Because—Well, it happened like this:\n\"It looks great,\" I said, lifting my face from the blueprint, and\n nodding across the workbench at Artie. \"But what the hell does it do?\"\n\n\n Artie shoved a shock of dust-colored hair back off his broad, dull pink\n forehead, and jabbed excitedly with a grimy forefinger at the diagram.\n \"Can't you\ntell\n, Burt? What does\nthis\nlook like!\"\n\n\n My eyes returned to the conglomeration of sketchy cones beneath his\n flailing finger, and I said, as truthfully as possible, \"A pine forest\n on a lumpy hill.\"\n\n\n \"Those,\" he said, his tone hurt as it always was when I inadvertently\n belittled his draftmanship, \"are flywheels.\"\n\n\n \"Cone-shaped flywheels?\" I said. \"Why, for pete's sake?\"\n\n\n \"Only,\" he said, with specious casualness, \"in order to develop a\n centrifugal thrust that runs in a\nstraight line\n!\"\n\n\n \"A centr—\" I said, then sat back from the drawings, blinking. \"That's\n impossible, Artie.\"\n\n\n \"And why should it be?\" he persisted. \"Picture an umbrella, with the\n fabric removed. Now twirl the handle on its axis. What do the ribs do?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose they splay out into a circle?\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" he exulted. \"And if they\nimpeded\nfrom splaying out? If,\n instead of separate ribs, we have a hollow, bottomless cone of metal?\n Where does the force go?\"\n\n\n I thought it over, then said, with deliberation, \"In\nall\ndirections,\n Artie. One part shoving up-to-the-right, one part up-to-the-left, like\n that.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he said, his face failing to fight a mischievous grin. \"And\n since none of them move, where does the\nresultant\nforce go?\"\n\n\n I shrugged, \"Straight up, I guess—\" Then my ears tuned in belatedly on\n what I'd said, and a moment later I squeaked, \"Artie! Straight\nup\n!\"\nHe nodded eagerly. \"Or, of course, straight east, straight west, or\n whichever way the ferrule of this here theoretical umbrella was pointed\n at the time the twirling began. The point is, we can generate pure force\n in\nany\ndirection. What do you think? Can you build it?\"\n\n\n \"It'd be child's play. In fact, Artie, it's\ntoo\ndamned simple to be\n believed! What's the hitch? Why hasn't anyone tried it before\nnow\n?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" he said, his blue eyes dancing. \"Maybe no one ever thought\n of it before. You could sit down and twist a paper clip out of a hunk\n of soft wire, couldn't you? Easy as pie. But someone had to invent the\n thing, first. All the great inventions have been simple. Look at the\n wheel.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" I said, since I'd been sold on his gadget the moment\n I pictured that umbrella moving ferruleward like a whirling arrow.\n \"Still, it looks like you're getting something for nothing. A kind of\n by-your-own-bootstraps maneuver....\"\n\n\n \"An inventor,\" said Artie, quoting his favorite self-coined aphorism,\n \"must never think like a scientist!\"\n\n\n \"But\"—I said, more to stem the tide I expected than to really make a\n coherent objection.\n\n\n \"An inventor,\" he went dreamily onward, \"is essentially a dreamer; a\n scientist is an observer. An inventor tries to make a result he wants\n happen; a scientist tries to tell the inventor that the result cannot be\n achieved.\"\n\n\n \"Please. Artie. Don't tell me about the bee again.\"\n\n\n But Artie told me about the bumblebee, and how there were still some\n scientists who insisted, according to the principles of aerodynamics,\n that it was not constructed properly to enable it to fly. And about\n how men of this short-sighted ilk were still scoffing at the ancient\n alchemist's talk of the Philosopher's Stone for transmuting metals, even\n though transmutation of metals was being done every day in atomic piles.\n And how he'd theorized that there\nwas\nonce a genuine Philosopher's\n Stone, probably a hunk of pure U-235, that someone had managed to make,\n which might explain why so many alchemists (lacking, unfortunately, any\n knowledge of heavy radiations or Geiger counters) sort of died off in\n their quest for the stone.\nIt was nearly lunchtime when he finished his spiel, and I was kicking\n myself in my short-memoried brain for having let him get onto the\n subject, when abruptly the joyous glow behind his eyes damped its\n sparkle a bit.\n\n\n \"There\nis\none little hitch—\"\n\n\n \"I thought it looked too easy,\" I sighed, waiting for the clinker.\n \"Don't tell me it has to be made out of pure Gallium, which has the\n regrettable tendency to liquiefy at about thirty degrees centigrade? Or\n perhaps of the most elusive of its eleven isotopes?\"\n\n\n \"No, no, nothing like that,\" he murmured almost distractedly. \"It's the\n force-per-gram part that's weak.\"\n\n\n \"Don't tell me,\" I said unhappily, \"that this thing'll only generate\n enough force to lift itself?\"\n\n\n A feeble ghost of his erstwhile grin rode briefly across his lips.\n \"That's the way it works out on paper,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Which means,\" I realized aloud, \"that it's commercially useless,\n because what's the good of an anti-gravity machine that can't lift\n anything except\nitself\n! It falls into the class of lifeboats that\n float up to the gunwales in the water while still\nempty\n. Fun to watch,\n but impossible to use. Hell, Artie, if that's the setup, then this\n thing wouldn't be any more help to a space-aiming government than an\n aborigine's boomerang; it flies beautifully, but not if the aborigine\n tries to go\nwith\nit.\"\n\n\n \"However,\" he said, a bit more brightly, \"I've been wrong on paper\n before. Remember the bumblebee, Burt!\nThat\ntheory still holds up on\n paper. But the bee still flies.\"\n\n\n He had me, there. \"So you want I should build it anyhow, just on the\n off-chance that it\nwon't\nfollow the rules of physical logic, and will\n decide to generate a force above and beyond its own gravitic drag?\"\n\n\n \"That's it,\" he said happily. \"And even if it only manages to negate\n its own weight, we'll have an easier time ironing the bugs out of a\n model than we would out of a diagram. After all, who'd have figured that\n beyond\nMach I\n, all the lift-surfaces on a plane work in\nreverse\n?\"\n\n\n It wasn't, I had to admit, anything that an inventor could have\n reasonably theorized at the outset.... So I locked myself in the lab for\n a week, and built his gadget, while he spent his time pacing through his\n fourteen-room mansion across the way from the lab building (the \"way\"\n being the flat grassy region on Artie's estate that housed his swimming\n pool, private heliport, and movie theatre), trying to coin a nifty name\n for the thing. We both finished in a dead heat.\nI unlocked the door of the lab, blinked hard against the sting of warm\n yellow sunlight after a week of cool blue fluorescents, and just as I\n wheezed, \"Got it,\" Artie was counterpointing with, \"We'll call it The\nUuaa\n!\" (He made four syllables out of it.)\n\n\n \"The Oo-oo-\nah\n-ah?\" I glottaled. \"In honor of the fiftieth state, or\n what? I know 'aa' is a type of lava, but what the hell's 'uu', besides\n the noise a man makes getting into an overheated bath?\"\n\n\n Artie pouted. \"'Uuaa' is initials. For 'Up, up, and away!' I thought it\n was pretty good.\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Why feed free fodder to the telecomics? I can hear\n them now, doing monologues about people getting beri-beri flying from\n Walla Walla to Pago Pago on their Uuaas....\"\n\n\n \"So what would\nyou\ncall it!\" he grunted.\n\n\n \"A bust,\" I sighed, left-thumbing over my shoulder at the lab. \"It sits\n and twirls and whistles a little, but that's about the size of it,\n Artie.\"\n\n\n He spanieled with his eyes, basset-hounded with his mouth, and\n orangutaned with his cheeks, then said, with dim hope, \"Did you weigh\n it? Maybe if you weighed it—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, it lost, all right,\" I admitted. \"When I connected the batteries,\n the needle on the scale dropped down to zero, and stopped there. And I\n found that I could lift the machine into the air, and it'd stay where it\n was put, just whistling and whirling its cones. But then it started to\n settle.\" I beckoned him back inside.\n\n\n \"Settle? Why?\" Artie asked.\n\n\n \"Dust,\" I said. \"There's always a little dust settling out of the air.\n It doesn't weigh\nmuch\n, but it made the machine weigh at least what the\n dust-weight equalled, and down it went. Slow and easy, but down.\"\n\n\n Artie looked at the gadget, sitting and whistling on the floor of the\n lab, then turned a bleak-but-still-hopeful glance my way. \"Maybe—If we\n could make a\nguy\ntake on a cone-shape, and whirled him—\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I muttered. \"Bend over, grab his ankles, and fly anywhere in\n the world, with his torso and legs pivoting wildly around his peaked\n behind.\" I shook my head. \"Besides the manifestly undignified posturing\n involved, we have to consider the other effects; like having his\n eyeballs fly out.\"\n\n\n \"If—If we had a bunch of men lie in a circle around a kind of\n Maypole-thing, each guy clutching the ankles of the next one....\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'd be weightless, but they\nstill\nwouldn't go\nup\n,\" I\n said. \"Unless they could be towed, somehow. And by the time they\n landed, they'd be too nauseous to be of any use for at least three\n days. Always assuming, of course, that the weak-wristed member of the\n sick circlet didn't lose his grip, and have them end up playing mid-air\n crack-the-whip before they fell.\"\n\n\n \"So all right, it's got a couple of bugs!\" said Artie. \"But the\n principle's sound, right?\"\n\n\n \"Well—Yeah, there you got me, Artie. The thing\ncancels\nweight,\n anyhow....\"\n\n\n \"Swell. So we work from there,\" He rubbed his hands together joyously.\n \"And who knows what we'll come up with.\"\n\n\n \"\nWe\nnever do, that's for sure,\" I mumbled.\n\n\n But Artie just shrugged. \"I like surprises,\" he said.\nThe end of the day—me working, Artie inventing—found us with some\n new embellishments for the machine. Where it was originally a sort\n of humped metal box (the engine went inside the hump) studded with\n toothbrush-bristle rows of counter-revolving cones (lest elementary\n torque send the machine swinging the other way, and thus destroy the\n thrust-effect of the cones), it now had an additional feature: A helical\n flange around each cone.\n\n\n \"You see,\" Artie explained, while I was torching them to order from\n plate metal, \"the helices will provide\nlift\nas the cones revolve.\"\n\n\n \"Only in the atmosphere of the planet,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Sure, I know. But by the time the outer limits of the air are reached,\n the machine, with the same mass-thrust, will have less gravity-drag\n to fight, being that much farther from the Earth. The effect will be\n cumulative. The higher it gets, the more outward thrust it'll generate.\n Then nothing'll stop it!\"\n\n\n \"You could be right,\" I admitted, hammering out helix after helix on an\n electric anvil (another gadget of Artie's; the self-heating anvil—The\n Thermovil—had begun life as a small inspiration in Artie's mind for a\n portable toaster).\n\n\n It was just after sunset when we figured the welds were cool enough so\n we could test it. Onto the scale it went again, I flicked the toggle,\n and we stood back to watch the needle as the cones picked up speed.\n Along with the original whistling sound made by the cones we began to\n detect a shriller noise, one which abruptly became a genuine pain in the\n ear. As Artie and I became somewhat busy with screaming (the only thing\n we could think of on the spur of the moment to counteract the terrible\n waves of noise assaulting our tympana), it was all at once much easier\n to see the needle of the scale dropping toward zero, as the glass disc\n facing the dial dissolved into gritty powder, along with the glass panes\n in every window in the lab, the house, the heliport, and the movie\n theatre. (Not to mention those of a few farmhouses a couple of miles\n down the highway, but we didn't find that out till their lawyers showed\n up with bills for damages.)\n\n\n Sure enough, though, the thing lifted. Up it bobbed, like a metal\n dirigible with agonizing gas pains, shrieking louder by the second.\n When the plaster started to trickle and flake from the walls, and the\n fillings in my teeth rose to a temperature just short of incandescence,\n I decided it was time to cancel this phase of the experiment, and, with\n very little regret, I flung a blanket-like canvas tarpaulin up and over\n the ascending machine before it started using its helices to screw into\n the ceiling. The cones bit into the tarpaulin, tangled, jammed, and the\n machine—mercifully noiseless, now—crashed back onto the scale, and\n lost a lot of symmetry and a couple of rivets.\n\n\n \"What's Plan C?\" I said to Artie.\n\n\n \"\nQuiet!\n\" he said, either because I'd interrupted his thinking or\n because that was our next goal.\nThe next four days were spent in the arduous and quite tricky business\n of reaming acoustically spaced holes along the flanges. Artie's theory\n was that if we simply (\"simply\" was his word, not mine) fixed it so\n that the sound made by each flange (anything whirly with a hole or two\n in it is bound to make a calculated noise) was of the proper number of\n vibrations to intermesh with the compression/rarefaction phases of the\n sounds made by the other flanges, a veritable sphere of silence would be\n thereby created, since there'd be no room for any sound waves to pass\n through the already crowded atmosphere about the machine.\n\n\n \"It'll make less noise than a mouse in sneakers drooling on a blotter!\"\n enthused Artie, when I had it rigged again, and ready to go.\n\n\n \"Still,\" I said uncertainly, \"whether we\nhear\nit or not, all that\n soundwave-energy has to do\nsomething\n, Artie. If it turns ultrasonic,\n we may suddenly find ourselves in a showerbath of free electrons and\n even\nworse\nsubatomic particles from disrupted air molecules. Or the\n lab might turn molten on us. Or—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, turn it\non\n, Burt!\" said Artie. \"That's just a chance we have to\n take.\"\n\n\n \"Don't see why we\nhave\nto take it....\" I groused, but I'm as curious\n as the next man, so I turned it on. (I could have arranged to do it by\n remote control, except for two pressing deterrents: One—At a remote\n point of control, I wouldn't be able to watch what, if anything,\n the machine did, and Two—Who knows where the\nsafe\nspot is where\n soundwaves are concerned? With some sonic forces, you're safer the\nnearer\nyou get to the source.) So, like I said, I turned it on.\n\n\n Silence. Beautiful, blissful, silence. There before us twirled the rows\n of shiny cones, lifting slowly into the air, and there was nothing\n to hear at all. Beside me, Artie's lips moved, but I couldn't catch\n a syllable. This time around, we'd looped a rope through a few metal\n grommets in the base of the machine, and as it rose, Artie slipped the\n trailing ends under his arms from behind, and proceeded to lash it\n across his chest, to test the thing's lift-power. As he fumbled with the\n knot, I shouted at him, \"Use a firm hitch!\"\nNothing came out, but Artie wasn't a bad lip-reader. He scowled, and\n his lips made a \"\nWhat?!\n\" motion, so I repeated my caution. Next thing\n I knew, he was taking a poke at me, and I, to fend him off, ended up\n wrestling on the floor with him, while the untended machine burred its\n way into the ceiling, until the engine overheated and burned away the\n electrical insulation on the wires, and the machine, plus a good two\n feet square of lab-ceiling, once more descended to demolish the scale.\n\n\n \"—your language!\" Artie was snarling, as sound returned.\n\n\n \"All I said was 'Use a firm hitch!'\" I pleaded, trying to shove his\n shins off my floor-pinned biceps.\n\n\n Artie stared at me, then rocked off my prostrate body, convulsed in\n a fit of laughter. \"Say it silently in front of a mirror, sometime,\"\n he choked out. Before I had time to see what he was talking about,\n I smelled smoke, above and beyond that engendered by the scorched\n insulation.\n\n\n I ran to the door, and opened it to observe the last glowing,\n crackling timbers of the house, the theatre, and the heliport vanish\n into hot orange sparks, in the grip of a dandy ring of fire that—in\n a seventy-yard path—had burned up everything in a sixty-five to\n hundred-thirty-five yard radius of the lab.\n\n\n \"I told you those soundwaves had to do something,\" I said. \"Ready to\n give up?\"\n\n\n But Artie was already staring at the debris around the scale and making\n swift notes on a memo pad....\n\"It looks awfully damned complex—\" I hedged, eight days later,\n looking at the repaired, refurbished, and amended gadget on the table.\n \"Remember, Artie, the more parts to an invention, the more things can go\n wrong with it. In geometric progression....\"\n\n\n \"Unh-uh,\" he shook his head. \"Not the more parts, Burt. The more\nmoving\nparts. All we've done is added a parabolic sound-reflector, to\n force all the waves the cones make down through a tube in the middle of\n the machine. And we've insulated the tube to keep extraneous vibration\n from shattering it with super-induced metal fatigue.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" I said, \"but about that\ninsulation\n, Artie—\"\n\n\n \"You got a\nbetter\nidea?\" he snapped. \"We tried rubber; it charred\n and flaked away. We tried plastics; they bubbled, melted, extruded,\n or burned. We tried metal and mineral honeycombs; they distorted,\n incandesced, fused or vaporized. Ceramic materials shattered. Fabrics\n tore, or petrified and cracked. All the regular things failed us. So\n what's wrong with trying something new?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing, Artie, nothing. But—\nCornflakes\n?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we sogged 'em down good with water, right? And they've still got\n enough interstices between the particles to act as sound-baffles, right?\n And by the time they get good and hot and dry, they'll cook onto the\n metal, right? (Ask anyone who ever tried to clean a pot after scorching\n cereal just how hard they'll stick!) And even when most of them flake\n away, the random distribution of char will circumvent any chance the\n soundwaves have of setting up the regular pulse-beat necessary to\n fatigue the metal in the tube, okay?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, sure, Artie, it's okay, but—\nCornflakes\n?\"\n\n\n \"I take it your objections are less scientific than they are esthetic?\"\n he inquired.\n\n\n \"Well, something like that,\" I admitted. \"I mean, aw—For pete's sake,\n Artie! The patent office'll laugh at us. They'll start referring us to\n the copyright people, as inventors of cookbooks!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not,\" he said philosophically. \"The thing\nstill\nmay not\nwork\n,\n you know.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\nthere's\none bright spot, anyhow!\" I agreed, fiddling with the\n starting switch. \"So okay, I'm game if you are.\"\n\n\n \"Let 'er rip,\" he pontificated, and I flicked the switch.\nIt worked beautifully. Not even a faint hum. The only way we could tell\n it was working was from the needle on the—rebuilt again—scale, as it\n dropped lazily down to the zero mark. Our ears didn't sting, no glass\n went dusting into crystalline powder, and a quick peek through the door\n showed no ring of fire surrounding the lab.\n\n\n \"We may just have\ndone\nit!\" I said, hopefully, as the silver-nosed\n machine began to float upward (We hadn't\nhad\nto mount the parabolic\n reflector in the position of a nose-cone, but it made the thing look\n neater, somehow.)\n\n\n It seemed a little torpid in its ascent, but that could be credited to\n the extra weight of the reflector and cornflakes, not to mention the\n fact that the helices had to suck all their air in under the lip of the\n silvery nose-cone before they could thrust properly. But its rise was\n steady. Six inches, ten inches—\n\n\n Then, at precisely one foot in height, something unexpected happened.\n Under the base of the machine, where the sound-heated air was at its\n most torrid, a shimmering disc-like thing began to materialize, and\n warp, and hollow out slightly, and beside it, a glinting metal rod-thing\n flattened at one end, then the flat end went concave in the center and\n kind of oval about the perimeter, and something brownish and shreddy\n plopped and hissed into the now-very-concave disc-like thing.\n\n\n \"Artie—!\" I said, uneasily, but by then, he, too, had recognized the\n objects for what they were.\n\n\n \"Burt—\" he said excitedly. \"Do you realize what we've done? We've\n invented a\nsyntheticizer\n!\"\n\n\n Even as he was saying it, the objects completed their mid-air\n materialization (time: five seconds, start to finish), and clattered\n and clinked onto the scale. We stood and looked down at them: A bowl of\n cornflakes and a silver spoon.\n\n\n \"How—?\" I said, but Artie was already figuring it out, aloud.\n\n\n \"It's the soundwaves,\" he said. \"At ultrasonic, molecule-disrupting\n vibrations, they're doing just what that Philosopher's Stone was\n supposed to: Transmuting. Somehow, we didn't clean out the reflector\n sufficiently, and some of the traces of our other trial insulations\n remained inside. The ceramics formed the bowl, the metals formed the\n spoon, the cornflakes formed the cornflakes!\"\n\n\n \"But,\" I said logically (or as logically as could be expected under the\n circumstances), \"what about the rubber, or the fabrics?\"\nArtie's face lit up, and he nodded toward the machine, still hovering at\n one foot above the scale. In its wake, amid the distorting turbulence of\n the sound-tortured air, two more objects were materializing: a neatly\n folded damask napkin, and a small rubber toothpick. As they dropped down\n to join their predecessors, the machine gave a satisfied shake, and\n rose steadily to the two-foot level. I was scribbling frantically in my\n notebook:\nBowl + cereal + spoon: 5 seconds. Lag: 10 seconds. Napkin +\n toothpick: 3 seconds. Total synthesizing time: 18 seconds. Allowance for\n rise of machine per foot: 2 seconds.\n\"Burt—!\" Artie yelled joyously, just as I completed the last item,\n \"Look at that, will you?!\"\n\n\n I looked, and had my first presentiment of disaster. At two feet, the\n machine was busily fabricating—out of the air molecules themselves, for\n all I knew—\ntwo\nbowls,\ntwo\nspoons, and\ntwo\nbowlfuls of cereal.\n\n\n \"Hey, Artie—\" I began, but he was too busy figuring out this latest\n development.\n\n\n \"It's the altimeter,\" he said. \"We had it gauged by the foot, but it's\n taking the numerical calibrations as a kind of output-quota, instead!\"\n\n\n \"Look, Artie,\" I interrupted, as twin napkins and toothpicks dropped\n down beside the new bowls on the table where the scale lay. \"We're going\n to have a little problem—\"\n\n\n \"You're telling\nme\n!\" he sighed, unhappily. \"All those damned\nrandom\nfactors! How many times did the machine have to be repaired after each\n faulty test! What thickness of ceramics, or fabric, or rubber, or metal\n remained! What was the precise distribution and dampness of each of\n those soggy cornflakes! Hell, Burt, we may be\nforever\ntrying to make a\n duplicate of this!\"\n\n\n \"Artie—\" I said, as three toothpick-napkin combinations joined the\n shattered remains of triple bowl-cereal-spoon disasters from the\n one-yard mark over the scale, \"that is\nnot\nthe problem I had in mind.\"\n\n\n \"Oh?\" he said, as four shimmering discs began to coalesce and shape\n themselves. \"What, then?\"\n\n\n \"It's not that I don't appreciate the side-effect benefits of free\n cornflake dinners,\" I said, speaking carefully and somberly, to hold\n his attention. \"But isn't it going to put a crimp in our anti-gravity\n machine sales? Even at a mere mile in height, it means that the spot\n beneath it is due for a deluge of five-thousand-two-hundred-eighty bowls\n of cornflakes. Not to mention all those toothpicks, napkins and spoons!\"\n\n\n Artie's face went grave. \"Not to mention the\n five-thousand-two-hundred-seventy-nine of the same that the spot beneath\n would get from the gadget when it was just one foot\nshort\nof the mile!\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I said, calculating rapidly as the five-foot mark produced\n a neat quintet of everything, a quintet which crashed noisily onto the\n ten lookalikes below it as the machine bobbed silently to the six-foot\n mark, \"we have one interesting thing in our favor: the time element.\"\n\n\n \"How so?\" said Artie, craning over my shoulder to try and read my lousy\n calligraphics on the pad.\n\"Well,\" I said, pointing to each notation in turn, \"the first batch,\n bowl-to-toothpick, took twenty seconds, if we include the time-lapse\n while the machine was ascending to the one-foot mark.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh,\" he nodded. \"I see. So?\"\n\n\n \"So the second batch took double. Forty seconds. Not only did it require\n thirty-six seconds for the formation of the stuff, it took the machine\n twice as many seconds to reach the two-foot mark.\"\n\n\n \"I get it,\" he said. \"So I suppose it took three times the base number\n for the third batch?\"\n\n\n \"Right. A full minute. And the materialization of the objects is—Boy,\n that's noisy!\" I interrupted myself as batch number six came smashing\n down. \"—always at a point where the objects fit into a theoretical\n conical section below the machine.\"\n\n\n \"How's that again?\" said Artie.\n\n\n \"Well, bowl number one formed just below the exhaust vent of the central\n cylinder. Bowls two and three, or—if you prefer—bowl-batch two,\n formed about six inches lower, edge to edge, at the cross-section of an\n imaginary cone (whose rather truncated apex is the exhaust vent) that\n seems to form a vertical angle of thirty degrees.\"\n\n\n \"In other words,\" said Artie, \"each new formation comes in a spot\n beneath this cone where it's possible for the new formations to\n materialize side-by-side, right?\" When I nodded, he said, \"Fine. But so\n what?\"\n\n\n \"It means that each new materialization occurs at a steadily increasing\n height, but one which—\" I calculated briefly on the pad \"—is never\n greater than two-thirds the height of the machine itself.\"\n\n\n Artie looked blank. \"Thank you very kindly for the math lesson,\" he said\n finally, \"but I still don't see what you are driving at, Burt. How does\n this present a problem?\"\n\n\n I pointed toward the un-repaired hole in the lab ceiling, where the\n machine, after dutifully disgorging the number-seven load, was slowly\n heading. \"It means that unless we grab that thing before it gets too\n much higher, the whole damn planet'll be up to its ears in cornflakes.\n And the one-third machine-height gap between artifacts and machine means\n that we can't even use the mounding products to climb on and get it.\n We'd always be too low, and an\nincreasing\ntoo-low at that!\"\n\n\n \"Are you trying to say, in your roundabout mathematical way, let's grab\n that thing, fast?\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" I said, glad I had gotten through to him. \"I would've said as\n much sooner, only you never listen until somebody supplies you with all\n the pertinent data on a crisis first.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What kind of weapon did the government develop from Artie's remote can opener?", "question_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N_1", "options": ["A device that could twist the tailpipe of a car, closing it off and preventing the car from running.", "A remote screwdriver that could take the outer door off a space ship.", "A disintegrator pistol.", "A radio-controlled home thermostat."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What invention of Artie's could help put distilleries out of business?", "question_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N_2", "options": ["A contraption to change water from the ocean into a type of alcohol.", "A device that could change any plant material into a very good barrel of whiskey in less than half an hour.", "A drug with the same effects as alcohol but no ill effects on the liver.", "In his spare time, he was a social activist, and he worked to bring back Prohibition."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Artie describe the gap between what science says is possible and his own creative concepts?", "question_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N_3", "options": ["He says that he was impressed with the scientists who figured out the aerodynamic priniciples that control the flight of the bumblebee.", "He says that scientists eventually figure out the laws of physics that inventors can already feel in their bones.", "He says that scientists and inventors constantly spur each other on by sharing good ideas.", "He essentially says that scientists don't have any imagination, all they do is say why an idea won't work, while inventors are leading the way with their dreams."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How many test flights of the anti-gravity machine are described in the story?", "question_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N_4", "options": ["There were so many that Artie and Burt lost count.", "It was just one test flight with a few tweaks.", "Three are described.", "Four are described."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the downside of the modification of the helical flanges?", "question_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N_5", "options": ["The energy from the confined soundwaves left a path of flaming destruction out the roof and along Artie's property.", "The machine would no longer fly a straight line.", "The anti-gravity machine did not display as much lift after the holes were drilled.", "Artie couldn't hear his wife calling him for dinner."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What role are the cornflakes meant to play in the anti-gravity machine?", "question_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N_6", "options": ["They are supposed to serve as  acoustic insulation that won't be destroyed when the anti-gravity machine is running.", "They are supposed to serve as organic ballast that the anti-gravity machine can release when it needs more lift.", "They are supposed to serve as fuel for the anti-gravity machine.", "They are supposed to serve as thermal insulation."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What features added to the anti-gravity machine turned it into a replicator?", "question_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N_7", "options": ["The combination of the addition of the cornflakes and the parabolic reflector plus trace materials left from previous flight tests.", "This was Artie's idea of a practical joke. He left a bowl of cornflakes inside the exhaust vent of the anti-gravity machine to pop out and amaze Burt.", "They added an altimeter, and the metal from it combined with the cornflakes to make the bowl and spoon.", "The cornflakes focused the sound waves in a manner that caused them to absorb materials from the surroundings and spit out perfect bowls of cornflakes."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Artie's main concern with the version of the anti-grav machine that is spitting out bowls of cornflakes seem to be, at least initially?", "question_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N_8", "options": ["He can't understand why the machine is making a bowl, a spoon, the cornflakes, a napkin and toothpicks, but there is no milk on the cornflakes.", "He is concerned that so many different materials may have been part ot test runs during various reconstructions that he will never be able to replicate the machine he has just made.", "He is concerned that scientists will not take his invention seriously because a machine that extrudes bowls of cornflakes is just - funny.", "He is concerned that the anti-grav machine will run out of cornflakes and the whole supersonic field holding it off the ground will collapse."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What prevented the first anti-gravity machine attempt from being able to hold position off the ground?", "question_unique_id": "43041_3VNZEZ3N_9", "options": ["The machine did not make enough noise.", "They failed to take into account the heavier air pressure at their altitude, right at sea level.", "The syntheticizer did not work properly on the first test flight.", "Dust accumulated on the machine and pressed it back down."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/3/0/4/43041//43041-h//43041-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50928", "set_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Hot Planet", "year": 1962, "author": "Clement, Hal", "topic": "PS; Mercury (Planet) -- Fiction; Explorers -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "HOT PLANET\nBy HAL CLEMENT\n\n\n Illustrated by FINLAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMercury had no atmosphere—everyone knew\n\n that. Why was it developing one now?\nI\n\n\n The wind which had nearly turned the\nAlbireo's\nlanding into a\n disaster instead of a mathematical exercise was still playing tunes\n about the fins and landing legs as Schlossberg made his way down to\n Deck Five.\n\n\n The noise didn't bother him particularly, though the endless seismic\n tremors made him dislike the ladders. But just now he was able to\n ignore both. He was curious—though not hopeful.\n\n\n \"Is there anything at all obvious on the last sets of tapes, Joe?\"\n\n\n Mardikian, the geophysicist, shrugged. \"Just what you'd expect ... on\n a planet which has at least one quake in each fifty-mile-square area\n every five minutes. You know yourself we had a nice seismic program set\n up, but when we touched down we found we couldn't carry it out. We've\n done our best with the natural tremors—incidentally stealing most of\n the record tapes the other projects would have used. We have a lot of\n nice information for the computers back home; but it will take all of\n them to make any sense out of it.\"\n\n\n Schlossberg nodded; the words had not been necessary. His astronomical\n program had been one of those sabotaged by the transfer of tapes to the\n seismic survey.\n\n\n \"I just hoped,\" he said. \"We each have an idea why Mercury developed\n an atmosphere during the last few decades, but I guess the high school\n kids on Earth will know whether it's right before we do. I'm resigned\n to living in a chess-type universe—few and simple rules, but infinite\n combinations of them. But it would be nice to know an answer sometime.\"\n\n\n \"So it would. As a matter of fact, I need to know a couple right now.\n From you. How close to finished are the other programs—or what's left\n of them?\"\n\n\n \"I'm all set,\" replied Schlossberg. \"I have a couple of instruments\n still monitoring the sun just in case, but everything in the revised\n program is on tape.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Tom, any use asking you?\"\n\n\n The biologist grimaced. \"I've been shown two hundred and sixteen\n different samples of rock and dust. I have examined in detail twelve\n crystal growths which looked vaguely like vegetation. Nothing was alive\n or contained living things by any standards I could conscientiously\n set.\"\n\n\n Mardikian's gesture might have meant sympathy.\n\n\n \"Camille?\"\n\n\n \"I may as well stop now as any time. I'll never be through. Tape didn't\n make much difference to me, but I wish I knew what weight of specimens\n I could take home.\"\n\n\n \"Eileen?\" Mardikian's glance at the stratigrapher took the place of the\n actual question.\n\n\n \"Cam speaks for me, except that I could have used any more tape you\n could have spared. What I have is gone.\"\n\n\n \"All right, that leaves me, the tape-thief. The last spools are in the\n seismographs now, and will start running out in seventeen hours. The\n tractors will start out on their last rounds in sixteen, and should be\n back in roughly a week. Will, does that give you enough to figure the\n weights we rockhounds can have on the return trip?\"\nThe\nAlbireo's\ncaptain nodded. \"Close enough. There really hasn't been\n much question since it became evident we'd find nothing for the mass\n tanks here. I'll have a really precise check in an hour, but I can\n tell right now that you have about one and a half metric tons to split\n up among the three of you.\n\n\n \"Ideal departure time is three hundred ten hours away, as you all know.\n We can stay here until then, or go into a parking-and-survey orbit at\n almost any time before then. You have all the survey you need, I should\n think, from the other time. But suit yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"I'd just as soon be space-sick as seasick,\" remarked Camille Burkett.\n \"I still hate to think that the entire planet is as shivery as the spot\n we picked.\"\n\n\n Willard Rowson smiled. \"You researchers told me where to land after ten\n days in orbit mapping this rockball. I set you just where you asked. If\n you'd found even five tons of juice we could use in the reaction tanks\n I could still take you to another one—if you could agree which one. I\n hate to say 'Don't blame me,' but I can't think of anything else that\n fits.\"\n\n\n \"So we sit until the last of the tractors is back with the precious\n seismo tapes, playing battleship while our back teeth are being\n shaken out by earthquakes—excuse the word. What a thrill! Glorious\n adventure!\" Zaino, the communications specialist who had been out of a\n job almost constantly since the landing, spoke sourly. The captain was\n the only one who saw fit to answer.\n\n\n \"If you want adventure, you made a mistake exploring space. The only\n space adventures I've heard of are second-hand stories built on\n guesswork; the people who really had them weren't around to tell about\n it. Unless Dr. Marini discovers a set of Mercurian monsters at the last\n minute and they invade the ship or cut off one of the tractors, I'm\n afraid you'll have to do without adventures.\" Zaino grimaced.\n\n\n \"That sounds funny coming from a spaceman, Captain. I didn't really\n mean adventure, though; all I want is something to do besides betting\n whether the next quake will come in one minute or five. I haven't even\n had to fix a suit-radio since we touched down. How about my going out\n with one of the tractors on this last trip, at least?\"\n\n\n \"It's all right with me,\" replied Rowson, \"but Dr. Mardikian runs the\n professional part of this operation. I require that Spurr, Trackman,\n Hargedon and Aiello go as drivers, since without them even a minor\n mechanical problem would be more than an adventure. As I recall it, Dr.\n Harmon, Dr. Schlossberg, Dr. Marini and Dr. Mardikian are scheduled to\n go; but if any one of them is willing to let you take his or her place,\n I certainly don't mind.\"\n\n\n The radioman looked around hopefully. The geologists and the biologist\n shook their heads negatively, firmly and unanimously; but the\n astronomer pondered for a moment. Zaino watched tensely.\n\n\n \"It may be all right,\" Schlossberg said at last. \"What I want to get\n is a set of wind, gas pressure, gas temperature and gas composition\n measures around the route. I didn't expect to be more meteorologist\n than astronomer when we left Earth, and didn't have exactly the right\n equipment. Hargedon and Aiello helped me improvise some, and this is\n the first chance to use it on Darkside. If you can learn what has to be\n done with it before starting time, though, you are welcome to my place.\"\nThe communicator got to his feet fast enough to leave the deck in\n Mercury's feeble gravity.\n\n\n \"Lead me to it, Doc. I guess I can learn to read a home-made\n weathervane!\"\n\n\n \"Is that merely bragging, or a challenge?\" drawled a voice which had\n not previously joined the discussion. Zaino flushed a bit.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Luigi,\" he said hastily. \"I didn't mean it just that way. But I\n still think I can run the stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Likely enough,\" Aiello replied. \"Remember though, it wasn't made just\n for talking into.\" Schlossberg, now on his feet, cut in quickly.\n\n\n \"Come on, Arnie. We'll have to suit up to see the equipment; it's\n outside.\"\n\n\n He shepherded the radioman to the hatch at one side of the deck and\n shooed him down toward the engine and air lock levels. Both were silent\n for some moments; but safely out of earshot of Deck Five the younger\n man looked up and spoke.\n\n\n \"You needn't push, Doc. I wasn't going to make anything of it. Luigi\n was right, and I asked for it.\" The astronomer slowed a bit in his\n descent.\n\n\n \"I wasn't really worried,\" he replied, \"but we have several months yet\n before we can get away from each other, and I don't like talk that\n could set up grudges. Matter of fact, I'm even a little uneasy about\n having the girls along, though I'm no misogynist.\"\n\n\n \"Girls? They're not—\"\n\n\n \"There goes your foot again. Even Harmon is about ten years older than\n you, I suppose. But they're girls to me. What's more important, they no\n doubt think of themselves as girls.\"\n\n\n \"Even Dr. Burkett? That is—I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Even Dr. Burkett. Here, get into your suit. And maybe you'd better\n take out the mike. It'll be enough if you can listen for the next\n hour or two.\" Zaino made no answer, suspecting with some justice that\n anything he said would be wrong.\n\n\n Each made final checks on the other's suit; then they descended\n one more level to the airlock. This occupied part of the same deck\n as the fusion plants, below the wings and reaction mass tanks but\n above the main engine. Its outer door was just barely big enough to\n admit a spacesuited person. Even with the low air pressure carried\n by spaceships, a large door area meant large total force on jamb,\n hinges and locks. It opened onto a small balcony from which a ladder\n led to the ground. The two men paused on the balcony to look over the\n landscape.\n\n\n This hadn't changed noticeably since the last time either had been out,\n though there might have been some small difference in the volcanic\n cones a couple of miles away to the northeast. The furrows down the\n sides of these, which looked as though they had been cut by water but\n were actually bone-dry ash slides, were always undergoing alteration as\n gas from below kept blowing fresh scoria fragments out of the craters.\nThe spines—steep, jagged fragments of rock which thrust upward from\n the plain beyond and to both sides of the cones—seemed dead as ever.\n\n\n The level surface between the\nAlbireo\nand the cones was more\n interesting. Mardikian and Schlossberg believed it to be a lava sheet\n dating from early in Mercury's history, when more volatile substances\n still existed in the surface rocks to cut down their viscosity when\n molten. They supposed that much—perhaps most—of the surface around\n the \"twilight\" belt had been flooded by this very liquid lava, which\n had cooled to a smoother surface than most Earthly lava flows.\n\n\n How long it had stayed cool they didn't guess. But both men felt sure\n that Mercury must have periodic upheavals as heat accumulated inside\n it—heat coming not from radioactivity but from tidal energy. Mercury's\n orbit is highly eccentric. At perihelion, tidal force tries to pull it\n apart along the planet-to-sun line, while at aphelion the tidal force\n is less and the little world's own gravity tries to bring it back to\n a spherical shape. The real change in form is not great, but a large\n force working through even a small amount of distance can mean a good\n deal of energy.\n\n\n If the energy can't leak out—and Mercury's rocks conduct heat no\n better than those of Earth—the temperature must rise.\n\n\n Sooner or later, the men argued, deeply buried rock must fuse to magma.\n Its liquefaction would let the bulk of the planet give farther under\n tidal stress, so heat would be generated even faster. Eventually a\n girdle of magma would have to form far below the crust all around the\n twilight strip, where the tidal strain would be greatest. Sooner or\n later this would melt its way to the surface, giving the zone a period\n of intense volcanic activity and, incidentally, giving the planet a\n temporary atmosphere.\n\n\n The idea was reasonable. It had, the astronomer admitted, been\n suggested long before to account for supposed vulcanism on the moon.\n It justified the careful examination that Schlossberg and Zaino gave\n the plain before they descended the ladder; for it made reasonable\n the occasional changes which were observed to occur in the pattern of\n cracks weaving over its surface.\n\n\n No one was certain just how permanent the local surface was—though\n no one could really justify feeling safer on board the\nAlbireo\nthan\n outside on the lava. If anything really drastic happened, the ship\n would be no protection.\n\n\n The sun, hanging just above the horizon slightly to the watcher's\n right, cast long shadows which made the cracks stand out clearly;\n as far as either man could see, nothing had changed recently. They\n descended the ladder carefully—even the best designed spacesuits are\n somewhat vulnerable—and made their way to the spot where the tractors\n were parked.\n\n\n A sheet-metal fence a dozen feet high and four times as long provided\n shade, which was more than a luxury this close to the sun. The\n tractors were parked in this shadow, and beside and between them were\n piles of equipment and specimens. The apparatus Schlossberg had devised\n was beside the tractor at the north end of the line, just inside the\n shaded area.\n\n\n It was still just inside the shade when they finished, four hours\n later. Hargedon had joined them during the final hour and helped\n pack the equipment in the tractor he was to drive. Zaino had had no\n trouble in learning to make the observations Schlossberg wanted, and\n the youngster was almost unbearably cocky. Schlossberg hoped, as they\n returned to the\nAlbireo\n, that no one would murder the communications\n expert in the next twelve hours. There would be nothing to worry about\n after the trip started; Hargedon was quite able to keep anyone in his\n place without being nasty about it. If Zaino had been going with Aiello\n or Harmon—but he wasn't, and it was pointless to dream up trouble.\n\n\n And no trouble developed all by itself.\nII\n\n\n Zaino was not only still alive but still reasonably popular when\n the first of the tractors set out, carrying Eileen Harmon and Eric\n Trackman, the\nAlbireo's\nnuclear engineer.\n\n\n It started more than an hour before the others, since the\n stratigrapher's drilling program, \"done\" or not, took extra time. The\n tractor hummed off to the south, since both Darkside routes required a\n long detour to pass the chasm to the west. Routes had been worked out\n from the stereo-photos taken during the orbital survey. Even Darkside\n had been covered fairly well with Uniquantum film under Venus light.\n\n\n The Harmon-Trackman vehicle was well out of sight when Mardikian and\n Aiello started out on one of the Brightside routes, and a few minutes\n later Marini set out on the other with the spacesuit technician, Mary\n Spurr, driving.\n\n\n Both vehicles disappeared quickly into a valley to the northeast,\n between the ash cones and a thousand-foot spine which rose just south\n of them. All the tractors were in good radio contact; Zaino made sure\n of that before he abandoned the radio watch to Rowson, suited up and\n joined Hargedon at the remaining one. They climbed in, and Hargedon set\n it in motion.\n\n\n At about the same time, the first tractor came into view again, now\n traveling north on the farther side of the chasm. Hargedon took this as\n evidence that the route thus far was unchanged, and kicked in highest\n speed.\n\n\n The cabin was pretty cramped, even though some of the equipment had\n been attached outside. The men could not expect much comfort for the\n next week.\n\n\n Hargedon was used to the trips, however. He disapproved on principle\n of people who complained about minor inconveniences such as having\n to sleep in spacesuits; fortunately, Zaino's interest and excitement\n overrode any thought he might have had about discomfort.\n\n\n This lasted through the time they spent doubling the vast crack in\n Mercury's crust, driving on a little to the north of the ship on the\n other side and then turning west toward the dark hemisphere. The\n route was identical to that of Harmon's machine for some time, though\n no trace of its passage showed on the hard surface. Then Hargedon\n angled off toward the southwest. He had driven this run often enough\n to know it well even without the markers which had been set out with\n the seismographs. The photographic maps were also aboard. With them,\n even Zaino had no trouble keeping track of their progress while they\n remained in sunlight.\n\n\n However, the sun sank as they traveled west. In two hours its lower rim\n would have been on the horizon, had they been able to see the horizon;\n as it was, more of the \"sea level\" lava plain was in shadow than not\n even near the ship, and their route now lay in semi-darkness.\n\n\n The light came from peaks projecting into the sunlight, from scattered\n sky-light which was growing rapidly fainter and from the brighter\n celestial objects such as Earth. Even with the tractor's lights it was\n getting harder to spot crevasses and seismometer markers. Zaino quickly\n found the fun wearing off ... though his pride made him cover this fact\n as best he could.\n\n\n If Hargedon saw this, he said nothing. He set Zaino to picking up\n every other instrument, as any partner would have, making no allowance\n for the work the youngster was doing for Schlossberg. This might, of\n course, have had the purpose of keeping the radioman too busy to think\n about discomfort. Or it might merely have been Hargedon's idea of\n normal procedure.\n\n\n Whatever the cause, Zaino got little chance to use the radio once they\n had driven into the darkness. He managed only one or two brief talks\n with those left at the ship.\nThe talks might have helped his morale, since they certainly must have\n given the impression that nothing was going on in the ship while at\n least he had something to do in the tractor. However, this state of\n affairs did not last. Before the vehicle was four hours out of sight of\n the\nAlbireo\n, a broadcast by Camille Burkett reached them.\n\n\n The mineralogist's voice contained at least as much professional\n enthusiasm as alarm, but everyone listening must have thought promptly\n of the dubious stability of Mercury's crust. The call was intended for\n her fellow geologists Mardikian and Harmon. But it interested Zaino at\n least as much.\n\n\n \"Joe! Eileen! There's a column of what looks like black smoke rising\n over Northeast Spur. It can't be a real fire, of course; I can't see\n its point of origin, but if it's the convection current it seems to\n be the source must be pretty hot. It's the closest thing to a genuine\n volcano I've seen since we arrived; it's certainly not another of those\n ash mounds. I should think you'd still be close enough to make it out,\n Joe. Can you see anything?\"\nThe reply from Mardikian's tractor was inaudible to Zaino and Hargedon,\n but Burkett's answer made its general tenor plain.\n\n\n \"I hadn't thought of that. Yes, I'd say it was pretty close to the\n Brightside route. It wouldn't be practical for you to stop your run now\n to come back to see. You couldn't do much about it anyway. I could go\n out to have a look and then report to you. If the way back is blocked\n there'll be plenty of time to work out another.\" Hargedon and Zaino\n passed questioning glances at each other during the shorter pause that\n followed.\n\n\n \"I know there aren't,\" the voice then went on, responding to the words\n they could not hear, \"but it's only two or three miles, I'd say. Two\n to the spur and not much farther to where I could see the other side.\n Enough of the way is in shade so I could make it in a suit easily\n enough. I can't see calling back either of the dark-side tractors.\n Their work is just as important as the rest—anyway, Eileen is probably\n out of range. She hasn't answered yet.\"\n\n\n Another pause.\n\n\n \"That's true. Still, it would mean sacrificing that set of seismic\n records—no, wait. We could go out later for those. And Mel could take\n his own weather measures on the later trip. There's plenty of time!\"\n\n\n Pause, longer this time.\n\n\n \"You're right, of course. I just wanted to get an early look at this\n volcano, if it is one. We'll let the others finish their runs, and when\n you get back you can check the thing from the other side yourself. If\n it is blocking your way there's time to find an alternate route. We\n could be doing that from the maps in the meantime, just in case.\"\n\n\n Zaino looked again at his companion.\n\n\n \"Isn't that just my luck!\" he exclaimed. \"I jump at the first chance\n to get away from being bored to death. The minute I'm safely away, the\n only interesting thing of the whole operation happens—back at the\n ship!\"\n\n\n \"Who asked to come on this trip?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not blaming anyone but myself. If I'd stayed back there the\n volcano would have popped out here somewhere, or else waited until we\n were gone.\"\n\n\n \"If it is a volcano. Dr. Burkett didn't seem quite sure.\"\n\n\n \"No, and I'll bet a nickel she's suiting up right now to go out and\n see. I hope she comes back with something while we're still near enough\n to hear about it.\"\n\n\n Hargedon shrugged. \"I suppose it was also just your luck that sent you\n on a Darkside trip? You know the radio stuff. You knew we couldn't\n reach as far this way with the radios. Didn't you think of that in\n advance?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think of it, any more than you would have. It was bad luck,\n but I'm not grousing about it. Let's get on with this job.\" Hargedon\n nodded with approval, and possibly with some surprise, and the tractor\n hummed on its way.\n\n\n The darkness deepened around the patches of lava shown by the driving\n lights; the sky darkened toward a midnight hue, with stars showing\n ever brighter through it; and radio reception from the\nAlbireo\nbegan to get spotty. Gas density at the ion layer was high enough so\n that recombination of molecules with their radiation-freed electrons\n was rapid. Only occasional streamers of ionized gas reached far over\n Darkside. As these thinned out, so did radio reception. Camille\n Burkett's next broadcast came through very poorly.\n\n\n There was enough in it, however, to seize the attention of the two men\n in the tractor.\nShe was saying: \"—real all right, and dangerous. It's the ... thing I\n ever saw ... kinds of lava from what looks like ... same vent. There's\n high viscosity stuff building a spatter cone to end all spatter cones,\n and some very thin fluid from somewhere at the bottom. The flow has\n already blocked the valley used by the Brightside routes and is coming\n along it. A new return route will have to be found for the tractors\n that ... was spreading fast when I saw it. I can't tell how much will\n come. But unless it stops there's nothing at all to keep the flow away\n from the ship. It isn't coming fast, but it's coming. I'd advise all\n tractors to turn back. Captain Rowson reminds me that only one takeoff\n is possible. If we leave this site, we're committed to leaving Mercury.\n Arnie and Ren, do you hear me?\"\n\n\n Zaino responded at once. \"We got most of it, Doctor. Do you really\n think the ship is in danger?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I can only say that\nif\nthis flow continues the\n ship will have to leave, because this area will sooner or later be\n covered. I can't guess how likely ... check further to get some sort\n of estimate. It's different from any Earthly lava source—maybe you\n heard—should try to get Eileen and Eric back, too. I can't raise\n them. I suppose they're well out from under the ion layer by now.\n Maybe you're close enough to them to catch them with diffracted waves.\n Try, anyway. Whether you can raise them or not you'd better start back\n yourself.\"\n\n\n Hargedon cut in at this point. \"What does Dr. Mardikian say about that?\n We still have most of the seismometers on this route to visit.\"\n\n\n \"I think Captain Rowson has the deciding word here, but if it helps\n your decision Dr. Mardikian has already started back. He hasn't\n finished his route, either. So hop back here, Ren. And Arnie, put that\n technical skill you haven't had to use yet to work raising Eileen and\n Eric.\"\n\n\n \"What I can do, I will,\" replied Zaino, \"but you'd better tape a recall\n message and keep it going out on. Let's see—band F.\"\n\n\n \"All right. I'll be ready to check the volcano as soon as you get back.\n How long?\"\n\n\n \"Seven hours—maybe six and a half,\" replied Hargedon. \"We have to be\n careful.\"\n\n\n \"Very well. Stay outside when you arrive; I'll want to go right out in\n the tractor to get a closer look.\" She cut off.\n\n\n \"And\nthat\ncame through clearly enough!\" remarked Hargedon as he swung\n the tractor around. \"I've been awake for fourteen hours, driving off\n and on for ten of them; I'm about to drive for another six; and then\n I'm to stand by for more.\"\n\n\n \"Would you like me to do some of the driving?\" asked Zaino.\n\n\n \"I guess you'll have to, whether I like it or not,\" was the rather\n lukewarm reply. \"I'll keep on for awhile, though—until we're back in\n better light. You get at your radio job.\"\nIII\n\n\n Zaino tried. Hour after hour he juggled from one band to another. Once\n he had Hargedon stop while he went out to attach a makeshift antenna\n which, he hoped, would change his output from broadcast to some sort\n of beam; after this he kept probing the sky with the \"beam,\" first\n listening to the\nAlbireo's\nbroadcast in an effort to find projecting\n wisps of ionosphere and then, whenever he thought he had one, switching\n on his transmitter and driving his own message at it.\n\n\n Not once did he complain about lack of equipment or remark how much\n better he could do once he was back at the ship.\n\n\n Hargedon's silence began to carry an undercurrent of approval not\n usual in people who spent much time with Zaino. The technician made no\n further reference to the suggestion of switching drivers. They came\n in sight of the\nAlbireo\nand doubled the chasm with Hargedon still at\n the wheel, Zaino still at his radio and both of them still uncertain\n whether any of the calls had gotten through.\n\n\n Both had to admit, even before they could see the ship, that Burkett\n had had a right to be impressed.\n\n\n The smoke column showed starkly against the sky, blowing back over the\n tractor and blocking the sunlight which would otherwise have glared\n into the driver's eyes. Fine particles fell from it in a steady shower;\n looking back, the men could see tracks left by their vehicle in the\n deposit which had already fallen.\n\n\n As they approached the ship the dark pillar grew denser and narrower,\n while the particles raining from it became coarser. In some places the\n ash was drifting into fairly deep piles, giving Hargedon some anxiety\n about possible concealed cracks. The last part of the trip, along the\n edge of the great chasm and around its end, was really dangerous;\n cracks running from its sides were definitely spreading. The two men\n reached the\nAlbireo\nlater than Hargedon had promised, and found\n Burkett waiting impatiently with a pile of apparatus beside her.\n\n\n She didn't wait for them to get out before starting to organize.\n\n\n \"There isn't much here. We'll take off just enough of what you're\n carrying to make room for this. No—wait. I'll have to check some of\n your equipment; I'm going to need one of Milt Schlossberg's gadget's, I\n think, so leave that on. We'll take—\"\n\n\n \"Excuse me, Doctor,\" cut in Hargedon. \"Our suits need servicing, or at\n least mine will if you want me to drive you. Perhaps Arnie can help you\n load for a while, if you don't think it's too important for him to get\n at the radio—\"\n\n\n \"Of course. Excuse me. I should have had someone out here to help me\n with this. You two go on in. Ren, please get back as soon as you can. I\n can do the work here; none of this stuff is very heavy.\"\n\n\n Zaino hesitated as he swung out of the cab. True, there wasn't too\n much to be moved, and it wasn't very heavy in Mercury's gravity,\n and he really should be at the radio; but the thirty-nine-year-old\n mineralogist was a middle-aged lady by his standards, and shouldn't be\n allowed to carry heavy packages....\n\n\n \"Get along, Arnie!\" the middle-aged lady interrupted this train of\n thought. \"Eric and Eileen are getting farther away and harder to reach\n every second you dawdle!\"\nHe got, though he couldn't help looking northeast as he went rather\n than where he was going.\n\n\n The towering menace in that direction would have claimed anyone's\n attention. The pillar of sable ash was rising straighter, as though\n the wind were having less effect on it. An equally black cone had\n risen into sight beyond Northeast Spur—a cone that must have grown\n to some two thousand feet in roughly ten hours. It had far steeper\n sides than the cinder mounds near it; it couldn't be made of the same\n loose ash. Perhaps it consisted of half-melted particles which were\n fusing together as they fell—that might be what Burkett had meant by\n \"spatter-cone.\" Still, if that were the case, the material fountaining\n from the cone's top should be lighting the plain with its incandescence\n rather than casting an inky shadow for its entire height.\n\n\n Well, that was a problem for the geologists; Zaino climbed aboard and\n settled to his task.\n\n\n The trouble was that he could do very little more here than he could\n in the tractor. He could have improvised longer-wave transmitting\n coils whose radiations would have diffracted a little more effectively\n beyond the horizon, but the receiver on the missing vehicle would\n not have detected them. He had more power at his disposal, but could\n only beam it into empty space with his better antennae. He had better\n equipment for locating any projecting wisps of charged gas which might\n reflect his waves, but he was already located under a solid roof of the\n stuff—the\nAlbireo\nwas technically on Brightside. Bouncing his beam\n from this layer still didn't give him the range he needed, as he had\n found both by calculation and trial.\n\n\n What he really needed was a relay satellite. The target was simply too\n far around Mercury's sharp curve by now for anything less.\n\n\n Zaino's final gesture was to set his transmission beam on the lowest\n frequency the tractor would pick up, aim it as close to the vehicle's\n direction as he could calculate from map and itinerary and set the\n recorded return message going. He told Rowson as much.\n\n\n \"Can't think of anything else?\" the captain asked. \"Well, neither can\n I, but of course it's not my field. I'd give a year's pay if I could.\n How long before they should be back in range?\"\n\n\n \"About four days. A hundred hours, give or take a few. They'll be\n heading back anyway by that time.\"\n\n\n \"Of course. Well, keep trying.\"\n\n\n \"I am—or rather, the equipment is. I don't see what else I can do\n unless a really bright idea should suddenly sprout. Is there anywhere\n else I could be useful? I'm as likely to have ideas working as just\n sitting.\"\n\n\n \"We can keep you busy, all right. But how about taking a transmitter up\n one of those mountains? That would get your wave farther.\"\n\n\n \"Not as far as it's going already. I'm bouncing it off the ion layer,\n which is higher than any mountain we've seen on Mercury even if it's\n nowhere near as high as Earth's.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph. All right.\"\n\n\n \"I could help Ren and Dr. Burkett. I could hang on outside the\n tractor—\"\n\n\n \"They've already gone. You'd better call them, though, and keep a log\n of what they do.\"\n\n\n \"All right.\" Zaino turned back to his board and with no trouble raised\n the tractor carrying Hargedon and the mineralogist. The latter had been\n trying to call the\nAlbireo\nand had some acid comments about radio\n operators who slept on the job.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Who refers to themself as a \"tape-thief\" and why?", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_1", "options": ["Mardikian. He is the geophysicist, and since there is a lot of quake activity on the planet, he ended up using more resources.", "Camille Burkett used it on a public relations project for when the crew returns to Earth.", "Tom, the biologist is also a filmmaker, and he used more than his share of tape recording visuals of the samples of crystals on Mercury.", "Schlossberg, the astronomer. He ended up responsible for meteorology, and there is a lot that is unknown about Mercury's weather."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Schlossberg think of women astronauts?", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_2", "options": ["He believes women can do anything men can do.", "He thinks they are a potential source of conflict on a space mission.", "He has his doubts as to whether they can perform in space as well as men.", "He thinks that women are better suited to space flight than men because they are smaller and use fewer resources."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What would enable the spaceship to select an alternate spot to visit before returning to earth?", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_3", "options": ["If they could find another safe place to land, they could still make another stop.", "finding useable rocket fuel on the surface of Mercury.", "The tidal forces exerted on Mercury by the sun would tear the ship apart if they landed where they wanted to, on the day side.", "They could visit an alternate location if they were willing to give up some of their data tapes to save weight."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the role in the story of Zaino's conversation with the captain and crew before the crew sets out for their last tractor run?", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_4", "options": ["Zaino's complaints set the stage for his later mutinous activities.", "Zaino's complaining about lack of excitement in his duties sets the stage for the trouble that soon besets the tractor teams.", "Zaino's conversation firmly establishes the emotionally mature and professional demeanor Schlossberg.", "Zaino's complaints make it clear that he will never get another opportunity to fly in space."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is significant about Aiello's harsh ribbing of Zaino when Schlossberg offers Zaino his seat?", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_5", "options": ["Aiello is Zaino's mentor, but he is kind of like a drill sergeant, a bit of a jerk, but is just trying to build Zaino's character.", "Although the other crew think Zaino's attitude could be a problem, Aiello's comments are even worse and suggest that everyone is feeling the strain.", "Aiello would be Zaino's partner during the tractor trip, so generating bad vibes beforehand is not a good beginning.", "The whole crew is on edge. Everyone knows Zaino has expressed mutinous thoughts, "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What process causes lava flow at the surface on Mercury?", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_6", "options": ["During previous missions to Mercury, scientists set off a large number of nuclear bombs under the surface to try to make underground living space. This backfired, heating the rocks and causing the current lava flows.", "Mercury has a very high proportion of radioactive elements in its core compared to most planets, and these cause it to have a liquid mantle that reaches the surface as lava in weak spots of the crust.", "As Mercury goes around the sun, the sun pulls harder on the side of the small planet that faces it. The friction of some parts of Mercury's mass sliding past others creates heat, eventually melting the rock to create lava that can escape in volcanos.", "On the time scale of the universe, Mercury is still young and hasn't cooled down much. In addition, being close to the sun, the sun provides a lot of heat input. These factors make the core molten, and molten rock can escape to the surface as lava."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What danger did the tractors face in running their survey routes back and forth from the space ship?", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_7", "options": ["There was no danger for the tractors, which were highly maneuverable, but meteor strikes on the surface of Mercury were common, and were a danger to the space ship itself.", "If a solar flare occurred while a tractor was out on its Dayside route, it could ruin the electronics on the tractors, disabling them and cutting off communications.", "Because this was the first mission to the surface of Mercury, the crew could still not be certain that there were no native lifeforms that might attack them while away from the ship's defenses.", "Volcanic activity could change the planet's surface features and disrupt the established routes to and from the ship."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which crews were on the tractors that had routes on the dark side of Mercury?", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_8", "options": ["Harmon/Trackman and Zaino/Hargedon", "Marini/Spurr and Mardikian/Aiello", "Harmon/Trackman and Mardikian/Aiello", "Zaino/Aiello and Harmon/Trackman"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What were the full names and occupations of each of the crew listed here: Marini, Mardikian, Hargedon, Harmon.", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_9", "options": ["Ren Hargedon, technician;\nTom Marini, biologist;\nEileen Harmon, stratigrapher;\nMel Mardikian, geophysicist.\n", "Ren Hargedon, nuclear engineer ;\nTom Marini, biologist;\nEileen Harmon, stratigrapher;\nJoe Mardikian, geophysicist.\n", "Ren Hargedon, technician;\nTom Marini, biologist;\nEileen Harmon, stratigrapher;\nJoe Mardikian, geophysicist.\n", "Ren Hargedon, technician;\nTom Marini, biologist;\nEileen Harmon, mineralogist;\nJoe Mardikian, geophysicist.\n"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the mineralogist propose doing to investigate the state of the Bright side route after the volcanic plume is first noticed?", "question_unique_id": "50928_NL2YSJ6G_10", "options": ["The mineralogist proposes bouncing radio signals off the ion clouds, like radar, to determine the condition of the surface.", "The mineralogist proposes calling back the Harmon/Trackman or Zaino/Hargedon tractors to go and check whether the route is still passable.", "The mineralogist says that the Brightside tractors will just have to find their own route in, because the ship itself is in danger and may need to blast off imminently.", "The mineralogist proposes checking whether the route is blocked by new volcanic disruptions by walking out to the location of the volcanic plume."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/2/50928//50928-h//50928-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51210", "set_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "I, the Unspeakable", "year": 1956, "author": "Sheldon, Walter J.", "topic": "Names, Personal -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Authoritarianism -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction", "article": "I, the Unspeakable\nBy WALT SHELDON\n\n\n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous\n\n to ask in certain societies, in which sticks\n\n and stones are also a big problem!\nI fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed.\n I must have blushed in my sleep.\n\n\n \"\nDo it!\n\" she said. \"\nPlease do it! For me!\n\"\n\n\n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound\n of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it\n was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n\n\n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living\n machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things\n were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n\n\n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the\n chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning\n nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun\n to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had\n been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just\n swung a decimal or two our way.\n\n\n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and\n looked at myself. New wrinkles—or maybe just a deepening of the old\n ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n\n\n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of\n Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing\n research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other\n jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed\n every possible thing in my favor.\n\n\n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to\n keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n\n\n I'd go out again today.\n\n\n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and\n then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n\n\n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck,\n catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n\n\n Everything came back in a rush—\n\n\n My name. The dream and\nher\nvoice. And her suggestion.\nWould I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk,\n the terrible risk?\nYou remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then;\n how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody\n made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records\n were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n\n\n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and\n they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous\n nonconform.\n\n\n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't\n complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the\n night.\n\n\n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the\n population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations\n were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good\n of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n\n\n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was\n a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled\n longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty\n much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war.\n They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment\n with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n\n\n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody\n now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters.\n Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to\n address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try\n to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to\n Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n\n\n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel.\n Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was\n still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and\n be psycho-scanned.\n\n\n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n\n\n A four letter word.\n\n\n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n\n\n Mine was.\n\n\n It was unspeakable.\n\n\n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my\n sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to\n qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space\n drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and\n turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n\n\n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter\n combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably\n embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked\n and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his\n secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and\n registered it himself.\n\n\n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient\n organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work\n was important—magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta\n reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the\n answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars—and\n there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important\n Persons.\n\n\n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment\n would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic\n was just not to answer.\nThe chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n\n\n \"Er—old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my\n name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would\n you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n\n\n \"Nutrition kits?\nMe?\nOn nutrition kits?\"\n\n\n \"Well, I—er—know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had\n the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it\n justifies.\"\n\n\n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report\n had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there\n were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out,\n you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to.\n Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications\n and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But\n if I should infract—deliberately infract—it would enable the chief to\n let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n\n\n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll\n infract.\"\n\n\n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh—fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you\n would.\"\n\n\n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an\n N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book.\n I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but\n basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the\n state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n\n\n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n\n\n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to\n department—any place where they might use a space drive expert. A\n pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my\n specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they\n saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as\n they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\nA few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n\n\n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say\n it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic\n needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds\n attractive.\n\n\n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go\n to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take\n your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes\n your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package—and then\n he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the\n State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n\n\n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll\n check it later.\"\n\n\n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter.\n No more packages.\n\n\n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and\n with my name I\ncouldn't\nget a post.\n\n\n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to\n change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting\n change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n\n\n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it\n suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional,\n provocative tone.\n\n\n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice—to\nher\n—in a moment.\n\n\n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness.\n I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join\n no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I\n dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely\n submit any findings for publication—not with my name attached. A\n pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n\n\n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\nFunny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I\n remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a\n Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it\n for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual\n double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n\n\n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your\n application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths\n with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n\n\n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n\n\n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew\n no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a\n mating booth with him.\n\n\n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts\n of wild schemes.\n\n\n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to\n Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate\n planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted.\n Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild\n irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be\n willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n\n\n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream\n there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it\n I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the\n sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of\n course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed\n an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n\n\n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n\n\n \"\nTry it\n,\" she said. \"\nDo it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed.\n There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up\n that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please—for me.\n\"\nShe was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making\n heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon\n to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n\n\n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n\n\n It hammered away.\n\n\n \"\nWhat if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the\n miserable existence you're leading now!\n\"\n\n\n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this\n idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n\n\n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \"\nConsult the cybs\n in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll\n find a way.\n\"\n\n\n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month,\n I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I\n thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my\n fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be\n busy—desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't\n want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n\n\n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got\n up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the\n location of the nearest Govpub office.\n\n\n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\nII\n\n\n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was\n underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed\n pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a\n bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n\n\n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a\n plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on\n and get close to the speaker and I did.\n\n\n The cyb's mechanical voice—they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds\n right—said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government\n Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as\n thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard\n phraseology.\"\n\n\n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my\n knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate\n efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n \"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment,\n change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally\n referred to as nomenclature.\"\n\n\n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and\n brought the memory tubes in.\n\n\n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult\n alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is\n military information and classified. State authorization for—\"\n\n\n I switched it off.\nNumbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the\n proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through\n the glowlit corridors.\n\n\n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very\n high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls.\n Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There\n was an information desk in the center of the room.\n\n\n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n\n\n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive\n girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her\n features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde—but she had\n something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense\n of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It\n seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which\n even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n\n\n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n\n\n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common\n sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this\n thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments\n and discomforts. It had to be done.\n\n\n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could\n have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the\n shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks\n topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt\n suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n\n\n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard—or\n was it?\n\n\n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n\n\n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial\n designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they\n might be changed.\"\n\n\n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n\n\n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n\n\n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I—er—no post at present. N/P status.\"\n\n\n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n\n\n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n\n\n Then I paused again.\n\n\n She said, \"And your name?\"\n\n\n I took a deep breath and told her.\n\n\n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I\n couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and\n noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse\n color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more\n than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and\n dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the\n top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking\n stupid, meeting her stare—\nShe looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little\n longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n\n\n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n\n\n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk\n and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away.\n She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information\n desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n\n\n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement\n of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged\n and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost\n beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and\n was heartily ashamed of myself.\n\n\n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full\n authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the\n realization hardly scared me at all.\n\n\n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n\n\n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get—well, pretty\n lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved\n behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n\n\n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not\n terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n\n\n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n\n\n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who\n come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript\n room. The—er—social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n\n\n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their\n ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside\n her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n\n\n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n\n\n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\nShe didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint\n spot of color on her cheek.\n\n\n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one\n of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have,\n but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard,\n unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the\n psycho-scan.\n\n\n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure\n just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not\n actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the\n left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her,\n knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n\n\n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly.\n I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our\n eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n\n\n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n\n\n After that she was very business-like.\n\n\n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them\n and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched\n her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked\n on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out\n information.\n\n\n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at\n it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n \"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be—a little difficult.\"\n\n\n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it\n would be easy.\"\n\n\n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial\n under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n\n\n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n\n\n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go\n from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n\n\n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just\n an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is\n qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment\n Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to\n Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect\n him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C,\n he is permitted a new number.\"\n\n\n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n\n\n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n\n\n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on\n Marscol—or—in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n\n\n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this\n whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s\n even gone down.\"\n\n\n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n\n\n \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your\n number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to\n justify a change.\"\n\n\n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n\n\n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for\n a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course.\n Just a moment.\"\n\n\n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed\n slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was\n in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his\n office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One\n containing the Opsych offices.\n\n\n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of\n me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with\n everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples\n again.\n\n\n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to\n get a travel permit?\"\n\n\n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day\n tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it\n if you hold out long enough.\"\n\n\n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought\n to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you\n can make it impossible?'\"\nShe started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into\n the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n\n\n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n\n\n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had\n that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric\n clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n\n\n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they\n kept looking at me.\n\n\n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the\n exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth,\n tracking us.\n\n\n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my\n smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her\n again—but of course I didn't dare.\nIII\n\n\n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into\n them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping\n pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to\n feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n\n\n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing\n time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the\n following morning.\n\n\n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at\n theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping\n around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and\n got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a\n drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to\n the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem\n political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of\n Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led\n by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker\n than water. Standard.\n\n\n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless\n forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in\n a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up\n with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n\n\n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for\n the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere\n in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere\n beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go\n there....\n\n\n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a\n verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had\n unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The\n poem went:\n\nWherever I go,\nI\ngo too,\nAnd spoil everything.\n\n That was it. The story of mankind.\n\n\n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I\n didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n\n\n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice\n again. The low, seductive woman's voice—the startling, shocking voice\n out of my unconscious.\n\n\n \"\nYou have taken the first step\n,\" she said. \"\nYou are on your way\n to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of\n conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only\n answer....\n\"\nI didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I\nthought\nobjections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my\n life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew\n no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might\n have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed,\n stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within\n me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not\n even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n\n\n \"\nThe woman, Lara, attracts you\n,\" said the voice.\n\n\n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the\n voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with\n it.\n\n\n \"\nTake her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and\n know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way.\n\"\n\n\n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n\n\n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n\n\n It was morning.\n\n\n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center\n One.\n\n\n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats\n for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied\n myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there\n was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic\n decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with\n life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and\n sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who\n hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching\n existence from the earth today.\n\n\n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of\n the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners\n in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather\n non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two\n Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and\n I could see the prisoners' faces.\n\n\n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet\n their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n\n\n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar\n emotional display.\n\n\n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding\n hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were\n wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy,\n quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a\n smile.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What kind of life does the author imply that nonconforms lead?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_1", "options": ["They are quickly arrested and sent to a colony on Mars where the true conditions are not known to the narrator, but by the end of the story, he gains the impression that nonconforms may actually be freer and more hopeful than those on Earth.", "There is no Mars colony covered with forests. Nonconforms are taken to extermination camps and never seen again.", "They are sent to the Marscol prison, where prisoners are kept alone in desolate cement yards except for when they are having sex with other prisoners.", "They are sent to Mars, where the land is divided into warring southern and northern halves, and just like on Earth, the North half dominates the South."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the narrator need to travel to Center One?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_2", "options": ["To see the head of Opsych to try to get his Emotional Adjustmetn Category lowered.", "To see the head of Opsych to interview for a new job and escape his N/P status.", " To see the head of Opsych to try to get his Emotional Adjustment Category raised.", "To see the head of Opsych to get permission to mate with LARA."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who are the Deacons in this story?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_3", "options": ["The society is so bureaucratic that no one can figure out how to accomplish anything, and the Deacons are like ombudsmen, helping citizens work their way through the red tape.", "They fulfuill the role of morality police in the totalitarian society of the story, enforcing proper thought.", "They are secret Nonconforms, and they circulate through the society trying to recruit more of them, in preparation for a revolution.", "The society in the story is very conservative and religious. People who want to demonstrate their faith by helping others adhere to the Way turn up everywhere to evangelize."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was the the narrator classified as N/P?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_4", "options": ["Because he refused his boss's order to work in a section of the company other than interstellar drives, which was his expertise.", "To keep him away from Lara.", "Because he never even tried to look for a mate till he was in his mid-thirtie, so there was no point in society wasting resources on him.", "He chose to go on N/P status because he wanted the challenge of living a more spartan life. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the problem with the narrator's alphanumeric designation?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_5", "options": ["The alphabetic part of his name was so common that no one could remember who he was - he was forgotten.", "The alphabetic part of his name instantly marked him as a non-conformist, even though to this point in his life, he had been completely conformist.", "The alphabetic part of his designation was instantly recognized as being an offensive term when pronounced, as citizens were wont to do with their alpha-designations.", "The alphabetic part of his designation was literally unspeakable, as in, it was impossible to generate the sounds to pronounce it."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the ostensible reason all the people given new identifiers by the state, and what is implied about the real reason?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_6", "options": ["With the population growing, the state considered it efficient to give each citizen a unique identifier.  Unique identifiers are also a great convenience to a totalitarian state in being able to track the actions of every citizen through their unique identifiers.", "The unique identifiers contained genetic information in the numbers and letters, which made it easier to tell whose genes were damaged by radiation, to avoid picking them as a mate. Underlying this was the totalitarian hope of creating more perfect citizens.", "Traditional names did not fit into computer programs as well as unique identifiers. One person's Real Food allotment was constantly being given to another person by mistake. With unique identifiers. individuals could get all the benefits they were supposed to get.", "When the Earth split into competing \"North\" and \"South\" hemispheres of influence, the North got all the Chinese, and duplicate names were extremely common, which was confusing. With unique identifiers, individual citizens could get all the benefits they were entitled to."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the result of ten years of using nuclear devices on Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_7", "options": ["It eliminated poverty, and made it possible to adequately feed all of the two bilion people on Earth at that time.", "Nothing happened. Nuclear war was outlawed, and nuclear was just one of the power sources used to support everyone's modern life.", "Earth now consisted of large stretches of barren land with neither flora nor fauna, and a lot of people had genetic defects that produced undesirable or non-viable offspring.", "Life on earth was nearly extinguished, except for roaches and rats, which is why a colony was started on Mars, and why people have to now do everything inside radiation-hardened offices and living machines."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the difference between living in the Northern hemisphere or the Southern?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_8", "options": ["The atomic period had a much more pronounced effect on the North. In the South, people live more as they did throughout human history.", "The North is more industrialized and richer than the South.", "There is not much difference. North and South live in a state of cold war, and are very easily matched.", "The North has a totalitarian government. It sends its criminals to Marscol in the South, so the South is a very rough place, but it has almost no government at all."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the cyb answer the narrator's routine statement, \"Thanks,\" by saying that information on tanks is military information, and classified\"?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_9", "options": ["Because the cyb could read minds as well as hearing and speaking, and knew that the narrator wished he still had his highly classified military job.", "Because the narrator has a lisp that prevents him from pronouncing some words correctly, so he was misunderstood.", "The cyb crossed wires and delivered the response meant for another man's question to him, instead.", "Because the cyb voices were not able to handle the phonetic unit represented by \"t\" and \"h\" together."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is LARA portrayed as being attractive and charming?", "question_unique_id": "51210_KVRJ0NOI_10", "options": ["To provide motivation for the narrator to carry through on trying to get a different identifier.", "This attractive girl was placed in this job role by the Deacons to act as a lure to trap potential nonconforms.", "The Northern State often put pretty girls into dead-end jobs with little exposure to the public so that theu would not distract important, efficient members of society from their jobs.", "To titillate the mostly male readers of the science fiction magazine where this piece was originally published."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/2/1/51210//51210-h//51210-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51398", "set_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Growing up on Big Muddy", "year": 1954, "author": "De Vet, Charles V.", "topic": "Explorers -- Fiction; Science fiction; Extrasolar planets -- Fiction; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Short stories; Diseases -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction", "article": "Well, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby\n\n talk messages to his mother ship! He was—\nGROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\nBy CHARLES V. DE VET\n\n\n Illustrated by TURPIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nKaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending\n minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby\n talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this\n last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual\n about it?\n\n\n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as\n they should.\n\n\n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER,\n LET USNS KNOW.\nSS II\n\n\n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape\n thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large\n drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout\n ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n\n\n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do\n anything here except rain?\"\n\n\n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And\n why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been\n doing during that time?\n\n\n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture\n from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out\n when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he\n was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the\n job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle\n alone—or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or\n no chance of his being able to find either here.\n\n\n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and\n brought them out where he could look at them:\n\n\n The mother ship,\nSoscites II\n, had been on the last leg of its\n planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout\n ship—the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the\n exploring of new worlds—and set itself into a giant orbit about this\n planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n\n\n The\nSoscites II\nhad to maintain its constant speed; it had no means\n of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop.\n Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an\n orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle\n a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n\n\n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here\n forever.\n\n\n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing\n recently.\n\n\n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the\n tape in his hand. Baby talk....\nOne thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He\n turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its\n bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last\n several messages—both those sent and those received. He pulled it out\n impatiently and began reading.\n\n\n The first was from himself:\n\n\n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT\n WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND\n A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n\n\n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE.\n FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER.\n BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF\n ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER\n THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER.\n WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW\n I REPAIR SCOUT.\n\n\n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN\n HOUR AGO.\nSMOKY\n\n\n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time\n was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for\n two-way exchange.\n\n\n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO\n KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU\n DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT\n CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL\n ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING\n EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\nSS II\n\n\n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report\n followed:\n\n\n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO\n HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS.\n THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\nSMOKY\n\n\n The ship's next message read:\n\n\n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US\n ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\nSS II\n\n\n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n\n\n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK?\n DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\nSMOKY\n\n\n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n\n\n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO\n REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE\n SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\nSS II\n\n\n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n\n\n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY\n LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n\n\n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the\n last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they\n decided to humor him.\n\n\n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER,\n LET USNS KNOW.\nSS II\n\n\n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n\n\n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though\n convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his\n forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n\n\n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at\n the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty\n hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the\n communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n\n\n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND\n HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR\n BOTH.\nSMOKY\n\n\n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried\n to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and\n wakefulness—he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n\n\n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back\n home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had\n realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love\n him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And\n though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain,\n she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by\n persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by\n caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n\n\n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married.\n His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight\n in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\nKaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an\n hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still\n five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck\n and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n\n\n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of\n Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a\n heavy drizzle now.\n\n\n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest\n against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots\n and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with\n a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll\n over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n\n\n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n\n\n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid\n ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside\n the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae,\n extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded\n temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary\n conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and\n all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n\n\n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide,\n sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there,\n he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a\n higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw\n them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\nOne old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture\n of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps\n a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his\n toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that\n might have been a greeting—or a warning to the others that a stranger\n approached.\n\n\n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery\n body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms\n to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in\n three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick,\n with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave\n his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish\n smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n\n\n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling\n slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm\n forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main\n group.\nThey had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now\n most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and\n piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults.\n Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their\n lips and drew into their mouths.\n\n\n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it\n was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The\n proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n\n\n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing\n his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his\n breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear.\n One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser\n gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to\n display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take\n much more of this.\n\n\n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and\n they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The\n entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase,\n or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors\n followed.\n\n\n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with\n an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had\n few natural enemies.\n\n\n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and\n came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three\n haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their\n construction more closely this time.\n\n\n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built\n of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How\n they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser\n did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and\n all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to\n have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n\n\n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a\n circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others\n were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until\n the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next\n above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof.\n They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found\n them dark and dank—and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n\n\n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and\n he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and\n returned to the scout.\n\n\n The\nSoscites II\nsent little that helped during the next twelve hours\n and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the\n scout.\n\n\n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for\n a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent\n inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the\n fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\nOpening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had\n to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet\n metal back into place with a small crowbar—the best leverage he had on\n hand—but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way\n to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it\n the rest of the day.\n\n\n That evening, Kaiser received information from the\nSoscites II\nthat\n was at least definite:\n\n\n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T\n LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU\n HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE—SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND\n WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND\n WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\nSOSCITES II\n\n\n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n\n\n WHAT THE HELL?\n\n\n SMOKY\nSoscites II's\nnext communication followed within twenty minutes and\n was signed by the ship's doctor:\n\n\n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET\n THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER\n THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT\n INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST\n CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD\n SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING\n ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN\n WE FINISH WITH SAM.\nJ. G. ZARWELL\n\n\n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that\n his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk\n and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very\n little clear thought, for several hours—until the next communication\n came in:\n\n\n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND\n APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN\n EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU\n WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n\n\n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT\n KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND\n MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY.\n THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS\n THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE\n YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED\n THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n\n\n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT\n BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\nSS II\nKaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about\n the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close\n friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in\n space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people\n here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he\n would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n\n\n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because\n he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work\n well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked\n him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they\n respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n\n\n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He\n hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized—and fell\n instantly asleep.\n\n\n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n\n\n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH\n DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n\n\n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN\n LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION\n CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND\n PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n\n\n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE\n COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE\n BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH\n YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN\n GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS\n IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n\n\n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS.\n IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT\n WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\nSS II\n\n\n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and\n anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish\n better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he\n set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea\n occurred to him.\n\n\n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in\n his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would\n supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow\n drops—and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding\n stopped.\n\n\n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n\n\n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing\n his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him\n that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but\n the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried\n reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood\n out sharp and clear!\n\n\n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the\n symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort\n of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he\n waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n\n\n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture\n on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been\n here.\n\n\n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n 102, humidity 113—just about the same as it had been on earlier\n readings.\nDuring the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged\n messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at\n repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n\n\n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed\n to drop off to sleep immediately—and awake at the exact times he\n had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in\n straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a\n subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the\n symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really\n important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming\n discouraged.\n\n\n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He\n sent out a terse message to the\nSoscites II\n:\n\n\n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE\n INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS\n ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL,\n BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND\n IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN\n IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\nSMOKY\n\n\n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires,\n a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed\n that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at\n the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he\n wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant\n horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n\n\n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the\n doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on\n his shoulders and began his journey—in the opposite direction from the\n first native settlement.\n\n\n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise\n had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the\n river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This\n group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n\n\n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change\n was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was\n more subdued, less repugnant.\n\n\n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to\n understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and\n called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The\n first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a\n gesture of friendship.\n\n\n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned\n part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n\n\n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed\n the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him\n and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\nAs dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the\n native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react\n to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by\n his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at\n peace with this world.\n\n\n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise\n of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in\n case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the\n beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as\n it went.\n\n\n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of\n shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in\n the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n\n\n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded\n around as he swam—they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency—and\n often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had\n difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he\n neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and\n pulled him under.\n\n\n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was\n clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him\n helpless. They sank deeper.\n\n\n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of\n bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee\n up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the\n surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his\n feet hit the river bottom.\n\n\n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and\n seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying\n to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but\n there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n\n\n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here—if they\n had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for\n them—and he packed and started back to the scout.\n\n\n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed\n the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and\n now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist,\n he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his\n bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n\n\n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The\n tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free\n it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling\n the equipment to the ground.\n\n\n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in\n the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly\n his eyes widened.\nMoving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment\n through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator,\n as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped\n place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n\n\n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine\n casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried\n again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The\n metal beneath yielded slightly—but he felt the palms of his hands\n bruise against the lever.\n\n\n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted.\n His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased\n tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried\n again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly—until the fuel pump\n hung free!\n\n\n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution\n rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its\n anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n\n\n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to\n read the two messages waiting for him.\n\n\n The first was quite routine:\n\n\n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL\n WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME\n MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE\n COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n\n\n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME\n ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE\n SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES'\n AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU\n INFORMED.\n\n\n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\nSS II\n\n\n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note\n of uneasiness in it.\n\n\n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION\n ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\nSS II\n\n\n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had\n covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to\n sleep.\n\n\n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n\n\n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS\n QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\nSS II\nKaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the\nSoscites II\nbe\n experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they\n were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a\n suggestion of urgency—there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of\n information.\n\n\n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser.\n He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time.\n And the\nSoscites II\nwould not complete its orbit of the planet for\n two weeks yet.\n\n\n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used\n to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the\n vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went\n back inside.\n\n\n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the\n captain himself:\n\n\n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR\n SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\nH. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n\n\n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal—which he had been eating with his\n fingers—into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his\n hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n\n\n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding\n the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for\n serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only\n to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment.\n It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from\n the ship on his trip.\nThe tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and\n when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to\n the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other\n seal-people here.\n\n\n And they were almost human!\n\n\n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup—that\n was little changed from the first he had found—as in their obviously\n greater intelligence.\n\n\n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked.\n Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he\n slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them.\n Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly\n alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these\n had no odor—only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet\n him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n\n\n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes\n of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n\n\n One was a female.\n\n\n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he\n understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He\n tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object,\n but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused\n himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was\n fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to\n carry on a limited conversation.\n\n\n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until\n Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached\n the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\nBefore he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the\n communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment,\n then returned and read the message on the tape:\n\n\n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n\n\n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n\n\n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE\n PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS\n WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU—TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS\n PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n\n\n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW—WHEN YOU HAVE\n FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE—IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR\n MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY\n INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE\n INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE\n BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n\n\n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\nSS II\n\n\n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the\n communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n\n\n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank.\n She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her\n throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They\n ran, still laughing, into the water.\n\n\n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the\n past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did the Soscites II transmit \"baby talk\" to Kaiser?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_1", "options": ["Because they had been receiving baby talk messages from him, and they were trying to adapt and be helpful.", "Because everyone on the ship had fallen extremely ill, and it was the best they could do.", "Because it was a way of speaking in code to keep enemy ears from understanding the message.", "Because they thought the seal people had killed Kaiser and taken over his scout ship and were learning to communicate in English."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Kaiser have to fix the scout ship in one month?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_2", "options": ["Because he only had food and oxygen supplies to last for one month.", "Because that's all the time the main mission could spare for scouting this planet.", "Because winter would begin on the planet in one month and his fuel lines would freeze so he couldn't blast off.", "Because the main ship would be back overhead in one month."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was wrong with Kaiser in the beginning of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_3", "options": ["When his scout ship crash landed on the planet, he banged his head and got a severe concussion that affected his speech.", "He had a cut on his leg that got severely infected and caused him to become delerious for a few days.", "He had been invaded by an alien creature that his body was reacting to and that was trying to adapt to him.", "He was already sick when he left the ship, and one of the symptoms of the virus that everyone caught was the delirium that resulted in the baby talk."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was wrong with Kaiser at the end of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_4", "options": ["He couldn't get the fuel line fixed at the end of the story, so he had no choice but to \"go native.\"", "He was rebellious by nature, and the captain nagging him to check in made him angry.", "He had fallen in love with a seal woman and wanted to stay on the planet with her.", "He had been invaded by an alien creature that gradually turned him into a seal person."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the climate like on Big Muddy?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_5", "options": ["Until the ship has been in orbit for a whole year, the climate cannot really be understood.", "Like Earth's, Big Muddy's axis of rotation is off-vertical, and its orbit is an ellipse, so it has cold and warm seasons, like Earth.", "It has monsoon-type weather: alternating wet and dry seasons.", "It is in a tropical latitude of the planet: hot and humid all year round."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who is Smoky?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_6", "options": ["Smoky is the name of the captain of the Soscites II.", "Smoky is the name the ship's crew uses for Kaiser.", "Smoky is a radio communication code meaning \"end of message.\"", "Smoky is the radio communications officer on the Soscites II."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How are Kaiser's symptoms explained once the nature of his illness becomes known?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_7", "options": ["Kaiser is told that he was unconscious the whole time he was \"sick,\" and he just dreamed that he was suffering from those symptoms.", "Kaiser is told that infections routinely result in redness of the affected areas and loss of appetite while the body is fighting the infection.", "Kaiser is told that the creature now inhabiting him is trying to give him what he needs - for example, his red coloration is interpreted as an effort at protective coloration.", "Kaiser is told that the symptoms are typical of the kind of extraterrestrial virus that infected him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Kaiser keep finding smarter and smarter groups of seal people?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_8", "options": ["The more evolved seal people were able to avoid detection from the alien invader (i.e. Kaiser) for a longer period of time.", "Kaiser interprets the later groups as being smarter because he has had more time to observe and understand their ways.", "They are not smarter. The alien symbiote is making him more like the seal people.", "The seal people play dumb at first, but later they trust Kaiser more and are willing to show him more of their culture."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who does the Soscites II crew consult with for help figuring out what is wrong with Kaiser?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_9", "options": ["Sam, who appears to be the ship's pathologist.", "The ship established communication with a medical expert among the seal people, and they called him Sam since they could not pronounce his name.", "Sam, who appears to be a robot programmed to perform medical diagnostic tests.", "J. G. Zarwell, ship's doctor, whose nickname is Sam."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Kaiser finally fix the smashed fuel line on the scout ship?", "question_unique_id": "51398_8A0ILCBC_10", "options": ["He disassembled the scout ship's air conditioner and used the tubing inside it to fix the fuel line.", "He didn't. He pried it off the ship and then procrastinated about actually fixing it.", "At the campe of the most advanced seal people, he traded tobacco for metal tubing to fix the fuel line.", "He didn't. He got the fuel line and pump off the scout ship, finally, and then smashed the pump to smithereens."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/9/51398//51398-h//51398-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50827", "set_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Orphans of the Void", "year": 1958, "author": "Shaara, Michael", "topic": "Robots -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; PS; Extrasolar planets -- Fiction", "article": "Orphans of the Void\nBy MICHAEL SHAARA\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nFinding a cause worth dying for is no\n \ngreat trick—the Universe is full of them. Finding\n \none worth living for is the genuine problem!\nIn the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of\n a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood\n counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any\n significance in the number. He had no idea.\n\n\n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n\n\n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to\n scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n\n\n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all\n built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways,\n maybe?\"\n\n\n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered\n stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n\n\n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n\n\n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's\n not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it\n much of a civilization.\"\n\n\n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n\n\n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n\n\n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great\n age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old—\ntoo\nold.\n He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone\n ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed\n that the buildings had no airlocks.\n\n\n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n\n\n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n\n\n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These\n things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And\n you can see that the rock itself is native—\" he indicated the ledge\n beneath their feet—\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n\n\n \"How long?\"\n\n\n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n\n\n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n\n\n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled\n wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n\n\n Steffens whistled.\n\n\n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell\n from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind\nat least\nseveral thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a\n fraction of that force.\"\n\n\n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in\n interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first\n uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was\n an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n\n\n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built\n these had been in space for thousands of years.\n\n\n Which ought to give\nthem\n, thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of\n a good head-start.\nWhile the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens\n remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly\n at the walls.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n\n\n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was\n roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears\n at each other,\nthat\nlong ago. And this planet is only a parsec from\n Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these\n get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n\n\n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they\n now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n \"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n\n\n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized\n now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n\n\n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last?\n There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need\n to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left\nsomething\nbehind. The only reason they would need a camp would be—\"\n\n\n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n\n\n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it\n go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black\n midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n\n\n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n\n\n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The\n third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but\nit\nhas a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n\n\n \"How about moons?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\nThe third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close,\n and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly,\n in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the\n clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the\n misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight\n zone.\n\n\n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a\n hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors\n had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing,\n but he had to try.\n\n\n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning,\n moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark\n outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n\n\n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n\n\n After a while he saw a city.\n\n\n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and\n they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when\n he saw that the city was dead.\n\n\n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces\n rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center\n of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in\n diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n\n\n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and\n headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun.\n The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then\n there were more cities—all with the black depression, the circular\n stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n\n\n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for\n there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred\n years.\n\n\n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were\n down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became\n apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n\n\n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends\n from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n\n\n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around\n to the daylight side.\n\n\n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the\n radiation suits.\"\n\n\n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to\n this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one\n of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then,\n thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was\n that Ball's question be answered.\n\n\n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n\n\n Nothing alive but robots, he thought,\nrobots\n. He adjusted to full\n close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.\n Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n\n\n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the\n eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a\n single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,\n he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now\n almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of\n the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the\n most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n\n\n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight\n of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the\n alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He\n tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n\n\n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n\n\n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly\n at Steffens.\n\n\n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite\n possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and\n see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n\n\n \"\nCan\nwe go down?\"\n\n\n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot\n constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his\n fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all.\n They could be the natives.\"\n\n\n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of\n them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n \"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the\n screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n\n\n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed\n to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking\n for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of\n human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very\n clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this\n robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the\n other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of\n duty.\n\n\n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him,\n that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and\n gone.\n\n\n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought\n opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an\n outpost?\nAn outpost!\nHe turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was\n lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and\n stirred up trouble....\n\n\n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away.\n A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n\n\n \"\nGreetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our\n desire is only to serve....\n\"\n\"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously\n through shocked lips.\n\n\n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens\n was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n\n\n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is\n only to serve.\"\n\n\n And then the robots sent a\npicture\n.\n\n\n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took\n shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone\n against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots.\n With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the\n hanging arms of its side, of its\nright\nside, and extended it toward\n Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n\n\n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized\n right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The\n robot mind had helped.\n\n\n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He\n waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of\n the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if\n they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more\n happened, he began to lose his fear.\n\n\n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back.\n He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good\n measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking\n hands.\n\n\n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what\nthey\nhad said, and\n explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n\n\n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered\n baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order\n someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and\nthink\na message?\n\n\n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n\n\n \"We request—we respectfully request permission to land upon your\n planet.\"\nSteffens had not realized that there were so many.\n\n\n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit.\n\n\n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now\n Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was\n less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less\ninterested\n, as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission\n to land.\"\n\n\n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He\n tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they\nshould\nseem inhuman. But....\n\n\n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n\n\n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above,\n jets throbbing gently.\n\n\n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n\n\n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n\n\n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete\n access to your mind, and would perhaps be—dismayed—to learn that\n we have been gathering information from you. We must—apologize.\n Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only\n that information was taken which is necessary for communication\n and—understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your\n request.\"\n\n\n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed\n as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he\n retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n\n\n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way\n different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots\n was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens\n guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake,\n because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The\n picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen,\n had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and\n the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary\n lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed\n almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to\n examine the first robot in detail.\n\n\n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen.\n The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of\n the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the\n metal chest. Symbols in row upon row—numbers, perhaps—were upon the\n chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued\n in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the\n base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was\n a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on\n the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude\n that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at\n that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n\n\n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.\n\n\n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"\n\n\n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope\n you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We\n have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said\n haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n\n\n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n\n\n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you.\n Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am\n not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to\n convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe\n that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n\n\n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was\n disconcerted.\n\n\n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are—curious.\"\n It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend.\n Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n\n\n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely\n metallic, and that of the\nMakers\n, which would appear to be somewhat\n more like yours. I am not a—doctor—and therefore cannot acquaint you\n with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are\n interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be\n of assistance.\"\n\n\n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while\n Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously,\n were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\"\n Steffens decided, were probably just that—doctor-robots, designed\n specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n\n\n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question\n he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n\n\n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n\n\n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't\n really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke\n with difficulty.\n\n\n \"The Makers—are not here.\"\n\n\n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and\n went on:\n\n\n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n\n\n Could that be\npain\nin its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the\n spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n\n\n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been\n killed.\n\n\n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the\n midst of a radiation so lethal that\nnothing\n,\nnothing\ncould live;\n robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n\n\n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n\n\n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as\n well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the\n free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere—good God, how old\n were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots,\n then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black\n wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n\n\n Were they immortal?\n\"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n\n\n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot\n was referring.\n\n\n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots\n continued waiting patiently.\n\n\n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n\n\n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the\n calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of\n age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n\n\n Steffens tried to understand that.\n\n\n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if\n you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the\n first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n\n\n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added,\n pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of—Peb—is seventeen\n years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some\n thirty-eight years.\"\n\n\n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about\n fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot,\n Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen\n and plant life would have been needed. Unless—\n\n\n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n\n\n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n\n\n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n\n\n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n\n\n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as\n if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n\n\n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the—\" another pause for\n a word—\"by the\nFactory\n.\"\n\n\n \"The Factory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n\n\n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n\n\n \"Would you prefer to use your—skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n\n\n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went\n along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other\n side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of\n dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in\n a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling\n in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved\n outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance—moving around\n their birthplace.\nThe Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was\n usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon\n team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the\n strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those\n buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have\n to be cleared up before they could leave.\n\n\n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came\n near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling\n that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots\n that he did little thinking.\n\n\n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as\n unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great\n shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a\n bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors\n knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by\n the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize\n that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and\n it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were\n needed.\n\n\n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n\n\n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.\n\n\n He had a vague idea of the robot's history—more, perhaps, then they\n knew themselves—but he refrained from forming an opinion until\n Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing\n philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n\"What do you\ndo\n?\" Steffens asked.\n\n\n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very\n little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at\n birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that\n knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural\n sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is\n to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much\n more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n\n\n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the\n robots expected the Makers to do so.\n\n\n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had\n surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n\n\n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then.\n But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n\n\n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else\n would we have been built?\"\n\n\n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to\n Elb, was no question at all.\n\n\n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have\n known—that the Makers were gone and would never come back—he was a\n long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the\n back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a\n faith.\n\n\n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the\n structure of human society, and the robot—a machine which did not eat\n or sleep—listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens\n mentioned God.\n\n\n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n\n\n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n\n\n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you\n were the Makers returning—\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the\n seeming disappointment he had sensed—\"but then we probed your minds\n and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being,\n unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even—\" Elb caught\n himself—\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled\n over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology,\n but it seemed to have a peculiar—\" Elb paused for a long while—\"an\n untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n\n\n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n\n\n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The\n Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them\n who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n\n\n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n\n\n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What technique do the astronauts use to make a guess a to the age of the buildings on the fourth planet?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_1", "options": ["They looked at the amount of wind erosion that had happened on the stone buildings and took into account the density of the atmosphere compared to Earth's.", "They found an inscription at the base of one of the buildings that had the year it was built written on it.", "They broke off a sample of one of the buildings and sent it back to the ship for carbon-14 dating.", "Because the buildings had no airlocks, but the air was too thin to breathe now, they could estimate the age of the buildings based on the rate of loss of atmosphere from the planet, starting from a breathable atmosphere to the current air density."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How old are the buildings on the fourth planet estimated to be?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_2", "options": ["3,000 years.", "15,000 years.", "300 years.", "5,000 years."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What star does the planet with the robots on it orbit?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_3", "options": ["It orbits the Terran sun.", "It orbits Varius II.", "It orbits the star Tyban.", "It orbits Betelgeuse."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the story say that the atmosphere of the planet the robots are on got to be all carbon dioxide?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_4", "options": ["There was once an ocean with lots of shellfish with carbonate shells, but the ocean became acidified, which dissolved the carbonate, which reacted with other minerals and off-gassed carbon dioxide.", "Due to nuclear war burning all the vegetation, no more oxygen was created by photosynthesis, so the oxygen levels declined and carbon dioxide dominated.", "The atmosphere of the planet was carbon dioxide all along...that's why only the robots could live there.", "Climate change due to excessive burning of fossil fuels caused a runaway chemical reaction in the atmosphere that burned up all the oxygen."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the captain concerned about when he learns how old the buildings on the fourth planet are?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_5", "options": ["He was thinking about how far ahead the race that built them was in space travel, and whether they might go to Earth.", "He was concerned that the aliens were still on the planet, and that they might be captured.", "He was concerned that the aliens might have invisibility technology, and that they were being observed.", "He was concerned that the aliens may have left behind pathogens that the astronauts might carry back onto the ship."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where did the robots who met the humans on the third planet come from?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_6", "options": ["The aliens visited the system every so often and brought fresh, updated robots.", "The Makers built all the robots.", "Each robot made his own replacements, which was how the robots \"had children.\"", "They were churned out by a robot manufacturing plant in one location on the planet."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What procedure was Steffens legally bound to regarding the planet with the robots?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_7", "options": ["There is no clear legal procedure, since the regulations do not specifically mention mechanical beings.", "As long as the planet's inhabitants were willing to have the Earthmen land there, it was permissible to have contact with the planet's inhabitants.", "He should have called in a special diplomatic mission ship  to deal with the first contact.", "Steffens and his crew are legally bound to avoid any contact with the robots on the planet because they don't have space flight."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How do the robots communicate?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_8", "options": ["They use a sophisticated artificial intelligence program to learn alien languages quickly, and speak to visitors in the visitor's own language.", "There is a message screen on the torso of each robot, and they display messages they want to communicate on that screen.", "They use telepathic communication, creating not just sentences, but also moods and feelings, by some unknown technique.", "The 360 degree band of \"eyes\" around the robots' foreheads doubles as a signaling device. They use light flashes in their own version of Morse code to communicate."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were the robots disappointed at meeting Steffens and his crew?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_9", "options": ["They were expecting the crew to bring fresh supplies of rare materials to trade with them.", "They were disappointed that the human visitors were not even as intelligent as the robots and could not communicate telepathically.", "They had expected that Steffens and his crew would worship the robots as the gods they believed themselves to be.", "They thought that Steffens and his crew were the beings who made them, returning to rejoin them."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Once the robots realized that the spaceship crew were organic beings underneath their protective space suits, what surprising thing did they do?", "question_unique_id": "50827_47Q42HQC_10", "options": ["They completely lost interest in Steffens and his crew. Organic beings were considered inferior.", "They immediately beamed a message into space, which Steffens detected, informing the Makers that the Earthmen were organic, and therefore highly vulnerable to nuclear attack.", "They began to bring Steffens and his crew fresh vegetables, which they could grow very quickly because of the high carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere. ", "They cleaned up and neutralized all the residual highly radioactive elements in the area around the spaceship where the crew spent its time."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/2/50827//50827-h//50827-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51167", "set_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Butterfly 9", "year": 1958, "author": "Keith, Donald", "topic": "Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction; Kidnapping -- Fiction; Science fiction; Husband and wife -- Fiction; PS; Engineers -- Fiction", "article": "Butterfly 9\nBy DONALD KEITH\n\n\n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nJeff needed a job and this man had a job to\n \noffer—one where giant economy-size trouble\n \nhad labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\nI\n\n\n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table.\n Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n\n\n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff\n as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your\n supper.\"\n\n\n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't\n talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and\n fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and\n yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n\n\n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like\n popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n\n\n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost\n your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young\n yet.\"\nJeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished\n he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the\n mustachioed man at the next table.\n\n\n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his\n confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n\n\n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I\n think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n\n\n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts.\n We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n\n\n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n\n\n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just\n in the mood.\"\n\n\n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk\n about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n\n\n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building\n being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that\n if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought\n it for two thousand.\"\n\n\n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n \"But since we can't—\"\n\n\n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them,\n grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n\n\n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman,\n with extra gall.\n\n\n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n\n\n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n \"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five\n years. Maybe I help you.\"\n\n\n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was\n yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized\n the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n\n\n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952.\n Is that what you really mean?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n\n\n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we\n started home.\"\nAnn laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's\n chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a\n psycho—but sort of an inspired one.\"\n\n\n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people.\n I join you.\"\n\n\n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with\n an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n\n\n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not\n take trip to another time?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n\n\n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we\n talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n\n\n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n4-D TRAVEL BEURO\n\n Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even\n spells it different.\"\n\n\n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n\n\n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n\n\n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man\n didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and\n force.\n\n\n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added\n persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n\n\n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every\n day. I look damaged?\"\n\n\n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and\n his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff\n politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n\n\n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?\n\n\n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"\n\n\n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like\n grace of his short, broad body.\n\n\n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got\n some gimmick.\"\n\n\n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n \"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's\n kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\nII\n\n\n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a\n good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the\n whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm\n dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n\n\n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine\n metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a\n flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n\n\n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to\n Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n\n\n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n \"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for\n some daffy religious sect.\"\n\n\n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader\n said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n\n\n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the\n next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n\n\n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut\n after them.\n\n\n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the\n walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle\n of the ceiling and two movie screens—or were they giant television\n screens?—occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n\n\n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an\n arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word\nAnte\n, and to\n the right with the word\nPost\n.\nJeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One\n appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like\n a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left\n wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined\n corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n\n\n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it\n for?\"\n\n\n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n\n\n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of\n time, I suppose?\"\nInstead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed\n a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled\n toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in\n the picture waved back.\n\n\n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n\n\n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth\n dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n\n\n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed\n them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the\n chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture\n surged past.\n\n\n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have\n criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work.\n Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove\n reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when\n he get there. Put him to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n\n\n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n\n\n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some\n day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n\n\n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the\n fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to\n know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n\n\n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n\n\n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and\n disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n\n\n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his\n instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in\n the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky\n figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds,\n he was recognizable as Snader—and as the picture brought him forward,\n he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n\n\n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took\n other carrier back here.\"\n\n\n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How\n did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n\n\n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again.\n\n\n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"\n\n\n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember?\n Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would—\"\n\n\n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was\n moving through a room numbered 724.\n\n\n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n\n\n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by\n a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\nAgain there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a\n bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of\n the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous\n club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n\n\n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n\n\n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.\n\n\n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"\n\n\n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He\n glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And\n the street—\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n \"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\nIII\n\n\n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The\n car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff\n knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957—nor in any earlier\n year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the\n mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n\n\n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we\n escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n\n\n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a\n minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n\n\n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned\n forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us\n into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n\n\n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he\n shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n\n\n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit\n back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n\n\n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty\n of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were.\n The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite\n Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him\n from a fork in the freeway.\n\n\n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new,\n but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift—\"\n\n\n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up\n in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center,\n ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize\n it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n\n\n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a\n commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's\n have some answers before we go any further.\"\n\n\n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n\n\n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n\n\n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as\n well go in and see what's there.\"\n\n\n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a\n corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\nA tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them\n heartily.\n\n\n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this\n our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n\n\n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n\n\n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n\n\n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr.\n Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not\n yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well\n understood in your time, are they not?\"\n\n\n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. You are an expert in—ah—colored television, I think.\"\n\n\n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n\n\n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You\n will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n\n\n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\nBullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this!\n You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract,\n but you do what I say!\"\n\n\n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n\n\n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the\n way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your\n knowledge.\"\n\n\n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate\n permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen\n has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can\n make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you\n to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n\n\n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He\n wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange\n streets. But he put on a bold front.\n\n\n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work\n for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and\n stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n\n\n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen\n chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go\n on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here—Butterfly 9, ask for\n Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow\n pre-noon.\"\n\n\n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n\n\n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it.\n For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n\n\n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics—or practical jokers.\" He\n looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was\n no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\nHer hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off\n their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n\n\n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of\n neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they\n expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n\n\n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann\n glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where\n are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't\n even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are\n dressed—it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n\n\n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He\n pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n\n\n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same\n jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff\n pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit\n chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what\n clearly were hamburgers—though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n\n\n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n\n\n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate\n in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n\n\n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked\n at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two\n dollar bills.\n\n\n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n\n\n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n \"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n\n\n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's\n no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you\n want? This is all I have.\"\n\n\n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one\n of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a\n policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n\n\n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their\n checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n\n\n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got\n something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender.\n Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\nThe officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident\n interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of\n America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n\n\n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n \"I—uh—got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further\n than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n\n\n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you\n must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know\n about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak\n Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n\n\n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the\n United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where\n they know about foreign exchange?\"\n\n\n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You\n got immigrate clearance?\"\n\n\n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n\n\n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n\n\n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high\n counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men\n whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to\n listen.\n\n\n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or\n lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n\n\n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n\n\n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in\n something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I\n do—more or less—but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong\n in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm\n so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n\n\n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n\n\n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and\n got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n\n\n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you\n advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n\n\n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his\n wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which\n Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave\n doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n\n\n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night.\n Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned\n and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down\n in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he\n hesitated.\n\n\n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately\n he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the\n big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow\n brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\nIV\n\n\n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a\n little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n\n\n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's\n barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release,\n if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n\n\n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm\n ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n\n\n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man\n claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n\n\n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen\n isn't getting me out of here.\"\n\n\n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday—you've\n gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to\n understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie\n film. A film never changes. Space does—and time does. For example, if\n a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to\n find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n\n\n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil\n War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n\n\n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865—which is most easily\n done—you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or\n that war.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n\n\n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at\n Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day\n of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you\n grasp the difference between the two?\"\n\n\n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you\n speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space—say, a lake\n in the mountains—how do you identify that place? By looking for\n landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain\n peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n\n\n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What drugs does Jeff decide to take while he is in the jail cell?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_1", "options": ["Ann took the pill container away because she disapproved of how much self-medication Jeff was doing.", "He takes a vitamin, since the food at the restaurant was not very healthy.", "He decides not to take any of them, so he can stay sharp.", "He takes a sleeping aid, so that he can be well-rested for whatever the next morning brings."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the role of Greet Snader in the story?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_2", "options": ["To act as a guide to adventure travelers who want to have a totally different, new experience.", "To fleece Jeff and Ann out of what little money they have left by getting them to sign for a lease on a new building.", "To con Jeff and Ann into following him into the time machine, and turn them over to his boss.", "To collect on the loan that Jeff unwisely took from a mafia boss in order to start a new color television business."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What details about Snader suggest that he is a shady character?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_3", "options": ["He is described as suave and sophisticated, a charming person with a bit of an edge - and a mustache.", "He stays furtively in the shadows, as if he were shy, and keeps watching Jeff and Ann for a long time before he says a word.", "He is described as a stereotypical gangster: shiny, ill-fitting suit, loud shirt, short and squat, with a scarred face that looks like it's been in a fight.", "He is described as a salesman, with a silk suit, perfectly tailored, and sweaty hands."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the first solid clue that Snader meeting up with Jeff and Ann was not an accident?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_4", "options": ["When Snader uses Jeff's last name, without Jeff having provided it in the conversation.", "When Snader shows Jeff and Ann a folder with copies of the official documents showing that Jeff lost his leased business space.", "When Snader takes Jeff and Ann to his boss, and the boss already knows who they are.", "When Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff and walked them into the time travel machine."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the legal system in Snader's time do with people who break the law?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_5", "options": ["They ship them to the future, when space travel is established, and then transport them off Earth to prison planets.", "Sends them back to the earliest moment that the time machine currently works, and has them build \"tracks\" even further into the past.", "In the future, new psychological methods re-educate wrongdoers, so the jail system is miniscule and there are no repeat offenders.", "Illegal activity is not tolerated, and offenders are simply shot."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What motivations drive Jeff and Ann on until they are past the point of no return in this story?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_6", "options": ["Jeff is desperate to get money for a place to restart his business; Ann is excited by the idea of adventure, and she thinks Snader is attractive.", "Jeff has a professional interest in knowing what is behind the special effects trick he thinks he is seeing with the time machine; Ann yearns to see her dead mother again by traveling into the past.", "Jeff has a professional interest in knowing what is behind the special effects trick he thinks he is seeing with the time machine; Ann is excited by the idea of adventure, and she thinks Snader is attractive.", "Jeff is a stone cold risk taker. He thinks this is an exciting adventure; Ann just goes where Jeff goes."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Snader grunt happily as the time machine takes them past room 724?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_7", "options": ["He works like a dog on this time machine gig. Jeff and Ann are nice people, and he thinks they will give him a big tip.", "His prey is in the net, and the net has closed around them. Jeff and Ann cannot get away now.", "He loves his job more than life itself - making people happy by taking them on adventures they could never have otherwise.", "Another day, another dollar - he is thinking about quitting time and the gin and tonics he will drink on the money he made conning Jeff and Ann to take the \"time machine.\""], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the two, Jeff and Ann, first realizes that they really did travel through time, and what causes this realization?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_8", "options": ["Jeff is the first one to realize it, because Snader is driving them through a familiar landscape on a highway he knows did not exist in his own time.", "Ann is the first one to realize it, because there are no bars on the windows.", "Jeff is the first one to realize it, because the trees, houses and street lights don't look right.", "Ann is the first one to realize it, because she recognizes the motherly old lady at the house where station 724 is located as a friend of her mother's that died years ago."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Snader con Jeff and Ann into coming on the time travel trip?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_9", "options": ["Snader's boss was a philanthropist. He thought Jeff would appreciate another chance to run his business and get it right this time.", "Snader's boss is the executive of a TV manufacturing company, and they want to gain a competitive edge by transporting Jeff, a color TV expert, back to the past to invent color TV first for their company.", "The time machine business is a pyramid scheme. Snader is paid based on how many people he brings back, Snader's boss gets a cut, so they constantly need to bring back more and more people to keep the scheme profitable.", "Snader's boss is attracted to Ann and wants to get rid of Jeff so he can get his hands on Ann."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How do Jeff and Ann end up in prison in the past?", "question_unique_id": "51167_FA7MCSCR_10", "options": ["Jeff became upset and made a scene in the restaurant, and was arrested for disorderly conduct.", "Snader's boss accused them of stealing valuable artwork from his office.", "They tried to pay their restaurant bill with US currency, which wasn't accepted in this past.", "It wasn't a prison, it was a psychiatric hospital. The bystanders thought Jeff was nuts raving about time travel from the future."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/6/51167//51167-h//51167-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51184", "set_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Inside Earth", "year": 1964, "author": "Anderson, Poul", "topic": "Revolutionaries -- Fiction; PS; Spy stories; Science fiction", "article": "INSIDE EARTH\nBy POUL ANDERSON\n\n\n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nObviously, no conqueror wants his subjects to\n\n revolt against his rule. Obviously? This one\n\n would go to any lengths to start a rebellion!\nI\n\n\n The biotechnicians had been very thorough. I was already a little\n undersized, which meant that my height and build were suitable—I\n could pass for a big Earthling. And of course my face and hands and so\n on were all right, the Earthlings being a remarkably humanoid race.\n But the technicians had had to remodel my ears, blunting the tips and\n grafting on lobes and cutting the muscles that move them. My crest had\n to go and a scalp covered with revolting hair was now on the top of my\n skull.\n\n\n Finally, and most difficult, there had been the matter of skin color.\n It just wasn't possible to eliminate my natural coppery pigmentation.\n So they had injected a substance akin to melanin, together with a virus\n which would manufacture it in my body, the result being a leathery\n brown. I could pass for a member of the so-called \"white\" subspecies,\n one who had spent most of his life in the open.\n\n\n The mimicry was perfect. I hardly recognized the creature that looked\n out of the mirror. My lean, square, blunt-nosed face, gray eyes,\n and big hands were the same or nearly so. But my black crest had\n been replaced with a shock of blond hair, my ears were small and\n immobile, my skin a dull bronze, and several of Earth's languages were\n hypnotically implanted in my brain—together with a set of habits and\n reflexes making up a pseudo-personality which should be immune to any\n tests that the rebels could think of.\n\n\n I\nwas\nEarthling! And the disguise was self-perpetuating: the hair\n grew and the skin color was kept permanent by the artificial \"disease.\"\n The biotechnicians had told me that if I kept the disguise long enough,\n till I began to age—say, in a century or so—the hair would actually\n thin and turn white as it did with the natives.\n\n\n It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be\n restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as\n much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete\n and scarless. I'd be human again.\n\n\n I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly\n garments—rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and\n heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as\n felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a\n claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even\n to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort\n of man, an educated atavist.\n\n\n I went out of the hospital with the long swinging stride of one\n accustomed to walking great distances.\nThe Center was busy around me. Behind me, the hospital and laboratories\n occupied a fairly small building, some eighty stories of stone and\n steel and plastic. On either side loomed the great warehouses, military\n barracks, officers' apartments, civilian concessions, filled with the\n vigorous life of the starways. Behind the monstrous wall, a mile to my\n right, was the spaceport, and I knew that a troopship had just lately\n dropped gravs from Valgolia herself.\n\n\n The Center swarmed with young recruits off duty, gaping at the sights,\n swaggering in their new uniforms. Their skins shone like polished\n copper in the blistering sunlight, and their crests were beginning to\n wilt a little. All Earth is not the tropical jungle most Valgolians\n think it is—northern Europe is very pleasant, and Greenland is even a\n little on the cold side—but it gets hot enough at North America Center\n in midsummer to fry a shilast.\n\n\n A cosmopolitan throng filled the walkways. Soldiers predominated—huge,\n shy Dacors, little slant-eyed Yangtusans, brawling Gorrads, all the\n manhood of Valgolia. Then there were other races, blue-skinned Vegans,\n furry Proximans, completely non-humanoid Sirians and Antarians.\n They were here as traders, observers, tourists, whatever else of a\n non-military nature one can imagine.\n\n\n I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior\n breed to be kicked around misses the whole point of Empire. If, indeed,\n Earth's millions were an inferior breed, I wouldn't have been here at\n all. Valgol needs an economic empire, but if all we had in mind was\n serfdom we'd be perfectly content with the plodding animal life of\n Deneb VII or a hundred other worlds.\n\n\n I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal,\n and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was\n to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one.\nThere were plenty of Terries—Terrestrials—around, of course, moving\n with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and\n arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the\n habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak\n Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save\n for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes\n suggesting those of civil functionaries at home.\n\n\n I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study,\n and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating,\n because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians\n and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the\n ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are.\n They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate.\n\n\n I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took\n me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as\n far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings\n around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but\n General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, \"Hello,\n Coordinator.\"\n\n\n The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading\n his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. \"Ah, yes. I'm\n glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started—\"\n He extended a silver galla-dust box. \"Sniff? Have a seat, Conru.\"\n\n\n I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of\n papers on his desk and leafed through them. \"Umm-mm, only fifty-two\n years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man\n like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan\n business....\"\n\n\n I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You\n couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was\n as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being\n with my ex-countrymen.\n\n\n The Coordinator shrugged. \"Well, if you can carry this business\n off—fine. If you fail, you may die quite unpleasantly. That's their\n trouble, Conru: you wouldn't be regarded as an individual, but as a\n Valgolian. Did you know that they even make such distinctions among\n themselves? I mean races and sub-races and social castes and the like;\n it's keeping them divided and impotent, Conru. It's also keeping them\n out of the Empire. A shame.\"\nI knew all that, of course, but I merely nodded. Coordinator Vorka was\n a wonderful man in his field, and if he tended to be on the garrulous\n side, what could I do? I said, \"I know that, sir. I also know I was\n picked for a dangerous job because you thought I could fill the role.\n But I still don't know exactly what the job is.\"\n\n\n Coordinator Vorka smiled. \"I'm afraid I can't tell you much more\n than you must already have guessed,\" he said. \"The anarch movement\n here—the rebels, that is—is getting no place, primarily because of\n internal difficulties. When members of the same group spit epithets\n at each other referring to what they consider racial or national\n distinctions which determine superiority or inferiority, the group is\n bound to be an insecure one. Such insecurity just does not make for a\n strong rebellion, Conru. They try, and we goad them—but dissention\n splits them constantly and their revolutions fizzle out.\n\n\n \"They just can't unite against us, can't unite at all. Conru, you know\n how we've tried to educate them. It's worked, too, to some extent.\n But you can't educate three billion people who have a whole cultural\n pattern behind them.\"\n\n\n I winced. \"Three billion?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Earth is a rich planet, Conru, and a fairly crowded one at\n the same time. Bickering is inevitable. It's a part of their culture,\n as much as cooperation has been a part of ours.\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"We learned the hard way. The old Valgol was a poor planet\n and we had to unite to conquer space or we could not have survived.\"\n\n\n The Coordinator sniffed again at his silver box. \"Of course. And we're\n trying to help these people unite. They don't have to make the same\n mistakes we did, long ago. They don't have to at all. Get them to hate\n us enough, get them to hate us until all their own clannish hatreds\n don't count at all.... Well, you know what happened on Samtrak.\"\n\n\n I knew. The Samtraks are now the entrepreneurs of the Empire, really\n ingenious traders, but within the memory of some of our older men they\n were a sore-spot. They didn't understand the meaning of Empire any more\n than Earth does, and they never did understand it until we goaded them\n into open rebellion. The very reverse of divide and rule, you might\n say, and it worked. We withdrew trading privileges one by one, until\n they revolted successfully, thus educating themselves sociologically in\n only a few generations.\nVorka said, \"The problem of Earth is not quite that simple.\" He leaned\n back, made a bridge of his fingers, and peered across them at me. \"Do\n you know precisely what a provocateur job is, Conru?\"\n\n\n I said that I did, but only in a hazy way, because until now my work\n had been pretty much restricted to social relations on the more\n advanced Empire planets. However, I told him that I did know the idea\n was to provoke discontent and, ultimately, rebellion.\n\n\n The Coordinator smiled. \"Well, that's just the starter, Conru. It's a\n lot more complex than that. Each planet has its own special problems.\n The Samtraks, for example, had a whole background of cutthroat\n competition. That was easy: we eliminated that by showing them what\nreal\ncutthroat competition could be like. But Earth is different.\n Look at it this way. They fight among themselves. Because of their\n mythical distinctions, not realizing that there are no inferior races,\n only more or less advanced ones, and that individuals must be judged as\n individuals, not as members of groups, nations or races. A planet like\n Earth can be immensely valuable to the Empire, but not if it has to be\n garrisoned. Its contribution must be voluntary and whole-hearted.\"\n\n\n \"A difficult problem,\" I said. \"My opinion is that we should treat all\n exactly alike—\nforce\nthem to abandon their unrealistic differences.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly!\" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was\n pretty elementary stuff. \"We're never too rough on the eager lads\n who come here from Valgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even\n encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down.\"\n\n\n I told him I had met one.\n\n\n \"Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads\n will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military\n service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all\n Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these\n colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild\n stories about brutality on our part. Not enough to make everybody mad\n at us, or even a majority—the rumored tyranny has always happened to\n someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting\n mad, and that's the class we want.\"\n\n\n \"The leaders,\" I chimed in. \"The idealists. Brave, intelligent,\n patriotic. The kind who probably wouldn't be a part of this racial\n bickering, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the Coordinator. \"We'll give them the ammunition for\n their propaganda. We've\nbeen\ndoing it. Result: the leaders get mad.\n Races, religions, nationalities, they hate us worse than they hate each\n other.\"\nThe way he painted it, I was hardly needed at all. I told him that.\n\n\n \"Ideally, that would be the situation, Conru. Only it doesn't work\n that way.\" He took out a soft cloth and wiped his forehead. \"Even the\n leaders are too involved in this myth of differences and they can't\n concentrate all their efforts. Luron, of course, would be the other\n alternative—\"\n\n\n That was a very logical statement, but sometimes logic has a way of\n making you laugh, and I was laughing now. Luron considered itself our\n arch-enemy. With a few dozen allies on a path of conquest, Luron\n thought it could wrest Empire from our hands. Well, we let them play.\n And each time Luron swooped down on one of the more primitive planets,\n we let them, for Luron would serve as well as ourselves in goading\n backward peoples to unite and advance. Perhaps Luron, as a social\n entity, grew wiser each time. Certainly the primitive colonials did.\n Luron had started a chain reaction which threatened to overthrow the\n tyranny of superstition on a hundred planets. Good old Luron, our\n arch-enemy, would see the light itself some day.\n\n\n The Coordinator shook his head. \"Can't use Luron here. Technologies are\n entirely too similar. It might shatter both planets, and we wouldn't\n want that.\"\n\n\n \"So what do we use?\"\n\n\n \"You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that\n they want to fight, you—\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I told him. \"Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so\n soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all—\"\n\n\n The Coordinator put his hand down flat. \"Nothing of the sort. They\nmust\nfight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary,\n until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are\ntotally\nagainst us.\"\n\n\n I stood up. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n He waved me back into the chair. \"You'll be lucky to understand it\n by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to\n another ... that is, if you come out of this one alive.\"\n\n\n I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead.\n\n\n \"We have some influence in the underground movement, as you might\n logically expect. The leader is a man we worked very hard to have\n elected.\"\n\n\n \"A member of one of the despised races?\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"The best we could do at this point was to help elect someone from a\n minority sub-group of the dominant white race. The leader's name is\n Levinsohn. He is of the white sub-group known as Jews.\"\n\"How well is this Levinsohn accepted by the movement?\"\n\n\n \"Considerable resistance and hostility,\" the Coordinator said. \"That's\n to be expected. However, we've made sure that there is no other\n organization the minority-haters can join, so they have to follow\n him or quit. He's able, all right; one of the most able men they\n have, which helps our aims. Even those who discriminate against Jews\n reluctantly admire him. He's moved the headquarters of the movement\n out into space, and the man's so brilliant that we don't even know\n where. We'll find out, mainly through you, I hope, but that isn't the\n important thing.\"\n\n\n \"What is?\" I asked, baffled.\n\n\n \"To report on the unification of Earth. It's possible that the anarch\n movement can achieve it under Levinsohn. In that case, we'll make sure\n they win, or think they win, and will gladly sign a treaty giving Earth\n equal planetary status in the Empire.\"\n\n\n \"And if unity hasn't been achieved?\"\n\n\n \"We simply crush this rebellion and make them start all over again.\n They'll have learned some degree of unity from this revolt and so the\n next one will be more successful.\" He stood up and I got out of my\n chair to face him. \"That's for the future, though. We'll work out our\n plans from the results of this campaign.\"\n\n\n \"But isn't there a lot of danger in the policy of fomenting rebellion\n against us?\" I asked.\n\n\n He lifted his shoulders. \"Evolution is always painful, forced evolution\n even more so. Yes, there are great dangers, but advance information\n from you and other agents can reduce the risk. It's a chance we must\n take, Conru.\"\n\n\n \"Conrad,\" I corrected him, smiling. \"Plain Mr. Conrad Haugen ... of\n Earth.\"\nII\n\n\n A few days later, I left North America Center, and in spite of the\n ominous need to hurry, my eastward journey was a ramble. The anarchs\n would be sure to check my movements as far back as they could, and my\n story had better ring true. For the present, I must\nbe\nmy role, a\n vagabond.\n\n\n The city was soon behind me. It was far from other settlement—it is\n good policy to keep the Centers rather isolated, and we could always\n contact our garrisons in native towns quickly enough. Before long I was\n alone in the mountains.\n\n\n I liked that part of the trip. The Rockies are huge and serene, a fresh\n cold wind blows from their peaks and roars in the pines, brawling\n rivers foam through their dales and canyons—it is a big landscape,\n clean and strong and lonely. It speaks with silence.\n\n\n I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great\n truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was\n Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he\n looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been\n laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which\n the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule\n itself.\n\n\n I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of\n Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the\n talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent!\n\n\n \"Their taxes are killing me,\" said the owner. \"What the hell incentive\n do I have to produce if they take it away from me?\" I nodded, but\n thought:\nYour kind was paying more taxes in the old days, and had\n less to show for it. Here you get your money back in public works and\n universal security. No one on Earth is cold or hungry. Can you only\n produce for your own private gain, Earthling?\n\"The labor draft got my kid the other day,\" said the foreman. \"He'll\n spend two good years of his life working for them, and prob'ly come\n back hopheaded about the good o' the Empire.\"\nThere was a time\n, I thought,\nwhen millions of Earthlings clamored\n for work, or spent years fighting their wars, gave their youth to a\n god of battle who only clamored for more blood. And how can we have a\n stable society without educating its members to respect it?\n\"I\nwant\nanother kid,\" said the female cook. \"Two ain't really enough.\n They're good boys, but I want a girl too. Only the Eridanian law says\n if I go over my quota, if I have one more, they'll sterilize me! And\n they'd do it, the meddling devils.\"\nA billion Earthlings are all the Solar System can hold under decent\n standards of living without exhausting what natural resources their own\n culture left us\n, I thought.\nWe aren't ready to permit emigration; our\n own people must come first. But these beings can live well here. Only\n now that we've eliminated famine, plague, and war, they'd breed beyond\n reason, breed till all the old evils came back to throttle them, if we\n didn't have strict population control.\n\"Yeah,\" said her husband bitterly. \"They never even let my cousin have\n kids. Sterilized him damn near right after he was born.\"\nThen he's a moron, or carries hemophilia, or has some other hereditary\n taint\n, I thought.\nCan't they see we're doing it for their own good?\n It costs us fantastically in money and trouble, but the goal is a level\n of health and sanity such as this race never in its history dreamed\n possible.\n\"They're stranglin' faith,\" muttered someone else.\nAnyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission\n be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or\n antisocial nonsense? The old \"free\" Earth was not noted for liberalism.\n\"We want to be free.\"\nFree? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds\n and nationalisms on each other—and on the Galaxy—to wallow in\n barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our\n works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be\n demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is\n Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!\n\"We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either—\"\nThat's up to nobody else but you!\nI couldn't get much specific information, but then I hadn't expected\n to. I collected my pay and drifted on eastward, talking to people of\n all classes—farmers, mechanics, shopowners, tramps, and such data as I\n gathered tallied with those of Intelligence.\n\n\n About twenty-five per cent of the population, in North America at\n least—it was higher in the Orient and Africa—was satisfied with the\n Imperium, felt they were better off than they would have been in the\n old days. \"The Eridanians are pretty decent, on the whole. Some of 'em\n come in here and act nice and human as you please.\"\n\n\n Some fifty per cent was vaguely dissatisfied, wanted \"freedom\" without\n troubling to define the term, didn't like the taxes or the labor draft\n or the enforced disarmament or the legal and social superiority of\n Valgolians or some such thing, had perhaps suffered in the reconquest.\n But this group constituted no real threat. It would tend to be passive\n whatever happened. Its greatest contribution would be sporadic rioting.\n\n\n The remaining twenty-five per cent was bitter, waiting its chance,\n muttering of a day of revenge—and some portion of this segment was\n spreading propaganda, secretly manufacturing and distributing weapons,\n engaging in clandestine military drill, and maintaining contact with\n the shadowy Legion of Freedom.\n\n\n Childish, melodramatic name! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a\n certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement\n was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting,\n its activities mounted almost daily.\nThe illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated\n stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that\n some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to\n spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't\n trace such a well-organized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and\n jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so—\nThe day is coming.... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your\n shackles.... Stand by for freedom!\nI stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native\n cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old\n settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got\n a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill.\n\n\n I was Conrad Haugen, Norwegian-American, assigned to a spaceship by the\n labor draft and liking it well enough to re-enlist when my term was\n up. I had wandered through much of the Empire and had had a great deal\n of contact with Eridanians, but was most emphatically not a Terrie. In\n fact, I thought it would be well if the redskin yoke could be thrown\n off, both because of liberty and the good pickings to be had in the\n Galaxy if the Empire should collapse. I had risen to second mate on an\n interstellar tramp, but could get no further because of the law that\n the two highest officers must be Valgolian. That had embittered me and\n I returned to Earth, foot-loose and looking for trouble.\nI found it. With officer's training and the strength due to a home\n planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at\n all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who\n thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with\n the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible.\n The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside.\nThey'd let\nthis\nloose among the stars\n!\nAfter that I was one of the boys and Riley was my best friend. We went\n out together, wenching and drinking, raising hell in the cold dirty\n canyons of steel and stone which the natives called streets.\nValgolia,\n Valgolia, the clean bare windswept heights of your mountains, soughing\n trees and thunderous waters and Maara waiting for me to come home!\nRiley often proposed that we find an Eridanian and beat him to death,\n and I would agree, hiccupping, because I knew they didn't go alone\n into native quarters any more. I sat in the smoky reek of the bars,\n half deafened by the clatter and raucousness called music, trying not\n to think of a certain low-ceilinged, quiet tavern amid the gardens of\n Kalariho, and sobbed the bitterness of Conrad Haugen into my beer.\n\n\n \"Dirty redskins,\" I muttered. \"Dirty, stinking, bald-headed, sons of\n bitches. Them and their god-damn Empire. Why, y'know, if 't hadn' been\n f' their laws I'd be skipper o' my own ship now. I knew more'n that\n slob o' a captain. But he was born Eridanian—God, to get my hands on\n his throat!\"\n\n\n Riley nodded. Through the haze of smoke I saw that his eyes were\n narrowed. He wasn't drunk when he didn't want to be, and at times like\n this he was suddenly as sober as I was, and that in spite of not having\n a Valgolian liver.\n\n\n I bided my time, not too obviously anxious to contact the Legion. I\n just thought they were swell fellows, the only brave men left in the\n rotten, stinking Empire; I'd sure be on their side when the day came. I\n worked in the mill, and when out with the boys lamented the fact that\n we were really producing for the damned Eridanians, we couldn't even\n keep the products of our own sweat. I wasn't obtrusive about it, of\n course. Most of the time we were just boozing. But when the talk came\n to the Empire, I made it clear just where I stood.\nThe winter went. I continued the dreary round of days, wondering how\n long it would take, wondering how much time was left. If the Legion\n was at all interested, they would be checking my background right now.\n Let them. There wouldn't be much to check, but what there was had been\n carefully manufactured by the experts of the Intelligence Service.\n\n\n Riley came into my room one evening. His face was tight, and he plunged\n to business. \"Con, do you really mean all you've said about the Empire?\"\n\n\n \"Why, of course. I—\" I glanced out the window, as if expecting to\n see a spy. If there were any, I knew he would be native. The Empire\n just doesn't have enough men for a secret police, even if we wanted to\n indulge in that sort of historically ineffective control.\n\n\n \"You'd like to fight them? Like really to help the Legion of Freedom\n when they strike?\"\n\n\n \"You bet your obscenity life!\" I snarled. \"When they land on Earth,\n I'll get a gun somewhere and be right there in the middle of the battle\n with them!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Riley puffed a cigaret for a while. Then he said, \"Look, I\n can't tell you much. I'm taking a chance just telling you this. It\n could mean my life if you passed it on to the Eridanians.\"\n\n\n \"I won't.\"\n\n\n His eyes were bleak. \"You damn well better not. If you're caught at\n that—\"\n\n\n He drew a finger sharply across his throat.\n\n\n \"Quit talking like a B-class stereo,\" I bristled. \"If you've got\n something to tell me, let's have it. Otherwise get out.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, sure. We checked up on you, Con, and we think you're as good a\n prospect as we ever came across. If you want to fight the Eridanians\n now—\njoin the Legion\nnow—here's your chance.\"\n\n\n \"My God, you know I do! But who—\"\n\n\n \"I can't tell you a thing. But if you really want to join, memorize\n this.\" Riley gave me a small card on which was written a name and\n address. \"Destroy it, thoroughly. Then quit at the mill and drift to\n this other place, as if you'd gotten tired of your work and wanted to\n hit the road again. Take your time, don't make a beeline for it. When\n you do arrive, they'll take care of you.\"\n\n\n I nodded, grimly. \"I'll do it, Mike. And thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Just my job.\" He smiled, relaxing, and pulled a flask from his\n overcoat. \"Okay, Con, that's that. We'd better not go out to drink,\n after this, but nothing's to stop us from getting stinko here.\"\nIII\n\n\n Spring had come and almost gone when I wandered into the little Maine\n town which was my destination. It lay out of the way, with forested\n hills behind it and the sea at its foot. Most of the houses were old,\n solidly built, almost like parts of the land, and the inhabitants were\n slow-spoken, steady folk, fishermen and artisans and the like, settled\n here and at home with the darkling woods and the restless sea and the\n high windy sky. I walked down a narrow street with a cool salt breeze\n ruffling my hair and decided that I liked Portsboro. It reminded me of\n my own home, twenty light-years away on the wide beaches of Kealvigh.\n\n\n I made my way to Nat Hawkins' store and asked for work like any\n drifter. But when we were alone in the back room, I told him, \"I'm\n Conrad Haugen. Mike Riley said you'd be looking for me.\"\n\n\n He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"\n\n\n \"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,\" he\n smiled. \"There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.\n But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made\n them in the names of many people.\"\n\n\n \"But you—\"\n\n\n \"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.\"\n\n\n He could. He put me through the mill in the next few\n nights—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,\n psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He\n did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service\n had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very\n thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.\n\n\n In the end he said, still calmly, \"This is amazing. You have an\n IQ well over the borderline of genius, an astonishing variety of\n assorted knowledge about the Empire and about technical subjects, and\n an implacable hatred of Eridanian rule—based on personal pique and\n containing self-seeking elements, but no less firm for that. You're out\n for yourself, but you'll stand by your comrades and your cause. We'd\n never hoped for more recruits of your caliber.\"\n\n\n \"When do I start?\" I asked impatiently.\n\n\n \"Easy, easy,\" he smiled. \"There's time. We've waited fifty years; we\n can wait a while longer.\" He riffled through the dossier. \"Actually,\n the difficulty is where to assign you. A man who knows astrogation, the\n use of weapons and machines, and the Empire, who is physically strong\n as a bull, can lead men, and has a dozen other accomplishments, really\n seems wasted on any single job. I'm not sure, but I think you'll do\n best as a roving agent, operating between Main Base and the planets\n where we have cells, and helping with the work at the base when you're\n there.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What planet is the main character from?", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_1", "options": ["Valgolia", "Deneb VII", "Earth", "Proxima"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where are the Terries from?", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_2", "options": ["Southern Valgolia", "Terralia", "Mars", "Earth"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do the Valgolians want to happen on Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_3", "options": ["They want to encourage rebel groups on Earth to weaken Earth's government enough that Valgolia will become the undisputed master of Earth.", "They want to ally with Earthlings and convince them to fight in the Valgolians' war against Samtrak.", "They want to crush resistance to the Empire on Earth.", "They want Earthlings to unite and rise up against the Valgolians and become full members of the Empire."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the Valgolian military's attitude toward their own soldiers who smacked the Earthlings around a little, like the soldier that slapped Conru?", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_4", "options": ["The Valgolian people thought of Earthlings as animals, so it didn't make any difference if you kicked a few animals around.", "On Valgolia, people were accustomed to cooperating, not fighting. That soldier would e charged as a war criminal and court-martialed.", "The behavior was considered acceptable, as it was in pursuit of the larger goal of getting Earth to rebel.", "The Valgolians know that a lot of soldiers go into the military because they like violence, so a little bit of that is only to be expected."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What kept Conru from feeling the effects of alcohol when drinking?", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_5", "options": ["He always slipped the bartender a twenty to water down his drinks when he and his friends entered a bar.", "He has a special liver that prevents alcohol from having an effect.", "He actually was affected, but like most drinkers, he thought he was perfectly sober.", "He was pouring half of every drink under the table when his drinking buddy wasn't watching."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who are the Eridians?", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_6", "options": ["Eridians are allies of the Lurons, mortal enemies of Valgolians.", "It's a slang term for any arrogant person.", "It's another term for the bureaucrats of Earth's planetary government.", "It's another term for the Valgolians."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the fundamental problem keeping Earthers from uniting?", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_7", "options": ["They can't compete technologically with the Valgolians.", "Humans cannot seem to give up their desire to define \"in groups\" and \"out groups,\" and to treat \"out groups\" badly.", "Humans are not very smart.", "There are so many humans on Earth that they are stressed by overcrowding and the need for constant competition."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following are policies that the Valgolians instituted on Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_8", "options": ["Earthers may not reproduce if they do not meet genetic standards, they may emigrate from Earth if they meet requirements, and all forms of religion are permitted except falsehood.", "Earthers are required to live off-planet on either Proxima or Valgolia for two years, they are required to attend Valgolian-run schools, and they have to pay high taxes.", "Earthers are required to do two years' public service for the Empire, they are only allowed a limited number of children, and they are not allowed to occupy the two top leadership positions on starships.", "Earthers may not vote, may not be members of the police, and are allotted only a certain amount of grain for food each year, and if they choose to have too many children, too bad, they do not get more food."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Conru feel about his role as an agent provocateur?", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_9", "options": ["Conru ends up getting a little too deep into his role when he meets Mike Riley. He forgets that he is Valgolian, and switches sides, working for the Earth rebels in earnest.", "He is determined to do his job, but he is not super-thrilled because Earthers are violent and enjoy conflict, while Valgolians prefer cooperation and peaceful ways, and he doesn't like some of the things he has to do.", "Conru is still young for a Valgolian and highly accomplished. He is a rock star rising through the ranks, and this is just one more unpleasant job he has to do.", "Conru is a true believer in the superiority of Valgolians, and he is looking forward to crushing Earth's rebels after he foments the rebellion."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Conru \"as strong as a bull?\"", "question_unique_id": "51184_CP6671VN_10", "options": ["Because the gravity on Valgolia is 50% higher than the gravity on Earth, so it's a natural characteristic.", "Because Valgolian military men are accustomed to hard work and a harsh life, so his military background has made him strong.", "Because the drug given him to make his skin brownish instead of copper-colored is a steroid with the side effect of making him stronger.", "Because he works out every day to compensate for being a bit smaller than most Earthmen."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/8/51184//51184-h//51184-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51336", "set_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "What is POSAT?", "year": 1958, "author": "Smith, Phyllis Sterling", "topic": "Secret societies -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; PS", "article": "What is POSAT?\nBy PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOf course coming events cast their shadows\n\n before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\nThe following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several\n magazines:\nMASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\nWhat is the secret source of those profound\n\n principles that can solve the problems of life?\n\n Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\nDo not be a leaf in the wind! YOU\n\n can alter the course of your life!\nTap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\nThe Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\nPOSAT\nan ancient secret society\n\n\n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all,\n similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the\n name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the\n familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and\n mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip\n the attached coupon and send for the booklet—sometime—when a pen or\n pencil was nearer at hand.\n\n\n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of\nYour\n Life and Psychology\nthat had been abandoned on his seat in the bus.\n He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n \"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly\n liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe\n it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he\n had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n\n\n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement\n was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine.\n The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always\n liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading\n would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what\n the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n\n\n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n\n\n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that\n some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his\n brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that\n couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n\n\n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his\n attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small\n black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr\n atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the\n printed matter that accompanied it.\n\n\n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter\n was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted\n it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted\n lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it.\n He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and\n promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was\n entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his\n other letters.\n\n\n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in\n response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information\n than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more\n volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the\n key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would\n merely fill out the enclosed form.\n\n\n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.\n\n\n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.\n\n\n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty,\n handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n\n\n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as\n she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's\n that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n\n\n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n\n\n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she\n suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our\n money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n\n\n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with\n correct answers!\"\n\n\n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.\n\n\n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he\n had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap.\n When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a\n position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older\n industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place\n to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was\n hope for the future.\n\n\n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the\n other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind\n alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence\n in them.\n\n\n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n\n\n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by\n one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of\n some sort.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried\n Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered\n a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common\n household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a\n daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent\n exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use\n as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too\n dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n\n\n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to\n find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're\n so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n\n\n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:\n\n\n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to\n us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the\n requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After\n Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable\n secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal\n interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand\n Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this\n arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make\n another appointment for you.\n\n\n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one\n for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the\n laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his\n research problems home with him and worried over them half the night,\n they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for\n pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was\n in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a\n whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n\n\n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be\n disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been\n sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her\n about it without telephoning.\nSince the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home!\nBut it was impossible!\n\n\n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the\n envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him,\n unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number\n of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given\n them!\n\n\n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some\n perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the\n directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of\n the university. Or—or—\"\n\n\n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His\n laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble\n of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that\n particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own,\n POSAT had unearthed the information.\n\n\n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n\n\n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n\n\n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step\n into the next room—\"\n\n\n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n\n\n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the\n shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and\n the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing.\n The rug—Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum.\n The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were\n surely old masters—of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he\n recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the\n artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian.\n Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities\n of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of\n Operational Circuit Analysis.\n\n\n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with\n the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another\n door.\n\n\n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye\n level—that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend\n over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently\n there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those\n days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n\n\n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube\n held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his\n scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the\n light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a\n muffled thud.\nNow I've done it!\nthought Don with dismay. But at least the tube\n hadn't shattered.\n\n\n In fact—it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact,\n even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the\n brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support\n the tube.\n\n\n There were no wires!\n\n\n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between\n trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two\n or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it\n minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n\n\n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never\n seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held\n one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as\n experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the\n radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n\n\n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still\n be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material\n and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient,\n self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this\n moment!\nBut this is impossible!\nhe thought.\nWe're the only company that's\n working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual\n production!\nAnd even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it\n have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society,\n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n\n\n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper\n and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have\n asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the\n F.B.I. Even now—\n\n\n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and\n stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it\n impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His\n impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n\n\n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had\n entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light\n bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still\n as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer\n seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was\n distressingly ominous.\n\n\n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal\n expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage\n to find.\n\n\n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n\n\n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There\n could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely\n through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n\n\n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had\n spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n\n\n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated\n wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense\n that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain\n semitransparent?\n\n\n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as\n the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't—couldn't—be allowed to\n leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place\n alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n\n\n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n\n\n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n\n\n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n\n\n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n\n\n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part\n of his personal collection—which, incidentally, he bought from the\n artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for\n power here in the laboratory.\"\n\n\n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was\n hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian—\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I\n really don't know too much about them.\"\n\n\n \"But how could a man alive\ntoday\nbuy paintings from an artist of the\n Renaissance?\"\n\n\n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements\n claim—an\nancient\nsecret society. Our founder has been dead for over\n four centuries.\"\n\n\n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years,\n however.\"\n\n\n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's\n start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the\n classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the\n pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years\n ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a\n super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not\n in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of\n years.\n\n\n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was\n one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia,\n and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course\n of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand\n years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the\n civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n\n\n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was\n a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager\n heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling\n physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his\n principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the\n quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what\n we call Maxwell's equations—although, of course, he antedated Maxwell\n by centuries—developed the special and general theories of relativity,\n the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he\n mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding\n energy of nuclei—\"\n\n\n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It\n hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed\n cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet—there sat the\n reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction\n of Don's glance.\n\n\n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed\n his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw\n the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could\n not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his\n knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about\n him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states,\n intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his\n time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker\n with a lighted fuse.\n\n\n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He\n didn't think so. No one else in his age could have\nderived\nthe\n knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo.\n Michelangelo. There were men capable of\nlearning\nhis science, even as\n men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded\n this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries\n and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He\n urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them\n safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as\n possible.\"\n\n\n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that\n it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have\n walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four\n hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a\n little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n\n\n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n\n\n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men.\n So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had\n come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know\n that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based\n on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of\n simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only\n our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n\n\n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\nDon's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm\n of possibility.\n\n\n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread\n before him.\n\n\n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred\n years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have\n uncovered in that time!\"\n\n\n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n \"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've\n undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a\n fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are\n other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until\n you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n\n\n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as\n they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization\n so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n\n\n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his\n heart sank.\n\n\n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n\n\n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"\n\n\n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that!\n But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is\n to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely\n disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this\n building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached\n the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if\n they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n\n\n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were\n invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we\n know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do\n yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be\n safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might\n be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though,\n at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we\n want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well,\n and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want,\n a powerful motivator.\"\n\n\n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of\n applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We\n enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in\n line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep,\n if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if\n they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we\n can act when the time finally comes.\n\n\n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last\n resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we\n put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate\n them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's\n good practice for us.\n\n\n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't\n answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n\n\n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him.\n He had one more question.\n\n\n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the\n stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n\n\n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n\n\n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is POSAT?", "question_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP_1", "options": ["It's a gigantic scam, a fake religion designed to draw in the  hopeless and the lonely and to separate thrm from their money.", "It is a secret society like the Illuminati - quite a bit like the Illuminati. Even their symbols look the same.", "It is a secret society that guards the technological inventions of a brilliant inventor  from Earthlings against the day when said Earthlings can use the technology responsibly.", "It's a harmless social society that disguises its meaninglessness behind a lot of ritual mumbo jumbo."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What types of applicants does POSAT accept, and which character provides an example of that type?", "question_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP_2", "options": ["Mild religious fanatics - Elizabeth; desperate, lost people - Bill; people who are curious - Don.", "Mild religious fanatics - Betty; desperate, lost people - Bill; people who are curious - Don.", "People with a lot of money - Dr. Crandon; people who know nuclear physics - Don; People who are simply curious - Elizabeth.", "Mild religious fanatics - Elizabeth; brilliant but lonely youths - Don; people wiho are curious - Dr. Crandon."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What can we conclude that POSAT did for Bill?", "question_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP_3", "options": ["It was more what POSAT did TO Bill - secretly caused him to be fired.", "They arranged for Elizabeth and Bill to meet, bringing two lonely people together.", "Behind the scenes, they arranged employment for him.", "They sent him a disappointingly vague pamphlet in answer to his six page description of his brilliant character and personality."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Dr. Crandon describe what use is made of POSAT members like Elizabeth?", "question_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP_4", "options": ["They pocket their donations and keep them happy with a continual trickle of bulletins on topics they are interested in.", "They facilitate romance between people like Elizabeth and people like Bill, because they will typically make larger donations out of gratitude.", "They ask people like Elizabeth to go out and find yet more members.", "They hire people like Elizabeth as production workers in their warehouse."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who does Dr. Crandon place in the same intellectual category as the founder of POSAT?", "question_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP_5", "options": ["Leonardo DaVinci", "The man who invented the atomic reactor.", "The man who invented writing symbols correlated with specific sounds.", "Albert Einstein, who developed the theory of relativity."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the critical feature of the lightbulb that Don knocks loose, that hasn't been invented yet, as far as he knows?", "question_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP_6", "options": ["Colored LED bulbs, not just clear white.", "Fluorescent light bulbs", "Battery-operated fluorescent tubes.", "Clear, thin radiation shielding"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does suggestions does Don's wife make about possible purposes of POSAT?", "question_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP_7", "options": ["She initially suggests that it is a secret social club, but later believes it is more sinister because of the questions to Don about poisons.", "She suggests that it is a cult tyring to convert new members, and also  that it is truly a secret society with lots of hoops to jump through", "She suggests several possibile POSAT purposes, including trying to scam money from the rich and running an espionage ring to steal confidential technological information", "She suggests that Don not answer the multiple choice question test."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What made Don decide to go to the POSAT appointment he was invited to?", "question_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP_8", "options": ["He secretly hoped he would meet a pretty secretary that could replace his somewhat timeworn housewife, Betty.", "He knew that his mentor, Dr. Crandon, was a member of the society, so he felt sure he could get the straight scoop on it from Crandon.", "He was creeped out that POSAT knew information about him that he had not provided, and wanted to satisfy himself as to whether they were spies.", "His curiousity very simply would not be put off. He wanted to know what was going on."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Don so surprised by the splendor of the waiting room at POSAT?", "question_unique_id": "51336_N8W8AJKP_9", "options": ["He had not seen a behind like the one on the POSAT secretary for a long time.", "Because the ante-room and the surroundings of the warehouse were a real dump.", "As a scientist, he had a hard time understanding the expenditure of capital unless he could lay out a proof that it made sense, and these opulent surroundings kind of stuck in his craw.", "He was staggered by what it indicated about POTAS's wealth."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/3/51336//51336-h//51336-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51534", "set_unique_id": "51534_HOKMGFHS", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Self Portrait", "year": 1950, "author": "Wolfe, Bernard", "topic": "Princeton University -- Fiction; Diary fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Cybernetics -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS", "article": "Self Portrait\nBy BERNARD WOLFE\n\n\n Illustrated by MARTIN SCHNEIDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction November 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIn the credo of this inspiringly selfless\n \ncyberneticist, nothing was too good for his colleagues\n \nin science.\nMuch\ntoo good for them\n!\nOctober 5, 1959\nWell, here I am at Princeton. IFACS is quite a place,\nquite\na place,\n but the atmosphere's darned informal. My colleagues seem to be mostly\n youngish fellows dressed in sloppy dungarees, sweatshirts (the kind\n Einstein made so famous) and moccasins, and when they're not puttering\n in the labs they're likely to be lolling on the grass, lounging in\n front of the fire in commons, or slouching around in conference rooms\n chalking up equations on a blackboard. No way of telling, of course,\n but a lot of these collegiate-looking chaps must be in the MS end,\n whatever that is. You'd think fellows in something secret like that\n would dress and behave with a little more dignity.\n\n\n Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I\n was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it\n way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day\n I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the\n pre-faded kind.\nOctober 6, 1959\nMet the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut,\n wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd\n thought to change into my dungarees before the interview.\n\n\n \"Parks,\" he said, \"you can count yourself a very fortunate young man.\n You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the\n Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch\n in some of the background of the place.\"\n\n\n That would be most helpful, I said. I wondered, though, if he was as\n naive as he sounded. Did he think I'd been working in cybernetics labs\n for going on six years without hearing enough rumors about IFACS to\n make me dizzy? Especially about the MS end of IFACS?\n\n\n \"Maybe you know,\" he went on, \"that in the days of Oppenheimer and\n Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies.\n It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and\n physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets,\n egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows\n what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up\n around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency,\n so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon\n as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in\n our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced\nCybernetics\nStudies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now,\npret\n-ty keen.\"\n\n\n I said I'd bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into?\n\n\n \"Sure thing,\" he said. \"You're going to take charge of a very important\n lab. The Pro lab.\" I guess he saw my puzzled look. \"Pro—that's short\n for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal.\n With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs\n which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually\n we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy\n pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on\n you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge.\"\n\n\n I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to\n meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around\n cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the\n hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting\n that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into\nthat\nend of\n things.\n\n\n \"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" the boss insisted. \"You're first and foremost a talented\n neuro man, and that's exactly what we need in the Pro department.\n There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous\n mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and\n electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about MS,\n forget it fast—it's not a proper subject of conversation for you. The\n loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get\n into with loose talk. Remember that.\"\n\n\n I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice.\n\n\n Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.\n\n\n \"You can't get away from it,\" he said. \"E=MC\n 2\n is in a tree trunk\n as well as in a uranium atom or a solar system. When you're hacking\n away at a particular tree, though, you don't think much about such\n intangibles—like any good, untheoretical lumberjack, you're a lot\n more concerned with superficialities, such as which way the grain\n runs, how to avoid the knots, and so on. It's very restful. So long\n as a cyberneticist is sawing and chopping, he's not a sliver of\n uncontaminated cerebrum contemplating the eternal slippery verities of\n gravity and electromagnetism; he's just one more guy trying to slice\n up one more log. Makes him feel he belongs to the human race again.\n Einstein, you know, used to get the same results with a violin.\"\n\n\n Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.\n\n\n \"Bravo, Goldie,\" he said. \"Let us by all means pretend that we belong\n to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old\n saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!\"\n\n\n I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste\n and—as I might have guessed—it was Len Ellsom. He was just as\n surprised as I was.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"if it isn't Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in\n Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs.\"\n\n\n After M. I. T. I\nhad\nspent some time out in California doing\n neuro-cyber research, I explained—but what was\nhe\ndoing here? I'd\n lost track of him after he'd left Boston; the last I'd heard, he'd been\n working on the giant robot brain Remington-Rand was developing for the\n Air Force. I remembered seeing his picture in the paper two or three\n times while he was working on the brain.\n\n\n \"I was with Remington a couple of years,\" he told me. \"If I do say\n so myself, we built the Air Force a real humdinger of a brain—in\n addition to solving the most complex problems in ballistics, it could\n whistle\nDixie\nand, in moments of stress, produce a sound not unlike\n a Bronx cheer. Naturally, for my prowess in the electronic simulation\n of I.Q., I was tapped for the brain department of these hallowed\n precincts.\"\n\n\n \"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"\n\n\n He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty\n conscience. I'll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole\n episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed\n book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He's\n right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It's the\n usual Ellsom charm, I suppose.\n\n\n The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He's still\n trying to get my goat; he knows how much I've always hated to be called\n Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at\n Len's wisecracks.\nOctober 18, 1959\nThings are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here's how I get the picture.\n\n\n A year ago, the boss laid down a policy for the lab: begin with legs\n because, while the neuro-motor systems in legs and arms are a lot\n alike, those in legs are much simpler. If we build satisfactory legs,\n the boss figures, we can then tackle arms; the main difficulties will\n have been licked.\n\n\n Well, last summer, in line with this approach, the Army picked out\n a double amputee from the outpatient department of Walter Reed\n Hospital—fellow by the name of Kujack, who lost both his legs in a\n land mine explosion outside Pyongyang—and shipped him up here to be a\n subject in our experiments.\n\n\n When Kujack arrived, the neuro boys made a major decision. It didn't\n make sense, they agreed, to keep building experimental legs directly\n into the muscles and nerves of Kujack's stumps; the surgical procedure\n in these cine-plastic jobs is complicated as all getout, involves a\n lot of pain for the subject and, what's more to the point, means long\n delays each time while the tissues heal.\n\n\n Instead, they hit on the idea of integrating permanent metal and\n plastic sockets into the stumps, so constructed that each new\n experimental limb can be snapped into place whenever it's ready for a\n trial.\nBy the time I took over, two weeks ago, Goldweiser had the sockets\n worked out and fitted to Kujack's stumps, and the muscular and\n neural tissues had knitted satisfactorily. There was only one hitch:\n twenty-three limbs had been designed, and all twenty-three had been\n dismal flops. That's when the boss called me in.\n\n\n There's no mystery about the failures. Not to me, anyhow. Cybernetics\n is simply the science of building machines that will duplicate and\n improve on the organs and functions of the animal, based on what we\n know about the systems of communication and control in the animal. All\n right. But in any particular cybernetics project, everything depends\n on just how\nmany\nof the functions you want to duplicate, just how\nmuch\nof the total organ you want to replace.\n\n\n That's why the robot-brain boys can get such quick and spectacular\n results, have their pictures in the papers all the time, and become\n the real glamor boys of the profession. They're not asked to duplicate\n the human brain in its\nentirety\n—all they have to do is isolate and\n imitate one particular function of the brain, whether it's a simple\n operation in mathematics or a certain type of elementary logic.\n\n\n The robot brain called the Eniac, for example, is exactly what its\n name implies—an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, and\n it just has to be able to integrate and compute figures faster and\n more accurately than the human brain can. It doesn't have to have\n daydreams and nightmares, make wisecracks, suffer from anxiety, and\n all that. What's more, it doesn't even have to\nlook\nlike a brain or\n fit into the tiny space occupied by a real brain. It can be housed\n in a six-story building and look like an overgrown typewriter or an\n automobile dashboard or even a pogo stick. All it has to do is tell you\n that two times two equals four, and tell you fast.\n\n\n When you're told to build an artificial leg that'll take the place\n of a real one, the headaches begin. Your machine must not only\nlook\nlike its living model, it must\nalso\nbalance and support, walk, run,\n hop, skip, jump, etc., etc.\nAlso\n, it must fit into the same space.\nAlso\n, it must feel everything a real leg feels—touch, heat, cold,\n pain, moisture, kinesthetic sensations—\nas well as\nexecute all the\n brain-directed movements that a real leg can.\n\n\n So you're not duplicating this or that function; you're reconstructing\n the organ in its totality, or trying to. Your pro must have a full set\n of sensory-motor communication systems, plus machines to carry out\n orders, which is impossible enough to begin with.\n\n\n But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only\nequal\nthe\n real thing, it must be\nsuperior\n! That means creating a synthetic\n neuro-muscular system that actually\nimproves\non the nerves and\n muscles Nature created in the original!\n\n\n When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last\n week—it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot\n bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser\n said something that made an impression on me.\n\"They don't want much from us,\" he said sarcastically. \"They just want\n us to be God.\"\n\n\n I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.\n\n\n Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.\n\n\n \"As I see it,\" I said, \"there are two sides to the problem, the\n kinesthetic and the neural. We're making definite progress on the K\n side—I've worked out a new solenoid system, with some miniature motors\n tied in, and I think it'll give us a leg that\nmoves\ndamned well. I\n don't know about the N side, though. It's pretty tough figuring out\n how to hook the thing up electrically with the central nervous system\n so that the brain can control it. Some sort of compromise system of\n operation, along mechanical rather than neural lines, would be a lot\n simpler.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" the boss said with a smile, \"that it's stumping you.\"\n\n\n I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"\n\n\n \"Do you know him?\" the boss said. \"Good man. One of the best\n brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere.\"\n\n\n I explained that Len had gotten his degree at M.I.T. the year before I\n did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the\n Remington-Rand ballistics computer.\n\n\n \"He did indeed,\" the boss said, \"but that's not the half of it. After\n that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a\n matter of fact, that's why he's here.\"\n\n\n I said I hadn't heard about the chess player.\n\n\n \"As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington\n put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you\n won't hear any more about it from me.\"\n\n\n I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself.\n If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain\n capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to\n something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not\n having guessed it before.\n\n\n Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to\n happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess\n player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain\n that's useful in military strategy.\nThat's\nwhat Len Ellsom's in the\n middle of.\n\n\n \"Really brilliant mind,\" the boss said after we'd sawed for a while.\n \"Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't\n that your impression?\"\n\n\n \"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.\n\n\n \"If we're pals,\" he said, \"come on and have a beer with me.\"\n\n\n There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we\n drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as\n we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them\n in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong\n records.\n\n\n \"Sorry, kid,\" he said. \"I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but\n can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy\n ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on\n this side of the tracks.\" Len has always been very snobbish about my\n interest in folk music.\n\n\n I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.\n\n\n \"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.\n\n\n \"It is\nnot\nsomething personal,\" he said, mimicking me. \"Guess I can\n tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years\n because I've been scared for three years. Been scared for three years\n because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess.\"\n\n\n A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said.\n\n\n \"Didn't tell you the whole truth the other day,\" Len mumbled. \"I\ndid\nwork on the Remington-Rand computer, sure, but I didn't come to IFACS\n directly from that. In between I spent a couple years at the Bell\n Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon—or, rather, to begin with there was\n Norbert Wiener back at M.I.T.—it's complicated....\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" I said, \"are you sure you want to talk about it?\"\n\n\n \"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve,\" he said belligerently.\n \"Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at\n the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those\n two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for\n Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern,\n no, Von\nNeu\nmann and\nMor\nganstern. You remember, they did a\n mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker,\n tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their\n findings in a volume you certainly know,\nThe Theory of Games\n.\n\n\n \"Well, that got Wiener started. You may remember that when he founded\n the science of cybernetics, he announced that on the basis of the\n theory of games, it was feasible to design a robot computing machine\n that would play a better than average game of chess. Right after that,\n back in '49 or maybe it was '50, Claude Shannon of the Bell Labs said\n Wiener wasn't just talking, and to prove it he was going to\nbuild\nthe robot chess player. Which he proceeded withforth—forthwith—to\n do. Sometime in '53, I was taken off the Remington-Rand project and\n assigned to Bell to work with him.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to start back,\" I cut in. \"I've got a lot of work to\n do.\"\n\n\n \"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"\n\n\n What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt\n happy.\n\n\n \"Listen, Ollie,\" he said, \"for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy\n Scout for once in your life.\"\n\n\n If he was going to insult me—\n\n\n \"No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any\n five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied\n behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the\n champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given\n birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you\n find that terrifying?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all,\" I said. \"\nYou\nmade the machine, didn't you? Therefore,\n no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel\n proud to have devised a powerful new tool.\"\n\n\n \"Some tool,\" he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly\n understand what he was saying. \"The General Staff boys in Washington\n were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good\n reason—they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most\n complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form\n of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the\n globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets\n this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned\n involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble.\n\n\n \"In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind\n of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with\n everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up IFACS and handed us a\n top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player\n that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole\n campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war.\n\n\n \"We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports\n from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on\n the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic\n overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the\n units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty\n tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell\n you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago.\"\n\n\n So\nthat\nwas the secret of MS! The most extraordinary machine ever\n devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of\n excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider.\n\n\n \"Why all the jitters?\" I said. \"This could be the most wonderful tool\n ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether.\"\n\n\n Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space.\n Then he turned to me.\n\n\n \"Steve Lundy has a cute idea,\" he said. \"He was telling me about it\n this afternoon. He's a bum, you see, but he's got a damned good mind\n and he's done a lot of reading. Among other things, he's smart enough\n to see that once you've got your theory of games worked out, there's\n at least the logical possibility of converting your Eniac into what\n he calls a Strategy Integrator and Computer. And he's guessed, simply\n from the Pentagon's hush-hush policy about it, that that's what we're\n working on here at IFACS. So he holds forth on the subject of Emsiac,\n and I listen.\"\n\n\n \"What's his idea?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"He thinks Emsiac might eliminate war, too, but not in the way a\n Boy Scout might think. What he says is that all the industrialized\n nations must be working away like mad on Emsiac, just as they did on\n the atom bomb, so let's assume that before long all the big countries\n will have more or less equal MS machines. All right. A cold war gets\n under way between countries A and B, and pretty soon it reaches the\n showdown stage. Then both countries plug in their Emsiacs and let them\n calculate the date on which hostilities should begin. If the machines\n are equally efficient, they'll hit on the same date. If there's a\n slight discrepancy, the two countries can work out a compromise date by\n negotiation.\n\n\n \"The day arrives. A's Emsiac is set up in its capital, B's is set up\n in\nits\ncapital. In each capital the citizens gather around their\n strategy machine, the officials turn out in high hats and cut-aways,\n there are speeches, pageants, choral singing, mass dancing—the ritual\n can be worked out in advance. Then, at an agreed time, the crowds\n retreat to a safe distance and a committee of the top cyberneticists\n appears. They climb into planes, take off and—this is beautiful—drop\n all their atom bombs and H-bombs on the machines. It happens\n simultaneously in both countries, you see. That's the neat part of it.\n The occasion is called International Mushroom Day.\n\n\n \"Then the cyberneticists in both countries go back to their vacuum\n tubes to work on another Emsiac, and the nuclear physicists go back to\n their piles to build more atom bombs, and when they're ready they have\n another Mushroom Day. One Mushroom Day every few years, whenever the\n diplomatic-strategic situation calls for it, and nobody even fires a\n B-B gun. Scientific war. Isn't it wonderful?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "How does the main character think that people who work for MS can be differentiated from the average Princeton intellectual?", "question_unique_id": "51534_HOKMGFHS_1", "options": ["He has not been able to find a way to differentiate MS men from the others.", "He makes the connection that all the MS men wear sloppy dungarees, while the rest at least wear chinos.", "He notices that the MS men all have a gold edge on their Princeton lapel pins, while the rest have a silver edge.", "He thinks that the ones who dress most like Albert Einstein are the ones who work for MS."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does the main character's view of his chosen work differ from that of his assistant's?", "question_unique_id": "51534_HOKMGFHS_2", "options": ["The main character thinks that a man of science should see the principles of work in everything he does, including sawing up logs, while his assistant seems to think that scientists need a mental escape from the precise and intricate details of their work.", "The main character believes that scientists should simply do science and let the psychologists and politicians figure out the ethics, while the assistant believes that scientists should choose their projects so as not to tempt society with inventions that have a potentially evil side.", "The assistant tends to view scientific problems from the view of the whole tree first, working down to individual tree rings and wood grains, while the main character immerses himself in the intricate details and only occasionally steps back to consider the whole picture.", "The main character wishes he had chosen a different profession, one that would totally occupy his mind, like neurosurgery, while the assistant, who also wishes he had chosen a different career, would have liked to be a cabinetmaker, with the satisfaction of seeing his work in finished, concrete objects."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which part of the body does the main character think is easiest to re-create mechanically and why?", "question_unique_id": "51534_HOKMGFHS_3", "options": ["The legs are easiest because their neuro-motor systems are simpler to build than trying to imitate the many synapses in a brain.", "His boss thinks that legs are easiest, but the main character things that arms are easier because they don't have to provide \"structural pillars\" for the body, or provide equilibrium and balance.", "The brain is easiest because the functions it has to reproduce are narrower than the requirements that must be met by other body parts.", "An artificial ear is easiest because the physics underlying the detection of sound waves, the conversion of those waves to electrical impulses is already well understood, just building off the gramophone."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the main character decide that Kujack should have permanent metal and plastic sockets affixed to his leg stumps?", "question_unique_id": "51534_HOKMGFHS_4", "options": ["His boss made this decision because it looked like the main character was ignoring the discomfort of the test subject, and that could have been reported as an ethics violation.", "He made this decision so that each new experimental limb could be snapped into place whenever it was ready to try out, resulting in gains of efficiency for the workers, and more comfort for the patient.", "The neuro team made this decision before the main character took over the Pro lab to make it faster for the scientists and less painful for the patient to try out new revisions of prostheses.", "He made this decision because he feared that Kujack, who appeared malicious and somewhat sneering, though he said little, would walk away from the project otherwise."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is the boss's response to the main character's problems with creating a functioning artificial leg particularly tasteless?", "question_unique_id": "51534_HOKMGFHS_5", "options": ["What he should have said was that the Pro team should try going out on a limb.", "The boss implies that the main character is just dumb and can't figure out the problem.", "The boss displays no compassion for how hard the main character and his team have been working to solve the problems.", "The boss makes a pun with the double meaning of \"can't figure something out\" and \"the end of an amputated limb.\""], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Where did Ellsom and the main character go to college for their Bachelors degrees?", "question_unique_id": "51534_HOKMGFHS_6", "options": ["Massachusetts Institute of Technology", "Princeton", "Cal Tech", "New York State University"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Ellsom say caused him to become an alcoholic?", "question_unique_id": "51534_HOKMGFHS_7", "options": ["Ellsom confessed that he had always been a little wild, and with drinking, one thing led to another and he just could not stop.", "Watching an artificial intelligence machine of his own creation best the human brain by beating a world champion at chess.", "His inability to create an artificial intelligence machine that could meet the longstanding goal of beating a competent human chess player.", "Marilyn, the woman he had stolen from the main character some years ago, had left him for another man."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Ellsom summarize the way an artificial intelligence machine could be used to conduct military operations?", "question_unique_id": "51534_HOKMGFHS_8", "options": ["The computers would eliminate war by having each side's machines calculate the most equitable resolution to the conflict. The humans would agree beforehand to accept the computers' decisions as final and implement them.", "It would be like a game of chess between countries, and the machines would predict every military move, including when the war should start. The countries engaged in the conflict would agree on the date, and then each blow the other's computers up with nuclear bombs simultaneously.", "Each side's computers would predict every move in the military campaign, and as with a game of chess, each side in the war would move their pieces on a map of the world in response to the predictions. The side predicted to win would be declared the winner, eliminating actual, physical war.", "The computers would be used to direct remote operations, like bombs dropped on high-value targets from pilotless airplanes."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/5/3/51534//51534-h//51534-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51075", "set_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "A Stone and a Spear", "year": 1954, "author": "Jones, Raymond F.", "topic": "PS; Scientists -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Weapons -- Fiction", "article": "A Stone and a Spear\nBY RAYMOND F. JONES\n\n\n Illustrated by JOHN BUNCH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction December 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGiven: The future is probabilities merging into one certainty.\n\n Proposition: Can the probabilities be made improbables\n\n so that the certainty becomes impossible?\nFrom Frederick to Baltimore, the rolling Maryland countryside lay under\n a fresh blanket of green. Wholly unaware of the summer glory, Dr.\n Curtis Johnson drove swiftly on the undulating highway, stirring clouds\n of dust and dried grasses.\n\n\n Beside him, his wife, Louise, held her blowing hair away from her face\n and laughed into the warm air. \"Dr. Dell isn't going to run away.\n Besides, you said we could call this a weekend vacation as well as a\n business trip.\"\n\n\n Curt glanced at the speedometer and eased the pressure on the pedal. He\n grinned. \"Wool-gathering again.\"\n\n\n \"What about?\"\n\n\n \"I was just wondering who said it first—one of the fellows at Detrick,\n or that lieutenant at Bikini, or—\"\n\n\n \"Said\nwhat\n? What are you talking about?\"\n\n\n \"That crack about the weapons after the next war. He—whoever it\n was—said there may be some doubt about what the weapons of the next\n war will be like, but there is absolutely no doubt about the weapons of\n World War IV. It will be fought with stones and spears. I guess any one\n of us could have said it.\"\n\n\n Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"\n\n\n \"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.\n\n\n \"Nobody claims to have figured him out. They laugh a little at him now.\n They eat his gifts willingly enough, but consider him slightly off his\n rocker. He still has all his biological talents, though. I've never\n seen or tasted vegetables like the ones he grows.\"\n\n\n \"And the brass at Detrick doesn't think he's gone soft in the head,\n either,\" she added much too innocently. \"So they ordered you to take\n advantage of his invitation and try to persuade him to come back.\"\n\n\n Curt turned his head so sharply that Louise laughed.\n\n\n \"No, I didn't read any secret, hush-hush papers,\" she said. \"But it's\n pretty obvious, isn't it, the way you rushed right over to General\n Hansen after you got the invitation?\"\n\n\n \"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.\n\n\n His sign was visible for a half mile:\nYOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT\n\n Eat the Best\n\n EAT DELL'S VEGETABLES\n\n\n \"Dr. Hamon Dell, world's foremost biochemist—and truck farmer,\" Curt\n muttered as he swung the car off the highway.\n\n\n Louise stepped out when the tires ceased crunching on the gravel lane.\n She scanned the fields and old woods beyond the ancient but preserved\n farmhouse. \"It's so unearthly.\"\n\n\n Curt followed. The song of birds, which had been so noticeable before,\n seemed strangely muted. The land itself was an alien, faintly greenish\n hue, a color repulsive to more than just the eyes.\n\n\n \"It must be something in this particular soil,\" said Curt, \"something\n that gives it that color and produces such wonderful crops. I'll have\n to remember to ask Dell about it.\"\n\n\n \"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"\n\n\n From somewhere behind the house came the sound of a truck engine. Curt\n took Louise's arm and led her around the trim, graveled path.\n\n\n The old farmhouse had been very carefully renovated. Everywhere was\n evidence of exquisite care, yet the cumulative atmosphere remained\n uninviting, almost oppressive. Curt told himself it was the utter\n silence, made even more tense by the lonely chugging of the engine in\n back, and the incredible harsh color of the soil beneath their feet.\nRounding the corner, they came in sight of a massive tank truck. From\n it a hose led to an underground storage tank and pulsed slowly under\n the force of the liquid gushing through it. No one was in sight.\n\n\n \"What could that be for?\" asked Louise.\n\n\n \"You've got me. Could be gasoline, but Dell hasn't any reason for\n storing that much here.\"\n\n\n They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended\n the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross\n section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported\n the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight\n distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a\n depth of an inch or more.\n\n\n \"They must haul liquid lead in that thing,\" said Curt.\n\n\n \"It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up.\" Louise glanced out\n over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust\n plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other\n vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between\n them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered\n the farm from the rear.\n\n\n A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from\n around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure.\n\n\n \"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that. It brings liquid fertilizer to pump into my irrigation\n water, that's all. No mystery. Let's go on to the house. After you're\n settled we can catch up on everything and I'll tell you about the\n things I'm doing here.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the man we saw?\" asked Curt. \"He looks as if his health is\n pretty precarious.\"\n\n\n \"That's Brown. He came with the place—farmed it for years for my uncle\n before I inherited it. He could grow a garden on a granite slab. In\n spite of appearances, he's well enough physically.\"\n\n\n \"How has your own health been? You have—changed—since you were at\n Detrick.\"\n\n\n Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"\n\n\n \"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dell, it's not as simple as that.\" Curt raised a hand and let it\n fall wearily. They had been over this so many times before. \"Weapon\n designers are no more responsible than any other agents of society.\n It's pure neurosis to absorb the whole guilt of wars yet unfought\n merely because you happened to have developed a potential weapon.\"\n\n\n Dell touched the massive dome of his skull. \"Here within this brain of\n mine has been conceived a thing which will probably destroy a billion\n human lives in the coming years. D. triconus toxin in a suitable\n aerosol requires only a countable number of molecules in the lungs of\n a man to kill him. My brain and mine alone is responsible for that\n vicious, murderous discovery.\"\n\n\n \"Egotism! Any scientist's work is built upon the pyramid of past\n knowledge.\"\n\"The weapon I have described exists. If I had not created it, it would\n not exist. It is as simple as that. No one shares my guilt and my\n responsibility. And what more do they want of me now? What greater\n dream of mass slaughter and destruction have they dreamed?\"\n\n\n \"They want you,\" said Curt quietly, \"because they believe we are not\n the only ones possessing the toxin. They need you to come back and help\n find the antitoxin for D. triconus.\"\n\n\n Dell shook his head. \"That's a blind hope. The action of D. triconus is\n like a match set to a powder train. The instant its molecules contact\n protoplasm, they start a chain reaction that rips apart the cell\n structure. It spreads like fire from one cell to the next, and nothing\n can stop it once it's started operating within a given organism.\"\n\n\n \"But doesn't this sense of guilt—unwarranted as it is—make you\nwant\nto find an antitoxin?\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I succeeded? I would have canceled the weapon of an enemy.\n The military would know he could nullify ours in time. Then they would\n command me to work out still another toxin. It's a vicious and insane\n circle, which must be broken somewhere. The purpose of the entire\n remainder of my life is to break it.\"\n\n\n \"When you are fighting for your life and the enemy already has his\n hands about your throat,\" Curt argued, \"you reach for the biggest rock\n you can get your hands on and beat his brains in. You don't try to\n persuade him that killing is unethical.\"\n\n\n For an instant it seemed to Curt that a flicker of humor touched the\n corners of Dell's mouth. Then the lines tightened down again.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"\n\n\n \"You might say that we would be in the rock business,\" replied Dell.\n \"Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about\n another's throat, but it\nshould\nbe. Those who want power and\n domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a\n long time since they had to.\n\"Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight\n their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains.\n We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was\n honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and\n because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world\n because science was a universal language.\n\n\n \"What a horrible joke that turned out to be! Today we are the terror of\n the world. The war-makers built us fine laboratories, shining palaces,\n and granted every whim—for a price. They took us up to the hills and\n showed us the whole world and we sold our souls for it.\n\n\n \"Look what happened after the last war. Invading armies carried off\n prize Nazi brains like so much loot, set the scientists up in big new\n laboratories, and these new mercenaries keep right on pouring out\n knowledge for other kings and emperors.\n\n\n \"Their loyalty is only to their science. But they can't experiment for\n knowledge any more, only weapons and counter-weapons. You'll say I'm\n anti-war, even, perhaps, anti-American or pro-Russian. I am not against\n just wars, but I am against unjust slaughter. And I love America too\n much to let her destroy herself along with the enemy.\"\n\n\n \"Then what are we to do?\" Curt demanded fiercely. \"What are we to do\n while enemy scientists prepare these same weapons to exterminate\nus\n?\n Sure, it's one hell of a mess. Science is already dead. The kind you\n talk about has been dead for twenty years. All our fine ideals are\n worthless until the politicians find a solution to their quarrels.\"\n\n\n \"Politicians? Since when did men of science have to wait upon\n politicians for solutions of human problems?\" Dell passed a hand over\n his brow, and suddenly his face contorted in pain.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Curt exclaimed, rising.\n\n\n \"Nothing—nothing, my boy. Some minor trouble I've had lately. It will\n pass in a moment.\"\n\n\n With effort, he went on. \"I wanted to say that already you have come\n to think of science being divided into armed camps by the artificial\n boundaries of the politicians. Has it been so long ago that it was\n not even in your lifetime, when scientists regarded themselves as one\n international brotherhood?\"\n\n\n \"I can't quarrel with your ideals,\" said Curt softly. \"But national\n boundary lines do, actually, divide the scientists of the world into\n armed camps.\"\n\"Your premises are still incorrect. They do not deliberately war on\n each other. It is only that they have blindly sold themselves as\n mercenaries. And they can be called upon to redeem themselves. They can\n break their unholy contracts.\"\n\n\n \"There would have to be simultaneous agreement among the scientists of\n all nations. And they are men, influenced by national ideals. They are\n not merely ivory-tower dabblers and searchers after truth.\"\n\n\n \"Do you remember me five years ago?\" Dell's face became more haggard,\n as if the memory shamed him. \"Do you remember when I told the atomic\n scientists to examine their guts instead of their consciences?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. You certainly\nhave\nchanged.\"\n\n\n \"And so can other men. There is a way. I need your help desperately,\n Curt—\"\n\n\n The face of the aging biochemist contorted again with unbearable pain.\n His forehead beaded with sweat as he clenched his skull between his\n vein-knotted hands.\n\n\n \"Dell! What is it?\"\n\n\n \"It will pass,\" Dr. Dell breathed through clenched teeth. \"I have some\n medicine—in my bedroom. I'm afraid I'll have to excuse myself tonight.\n There's so much more I have to say to you, but we'll continue our talk\n in the morning, Curt. I'm sorry—\"\n\n\n He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I hope it's not that!\"\nIt seemed to Curt that he had slept only minutes before he was roused\n by sounds in the night. He rolled over and switched on the light. His\n watch said two o'clock. Louise raised up in sharp alarm.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"I thought I heard something. There it is again!\"\n\n\n \"It sounds like someone in pain. It must be Dell!\"\n\n\n Curt leaped from the bed and wrestled into his bathrobe. As he hurried\n toward Dell's room, there was another deep groan that ended in a\n shuddering sob of unbearable agony.\n\n\n He burst into the scientist's room and switched on the light. Dell\n looked up, eyes glazed with pain.\n\n\n \"Dr. Dell!\"\n\n\n \"Curt—I thought I had time left, but this is as far as I can go—Just\n remember all I said tonight. Don't forget a word of it.\" He sat up\n rigidly, hardly breathing in the effort of control. \"The responsibility\n for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the doors of the\n scientist mercenaries. Don't allow it, Curt. Get them to abandon the\n laboratories of the warriors. Get them to reclaim their honor—\"\n\n\n He fell back upon the pillow, his face white with pain and shining with\n sweat. \"Brown—see Brown. He can tell you the—the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go for a doctor,\" said Curt. \"Who have you had? Louise will stay\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't bring a doctor. There's no escaping this. I've known it for\n months. Wait here with me, Curt. I'll be gone soon.\"\n\n\n Curt stared with pity at the great scientist whose mind had so\n disintegrated. \"You need a doctor. I'll call a hospital, Johns Hopkins,\n if you want.\"\n\n\n \"Wait, maybe you're right. I have no phone here. Get Dr. Wilson—the\n Judge Building, Towson—find his home address in a phone book.\"\n\n\n \"Fine. I'll only be a little while.\"\n\n\n He stepped to the door.\n\n\n \"Curt! Take the lane down to the new road—behind the farm. Quicker—it\n cuts off a mile or so—go down through the orchard—\"\n\n\n \"All right. Take it easy now. I'll be right back.\"\n\n\n Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.\n\n\n He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas\n station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned\n himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment he glimpsed a\n spark of light far ahead.\n\n\n Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at\n the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he\n got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But\n there should be a telephone, at least.\n\n\n He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within.\n\n\n The door swung wide.\n\n\n \"I wonder if I could use your—\" Curt began. He gasped. \"Brown! Dell's\n dying—we've got to get a doctor for him—\"\n\n\n As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"\n\n\n Curt moved slowly forward. Brown closed the door behind him and\n motioned toward a closed door at the other end of a short hall. They\n opened it and stepped into a dimly lighted room.\nCurt's eyes slowly adjusted and he saw what seemed to be a laboratory.\n It was so packed with equipment that there was scarcely room for the\n group of twelve or fifteen men jammed closely about some object with\n their backs to Curt and Brown.\nBrown shambled forward like an agitated skeleton, breaking the circle.\n Then Curt saw that the object of the men's attention was a large\n cathode ray screen occupied by a single green line. There was a pip on\n it rising sharply near one side of the two-foot tube. The pip moved\n almost imperceptibly toward a vertical red marker over the face of the\n screen. The men stared as if hypnotized by it.\nThe newcomers' arrival, however, disturbed their attention. One man\n turned with an irritable growl. \"Brown, for heaven's sake—\"\n\n\n He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught\n sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.\n\n\n \"Who is this? What's he doing here?\"\n\n\n The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp\n collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen\n calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.\n\n\n \"This is Curtis Johnson,\" said Brown. \"He got lost looking for a doctor\n for Dell.\"\n\n\n A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. \"Your coming\n is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about\n it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.\"\n\n\n The man indicated a chair.\n\n\n \"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—\n\n\n \"I'm not staying,\" Curt insisted. \"You can't prevent me from helping\n Dell without assuming responsibility for his death. I demand you let me\n call.\"\n\n\n \"You're not going to call,\" said Sark wearily. \"And we assumed\n responsibility for Dell's death long ago. Sit down!\"\n\n\n Slowly Curt sank down upon the chair beside the stranger. There was\n nothing else to do. He was powerless against Brown's gun. But he'd\n bring them to justice somehow, he swore.\n\n\n He didn't understand the meaning of the slowly moving pattern on the\n 'scope face, yet, as his eyes followed that pip, he sensed tension in\n the watching men that seemed sinister, almost murderous. How?\n\n\n What did the inexorably advancing pip signify?\nNo one spoke. The room was stifling hot and the breathing of the circle\n of men was a dull, rattling sound in Curt's ears.\n\n\n Quickly then, gathering sudden momentum, the pip accelerated. The\n circle of men grew taut.\n\n\n The pip crossed the red line—and vanished.\n\n\n Only the smooth green trace remained, motionless and without meaning.\n\n\n With hesitant shuffling of feet, the circle expanded. The men glanced\n uncertainly at one another.\n\n\n One said, \"Well, that's the end of Dell. We'll soon know now if we're\n on the right track, or if we've botched it. Carlson will call when he's\n computed it.\"\n\n\n \"The end of Dell?\" Curt repeated slowly, as if trying to convince\n himself of what he knew had happened. \"The pip on the screen—that\n showed his life leaving him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Sark. \"He knew he had to go. And there are perhaps hundreds\n more like him. But Dell couldn't have told you of that—\"\n\n\n \"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"\n\n\n \"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.\n\n\n \"An American city,\" said Sark, hurrying his words now. \"Any city. They\n are all alike. Ruin. Death. This one died thirty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Curt complained, bewildered. \"Thirty years—\"\n\n\n \"At another point in the Time Continuum,\" said Sark. \"The future. Your\n future, you understand. Or, rather,\nour\npresent, the one you created\n for us.\"\n\n\n Curt recoiled at the sudden venom in Sark's voice. \"The\nfuture\n?\" That\n was what they had in common with Dell—psychosis, systematic delusions.\n He had suspected danger before; now it was imminent and terrifying.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you are one of those who regard your accomplishments with\n pride,\" Sark went on savagely, ignoring or unaware of Curt's fear and\n horror. \"That the hydrogen bombs smashed the cities, and the aerosols\n destroyed the remnants of humanity seems insignificant to you beside\n the high technical achievement these things represent.\"\n\n\n Curt's throat was dry with panic. Irrelevantly, he recalled the\n pain-fired eyes of Dell and the dying scientist's words: \"The\n responsibility for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the\n doors of the scientist mercenaries—\"\n\n\n \"Some of us\ndid\nmanage to survive,\" said Sark, glaring at the scene\n of gaunt rubble. Curt could see the veins pounding beneath the thin\n flesh of his forehead. \"We lived for twenty years with the dream of\n rebuilding a world, the same dream that has followed all wars. But at\n last we knew that the dream was truly vain this time. We survivors\n lived in hermetically sealed caverns, trying to exist and recover our\n lost science and technology.\n\n\n \"We could not emerge into the Earth's atmosphere. Its pollution with\n virulent aerosols would persist for another hundred years. We could\n not bear a new race out of these famished and rickety bodies of ours.\n Unless Man was to vanish completely from the face of the Earth, we had\n only a single hope. That hope was to prevent the destruction from ever\n occurring!\"\n\n\n Sark's eyes were burning now. \"Do you understand what that means? We\n had to go\nback\n, not forward. We had to arm to fight a new war, a war\n to prevent the final war that destroyed Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"Back? How could you go back?\" Curt hesitated, grasping now the full\n insanity of the scene about him. \"How have you\ncome\nback?\" He waited\n tautly for the answer. It would be gibberish, of course, like all the\n mad conversation before it.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is one of the problems with chemical warfare in Dell's opinion?", "question_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V_1", "options": ["It creates vast toxic wastelands where nothing can grow.", "It is a tool of tyranny, available only to the rich and powerful who can then keep their power over the little guy.", "It causes genetic mutations that will affect the people of Earth for generations to come.", "It removes the direct \"bash your enemy in the head with the biggest rock you can find\" immediacy of being confronted with the results of your own violence."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why do Brown and his confederates look so haggard and unhealthy?", "question_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V_2", "options": ["Smoking was a very common activity, especially among men, at the time of the story. Their lungs were already vulnerable, and working around both military grade and agricultural chemicals has made it worse.", "There was neither a vaccine nor an effective treatment for tuberculosis at the time of this story, and these men had been sent to the country to isolate them, and to wait while they recovered or died.", "The men were living as fugitives, and it was hard for them to get enough food or medical care, which took a toll on their healht over time.", "They come from a future when a massive chemical weapons attack was unleashed. They are the debilitated survivors."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the goal of the travelers from the future?", "question_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V_3", "options": ["They were studying the pure science of time travel.", "To take revenge on the inventor of the chemical toxin that ruined their lives and their world.", "To invent an antidote to the chemical toxin that they could take back to the future before the chemical attack so that everyone could be saved.", "To prevent the war that unleashed the chemical holocaust on them."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Dr. Dell send packages of choice fruits and vegetables to former colleages at Camp Detrick and universities and research centers across the country?", "question_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V_4", "options": ["Dell is a truck farmer now, and he is proud of the healthy produce he grows, and wants to advertise his skill. Better living through chemistry!", "Dell has poisoned the fruits and vegetables in a subtle way, and is trying to kill off scientists.", "Dell's truck farm has a mail order component, and he is trying to drum up business among people he knows, at their far-flung locations.", "Dell is part of the effort to prevent the war that leads to the chemical devastation of Earth. To prevent it, he needs to try to reduce the likelihood that the next toxin will be invented in the future by recruiting more scientists to his point of view. Gifts help."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Johnson's purpose in visiting Dell's truck farm?", "question_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V_5", "options": [" To get a good look at the techniques Dell uses to grow such lush and appealing produce.", "He is considering quitting Camp Detrick himself, and he wants to understand what life might be like if he does that.", "To attempt to persuade him return to his career as a chemical weapons developer.", "To renew the friendship they had when they both worked at Camp Detrick."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who is the farmhand that Curt and Louise first meet when they arrive at Dell's farm?", "question_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V_6", "options": ["He is Mr. Brown, a worker who has served generations of Dells on this farm.", "He is a vagrant that Dell has kindly taken in, giving him food for work. ", "He is Mr. Brown, one of the people who returned from the future. ", "He's a former crab fisherman in Cheseapeake Bay, working on farms now that the Bay is fished out."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the real purpose of the ominously heavy truck attached by a hose to an underground tank that Curt and Louise notice?", "question_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V_7", "options": ["Curt and Louis observe a dead rabbit in the vicinity of a small leak near the hose and realize that Dell is working on bioweapons secretly at the truck farm.", "According to the farmhand, Brown, it is a special chemical of Dell's devising that gives the fields their greenish cast and makes them grow so well.", "The heavy liquid being pumped is the coolant loop for the time machine that transported survivors from the future back to Dell's farm.", "According to Dell, it is just liquid fertilizer being transferred from underground tank to truck, to then fertilize the fields. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the role of Curt's wife in this story?", "question_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V_8", "options": ["Her insight helps Curt realize that war is evil.", "She doesn't really have a role. She is just a decoration.", "She makes the key observation that Dr Dell's and Mr. Brown's afflictions must be related, a clue that they both came from the future.", "She is there as eye candy for Dr. Dell, who was a noted womanizer in his Camp Detrick  days."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Does Dr. Dell want to be saved?", "question_unique_id": "51075_8YQWJ65V_9", "options": ["Yes. Like so many suffering from chronic pain, there are times he wants to die, but with a little support, he finds the courage to get help and go on.", "Yes. He realizes that he needs help, and he sends Curt to bring Dr. Wilson from Towson.", "No. He purposely sends Curt the wrong direction because he knows he needs to die to prevent a future war.", "No. He has been in pain for so long now that he just wants an end to it all."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/0/7/51075//51075-h//51075-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50571", "set_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Green Odyssey", "year": 1964, "author": "Farmer, Philip José", "topic": "Adventure stories; PS; Science fiction", "article": "THE GREEN ODYSSEY\nby Philip José Farmer\n\n\n Make friends fast.\n\n —\nHandbook For The Shipwrecked\nBallantine Books\n\n New York\n\n\n Copyright 1957, by\n\n Philip José Farmer\n\n\n Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 57-10603\n\n Printed in the United States of America\n\n\n Ballantine Books, Inc.\n\n 101 Fifth Avenue,\n\n New York 3, N. Y.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any\n\n evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\n\n This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.\n\n\n So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with\n a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to\n the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But\n he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the\n \"traveling islands,\" the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna\n peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan\n with unnerving malevolence.\n\n\n And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.\n\n\n Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.\n\n\n That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.\n\n\n The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.\n\n\n Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.\n\n\n Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.\n\n\n \"Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air?\n These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that\n means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy:\nA demon will come, claiming\n to be an angel\n. No doubt about these two! Just to show you their\n subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now,\n there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most\n clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in.\"\n\n\n Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her\n red-painted mouth open and wet. \"Oh, has he burned them already? What a\n shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while.\"\n\n\n Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.\n\n\n Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.\n\n\n Miran cleared his throat, adjusted his violet turban and yellow robes,\n pulled gently at the large gold ring that hung from his nose and said,\n \"It took me a month to get back from Estorya, and that is very good\n time indeed, but then I am noted for my good luck, though I prefer to\n call it skill plus the favor given by the gods to the truly devout.\n I do not boast, O gods, but merely give you tribute because you have\n smiled upon my ventures and have found pleasing the scent of my many\n sacrifices in your nostrils!\"\n\n\n Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he\n felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe\n tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would\n divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her\n clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would\n be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that\n the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast.\n If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically\n have had uncontested control.\n\n\n \"These two demons were very tall, like your slave Green, here,\" said\n Miran, \"and they could not speak a word of Estoryan. Or at least they\n claimed they couldn't. When King Raussmig's soldiers tried to capture\n them they brought from the folds of their strange clothes two pistols\n that only had to be pointed to send silent and awesome and sure death.\n Everywhere men dropped dead. Panic overtook many, but there were brave\n soldiers who kept on charging, and eventually the magical instruments\n became exhausted. The demons were overpowered and put into the Tower\n of Grass Cats from which no man or demon has yet escaped. And there\n they will be until the Festival of the Sun's Eye. Then they will be\n burnt....\"\n\n\n From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.\n\n\n There was a big difference between reading about such people and\n actually living among them. A history or a romantic novel could\n describe how unwashed and diseased and formula-bound primitives were,\n but only the too-too substantial stench and filth could make your gorge\n rise.\n\n\n Even as he stood there Zuni's powerful perfume rose and clung in heavy\n festoons about him and slithered down his nostrils. It was a rare and\n expensive perfume, brought back by Miran from his voyages and given to\n her as a token of the merchant's esteem. Used in small quantities it\n would have been quite effective to express feminine daintiness and to\n hint at delicate passion. But no, Zuni poured it like water over her,\n hoping to cover up the stale odor left by\nnot\ntaking a bath more than\n once a month.\n\n\n She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"\n\n\n \"Diamonds, emeralds, rubies!\" cried Miran, kissing his hand and rolling\n his eye ecstatically. \"I tell you, the Estoryans are rich beyond our\n dreams! Jewels flow in their marketplaces like drops of water in a\n cataract! Ah, if only the Emperor could be induced to organize a great\n raiding fleet and storm its walls!\"\n\n\n \"He remembers too well what happened to his father's fleet when he\n tried it,\" growled the Duke. \"The storm that destroyed his thirty ships\n was undoubtedly raised by the priests of the Goddess Hooda. I still\n think that the expedition would have succeeded, however, if the late\n Emperor had not ignored the vision that came to him the night before\n they set sail. It was the great god Axoputqui, and he said....\"\n\n\n There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.\n\n\n But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2\nThe Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many\n times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet\n via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when\n escape was so near!\n\n\n So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.\n\n\n How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.\n\n\n Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"\n\n\n Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"\n\n\n Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.\n\n\n The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya\n were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea\n of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a\n freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to\n leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency\n shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and\n was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After\n wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up\n by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby\n garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect\n a reward. Taken to the capital city of Quotz, Green had almost been\n freed because there was no record of his being anybody's property. But\n his tallness, blondness and inability to speak the local language had\n convinced his captors that he must have wandered down from some far\n northern country. Therefore if he wasn't a slave he should be.\n\n\n Presto, changeo! He was. And he'd put in six months in a quarry and a\n year as a dock worker. Then the Duchess had chanced to see him on the\n streets as she rode by, and he'd been transferred to the castle.\n\n\n The streets were alive with the short, dark, stocky natives and the\n taller, lighter-complexioned slaves. The former wore their turbans of\n various colors, indicating their status and trade. The latter wore\n their three-cornered hats. Occasionally a priest in his high conical\n hat, hexagonal spectacles and goatee rode by. Wagons and rickshaws\n drawn by men or by big, powerful dogs went by. Merchants stood at the\n fronts of their shops and hawked their wares in loud voices. They sold\n cloth, grixtr nut, parchment, knives, swords, helmets, drugs, books—on\n magic, on religion, on travel—spices, perfumes, ink, rugs, highly\n sugared drinks, wine, beer, tonic, paintings, everything that went to\n make up their civilization. Butchers stood before open shops where\n dressed fowl, deer and dogs hung. Dealers in birds pointed out the\n virtues of their many-colored and multi-songed pets.\n\n\n For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.\n\n\n Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.\n\n\n He averted his eyes from the Pens and looked at the other side of\n the street, where the walls of the great warehouses towered. Workmen\n swarmed around them, and cranes, operated by gangs pushing wheels like\n a ship's capstan, raised or lowered big bundles. Here, he thought, was\n a business opportunity for him.\n\n\n Introduce the steam engine. It'd be the greatest thing that ever hit\n this planet. Wood-burning automobiles could replace the rickshaws.\n Cranes could be run by donkey-engines. The ships themselves could have\n their wheels powered by steam. Or perhaps, he thought, rails could be\n laid across the Xurdimur, and locomotives would make the ships obsolete.\n\n\n No, that wouldn't work. Iron rails cost too much. And the savages that\n roved over the grassy plains would tear them up and forge weapons from\n them.\n\n\n Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.\n\n\n \"ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,\n a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.\n\n\n The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.\n\n\n The captain of a ship had purchased her, but here again the law came\n to her rescue. He could not take her out of the country, and she again\n refused to leave. By now she had purchased several businesses—slaves\n were allowed to hold property and even have slaves of their own—and\n she knew that her two boys by the Duke would be valuable later on, when\n they'd go to live with him.\n\n\n The temple sculptor had used her as his model for his great marble\n statue of the goddess of Fertility. Well he might, for she was a\n magnificent creature, a tall woman with long, richly auburn hair, a\n flawless skin, large russet brown eyes, a mouth as red and ripe as a\n plum, breasts with which neither child nor lover could find fault, a\n waist amazingly slender considering the rest of her curved body and her\n fruitfulness. Her long legs would have looked good on an Earthwoman and\n were even more outstanding among a population of club-ankled females.\n\n\n There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.\n\n\n He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.\n\n\n Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you\n know he's an affectionate boy and worships you, and it's absurd to\n say that in your country grown men don't kiss boys that old. You're\n not in your country—what a strange, frigid, loveless race must live\n there—and even if you were you might overlook their customs to show\n some tenderness to the boy. Come on back to our house and I'll bring up\n some of that wonderful Chalousma wine that came in the other day out of\n the cellar——\"\n\n\n \"What was a ship doing in your cellar?\" he said, and he whooped with\n laughter. \"By all the gods, Amra, I know it's been two days since I've\n seen you, but don't try to crowd forty-eight hours' conversation into\n ten minutes, especially your kind of conversation. And quit scolding me\n in front of the children. You know it's bad for them. They might pick\n up your attitude of contempt for the head of the house.\"\n\n\n \"I? Contempt? Why, I worship the ground you walk on! I tell them\n continually what a fine man you are, though it's rather hard to\n convince them when you do show up and they see the truth. Still....\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "How did Green become a slave?", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_1", "options": ["He was made a slave because he was tall, blonde and could not speak the local tongue, and it was determined that if he wasn't a slave, he should be.", "On this planet, people who could not pay their debts were routinely enslaved, and this was his unfortunate circumstance.", "He was blending in with local townsfolk when the Duchess took a fancy to him and since it would be immoral to have an affair with a freeman, she made him a slave.", "He had fought as a soldier in the north, and when his army lost a critical battle, he was taken as a prisoner of war and brought south as a slave."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of Amra's six children had been fathered by Alan?", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_2", "options": ["He had fathered the second-to-last, but Amra's sexual appetites were enormous, and she took another lover for the last child while he was servicing the duchess.", "He was proud biological father to all six.", "Only the last one.", "The last two children were his."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Other than the mere fact of being a slave, what did Alan hate about living on this planet?", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_3", "options": ["He hated dogs and on this planet, dogs and slaves were the main beasts of burden, so he was constantly surrounded by them.", "It really grated on him that his wife was unfaithful to him.", "The inhabitants were smelly, superstitious, violent and dirty.", "He had very fair skin, unlike the inhabitants and the heat and aridity wreaked havoc on his skin. He was always uncomfortable."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does the duchess' reaction to news of the captured \"demons\" differ from that of the men around her?", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_4", "options": ["She insists that the Estoryans must follow the law, keeping the demons in prison for two years to see if their human forms convert back to their demon forms, while the men are ready to kill them immediately, preferably after torturing them.", "She is bored by the subject and makes eyes at Alan, and a beckoning motion with her finger, while the men discuss why the demons' captors hate Tropatians.", "She is entirely interested in what violence may have been done to them, while the merchant-captain and the priest give all appearances of being frightened.", "She is completely undone and faints, while the duke tosses back a goblet of wine and the merchant-captain makes the warding sign against evil."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Identify two twists on society in the story compared to society as the average reader knows it that are intended to draw attention to customs outside the world of the story.", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_5", "options": ["In the story, sexual freedom is absolute within the bounds of appearances, and priests have no power whatsoever.", "In the story, space ships and a pre-steam engine society are juxtaposed. The other important detail is that no one is interested in money in the story.", "In the story, women are in charge of government while men are ornaments, and large quantities of perfume are used to douse body odors.", "In the story, dark-skinned people enslave tall, white people with blond hair and free men and women wear rings in their noses, while slaves do not."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What benefits and perils did Green face, being the duchess' current favorite?", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_6", "options": ["By being the assistant majordomo and serving the duchess at table, he had power and wealth among slaves, but the duke was also attracted to him, and it was exhausting and humiliating to service both.", "Green had been salting away coins he stole from his mistress, the duchess so that he could try to escape but ironically, the visibility of his position gave him less chance to escape unnoticed.", "His position in the slave hierarchy offered him as much comfort as he could hope for, but exposed him to the danger of being shivved by another slave or put into a compromising position by the priest.", "He had the opportunity to be a house slave, which was easier physically and gave him the chance to have a better and more prosperous life than as a run of the mill slave, but he had to be ready to constantly please the duchess and he was exhausted trying to service both his wife and the duchess."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What plan did Green come up with for escaping slavery and hooking up with the \"demons\" and their spaceship?", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_7", "options": ["His escape capsule was still hidden in the wilderness where he landed. Now that he knew his way around, he decided it was time to sneak away and reactivate it and fly it to the location of the spaceship that had just landed with two other marooned spacemen.", "He finally decided that there was no alternative but to just leave and take his chances walking through the desert to Estorya.", "He decided to make the merchant-captain an offer that would appeal to his greed and get him to agree to take Green with his next caravan north.", "He was now confident enough of the duchess' affections that he decided to offer to go to Estorya to get some of her favorite perfume for her. While there, he would just disappear and find the spacemen."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happened to Green as everyone was getting up and leaving dinner?", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_8", "options": ["The court jester jumped up from below the table and grabbed his leg and pulled him off balance to make everyone laugh.", "Amra saw him walking in front of the duchess and could not contain her jealousy and shouted insults at him.", "The duchess' dog grabbed his leg and pulled him down and he had to pretend it was funny.", "The Eye of the Sun happened to shine on one of the buttons of his uniform and it left a smoking hole which startled him and he tripped and fell."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does the merchant-captain react to Green's proposal?", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_9", "options": ["The proposal ignites his greed, but he is cautious about listeners and proposes a later meeting.", "The merchant-captain realizes instantly that Green wants to escape. However, the merchant has had his eye on Amra for a long time, and helping Green escape might be a way to get her.", "He laughs in Green's face and tells him to go back to the duchess and thank his lucky stars he is a well-off slave.", "The merchant-captain immediately sees through the ruse and proposes a later meeting so that he can have the duke's guards ready to capture Green."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did Green idly dream about in his spare moments?", "question_unique_id": "50571_VO0FQMCX_10", "options": ["He dreamed about businesses he could start that involved technology not presently used on the planet, but the Duke always refused in favor of tradition.", "He dreamed night and day about getting back to Earth.", "He daydreamed about Amra's flawless skin, russet eyes, auburn hair and ripe, red mouth.", "He dreamed over and over - more of a nightmare, really - about his crash landing on the planet two years ago."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/5/7/50571//50571-h//50571-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50774", "set_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Contagion", "year": 1965, "author": "MacLean, Katherine", "topic": "Science fiction; PS; Diseases -- Fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction", "article": "CONTAGION\nBy KATHERINE MacLEAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMinos was such a lovely planet. Not a\n\n thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food,\n\n perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\nIt was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The\n forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a\n wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf\n shadows.\n\n\n The hunt party of the\nExplorer\nfiled along the narrow trail, guns\n ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries\n of strange birds.\n\n\n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.\n\n\n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n\n\n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n\n\n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n\n\n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to\n Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n\n\n \"English?\" gasped June.\n\n\n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to\n you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass\n twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\nJune looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the\n tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles\n of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already\n settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not\n on the map.\"\n\n\n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We\n have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n\n\n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name\n is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and\n George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n\n\n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n \"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos\n before.\"\n\n\n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June\n could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded\n steel.\n\n\n \"What—what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n\n\n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n\n\n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"\n\n\n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n\n\n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two\n years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead\n families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all\n related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way\n people can look.\"\nPlague.\n\"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n\n\n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting\n sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to\n do about it.\"\n\n\n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for\n some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n\n\n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"\n\n\n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n\n\n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n\n\n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n\n\n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n\n\n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n\n\n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n\n\n In the\nExplorer\n, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers,\n was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes\n so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused\n chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing\n could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to\n the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n\n\n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had\n been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human\n treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and\n interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding\n against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n\n\n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n\n\n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of\n allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\nJune stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped\n off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a\n wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n\n\n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n\n\n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he\n asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally\n get something to eat?\"\n\n\n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully,\n using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n\n\n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled\n chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go\n jump in the lake?\"\n\n\n \"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n\n\n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.\n\n\n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a\n fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half\n of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces,\n the sound of unfamiliar voices.\nThey climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich\n subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria\n was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship\n had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had\n the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound\n absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each\n table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n\n\n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June\n could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of\n conversation.\n\n\n \"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in.\n He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n\n\n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three\n heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in\n the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose\n tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four\n different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n\n\n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a\n table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are\n saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages,\n for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n\n\n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the\n shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n\n\n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n\n\n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.\n\n\n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n\n\n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n \"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n\n\n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You\n hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of\n those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n\"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n\n\n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different\n amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the\n carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until\n you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then\n you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n\n\n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n\n\n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—\"\nShe listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the\n explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to\n Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and\n hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells\n have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence,\n hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n\n\n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes.\n He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand\n generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien\n indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the\n cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n\n\n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution\n in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where\n they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he\n had taken them from.\"\n\n\n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n\n\n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the\n hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle\n with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before\n returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on\n the hour or run the risk of disease.\nReno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a\n mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their\n mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\"\n They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over\n to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n\n\n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n\n\n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all.\n Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia.\n Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some\n temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n\n\n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her\n field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with\n laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall,\n then abruptly lightened.\n\n\n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous\n Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man.\n It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon\n and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous\n vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero\n out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n\n\n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join\n them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual\n lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n\n\n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they\n passed he lightly touched her arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile,\n and knew that he had heard.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why are the people in the opening scene hunting and shooting animals?", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_1", "options": ["They are shooting specimens for the sake of scientific discovery, to classify their taxonomy and study them.", "The food stores on their space ship are critically low, and they must have food to have hope of surviving long enough to start a colony here.", "Terrans have hundreds of years of tradition of shooting animals for the pleasure and challenge of it, so these colonists also have those cultural habits.", "They are gathering specimens to test for pathogens on a planet that may have potential for starting a colony."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is one of the problems of space travel that colonists are very careful about these days?", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_2", "options": ["Colonists have learned not to assume that they can depend on their radios and other technology, because many planetary - star system interactions can interrupt processes that Terrans take for granted.", "Terrans no longer assume that all the members of their colony will be able to get along and cooperate over the long term, even if they can manage it during space travel. Therefore, they try to make their groups very homogeneous.", "Terran colonists on other worlds know that they cannot count on being able to interbreed with any humanoid species they encounter - and if they do, genetic monstrosities can result.", "The more like Earth a planet appears to be, the more likely it will harbor deadly diseases that Terrans can catch, and that they have no resistance to."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the humanoid that the hunting party encounters surprise them?", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_3", "options": ["It startles them by breaking into a dance that looks a lot like the way honeybees dance to let their hivemates know which way to go to the flowers with lots of pollen.", "It speaks English, looks absolutely human, sports a three-day growth of beard and is quite attractive to the one woman in the party.", "It startles them by not behaving aggressively after being shot at by them. Perhaps it does not recognize their weapons as a danger.", "The scientists are astonished at this evidence for parallel evolution - they are sure it is not actually a human because humans have never visited Minos before."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The ship's crew is worried that Pat may carry unfamiliar diseases, but what other contagion does he seem to possess?", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_4", "options": ["All of the people that Pat is familiar with look just like him, which results in a certain, natural distrust of anyone who looks different, and his arrival herals the beginning of mistrustful behavior among the colonists.", "Pat has an air of negativity that is catching. He grouses about everything, and soon everyone on the ship is also displaying signs of dissatisfaction about trivial matters.", "Pat has been genetically modified to be able to photosynthesize food directly from the light of Minos' sun. He tells the colonists that this modification, while not a disease, is contagious from person to person.", "He is a girl magnet. Every girl on the ship, including June, is either swooning over him or trying to resist swooning."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What might have been the outcome of the encounter with Pat if the hunting party had killed him?", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_5", "options": ["Since Pat was wearing a full body energy shield, they couldn't have hurt him no matter what they tried to do.", "It wouldn't matter a bit. After all, they could just pretend that they never saw him, and the Alexandrians had nothing to do with him being in the vicinity of the ship.", "Since they would have violated their oaths as doctors, the doctors might have taken off their space suits and exposed the colonists to the potential pathogens on the planet as compensation to the Alexandrians.", "Relations with the people of Alexandria might have gotten off to a very bad start, leading the Alexandrians to turn hostile to the colonists."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why do all the current residents of Alexandria look alike?", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_6", "options": ["One particular colonial family had natural immunity to the disease that killed the rest of the colonists, so over time, the group of familial traits that went with that appearance were concentrated in the population.", "The colonists mastered advanced gene technologies while trying to solve the problem of food supply, and they just all liked that red hair and coppery skin, so they all modified themselves to that appearance - it was just a fad at the time.", "One of the early rulers of the colony in Alexandria gained tyrannical power over the colonists. He then became mentally unbalanced and used his power to kill everyone in the town that didn't look like him.", "These colonists all came from one town in Ireland and they were all related to begin with, so it was natural that they all looked alike. With no new sources of genetic diversity, things just stayed that way."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Once they encountered Pat and got introduced and talked a little, what did the medical party think would happen on Minos?", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_7", "options": ["The medical party thought there would be no real problems, but the captain of the spaceship realized they would have to wipe out the present Alexandrians to be truly safe.", "The medical party was disappointed because the existence of the supposed \"melting sickness\" meant they could not colonize Minos.", "They assumed that there would be no problems with the colonists settling Minos alongside friendlies, once they finished concocting treatments for any foreign diseases.", "They assumed that the environment was safe, and they would be able to go back and report to the captain that everything was fine, and everyone could emerge from the spaceship without suits and get started building their new colony right away."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which hamsters lived? ", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_8", "options": ["All the hamsters that were injected with a trial vaccine against the melting sickness survived.", "The hamsters that lived were either controls or had Pat's blood injected but without any immune system suppressants", "All of the hamsters died, it just took a little longer for the ones that did not receive the immune system suppressant.", "The hamsters that lived were the controls, who received none of Pat's blood."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Pat eat so much during his first meal in the spaceship dining room?", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_9", "options": ["He wanted to prolong his social visit with the colonists, and the only way to do that seemed to be to just keep eating.", "Alexandria lived under very primitive conditions. It was a struggle to get food, and people ate anytime food was presented to them.", "He had been trying to bulk up because Alexandrian girls didn't like scrawny men.", "He was eating simply for enjoyment of the taste."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What detail about life as a colonist on Minos requires a permanent commitment?", "question_unique_id": "50774_EBSQLQT3_10", "options": ["Once they decide to stay, the colonists will disassemble the spaceship for materials to build land transport vehicles and factories....and they will no longer have a way off the planet.", "Being exposed to the melting sickness and other Minos pathogens makes life there a permanent commitment. They would not be allowed to land elsewhere because of the potential for contagion.", "Minos is smaller than Earth, and has much less gravity. Once the people decide to stay on Minos, their bones and muscles will weaken, and they will not be able to leave the planet without severe medical consequencs.", "None of the food plants or animals on Minos are compatible with the human digestive system, many of them being mirror image compounds of the earth version. A genetic treatment permanently changes digestive system to be able to use the foodstuffs on Minos. "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/7/7/50774//50774-h//50774-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50566", "set_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Falcons of Narabedla", "year": 1964, "author": "Bradley, Marion Zimmer", "topic": "Science fiction; PS", "article": "Somewhere on the Time Ellipse Mike Kenscott became Adric;\n\n and the only way to return to his own identity was to find\n\n the Keep of the Dreamer, and loose the terrible\nFALCONS of NARABEDLA\nBy Marion Zimmer Bradley\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds\n\n May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nContents\nCHAPTER ONE\n\n Voltage—from Nowhere!\nSomewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream.\n\n\n I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. \"There's your\n eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday.\" I started to reel\n in my line, knowing what my brother's next move would be. \"Get the\n camera, and we'll try for a picture.\"\n\n\n We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird\n of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy\n was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest,\n his eyes glued in the image-finder. \"Golly—\" he whispered, almost\n prayerfully, \"six foot wing spread—maybe more—\"\n\n\n The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to\n leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The\n eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the\n cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its\n beak—\n\n\n A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"\n\n\n I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"\n\n\n I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.\n\n\n I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I\n started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.\n\n\n \"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"\n\n\n \"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"\n\n\n Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.\n\n\n It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.\n\n\n It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas.\n\n\n I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it\n too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time\n we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his\n log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.\n\n\n \"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the\n vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—\" his jaw\n grew stubborn, \"the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to\n have something for the record.\"\n\n\n I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated\n me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division\n and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up\n those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook\n while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they\n could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of\n that.\n\n\n The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.\n\n\n I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions\n together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"\n\n\n \"Try another station;\" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the\n buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel\n light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. \"And\n reception was perfect at noon,\" I told him, \"You were listening to the\n news.\" I took my hand away again. \"I don't want to blow the thing up.\"\n\n\n Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light\n glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the\n room ... \"now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth\n or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...\" the noise of mixed\n applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering\n through the rooms of the cabin.\n\n\n \"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!\"\n\n\n My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.\n\n\n The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"\n\n\n Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.\n\n\n I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.\n\n\n \"Rhys!\nRhys!\nThat is the man!\"\nCHAPTER TWO\n\n Rainbow City\n\"\nYou are mad\n,\" said the man with the tired voice.\n\n\n I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a huge abyss of caverned\n space; chasmed, immense, limitless. Vaguely, through a sleeping\n distance, I heard two voices. This one was old and very tired.\n\n\n \"You are mad. They will know. Narayan will know.\"\n\n\n \"Narayan is a fool,\" said the second voice.\n\n\n \"Narayan is the Dreamer,\" the tired voice said. \"He is the Dreamer, and\n where the Dreamer walks he will know. But have it your way. I am very\n old and it does not matter. I give you this power, freely—to spare\n you. But Gamine—\"\n\n\n \"Gamine—\" the second voice stopped. After a long time, \"You are old,\n and a fool, Rhys,\" it said. \"What is Gamine to me?\"\n\n\n Bodiless, blind, I drifted and swayed and swung in the sound of the\n voices. The humming, like a million high-tension wires, sang around\n me and I felt myself cradled in the pull of a great magnet that\n held me suspended surely on nothingness and drew me down into the\n field of some force beneath. Far below me the voices faded. I swung\n free—fell—plunged downward in sickening motion, head over heels, into\n the abyss....\n\n\n My feet struck hard flooring. I wrenched back to consciousness with a\n jolt. Winds blew coldly in my face; the cabin walls had been flung back\n to the high-lying stars. I was standing at a barred window at the very\n pinnacle of a tall tower, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched\n flickeringly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face, a\n lean tired old face beneath a peaked hood, in the moment before my\n knees gave way and I fell, striking my head against the bars of the\n window.\n\n\n I was lying on a narrow, high bed in a room filled with doors and bars.\n I could see the edge of a carved mirror set in a frame, and the top\n of a chest of some kind. On a bench at the edge of my field of vision\n there were two figures sitting. One was the old grey man, hunched\n wearily beneath his robe, wearing robes like a Tibetan Lama's, somber\n black, and a peaked hood of grey. The other was a slimmer younger\n figure, swathed in silken silvery veiling, with a thin opacity where\n the face should have been, and a sort of opalescent shine of flesh\n through the silvery-sapphire silks. The figure was that of a boy or a\n slim immature girl; it sat erect, motionless, and for a long time I\n studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it\n rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft\n sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to\n the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The\n blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby's drinking-cup, at me. I took\n it in my hand hesitated—\n\n\n \"Neither drug nor poison,\" said the blue-robe mockingly, and the voice\n was as noncommittal as the veiled body; a sexless voice, soft alto, a\n woman's or a boy's. \"Drink and be glad it is none of Karamy's brewing.\"\n\n\n I tasted the liquid in the mug; it had an indeterminate greenish look\n and a faint pungent taste I could not identify, although it reminded me\n variously of anise and garlic. It seemed to remove the last traces of\n shock. I handed the cup back empty and looked sharply at the old man in\n the Lama costume.\n\n\n \"You're—Rhys?\" I said. \"Where in hell have I gotten to?\" At least,\n that's what I meant to say. Imagine my surprise when I found myself\n asking—in a language I'd never heard, but understood perfectly—\"To\n which of the domains of Zandru have I been consigned now?\" At the same\n moment I became conscious of what I was wearing. It seemed to be an\n old-fashioned nightshirt, chopped off at the loins, deep crimson in\n color. \"Red flannels yet!\" I thought with a gulp of dismay. I checked\n my impulse to get out of bed. Who could act sane in a red nightshirt?\n\n\n \"You might have the decency to explain where I am,\" I said. \"If you\n know.\"\n\n\n The tiredness seemed part of Rhys voice. \"Adric,\" he said wearily. \"Try\n to remember.\" He shrugged his lean shoulders. \"You are in your own\n Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.\" His voice\n sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite\n of the weird surroundings, the phrase \"under restraint\" had struck\n home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.\n\n\n The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic\n voice. \"While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be\n explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use\n to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at\n home, in Narabedla.\"\n\n\n I shook my head. Nightshirt or no nightshirt, I'd face this on my feet.\n I walked to Rhys; put my clenched hands on his shoulders. \"Explain\n this! Who am I supposed to be? You called me Adric. I'm no more Adric\n than you are!\"\n\n\n \"Adric, you are not amusing!\" The blue-robe's voice was edged with\n anger. \"Use what intelligence you have left! You have had enough\nsharig\nantidote to cure a\ntharl\n. Now. Who are you?\"\n\n\n The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"\n\n\n \"It is real,\" said Rhys, compassion in his tired face. \"He has been\n very far on the Time Ellipse, Gamine. Adric, try to understand. This\n was Karamy's work. She sent you out on a time line, far, very far into\n the past. Into a time when the Earth was different—she hoped you would\n come back changed, or mad.\" His eyes brooded. \"I think she succeeded.\n Gamine, I have long outstayed my leave. I must return to my own\n tower—or die. Will you explain?\"\n\n\n \"I will.\" A hint of emotion flickered in the voice of Gamine. \"Go,\n Master.\"\n\n\n Rhys left the room, through one of the doors. Gamine turned impatiently\n to me again. \"We waste time this way. Fool, look at yourself!\"\n\n\n I strode to a mirror that lined one of the doors. Above the crimson\n nightshirt I saw a face—not my own. The sight rocked my mind. Out of\n the mirror a man's face looked anxiously; a face eagle-thin, darkly\n moustached, with sharp green eyes. The body belonging to the face that\n was\nnot\nmine was lean and long and strongly muscled—and not\n quite human. I squeezed my eyes shut. This couldn't be—I opened my\n eyes. The man in the red nightshirt I was wearing was still reflected\n there.\n\n\n I turned my back on the mirror, walking to one of the barred windows\n to look down on the familiar outline of the Sierra Madre, about a\n hundred miles away. I couldn't have been mistaken. I knew that ridge\n of mountains. But between me and the mountains lay a thickly forested\n expanse of land which looked like no scenery I had ever seen in my\n life. I was standing near the pinnacle of a high tower; I dimly saw the\n curve of another, just out of my line of vision. The whole landscape\n was bathed in a curiously pinkish light; through an overcast sky I\n could just make out, dimly, the shadowy disk of a watery red sun.\n Then—no, I wasn't dreaming, I really did see it—beyond it, a second\n sun; blue-white, shining brilliantly, pallid through the clouds, but\n brighter than any sunlight I had ever seen.\n\n\n It was proof enough for me. I turned desperately to Gamine behind me.\n \"Where have I gotten, to? Where—\nwhen\nam I? Two suns—those\n mountains—\"\n\n\n The change in Gamine's voice was swift; the veiled face lifted\n questioningly to mine. What I had thought a veil was not that; it\n seemed to be more like a shimmering screen wrapped around the features\n so that Gamine was faceless, an invisible person with substance but\n no apprehensible characteristics. Yes, it was like that; as if there\n was an invisible person wearing the curious silken draperies. But the\n invisible flesh was solid enough. Hands like cold steel gripped my\n shoulders. \"You have been back? Back to the days before the second sun?\n Adric, tell me; did Earth truly have but one sun?\"\n\n\n \"Wait—\" I begged. \"You mean I've travelled in time?\"\n\n\n The exultation faded from Gamine's voice imperceptibly. \"Never mind. It\n is improbable in any case. No, Adric; not really travelling. You were\n only sent out on the Time Ellipse, till you contacted some one in that\n other Time. Perhaps you stayed in contact with his mind so long that\n you think you are he?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not Adric—\" I raged. \"Adric sent me here—\"\n\n\n I saw the blurring around Gamine's invisible features twitch in a\n headshake. \"It's never been proven that two minds can be interchanged\n like that. Adric's body. Adric's brain. The brain convolutions, the\n memory centers, the habit patterns—you'd still be Adric. The idea that\n you are someone else is only an illusion of your conscious mind. It\n will wear off.\"\n\n\n I shook my head, puzzled. \"I still don't believe it. Where am I?\"\n\n\n Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you meant that—\" a mournfulness breathed in the soft\n contralto. A sudden fury blazed up in me from nowhere. \"And what right\n have you to pry for that old fool Rhys? Get back to your own place,\n then, spell-singer—\" I broke off, appalled. What was I saying? Worse,\n what did I mean by it? Gamine turned. The sexless voice was coldly\n amused. \"Adric spoke then. Whoever sits in the seat of your soul, you\n are the same—and past redemption!\" The robes whispered sibilantly on\n the floor as Gamine moved to the door. \"Karamy is welcome to her slave!\"\n\n\n The door slammed.\n\n\n Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.\n\n\n Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore.\n Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid\n it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment\n in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the\n mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like\n a leaping fish. \"Lord of the Crimson Tower.\" Well, I looked it. There\n had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it,\n and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I\n stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of\n the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly\n and a man stood looking at me.\n\n\n He was young and would have been handsome in an effeminate way if his\n face had not been so arrogant. Lean, somehow catlike, it was easy to\n determine that he was akin to Adric, or me, even before the automatic\n habit of memory fitted name and identity to him. \"Evarin,\" I said,\n warily.\n\n\n He came forward, moving so softly that for an uneasy moment I wondered\n if he had pads like a cat's on his feet. He wore deep green from head\n to foot, similar to the crimson garments that clothed me. His face had\n a flickering, as if he could at a moment's notice raise a barrier of\n invisibility like Gamine's about himself. He didn't look as human as I.\n\n\n \"I have seen Gamine,\" he said. \"She says you are awake, and as sane as\n you ever were. We of Narabedla are not so strong that we can afford to\n waste even a broken tool like you.\"\n\n\n Wrath—Adric's wrath—boiled up in me; but Evarin moved lithely\n backward. \"I am not Gamine,\" he warned. \"And I will not be served like\n Gamine has been served. Take care.\"\n\n\n \"Take care yourself,\" I muttered, knowing little else I could have\n said. Evarin drew back thin lips. \"Why? You have been sent out on the\n Time Ellipse till you are only a shadow of yourself. But all this is\n beside the point. Karamy says you are to be freed, so the seals are off\n all the doors, and the Crimson Tower is no longer a prison to you. Come\n and go as you please. Karamy—\" his lips formed a sneer. \"If you call\nthat\nfreedom!\"\n\n\n I said slowly, \"You think I'm not crazy?\"\n\n\n Evarin snorted. \"Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What\n is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good\n hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the\n Toymaker. I need little. But you—\" his voice leaped with contempt,\n \"you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the\n coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!\"\n\n\n I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words\n seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his\n face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, \"The falcon\n flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.\"\n He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. \"As\n I say, if you call that freedom.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the relationship between Mike Kenscott and Adric?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_1", "options": ["Adric is Mike's half-brother who lives far up in the Sierra Madre mountains. Mike doesn't seem him very often.", "Adric lives in the future. Mike is Adric's ancestor, back in the genealogical mists of time.", "This tale has two separate substories, and the Mike and Adric characters are each the main character of their own story line, one having nothing to do with the other.", "Mike and Adric are two personalities, or people, occupying the same brain space."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the eagle break off from the engagement with Mike?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_2", "options": ["His brother stabbed it with his hunting knife.", "The eagle didn't start it in the first place, so when Mike lost his grip on the bird, it left immediately.", "His brother beat it off with his camera.", "He pulled at its pinion feathers and broke its wing."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Andy so angry about the incident with the eagle?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_3", "options": ["Andy is disgusted at this evidence of cruelty toward animals displayed by his brother, and he remembers some other incidents too, like the cat that Mike skinned and left for dead.", "He is afraid that his brother is mentally unbalanced, possibly as a result of his inability to let go of his work and relax on vacation.", "Eagles are a protected species, and Andy does not want them to get in trouble with the authorities for harming such a majestic bird.", "Mike ruined Andy's chance to take a really unique photo of an eagle that would have been an asset to Andy's portfolio, magazine front cover-quality."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Mike do to convince Andy that he is not a mental case?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_4", "options": ["Mike shows Andy the burn scars on his body from the incident in his lab, which convinced Andy that the military had carried out some unethical bio-engineering experiment on Mike that left him with post-traumatic stress syndrome.", "Mike shows Any documents on the secret projects he worked on in the military, and subsequently at General Electric. He admits the experiments have had some odd side effects, but the documents convince Andy that it is real, not craziness affecting his brother.", "Mike shows Andy an observable, repeatable, physical effect that Mike has on a radio, an effect that is easily understood as being abnormal, because Andy can restore normal behavior by touching the device after Mike does.", "Mike buys Andy a new camera and promises to lay off the long work hours and go fishing with Andy the next day."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What can Mike do that other people cannot do?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_5", "options": ["Communicate with Martians.", "Absorb electric current into his body without it harming his body.", "Switch electrical equipment on and off just by thinking \"On\" or \"Off,\" without actually touching the devices.", "Heal his body and make scars disappear using electric current."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did the military establishment handle Mike in the aftermath of his accident?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_6", "options": ["The military tried to give Mike the resources he needed to research what had happened to him, but the incident had profound after effects, and they finally discharged him to a mental hospital for proper care.", "It was military medical experiments that caused Mike's problems in the first place. They tried to hush it up and keep Mike out of the public eye, but everyone could see he was an oddity, so they wiped his memories and gave him a new identity.", "The military knew that Mike had been in communication with  aliens, though their public story was a lightning strike on the lab. Sending him to Korea was their last attempt to shut him up about his experience.", "The official report said his lab had been destroyed by a lightning strike, although the military knew this was a lie. They ordered secrecy and transferred Mike first to another type of work, then to a remote outpost in Alaska."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What triggers Mike to hear voices during the night after the incident with the eagle?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_7", "options": ["He had spent the evening thinking about his weird ability to absorb current, trying to understand it, then decided to go to the basement and see if he still had his ability to absorb all the electricity from the dynamo. When he touched it, he started hearing voices.", "After the uncomfortable fight with Andy in the afternoon and the heart-to-heart conversation in the evening, Mike was exhausted and switched off the lights and fell asleep. As soon as he fell into REM sleep, he started hearing the voices.", "He had spent the evening thinking about his weird ability to absorb current, trying to understand it, then decided to go to bed and in a moment of inattention, he touched an electronic device - the light switch. This triggered the voices.", "He had spent the evening thinking about his erratic and obsessive behavior, and how it was hurting the people around him, and after a sufficient amount of \"self-medicating\" with the whiskey the brothers kept at the cabin, he heard voices."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Andric end up lying on the bed?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_8", "options": ["He went to bed in the late evening and slept restlessly.", "He fainted and hit his head and the other people in the room put him in bed.", "He always lay on his back in his bed when he intended to travel the time ellipse.", "He and Gamine had a few moments to make love before Narayan entered the room and she leaped out of bed so no one would know what they'd done."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the fact that the main character is evidently the \"Lord of the Crimson Tower\" explain, that he had seemed puzzled about?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_9", "options": ["It explains why he is wearing a crimson flannel nightshirt. It doesn't explain why the nightshirt only comes down to his loins.", "It explains why he is being served by a man in a blue robe.", "It explains why his nightshirt has a crimson \"A\" (for Andric) embroidered on the left shoulder.", "It explains why the handsome Evarin comes to see him wearing green."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do Mike and Andric have in common?", "question_unique_id": "50566_A2HMZNQF_10", "options": ["Each of them, in his world, is thought to be insane by others around him.", "They like to wear red flannel shirts.", "They both speak English.", "They both live in the town of Narabedia, at the foot of the Sierra Madre mountains."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/5/6/50566//50566-h//50566-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50998", "set_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Delay in Transit", "year": 1960, "author": "Wallace, F. L. (Floyd L.)", "topic": "Interstellar travel -- Fiction; PS; Science fiction; Artificial intelligence -- Fiction; Inventions -- Fiction", "article": "DELAY IN TRANSIT\nBy F. L. WALLACE\n\n\n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAn unprovoked, meaningless night attack is\n \nterrifying enough on your own home planet, worse\n \non a world across the Galaxy. But the horror\n \nis the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n\"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high.\n Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you.\n Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n\n\n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.\n\n\n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk.\n It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he\ncould\nwalk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n\n\n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was\n peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was\n at a definite disadvantage.\n\n\n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in\n mind.\"\n\n\n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look\n unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and\n stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside,\n he might find safety for a time.\n\n\n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n\n\n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give\n the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various\n reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called\n Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own,\n say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the\n proper approach, either.\n\n\n \"Weapons?\"\n\n\n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long\n knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n\n\n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in\n semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could\n die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of\n protection himself.\n\n\n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on\n tenuous evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n\n\n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For\n some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n\n\n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand\n star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n\n\n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a\n transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he\n had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here.\n He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't\n unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as\n reliable as they might be.\n\n\n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?\n\n\n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.\n\n\n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the\n rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it\n unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility\n and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the\n near amphibians who created it.\n\n\n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport\n tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made\n life dangerous for a human—Venice revised, brought up to date in a\n faster-than-light age.\n\n\n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely\n flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the\n ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout\n the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly\n and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human—Cassal shivered.\n If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No\n investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had\n certainly picked the right place.\n\n\n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal\n was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by.\n What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n\n\n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"\n\n\n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.\n\n\n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"\n\n\n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n\n\n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"\n\n\n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of\n a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately,\n his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance,\n the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His\n opponent gasped and broke away.\n\n\n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got\n him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's\n afraid.\"\n\n\n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some\n didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent\n fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n\n\n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near\n the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't\n move.\n\n\n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?\n\n\n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.\n\n\n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the\n boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n\n\n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him.\n Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly\n trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he\n was forced to the ground.\n\n\n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps\n rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping\n by way of water.\n\n\n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man\n I've ever been strangled by.\"\n\n\n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the\n basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I\n checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n\n\n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted\n Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't\nwanted\nto kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the\n police.\n\n\n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second\n time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was\n successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He\n squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n\n\n Something, however, was missing—his wallet.\n\n\n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle.\n Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n\n\n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the\n supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police.\n Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It\n contained more money than his wallet had.\n\n\n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it\n was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece\n of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he\n now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for\n another tab.\n\n\n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell.\n Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word,\n STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\nThe old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling\n precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the\n door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The\n technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed\n on the door.\nTRAVELERS AID BUREAU\n\n Murra Foray, First Counselor\n\n\n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The\n old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n\n\n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed\n help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n\n\n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a\n maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable.\n Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he\n managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n\n\n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer\n everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be\n available for consultation.\"\n\n\n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he\n asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n\n\n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n \"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n\n\n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to\n the first counselor.\"\n\n\n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the\n screen.\n\n\n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n\n\n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly\n supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him,\n Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of\n him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and\n answers. One thing he drew the line at—why he wanted to go to Tunney\n 21 was his own business.\n\n\n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed,\n that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average,\n rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the\n chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\nShe glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth.\n Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales\n engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n\n\n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of\n customer relations.\"\n\n\n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows\n arched.\n\n\n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n\n\n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n\n\n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can\n guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study\n under them.\"\n\n\n Close—but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not\n necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could\n build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even\n less likely.\n\n\n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21\n that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies\n that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he\n could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that\n could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag\n could set its own price, which could be control of all communications,\n transport, trade—a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of\n all that.\n\n\n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher\n to come to Earth,\nif he could\n. Literally, he had to guess the\n Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition,\n the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their\n arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working\n for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as\n Dimanche was a key factor.\n\n\n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n\n\n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've\n been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n 21.\"\n\n\n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the\n screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \"\nRickrock C\narrived\n yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n\n\n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will\n the next ship arrive?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n\n\n He didn't answer.\n\"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation,\n is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've\n covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything\n within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer\n distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly,\n Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on\n or near Godolph. Within the next five years—maybe.\"\nHe blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local\n transportation, star-hopping?\"\n\n\n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n\n\n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the\n emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help\n you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification\n tab.\"\n\n\n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual\n speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood\n made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it\n plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n\n\n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it\n with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n\n\n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any\n part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier\n for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't\nremember\nyour real name and where you put your identification—\" She\n arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His\nreal\nname!\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n\n\n Presently she returned.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n\n\n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you\n don't believe it, send back to—\" He stopped. It had taken him four\n months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for\n a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances\n such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for\n anything.\n\n\n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The\n spaceport records indicate that when\nRickrock C\ntook off this\n morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who\n had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became\n clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten\n it.\n\n\n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to\n understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n\n\n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second\n transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond\n the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\nShe was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without\n stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is\n impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken\n off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently\n needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years\n pass before he learns it's never coming.\n\n\n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't\n vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend\n on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time,\n credit established, lost identification replaced—\"\n\n\n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any\n trouble.\"\n\n\n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was\n more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited\n number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide—why, no\n man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n\n\n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare\n galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a\n giant room. Or could you?\n\n\n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship,\n was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n\n\n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to\n be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n \"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third\n ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They\n don't encourage immigration.\"\n\n\n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a\n passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of\n having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when\n his money was gone.\n\n\n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n\n\n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n\n\n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\nThe woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his\n estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he.\n Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that\n he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first\n counselor.\n\n\n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is\n special, though—\"\n\n\n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that\n you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum\n that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any\n appreciable time.\n\n\n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always\n work, if I have to.\"\n\n\n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do\n business with Godolphians.\"\n\n\n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n\n\n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special\n knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly—\"\n\n\n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The\n instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large.\n From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that\n information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he\n could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can\n always find something in that line.\"\n\n\n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the\n Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't\n yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better\n as a salesman.\"\n\n\n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all—\"\n\n\n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot\n provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n\n\n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle,\n swung open. The agency was efficient.\n\n\n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is\n hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n\n\n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was\n also eminently practical.\n\n\n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable\n contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the\n bureau.\n\"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the\n first counselor had named.\n\n\n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle,\n attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n\n\n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n\n\n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n\n\n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing\n about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n\n\n \"Any other information?\"\n\n\n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached\n her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n\n\n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless,\n it sounded depressing.\n\n\n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as\n electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n\n\n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly\n inquisitive at times.\n\n\n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on\n the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man\n was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed\n every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was\n removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him.\n He turned and peered.\n\n\n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n\n\n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting\n for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n \"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency.\n Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency\n were new.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor\n resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one\n didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n\n\n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n\n\n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed\n overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n\n\n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job,\n afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He\n shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but\n he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Where is the planet that Cassal is trying to go to?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_1", "options": ["His destination planet is located near the center of the galaxy, inside the third ring. ", "He is trying to reach Godolph, which is a waystation on the path to his final destination near the center of the galaxy.", "He is trying to reach Tunney 21, a planet at the tip of a spiral arm on the other side of the galaxy from Earth.", "He is headed back to Earth for a vacation after a complex and demanding mission to Tunney 21."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Cassal's mission when he reaches his destination?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_2", "options": ["HIs company wants to buy out a small research company on Godolph.", "He is to try to recruit a certain research scientist who can help Cassal's own company develop instantaneous radio for cross-galaxy communication.", "He is to conduct industrial espionage to bring home technology secrets that his company has not been able to unlock through their own research.", "Tunney 21 is an untapped market for his company's products, and he is to establish a sales office and a foothold in the market there."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Cassal attacked?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_3", "options": ["Nativist groups on Godolph oppose galactic travel and immigration and choose off-worlders as targets of their violence to create a fearful attitude toward travel to Godolph.", "An operative for a company that is a direct competitor of Cassal's company wants to stop him from doing business on Tunney 21.", "It is an ordinary thug, preying on a vulnerable-looking person alone on a deserted street after dusk.", "The attacker steals Cassal's ID tab, which enables him to board the ship to Tunney 21 and disembark there, which is not permitted without the tab due to overcrowding of the inner planets."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who is Dimanche?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_4", "options": ["Dimanche is Cassal's human handler, providing advice through a cochlear implant based on remote-controlled drones that Cassal releases wherever he goes.", "Dimanche is a specialized electronic device that works with Cassals as a source of instant information about people around him.", "Dimanche is one of the counselors at the Travel Bureau on Godolph, trying to help him stay safe.", "Dimanche is Cassal's junior assistant."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Cassal \"kill\" his attacker?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_5", "options": ["It took only a single, mighty upward stabbing motion to catch the attacker under the ribs and stab up into the heart.", "Actually, it was Dimanche who killed the attacker.", "With repeated thrusts of a small, thin knife.", "Dimanche launched an attack drone, which blinded the attacker, and Cassal felled him with a rock he'd picked up."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What explains the fact that the attacker was not actually dead, as reported?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_6", "options": ["Dimanche reported that there was no heartbeat, and when it turned out the man was still alive, claimed that the problem is that some species can feign death by suspending their bodily functions, such as the heart beating.", "Dimanche wasn't sure the man was dead. Cassal gave a cursory check of the pulse and, finding none, assumed the man was dead.", "Dimanche reported that there was no heartbeat, but it turned out to be because the attacker-turned-victim had an electronic shield that made his pulse and respiration temporarily undetectable.", "The man actually was dead, but an accomplice dragged him away and then attacked Cassal himself when Cassal came back to check on the original stabbing victim."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who does the story imply was the man who boarded the Rickrock C in Cassal's place?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_7", "options": ["The CEO of Neuronics, Inc.", "The head of a local Godolphian gang.", "The previous director of the Travel Bureau.", "An intelligence operative from Tunney 21, trying to protect their scientists from being recruited by off-worlders."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the Travel Bureau director say  whose irony Cassal understands, but she is oblivious to?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_8", "options": ["That sales talent is mostly being in the right place at the right price.", "That if everyone had an electronic personal assistant, they could accomplish more and reduce confusion.", "That the travel system - reservations, credit, identification - would be improved if instantaneous radio were available.", "That no one ever leaves the planets in the center of the galaxy unless they get an offer they can't refuse to go to Earth."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How quickly will Cassal be able to get off Godolph and continue his journey to Tunney 21, having missed the RickRock C?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_9", "options": ["It could be years - or forever, judging by the old sign maker's question about Cassal's presence on the planet and in the Travel Aid bureau.", "It will be faster if Cassal gives generously to the Traveler's Aid Bureau.", "The RickRock C visits Godolph once per earth year, so it will be one year.", "It will probably only be a few more weeks, in spite of the dire predictions of the First Counselor, because Godolph is a major travel hub."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was supposed to be Dimanche's primary purpose?", "question_unique_id": "50998_MU8MAHBX_10", "options": ["To give an edge to Cassal during the sale process.", "To act as a mobile general information source for Cassal.", "To supervise Cassal and report back to Earth on his activities.", "To keep Cassal  company."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/9/50998//50998-h//50998-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50802", "set_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "A City Near Centaurus", "year": 1958, "author": "Doede, William R.", "topic": "PS; Archaeologists -- Fiction; Extinct cities -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction", "article": "A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe city was sacred, but not to its gods.\n \nMichaelson was a god—but far from sacred!\nCrouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his\n burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n\n\n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the\n Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he\n saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n\n\n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man\n was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were\n known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually\n natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of\n the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent,\n though uneducated.\n\n\n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the\n ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of\n time to wonder about him.\n\n\n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings\n before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge\n with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square\n buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges\n connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind\n after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony\n surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets\n and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller\n buildings.\n\n\n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"\n\n\n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short,\n even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up\n and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet\n dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n\n\n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said,\n chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it\n beautiful?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a\n child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n\n\n \"You must go.\"\n\n\n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n\n\n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was,\n said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n\n\n \"The spirits may return.\"\n\n\n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his\n trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say,\n some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n\n\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons,\n and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n\n\n \"Leave!\"\n\n\n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in\n anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly\n serious.\n\n\n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know\n that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half\n covered with sand and dirt.\"\n\n\n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The\n sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He\n glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n \"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy\n the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of\n change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now,\n or be killed.\"\nHe turned and walked off, not looking back.\n\n\n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n\n\n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell\n of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered\n through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness,\n dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in\n the sun.\n\n\n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although\n this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ...\n although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back\n there to worry about him.\n\n\n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His\n friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at\n least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a\n thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly,\n without effort save a flicker of thought.\n\n\n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n\n\n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he\n relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n\n\n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill\n you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer\n than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like\n a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n\n\n \"What rooms?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were\n bedrooms.\"\n\n\n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was\n sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n\n\n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be\n educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some\n sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n\n\n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the\n native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n\"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive\n god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old\n streets.\"\n\n\n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing\n I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian\n tombs—none can hold a candle to this.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n\n\n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names\n you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n\n\n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n\n\n \"Maota.\"\n\n\n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build\n a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just\n outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may\n decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago\n and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and\n evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n\n\n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like\n a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n\n\n \"You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They\n must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come\n here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who\n lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged\n and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their\n foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n\n\n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his\n body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his\n heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n\n\n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n\n\n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought\n a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind\n sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the\n sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n\n\n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over\n the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted\n at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the\n writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the\n writing.\n\n\n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n\n\n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the\n length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not\n Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he\n stooped and picked up the book again.\n\n\n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had\n touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring\n in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n\n\n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall,\n fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring\n God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already\n destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the\n artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n\n\n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They\n say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's\n see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand\n lifetimes.\n\n\n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those\n years!\n\n\n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery\n of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger\n against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered\n the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\"\n off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along\n the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over\n its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an\n exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\nThe clock was warm.\nHe felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there\n were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not\n be. Half a million years—and here was warmth!\n\n\n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No\n mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He\n stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling.\n Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason.\n He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled\n through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street\n until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for\n air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n\n\n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could\n be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss\n of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail\n of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n\n\n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\nWhen he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n\n\n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in\n the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair,\n familiar to Michaelson.\n\n\n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n\n\n \"For what?\"\n\n\n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n\n\n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try\n to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n\n\n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n\n\n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n\n\n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked\n like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its\n appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n\"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held\n it up for Maota to see.\n\n\n \"What about the book?\"\n\n\n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n\n\n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what\nkind\nof book? You have seen it. It\n is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it\n talks.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n\n\n \"Poetry.\"\n\n\n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history?\n Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a\n subject worthy of a book.\"\n\n\n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how\n they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must\n kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n\n\n The old man raised the gun.\n\"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot\n behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than\n you can fire the gun.\"\n\n\n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will\n kill you anyway.\"\n\n\n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"\n\n\n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand\n and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile,\n brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n\n\n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n\n\n \"Negotiate.\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not\n twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far\n away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n\n\n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just\n disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n\n\n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer\n toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n\n\n \"Wait!\"\n\n\n \"Now what?\"\n\n\n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n\n\n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n\n\n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n\n\n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n\n\n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items\n around.\"\n\n\n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand\n against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed\n through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for\n a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle\n softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but\n his desire to hear the book was strong.\nOld Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the\n syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been\n a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley,\n Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n\n\n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in\n sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n\n\n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n\n\n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.\n\n\n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the\n total destruction they might have caused.\n\n\n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n\n\n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and—they could not see how\n deep—stared at them.\n\n\n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book\n is gone!\"\n\n\n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\nBoth men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically\n for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or\n care.\n\n\n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area\n around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n\n\n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n\n\n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It\n talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I\n used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n\n\n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n\n\n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n\n\n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n\n\n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with\n songs.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n \"\nYou\nkilled it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying\n forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too\n weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n\n\n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've\n disgraced myself.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some\n reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n\n\n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night\n when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take\n them we lose forever.\"\n\n\n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never\n heard of negotiation?\"\n\n\n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One\n either loves them, or kills them.\"\n\n\n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step\n from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that.\n Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would\n ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit\n me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day\n I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than\n that.\"\nMaota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n\n\n \"It would not work for you.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n\n\n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred\n hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking\n half-heartedly again for the book.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human.\n Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n\n\n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's\n face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we\n could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We\n have finished, you and I.\"\n\n\n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n\n\n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n\n\n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the\n city?\"\n\n\n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n\n\n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n\n\n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of\n the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed\n against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading\n to a particular building.\n\n\n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you\n suppose happened to this race?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me.\"\n\n\n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know\n how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not\n die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n\n\n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth\n dimension?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death.\n I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people\n who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science,\n who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the\n face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n\n\n \"And what?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the\n streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now\n I will do so.\"\n\n\n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched\n whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it\n then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n\n\n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay\n still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more\n carefully. No question about it.\n\n\n The old man was dead.\nFeeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside\n the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and\n gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's\n body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the\n knoll.\n\n\n Here he buried him.\n\n\n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that\n the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense\n more complete than death.\n\n\n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came\n to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building\n with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination.\n Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n\n\n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all\n evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He\n had to know if the machine would work for him.\n\n\n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows\n over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old\n man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but\n determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the\n button.\n\n\n The high-pitched whine started.\n\n\n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes;\n nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only\n like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left\n or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no\n direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking\n through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n\n\n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win\n after all.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did you.\"\n\n\n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be\n anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n\n\n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the\n old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life\n force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body\n different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread\n stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n\n\n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried.\n I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication\n with you. No one can go back.\"\n\n\n Michaelson decided he try.\n\"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n\n\n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and\n gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and\n gave his most violent command.\n\n\n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then\n it struck him.\nHe was standing up!\nThe cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference\n between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where\n he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind,\n leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n \"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n\n\n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result\n as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n\n\n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger,\n irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n \"I said you were a god. I said you were a god.\nI said you were a\n god...!\n\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is Michaelson's profession?", "question_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY_1", "options": ["He is a retired engineer pursuing his antiques hobby.", "He is an astronaut.", "He is an Earthgod.", "He is an archaeologist."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the webfooted Alpha Centaurean accost Michaelson?", "question_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY_2", "options": ["He is trying to warn Michaelson about hidden dangers in the city.", "He is a beggar who makes his living from guilting tourists to the old city to give him money.", "He is the ticket taker for visitors to the old city, and Michaelson just walked in without buying a ticket.", "He indicates that Michaelson is violating a sacred space by being there."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Michaelson react to the native's demand that he leave?", "question_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY_3", "options": ["Michaelson realizes he needs to wrap it up quickly and minimize his intrusion into this city of the ancient spirits.", "He is dismissive of the old man's concerns, and ignores the demand.", "Michaelson offers to pay the old native extra to stay in the city unmolested for an extra day.", "As a man who has studied other cultures, Michaelson is understanding and patient with the view that the city is sacred ground, but that knowledge is at war with his desire to study what he finds there."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What kind of terrain surrounds the city?", "question_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY_4", "options": ["A lot can change in half a million years. It used to be a desert, but now it is covered by  a very thin sheet of ice.", "The climate is arrid and the terrain is mostly flat, but the city's water works still provide moisture to serve formal gardens around important buildings.", "The city itself is dry and sandy, but immediately outside it, the vegetation ramps up to the density of a jungle quite quickly.", "The characteristics described are those of a desert, with wind-blown sand and little to no vegetation."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What special characteristics does the book the native throws at Michaelson have?", "question_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY_5", "options": ["Michaelson can feel his fingers burning when he touches the pages, like a warning from angry gods.", "When he followed the printed text with his finger, it transferred the words into his head, telepathically.", "When Michaelson touches the text on the page, it causes a holoprojector in the book's spine to start showing the story of the book.", "The book tells the history of the entire galaxy, and helps Michaelson understand the significance of the old city."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Michaelson travel back and forth to the dead city?", "question_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY_6", "options": ["He paid a pilot to let him parachute in. The pilot will return for him when called by radio.", "He has a short range glider with sand skis that he set down just on the other side of a nearby hill.", "He has an implanted transportation device that teleports him wherever he wants.", "He parked a Land Rover (the Alpha Centaurus II equivalent) just outside the city and walked in."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What would Michaelson like to do in this old city?", "question_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY_7", "options": ["He wants to excavate the city and remove all the artifacts to a museum in the capitol city of Alpha Centaurus II.", "He wants to do his archaeological research very quietly, disturbing the place as little as possible, so that he can publish academic papers about the place before professors who are his competitors.", "He would like to turn it into a historical exhibition and tourist attraction.", "He wants to build an amusement theme park. The super-tall buildings with the bridges hanging between him gave him some ideas for some exciting rides."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Where does Maota find Michaelson the last time they meet?", "question_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY_8", "options": ["Michaelson had not moved since the encounter when Maota threw the book at him, because Michaelson was engrossed in reading the poetry.", "Michaelson found an opulently furnished bedroom on one of the top floors o the tall building. True, the bedclothes had disintegrated, but it looked safe and solid, so he stayed there.", "In the street at the edge of the city, where Michaelson collapsed after fleeing the tall building with the warm clock that freaked him out.", "Michaelson used his teleportation device to take him home to spend the night safe in his own bed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Where did Maota and Michaelson end up at the end of the story?", "question_unique_id": "50802_7XAL7CMY_9", "options": ["Maota is trapped in an alternate dimension, but can travel anywhere. Michaelson succeeded in returning to his body on Alpha Centaurus II after visiting this alternate dimension.", "When Maota touched the magic clock, his mind went into another dimension and his body stayed behind. When Michaelson touched it, nothing happened at all.", "Maota believed that touching the clock would transport him to a new plane of existence, but in fact, he just died. Michaelson studied the culture and arrived at the same conclusion and made the same mistake.", "After Maota pressed the clock and appeared to die, Michaelson decided to try it too. They both ended up in the spirit world, so now Michaelson understands what Maota meant about the spirits in the city."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/0/50802//50802-h//50802-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51321", "set_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Prime Difference", "year": 1972, "author": "Nourse, Alan Edward", "topic": "Robots -- Fiction; Science fiction; Impostors and imposture -- Fiction; Short stories; PS; Husband and wife -- Fiction", "article": "PRIME DIFFERENCE\nBy ALAN E. NOURSE\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBeing two men rolled out of one would solve\n \nmy problems—but which one would I be?\nI suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he\n gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n\n\n Understand now—I've got nothing against marriage or any thing\n like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American\n Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw\n a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman\n like Marge—\n\n\n It's so\npermanent\n.\n\n\n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the\n Blissful 'Fifties—but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968,\n and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got\n their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse\n Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if\n I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n\n\n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man\n has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n\n\n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep\n Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n\n\n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes\n and a shape that could set your teeth chattering—but that was where\n the dream stopped.\n\n\n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long\n enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was\n crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling\n detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband,\n which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly\n headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half\n she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we\n got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\nMaybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to\n envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live\n with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a\n while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n\n\n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't\n even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give\n Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab\n Center in a week.\n\n\n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found\n out when Jeree came along.\n\n\n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled\n around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an\n executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As\n a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of\n secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any\n work—just to sit there.\n\n\n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying\n anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was\n there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the\n opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n\n\n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over\n during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my\n mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n\n\n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n\n\n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's\n five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n\n\n Marge had quite a spy system.\n\n\n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n\n\n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself\n mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n\n\n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong\n at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no\n stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n\n\n Harry Folsom administered the\ncoup de grace\nat coffee next morning.\n \"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your\n problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n\n\n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be\n ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a\n thing. It's—it's indecent.\"\n\n\n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to\n think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not\n even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a\n friend who knows a guy—\"\n\n\n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped\n my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n\n\n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n\n\n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n\n\n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\nIt was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime,\n Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the\n nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n\n\n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the\n use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license\n for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a\n high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even\n then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to\n have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance\n exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how,\n why, and under what circumstances.\n\n\n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n\n\n But everybody knew that if you\nreally\nwanted a personal Prime with\n all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black\n market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be\n done.\n\n\n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got\n lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with\n a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse\n off lower Broadway.\n\n\n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting\n you.\"\nI didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the\n place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a—\"\n\n\n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered\n his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often\n come to us to avoid the—ah—unpleasantness of formal arrangements.\n Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the\n merchandise ourselves—\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were\n you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n\n\n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door\n for Utility models.\n\n\n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful\n workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically\n complete circuit duplication. Very useful for—ah—close contact work,\n you know. Social engagements, conferences—\"\n\n\n I was shaking my head. \"I want a\nSuper\nDeluxe model,\" I told him.\n\n\n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication.\n Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be—awkward, shall we say. Very\n awkward—\"\n\n\n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were\n any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n\n\n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our\n laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I\n can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n\n\n The blanks weren't very impressive—clay and putty and steel, faceless,\n brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all\n sorts. He was thorough—embarrassingly thorough, in fact—but finally\n he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n\n\n And that was all there was to it.\nPractical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the\n Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it\n once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought\n him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design,\n artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with\n the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n\n\n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked\n outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty\n woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the\n recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime\n when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked\n in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a\n tired look on his face.\n\"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like\n a nursing mother.\n\n\n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly.\n Nothing flabby about it.\n\n\n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I\n said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n\n\n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n\n\n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded\n neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought\n what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The\n only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime\n did.\n\n\n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make\n the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders,\n he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my\n signature. It would hold up in court.\n\n\n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted\n girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time\n I chose, he'd do that, too.\n\n\n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on\n the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same\n mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical\n difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression\n buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop\n George Prime dead in his tracks.\n\n\n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a\n pile of gears.\n\n\n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n\n\n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it\n up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's\n natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes\n it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be\n confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough,\n and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent\n enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate\n him for it, but he'll win.\n\n\n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a\n corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in\n the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\nAt first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she\n said. I told her I didn't\nwant\nher to clean it up. She could clean\n the whole house as often as she chose, but\nI\nwould clean up the\n workshop.\n\n\n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a\n strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood\n shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next.\n A wrench would be back on the rack—upside down, of course. An open\n paint can would have a cover on it.\n\n\n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I\n swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n\n\n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while\n to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door\n routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a\n battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It\n was that predictable.\n\n\n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore\n her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n\n\n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n\n\n Eventually.\n\n\n If you're\nreally\npersistent.\n\n\n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.\n\n\n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.\n\n\n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n\n\n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model,\n remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this\n cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous.\n I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n\n\n So I did.\n\n\n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very\n cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after\n a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is.\n As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was\n wonderful.\n\n\n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the\n accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n\n\n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a\n reputation for myself around the office.\n\n\n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the\n novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It\n took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable\n program.\n\n\n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n \"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky\n around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime\n cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely\n trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n\n\n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to\n quick-step some questions about my work at the office—there was no\n way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular\n two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the\n meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n\n\n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.\n\n\n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really\n meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which\n happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by\n candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly\n because I liked it.\n\n\n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old\n times.\nVery\nold times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge\n again—really\nlooking\nat her, watching the light catch in her hair,\n almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not\n glint.\n\n\n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night,\n she was practically ravishing.\n\n\n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the\n workshop.\n\n\n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n\n\n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"\n\n\n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was\n beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control—I\n could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for\n a complete recircuiting—but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice\n job.\n\n\n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized\n with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss,\n despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After\n dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and\n said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by\n the fire.\n\n\n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living\n room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair\n I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite\n perfume.\n\n\n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n\n\n \"Uh?\"\n\n\n \"Do you still love me?\"\n\n\n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I\n still—\"\n\n\n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n\n\n \"Mm. I guess I've—uh—got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that\n perfume!\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n\n\n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep—\"\n\n\n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her\n voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n\n\n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.\n\n\n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep\n a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a\n four-day hangover.\n\n\n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting\n blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first\n logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly\n what he'd done.\n\n\n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all\n right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the\n laboratory could take him.\n\n\n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got\n to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that\n check of mine that had just bounced.\n\n\n \"What check?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday—five hundred dollars—against\n your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n\n\n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that\n account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you\ndid\nuntil last week. But all these checks\n you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n\n\n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one\n of them.\n\n\n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an\n account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n\n\n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n\n\n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared\n at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n\n\n I came up with a horrible thought.\n\n\n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get\n away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n\n\n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started\n down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir,\n not\nMrs.\nFaircloth.\nYou\nbought two tickets. One way. Champagne\n flight to Bermuda.\"\n\n\n \"When?\" I choked out.\n\n\n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven\n o'clock—\"\n\n\n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know\n what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question\n now that he was out of control—\nway\nout of control. And poor Marge,\n all worked up for a second honeymoon—\n\n\n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent.\n\n\n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of\n grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n\n\n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n\n\n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n\n\n \"But I thought—I mean the ticket office—\"\n\n\n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes,\n almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go\n running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n\n\n \"Then—you knew?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing\n him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of\n his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to\n run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n\n\n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n\n\n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek\n against my chest.\n\n\n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He\n was like you, but he wasn't\nyou\n, darling. And all I ever want is you.\n I just never appreciated you before....\"\n\n\n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George\n Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what\n did you do with him?\"\n\n\n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot\n him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more.\n We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n\n\n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the\n Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have\n been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully\n porous, the old Marge was\nnever\nlike this—\n\n\n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt\n the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really\n happened.\n\n\n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n\n\n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\nMarge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the\n laugh was on her, after all.\n\n\n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes\n Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty\n sad by comparison.\n\n\n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers.\n As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n\n\n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any\n slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n\n\n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll\n go to Hawaii.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How did George win the battle to keep his \"man cave\" inviolate from Marge's intrusions?", "question_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ_1", "options": ["George put a lock on the workshop and when she would get a locksmith to make a new key, he would get a more advanced lock, till finally she could not get in any more.", "He told her to keep out, but she went in anyway. He left little \"spy traps,\" which she tripped. Years of consistently being berated every time she entered the workshop finally made her give up.", "George and his neighbor both had the same problem, so the neighbor set up at George's house and George had his man cave at the neighbor's.", "George moved his \"retreat\" to a garage-sized self-storage facility cube that Marge didn't know about."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does one disable one of the Prime androids?", "question_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ_2", "options": ["Each buyer of a Prime android is given a remote control fob that can turn the android off instantly.", "One issues the \"recall\" command, and once the android is on its charging station, one cuts the power.", "By pushing on a little low spot in the skull above the ear.", "There is an off switch hidden by the hairline on the back of the neck."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In the Battle of the Sexes described in this story, whose side, ultimately, does this author come down on?", "question_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ_3", "options": ["They both win. Marge is freed from a loveless marriage, and George now has a combination house maid and blow-up doll, which is all he really wanted in the first place.", "The man wins because Marge's reputation was ruined by leaving her husband.", "Neither wins, because neither is happy in the end.", "The woman wins the prize for being clever enough to escape her loveless marriage with an inveterate cheat. Everyone will soon know that Marge left George, which will be humiliating for him."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When George finds out about the Bermuda tickets and goes home to an empty house, what has happened?", "question_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ_4", "options": ["Marge had George Prime repurposed as Marge Prime, and she ran off, while Marge Prime came home to greet George.", "George Prime and Marge ran off together to Bermuda.", "Marge learned about George Prime and sent him back to the factory because she wanted her flesh and blood husband back.", "Marge deactivated George Prime and put him back on the charging station, and she threatens George with exposing the illegal Prime android if he doesn't give her a divorce settlement with generous alimony."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What are the laws concerning Ego Prime androids?", "question_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ_5", "options": ["They are completely illegal in all forms.", "One can buy a Utility model, a Deluxe or a Super Deluxe, provided that one fills out the right forms and registers it at the appropriate government office.", "Basic models were allowed under very strict circumstances.", "You can get a Utility model without much trouble, and if you upgrade it at home, no one will ever know."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "George didn't like the looks of the black market Prime android salesman. Was his gut instinct correct?", "question_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ_6", "options": ["Yes. The salesman told him that the Super Deluxe would be updated daily, but it turned out the company only updated it every two months.", "Yes. The salesman promised George a Super Deluxe model, but only delivered a Deluxe.", "No. There is no evidence that George was cheated by the Prime salesman. His friend Harry cheated him, though, by taking kickbacks from the middlemen for sending business their way.", "No. The story provides no evidence that George was cheated by the Prime salesman. His friend Harry paid the right bribes and greased the skids."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What functionality is it implied that Super Deluxe Prime androids have that is lacking in lower models?", "question_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ_7", "options": ["It is implied that the Super Deluxe models can take a licking and keep on ticking - for the more exotic tastes in bedroom gymnastics.", "It is implied that they have superior networks of Neuro-pantographs that allow them to be updated wirelessly and to be able to store more relevant information, like favorite recipes.", "It is implied that they can perform marital bedroom duties that eliminate awkwardness in situations between couples.", "It is implied that the Super Deluxe models, unlike the others, can replace a person who wants to be elsewhere not just at home, but also in the office, which takes more memory."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What unexpected (to George) thing happened very quickly once the George Prime started interacting with Marge?", "question_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ_8", "options": ["George noticed that his workshop was cleaner than it had been for years.", "Marge started having an affair with Harry Folsom.", "George realized just how little he cared about Marge anymore.", "Marge and George Prime stopped arguing and seemed to be getting along very well."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "After his first extramarital conquest, the new secretary, why did George pursue more office girls?", "question_unique_id": "51321_M4OFD2QJ_9", "options": ["The first girl decided she didn't want to be a side piece, and she got married.", "He got bored with just the first girl, whose conversational skills were limited.", "George's boss developed an interest in the first girl, and discretion being the better part of valor, he moved on.", "He realized that he preferred redheads, and the first girl had dark hair."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/2/51321//51321-h//51321-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "49838", "set_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Jack of No Trades", "year": 1961, "author": "Smith, Evelyn E.", "topic": "Parapsychology -- Fiction; PS; Families -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "Jack of No Trades\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by CAVAT\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nI was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd\n psee otherwise psomeday!\nI walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of\n fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n\n\n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled\n through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n\n\n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"\n\n\n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n\n\n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father\n reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe\n telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It\n was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n \"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n\n\n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n \"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n\n\n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level,\n because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n\"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched\n in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way\n upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I\n must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts,\n please.\"\n\n\n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n\n\n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the\n back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n\n\n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him—\nstop\nhim! He's\n hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n\n\n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it,\n Sylvia.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over\n myself a-tall.\"\n\n\n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned\n woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her\n the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to\n probe anyone without permission.\"\n\n\n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father\n suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at\n the cure-all?\"\n\n\n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times\n and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the\n time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly\n be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a\n machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\nNow that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever\n got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.\n Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents\n these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted\n into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the\n population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't,\n like me—psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no\n physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg\n grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if\n you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n\n\n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my\n youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n\n\n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I\n must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n\n\n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what\n was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n\n\n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could\n answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she\n called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food\n floating ahead of him.\n\n\n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my\n sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.\n\n\n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test\n for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\nI smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who\n really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim.\n I know you're trying to be kind, but—\"\n\n\n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it.\n Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim\n scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his\n extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n\n\n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes.\n After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he\n wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather\n Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n\n\n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.\n\n\n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there\n were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents\n would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of\n their own community standing.\n\n\n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always\n said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take\n care of the house.\"\n\n\n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a\n techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough,\n those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke\n down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement\n robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a\n constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of\n a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine\n could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of\n my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway,\n they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n\n\n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to\n take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and\n couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was\n telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even\n if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got\n nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can\n get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a\n hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound\n tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n\n\n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting,\n which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being\n considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't\n even do anything like that.\n\n\n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were\n out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't\n want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me\n and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they\n were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest\n Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\nI didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of\n attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me\n without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have\n done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\nI wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago—before people\n started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with\n radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous\n monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been\n latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I\n don't know why I say\nwe\n—in 1960 or so, I might have been considered\n superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n\n\n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything\n useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found\n a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers\n geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the\n time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just\n barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres\n drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive\n had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the\n stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n\n\n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people\n couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running\n around—not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior\n wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent\n in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of\n power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was\n that power?\n\n\n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be,\n explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none\n productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself.\n As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably\n nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative. Yet, from\n time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my\n knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent\n psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n\n\n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people\n liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature.\n Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at\n home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings,\n able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could\n with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more\n sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any\n household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody\n noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness\n as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n\n\n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n\n\n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n \"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n\n\n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my\n enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep\n their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n \"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship\n says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and\n left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a\n pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial\n ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n\n\n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n\n\n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace,\n but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n\n\n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but\n we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military\n techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back\n with reinforcements—if such were its intention—in less than six\n months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though\n we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the\n aliens' armament.\n\n\n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would\n be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits\n of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths\n to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the\n outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the\n first place.\n\n\n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.\n\n\n \"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.\n\n\n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever\n worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers\n aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but\n I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman\n abilities—normal human abilities, rather.\n\n\n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so\n strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n\n\n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My\n name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n\n\n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I\n started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed\n when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a\n tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent\n unconcern.\n\n\n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll\n be mortified!\"\n\n\n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only\n a low-grade telesensitive—just a poetess—so I had nothing to worry\n about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of\n Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she\n got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and\n she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable\n a position herself.\n\n\n However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.\n\n\n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on—now's your\n chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\nGritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had\n pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the\n right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's\n eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed\n face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as\n if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n\n\n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like\n that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I\n wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking\n so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping\n wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not\n even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n\n\n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I\n could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my\n patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound,\n no wound at all—just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole\n again. Not even a scar.\n\n\n \"Wha—wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n\n\n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I\n was frightened, too—too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do\n anything but stare witlessly at him.\n\n\n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing\n astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n\n\n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they\n were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in\n the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and\n shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole\n thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have\n imagined all those horrors.\n\n\n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them\n almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it.\n There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in\n seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it\n would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n\n\n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and\n I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son—\" and she said\n the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it—\"the\n greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And\n Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n\n\n I felt ... well, good.\n\"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my\n mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she\n was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to\n make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n \"The ability to heal\nis\nrecorded in history, only we never paid much\n attention to it.\"\n\n\n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n\n\n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I\n had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch\n of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I\n guess.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's\n probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n\n\n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other\n deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of\n them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive,\n and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and\n effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital\n just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the\n world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise\n the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I\n wouldn't be able to do even that.\n\n\n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but\n Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm\n your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n\n\n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n\n\n \"I—I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with\n apprehension.\n\n\n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can\n tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to\n say. But right now—\" I clapped her arm—\"there's a job to be done.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have\n time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were\n waiting for me.\n\n\n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough\n sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to\n show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit\n thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those\n powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n\n\n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know\n that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently\n disfigured. In a sense, they were—well, my children; I felt a warm\n glow of affection toward them.\n\n\n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the\n hospital soon leaked out—during all those years of peace, the\n government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets—and\n people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\nThe government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might\n attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on\n Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The\n human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And\n it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than\n they wanted to risk me.\n\n\n Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President,\n generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other\n obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I\n began to love everybody.\n\n\n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\"\n Lucy asked me one day.\n\n\n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that.\n Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n\n\n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are\n you jealous, Lucy?\"\n\n\n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to\n an end, you know, and—\"\n\n\n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you\n mean—\"\n\n\n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to\n them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to\n have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n\n\n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed\n that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness,\n were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being\n light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off\n and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the\n equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from\n the Centaurians again.\n\n\n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then\n I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary—only\n the Vice President this time—had thanked me on behalf of a grateful\n country. I wasn't needed any more.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why didn't Kevin fit in with his family?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_1", "options": ["Kevin had psychological problems. He was so filled with anger from having been abused by his uncle that no one in the family wanted to be around him.", "Because they all had psi powers of one kind or another, and he had never shown any such talents.", "Kevin's family was highly educated, and Kevin didn't even know how to read.", "Kevin's family was very industrious, and Kevin was positively lazy."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Kevin identify as being one of the hardest things about being non-telepathic in a family full of telepaths?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_2", "options": ["He couldn't operate any of the machines in his own home because they were all psi-control models.", "The ability to hide your own thoughts from others is linked to the ability to detect others' thoughts, and since Kevin lacked the latter, he also lacked the former.", "He couldn't pursue a career as an astronaut because only psi-talented people were accepted for that.", "When he was young, he was constantly teased by by his elementary school classmates, as their psi-powers started to manifest themselves, and he had none."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What accounts for the different modes of transportation taken by each family member to commute to their jobs?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_3", "options": ["The family members that work close to the house take the bus because teleportation does put a strain on the body, so they don't do it unnecessarily.", "Because the alternate dimension through which people pass when they teleport can get quite crowded, only one person per family is permitted to travel by that method. That was the dad. Everyone else walked to work.", "They have different levels of psi ability. In the family, only the dad had the talent of teleportation. The rest had to take the bus.", "Sylvia could do her job remotely with a computer, but the rest of them rode the bus to work."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Kevin keep busy apart from occasionally fixing one of the household servomechanisms, and why was this unsatisfactory?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_4", "options": ["Kevin's mother took him to the Psycho hospital each day for therapy and adult care, since he could not be trusted to take care of himself. He hated being treated ike a child.", "He read a lot of books. However, they were all more than a hundred years old, because no one wrote books anymore.", "He did the investing for the family because he could do it without being affected by everyone else's emotions. However, he found it boring.", "He prepared dinner for the family every night without the aid of the robocook, but he hated chopping vegetables and figuring out who liked what."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why couldn't Kevin pursue a career as an astronaut?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_5", "options": ["Because all the nearby planets had been explored and found to be uninhabitable, and the first missions to more distant places had left when he was too young to join up and had not returned yet.", "Because the space agency had replaced radio communication with telepathic communication. It was cheaper and more reliable, but since Kevin lacked psi abilities, he did not qualify as an astronaut.", "Because education these days depended so much on knowledge imparted quickly and telepathically, Kevin could not get the education he needed to apply.", "Because his scores on the space agency entrance exams were too low."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What changes did the emergence of psi abilities bring to the residents of Earth?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_6", "options": ["Expensive medical diagnostics were eliminated because doctors could just probe the minds of their patients and figure out the true problem.", "It eliminated war and crime but it also caused people to want to simply connect with each other and not the natural world.", "It eliminated income inequality because everyone telepathically had access to the same information and education, so no one was worth more than anyone else.", "Telepathy made bargaining useless - you always knew what the other guy's bottom line was when you started, so why haggle?"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Kevin returns from a walk to find out that the rest of the family is in a tizzy. Why are they upset, and why was Kevin unaware of the news?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_7", "options": ["Because there is news that the fleet that was sent to explore outside the solar system discovered planets peopled by hostile beings which may or may not be planning to attack Earth. Kevin is unaware because he doesn't receive telepathic news transmissions.", "The dad has been asked to step down from his job because of Kevin - the whole family is suspect and may all lose their jobs. Kevin didn't know because he didn't ask.", "Danny is getting married. Kevin didn't know this because Danny never discussed it with him, and the rest of the family communicated about it telepathcally.", "The space exploration fleet has returned from outside the solar system with hostile alien ships hot on their tails, which Kevin is unaware of because he was reading a book in the garden."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Kevin's mother do to help prepare for war with the aliens?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_8", "options": ["She telepathically recruits all the local women to start winding bandages and growing  victory gardens even though no one likes to garden anymore, to save foodstuffs for the space soldiers.", "She analyzes the medical care system and realizes it will be insufficient, so she recruits Kevin and his sister to learn basic first aid.", "The government orders her to convert the Psycho Center to a hospital for the wounded that are expected, so she carries out the directions.", "Although she had always been a strong woman, she feels anxious and frightened about the war with the space aliens. She believes they may have psi weapons that will wipe ou the psi-sensitive population."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Kevin fare at learning first aid?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_9", "options": ["The adulation he receives simply for being strong enough to maneuver large patients goes to his head, and his cocky attitude turns off the other psi-sensitive volunteers.", "Kevin isn't very successful at learning first aid, just like he has never succeeded at anything else, but he does meet a girl he likes, Lucy, and she seems to like him.", "Being a telepath confers no advantage in the practice of battlefield first aid, and he finds that he likes it and he is receiving some admiration from those around him for the first time.", "He is utterly insensitive to the patients' needs, because he can't sense them. His bedside manner is terrible, even though  his technical work is satisfactory."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How do Kevin's fortunes change during the war and afterward?", "question_unique_id": "49838_6J1LWBU1_10", "options": ["Kevin does his best at his patriotic duty, even though it is just non-psi grunt work. He works so hard that he shunts Lucy aside and loses his best chance for a good marriage.", "As Kevin practices his talent for healing, other talents spring into being, as if they just needed to be triggered. By the end of the war, he has the full spectrum of talents expected of a normal citizen.", "Kevin has a psi talent after all - instant healing. He becomes famous, but it goes to his head. He becomes arrogant and starts doing drugs, and at the end, he is shunted aside, nolonger useful.", "Kevin has a psi talent after all - instant healing. This is a huge help in the war and earns him medals. At the end of the war, however, his services are no longer needed, and he is back to being an obscure citizen with an unneeded psi talent.."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/9/8/3/49838//49838-h//49838-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "20060", "set_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching", "year": "1997", "author": "Joel Achenbach", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n         As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n         Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n         I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action. \n\n         And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n         Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n         I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership. \n\n         The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n                         1. Don't start thinking like George Will.              \n\n         Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\" \n\n         His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n         So that's the next tip: \n\n                         2. Get more, and bigger, televisions.              \n\n         If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n         Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged. \n\n         \"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n                         3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails.              \n\n         Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n                         4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.              \n\n         (Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n         Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room. \n\n         Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n         Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors. \n\n         \"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n         Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n         The point of all this is: \n\n                         5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the                 name of the \"announcer.\"              \n\n         The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n         In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever. \n\n         In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n         In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n         When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n                         6. Expand your zone of attention.              \n\n         In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n         Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially. \n\n         Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n         \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n         \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n                         7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the                 squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind.              \n\n         Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years: \n\n                         8. Prepare.              \n\n         \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n         It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n         Life is a competition. Be a champion.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Into what literary genre does this story fall?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_1", "options": ["Self-help / How-to.", "Satire.", "Journalism.", "Tragedy."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does the advice provided in the rest of the piece solve the problems laid out at the start?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_2", "options": ["The main problem is that the author's addiction to watching sports is affecting his family life. The 8 pointers provided all reinforce the original problem and do not solve the problems at all.", "The main problem is that the author's addiction to watching sports is affecting his family life. By implementing the 8 pointers he outlines, he will be able to make watching sports a shared family activity that reinforces family closeness.", "The problem of women not being interested in watching professional sports on TV is not confined to the author's family. No women like pro sports - the author comes to realize that the problem is not solvable.", "The problem outlined is that his family members are too selfish to watch sports with him, and this article is an effort to come up with ways to appeal to their narcissistic self-interest to make it more attractive to them to spend time with him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What pieces of information in the story can we use to judge the likelihood that Steve Sabol's advice will actually help families have more fun watching football together?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_3", "options": ["Sabol became so sick of football that he never wanted to watch another game.", "Sabol takes his whole family to the stadium to watch football live at least once a month, so that they can smell the sweat and see the grunting, muddy men close up.", "Sabol started a charity for injured football players, which he supports largely from proceeds of his company, NFL Films.", "Sabol is no longer married."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to the story, what are the features of the ideal football viewing set-up?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_4", "options": ["Multiple large TV screens, a bathroom close by the viewing area and a comfortable recliner.", "Multiple large TV screens, a comfortable recliner, and TV trays to hold plenty of snacks and cold beer.", "The ideal viewing area is an in area of the house that is off-limits to other family members, like a room in the basement, or in a heated garage. It should have multiple TV screens and a lock on the door.", "Multiple large TV screens, a laptop computer for double checking statistics on players, a comfortable recliner and a bathroom close by."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What strategies does the story suggest using for optimizing football viewing?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_5", "options": ["Give your wife the best seat in the room so she will enjoy the experience, and serve the types of snacks she likes best. Explain every play patiently even if it's obvious to you.", "Be well-rested, don't eat full meals, keep your eyes on the screen, and make sure to pay attention not just to the person at the center of the shot, but also the surrounding areas.", "Exercise regularly to build the aerobic stamina to shout at the referees as needed, and to keep the weight off you so you can afford to eat snacks and drink beer on football days.", "Be well-rested, eat nutritious meals (but not turkey, which contains tryptophan and will put you to sleep), and give your eyes a break at least every fifteen minutes."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The author reveals that he thinks it is hopeless to get his wife on board watching sports the way they should be watched. Why?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_6", "options": ["Because she spends the entire time they are watching a game together adding items to his \"honey do\" list.", "Because at critical moments in the game, she opens her current mystery novel and resumes reading it.", "Because she keeps making excuses to leave the room, like \"picking up the girls from dance lessons,\" and \"getting dinner on the table.\"", "Because she can look right at the screen and fail to understand what is going on."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to the author, how can one improve his ability to interpret what is happening on the screen?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_7", "options": ["Having multiple screens gives you the opportunity to see the same play from different angles, which helps you interpret the play.", "It's best to watch a game online, in a format with streaming chat comments. If you miss something, someone else will catch it and explain it.", "Listen to what the announcer explains has happened and then watch the replay.", "Watch the early preparations for a play, shot or throw."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What information is provided as a lead-in to the advice to never reveal that you have forgotten who the announcer of the game you are watching is?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_8", "options": ["The author says that \"life is a competition.\" Therefore, you must be prepared with the announcer's name, if asked, to avoid being a loser, and looking like a fool.", "The author discusses the details of what kind of TV monitors work best for creating the \"cockpit experience\" that allows you to simultaneously track three games.", "An explanation is provided of the process of choosing TV shots and graphics, which you should learn about so you can blow some knowledgeable-sounding smoke if you forget the announcer's name.", "The author takes the reader through a careful explanation of what constitutes an \"illegal defense,\" which most viewers cannot detect on their own."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does a TV football broadcast get put together?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_9", "options": ["At a minimum, it requires 8 to 13 cameras, Fox Trax, an announcer, a director who specifies the shot to show, a technical director who is kind of like an executive officer that makes it happen, and a producer who makes sure the bills get paid by inserting the advertisements.", "Whole corporations are built solely around what it takes to produce a good football broadcast. Many of the functions, like replay and special feature footage, are subcontracted to small specialist companies like NFL Films.", "A football broadcast is really relatively simple: focus on the action with the quarterback at the line of scrimmage, then pull back to show the tactics on each play. All the rest of it is just competition between the networks for the glitziest production.", "At a minimum, it requires lots of cameras, an announcer, a director who specifies the shot to show, a technical director who is kind of like an executive officer that makes it happen, and a producer who makes sure the bills get paid by inserting the advertisements."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How can the reader make sense of the advice not to start thinking like George Will, based on the story?", "question_unique_id": "20060_GEXSEDMY_10", "options": ["\"George Will\" is a term synonymous with \"Everyman,\" so the author is essentially telling the reader to be better than the common man as a watcher of football and evangelizer of trying to convert women to loving football.", "George Will is a sportswriter particularly famous for his book, \"Why Football Matters,\" which explains football as a metaphor for all of life. This is revealed at the end of the story when the author discusses all of life as a competition.", "Any reader of a piece on football will know that George Will is a sportswriter particularly famous for his book, \"Why Football Matters,\" which explains football as a metaphor for all of life. This is explained in the paragraphs leading up to the first numbered pointer.", "The reader would have to know that George Will is a serious, somewhat prissy writer of conservative opinion pieces to be in on the joke, but the story assumes the reader will know this, without it being explained."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20035", "set_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Masked and the Unmasked", "year": "1999", "author": "David Edelstein", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Masked and the Unmasked \n\n         Paul Thomas Anderson's \n\n               Magnolia                 takes place on a dark night of the soul in the City of Angels. A patriarch is dying. No, hold on, this is a three-hour movie: Two patriarchs are dying. Rich geezer Jason Robards is slipping in and out of a coma on a bed with an oxygen tube up his nose while his minky young wife (Julianne Moore) acts out her despair at losing an old man she thought she'd married for his money. The geezer's nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) listens to his semi-coherent monologues then decides to get in touch with the dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to \"turn women into sperm receptacles\" and to leave behind their \"unmanly\" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this night, since a female TV journalist (April Grace) has uncovered the history he has determinedly concealed and is eating through his mask of machismo on camera. \"We may be through with the past,\" says someone, \"but the past isn't through with us.\" \n\n         The second dying paterfamilias is Philip Baker Hall as the host of a quiz show for bright kids. He bursts in on his estranged daughter (Melora Walters) with news of his imminent demise, but the addled girl for some reason (three guesses) won't have anything to do with him. His visit sends her into a cocaine-snorting frenzy, which is interrupted by a policeman (John C. Reilly) checking out her deafening stereo: \"You've been doing some drugs today?\" After 10 minutes, it isn't clear whether this dweebish flatfoot is interrogating her or trying to ask for a date--or whether he even knows. Meanwhile ( Magnolia could have been titled Meanwhile ), an aging ex-quiz-kid celebrity (William H. Macy) gets fired from his job and goes looking for the love he never had, while a contemporary quiz-kid celebrity (Jeremy Blackman) tries to make his father (Michael Bowen) understand that he wants to be loved for himself and not his TV achievements--even if that means peeing in his pants on-camera. \n\n         What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything. \n\n         OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything. \n\n         What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion. \n\n         The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin. \n\n         The title card of                    The Talented Mr. Ripley                 is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs. \n\n         Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on. \n\n         Minghella is a thoughtful man and a snazzy craftsman, but by the end of Ripley , I wasn't sure what had attracted him to this material. What does a vaguely masochistic humanist see in Patricia Highsmith? The novel's Ripley (and the Ripley of René Clément's 1960 Purple Noon , Alain Delon) isn't so palpably out of his depth. With a bit of polish he can pass for a playboy, and the bad fun is watching him do anything to keep from accepting the swinish Dickie's view of him as an eternal loser. Damon's Ripley is an eternal loser, an anti-chameleon, and so conscientiously dreary that he lets Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic little melodrama needs. He's trying to inflate it into tragedy, where Highsmith's setups are too cold and shallow to be tragic. The old biddy herself would have thought this ending stinks. \n\n         Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head. \n\n         That whole act is reproduced in the funny, frustrating Kaufman biopic                    Man on the Moon                , but not on the Tonight Show . Kaufman (Jim Carrey) does it onstage at a tiny club. We don't know where it came from or what the thinking was behind it. He brings down the house (lots of shots of people smiling and laughing), then goes out for a drink with a potential manager (Danny DeVito), who tells him, \"You're insane--but you might also be brilliant.\" That's about as close to analysis as the picture gets. \n\n         As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It meshed with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) but seemed odd with Mozart ( Amadeus , 1984) and disastrous with Valmont ( Valmont , 1989). With Andy Kaufman, it seems not so much wrong as beside the point. Where did the rage in Kaufman come from, and at what point did it kill the comedy? More important: Did Kaufman himself consider some of his experiments failures, or had his aesthetic finally become so punk/pro-wrestling that he thought driving people crazy was enough? As Jared Hohlt  in                    Slate                , the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical synthesis of warmth and aggression--and then gets cut down at his prime. That's not just bogus; it's false to the conflicts that ate Kaufman alive. \n\n         The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's \"channeling\" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light. \n\n         Anyone who reads                    Angela's Ashes                 is torn down the middle--appalled by the misery and deaths of small children and yet exhilarated, even turned on, by the cadences of Frank McCourt. His alcoholic father starved him of real food but filled his head with the kind of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it turns into a lifeless slide show. There's no flow, no connective tissue between episodes. After the 80 th teensy scene goes by, you realize the movie isn't just botched: It doesn't even exist. Emily Watson suffers prettily, but whatever she's thinking stays in her head, and Robert Carlyle is so mopily present that you don't have a clue why such an earnest fellow would drink so many lives away. (The horror of the father McCourt describes is that he's not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?\n", "questions": [{"question": "How many movies are reviewed in this article?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_1", "options": ["One", "Four", "Two", "Three"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How many actors appeared in more than one of the movies reviewed, and in how many did they appear?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_2", "options": ["None of the actors appeared in more than one movie, however, two of the movies were based on stories by the same author.", "One actor appeared in more than one of the reviewed movies, appearing in all of them.", "One actor appeared in more than one of the reviewed movies, appearing in two of them.", "Two actors appeared in more than one of the reviewed movies, each appearing in three of them."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which movie does the reviewer like best?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_3", "options": ["The reviewer didn't have anything good to say about any of the four movies.", "The comments he makes point to Magnolia as the only movie of the four that he found worthwhile.", "The reviewer liked The Talented Mr. Ripley best because of the good job done by director Anthony Minghella.", "The reviewer liked all four movies equally."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the author's primary criticism of Angela's Ashes?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_4", "options": ["It dwells too much on the tragic details of the book.", "No coherent story is presented, just a bunch of disconnected scenes.", "Too many of the book's details were twisted to turn it into a movie with commercial potential.", "Emily Watson is no good at projecting her emotions."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the movie \"Man on the Moon\" about?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_5", "options": ["It is a biographical movie about Larry Flynt,", "It is a biographical movie about the sidekicks that Johnny Carson had on his show over the years.", "It is a more or less biographical movie about Andy Kaufman.", "It is a biographical picture about Jim Carrey, whose stage name was Andy Kaufman."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What actors does the author single out for expressions of his particular admiration?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_6", "options": ["Frank McCourt and Tom Cruise.", "Jim Carrey and Anthony Minghella.", "The entire cast of Magnolia except for Tom Cruise.", "Jim Carrey and John Reilly."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author say that the movie \"Magnolia\" could have been entitled \"Meanwhile,\" instead?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_7", "options": ["Because everything happens while the one old patriarch is dying.", "Because the story jumps around between so many subplots.", "Because there actually was a movie called \"Meanwhile,\" and the plot of \"Magnolia\" was very similar.", "Because he gave up trying to follow the plot and \"meanwhile,\" he wrote his review of the movie."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the director of Magnolia do that shows he views his fellow workers as family?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_8", "options": ["He got the whole cast together at his home once a week for a catered dinner, because some of the cast were not that well paid.", "He made sure that actors worked out any conflicts among them before the shooting started so that they would feel safe with each other.", "He had very strict policies on actors dating each other during filming. It was not allowed, and this was to make sure that less famous actors were not bullied by the more prominent, powerful ones.", "He creates a role for a friend who worked in one of his previous movies."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What seems to be one of the author's chief complaint about \"The Talented Mr. Ripley\" ?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_9", "options": ["He didn't think Gwyneth Paltrow belonged in the movie at all.", "He thinks that Jude Law was an unfortunate choice as a co-star, because he only has one expression, a sort of leering smile.", "He thinks the movie would have come off better played as a comedy.", "He doesn't like Matt Damon in the starring role because he doesn't like his looks."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What specific issue does the author have with the accuracy of \"Man on the Moon\" ?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7UHU8INF_10", "options": ["In the movie, Kaufman is shown as getting sick at the pinnacle of his career, while in reality, his star had already faded by that time.", "Jim Carrey puts a sense of anger into the Kaufman character that really wasn't there.", "Kaufman was never in the same class as Mozart, but the screenwriters fluff the story to make him seem like a giant in his field.", "The movie makes Kaufman seem like just another small-time Mafia asset."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20049", "set_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "If At First You Don't Secede", "year": "1997", "author": "Alex Heard", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "If At First You Don't Secede \n\n                         Forget the Alamo!              \n\n         This sounds crass, but I can't deny it: I desperately wanted the standoff at the Republic of Texas trailer-trash compound to last longer than it did--for selfish reasons. \n\n         Not weeks longer, mind you. Just a few hours. Just long enough for me to get there . Having missed all the famous government vs. fringe standoffs--Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Montana Freemen--I was determined to go and bear witness this time. I would find out at last if mysterious U.N.-dispatched \"black helicopters\" really buzz around at these things like giant hell-spawned bumblebees. I would document the local movements of guts-and-glory militia reinforcements. (A militia offensive of some sort was widely rumored on the Net, where one rabid militia man wrote: \"WE HAVE HAD A BELLY FULL OF THE FBI, BATF, DEA, ETC. ETC. ... Lock and Load, prepare to Rock and Roll.\") It sounds silly now, but militia trouble did seem plausible at Fort Davis. Wednesday, April 30, three days after the siege began, several heavily armed Republic of Texas members were apprehended at a truck stop near Pecos, Texas, about 90 miles from the action. \n\n         Alas, none of it was to be. I took off from Newark, N.J., at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, May 3. After landing in El Paso, I called a militia contact who had agreed to ask around about possible right-wing bivouacs. (I even brought camping gear!) Things looked \"hot\" when I left--from inside his \"embassy,\" ROT leader Richard McLaren was busily faxing out apocalyptic maydays--but his hot blood turned to pink Jell-O. \n\n         \"Hey!\" said my contact. \"Guess you heard. It's over.\" \n\n         \"What? No! McLaren was talking so tough.\" \n\n         \"Well, he came out.\" \n\n         While I groaned, he described the final hours. McLaren had swallowed the old negotiator's bait of surrender \"with honor.\" The lawmen treated him like the head of a brave conquered nation. He would be allowed to press in court his claim that the Republic of Texas had been illegally annexed by the United States in 1845. Then he would go to jail for many years. Not the best of deals, but he obviously preferred it to Plan B: getting shot. \n\n          Irented a car and putted around morosely, listening to the radio and mulling over my options. Texas lawmen were boasting, justifiably, about the happy outcome. Yes, there was one tiny glitch--two ROT activists had somehow slipped away--but that was no problem. A drawling official said these fugitives were not experienced in the back country, so they would be easy pickings. For my part, I knew there would be little left to see. The militia would \"stand down.\" Even the trailer compound--which had been tricked out with Swiss Family Robinson-style self-defense gizmos--was still off-limits to the media. \n\n         There was, however, one notable event left: Sunday, members of the other factions of the Republic of Texas were holding a big rally in Kilgore, to make clear that the movement would live on. (The republic, as you probably know, contains three competing clans.) I unfolded my map. Hmmm. Kilgore was way over by Louisiana. Even at 75 miles per hour, I could count on driving at least 12 hours, making it just in time for the opening gavel at 1 p.m. \n\n         Was it worth it? \n\n         No, but what else could I do--go see the Carlsbad Caverns? I buckled up and hit the road. \n\n                         My Countries, Right or Wrong              \n\n         The trip was worth it, at least in terms of understanding what motivates Republic of Texas believers. What motivates them is: They're nuts. All of them. \n\n         That word is somewhat loaded, so I should be more precise. ROT members are nuts like the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels were nuts. They don't drool or wear their shirts backward, but they do expend insane amounts of energy on ridiculous \"politics,\" dissipating most of it through meaningless infighting and petty posturing. Are they evil, hateful nuts? No. I kind of liked most of them. They would be fun people to go fishing with. \n\n          Unfortunately, they have this other hobby: seceding from the union. And, being Texans, they have enough guns and ammo to potentially make matters not so cute. Most non-McLarian ROT members publicly disavow violence, but the possibility always lurks. Groups like the Republic of Texas exist in a murky gray zone where relatively harmless right-wing bigmouths meet the frightening shriekers of renegade militias, raising the question: At what point does nutty end and scary begin? \n\n          You can never tell, but Richard Keyes III is a good example of how quickly A can become Z. Keyes is the 21-year-old McLaren follower who actually carried out the kidnapping and shooting that started the whole Fort Davis mess. He's originally from Kansas--so, to find out more about him, I called a county police detective there who tracks the far right. He'd heard of him only once, in a nutty-but-funny context. Keyes filed papers earlier this year demanding that Kansas return portions of the state to the rightful ownership of the Republic of Texas. Tee-hee. Next thing you know, however, he emerged as a serious shoot-'em-up guy. \n\n         As for the meeting, it was simply funny-nutty, but it became all too clear that the republic's separatist fantasies will live on. A few hundred boisterous Texans--mostly men, middle-aged or above, with a fair number of angry young rednecks and dotty old women--filled the cramped banquet room of a run-down motor lodge in \"downtown\" Kilgore. Crowding one side of a long dais were frowning representatives of the two non-McLarian Republics of Texas. One is headed by David Johnson of Odessa, Texas. He didn't show up, but some of his \"council\" members did--they were gray, natty, and grumpy, like Baptist deacons. The other faction is under the sway of Archie Lowe, a long-haired guy who looks like an amiable Harley rider and whose followers are a tiny bit more young and with-it. The Archies' current agenda includes a quest for \"international recognition\" and the convening of a \"Constitutional Convention\" this July. \n\n         The meeting itself was extremely hard to follow. After generic introblab, the floor was opened to \"the people,\" a platoon of Brave New World Epsilons who lined up behind a floor microphone and took turns huffing and ranting. Among the highlights: \n\n         A very pale young man stood up and said that Judgment Day was coming unless the Republic of Texas succeeded. Then he started crying. \n\n         A stocky guy in a red shirt and a Republic of Texas cap stood and dramatically announced that he was the driver of one of the two vehicles detained by authorities in Pecos. It was all a gross injustice, of course. Yes, he and four ROT colleagues were traveling with full packs, semiautomatic weapons, pistols, radios, and plenty of ammo, but he said they were merely going to Kermit, Texas, to \"hunt wild hogs.\" But Pecos is not on the way if you're going to Kermit from Garland. I asked him later: Why was he there? \"I was curious about what was going on,\" he said. \"On a personal level.\" \n\n         A gap-toothed old woman yelped that the federal government is \"getting boxcars prepared with some kind of leg irons in 'em to fasten you into place to ship you to concentration camps.\" \n\n          OK, perhaps quoting the old woman is a cheap shot. Then again, I heard similar effusions from a high official--Jim Warmke, a wiry, sun-burnished old guy in a mustard-colored Western suit who serves as \"secretary of commerce and trade\" for the Branch McLarian remnant. I liked Jim, and I just hope his nuttiness stays \"funny,\" but I have to wonder. When we met he extended a huge sandpapery hand and said: \"Howdy! Jim Warmke. W-A-R-M-K-E. Hot lock, warm key.\" We talked about McLaren--\"The man is a genius; he has a 160 IQ\"--and I raised the question of violence. Given that the federal government and the state are always and forever going to kick ass in U.S. vs. Republic confrontations, when would a patriot like Jim feel justified in picking up a gun and charging? \n\n         And with such overwhelming odds, why would he do that? \n\n         \"You'll not know how close some came,\" he said eerily. \"I can tell you that the militias have but one methodology in mind. They do not intend to assemble 10-, 20-, 50,000 armed men in one spot and allow napalm to destroy them! There is a tactic called 'targets of availability.' What that means is ... Your interpretation would be terrorism. There is no one that can control that. There is no government could control that.\" \n\n         Bomb talk! Did he hear about specific targeted sites? \n\n         \"I have suspicions, but I'll not answer that based on suspicions.\" \n\n         After Jim left, two Archie-faction ROT men scurried over and nervously assured me that Jim was a kook. Great. Why didn't I feel reassured? \n\n                         The Joke Stops Here              \n\n         Monday, I finally visited Fort Davis on the way back to El Paso, just to get a feel for the place. Things sounded quite sparky on the radio. Early that morning, reports said that someone fired at the bloodhounds, and that lawmen were closing in. I arrived about 2 p.m. and roosted for a while by the police roadblock at the entrance to the Davis Mountain Resort subdivision. In the distance rose the stark, rocky, mesquite-covered peaks that define this area. A couple of dozen sunburned, siege-weary reporters were hanging around in cars, and one explained that the resort itself was miles and miles away. Whatever was happening, we wouldn't be able to see it or hear it. \n\n         I took off and stopped for gas in the nearby town of Valentine. Inside I met an old codger named Clifford Beare, who had recently retired from the Jeff Davis County sheriff's department. I asked him if it would be hard for runaways to hide in treeless mountains. \n\n         \"Well, I guess, but you could hide. There's a lot of caves and stuff.\" \n\n         Did he think these guys would get caught? \n\n         \"I think they will,\" he said. \"Yes I do.\" \n\n          He was half right. About that time one fugitive, believed to be Mike Matson, was getting shot to death in a gun battle. The other, Keyes, appears to have got away, and Tuesday, the authorities scaled back the search for him, making vague noises about the terrain and wild animals finishing him off. \"He can ... only have a finite amount of food and water,\" said Mike Cox, who has been the state's spokesman throughout the siege. \n\n         What? Of all these people, Keyes is the only survivor who demands to be taken seriously. He started the violence; he never gave up; and he went out ready to blast away and die. They better hope something gets him, because if he does stagger out of those mountains alive, he's going to be biblically, nuttily, and unfunnily pissed.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the Republic of Texas?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_1", "options": ["The Republic of Texas is the far eastern part of the state that used to belong to France and was acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase.", "The Republic of Texas is a popular restaurant in Kilgore that serves only food produced in Texas.", "A group of activists who believe that Texas was illegally added as one of the United States.", "\"The Republic of Texas\" is the sarcastic name given to a run-down trailer park where a bunch of right wing Texas gun nuts lived."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did McLaren give himself up to police?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_2", "options": ["They told him that all the other members of ROT had been captured, including his son. He traded his own freedom for that of his son.", "The police were secretly on McLaren's side, so they \"accidentally\" let him escape.", "They told him he could sue the federal government over his ROT claims and then go to prison, or be shot then and there. He chose Plan A.", "McLaren was feeling extremely ill and needed medical attention - in fact, he died shortly thereafter."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the author feel about arriving in Texas after McLaren had surrendered?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_3", "options": ["He was relieved that the leader of the secessionists had been captured.", "He was determined to be an eyewitness to insurrection, and having missed all his other opportunities, he was disappointed to miss another.", "He was really mad about wasting so much effort getting to a place that wasn't going to yield a story.", "He was worried that missing this scoop would cost him his job, so he decided to go sniffing for some back stories."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who led the three factions of the ROT?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_4", "options": ["McLaren, Lowe and Johnson.", "Warmke, McLaren and Keyes.", "McLaren, Lowe and Warmke.", "McLaren, Keyes and Johnson."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author think of the rhetoric he heard at the meeting in Kilgore?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_5", "options": ["He thinks they are all nutcases, some scarier than others, but some of them are nice enough as beer-drinking companions.", "He thinks they are sincere in their beliefs, and after talking to them, he comes to agree with their opinions.", "He thinks they are pathological bullies who believe that if they scare enough people they will get exactly what they want, and once they take over Texas, they will go after New Mexico.", "He thinks they are all low life grifters, failures in every other walk of life who have nothing better to do than cause trouble."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where did the main action that the quthor missed out on take place?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_6", "options": ["Valentine.", "El Paso.", "Fort Davis.", "Waco."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does the author assess the one man who escaped from the Fort Davis standoff?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_7", "options": ["He thinks that having given law enforcement the slip, the escapee will go over the border into Mexico, get false papers, return to the US and stay quiet and out of trouble.", "He is surprised that this guy escaped, because he didn't seem that heroic - he was just another ROT \"soldier.\"", "He is a good example of someone who is never going to survive in the mesquite-covered peaks in the area surrounding Fort Davis. If the wild cougars don't get him, he'll starve to death.", "He is the worst possible one to escape, as he triggered the violence and is the most likely to survive the wilderness and come back more violent and crazier than ever."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What Texas towns did the author visit during his whirlwind tour?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_8", "options": ["El Paso, Waco, Pecos, and Valentine.", "El Paso, Kilgore, Valentine and Newark.", "Pecos, El Paso, Fort Davis and   Kilgore.", "Valentine, Fort Davis, Kilgore, and El Paso."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did the author particularly notice about the speeches of the ROT members in Kilgore?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_9", "options": ["Their arguments were a lot more sensible than he had thought. He learned a lot about local history from listening to them.", "They were largely deeply held conspiracy theories, and their fervent convictions convinced him that these cultists would be around for awhile.", "He noticed that all of them carried concealed weapons and an insignia that marked them as ROTers: a miniature silver star like a sheriff's badge tie tack.", "He noticed that if Texas provided better mental health care, most of these folks would not be free to walk around in society."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How many helicopters were dispatched to Fort Davis?", "question_unique_id": "20049_P6KJB4SZ_10", "options": ["None.", "Dozens of helicopters surrounded Fort Davis, since they were the best tool for controlling the situation with minimal loss of life.", "There was one U.N. helicopter and one helicopter that was put at the disposal of the author so that he could get the best view of what was going on.", "Just one, loaned by the U.N."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20057", "set_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "Big-Bang Theology", "year": "1998", "author": "Jim Holt", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Big-Bang Theology \n\n         Did God cause the big bang? That is what half a dozen new books about science and religion--whose authors range from a Reagan-administration official to an Israeli physicist to an elementary-particle-theorist-turned-Anglican-priest--are saying. The fact that the universe abruptly exploded into existence out of apparent nothingness some 15 billion years ago, they submit, means it must have had a supernatural creator. A couple of months ago the same claim was enthusiastically aired at a Washington conference sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center under the rubric \"Beyond the Death of God,\" with eminent thinkers such as Fred Barnes, Mona Charen, and Elliott Abrams in attendance. And the idea received a sympathetic hearing on William F. Buckley's show Firing Line a few weeks ago .              \n\n         The idea that only God could have caused the big bang is scarcely new. In fact, the big bang is probably the only idea in the history of science that was ever resisted because of its pro-God import. \n\n         For much of the modern era, scientists followed Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton in believing the cosmos to be eternal and unchanging. But in 1917, when Albert Einstein applied his theory of relativity to space-time as a whole, his equations implied that the universe could not be static; it must be either expanding or contracting. This struck Einstein as grotesque, so he added to his theory a fiddle factor called the \"cosmological constant\" that eliminated the implication and held the universe still. \n\n         It was an ordained priest who took relativity to its logical conclusion. In 1927, Georges Lemaître of the University of Louvain in Belgium worked out an expanding model of the universe. Reasoning backward, he proposed that at some definite point in the past it must have originated from a primeval atom of infinitely concentrated energy. Two years later, Lemaître's model was confirmed by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who had observed that the galaxies everywhere around us were receding. Both theory and empirical evidence pointed to the same verdict: The universe had an abrupt beginning in time. \n\n          Churchmen rejoiced. Proof of the biblical account of creation had dropped into their laps. Pope Pius XII, opening a conference at the Vatican in 1951, declared that this scientific theory of cosmic origins bore witness \"to that primordial 'Fiat lux ' uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation. ... Hence, creation took place in time, therefore there is a creator, therefore God exists!\" \n\n         Marxists, meanwhile, gnashed their teeth. Quite aside from its religious aura, the new theory contradicted their belief in the infinity and eternity of matter--one of the axioms of Lenin's dialectical materialism--and was accordingly dismissed as \"idealistic.\" The Marxist physicist David Bohm rebuked the developers of the theory as \"scientists who effectively turn traitor to science, and discard scientific facts to reach conclusions that are convenient to the Catholic Church.\" Atheists of a non-Marxist stripe were also recalcitrant. \"Some younger scientists were so upset by these theological trends that they resolved simply to block their cosmological source,\" commented the German astronomer Otto Heckmann, a prominent investigator of cosmic expansion. The dean of the profession, Sir Arthur Eddington, wrote, \"The notion of a beginning is repugnant to me ... I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang. ... The expanding Universe is preposterous ... incredible ... it leaves me cold .\" \n\n         Even some believing scientists were troubled. The cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle simply felt that an explosion was an undignified way for the world to begin, rather like \"a party girl jumping out of a cake.\" In a BBC interview in the 1950s, Hoyle sardonically referred to the hypothesized origin as \"the big bang.\" The term stuck. \n\n         Einstein overcame his metaphysical scruples about the big bang not long before his death in 1955, referring to his earlier attempt to dodge it by an ad hoc theoretical device as \"the greatest blunder of my career.\" As for Hoyle and the rest of the skeptics, they were finally won over in 1965, when two scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey accidentally detected a pervasive microwave hiss that turned out to be the echo of the big bang (at first they thought it was caused by pigeon droppings on their antenna). If you turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white-speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the cosmogonic event. What greater proof of the reality of the big bang--you can watch it on television! \n\n         Since the '60s, scientists have been busy working out, and feuding over, the details of the big-bang cosmology. But God is not in the details--his existence is deducible from the mere fact that there is a world at all. So goes the cosmological argument , one of the three traditional arguments toward a Supreme Being. (Click to read the ontological argument and the teleological argument .) \n\n          The reasoning starts off like this: \n\n         1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.              \n\n         2) The universe began to exist.              \n\n         3) Therefore the universe has a cause of its existence. (Click to learn more about the surprising Islamic origins of this argument and what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say about it.) \n\n         There are many options for attacking the logic of this cosmological argument, and contemporary opponents of theism have tried them all. \n\n         If everything needs a cause for its existence, then so does God. (More frequently heard in the form \"But Mummy, who made God?\") This objection fails because it gets Premise 1 wrong. The premise does not say that everything needs a cause but that everything that begins to exist does. God never began to exist--he is eternal. So he does not need a cause for his existence. \n\n                         Maybe the universe had a natural cause. But the big bang could not have been caused by prior physical processes. That is because it began with pointlike singularity , which, according to relativity theory, is not a \"thing\" but a boundary or an edge in time. Since no causal lines can be extended through it, the cause of the big bang must transcend the physical world. \n\n          Well, then, perhaps it had no cause at all. It is hard to think of a principle more amply confirmed by our experience than that things do not just pop into existence uncaused. No one can really pull a rabbit out of a hat. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Yet something of the sort does seem to happen in the quantum world, where, owing to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, tiny \"virtual particles\" spontaneously appear and disappear all the time. An entire universe could do the same, claim some cosmologists. Calling themselves \"nothing theorists,\" they have produced models showing how the cosmos could have burst into being all by itself out of a patch of \"false vacuum,\" or a 3-D geometry of zero volume, or--in the case of Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University--literally nothing at all (this took Vilenkin four pages of math). So the universe is summoned out of the void by the laws of physics. But this can't be right. The laws of physics are just a set of equations, a mathematical pattern. They cannot cause the world to exist. As Stephen Hawking has written, \"A scientific theory ... exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean).\" \n\n                         Just because the universe is temporally finite does not mean it had a beginning. Speaking of Hawking, this is his famous \"no boundary\" proposal. \"So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator,\" Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time . \"But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning or end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?\" In Hawking's quantum cosmology, the pointlike singularity of the big bang is replaced by a smooth hemisphere in which space and time are commingled. \"Time zero\" becomes an arbitrary point, not a true beginning; it is no more a boundary than the North Pole is. \n\n         Hawking's proposal is extremely popular with laymen who are hostile to the cosmological argument, judging from the mail I get. Apparently they enjoy being baffled by \"imaginary time,\" a theoretical fiction Hawking uses to redescribe the big bang so that there is no beginning. In real time there still is a beginning. Sometimes Hawking says that imaginary time is \"earlier\" than real time, which is a logical contradiction; sometimes he suggests it might be more real than real time, which is an absurdity. \n\n         OK, so the universe had a beginning, and hence a First Cause, which is, moreover, transcendent. How does it follow that this cause is God, or even God-like? Now there is an acute question. Philosopher Thomas Nagel has suggested that something humanly inconceivable lies behind the big bang. What, if anything, can really be inferred about the First Cause? Well, suppose that it were something mechanical. An ideal machine produces its effect either always or never; it does not just suddenly start to operate at some moment, unless someone gives it a kick. If a mechanical cause produced the universe at time T, there is no reason it should not have done so at time T minus 1. The argument can be repeated to T minus infinity: A mechanical cause would have either produced the universe from eternity or not at all. But the universe was created at one moment out of an infinity of other indistinguishable moments. This implies that the moment was freely chosen, and hence that the creator had a will, and to that extent a personal nature. And power. \n\n         Yet the big-bang cosmology has one unwelcome consequence for theists. It seems to suggest that the Creator was a bungler. A singularity is inherently lawless. Anything at all can come out of one. It is exceedingly unlikely that a big-bang singularity should give rise to a universe whose conditions are precisely suitable for life, let alone the best of all possible worlds. As the American philosopher Quentin Smith has pointed out, \"If God created the universe with the aim of making it animate, it is illogical that he would have created as its first state something whose natural evolution would lead with high probability only to inanimate states .\" The only way God could have ensured the appearance of creatures in his own image was by repeatedly intervening and making adjustments to steer the evolution of the world away from lifeless disaster. But \"a competent Creator does not create things he immediately or subsequently needs to set aright,\" observes Smith. (Remember, we are talking about the universe's physical infrastructure, not sinners with free will.) \n\n         So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil's Bible . Turning to Genesis I read: \"In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What evidence can the ordinary person observe from the time of the sudden expansion of the universe?", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_1", "options": ["The aurora borealis is caused by photons left over from the sudden expansion.", "A portion of the grainy static on  a television screen set between channels is caused by light particles left over from the event.", "When your microwave makes a hissing sound while it cooks your food, that is caused by reverberating sound waves from the sudden expansion.", "The sunspot cycle is caused by continuing pressure waves of particles from the sudden expansion."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Albert Einstein's opinion of the big bang theory change over time?", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_2", "options": ["Originally, Einstein did not see a need to consider the possibility of an expanding/contracting universe, but once he realized that his equations required it, it became his most important discovery.", "Einstein believed from the start that the universe was expanding, though he did not understand why, and he never changed this opinion.", "He originally added a fudge factor to his relativity equations to avoid the need to consider an expanding/contracting universe. Near the end of his life, he said that adding that fudge factor was the biggest mistake of his career.", "He assigned a graduate student to determine the value of the universe's expansion/contraction  coefficient in his relativity equations and the student reported it as 0, which Einstein accepted. Later, he said it was his biggest error."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What unusual positions did religious authorities and scientists find themselves in as evidence for the big bang mounted in the 1950s?", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_3", "options": ["Religious authorities were pleased that the big bang appeared to require the existence of a god to trigger it. Scientists immediately set about trying to show experimentally whether god existed or not.", "Religious authorities could take a pro-science position, since it supported their preconceived notion that a deity must have triggered the big bang; scientists found themselves denying a scientific finding to resist admitting that a god existed, which was unscientific.", "Marxists were forced to confront their atheism and adopt belief in a god, while the church confessed that if the big bang theory was true, and demanded a god to start it, then evolution was also true.", "Scientists were forced to admit that some of the other claims of miracles by the church merited investigation, while the church quickly sanctioned the teaching of evolution."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is one of the key arguments against the apparent existence of a god who triggered the expansion of the universe?", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_4", "options": ["One must next answer the question of why a God who created a whole universe would spend so much time alternately hectoring and helping the people of one minor planet (Earth) in a minor spiral galaxy (ours).", "It stands to reason that if God could trigger one universe to come into being, he could trigger others. Where are the other universes?", "One must next answer the question of who created the god that set off the big bang.", "If God initiated the big bang, then he would have been destroyed by the initial extremely rapid expansion."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Stephen Hawking explain what caused the big bang?", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_5", "options": ["He believes that our universe could be, for example, an atom in the leg of someone's kitchen chair in a much larger universe, and came into being when the tree grew the cell that ended up in the wood of the chair.", "He theorizes that the universe is self-contained and without boundaries, which means it woudl have no beginning or end, which means that time has no real beginning, the beginning is an arbitrary choice.", "After an entire career in cosmology, he concluded that the sourceof the trigger for the big bang is unknowable.", "He theorizes that in a self-contained system, particles can pop in and out of existence as quantum theory predicts, and that the universe burst into being on its own from a patch of false vacuum."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where does the author come down on the question of what triggered the big bang?", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_6", "options": ["As far as the author is concerned, no one can determine which theory is correct by experiment, and in the end, it does not affect his daily life, so he doesn't care which theory is right.", "He believes that the explanation that a Creator triggered the big bang is the best one.", "He makes a joke about it, quoting a satirical version of the bible, which indicates that he has no idea which theory is right and is sick of thinking about it.", "He believes that string theory explains the observed facts best. But string theory is complicated and difficult to understand."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the difference between Quentin Smith's and Alexander Vilenkin's arguments against god as the big bang initiator? ", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_7", "options": ["Smith thinks it unlikely God would have set in motion an evolutionary process with such a low probability of producing intelligent life, while Vilenkin suggests, via a series of elegant mathematical proofs, that an ideal machine of unknown origin, but with no agency or power, could have done the job.", "Smith thinks it unlikely God would have set in motion an evolutionary process with such a low probability of producing intelligent life, while Vilenkin suggests, via a series of elegant mathematical proofs, that the original singularity that became the universe simply burst into being from nothing.", "Smith believes that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle guaranteed that the universal singularity would,by random chance, come to exist; while Vilenkin believes that an alien - not a god - from another universe already created, triggered the big bang for our own universe.", "Vilenkin thinks it unlikely God would have set in motion an evolutionary process with such a low probability of producing intelligent life, while Smith  suggests, via a series of elegant mathematical proofs, that the original singularity that became the universe simply burst into being from nothing."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did communists feel about evidence for the big bang theory?", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_8", "options": ["Because communists were looked down on and frequently harassed in the US, they  kept a low profile, and did not comment on matters of science.", "They were ok with it because they had bigger concerns, like seizing the means of production and advancing the interests of the proletariat.", "Communists were generally people of the Eastern Orthodox faith, so they were happy that there was evidence of a god.", "They were quite put out because it went against their faith in the infinity and eternity of matter."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What confirming evidence did an American astronomer find for the big bang theory advanced by a Belgian in the early 20th century?", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_9", "options": ["Through astronomical observations, the American confirmed the location of the edge of the universe and documented the continuing creation of new space at the expanding boundary.", "Through astronomical observations, the American confirmed that galaxies visible from Earth were all moving away, which meant the universe was expanding.", "Through astronomical observations, the American confirmed that galaxies visible from Earth were all moving toward us, which meant the universe was expanding.", "By using the Hubble telescope, the American confirmed that visible celestial objects were all moving away from Earth, indicating continued expansion of the universe."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did scientists prior to the 20th century think about the big bang theory?", "question_unique_id": "20057_2A64L9RZ_10", "options": ["Their idea of \"the universe\" was rather more limited, since they did not have access to good optical telescopes. What they thought of as \"the universe,\" we think of as \"the Milky Way Galaxy.\"", "Even with their crude telescopes, pre-20th century astronomers could observe that objects were moving apart from each other, so they believed the universe was expanding - they just didn't know why.", "Most early astronomers were Christians. They just assumed that God had created the universe, as indicated in Genesis.", "They thought the universe was static, but this was before the big bang theory was proposed."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20062", "set_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "Eyes on the Prize", "year": "1998", "author": "David Edelstein", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Eyes on the Prize \n\n         These days, studios are inordinately attentive to my viewing habits. As a member of the National Society of Film Critics, which votes a slate of year-end prizes, I'm fielding calls from eager publicists who want to make sure I've seen all those award-worthy movies featuring all those award-worthy performances. I've tried to stay mum, so as to keep my voting options open, but it's hard for a guy brimming with opinions to be circumspect. Beloved ? A worthy effort. Oprah? Worthiness incarnate; I feel unworthy even to sit in judgment. Meryl Streep in Dancing at Lughnasa ? Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters ? Leonardo DiCaprio in Celebrity ? Damn worthy actors. (I enthused about DiCaprio when the sour Celebrity opened the New York Film Festival in September; since it shows up in theaters this week, you might want to click here so that I don't have to quote myself.) \n\n         Streep should be awarded a rubber chicken for irradiating us with her yokel devotion in One True Thing (1998), but in Dancing at Lughnasa she goes a long way toward winning back her good (well, pretty good) name. As Kate Mundy, the stick-in-the-mud schoolteacher who presides over four younger, unmarried sisters in 1936 Donegal, Ireland, she holds her facial muscles tense and signals with her eyes her exhaustion from keeping them so fiercely in place. It is a terrible responsibility, upholding her society's values and preventing her siblings and Michael, the illegitimate son of her youngest sister, Christina (Catherine McCormack), from descending into chaos and impoverishment. Not to mention the fact that she's regarded by all as a stupid goose--or, as they call her in town, mocking her sexlessness, \"the gander.\" \n\n         Streep's performance is layered and compelling, but the film doesn't click. Closely based on Brian Friel's play, it wilts in translation the way Friel's potent but static dramas always do. On stage, every character, every prop, every interjection has a precise symbolic function; on film, those elements no longer stand out in relief. In Dancing at Lughnasa (it's pronounced LOO-nassa), the sisters reside in a sterile and repressive Ireland--but one in which the pagan past continues to bubble up, most visibly in the harvest feast of Lughnasa, when peasants take to the hills to build fires, drink to even greater excess than usual, and dance orgiastically. The rite is liberating but also frightening: Remove a cork from a bottle so pressurized, and the contents are apt to explode. \n\n         The story, narrated by the now-grown Michael in the shopworn manner of The Glass Menagerie , is set in motion by the return of the boy's Uncle Jack (Michael Gambon) from Africa, where he has toiled as a missionary priest. Delusional, barely remembering his English, Jack becomes a rambling (and, to the local priest, horrific) spokesman for paganism, encouraging all his sisters to emulate Christina and have \"children of love.\" \n\n          There isn't much else in the way of a plot. Kate's position at the school, which is overseen by the local priest, is imperiled by the subversive presence of her brother. Michael's handsome dad (Rhys Ifans) roars back on a motorcycle to flirt with marriage to Christina: Will he stay or go fight the Fascists in Spain? Each sister chafes in her own way under Kate's oppressive rule--especially Rose (Sophie Thompson), the \"simple\" one, who might or might not be having an affair with a man whose wife and children have abandoned him for London. A weaving factory is opening nearby and threatens the household income. In venerable Chekhovian fashion, what happens on the surface only hints at the titanic plates that shift beneath, but the actresses--especially Streep, Thompson, Kathy Burke, and Brid Brennan--are supreme at conveying what's at stake. They create an indelibly glowering ensemble. \n\n         So why isn't Dancing at Lughnasa more involving? It's probably because the director, Pat O'Connor, can't tell the difference between images that express Friel's themes and Hibernian wallpaper, and because his idea of expansive, pictorial beauty proves no substitute for Friel's powerfully compressed stage pictures. In the theater, the radio that crackles on and off signals a world elsewhere; and when it's repaired and the stage is flooded with music and the sisters--beaten down, confronted with only the grimmest of economic and social prospects--begin to dance and then lose themselves in the freedom of the dance, the moment is truly cathartic. On-screen it means the movie's almost over. \n\n         People think I'm kidding when I say that my favorite film is The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but I can't imagine how I'd have survived an especially grisly puberty without the comfort of watching Boris Karloff express his anguish to an uncomprehending world through a misshapen body and halting language. Few films have ever offered so inspired a blend of sentimentality, Grand Guignol horror, and sophisticated camp, or such deliriously inventive laboratory bric-a-brac. The film's director, James Whale, has long been venerated for this and other droll '30s entertainments, among them The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933). Lately, he has also been scrutinized for being openly homosexual in an era when gay directors, such as George Cukor, kept that part of their lives rigidly compartmentalized. But not even David Ehrenstein in his trenchantly gossipy new book on the Hollywood closet, Open Secret , wants to make the case that Whale was penalized for his sexual preferences. If anything, the director seems to have suffered from a surfeit of dignity, proving too proud to overcome the loss of a powerful patron and a couple of ambitious flops. Comfortably rich, he took to painting and traveling before a series of strokes drove him to drown himself in his swimming pool--a suicide, though that fact was concealed from the public for 25 years. \n\n                         Gods and Monsters , based on Father of Frankenstein , a novel by Christopher Bram, explores the last days of the director (Ian McKellen) through the prism of a (fictional) friendship with a handsome, muscular, and heterosexual groundskeeper, Boone (Brendan Fraser). Critics have been unanimous in predicting statuettes in McKellen's future. Why? The movie is psychologically thin, artistically flabby, and symbolically opaque. Whale's Frankenstein films weren't personal testaments, but in Gods and Monsters they're raided for murky fantasy sequences. In one, the groundskeeper is the monster staggering around with Whale in his arms; in another, Whale is laid out on a laboratory slab being operated on by the groundskeeper. What's the metaphor? The script, meanwhile, is the stuff of bad two character plays, with spurious excuses for conflict (Boone storms out when Whale speaks tenderly of the naked, young men who once populated his pool) and a long, climactic monologue about a (fictional) wartime trauma that ostensibly shocked Whale into keeping his past under wraps. In Bram's novel, Boone is vaguely dangerous, a plausible suspect in Whale's death, but Fraser plays him (ingratiatingly) as a lovable lunk, and the conception removes whatever tension the material might have had. \n\n         As Whale, McKellen wears his elegance lightly. His face is fascinatingly two tiered: lean in long shot, in close-up its features distend to the point of acromegaly, the mouth going slack with lust. But Whale's plangent ruminations are slack as well: \"I've spent much of my life outrunning the past, and now it floods all over,\" he tells Boone, in what is surely the most generic line for a \"memory play\" ever written. \"Something about your face makes me want to tell the truth.\" All this mawkishness would likely have annoyed the real Whale, who exited the world on his own terms and steered clear, in his art, of banality. \n\n         W>aking Ned Devine is this year's stab at The Full Monty (1997), which made more than $100 million and even snagged an Oscar nomination. Set in a quaint olde Irish seacoast village, it tells the story of an elderly lottery player, Jackie O'Shea (Ian Bannen), who learns that one of his fifty-odd neighbors holds the winning ticket to a 7 million pound drawing. By a process of elimination, he and his buddy Michael O'Sullivan (David Kelly) end up at the remote stone house of Ned Devine--whom they find dead in his armchair with the ticket between his fingers, the shock of his windfall having felled him. As Devine has no living relations, it makes sense for the impoverished old men to cook up a scheme by which Michael will assume the dead fisherman's identity, and the pair will divide the money between themselves. \n\n         It was no surprise to read that Kirk Jones, the film's writer and director, doesn't hail from a small town in the Irish Republic or anywhere close. He makes TV commercials in London. Deciding he'd like to make an eccentric regional comedy with universal themes, he journeyed to a village in Ireland, set himself up in the pub, and took notes on what he saw and heard. Then he wrote a script that's one part Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), one part Preston Sturges' Christmas in July (1940), and about five parts synthetic whimsy. \n\n         The movie is a passable entertainment--call it The Half Monty . It has standard issue (but funny) farcical sight gags and a score of panpipes to provide the requisite undercurrent of Celtic melancholy. There's a witchy Margaret Hamilton type (Eileen Dromey) who rides some sort of electric wheelchair and attempts to spoil the whole caper. There's also a stock ingénue (Susan Lynch) who loves the town's endearing pig farmer (James Nesbitt) but won't marry him because he smells so bad--and I'm not oversimplifying. Waking Ned Devine might have been a snooze if Jones hadn't stocked it with a slew of old actors with magically lived-in visages. The owlish Bannen can twinkle without looking dear--there's something saturnine in that face. As his Ed Norton-ish sidekick, Kelly walks off--or, rather, rides off--with the picture, his skeletal frame planted buck naked on a motorcycle as he rushes to reach Devine's house before the man from the lottery. I see a future for elderly male actors willing to shed their clothes for laughs, but I don't see myself in the audience. \n\n         The term \"slice of life\" has come to mean dreary naturalism, but for the superb Richard LaGravenese, who wrote and directed Living Out Loud , that slice includes fantasy, fairy tale connections, sultry musical interludes, bridges that lead out, and bridges that lead nowhere. The movie, one of the year's most pleasant surprises, is the antithesis of Todd Solondz's Happiness , a humanist's answer to Solondz's evident conviction that life is all dead ends. When her cardiologist husband (Martin Donovan) leaves her, Judith Nelson (Holly Hunter) goes out into the world, her pain making her receptive to everything and everyone--from the elevator man (Danny DeVito) who returns her friendship with uninvited amorousness to the torch singer (Queen Latifah) who takes her to after-hours clubs, where she dances ecstatically with young women. Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you. The movie made me remember why I like Holly Hunter. (I don't always remember.) Her delivery isn't moist--it's prickly and blunt, and she can jabber convincingly, so that the jabbering takes on a life of its own and leaves her (sometimes horrified) in the dust. I might even vote for her.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How does the author transition from discussing \"Dancing at Lughnasa\" to discussing \"Gods and Monsters\" ?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_1", "options": ["He stops to analyze the impact of the movie \"Living Out Loud\" on him when he was a teenager.", "He just skips from discussing one movie to discussing another without any transition at all.", "He first discusses an unrelated play by Brian Friel.", "He first discusses another movie that was made by the man who is the subject of Gods and Monsters."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is one of the author's main criticisms of \"Dancing at Lughnasa\" ?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_2", "options": ["Meryl Streep does a good job, but she can't carry the movie all by herself, and the rest of the casting is dreadful.", "The title doesn't seem to have anything to do with the movie, other than throwing out a random Irish place name. ", "The director has done a poor job of translating a precisely staged play to the looser atmosphere of a movie set, thus losing the crisp symbolic meanings conveyed by every noise and object on the stage.", "Meryl Streep gives an uncharacteristically dull and unconvincing performance."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Lughnasa have to do with the plot of the movie, \"Dancing at Lughnasa\" ?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_3", "options": ["Lughnasa is an Irish festival  where the normally disciplined or repressed villagers can let it all hang out. The family that Streep heads in the film is also managed very strictly, and when the Streep character's brother appears on the scene, he ends up playing the same chaotic, yet potentially freeing role as dancing at the feast.", "Lughnasa is the last name of the family of sisters that Streep's character heads. All the sisters have worked hard and denied themselves pleasure for years, but they learn to let go and live a little.", "Lughnasa is a site in Ireland, like Craig-na-Dun in Scotland, from which witches can travel through rings of standing stones. Dancing there indicates the desire to be free, and the movie shows how the family explodes apart under stress.", "An elder from the village of Lughnasa, where the story takes place, gives Streep's character wise advice about how to handle her sisters and keep everyone moving forward."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the subject of the film \"Gods and Monsters\" kill himself?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_4", "options": ["This seems to have been his response to having repeated strokes.", "Because his homsexuality was made public and he was blacklisted from the better Hollywood studios.", "Like so many other tragic figures in Hollywood, after a couple of movie flops, he became depressed, started taking drugs and died of an overdose.", "The announcement of his drowning death was delayed for 25 years, during which detectives sought to get to the bottom of death that they felt was a murder, not a suicide."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to the author, what is the best part about the movie \"Gods and Monsters\" ?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_5", "options": ["The scene where Boone carries Whale around in his arms is both creepy and artistic.", "The actor portraying Whale has an interesting face.", "The tension between the two main characters keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.", "The mawkish, sentimental ending represents Whale's state mind before his demise very well."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What film does the author refer to as \"The Half Monty\" ?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_6", "options": ["\"Beloved\"", "\"Waking Ned Devine\"", "\"Celebrity\"", "The movie starring Ian McKellen"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do two of the four films discussed in detail have in common?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_7", "options": ["Ian McKellen starts in two of them.", "Richard LaGravenese directed two of them.", "They are set in Ireland.", "Two of them won Oscars."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author think of Waking Ned Devine?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_8", "options": ["It has all the hallmarks of a cult classic.", "All the characters are basically happy, which never makes for good drama.", "It's watchable, but nothing special.", "The aged actors playing the roles are a real snooze."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the title, \"Waking Ned Devine\" refer to?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_9", "options": ["Ned Devine has no TV or phone, and his neighbors want to wake him up to what is going on in the village.", "Ned Devine died without heirs or a will, and his neighbors are collecting money to hold a proper wake for him in the village pub.", "Ned Devine is dead, and a couple of old schemers plan to impersonate him to collect on a winning ticket he holds.", "Eileen Dromey's character is in love with Ned Devine, but he is  oblivious to it, and his friends attempt to awaken him to romance."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author indicate that Holly Hunter's character does in the movie he reviews that she stars in?", "question_unique_id": "20062_TBM0EP2G_10", "options": ["She has an unhealthy obsession with getting back th husband who left her.", "She has an affair with the elevator man.", "Gives off a sultry, sexy air that makes the whole film glow.", "Talks so much that her mouth is out ahead of her brain."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20063", "set_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "Kosovo Con Games", "year": "1999", "author": "William Saletan", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Kosovo Con Games \n\n         For weeks, critics of the war in Yugoslavia have pronounced it unwinnable. The atrocities continue unabated , they say. Air power alone will never get the job done. It's another Vietnam. President Clinton has blown it. Everything we do makes the situation worse. Whether Clinton and his allies can win the war remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: They can't win the debate over the war as long as critics are allowed to rig it with the following hidden premises: \n\n                         A. Selective Scrutiny              \n\n                         1. Policies. Critics observe that many things have gone badly since the air war began: Ethnic Albanians have been killed and expelled from Kosovo and anti-American nationalism has grown in Russia. It's easy to associate bad outcomes with the current policy. But critics seldom apply the same kind of scrutiny to alternative policies. If NATO had forsworn the use of force against the Serbs, what would the Serbs ultimately have done to the Kosovar Albanians? If NATO had launched a ground war, what would Russia be doing now? If, as critics observe, the Serbs have managed to cleanse Kosovo in less than four weeks, what difference could NATO have made by beginning a ground force buildup (which takes considerable time) a month ago? \n\n                         2. Policy-makers. American reporters think their job is to examine U.S. policy-makers not foreign policy-makers. So they discount Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's behavior as an objective consequence of Clinton's subjective decisions. When Serbian ethnic cleansing follows NATO bombing, reporters treat the Serbian action not as the product of free will but as a reaction determined by NATO's action. So while journalists on the ground report on Serbian atrocities, journalists in the studios and the newsrooms in effect pass the blame to NATO and Clinton. \n\n         This bias has produced a bizarre blame-America-first spin on the right. \"We have ignited the very human rights catastrophe the war was started to avoid,\" declared Pat Buchanan on Face the Nation . Columnist Arianna Huffington compared Kosovo to Waco, arguing that just as Clinton's actions six years ago \"precipitated\" the murder-suicides by the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, his intervention in Kosovo \"has unwittingly produced one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of the 20 th century.\" While some conservatives allege that Clinton's unnecessary belligerence provoked the Serbs to ethnic cleansing, others say his timidity about using ground troops \"emboldened\" the Serbs to the same effect. Clinton even gets the blame for Russian hostility. On Meet the Press , Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., accused Clinton of \"pushing Russia into a corner and putting them in a position where they're no longer able to do anything but to react in an aggressive way towards our action.\" \n\n                         3. Moral actors. When the Serbs butcher another 50 Kosovar Albanians or drive another 100,000 out of Kosovo, it's a dog-bites-man story. When NATO bombs what it thought was a military convoy and instead hits a caravan of civilian refugees, killing scores, it's a man-bites-dog story. For several days, the media treated the casualties caused by NATO as the lead story from Kosovo, overshadowing far greater casualties caused during that time by the Serbs. \"This may have cost NATO the moral high ground,\" declared John McLaughlin, invoking the moral-equivalence formula usually despised by conservatives. Meanwhile, the Serbs' role in pushing the refugees onto the road in the middle of a war zone was scarcely mentioned. \n\n                         B. Sleight-of-Hand Inferences              \n\n                         4. Unachieved to unachievable. Today's media report news instantaneously and expect it to be made instantaneously as well. In less than two weeks, their verdict on the bombing of Yugoslavia leapt from unfulfilled objectives to failure to impossibility. Since air power hasn't brought the Serbs to their knees in four weeks, the media conclude that it never will. Congressional Republicans have decided it's \"doomed to failure,\" according to Fred Barnes. Never mind that under NATO's plan, the bombing will become more severe each week. \n\n                         5. Vietnam to Kosovo. Critics constantly compare Kosovo to Vietnam. They infer two lessons from Vietnam: that \"gradual escalation\" never works and that \"bombing\" can't break an enemy's will. The trick in invoking such analogies is to ignore the differences: that the war in Kosovo is being waged by 19 countries against one; that no superpower is willing to prop up the targeted country; and that today's air power and surveillance are vastly more precise than the \"bombing\" technology used in Vietnam. \n\n                         6. Sinner to sin. Critics on the right argue that because Clinton is untrustworthy, so is the war. As George Will put it last week, the contempt of court citation against Clinton for falsely denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky is \"a timely reminder of the mendacity that drenches his presidency, including his Balkan policy.\" Meanwhile, critics on the left argue that because the United States failed to intervene in Rwanda, its intervention in Kosovo is morally suspect and probably racist. \n\n                         C. Hidden Dichotomies              \n\n                         7. Empirical/moral. Centuries ago, scientific philosophers invented a strict separation between talking about the way the world is and talking about the way it ought to be. Today's media, following this premise, separate \"editorial\" from \"news\" judgments. The only standard by which \"news\" organizations feel comfortable evaluating a policy is success or failure, not right or wrong. So the media's consensus about Kosovo is that NATO's policy is \"not working.\" As Tim Russert put it to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott on Meet the Press , \"The atrocities continue. What success can you point to that any of your strategy has worked?\" The alternative perspective goes overlooked: that the question is what NATO must do, that atrocities are a challenge rather than a verdict, and that NATO should persevere precisely because they continue. \n\n                         8. Political/military. Critics say Clinton should have destroyed Serbian TV networks by now and never should have sworn off ground troops. They deride these as \"political decisions\" and mock NATO for refusing to bomb Milosevic's palace because it contains cultural treasures, including a Rembrandt. \"The idea that Italy and Greece object to ground troops and therefore we shouldn't do what is necessary to win this war, is, in my view, ridiculous,\" protested Bill Kristol on This Week . But what's the definition of winning? Clinton and other NATO leaders say they're not just seeking a one-time victory over Milosevic. They're trying to develop what is essentially an international policing consortium. This is a political as well as military project. It entails compromising with allies who are more cautious about applying force and authorizing targets. Otherwise, the United States would have to police the world alone, which is unsustainable politically (thanks in part to vociferous opposition from many of these same critics), not to mention militarily. \n\n                         9. Harm/help. Skeptics maintain that the bombing isn't helping the Kosovars. \"I don't care about dropping any more bridges into the Danube River,\" Buchanan fumed on Face the Nation . \"I don't know how that helps those people\" in Kosovo. The question, he argued, should be \"What is the best way to help these people and save these lives? Not how we can bomb another oil plant or oil refinery.\" Minutes later, host Bob Schieffer ended the show by noting that the Kosovars were still being purged and asking \"whether what we are doing is doing any good.\" \n\n         This dichotomy rules out the fallback strategy that NATO and U.S. officials have articulated from the outset: to make the cost of Milosevic's \"victory\" outweigh the rewards. Conservatives used to defend this concept (which they called \"deterrence\") when it was preached and practiced by President Reagan. If the punishment you administer to the current troublemaker fails to stop him, the theory goes, at least it will make the next troublemaker think twice. \n\n                         D. Self-Fulfilling Doubts              \n\n                         10. Practical futility. The pundits' verdict is in: The war is \"doomed\" and \"already lost.\" On Late Edition , Wolf Blitzer observed that Milosevic \"doesn't give, after a month of this, any impression that he is backing down.\" Quoting a report that U.S. military leaders see no sign \"that Milosevic is changing his strategy or about to break,\" Russert asked Talbott, \"Are we losing this war?\" Other talking heads asserted that NATO is \"not united\" and won't be able to \"stand up\" as the conflict wears on. \"Time is not on our side,\" warned former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft on Late Edition . \"It is going to be very difficult to keep the alliance together.\" \n\n         Of course, the best way to assure that Milosevic doesn't break, that NATO comes apart, and that the United States loses the war is to predict that Milosevic won't break, that NATO will come apart, and that the United States will lose the war. These predictions bolster the Serbs' morale while undermining NATO's. As Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., observed on Face the Nation , \"Patience and resolve are as important a weapon today as actually the airstrikes are.\" \n\n                         11. Moral authority. Rather than call Clinton a liar, many pundits pass this off as a widespread perception by others. They call it a \"moral authority\" and \"public relations\" problem, asking how it will \"impact\" his \"ability to lead\" Americans and NATO in war. \"There is a common drum beat on the airwaves,\" a reporter asked Clinton on April 15, \"that you, personally, lack the moral authority to be commander in chief.\" New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd warned that Clinton \"does not inspire\" great \"loyalty,\" adding, \"He may have a conflict of interest if he sends in ground troops. It would be hard to save his skin and their skin at the same time.\" By questioning Clinton's moral authority in this pseudo-objective way, journalists destroy what's left of his moral authority. \n\n                         12. NATO credibility. Self-styled hawks fret that NATO will lose the war and thereby expose its impotence. This \"lumbering and clumsy\" alliance, incapable of \"managing such brush fires as Kosovo,\" could \"lose the Kosovo war in a month against the ruin of a rump state,\" warned columnist Charles Krauthammer. \"If the perception is that for 26 days tiny little Yugoslavia ... has withstood NATO and the United States,\" asked Russert, will NATO and the United States be exposed as \"a paper tiger\"? Russert's guest, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., grimly intoned, \"Many are predicting that this will be the funeral of NATO.\" And all because, in Krauthammer's words, Clinton \"staked the survival of the most successful alliance in history on bright new academic ideas cooked up far from the battlefields on which they now flounder.\" \n\n         Having defined anything less than the total recapture of Kosovo and the restoration of its refugees as a failure, Clinton's critics are ensuring that such failure will be interpreted as catastrophically as possible. As for their suggestion that NATO's credibility is too precious to be risked in war, you can understand their reluctance. Even tough guys have their Rembrandt.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is this article about?", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_1", "options": ["Why Clinton's strategy in Yugoslavia is such a disaster.", "Why Clinton's strategy in Rwanda should have provided a roadmap for a strategy for Kosovo.", "Types of bad faith arguments being made against the war in Yugoslavia.", "The fundamental fallacies in thinking that it is possible for a great power to ever successfully wage another war."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Based on the article, who is responsible for the bulk of the critcism of Clinton's strategies and why?", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_2", "options": ["It is exclusively the rabid conservatives, angry that Clinton was not impeached, who make it their mission to destroy him another way - by criticizing his actions in Yugolsavia.", "Russians used social media to stir up division in the US over NATO's attempts to quell the war in Yugoslavia, because it serves their interests for the free world to be in disarray.", "Granting that a few critiques come from the left, the right wing in America has  a big stake in tearing down Clinton's actions for political gain, and the media unskeptically allow this hypocritical behavior to enhance the TV drama. ", "The foreign policy establishment and even Congress were united in supporting Clinton, but Main Street, i.e. the normal, working American, was against it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Name two strategy / policy elements that the author identifies could become self-fulfilling prophecies.", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_3", "options": ["Saying that the US will lose the war, it will cause NATO to crumble, and that air bombardment is doomed to failure.", "Saying that the Serbian president will never give up and saying that the war in Yugoslavia will cause NATO to crumble.", "Saying that Russia will be upset and that the US will lose the war.", "Saying that blowing up bridges over the Danube won't help and that gradual escalation never works."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the author mean when he says that \"even tough guys have their Rembrandt\" ?", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_4", "options": ["This refers to Rembrandt's \"Man in the Golden Helmet,\" an inspiring symbol for victory in war, and the author mentions it because the right wingers want a more inspirational figure than the mendacious Bil Clinton to lead the war.", "He means that critics had no trouble slamming NATO for not bombing the Serbian president's palace, which housed Rembrandt, but these same critics wanted to protect their precious NATO from potential exposure as ineffective by not testing it.", "He means that even hardened military men can be moved by preserving a beautiful bridge over the Danube.", "He means that while the right wingers had no trouble letting Rwandans be slaughtered, they didn't want any white Serbians to be killed in the Yugoslavian war."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author think that civilian deaths inadvertently caused by NATO are more harshly criticized than the purposeful slaughter of Kosovars by Serbians?", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_5", "options": ["Because the latter is no more than one would expect, and the former is tragically novel.", "The author offers the opinion that any civilian casualty is a war crime, while the Serbian slaughter of Kosovars was just soldiers killing soldiers - a military thing.", "Because the former is on video, and the latter was later disproved.", "Because no one cares if a bunch of Muslim Kosovars get killed. What really matters is whether a few blonde-haired, blue-eyed people die."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the author's idea of the difference between the empirical and the moral argument for the war in Yugoslavia?", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_6", "options": ["The empirical argument says that the Serbians will join the new Russian Empire if they win the conflict. The moral argument says that the spread of communism must be prevented.", "The empirical argument takes a strategy as correct if it wins. The moral argument is that some goals are worth the struggle, whether or not they result in an easy win.", "The empirical approach requires analyzing the outcome before beginning based on feasible force projection. The moral approach says \"you go to war with the army have, not the army you wished for.\"", "The empirical argument says that we can forecast whether enough resources were applied by doing a linear regression on bombing casualties, while the moral argument says you just go in with overwhelming force to be sure of winning."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the author justify the American Commander in Chief giving in to some NATO ally requests?", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_7", "options": ["NATO came to America's aid on 9/11, so we owe NATO some deference in Yugoslavia.", "One must always consider the goal, and when the goal is getting rid of Milosevic without completely destroying Europe again, allies must be flexible.", "The author is Euro-centric and thinks that American excptionalism has taken our country into the weeds.", "America is trying to encourage NATO to share the burden of world policing in the future, so must treat them as true partners, and give in on some things, now."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the strategy of destroying infrastructure in Yugoloavia supposed to accomplish?", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_8", "options": ["It is supposed to make the cost of pursuing the war really high for the aggressor, and to not only weaken Serbia, but perhaps deter future aggressors.", "Bombing bridges at night is the only way to guarantee not killing civilians.", "Destroying infrastructure is less likely to trigger the Russians into joining the Serbs as allies than directly killing Serbs.", "Turning cities into rubble will later give both victor and vanquished projects that they can work together on, for healing."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which other section of this piece could #11, \"Moral Authority,\" fit under?", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_9", "options": ["It also fits in #6, \"Sinner to Sin.\" With Clinton, the author points out that \"sexual harassment was, for him, like winning the Vietnam War.\"", "It could fit under #3, \"Moral,\" because the right wingers trying to sow dissension in America have no Moral Authority.", "It could fit under \"Selective Scrutiny,\" because, as the author points out, Tom DeLay is a philanderer and a cheat, but he is a Republican, sono one cares.", "#10, \"Practical Futility.\" The premise of #11 is that saying Clinton lacks moral authority destroys the rest of his moral authority. That is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, the subject of #10."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the argument types presented in this article would be an appropriate place for an analogy about being given an \"F\" for the whole paper after turning in only the first page of a term paper for an early review?", "question_unique_id": "20063_HTQ2UAI6_10", "options": ["#1, Policies.", "Either #6, Sinner to Sin, or #7, Empirical/moral.", "#5, Vietnam to Kosovo.", "#4, Unachieved to unachievable. "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20030", "set_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "You Don't Tug on the Avenger's Cape", "year": "1999", "author": "Jeffrey Goldberg", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "You Don't Tug on the Avenger's Cape \n\n         Greetings, oh frustrated and bone-weary consumer! It is I, the great Shopping Avenger, who has pledged himself to the betterment of all humankind, or at least to that portion of humankind that shops at Circuit City and rents trucks from U-Haul. \n\n         The Shopping Avenger has much to discuss today: You will hear the tale of a Hasidic rabbi who suffered greatly at the hands of TWA, but who, due to his mystical and gentle nature, sought not the help of lawyers but instead the help of Shopping Avenger, who is a part-time kabalist and runs special discounts for clergy every Tuesday, and you will also learn the winning answer to the recent contest question \"How much Turtle Wax constitutes a year's supply of Turtle Wax?\" \n\n         But first, the Shopping Avenger would like to tell his own tale of consumer woe. Many of you might find this a shocking statement, but even the Shopping Avenger sometimes gets smacked upside the head by the evil forces of rampant capitalism. Granted, this seldom happens when the Shopping Avenger is wearing his cape and codpiece and special decals, but the Shopping Avenger seldom ventures outside the Great Hall of Consumer Justice in his cape and codpiece and special decals, on account of the fact that he doesn't want to get arrested. \n\n         What you should know is that by day the Shopping Avenger is a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan magazine, and it is in this guise that the Shopping Avenger sometimes finds himself holding the short end of the consumer stick. Whatever that means. \n\n         Take the following incident, which occurred at Heathrow airport, which, I am told, is somewhere in Europe. The Shopping Avenger, who was scheduled to transit home from the Middle East through Heathrow, was feeling ill and generally fed up at the end of his trip and so decided to upgrade himself, using his own money, to business class. The total cost of the ticket: $1,732. Remember that exorbitant sum. \n\n         The first flight, out of the Middle East, left late and arrived even later at Heathrow, though not too late to make the connection. However, the Shopping Avenger and several other passengers were met at the gate by a British Airways agent, who said that there was no time to make the connection, which was leaving from a different terminal. Technically, he admitted, there was enough time, but since British Airways was committed to \"on-time departures,\" the plane's doors would be closing early. The Shopping Avenger argued in his mild-mannered manner that British Airways did not, in fact, have a commitment to \"on-time departures\" because the originating flight did not depart on time. The Shopping Avenger received no answer to this statement. Instead, the Shopping Avenger was booked onto a later flight and so asked the agent if he could use a British Airways telephone to call Mrs. Shopping Avenger, who would be waiting for him at the other end. The agent directed the Shopping Avenger to the British Airways business-class lounge, where a telephone would be made available to him. \n\n         You, of course, know what happened next. The Shopping Avenger was told by a very nasty airline employee that only first-class passengers would be allowed to use the telephone. When the Shopping Avenger argued, in an increasingly less mild-mannered manner, that the call was necessitated by a British Airways screw up and, therefore, British Airways should pay for the call, he was told that pay phones could be found outside the lounge. This was when Shopping Avenger stated very loudly that for $1,732, he should be allowed to make a two-minute phone call. And it was the weekend! Weekend calling rates, for Pete's sake! \n\n         But British Airways is an insufferably greedy little company, and so the Shopping Avenger was given no recourse but to invoke the power of his high office. The Shopping Avenger asked this nasty lady if she had ever heard of the Shopping Avenger. To the Shopping Avenger's dismay, this was her answer: \"No.\" \n\n         What about                    Slate                 magazine? \"No.\" \n\n         Well, whatever. The Shopping Avenger, while not identifying himself as the Shopping Avenger--this would have meant changing into his codpiece and cape in the business-class lounge--informed this poorly informed British Airways employee that the Shopping Avenger was America's foremost consumer advocate (this is a lie, but she's English, so what does she know?) and that the Shopping Avenger would hear about this treatment and seek vengeance. \n\n         Well, did her tune ever change. Not exactly her tune--she remained as mean as a ferret, but she did let Shopping Avenger use her telephone. \n\n         The moral of this story for the world's airlines: Penny-pinching might make you rich, but it also gets you blasted in                    Slate                 magazine. The other moral: Superheroes should never travel without their codpiece under their pants. \n\n         There is only one airline the Shopping Avenger believes understands the fundamentals of customer service, and that is Southwest Airlines. But more on that in the next episode. First, this month's U-Haul outrage. The following letter contains perhaps the funniest story the Shopping Avenger has heard about U-Haul, and by now the Shopping Avenger has received upward of 6.7 million complaints about U-Haul. The story comes from one Susan Hwang: \n\n         \"A year ago, I, too, reserved a truck at U-Haul and get this--they said someone with my SAME NAME--Susan Hwang is really common--and going to the SAME SUBURB of Chicago, picked up my truck. Amazing!! They had to rent a bigger truck to me, which, of course cost more and at that point, they have you by the balls.\" \n\n         At least the anatomically confused Susan Hwang got her truck. Most of the Shopping Avenger's correspondents wind up having to rent from Ryder and Budget, who seem to keep extra trucks on hand in order to benefit from U-Haul's nefarious practice of overbooking. \n\n         On a semi-positive note, the Shopping Avenger did finally hear from Johna Burke, the U-Haul spokeswoman, who apologized for the inconvenience caused K., the . (For other U-Haul horror stories, click .) K., you'll recall, was left standing in the U-Haul parking lot when a credit-card reservation he'd made was dishonored by U-Haul. \"Mr. K.'s two day rental reservation should have been honored so long as he provided us with his credit card number, which we will assume was the case. This is what we at U-Haul call a 'confirmed reservation.' \" \n\n         Burke's letter, though, is filled with what we at Shopping Avenger call \"bullshit.\" \n\n         \"Once we have a confirmed reservation we should have moved heaven and earth to see that Mr. K.'s two day reservation was filled,\" Burke wrote. \n\n         Yes, of course they should have--but they never do. This is not Burke's fault. She is simply paid to explain the inexplicable. The Shopping Avenger has received 164--no exaggeration for effect in this instance--letters so far from people who say they had confirmed reservations with U-Haul, only to show up and find no truck waiting for them. The Shopping Avenger would like to hear from more--to show Burke and the bossmen at U-Haul the hollowness of their concept of \"confirmed reservations.\" \n\n         One more thing before we get to our tale of rabbinical woe: the winning answer to the recent contest question \"How much Turtle Wax comprises a year's supply of Turtle Wax?\" \n\n         Fifty-eight of you wrote in, 48 with the correct answer, which is, of course: \"Depends upon how many Turtles you wanna wax,\" in the words of one of our winners, Samir Raiyani. Or, as another of our winners, Karen Bitterman, wrote, it \"depends on the size of the turtle--and whether or not you park it in a covered space.\" \n\n         Unfortunately, because so many of you wrote in with the more or less correct answer, the Shopping Avenger is unable to award the contest prize, which was to be a year's supply of Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat. \n\n         Now to our hapless rabbi, Rabbi S., who wrote the Shopping Avenger seeking worldly justice in his case against TWA. The story of Rabbi S. is entirely typical of the airline industry--a minor problem made enormous by the cruelty and ignorance of employees who are, in theory, hired by the greedheads who run the airlines to take care of passengers. \n\n         Rabbi S., his wife, and kids arrived at Kennedy airport in time for his flight to Detroit, parked curbside, unloaded their luggage, and proceeded to the check-in counter. There the rabbi asked a TWA representative if he could leave his luggage by the counter for his wife to check in while he parked the car, to which he received a positive response and left to go park. No one told him, though, that he must first show his driver's license to the ticket agent.              \n\n         The ticket agent refused to check the rabbi's bags once he left, telling the wife that \"security reasons\" forbade him from checking the luggage of ticket holders who were not present. But then she told Rabbi S.'s wife: \"If you want, you can pay an extra $100 for the extra bags\"--i.e., charge his luggage to her ticket. \n\n         \"How could it be a security issue,\" Rabbi S. wrote the Shopping Avenger, \"if they're ready to take money for the bags?\" \n\n         Rabbi S. was running late (Kennedy airport is not a parking-friendly place), and his wife refused to check her bags without his bags. She was then told that she would miss the flight, and then her children began crying, and then she began crying. \n\n         Rabbi S. finally made it back to Terminal 25 minutes before the flight was scheduled to depart. His wife handed him one baby and took the other to the gate. \"The woman at the counter treated me like a piece of dirt,\" he wrote. \"First she said she's not sure whether the flight is still open. Then she took more than five minutes to look around and find someone who said, 'Yeah, I think we just closed it a minute ago.' ... In the meantime, my wife went to the gate and the people at the gate told her there's plenty of time for me--and let her wait outside the gate for me for another 15 minutes. Alas, my wife didn't realize that [I] could not come because of the luggage issue and the haughtiness of the people downstairs.\" \n\n         At the ticket counter, Rabbi S. was told that he wouldn't make this flight and that he should book himself on another. His wife and one of his children, meanwhile, got on the flight to Detroit. Rabbi S. had TWA book him on another flight, a Delta flight, and he schlepped--that's the only word for it--to the Delta terminal, only to be told that his was a \"voluntary\" transfer--he was late for his TWA flight--and so therefore he would have to pay an additional $300. \"My fault!?!? I'm thinking to myself, 'If your people would have been competent enough to tell me that I should show my license and courteous enough to put the luggage on for my wife, then I would be on a flight now with my family to Detroit, not roaming an airport with a starving baby being sent on a wild goose chase.\" \n\n         Here the story becomes as confusing as the Book of Leviticus, but suffice it to say that TWA continued to torture Rabbi S. for another day--finally forcing him to buy a new $400 ticket. \n\n         \"I have never in my life been treated so horribly,\" Rabbi S. wrote. \n\n         The Shopping Avenger contacted Jim Brown, a TWA spokesman, to discuss Rabbi S.'s case. To his surprise--the Shopping Avenger has not had very good experiences on TWA--Brown investigated the complaint and wrote: \"TWA has issued a credit for the value of Rabbi S.'s ticket for $244. In addition, a Customer Relations representative has been communicating with the rabbi on this incident and is sending him the difference between that ticket and the cost of a new ticket, $219, plus a letter of apology for the behavior of our representatives at Kennedy Airport. She is also enclosing four travel coupons valued at $75 each.\" \n\n         Brown, however, had no explanation for the behavior at the Kennedy ticket counter--entirely typical behavior that often makes the already unpleasant air travel experience completely unbearable. \n\n         In the next episode, the Shopping Avenger will tell the story of Southwest Airlines, the only airline that seems to actually care about customer service. But the Shopping Avenger needs your help! Keep those airline stories coming--and all those other stories, too--except computer stories. Let me say again, the Shopping Avenger does not fix computers. \n\n         One final request: The Shopping Avenger would like to hear from anyone who has actually eaten Rice-a-Roni and from anyone who could explain why it is known as \"the San Francisco treat.\" \n\n         Onward, shoppers!\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why would the Shopping Avenger eschew his specially described garb out on the street, and why might it get him arrested?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_1", "options": ["Because it would mark him as being a nutcase who might harm himself or others.", "Because he has done quite a few questionable things in his guise as the Shopping Avenger, and if he were recognized as such, he would be nabbed.", "Powerful corporate interests loathe him and have private thugs looking for him to take him down.", "Because wearing a cape would run afoul of pornography / decency laws."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What could Rabbi S's wife have done differently to greatly reduce the magnitude of their travel problem?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_2", "options": ["She could have left the luggage at the ticket counter and gone in search of her husband.", "She could have called the Shopping Avenger from the airport and gotten his help.", "She could have been more polite.", "She could have just paid the extra hundred bucks to check her husband's suitcases as extra baggage for herself."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What two airlines have operations in both New York and Michigan, based on the story?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_3", "options": ["Trans World Airlines and Southwest.", "Southwest Airlines and Delta.", "Britsh Airways and TWA.", "Trans World Airlines and Delta. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What, in the opinion of the Shopping Avenger, is the problem with the airlines as a whole (except for Southwest)?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_4", "options": ["Their greed leads to the hiring of poorly trained people who have or develop a mean streak, which leads to agents creating and compounding small problems.", "The problem is that the top executives came up the engineering ranks, and they do not understand how to work with people effectively.", "Ever since airline deregulation, airlines cut corners to try to compete, and air travel is no longer confined to the upper class. The hoi polloi cause problems.", "The problem is that the airlines refuse to investigate complaints, leading to lawsuits against them."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the source of the Shopping Avenger's power?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_5", "options": ["He has a platform from which he can publicly shame corporations, exposing their bad deeds to potential customers who may then shun them.", "He gets pictures with the cape and codpiece in front of corporate headquarters, then photoshops in the CEO to embarrass the company.", "He has a huge legal staff working for him. They routinely sue corporate actors who offer bad customer service.", "The Shopping Avenger writes legislation and gets both federal and state legislatures to pass similar bills, tightening requirements for honest customer service."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How do other moving truck rental companies apparently benefit from U-Haul's poor service?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_6", "options": ["When U-Haul overbooks, the other companies provide vehicles to U-Haul for them to rent out.", "Customers are often left high and dry by U-Haul, so they shift to another company and the other company gets to pick up the crumbs.", "The other rental companies can save on advertising dollars since U-Haul pays them to remain silent.", "The other companies can advertise \"great customer service\" as a feature without fear of U-Haul suing them over truth in advertising issues."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do all the responses that the Shopping Avenger gets from representatives of the corporations have in common?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_7", "options": ["They offer to meet with the wronged customers in person, along with the local employees, so that the customer can observe that the offending employees are disciplined.", "They don't bother to respond at all.", "They are appalled at the local customer service, but of course they can't control every employee. Nonetheless they provide monetary compensation and fire the employees who gave the bad service.", "They blame everything on the local employees, and while they offer monetary compensation, they make no commitment to improvement and clearly view such compensation as \"the cost of doing business.\""], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does this story refer to the wronged U-Haul customer as \"anatomically confused\" ?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_8", "options": ["Because the customer discussed male and female trailer hitches without understanding the distinction, or which one is one the truck and which on the trailer.", "Because the customer misuses the phrase \"throwing her weight around,\" which applies only to males.", "Because the customer talked about being henpecked, yet henpecking is what female chickens do to male chickens, not the other way around.", "Because the customer is female, yet uses a slang phrase appropriate only to males that indicates that she is in a situation of having no real leverage over a situation."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the Shopping Avenger think of the taste of Rice-a-Roni?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_9", "options": ["Rice-a-roni is made by a small company, and tastes like \"good customer service.\"", "He thinks it tastes a lot like Turtle Wax.", "He has no idea what it tastes like because he has never tasted it.", "Rice-a-roni is made of dehydrated beef chunks, dehydrated mango and rice, and the author thinks it tastes like purgatory smells."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In what kind of domestic situation does the Shopping Avenger live?", "question_unique_id": "20030_S9AOLYQB_10", "options": ["He is married to a woman.", "The codpiece puts off most women, thus he is not married. Yet.", "He is married to a man.", "He is married to his job."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20040", "set_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "Eastern Europe", "year": "1997", "author": "Franklin Foer", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Eastern Europe \n\n         Eight years after the Berlin Wall's collapse, how meaningful are the political and economic differences that once divided Eastern and Western Europe? Herewith, a primer on the transition to democracy and capitalism in the old Soviet bloc and former Soviet Republics. \n\n         Statistics gauging economic change since communism's collapse are deceptive. All countries initially foundered. Only since 1993, with the onset of widespread privatization of economic activity, have most of them grown. However, even post-1993 averages (compiled by the U.S. Agency for International Development from international lending-agency data) may be misleading in evaluating economic success. Take Albania, which averaged 8.4 percent growth during this period--and attribute much (perhaps all) of its measured growth to a massive Ponzi scheme, which collapsed this winter, bringing down the entire Albanian economy. \n\n                         Central Europe              \n\n                         Czech Republic ( 2.7 percent growth--measured for all countries as average annual GDP change since 1993--75 percent private-sector share of GDP in 1996. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power; free media.) Despite economic growth and the lowest unemployment in Eastern Europe , the Czech economy has suffered a recent setback. In the last six months, several of the nation's biggest banks collapsed because of loose lending and fraud. To reassure foreign investors, last week conservative Prime Minister Václav Klaus announced a 5 percent cut in government spending. Opposition Social Democrats may use Klaus' austerity program to mobilize growing discontent. Chain-smoking President Václav Havel's failing health is another concern. Though Havel's position is largely ceremonial, he helps give credibility to the widely mistrusted bureaucracy and police. \n\n          \n\n            Hungary                 (1.25 percent growth; 73 percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power; constitutional protection for the media and minorities.) Because it privatized early and aggressively, Hungary has attracted $15 billion in foreign investment since 1989 --more than any other Eastern European nation. To curry favor with NATO and the European Union, for the last two years its centrist government (led by Gyula Horn, also an ex-Communist) has battled popular nationalist parties. It installed Western-style legal protections for minorities and gave up long-standing claims to Transylvania, the Hungarian-populated section of Romania. \n\n          \n\n            Poland                 (5.25 percent growth; 60 percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power; no state-run media.) It is considered Eastern Europe's greatest economic success . Poland's government privatized more cautiously than Hungary's or the Czech Republic's. Western fears about the 1995 election of ex-party apparatchik Aleksander Kwasniewski as president (displacing Lech Walesa, who calls him the \"red spider\") have been allayed by Kwasniewski's support for further privatization and his enthusiasm for NATO expansion. (This summer Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic will probably be invited to join the alliance.) Amid much protest from the right wing, Kwasniewski's government restored the legal rights to abortion and divorce removed by the Walesa government. \n\n                         Romania                 (4.7 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy relatively weak: free and fair elections; state-controlled media.) Communist Party boss (ostensibly a social democrat) Ion Iliescu ruled between a mob's execution of longtime strongman Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 and his own loss of an election last year. His successor, a geology professor named Emil Constantinescu, promised rapid privatization and protection for an independent media. Romania is jockeying to be included in NATO expansion , but nobody takes its candidacy seriously. \n\n                         Slovakia                 (3.65 percent growth; 70 percent private. Democracy relatively weak: free elections; strong state security force; state-pressured media.) Inheriting the most depressed regions of former Czechoslovakia and a massive, outmoded arms-manufacturing industry, it fared badly after its 1992-1993 split with the Czech Republic. Slovakia has had less success than other Central European countries at ousting corrupt Communist bosses from its bureaucracy. Prime Minister Vladimír Meciar is accused of having orchestrated the kidnapping of the Slovakian president's son, among other charges. \n\n                         The Balkans              \n\n                         Albania                 (8.4 percent growth; 75 percent private. Democracy weak: widespread police killings and beatings; no free elections; state-controlled media.) Between 50 percent and 90 percent of the country invested nearly $3 billion in a Ponzi scheme that collapsed this winter. When the government failed to fulfill promises to compensate investors, rioters pillaged the capital, Tirana, and battled government-organized militias. So far the staunchly anti-Communist government has relied on repression to survive the crisis. \n\n          \n\n            Bosnia                 (No economic data. Democracy weak: elections held last September amid accusations of fraud.) Thoroughly destroyed by war , it is economically devastated and ethnically divided. The Dayton Accord separates the country into two provinces: the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Federation and the Serbian Republika Srpska. Serbian and Croatian minorities complain they will not get a fair shake in the Muslim-majority state. The U.S. military will leave Bosnia at the end of this year. \n\n          \n\n            Bulgaria                 (-2 percent growth; 45 percent private. Democracy weak: no elections until this month.) Bulgaria's economy remains socialist . Price controls are drastic: McDonald's restaurants in Bulgaria sell the cheapest Big Macs in the world, and oil costs the same as in Saudi Arabia. Shortages and slipping wages sparked street protests this winter that forced the ruling socialists to hand power over to a caretaker government. A centrist coalition won elections this month. Emigration to Western Europe has been significant : Five hundred thousand people have left Bulgaria (total population, 9 million) since 1989. \n\n          \n\n            Croatia                 (0.15 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy questionable: allegations of electoral fraud; authoritarian but popular government; little repression of media.) Since Yugoslavia's disintegration, Franjo Tudjman, a right-wing dictator, has exploited Croatian nationalist sentiments. Demonstrations this winter against Tudjman quickly dissipated (at the time, he was being treated in the United States for cancer--he may not live much longer). Despite rampant war profiteering and a large state presence in the economy, growth has been steady, and Tudjman remains popular . \n\n          \n\n            Macedonia ( -3.2 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections, though minority groups claim oppression. ) Though Macedonia avoided the Balkan War, ethnic tensions and instability are a problem. Last year, the country's liberal, pro-West president was seriously injured in a car-bomb attack. A Greek minority demands that Macedonia, with its ethnically Albanian majority, be absorbed into Greece. \n\n                         Serbia                 (No economic data. Democracy weak: corruption during elections; state-controlled media.) Slobodan Milosevic, an old party boss, has retained power since 1989, appealing to Serbian chauvinism to elude liberal reforms. War, hyperinflation, and unemployment , however, have recently undermined his popularity. Two months of street protests this winter were said to presage his ouster. His concession of the opposition's demands (recognition of local election results and reopening of nonstate-run media), however, ultimately solidified Milosevic's control. \n\n                         Slovenia                 (3.5 percent growth; 45 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections; constitutional protection for the media and minorities.) The most Western, liberal, and independent of the former Yugoslav republics, Slovenia escaped the Balkan War unscathed . Unlike the other agriculture-dependent Balkan economies, Slovenia has a significant manufacturing sector, much of it high-tech. Its per capita income is already higher than those of Portugal and Greece, members of the EU. However, because of its reluctance to privatize, foreign investment is scant, and growth has been lower than predicted. \n\n                         The Baltics              \n\n                         Estonia                 (-1.25 percent growth; 75 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: safeguards against police abuse and state interference in the media.) Thanks to Finnish and Swedish investment, Estonia is the most prosperous Baltic state , though its recovery did not begin until 1995. Russia still maintains military bases near its border, and Estonia relies on Russian oil and gas. But Estonia has been increasingly defiant: It switched official allegiance from the Russian to the Greek Orthodox Church, criticized Russia's war in Chechnya, and imposed requirements that make it difficult for its Russian-speaking minority to become citizens. \n\n                         Latvia                 (-3.1 percent growth; 60 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections; successful transfer of power.) Economists predict the country will soon benefit from its tight controls on inflation , which have stymied short-term growth. For the last two years, Latvia has been governed by a six-party \"rainbow coalition.\" \n\n                         Lithuania                 (-4.2 percent growth; 65 percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power.) After flirting with a return to communism, party bosses retook power in 1992. The conservative Vytautas Landsbergis--musicologist, former chess champion, and post-Communist Lithuania's first prime minister (between 1991 and 1992)--was re-elected last year. The economy has foundered since the Soviet Union's collapse. \n\n                         Western Soviet Republics              \n\n                         Belarus                 (-7.8 percent growth; 15 percent private. Democracy nonexistent: no independent judiciary; repressive state security apparatus; state-controlled media.) The most Soviet of the former Soviet republics, it is ruled by Alexander Lukashenko , a dictator who recently consolidated his personal control over the country's media and secret police. He has enhanced the country's ties to Russia, vociferously opposes NATO expansion, and alleges that fledgling opposition movements are CIA plants (there is no evidence of this). \n\n                         Moldova                 (-8.6 percent growth; 40 percent private. Democracy relatively weak: free elections; hostility toward minorities; government interference with press.) Initially touted as a model of reform, Moldova is now in a shambles. A rebellion by Ukrainian and Russian-speaking minorities ended in 1992, with the Romanian-speaking majority government retaining control over only half of the country. It was the center of a recently shut-down Internet porn scam that charged unwitting customers, mainly Americans, the cost of a long-distance call to Moldova when they downloaded dirty pictures. \n\n                         Ukraine                 (-14.8 percent growth; 40 percent private. Democracy weak: widespread corruption and organized crime.) Fifty percent of the economy is invested in the black market to avoid taxes (as high as 89 percent) and corrupt government officials--largely former Communists who require under-the-table payments. Consequently, foreigners have only reluctantly invested $700 million--the same amount as in Estonia, which is only a fraction of the size of Ukraine. The government disbanded its nuclear arsenal in 1994 after a U.S. payment of $400 million. Despite nationalist hostility toward Russia, Ukraine remains too dependent to do anything more than grumble about the Russian military's continued use of its ports. \n\n          \n\n            Transcaucasian Republics              \n\n                         Armenia                 (1.03 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy weak: allegations of election fraud; arbitrary arrests; restrictions on freedom of press.) Alienated by its Muslim neighbors--Turkey to the west, Iran to the south, and Azerbaijan to the east--Armenia aligns itself with Georgia and Russia (which keeps 12,000 troops on Armenia's border). An influential Armenian-American diaspora helps the country get more U.S. aid per capita                 than any country except Israel . Since 1994, it has been ruled by an autocratic intellectual, who has banned opposition parties and controls the media. \n\n                         Azerbaijan                 (-13.5 percent growth; 25 percent private. Democracy nonexistent: widespread corruption; no free elections; repression of minorities.) A recent cease-fire ended the Muslim government's six-year war with Armenia over control of a Christian enclave in the northeast part of the country. Afterward, oil companies scrambled to tap its prodigious reserves. Before the Soviets took over, Azerbaijan was a boom country that attracted hundreds of European speculators. The government has been unstable--done in by a series of coups and the continued rule of Communist bosses. \n\n                         Georgia                 (-15.75 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy fairly strong: free elections but continued human-rights abuses, including torture and forced confessions.) Western expectations for Georgia--the highly regarded former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze is the president--have been disappointed. The government battles rebels from Abkhazia, a Muslim province in the country's northwest. Russia still maintains thousands of troops in Georgia. Only last year did the country begin to emerge from a severe depression, but it still lacks consistent electricity in Tbilisi, its capital.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Which group of countries has the best combination of growth rate and democracy rating?", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_1", "options": ["The group of countries listed under the sub-heading \"Western Soviet Repulics\" have the most positive growth figures, overall, and the strongest democracy ratings.", "The group of countries listed under the sub-heading \"Central Europe\" have the most positive growth figures, overall, and the strongest democracy ratings.", "The group of countries listed under the sub-heading \"The Baltics\" have the most positive growth figures, overall, and the strongest democracy ratings.", "The group of countries listed under the sub-heading \"The Balkans\" have the most positive growth figures, overall, and the strongest democracy ratings."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What advantage does Armenia have that the other countries listed here lack?", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_2", "options": ["It has been able to prop up its economy using a Ponzi scheme that hasn't failed yet.", "Armenia is surrounded by hostile countries, which inspires patriotism in its citizens.", "Armenia receives the second-highest amount of American foreign aid, per capita, in the world.", "It is ruled by an intellectual who believes in free elections."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do the Prime Minister and the President of the Czech Republic have in common?", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_3", "options": ["They have the same first name.", "Both speak English fluently.", "Both were born and raised in Poland.", "Both were implicated in a bank fraud scheme that damaged the economy."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do Slovenia and Macedonia have in common?", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_4", "options": ["Both have significant ethnic Albanian minorities demanding to be reunified with Greece.", "Neither was damaged in the Balkan War and their democratic government ratings are pretty strong.", "Both have economies based on a solid high-tech manufacturing sector.", "Both inhherited depressed regions as part of the Balkan War border settlement: Slovenia got part of Czechoslovakia, and Macedonia got part of Greece."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do Armenia and Estonia have in common?", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_5", "options": ["Both countries ally themselves with Russia.", "Both have Russian troops stationed on their borders.", "Both countries impose restrictions on press freedom.", "Both countries rely on Russian oil and gas."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which countries, as mentioned in the article,  have, or have had, significant internal division from ethnic minority populations?", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_6", "options": ["All of the listed countries have current problems with minority populations. ", "Only Bosnia and Estonia have ethnic minority rebellions in progress.", "Bosnia, Macedonia, Estonia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and  Moldova, ", "Poland, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Ukraine all have significant current internal divisions."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "For the countries with statistics presented, what correlation can be seen between the amount of privatization of the economy and the growth rate of the economy? ", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_7", "options": ["During a world-wide economic slowdown, not one of these countries has a positive economic growth rate, and one cannot blame rate of privatization of the economy for this.", "The examples of Romania (4.7% growth, 50% private) and Lithuania (-4.2% growth, 65% private) are sufficient to demonstrate that maintaining more state control over the economy is a better strategy.", "There is a clear correlation between the growth rate of the economy and the percent privatization.", "Although we see a few examples of high growth/high privatization and low growth/low privatization, we can also find examples of the exact opposite. There is no universal correlation."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why hasn't Azerbaijan benefited from its extensive oil reserves as one might have expected?", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_8", "options": ["Instability of the government and continued, corrupt Communist rule appear to be the major factors.", "Russians paid Azerbaijani government officials to make sure the oil reserves stayed in the ground so that Russians could use them later, when other reserves were depleted.", "Western countries have refused to buy oil from Azerbaijan because of the country's war with Christians in the northeast.", "The Muslim government will not allow non-Muslims to own any oil industry assets, limiting the available technology and equipment."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do Latvia and Lithuania have in common, apart from the first letters of their names?", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_9", "options": ["Both are governed by LGBTQ coalitions.", "They are relatively strong democracies with weak economies.", "Both have tight inflation controls that will soon yield economic benefits.", "Both are in danger of being re-absorbed into Russia."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In summary, what is the state of democracy in the countries reviewed in this article?", "question_unique_id": "20040_6SKXCDPD_10", "options": ["It is particularly notable that all of the Balkan countries now have strong democracies.", "The article admits that the standards used to characterize democracy are so subjective that there is no use trying to compare one country to another.", "Democracy lives in at least some form in the overwhelming majority of countries discussed, but less than half are characterized as \"strong\" democracies.", "One man's dictatorship is another man's democracy. The government in Azerbaijan is fully justified in suspending elections while it attempts to rein in corruption."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20054", "set_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Other L-Word", "year": "1997", "author": "Jacob Weisberg", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Other L-Word \n\n \n \n What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation  \n By Charles Murray  \n Broadway Books; 192 pages; $20 \n\n Libertarianism: A Primer \n By David Boaz \n The Free Press; 336 pages; $23 \n \n          Are libertarians on a roll? If you begin with the recent election to Congress of Ron Paul, a former Libertarian presidential candidate; note the emergence of cyberlibertarians as a political constituency; factor in the collapse of communism; and quote Bill Clinton's admission that \"the era of big government is over,\" you have what sounds like a compelling case. There are other signs as well: the rise of the Cato Institute as one of the leading Washington think tanks; and the general accrual of credibility to what, 20 years ago, was a fringe-y movement of Ayn Rand devotees and risqué Republicans. \n\n         Yet, there is an equally strong argument to be made that the United States is only moving toward libertarian-style minimalist government in the same way that you get closer to Paris when you drive east to the supermarket. Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne got less than 500,000 votes in 1996. This was an increase over 1992 but only a slight improvement upon the Libertarian vote in 1988, and a far weaker performance than in 1980. Meanwhile, leaders of the Christian right, whose aims are antithetical to those of libertarians, make the plausible claim that it is they who are winning converts and influence by the day. And if Clinton now knows to eschew \"big government,\" members of the Republican Congress elected in 1994 have also learned their lesson about attempting to make government truly smaller. \n\n         The appearance of these two books counts as an entry in the plus side of the ledger. Each attempts to make libertarianism more respectable and popular. They are pitched, however, at different audiences. Charles Murray is a conservative trying to persuade other conservatives that the absence of restraint will in fact make people more moral. He rather reluctantly defends the legalization of drugs, prostitution, and pornography, and concedes that government has to play some more-than-minimal role. David Boaz, an official at the Cato Institute, sees libertarianism as neither conservative nor liberal, and aims to convert everyone. But while he is more ecumenical, Boaz is far more extreme. If you insist on keeping national parks or old-age pensions, he has some advice on the least bad way to run these things--but, given his druthers, he wouldn't run them at all. \n\n          Murray's more laconic account is based upon a classical liberal argument: Force is bad; cooperation is good; government is force; ergo, the only legitimate functions of government are to enforce voluntary agreements, and to prevent force and fraud. Murray accepts, though, that there also exist limited \"public goods.\" The two he names are environmental protection and education. These exceptions to the rule of the minimal state are probably necessary to make libertarianism palatable to mainstream conservatives. The problem is that they require an admission--which Murray never makes directly--that decisions made by a democratic government within the boundaries of a constitution are not merely \"force\" but also \"cooperation,\" albeit with a certain degree of legitimate coercion. \n\n         In an attempt to distinguish those public purposes that are tolerable from those that aren't, Murray posits that, to be valid, public goods either have to be \"nonexclusive\"--interventions from which everyone benefits--or else must arise to counter \"externalities,\" costs passed on to others that, in practical terms, cannot be compensated, as in the case of the chemical incinerator that pollutes the air. What this scheme leaves unclear is why education and the environment are valid public goods while other efforts he opposes--insuring elderly people against poverty, say, or providing national health insurance--are not. Education and the environment are not purely nonexclusive goods. Some people who either don't have children or who don't like to visit national parks--or both--will be taxed to pay for them. And if the standard of nonexclusivity is not absolute, then programs Murray rejects, such as welfare and Medicare, can reasonably qualify. Anyone may fall upon hard times, and most people anticipate being around long enough to benefit from nationalized health care for the elderly. \n\n         Murray's next strategy is to try a series of more pragmatic arguments against government action. To show how little sense regulations make, he proposes a thought experiment. Why not give consumers a choice, he asks, about whether to use regulated or unregulated products (unregulated products, he stipulates, would have to be labeled as such). This merely demonstrates that Murray has failed to understand his own argument about externalities as a basis for public goods. The point of regulation is not merely to protect consumers, but to protect innocent third parties. Of course consumers would be better off if the government gave them the right to buy appliances built by polluting factories and low-cost child labor. (In fact, consumers already can, so long as the pollution and child labor are foreign and not domestic.) These regulations exist for the benefit of those who live downstream from the factory and the children who would otherwise be working inside it. \n\n         Or, to take an example of regulation employed by Murray, consider the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. Murray says there is no reason to keep people from harming themselves. But speed limits don't just prevent people who willingly take the risk of driving faster and more dangerously from hurting themselves. They improve the odds for the children in the back seat, and for the safe driver in the opposite lane, whom the reckless driver might plow into. With this example, Murray undercuts himself in another way. He says regulation only gets more onerous over time. But the national speed limit is an example of precisely the opposite point. In most states you can now drive 65 or 70 on freeways. Like many conservatives, Murray high-dudgeons himself into the Jeane Kirkpatrick position of ascribing historical inevitability to a trend that is actually in the midst of reversal. \n\n          Murray involves himself in more serious contradictions by drawing in arguments from his earlier books, each of which presents a different case against public action to fight poverty. In Losing Ground (1984), the work that made him famous, he contended that government anti-poverty programs had done much to create the underclass. In The Bell Curve (1994), he said that some people--namely blacks--were genetically inferior, a condition that government could do nothing about. In What It Means to Be a Libertarian , he says government intervention is morally wrong. \n\n         He means these arguments to be mutually reinforcing: Government social programs don't work; they can't work on account of human nature; and if by chance they do work, they're morally unjustified anyhow. But this triple argument in the triple alternative actually obliterates itself. In The Bell Curve , Murray contends that government can't really help people. In the version of that argument given in What It Means , he asserts that \"most government interventions are ineffectual\" because \"modern society has the inertia of a ponderous freight train.\" But if government can't reroute the freight train in a better direction, it's hard to see how it can derail it. The metaphor undermines the Losing Ground Murray, the guy who writes that \"[u]ntil the government began masking the social costs created by large numbers of fatherless children, civilized communities everywhere stigmatized illegitimacy.\" The \"futility\" thesis--government can't help--and the \"perversity\" thesis--government makes problems worse instead of better--are at odds. If government can't do anything, how can it do so strongly the opposite of what it intends? \n\n         Dimly aware of this problem, Murray brings in a more sweeping illegitimacy thesis--government is unjustified--to trump all the others. But this exposes his underlying bias, which casts doubt on the critiques of government in both Losing Ground and The Bell Curve . The three Murrays play a kind of fugue throughout this book. In fact, there seems to be a fourth Murray struggling to get out. This is the Charles Murray who says late in the book that he half-supports the idea of a negative income tax--a guaranteed income for everyone. This would seem to violate all the aforementioned principles. It would create a powerful incentive (of the kind attacked in Losing Ground ) for people not to work; it would be an attempt to help people who The Bell Curve says can't be helped anyway; and it would certainly violate What It Means to Be a Libertarian 's admonition against forcing people to pay for dubious public goods. What Murray likes about the idea is that it would finally discharge society's obligation to members of the underclass. They might not be better off, but they would have to quit bellyaching. Combined with a new, heartfelt attack on civil-rights laws (Murray says bad, prejudicial discrimination is inseparable from good, economically sensible discrimination), this passage leaves one with the sense that in declaring himself a libertarian, Murray has not yet removed the final veil. \n\n         David Boaz has written a more stimulating, more consistent, and more dogmatic book. After a long history of libertarian ideas, he proposes a version of Murray's basic argument, which he calls the \"nonagression axiom\"--no one can use force against anyone else. That's it. Unlike Murray, Boaz draws no exception for public goods. He does not pander to political reality by accepting large expenditures for national defense, environmental regulation, or publicly funded education. He does not believe in national parks (\"private stewards\" will exercise \"proper stewardship\"). Nor does he believe in military conscription in wartime (\"[t]he libertarian believes that people will voluntarily defend a country worth defending\"). \n\n         Though this version of libertarianism seems to flirt with anarchism, Boaz isn't worried about disarray. In the absence of malign government intervention, there will emerge what he calls \"spontaneous order.\" Boaz's model for this is the Internet. He neglects, of course, the fact that the Internet began life as a federal defense project. But the real question Boaz begs is why the laws he thinks are necessary for society to function, including fair chunks of the U.S. Constitution, count as \"spontaneous\" and good while everything else is defined as coercion. Capitalism may arise spontaneously, but the Bill of Rights is as much a man-made construct as the food-stamp program. \n\n          In the end, it is futile to argue with this view. Boaz has worked out every possible detail of his libertarian heaven in an utterly comprehensive and slightly mad way. He takes pains to say he is not offering a plan for a perfect society, merely a \"framework for utopia\" (the phrase is Robert Nozick's). But his heart is clearly with the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, who wrote: \"Without law or compulsion, men would dwell in harmony.\" \n\n         Murray, too, is afflicted with millenarianism. \"That America is not the land of universal plenty it should have become is for many libertarians, including me, the source of our deepest anger about what big government has done to this country,\" he writes at one point. He offers instead \"a society that is prosperous and virtuous, but one that is exciting and fun as well.\" I was reminded of the famous passage where Marx writes that in the Communist future, every worker will spend part of his day fishing, part writing poetry, and only part working at his lathe. Marx believed that the state would wither away. Libertarians believe men must wither it. But really, their utopias are not so different. They share a wishful vision of human perfectibility dressed up as an idea of justice.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does the story imply when it says that \"Murray has not yet removed the final veil\"?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_1", "options": ["It implies that Murray's thinking is hopelessly muddled, and the real reason for his libertarian leanings is the affair he had with Ayn Rand in the 1950s.", "It imples that at heart, he doesn't believe in freedom at all, that he is a nationalist who thinks that dictatorship is the most efficient form of government.", "It implies that Murray, formerly simply an author, thinker and gadfly, intends to run for President.", "It implies, especially in combination with the theories he espouses in \"The Bell Curve,\" that Murray is, underneath the libertarian veil, a racist."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "From which two viewpoints do Murray and Boaz approach libertarianism?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_2", "options": ["Boaz approaches it from the viewpoint of someone who actually lived in the closest thing there is to a libertarian society - a tribe of indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, while Murray has led an ordinary and prosperous life - the kind conservatives approve of.", "Boaz's explanation of libertarianism smacks of anarchy, while Murray's is inextricably bound to conventional conservatism.", "Boaz is an atheist, which informs his laissez-faire attitude to libertarianism, and Murray is a Christian. Murray's \"libertarian\" objection to the application of force is his adherence to the teachings of Jesus. ", "Boaz is younger and more idealistic, believing that people will do the right thing. Murray believes that people are fundamentally sinful and must be controlled."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "On what grounds does the author criticize the consistency of Murray's arguments?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_3", "options": ["Publicly available records show that Murray donated exclusively to Democratic political candidates (supposedly the party of Big Government) while he was writing books like \"The Bell Curve.\" ", "In recently leaked documents, it was revealed that the hypocritical Murray collected food stamps while writing his book about government aid creating an underclass,  \"Losing Ground.\"", "He points out that the themes of Murray's previous books are in conflict with each other. One posits that government created the underclass through welfare, the other posits that government cannot accomplish anything. Both cannot be true.", "When pressed by Morley Safer on the show \"60 Minutes,\" Murray admitted that infrastructure like hospitals and good roads would never \"bubble up\" from local cooperative efforts, and required the assistance of governmental units."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the author describe Murray's and Boaz's vision of the future of a society that adopts libertatian-style government?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_4", "options": ["Both men imagine an agrarian-based society with little crowding and lots of room to swing an axe, which hardly comports with the reality of a crowded world.", "Neither will admit it, but their visions of the future rest on local strongmen organize small local populations to build locally needed public goods - which is a lot like feudalism.", "Libertarianism has an unavoidable note of Darwinism, and both men see a future libertarian society as being free from losers. They will all die and fail to reproduce since society will not support them.", "Both describe utopias in which men would follow their better angels because they were not under any threat of societal compulsion. The author compares Murray's vision to the rosy vision of Marx, imagining the proletariat writing poetry."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the author think that public opinions of libertarianism are faring in the USA?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_5", "options": ["Judging by the number of people joining libertarian militias, the philosophy is quickly becoming more popular.", "Judging by the number of votes that libertarian candidates are receiving in Federal elections, if they are making any headway, it is small.", "The author points out that, right wing talk radio rhetoric aside, more people are making more use of social programs than ever before - libertarianism is dead and buried.", "The author concludes that the increasing use of symbols like the \"Don't Tread On Me\" flag  by local groups \"resisting tyranny\" means that libertarianism is flourishing in America."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Boaz think that national defense should be accomplished?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_6", "options": ["Boaz's strict libertarian philosophy makes an exception for national defense, because everyone benefits, so everyone must contribute, whether with resources or manpower.", "Boaz thinks that volunteers would come forward to fight for a nation worth defending (and presumably would make the needed weapons). ", "Boaz is a pacifist in addition to being a libertarian and believes that in a cooperative world, war can always be avoided. Therefore, no national defense is needed.", "Boaz glosses over the question of national defense without providing any kind of proposal for how it would be accomplished."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author identify as the fallacy in Boaz's thinking?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_7", "options": ["Boaz does not offer any mechanism for dealing with the mentally ill or other segments of the population who are incapable of making a decision to cooperate or not cooperate with rules.", "He cannot explain why all religions, which are as old as Homo sapiens himself, all have rules of conduct for the members of society, rules that often have severe punishments, if coercion is not necessary for cooperation.", "If you make an income/expense balance sheet for a project like a hospital, Boaz simply cannot show how the economics of voluntary community contributions can enable anything more the most  minimal nods to civilization.", "Boaz never provides a logical explanation for why the societal rules and laws that *he* thinks are needed are organic to society, arising as part of some \"original bargain,\" while everything else is defined as compulsion. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Murray's concession that some public goods should be administered by the goverment fail to acknowledge, according to the author?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_8", "options": ["That the libertarian obsession with having no, or almost no rules or means of enforcing them, is all about a desire to obtain and keep power over others for one's own gain.", "That libertarianism is a giant, steaming heap of nonsense, and that Murray has admitted it without actually admitting it.", "That thousands of years of human history demonstrate the \"tragedy of the commons,\" i.e. the reality that any commonly held resource will be abused by some to advance their personal fortunes.", "That people can delegate the means and oversight of their desires and needs to democratically elected representatives, and that when they have done this, government action represents cooperation, not force."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Murray differentiate between laws that are \"ok\" and laws that are \"not ok\" under his version of liberatianism, and what inconsistencies does this expose?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_9", "options": ["Laws that are \"ok,\" by Murray's philosophy, provide benefits to everyone, like national health insurance. The problem is that no matter how much health care is provided, more will be needed, and no solution to this is proposed.", "The laws that are \"ok\" benefit everyone, such as public education, or they respond to external threats, like environmental pollution by industry. However, not everyone has children, so this is not logically consistent, since not everyone benefits.", "Laws that are \"ok\" simply enforce cooperative agreements, but it is never explained why it is ok to use force on people who are not competent to make their own decisions, like children or the mentally ill.", "Murray proposes the idea of \"negative income tax,\" i.e. government payments only to disadvantaged groups. He never explains where this money comes from - and, in fact, it must be extracted from others under threat of force, which is antithetical to libertarianism."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What argument does the author put forth against Murray's claim that, once regulation is initiated in an area of life, it only becomes more onerous?", "question_unique_id": "20054_I4AADEC3_10", "options": ["The author points to the increase in highway speed limits to counter the argument.", "The author points to the increasing use of mail-in ballots as an example of loosened regulation.", "The author points to deregulation of the railroads, making freight trains run more efficiently, with fewer restrictions.", "The author points to the increasing leniency in interpretation of the tax exempt status of supposedly charitable organizations (which actually have political purposes)."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20033", "set_unique_id": "20033_VW22O2MW", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1013", "source": "Slate", "title": " Martin Scorsese", "year": "1999", "author": "A.O. Scott", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Martin Scorsese \n\n         The first reviews of Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead are the latest evidence of the director's status as a critical favorite. This is not because the notices have been uniformly glowing--it's been some time since a Scorsese picture won unanimous praise from reviewers--but because Scorsese remains, almost uniquely among American directors, an embodiment of the beleaguered idea that filmmaking, and therefore film criticism, can be a serious, important, life-and-death matter. Here, for instance, is Roger Ebert, all thumbs: \n\n                         To look at Bringing Out the Dead --to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film--is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply. Scorsese is never on autopilot, never panders, never sells out, always goes for broke; to watch his films is to see a man risking his talent, not simply exercising it. He makes movies as well as they can be made.              \n\n         Never? Always? This is pure ideology--which is not to say that it isn't, to some extent, true. Even Scorsese's weaker films bristle with energy and intelligence. But look closely at what Ebert says: To be reminded of the power of film as a medium is not quite the same as being moved by a particular film, and Bringing Out the Dead is, for all its hectic pacing and breakneck intensity, an oddly unmoving experience. Yes, you think, movies can touch us urgently and deeply. Why doesn't this one? If Scorsese makes movies as well as they can be made, why does one so often feel that his movies--especially over the last decade or so--could have been better? \n\n         Above all, to look at Bringing Out the Dead is to be reminded of a lot of other Scorsese films. Critics have noted its similarities with Taxi Driver , Scorsese's first collaboration with screenwriter Paul Schrader (who also wrote The Last Temptation of Christ and the later drafts of Raging Bull ). Both movies feature a disturbed outsider cruising the nightmarish, as-yet-ungentrified streets of Manhattan in search of redemption. In place of Sport, Harvey Keitel's suave, vicious pimp in the earlier film, Bringing Out the Dead features Cy, a suave, vicious drug dealer played by Cliff Curtis. The mood here is a good deal softer: The scabrous nihilism of Taxi Driver is no longer as palatable--or, perhaps, as accurate in its response to the flavor of the times or the mood of its creators--as it was in 1976. Nicolas Cage's Frank Pierce saves Cy from a death as gruesome as the one De Niro's Travis Bickle visited on Sport, and when Frank does take a life (in the movie's best, most understated scene), it's an act of mercy. \n\n         Aside from these parallels and variations, there's plenty in Bringing Out the Dead to remind you that you're watching a Scorsese picture. There's voice-over narration. There's an eclectic, relentless rock 'n' roll score and a directorial cameo--this time Scorsese provides the disembodied voice of an ambulance dispatcher. There are jarring, anti-realist effects embedded in an overall mise en scène of harsh verisimilitude. And, of course, there is the obligatory religious imagery--the final frames present a classic Pietà, with Patricia Arquette (whose character is named Mary) cradling Cage, the man of sorrows, in her arms. To survey Scorsese's oeuvre is to find such echoings and prefigurations in abundance. Look at Boxcar Bertha , a throwaway piece of apprentice-work he made for schlock impresario Roger Corman in the early '70s (if you've never seen it, imagine Bonnie and Clyde remade as an episode of Kung Fu ), and then look at The Last Temptation of Christ , the controversial, deeply personal rendering of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel which infuriated some Christians a decade and a half later. Different as they are, both films prominently feature 1) a crucifixion and 2) Barbara Hershey naked. \n\n         Well, that may be a coincidence. But it's hard to think of an active director who has produced such an emphatically cross-referenced body of work who seems not so much to repeat himself (though he does some of that) as to make movies by recombining a recognizable and fairly stable set of narrative, thematic, and stylistic elements. In other words, Scorsese is the last living incarnation of la politique des auteurs.              \n\n         That old politique --the auteur theory, in plain English--was first articulated in the 1950s by a group of French critics, many of whom went on to become, as directors, fixtures of the Nouvelle Vague . In a nutshell, the theory--brought to these shores in 1962 by Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris--held that, like any work of art, a film represents the vision of an individual artist, almost always the director. The artists who populated the auterist canon--Howard Hawks and John Ford, pre-eminently--had labored within the constraints of the studio system. But even their lesser films, according to auterist critics, could be distinguished from mere studio hackwork by the reiteration of a unique cinematic vocabulary and by an implicit but unmistakable sense of solitary genius in conflict with bureaucratic philistinism. \n\n         The auteur theory was quickly challenged, most notably by Pauline Kael, who shredded Sarris in the pages of Film Quarterly . But the \"new Hollywood\" of the '70s--with Kael as its champion, scold, and Cassandra--was dominated by young directors who attained, thanks to the collapse of the old studios, an unprecedented degree of creative autonomy, and who thought of themselves as artists. What resulted, as Peter Biskind shows in his New Hollywood dish bible Easy Riders, Raging Bulls , was an epidemic of megalomania, sexual libertinism, money-wasting, and drug abuse--as well as a few dozen classics of American cinema. \n\n         The avatars of the New Hollywood were mostly \"movie brats\"--socially maladroit, nerdy young men (and they were, to a man, men) who shared a fervid, almost religious devotion to cinema. Scorsese, a runty, asthmatic altar boy from New York City's Little Italy who traded Catholic seminary for New York University film school, was arguably the purest in his faith. Unlike Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, or Steven Spielberg, \"St. Martin\" (as Biskind calls him) did not see directing as a route to world domination but as a priestly avocation, a set of spiritual exercises embedded in technical problems. Scorsese's technical proficiency won him some early breaks. While making Who's That Knocking at My Door , his earnest, autobiographical first feature, independently, Scorsese was hired to edit Woodstock into a coherent film. His success (more or less) led to more rock 'n' roll editing assignments--a traveling sub-Woodstock \"festival\" called Medicine Ball Caravan ; Elvis on Tour --and then to Boxcar Bertha , which allowed him to join the Directors Guild and gave him the chance to make Mean Streets . That movie helped launch the careers of Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, and taught generations of would-be tough guys the meaning of the word \"mook.\" \n\n         Kael called Mean Streets \"a triumph of personal film-making,\" and even though it may be the single most imitated movie of the past 30 years--cf The Pope of Greenwich Village, State of Grace, Federal Hill, Boyz N the Hood , etc.--it has lost remarkably little of its freshness and power. Watching it, you feel that you are seeing real life on the screen, but real life heightened and shaped by absolute artistic self-assurance. Or, to quote Kael again, \"Mean Streets never loses touch with the ordinary look of things or with common experience. Rather, it puts us in closer touch with the ordinary, the common, by turning a different light on them.\" \n\n         This kind of realism marks Scorsese's next two films, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore --his best piece of directing-for-hire, and one of the half-forgotten gems of the period--and Taxi Driver , both of which were critically and commercially successful. But the medium-budget, artisanal, personal filmmaking of the early '70s soon gave way to grander visions. To be a New Hollywood director was to flirt with hubris. Biskind's book, accordingly, concludes with a litany of spectacular flameouts: Coppola's Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, Spielberg's 1941 , William Friedkin's Sorcerer, and, of course, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate . According to Mardik Martin, Scorsese's erstwhile writing partner (as quoted by Biskind): \"The auteur theory killed all these people. One or two films, the magazines told them they were geniuses, that they could do anything. They went completely bananas. They thought they were God.\" Scorsese's own Götterdämmerung came with New York, New York , a hugely ambitious jazz epic starring De Niro and Liza Minelli (Scorsese's mistress at the time), and the first of a series of flops that continued with Raging Bull and The King of Comedy . \n\n         Of these three, Raging Bull has been singled out for vindication. It's the highest-ranking of the three Scorsese films on the American Film Institute's Top 100 list, and it's widely considered to be his masterpiece. But it remains exceedingly hard to watch, not so much because of the repulsiveness of De Niro's Jake La Motta as because of its overall sense of aesthetic claustrophobia. It's a movie lacquered by its own self-importance, so bloated with the ambition to achieve greatness that it can barely move. If it convinces you it's a masterpiece, it does so by sheer brute force. \n\n                         Raging Bull is undone by its own perfectionism. New York, New York and The King of Comedy stand up rather better, in my opinion, in spite of their obvious flaws. (So does The Last Waltz , a documentary of the Band's last concert done simultaneously with New York, New York , thanks to the magic of cocaine.) For one thing, New York, New York is virtually the only Scorsese movie (aside from \"Life Lessons,\" his crackerjack contribution to the Coppola-produced anthology film New York Stories ) to have at its center the relationship between a man and a woman. For another, it ends with Liza Minelli parading through a series of phantasmagoric stage sets singing a pointedly ironic song called \"Happy Endings\"--a sequence every bit as dazzling (and as mystifying) as the ballet from An American in Paris . Just as Mean Streets is an unparalleled demonstration of the power of film to convey reality, \"Happy Endings\" is a celebration of film's magical ability to create it. A moviegoer's dream, but good luck seeing it on the big screen. \n\n         For its part, The King of Comedy , a creepy reprise of Taxi Driver --played, this time, for laughs--is a movie made before its time, back when celebrity-stalking was a piquant metaphor for our cultural ills, rather than the focus of our cultural life. De Niro and Sandra Bernhard kidnap Jerry Lewis (playing, brilliantly, a famous late-night talk show host), Bernhard steals the movie, and the ending is guaranteed to provoke long, excruciating arguments about the difference between fantasy and reality. \n\n         In Biskind's account of the tragedy of the New Hollywood, Spielberg is the villain, Hal Ashby the martyr, and Scorsese the scarred survivor. After the failures of the early '80s, he picked himself up and made some more movies: the quirky, proto-Indie downtown comedy After Hours , The Color of Money (a respectable sequel to The Hustler ), and his long dreamed of The Last Temptation of Christ . His fortunes revived with GoodFellas , which was hailed as a return to form, and floundered again with The Age of Innocence , one of his periodic attempts--like The Last Waltz , Temptation and, most recently, Kundun --to defy expectation. Next came Casino, one of his periodic attempts to defy the expectation that he would defy expectations. Casino blends Raging                 Bull with GoodFellas and can be interpreted as a wry allegory of Hollywood in the '70s--a time when \"guys like us\" (i.e., the free-lancing gangsters played by De Niro and Joe Pesci) were allowed to run things without interference. Of course, they got too greedy, screwed everything up, and the big corporations turned their playground into Disneyland. At the end, De Niro's character, the scarred survivor, picks himself up and goes back to work. \n\n         Scorsese keeps working too--upcoming projects include Gangs of New York , with Leonardo DiCaprio, and a Dean Martin biopic starring Tom Hanks. His extracurricular good works--overseeing the re-release of classics such as El Cid and Belle de Jour , campaigning for film preservation, narrating a BBC documentary on his favorite movies--are testament to his abiding faith. But his movies more often than not feel cold and mechanical. They substitute intensity for emotion and give us bombast when we want passion. Why do we go to the movies? Pauline Kael used to say it was to be caught up, swept away, surfeited by sensation, and confronted by reality. Some of us keep going to Scorsese's movies because we still want to believe in that, and we leave wondering whether he still does.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does the author think that Ebert disliked \"Bringing Out the Dead\"?", "question_unique_id": "20033_VW22O2MW_1", "options": ["Ebert's words, \"He makes movies as well as they can be made\" clearly carry a negative meaning.", "He has spoken privately with Ebert about it and knows that Ebert does not respect Scorcese.", "The author thinks that Ebert is a dolt who is part of a Scorsese cult, and that he is incapable of disliking a Scorsese movie.", "He put words into Ebert's mouth, twisting what Ebert said about Scorsese films reminding people that film can touch us urgently and deeply, into something negative that Ebert didn't actually say."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is unique about the Scorsese film that Liza Minelli starred in, among Scorsese films?", "question_unique_id": "20033_VW22O2MW_2", "options": ["It didn't have good cinematography.", "It revolves around the relationship between a man and a woman.", "It had a very low budget and a very tight timeline.", "The storyline was on life support after the first twenty minutes and died before the end."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "After dragging Scorsese's movies through the mud for most of the article, what summation of Scorsese's work does the author give?", "question_unique_id": "20033_VW22O2MW_3", "options": ["His movies are cold and you don't get real emotion from them, just intensity.", "Scorsese's movies answered the times for which they were made, and since the times have moved on without Scorsese.", "He is the greatest director who ever lived.", "He made some of the most amazing special effects movies every produced, and he should have stuck with those kinds of lush, cinematic productions."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What characteristics does the author list as being typical of Scorsese films?", "question_unique_id": "20033_VW22O2MW_4", "options": ["The presence of Robert De Niro, a cameo by Scorsese, tearjerker emotional scenes, alienated people wandering the tough streets of New York, looking for redemption.", "Voice-over narration, rock-n-roll music score, a cameo of  a nude Barbara Hershey, alienated people wandering the tough streets of New York, looking for redemption.", "Soft-focus cinematography, rock-n-roll music score, an overall feel of the harsh verisimilitude, religious imagery. ", "Voice-over narration, brief appearance in the film by Scorsese, echoes of religious images, alienated people wandering the tough streets of New York, looking for redemption."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the author think of \"Bringing Out the Dead\"?", "question_unique_id": "20033_VW22O2MW_5", "options": ["He doesn't like it. He refers to it as \"undone by its own perfectionism.\"", "He puts it right up there with Raging Bull, since it has a similar vicious character and a fantastic, hard-driving musical score.", "He does not like it. He says it is similar to other Scorsese movies, having all of Scorsese's typical tics,  that it is overwhelming in intensity and pace yet brings no feelings, ", "He doesn't think it's Scorsese's best work, but it is a crowdpleaser, and it looks at the world with uncompromising  honesty."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is an important point about Mean Streets that enables some of Scorsese's later masterpieces?", "question_unique_id": "20033_VW22O2MW_6", "options": ["It finally puts De Niro on the map as a star, and launches a working relationship that lasts a long time.", "Liza Minnelli played a bit part in Mean Streets, that brought her to Scorsese's attention, leading to her becoming his mistress.", "It put an end to Harvey Keitel's career and started De Niro's.", "Before Mean Streets, Scorsese had only made shorts and cartoons, and afterward, he had his pick of work."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is \"la politique des auteurs\"?", "question_unique_id": "20033_VW22O2MW_7", "options": ["The concept that filmmakers should keep their politics out of films to avoid alienating part of the audience.", "The concept that a movie shows the ideas of an individual artist, usually the director, giving off a sense of solitary genius. ", "The concept that the makers of films always incorporated their politics into their films, whether they intended to or not.", "The concept that the best films were made by a small group of creative people working together."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who was a proponent of the \"politique des auteurs\" theory, and who was a detractor?", "question_unique_id": "20033_VW22O2MW_8", "options": ["Andrew Sarris promoted this theory, first brought out by Nikos Kazantzaki, and opposed by Roger Ebert and Francis Ford Coppola.", "Peter Biskind believed in this theorty, while several famous directors, like Steven Spielbert, pooh-poohed it because you couldn't get money for a good film by crashing around like a bull in a china shop.", "Pauline Kael first advanced this theory, and it was quickly adopted by Peter Biskind and other famous film critics. ", "Andrew Sarris promoted this theory, first brought out by a group of French critics, and Pauline Kael made mincemeat of it."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "51072", "set_unique_id": "51072_V3MGA5QZ", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Shamar's War", "year": 1950, "author": "Neville, Kris", "topic": "Spies -- Fiction; Political fiction; PS; Science fiction; Extrasolar planets -- Fiction", "article": "SHAMAR'S WAR\nBY KRIS NEVILLE\n\n\n ILLUSTRATED BY GUINTA\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction February 1964.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was Earth's secret weapon, as\n \ndeadly as a sword—and two-edged!\nI\n\n\n The year was 2346, and Earth, at the time, was a political democracy.\n\n\n The population was ruled by the Over-Council and, in order of\n decreasing importance, by Councils, and Local Councils. Each was\n composed of representatives duly apportioned by popular vote between\n the two contending parties. Executive direction was provided by a\n variety of Secretaries, selected by vote of the appropriate Councils.\n An independent Judiciary upheld the laws.\n\n\n A unified Earth sent colonists to the stars. Back came strange tales\n and improbable animals.\n\n\n Back, too, came word of a burgeoning technological civilization on the\n planet Itra, peopled by entirely humanoid aliens.\n\n\n Earth felt it would be wise for Itra to join in a Galactic Federation\n and accordingly, submitted the terms of such a mutually advantageous\n agreement.\n\n\n The Itraians declined....\nSpace Captain Merle S. Shaeffer, the youngest and perhaps the most\n naive pilot for Trans-Universe Transport, was called unexpectedly to\n the New York office of the company.\n\n\n When Capt. Shaeffer entered the luxurious eightieth story suite, Old\n Tom Twilmaker, the President of TUT, greeted him. With an arm around\n his shoulder, Old Tom led Capt. Shaeffer to an immense inner office and\n introduced him to a General Reuter, identified as the Chairman of the\n Interscience Committee of the Over-Council.\n\n\n No one else was present. With the door closed, they were isolated in\n Olympian splendor above and beyond the affairs of men. Here judgments\n were final and impartial. Capt. Shaeffer, in the presence of two of the\n men highest in the ruling councils of Earth, was reduced to incoherent\n awe.\n\n\n General Reuter moved about restlessly. Old Tom was serene and beatific.\n\n\n When they were seated, Old Tom swiveled around and gazed long\n in silence across the spires of the City. Capt. Shaeffer waited\n respectfully. General Reuter fidgetted.\n\n\n \"Some day,\" Old Tom said at last, \"I'm going to take my leave of this.\n Yes, gentle Jesus! Oh, when I think of all the souls still refusing\n to admit our precious Savior, what bitterness, oh, what sorrow is my\n wealth to me! Look down upon the teeming millions below us. How many\n know not the Lord? Yes, some morning, I will forsake all this and go\n out into the streets to spend my last days bringing the words of hope\n to the weary and oppressed. Are you a Christian, Merle?\"\n\n\n General Reuter cracked his knuckles nervously while Capt. Shaeffer\n muttered an embarrassed affirmative.\n\n\n \"I am a deeply religious man,\" Old Tom continued. \"I guess you've heard\n that, Merle?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir,\" Capt. Shaeffer said.\n\n\n \"But did you know that the Lord has summoned you here today?\" Old Tom\n asked.\n\n\n \"No, sir,\" Capt. Shaeffer said.\n\n\n \"General Reuter, here, is a dear friend. We've known each other, oh,\n many years. Distantly related through our dear wives, in fact. And we\n serve on the same Board of Directors and the same Charity Committees....\n A few weeks ago, when he asked me for a man, I called for your file,\n Merle. I made discreet inquiries. Then I got down on my knees and\n talked it over with God for, oh, it must have been all of an hour. I\n asked, 'Is this the man?' And I was given a sign. Yes! At that moment,\n a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds!\"\nGeneral Reuter had continued his nervous movements throughout the\n speech. For the first time, he spoke. \"Good God, Tom, serve us a\n drink.\" He turned to Capt. Shaeffer. \"A little drink now and then helps\n a man relax. I'll just have mine straight, Tom.\"\n\n\n Old Tom studied Capt. Shaeffer. \"I do not feel the gentle Master\n approves of liquor.\"\n\n\n \"Don't try to influence him,\" General Reuter said. \"You're embarrassing\n the boy.\"\n\n\n \"I—\" Capt. Shaeffer began.\n\n\n \"Give him the drink. If he doesn't want to drink it, he won't have to\n drink it.\"\n\n\n Sighing, Old Tom poured two bourbons from the bar in back of his desk\n and passed them over. Martyrdom sat heavily upon his brow.\n\n\n After a quick twist of the wrist and an expert toss of the head,\n General Reuter returned an empty glass. \"Don't mind if I do have\n another,\" he said. He was already less restless.\n\n\n \"How's your ability to pick up languages?\" General Reuter asked.\n\n\n \"I learned Spanish and Russian at TUT PS,\" Capt. Shaeffer said\n apologetically. \"I'm supposed to have a real high aptitude in\n languages, according to some tests I took. In case we should meet\n intelligent aliens, TUT gives them.\"\n\n\n \"You got no association with crackpot organizations, anything like\n that?\" General Reuter asked. \"You're either a good Liberal-Conservative\n or Radical-Progressive, aren't you? I don't care which. I don't believe\n in prying into a man's politics.\"\n\n\n \"I never belonged to anything,\" Capt. Shaeffer said.\n\n\n \"Oh, I can assure you, that's been checked out very, very thoroughly,\"\n Old Tom said.\n\n\n The General signaled for another drink. With a sigh of exasperation,\n Old Tom complied.\n\n\n \"Bob,\" Old Tom said, \"I really think you've had enough. Please, now.\n Our Master counsels moderation.\"\n\n\n \"Damn it, Tom,\" the General said and turned back to the space pilot.\n \"May have a little job for you.\"\n\n\n Old Tom shook his head at the General, cautioning him.\n\n\n \"Actually,\" the General said, ignoring the executive, \"we'll be sort of\n renting you from TUT. In a way you'll still be working for them. I can\n get a million dollars out of the—\"\n\n\n \"Bob!\"\n\n\n \"—unmarked appropriation if it goes in in TUT's name. No questions\n asked. National Defense. I couldn't get anywhere near that much for\n an individual for a year. It gives us a pie to slice. We were talking\n about it before you came in. How does a quarter of a million dollars a\n year sound to you?\"\n\n\n \"When it comes to such matters,\" Old Tom interjected hastily, \"I think\n first of the opportunities they bring to do good.\"\n\n\n The General continued, \"Now you know, Merle. And this is serious. I\n want you to listen to me. Because this comes under World Security laws,\n and I'm going to bind you to them. You know what that means? You'll be\n held responsible.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Merle said, swallowing stiffly. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Let's have a drink on that.\"\n\"Please be quiet, General,\" Old Tom said. \"Let me explain. You see,\n Merle, the Interscience Committee was recently directed to consider\n methods for creating a climate of opinion on Itra—of which I'm sure\n you've heard—which would be favorable to the proposed Galactic\n Federation.\"\n\n\n \"Excuse me,\" General Reuter said. \"They don't have a democracy, like\n we do. They don't have any freedom like we do. I have no doubt the\n average whateveryoucallem—Itraians, I guess—the average gooks—would\n be glad to see us come in and just kick the hell out of whoever is in\n charge of them.\"\n\n\n \"Now, General,\" Old Tom said more sharply.\n\n\n \"But that's not the whole thing,\" the General continued. \"Even fit were\n right thing to do, an' I'm not saying isn't—right thing to do—there's\n log-lo-lo-gistics. I don't want to convey the impresh, impression that\n our Defense Force people have been wasting money. Never had as much as\n needed, fact. No, it's like this.\n\n\n \"We have this broad base to buil' from. Backbone. But we live in\n a democracy. Now, Old Tom's Liberal-Conservative. And me, I'm\n Radical-Progresshive. But we agree on one thing: importance of strong\n defense. A lot of people don' understan' this. Feel we're already\n spendin' more than we can afford. But I want to ask them, what's more\n important than the defense of our planet?\"\n\n\n \"General, I'm afraid this is not entirely germane,\" Old Tom said\n stiffly.\n\n\n \"Never mind that right now. Point is, it will take us long time to get\n the serious nature of the menace of Itra across to the voters. Then,\n maybe fifteen, twenty years.... Let's just take one thing. We don't have\n anywhere near enough troop transports to carry out the occupation of\n Itra. You know how long it takes to build them? My point is, we may not\n have that long. Suppose Itra should get secret of interstellar drive\n tomorrow, then where would we be?\"\n\n\n Old Tom slammed his fist on the desk. \"General, please! The boy isn't\n interested in all that.\"\n\n\n The General surged angrily to his feet. \"By God, that's what's wrong\n with this world today!\" he cried. \"Nobody's interested in Defense.\n Spend only a measly twenty per cent of the Gross World Product on\n Defense, and expect to keep strong! Good God, Tom, give me a drink!\"\n Apparently heresy had shocked him sober.\n\n\n Old Tom explained, \"The General is a patriot. We all respect him for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I understand,\" Capt. Shaeffer said.\n\n\n General Reuter hammered his knuckles in rhythm on the table. \"The\n drink, the drink, the drink! You got more in the bottle. I saw it!\"\n\n\n Old Tom rolled his eyes Heavenward and passed the bottle across. \"This\n is all you get. This is all I've got.\"\n\n\n The General held the bottle up to the light. \"Should have brought my\n own. Let's hurry up and get this over with.\"\n\n\n Old Tom smiled the smile of the sorely beset and persecuted and said,\n \"You see, Merle, there's massive discontent among the population of\n Itra. We feel we should send a man to the planet to, well, foment\n change and, uh, hasten the already inevitable overthrow of the despotic\n government. That man will be strictly on his own. The Government will\n not be able to back him in any way whatsoever once he lands on Itra.\"\n\n\n The General had quickly finished the bottle. \"You she,\" he interrupted,\n \"there's one thing they can't fight, an' that's an idea. Jus' one man\n goes to Itra with the idea of Freedom, that's all it'll take. How\n many men did it take to start the 'Merican Revolution? Jefferson. The\n Russian Revolution? Marx!\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Old Tom said. \"One dedicated man on Itra, preaching the ideas of\n Liberty—liberty with responsibility and property rights under one God.\n That man can change a world.\" Exhausted by the purity of his emotions,\n Old Tom sat back gasping to await the answer.\n\n\n \"A quarter of a million dollars a year?\" Capt. Shaeffer asked at length.\nII\n\n\n The Itraians spoke a common language. It was somewhat guttural and\n highly inflected. Fortunately, the spelling appeared to be phonetic,\n with only forty-three characters being required. As near as anyone\n could tell, centuries of worldwide communication had eliminated\n regional peculiarities. The speech from one part of Itra was not\n distinguishable from that of another part.\n\n\n Most of the language was recovered from spy tapes of television\n programs. A dictionary was compiled laborously by a special scientific\n task force of the Over-Council. The overall program was directed\n and administered by Intercontinental Iron, Steel, Gas, Electricity,\n Automobiles and Synthetics, Incorporated.\n\n\n It took Shaeffer just short of three years to speak Itraian\n sufficiently well to convince non-Itraians that he spoke without accent.\n\n\n The remainder of his training program was administered by a variety\n of other large industrial concerns. The training was conducted at a\n Defense Facility.\n\n\n At the end of his training, Shaeffer was taken by special bus to the\n New Mexican space port. A ship waited.\n\n\n The car moved smoothly from the Defense Force Base, down the broad\n sixteen-lane highway, through the surrounding slum area and into Grants.\n\n\n Sight of the slums gave Shaeffer mixed emotions.\n\n\n It was not a feeling of superiority to the inhabitants; those he had\n always regarded with a circumspect indifference. The slums were there.\n He supposed they always would be there. But now, for the first time\n in his life, he could truly say that he had escaped their omnipresent\n threat once and for all. He felt relief and guilt.\n\n\n During the last three years, he had earned $750,000.\n\n\n As a civilian stationed on a Defense Force Base, he had, of course,\n to pay for his clothing, his food and his lodging. But the charge was\n nominal. Since he had been given only infrequent and closely supervised\n leaves, he had been able to spend, altogether, only $12,000.\n\n\n Which meant that now, after taxes, he had accumulated in his savings\n account a total of nearly $600,000 awaiting his return from Itra.\nShaeffer's ship stood off Itra while he prepared to disembark.\n\n\n In his cramped quarters, he dressed himself in Itraian-style clothing.\n Capt. Merle S. Shaeffer became Shamar the Worker.\n\n\n In addition to his jump equipment, an oxygen cylinder, a face mask and\n a shovel, he carried with him eighty pounds of counterfeit Itraian\n currency ... all told, forty thousand individual bills of various\n denominations. Earth felt this would be all he needed to survive in a\n technologically advanced civilization.\n\n\n His plan was as follows:\n\n\n 1. He was to land in a sparsely inhabited area on the larger masses.\n\n\n 2. He was to procure transportation to Xxla, a major city, equivalent\n to London or Tokyo. It was the headquarters for the Party.\n\n\n 3. He was to establish residence in the slum area surrounding the\n University of Xxla.\n\n\n 4. Working through student contacts, he was to ingratiate himself with\n such rebel intellectuals as could be found.\n\n\n 5. Once his contacts were secure, he was to assist in the preparation\n of propaganda and establish a clandestine press for its production.\n\n\n 6. As quickly as the operation was self-sufficient, he was to move on\n to another major city ... and begin all over.\n\n\n The ship descended into the atmosphere. The bell rang. Shamar the\n Worker seated himself, put on his oxygen mask and signaled his\n readiness. He breathed oxygen. The ship quivered, the door fell away\n beneath him and he was battered unconscious by the slipstream.\n\n\n Five minutes later, pinwheeling lazily in free fall, he opened\n his eyes. For an instant's panic he could not read the altimeter.\n Then seeing that he was safe, he noted his physical sensations. He\n was extremely cold. Gyrating wildly, he beat his chest to restore\n circulation.\n\n\n He stabilized his fall by stretching out his hands. He floated with no\n sensation of movement. Itra was overhead, falling up at him slowly. He\n turned his back to the planet and checked the time. Twelve minutes yet\n to go.\n\n\n He spent, in all, seventeen minutes in free fall. At 2000 feet, he\n opened his parachute. The sound was like an explosion.\n\n\n He floated quietly, recovering from the shock. He removed his oxygen\n mask and tasted the alien air. He sniffed several times. It was not\n unpleasant.\n\n\n Below was darkness. Then suddenly the ground came floating up and hit\n him.\n\n\n The terrain was irregular. He fought the chute to collapse it, tripped,\n and twisted his ankle painfully.\n\n\n The chute lay quiet and he sat on the ground and cursed in English.\n\n\n At length he bundled up the chute and removed all of the packages of\n money but the one disguised as a field pack. He used the shovel to\n dig a shallow grave at the base of a tree. He interred the chute, the\n oxygen cylinder, the mask, the shovel and scooped dirt over them with\n his hands.\n\n\n He sat down and unlaced his shoe and found his ankle badly swollen.\n Distant, unfamiliar odors filled him with apprehension and he started\n at the slightest sound.\n\n\n Dawn was breaking.\nIII\n\n\n Noting his bearings carefully, he hobbled painfully westward, with\n thirty pounds of money on his back. He would intersect the major\n North-South Intercontinental highway by at least noon.\n\n\n Two hours later, he came to a small plastic cabin in a clearing at the\n edge of a forest.\n\n\n Wincing now with each step, he made his way to the door. He knocked.\n\n\n There was a long wait.\n\n\n The door opened. A girl stood before him in a dressing gown. She\n frowned and asked, \"\nItsil obwatly jer gekompilp?\n\"\n\n\n Hearing Itraian spoken by a native in the flesh had a powerful\n emotional impact on Shamar the Worker.\n\n\n Stumblingly, he introduced himself and explained that he was camping\n out. During the previous night he had become lost and injured his\n ankle. If she could spare him food and directions, he would gladly pay.\n\n\n With a smile of superiority, she stepped aside and said in Itraian,\n \"Come in, Chom the Worker.\"\n\n\n He felt panic, but he choked it back and followed her. Apparently he\n had horribly mispronounced his own name. It was as though, in English\n he had said Barchestershire for Barset. He cursed whatever Professor\n had picked that name for whatever obscure reason.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she invited. \"I'm about to have breakfast. Eggs and\n bacon—\" the Itraian equivalent—\"if that's all right with you. I'm\n Garfling Germadpoldlt by the way, although you can call me Ge-Ge.\"\n\n\n The food was quite unpleasant, as though overly ripe. He was able to\n choke down the eggs with the greatest difficulty. Fortunately, the hot\n drink that was the equivalent of Earth coffee at the end of the meal,\n was sufficiently spicy to quiet his stomach.\n\n\n \"Good coffee,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Thank you. Care for a cigarette?\"\n\n\n \"I sure would.\"\n\n\n He had no matches, so she lit it for him, hovering above him a moment,\n leaving with him the fresh odor of her hair.\n\n\n The taste of the cigarette was mild. Rather surprisingly, it\n substituted for nicotine and allayed the sharp longing that had come\n with the coffee.\n\n\n \"Let's look at your ankle,\" she said. She knelt at his feet and began\n to unlace the right shoe. \"My, it's swollen,\" she said sympathetically.\n\n\n He winced as she touched it and then he reddened with embarrassment. He\n had been walking across dusty country. He drew back the foot and bent\n to restrain her.\n\n\n Playfully she slapped his hand away. \"You sit back! I'll get it. I've\n seen dirty feet before.\"\n\n\n She pulled off the shoe and peeled off the sock. \"Oh, God, it is\n swollen,\" she said. \"You think it's broken, Shamar?\"\n\n\n \"Just sprained.\"\n\n\n \"I'll get some hot water with some MedAid in it, and that'll take the\n swelling out.\"\n\n\n When he had his foot in the water, she sat across from him and arranged\n her dressing gown with a coquettish gesture. She caught him staring\n at the earring, and one hand went to it caressingly. She smiled that\n universal feminine smile of security and recklessness, of invitation\n and rejection.\n\n\n \"You're engaged,\" he noted.\n\n\n She opened her eyes wide and studied him above a thumbnail which she\n tasted with her teeth. \"I'm engaged to Von Stutsman—\" as the name\n might be translated—\"perhaps you've heard of him? He's important in\n the Party. You know him?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You in the Party?\" she said. She was teasing him now. Then, suddenly:\n \"Neither am I, but I guess I'll have to join if I become Mrs. Von\n Stutsman.\"\n\n\n They were silent for a moment.\n\n\n Then she spoke, and he was frozen in terror, all thoughts but of\n self-preservation washed from his mind.\n\n\n \"Your accent is unbelieveably bad,\" she said.\n\n\n \"I'm from Zuleb,\" he said lamely, at last.\n\n\n \"Meta—Gelwhops—or even Karkeqwol, that makes no difference. Nobody on\n Itra speaks like you do. So you must be from that planet that had the\n Party in a flap several years ago—Earth, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He said nothing.\n\n\n \"Do you know what they'll do when they catch you?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said hollowly.\n\n\n \"They'll behead you.\"\nShe laughed, not unkindly. \"If you could see yourself! How ridiculous\n you look, Shamar. I wonder what your real name is, by the way? Sitting\n with a foot in the water and looking wildly about. Here, let me fix\n more coffee and we can talk.\"\n\n\n She called cheerily over her shoulder, \"You're safe here. No one will\n be by. I'm not due back until Tuesday.\"\n\n\n She brought him a steaming mug. \"Drink this while I dress.\" She\n disappeared into the bedroom. He heard the shower running.\n\n\n He sat waiting, numb and desperate, and drank the coffee because it was\n there. His thoughts scampered in the cage of his skull like mice on a\n treadmill.\n\n\n When Ge-Ge came back, he had still not resolved the conflict within\n him. She stood barefoot upon the rug and looked down at him, hunched\n miserably over the pan of water, now lukewarm.\n\n\n \"How's the foot?\"\n\n\n \"All right.\"\n\n\n \"Want to take it out?\"\n\n\n \"I guess.\"\n\n\n \"I'll get a towel.\"\n\n\n She waited until he had dried the foot and restored the sock and shoe.\n The swelling was gone. He stood up and put his weight on it. He smiled\n wanly. \"It's okay now. It's not broken, I guess.\"\n\n\n She gestured him to the sofa. He complied.\n\n\n \"What's in the field pack?\" she asked. \"Money? How much?\" She moved\n toward it. He half rose to stop her, but by then she had it partly\n open. \"My,\" she said, bringing out a thick sheaf of bills. She rippled\n them sensuously. \"Pretty. Very, very pretty.\" She examined them for\n texture and appearance. \"They look good, Shamar. I'll bet it would cost\n ten million dollars in research on paper and ink and presses to do this\n kind of a job. Only another government has got that kind of money to\n throw around.\" She tossed the currency carelessly beside him and came\n to sit at his side.\n\n\n She took his hand. Her hand was warm and gentle. \"Tell me, Shamar,\" she\n said. \"Tell me all about it.\"\n\n\n So this is how easily spies are trapped in real life, Shamar told\n himself with numb disbelief.\n\n\n The story came out slowly and hesitantly at first. She said nothing\n until he had finished.\n\n\n \"And that's all? You really believe that, don't you? And I guess\n your government does, too. That all we need is just some little idea\n or something.\" She turned away from him. \"But of course, that's\n neither here nor there, is it? I never imagined an adventurer type\n would look like you. You have such a soft, honest voice. As a little\n girl, I pictured myself being carried off by a tanned desert sheik on\n a camel; and oh, he was lean and handsome! With dark flashing eyes\n and murderously heavy lips and hands like iron! Well, that's life, I\n guess.\" She stood and paced the room. \"Let me think. We'll pick up a\n flyer in Zelonip when we catch the bus next Tuesday. How much does the\n money weigh?\"\n\n\n \"Eighty pounds.\"\n\n\n \"I can carry about 10 pounds in my bag. You can take your field pack.\n How much is in it? Thirty pounds? That'll leave about forty which we\n can ship through on extra charges. Then, when we get to Xxla, I can\n hide you out in an apartment over on the East side.\"\n\n\n \"Why would you run a risk like that for me?\" he asked.\nShe brushed the hair from her face. \"Let's say—what? I don't really\n think you can make it, because it's so hopeless. But maybe, just maybe,\n you might be one of the rare ones who, if he plays his cards right, can\n beat the system. I love to see them licked!\n\n\n \"Well, I'm a clerk. That's all. Just a lowly clerk in one of the Party\n offices. I met Von Stutsman a year ago. This is his cabin. He lets me\n use it.\n\n\n \"He's older than I am; but there's worse husband material. But then\n again, he's about to be transferred to one of the big agricultural\n combines way out in the boondocks where there's no excitement at all.\n Just little old ladies and little old men and peasants having children.\n\n\n \"I'm a city girl. I like Xxla. And if I marry him, all that goes up the\n flue. I'll be marooned with him, God knows where, for years. Stuck,\n just stuck.\n\n\n \"Still—he is Von Stutsman, and he's on his way up. Everyone says that.\n Ten, twenty years, he'll be back to Xxla, and he'll come back on top.\n\n\n \"Oh ... I don't know what I want to do! If I marry him, I can get all\n the things I've always wanted. Position, security. He's older than I\n am, but he's really a nice guy. It's just that he's dull. He can't talk\n about anything but Party, Party, Party.\n\n\n \"That's what I came out to this cabin for. To think things over, to try\n to get things straightened out. And then you came along. Maybe it gives\n me a chance for something exciting before I ship off to the boondocks.\n Does that make sense to you?\n\n\n \"I'll get married and sit out there, and I'll turn the pages of the\n Party magazine and smile sweetly to myself. Because, you see, I'll\n always be able to lean forward and say, 'Dear? Once upon a time, I\n helped hide an Earth spy in Xxla.' And that'll knock that silly and\n self-satisfied look off his face for once.... Oh, I don't know! Let me\n alone!\" With that, she fled to the bedroom and slammed the door behind\n her.\n\n\n He could hear her sobbing helplessly.\n\n\n In the afternoon, she came out. He had fallen asleep. She shook him\n gently to waken him.\n\n\n \"Eh? Oh! Huh?\" He smiled foolishly.\n\n\n \"Wash up in there,\" she told him. \"I'm sorry I blew up on you this\n morning. I'll cook something.\"\n\n\n When he came back, she was serving them their dinner on steaming\n platters.\n\n\n \"Look, Ge-Ge,\" he said over coffee. \"You don't like your government.\n We'll help you out. There's this Galactic Federation idea.\" He\n explained to her the cross-fertilization of the two cultures.\n\n\n \"Shamar, my friend,\" she said, \"did you see Earth's proposal? There was\n nothing in it about giving us an interstellar drive. We were required\n to give Earth all transportation franchises. The organization you used\n to work for was to be given, as I remember it, an exclusive ninety-nine\n year right to carry all Earth-Itra commerce. It was all covered in the\n newspapers, didn't you see it?\"\n\n\n Shamar said, \"Well, now, I'm not familiar with the details. I wasn't\n keeping up with them. But I'm sure these things could be, you know,\n worked out. Maybe, for Security reasons, we didn't want to give you the\n interstellar drive right off, but you can appreciate our logic there.\n Once we saw you were, well, like us, a peace-loving planet, once you'd\n changed your government to a democracy, you would see it our way and\n you'd have no complaints on that score.\"\n\n\n \"Let's not talk politics,\" she said wearily. \"Maybe it's what you say,\n and I'm just naturally suspicious. I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I was just trying to help—\"\n\n\n The sentence was interrupted by a monstrous explosion.\n\n\n \"Good God!\" Shamar cried. \"What was that?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that,\" Ge-Ge said, shaking off the effects. \"They were probably\n testing one of their damned automated factories to see if it was\n explosion proof and it wasn't.\"\nIV\n\n\n During the week alone in the cabin, Ge-Ge fell in love with Shamar.\n\n\n \"Oh, my God!\" she cried. \"What will I do when they catch you? I'll die,\n Shamar! I couldn't bear it. We'll go to Xxla, we'll hide away as quietly\n as two mice, somewhere. We won't go out. The two of us, alone but\n together, behind closed doors and drawn shades. Nobody will ever know\n about us. We'll be the invisible people.\"\n\n\n Shamar protested. \"I don't see how we can ever be secure until\n something's done about your government. As long as you don't reach some\n kind of agreement with Earth, I'll be an outlaw. I'll be afraid any\n minute they'll tap my shoulder and come and take me away. I don't think\n we could hold up under that. We'd be at each other in no time.\"\n\n\n She wept quietly.\n\n\n The last day in the cabin, they went out and dug up the rest of the\n money. The trip to Xxla took place without incident. Ge-Ge rented an\n apartment for him, and he safely checked in. She went shopping for food\n and clothing.\n\n\n Thereafter she came nearly every evening. They would eat and she would\n reveal the inconsequential details of the office regime to which she\n was daily exposed. After dinner, they would sit in the living room and\n practice Itraian and neck a little. Then she would go home.\n\n\n One day, after a month of this routine, she threw herself into his\n arms and sobbed, \"I gave Von Stutsman back his earring today. It was\n the only fair thing to do. I'm afraid he knows about us. He's had me\n watched. I know he has. I admitted it was another man.\"\n\n\n Shamar held her tensely.\n\n\n She broke away. \"You were born in Zuleb, you suffered amnesia, you woke\n up in a ditch one morning without papers. You've been an itinerant\n worker since. Things like that happen all the time. You hit a big\n lottery ticket a few months ago. I told him that. How can he check it?\"\n\n\n \"You told him I didn't have any papers?\"\n\n\n \"Millions of people don't have any papers—the drifters, people that\n do casual labor, the people that don't work at all. The thing is,\n without papers he doesn't have any way to check on you. Oh, you should\n have seen his face when I gave him back his earring. He was absolutely\n livid. I didn't think he had it in him. I suppose I'll have to quit my\n job now. Oh, if you only had papers so we could be married!\"\n\n\n Ge-Ge's mood, that evening, alternated between despair and optimism. In\n the end, she was morose and restless. She repeated several times, \"I\n just don't know what's going to happen to us.\"\n\n\n \"Ge-Ge,\" he said, \"I can't spend my life in this apartment I've got to\n get out.\"\n\n\n \"You're mad.\" She faced him from across the room. She stood with her\n legs apart, firmly set. \"Well, I don't care what happens any more. I\n can't stand things to go on like they are. I'll introduce you to some\n people I know, since you won't be happy until I do. But God help us!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Old Tom Twilmaker has an obvious dedication to _____, and this is the most important driving factor in his life.", "question_unique_id": "51072_V3MGA5QZ_1", "options": ["Helping General Reuter stay sober.", "Helping the Itraians take the steps necessary to join the Galactic Federation.", "The Lord, Jesus Christ.", "The Trans-Universe Transport (TUT), where he proudly serves as its President."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Old Tom's plan for when he retires?", "question_unique_id": "51072_V3MGA5QZ_2", "options": ["He is determined to get the issues with the Itraians situated so that he can spend his retirement living in a cabin he plans to purchased there with part of his $250,000 per year salary.", "He has zero plans regarding retirement, as he plans to serve the people in his position until his death.", "He is going to happily walk away from his life of power and riches in exchange for that of a humble servant of the Lord, and his remaining years will be spent spreading the Lord's message", "Once he grooms Shaeffer to replace him as the president of the TUT, and then he plans to finish his days quietly surrounded by his family and loved ones."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What seems to be Shaeffer's driving motivation for accepting the mission?", "question_unique_id": "51072_V3MGA5QZ_3", "options": ["He knows that accepting the mission is his destiny, and he knows it's useless to fight the inevitable.", "He is thrilled that the older men place so much faith in him, and he does not want to let them down.", "He is drawn to the prospect of the salary he is offered, and he references it multiple times.", "He needs to do whatever is necessary to get back to Gi-Gi, his true love who awaits him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Gi-Gi end up assisting Shaeffer?\n", "question_unique_id": "51072_V3MGA5QZ_4", "options": ["Shaeffer's plans fall directly in line with those of the Party, and that is where Gi-Gi's loyalties are.", "Even though it's doubtful, she thinks he could be the one to beat the system.", "Shaeffer bribes her, and she needs the money.", "She is in love with him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What seems to be Gi-Gi's motivating factor behind virtually all of the decisions she makes?", "question_unique_id": "51072_V3MGA5QZ_5", "options": ["Her need for excitement.", "Her love for Shaeffer.", "Her loyalty to the Party.", "Her love for her fiance."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Gi-Gi think about her fiance?", "question_unique_id": "51072_V3MGA5QZ_6", "options": ["He's a good guy, but he is boring.", "He is a good guy, and she is ready to follow him around the planet without question.", "He is a good guy, and she is lucky to be engaged to someone of his status.  She truly loves him.", "He is a good guy, but he does not have ambition."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What stops Gi-Gi from marrying?", "question_unique_id": "51072_V3MGA5QZ_7", "options": ["She does not believe in the idea.", "Her fiance is killed in the war with the TUT.", "Shaeffer cannot procure the paperwork necessary to marry legally.", "Her fiance broke off their engagement."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/0/7/51072//51072-h//51072-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51445", "set_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Sordman the Protector", "year": 1958, "author": "Purdom, Tom", "topic": "Detective and mystery stories; PS; Science fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; Murder -- Fiction", "article": "SORDMAN THE PROTECTOR\nBY TOM PURDOM\n\n\n Illustrated by WOOD\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was the most powerful man in the world.\n \nHe could make anybody do anything—and yet\n \nhe was the slave of a mad criminal's mind!\nIn a beer hall on the eighty-first floor of the Hotel Mark Twain\n fourteen men held an adolescent girl prisoner.\n\n\n \"I'll go up there by myself,\" Sordman said.\n\n\n He was a big young man with sloppy black hair and a red beard. His\n fashionably ornate clothes covered the body of a first class Talent.\n Disciplined training, plus drugs and his natural gift, had made him\n one of the four truly\ndeveloped\npsionic adepts in the world. With\n drugs and preparation, he could command the entire range of psi powers.\n Without drugs, he could sense the emotions and sometimes the general\n thought patterns of the people near him.\n\n\n \"We'd better go with you,\" Lee Shawn said. \"There's an awful lot of\n fear up there. They'll kill you as soon as they learn you're a Talent.\"\n\n\n She was a lean, handsome woman in her early forties. A\n lawyer-politician, she was the Guggenheim Foundation's lobbyist. For\n years she had fought against laws to outlaw the development of Talent.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Mama, but I think I'd better go alone.\"\n\n\n Sordman, though he didn't tell her, knew that symbolically Lee saw him\n as the tree and herself as the rain and the earth.\n\n\n \"Go ahead and laugh,\" George Aaron said. \"But you'll need big medicine\n to fight that fear. Lee's symbolic place in your psyche is important.\"\n\n\n \"I've thought it over,\" Sordman said. \"I'll depend on God and nothing\n else.\"\n\n\n He felt George's mind squirm. As a psychologist, George accepted\n Sordman's Zen-Christian faith because Sordman needed it to control the\n powers of his Talent.\n\n\n But George himself was a confirmed skeptic.\n\n\n The men up there were scared. Sordman knew he would die if he lost\n control. But Lee and George were scared, too. Even now, standing in the\n park in early morning, their fear battered at his mind.\n\n\n He thought about swimming in the ocean. He made his skin remember\n salted wind. The real Atlantic, a mile away, helped the illusion.\n\n\n It was the right symbol. He felt his friends calm.\n\n\n \"Let him go,\" George said.\n\n\n \"He's manipulating us,\" Lee said.\n\n\n \"I know. But let him go.\"\n\n\n Sordman laughed. Lee bent and tore a clump of grass from the earth.\n \"Take this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\"\n\n\n It was wet with dew. He held it to his nose and smelled the dirt and\n grass. Two things kept him from destruction by his own Talent. He loved\n the physical world and he believed in God.\n\n\n \"I'll call you if I need you,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Be careful,\" George said. \"Many people need you.\"\n\n\n \"You've got status,\" Lee said. \"Use it. You're dealing with the kind of\n people it impresses.\"\nThe hotel stood three hundred stories tall. Surrounded by a\n five-mile-square park, connected to the major coastal cities by high\n speed vacuum tubes, the building was a small town. Eighty-five thousand\n people lived within its walls.\n\n\n Sordman rode an empty elevator. Through the glass sides he studied the\n deserted halls and shops.\n\n\n They were frightened here. Murder had been done. A Talent had\n destroyed two men.\nLord, protect us from the malice of a witch.\nThe eighty-first was a commercial floor. He got off the vator and\n walked down the main corridor. A man watched him through the door of a\n bar. A girl in a blue kimono froze behind the counter of a pastry shop.\n\n\n He stopped before the doors of the beer hall. He dropped to his knees\n and prayed.\n\n\n Once the brave leader walked into a panicky group and it was enough\n to\nlook\ncalm. Now he had to\nbe\ncalm. It was not enough to square\n the shoulders, walk erect, speak in a confident tone. Sordman's true\n emotions radiated from him every moment. Those within range felt them\n as their own.\n\n\n He drove thoughts like knives into the deepest corners of his mind. He\n begged release from fear. He prayed his God to grant him love for the\n frightened men within.\n\n\n He stood erect and squared his shoulders. His bulb-shouldered morning\n coat was grey as dawn. He thought a well loved formula, a Buddhist\n prayer from the Book of Universal Worship.\nAll life is transitory.\n All people must suffer and die. Let us forgive one another.\nHe roared his name and titles at the door.\n\n\n \"I am Talent Andrew Sordman, Fellow for Life of the Guggenheim\n Foundation, by Senate Act Protector of the People! By the laws of our\n country, I ask the right to enter.\"\n\n\n Silence.\n\n\n \"I am Talent Andrew Sordman, Fellow—\"\n\n\n \"\nGo away, witch!\n\"\n\n\n Without drugs and preparation, Sordman needed visual contact to sense\n emotions. But he didn't need Talent to sense the hatred in that voice.\n\n\n He pictured a rough block of stone.\n\n\n Using a basic skill, he kept the picture in his mind as he opened the\n door and planned his words.\n\n\n \"I have taken no drugs and made no preparation. You have nothing to\n fear. I'm your Protector and I've come to talk.\"\nThe beer hall was large and gloomy. The butts and ashes of the night's\n smoking filled its trays. Fourteen men watched him come. Half a dozen\n had hunting rifles.\n\n\n Hunched over, weeping, a thin, dark-haired girl sat beneath an\n unshaded light. A shiver of anger crossed his brain.\n\n\n \"Kill the witch!\" a young man shouted.\nLord, grant me love....\nHis eyes focused on the rifle bearers. One of them half-raised his gun.\n Then the butt clumped on the floor.\n\n\n \"You're bewitched!\" the young man said. \"I told you not to let him in.\"\n\n\n \"I've come to talk,\" Sordman said. \"Who's the leader of your group?\"\n\n\n The young man said, \"We don't have a leader. Here we're all equals.\"\n\n\n Sordman studied the young man's emotions. He was frightened, but only\n a little more than the others. There was something else there, too.\n Something very strong. Sex frustration! The young man had an athletic\n body and a handsome, chiselled face. On his yellow vest he wore the\n emblem of a Second Class Technician. But even a young man with adequate\n finances could be frustrated. Keeping the stone in his mind, he\n undressed a certain actress.\n\n\n He loved women and engaged in sex with lusty, triumphant joy. To him it\n was a celebration of the sacred mystery of life. He hoped some of this\n emotion reached its target.\n\n\n He started talking without asking for a parley.\n\n\n \"Two men died yesterday. I've come to hunt out the murderer and put him\n away. What's the evidence against this girl?\"\n\n\n \"We found drugs and a divining rod in her room.\"\n\n\n \"She's had a reputation for a long time.\"\n\n\n \"The school kids say she's a daydreamer.\"\n\n\n Sordman understood their fear. Psi was a new and dangerous force.\n Its use demanded moral and intellectual discipline. Only a rare and\n carefully developed personality could encounter the anger, hostility\n and fear in other minds and still retain compassion and reasonable\n respect for human beings. An undisciplined person panicked and went\n into a mental state approaching paranoia. Sordman fought panic every\n day. He fought it with a total acceptance of human motivations,\n cultivated tenderness and compassion, and a healthy ego which could\n accept and enjoy its own self-love.\n\n\n Those things, Sordman would have said, and also the necessary grace of\n God.\n\n\n But the most undisciplined personality could practice psi\n destructively. Hostile minds roamed the world. Death could strike you\n in a clear field beneath an open sky while your murderer lay home in\n his bed. No wonder they dragged a girl from her parents and bullied her\n till dawn.\nThey talked. Sordman picked his way through fourteen minds. As always,\n he found what he wanted.\n\n\n A fat, redheaded man sat a little apart from the group. He radiated a\n special kind of concern. He was concerned for the girl and for his own\n children. He believed the actions of the night had been necessary, but\n he felt the girl's pain and he wasn't sure he was doing the right thing.\n\n\n Above all, he was a man who wanted to do the right thing—the really\n right thing.\n\n\n \"You all have children,\" Sordman said. \"Would you like to see them\n dragged out at night and treated the way you've treated this girl?\"\n\n\n \"We've got to protect ourselves!\" the young man said.\n\n\n \"Let him talk!\" the fat man growled. He stared at the thick hands he\n spread on the table. \"The girl has said all night she's innocent. Maybe\n she is. Maybe the Protector can do what we haven't done and find the\n real killer.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a master Talent,\" Sordman said. \"If the killer is in the hotel, I\n can track him down before midnight. Will you give me that long?\"\n\n\n \"How do we know you'll bring in the right man?\"\n\n\n \"If he's the right man, he'll make it plain enough.\"\n\n\n \"You'll make him confess,\" the young man said. \"You'll manipulate him\n like a puppet.\"\n\n\n \"What good will that do?\" Sordman said. \"Do you think I could control a\n man all the time he's in prison and on trial? If I use my Talent more\n than a few hours, I collapse.\"\n\n\n \"Can we hold the girl here?\" asked the redheaded fat man.\n\n\n \"Feed her and treat her right,\" Sordman said. \"What's your name?\"\n\n\n \"John Dyer. My friends were about to use their belts on her.\"\n\n\n A rifleman shuffled uneasily. \"It's the only way. Mind killers use\n their Talent to tie their tongues and confuse us. Only pain can break\n their control.\"\n\n\n \"That's a fairy tale,\" Sordman said. \"Without drugs a Talent is\n helpless.\"\n\n\n \"We've got the girl,\" John Dyer said. \"She can't hurt us while we're\n waiting.\"\n\n\n \"\nHe can!\n\" the young man screamed. \"Are you a plain fool? He can go\n outside and kill us all.\"\n\n\n Sordman laughed. \"Sure I could. And tomorrow I'd have to fight off\n an army. That I couldn't do if I was fool enough to try. You're\n frightened, boy. Use your head.\"\n\n\n \"You are excited, Leonard,\" said an armed man. He wore a blue morning\n coat with Manager's stars and the emblem of a transportation company.\n \"We can wait a day. If we've got the killer, then we're safe. If we\n don't, then we've failed and the Protector should try.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not frightened. I just don't like Talent.\"\n\n\n Most of the men frowned. They didn't share the prejudice. A few nodded\n and mumbled and shot dark glances at Sordman.\n\n\n He let them talk. He stood there and thought apple pies and the\n brotherhood of man and the time he and his second wife spent three days\n in bed. And the big block of stone.\n\n\n He was a high-powered transmitter broadcasting joy, good will toward\n men and tranquility.\n\n\n In the end they listened to Dyer.\n\n\n \"But don't think you'll get a minute past midnight,\" said the young man.\n\n\n \"Technician, your Protector will remember.\"\nClarke Esponito had been a hard, quick little man in his early fifties.\n On the day of his death, the hotel newspaper had published his\n picture and announced his promotion to Director of Vocational Testing\n for the entire Atlantic Region. He had lived with his wife and his\n nineteen-year-old son, and his wife had been a lifetime wife. Esponito\n had been a Catholic, and that faith still called short-term marriages a\n mortal sin.\n\n\n For a moment Sordman wondered what it would be like to know only one\n woman your entire life. He loved the infinite variety of God's creation\n and wanted to sample as much of it as he could.\n\n\n \"Mylady Widow, our apologies.\" Lee bowed, hands before her chest, and\n Sordman and George Aaron bowed with her. \"We intrude on you,\" Lee said,\n \"only because we have to find the real killer. Other people may be in\n danger.\"\n\n\n The Widow Esponito bowed in return.\n\n\n \"I understand, Politician Shawn.\"\n\n\n Even with her face scarred by tears she looked lovely. From the\n earliest years of their marriage, her husband had been high in the\n Civil Service and able to buy her beauty treatments.\n\n\n \"Mylady,\" Sordman said, \"I need your help for two things. We want to\n know who you think wanted to kill your husband. And we need your want.\"\n\n\n \"Our want?\" her son asked. He stood rigidly beside his mother's chair.\n His clothes were rich and formal tweed.\n\n\n \"Do you want to find the killer?\"\n\n\n The boy nodded soberly. \"The moment I heard of his murder, I promised\n to avenge him.\"\n\n\n \"John!\" His mother trembled. \"You were raised to be a Christian!\"\n\n\n Sordman said, \"I want to locate the image I think was used to kill\n him. For that I want to hook your strong desires into my thoughts. You\n won't know I'm doing it. But if you're near me, I'll use your emotions.\"\n\n\n \"Your husband was a very important man,\" Lee said. \"Would anyone gain\n by his death?\"\n\n\n \"Everyone liked my husband. He was always laughing, he—\" The old-young\n woman started crying. Her son put his arm around her shoulders.\nSordman felt her pain and winced. Death and pain were part of Creation,\n but he hated them and often cursed them. At times like these, he\n understood George's skepticism.\n\n\n The boy said, \"Manager Kurt didn't like him.\"\n\n\n Mylady stifled her sobs and sat up. \"Manager Kurt has been our guest\n every month. Protector, John's upset. He's talking wildly.\"\n\n\n \"Father told me. He said Manager Kurt didn't like him.\"\n\n\n \"Your father and the Manager were good friends.\"\n\n\n He felt a sudden resentment in the woman. Why? The boy didn't feel as\n if he was lying. Maybe Esponito had been the kind of man who didn't\n talk about his job with his wife. But his son—who would some day be\n a member of his father's class—would have received a certain amount\n of practical advice. Perhaps Mylady resented being left out of her\n husband's professional life. That was a common family pattern, after\n all.\n\n\n George felt impatient. Sordman shot him a questioning glance. \"Where\n does Manager Kurt live?\"\n\n\n \"In Baltimore,\" the boy said.\n\n\n \"Mylady, may we use your phone?\"\n\n\n \"You don't take John seriously?\" Mylady said.\n\n\n \"We'll have to ask the Baltimore police to check on the Manager. It may\n not mean anything, but we have to follow every lead.\"\n\n\n \"Use the phone, Protector.\"\n\n\n Sordman and George stepped into the dining room.\n\n\n \"We're wasting time,\" George said. \"They're both upset and there seems\n to be a family quarrel.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But Esponito's murder gives us more leads than Bedler's.\n Bedler didn't even have a one-month wife when he died. Lots of people\n knew the Administrator and might have had a grudge against him.\"\n\n\n George clasped his hands behind his back. \"We've unraveled twenty-three\n murders in the last four years. Judging by that experience, I'd say\n there are three possibilities: both victims were picked at random; both\n victims are in some way related; or one victim was killed to confuse\n the police.\"\n\n\n \"Unless we have something entirely new.\"\n\n\n \"That's been the pattern so far.\"\n\n\n \"I think we're both coming to the same conclusion.\"\n\n\n \"Find out if the murderer used the picture from the paper?\"\n\n\n \"Mmm. If he did, Administrator Esponito was probably attacked on the\n spur of the moment. And we should be seeing who wanted to kill Bedler.\"\n\n\n \"What about Manager Kurt?\"\n\n\n \"Have Lee call the Baltimore police while I try to locate the murder\n weapon. At least they can search his home for drugs.\"\nGeorge went back to the parlor and Sordman stripped to his yellow vest.\n From the pockets of his morning coat he removed a leather case and a\n tiny plastic package. Unfolded, the plastic became a thin red robe with\n a yellow bomb-burst on the back.\n\n\n He called it his battle robe. Habit played a big part in the\n development of Talent. The same clothing, the same ritualized\n movements, helped put his mind in the proper state.\n\n\n He filled a hypodermic with a pink liquid and jabbed the needle into\n his wrist. As the drug took effect, he knelt to pray.\n\n\n \"Grant me, God, the strength to bind the demons in my mind.\"\n\n\n He stood up. At this point many Talents danced. Sordman loved to use\n his body, but ritual dancing made him feel ridiculous. It had been\n proven, however, that the Power flowed at its freest when the body was\n occupied, so he took three colored balls from the case and started\n juggling.\n\n\n The balls soared higher and faster. He mumbled a hymn. His voice grew\n stronger. He roared his love of life at the world.\nThe wall between his conscious and unconscious mind collapsed.\n Lightning flashed in his eyes. Colors sang in his brain. Walls, floor,\n table, chairs became extensions of his mind. They danced with the balls\n between his hands. The Universe and he flowed together like a sea of\n molten iron.\n\n\n His hands, miles from his mind, fumbled in the case. The balls danced\n and bobbed in the air. He laughed and unfolded his divining rod. The\n furniture bounced. Mylady Esponito screamed.\n\n\n All Creation is a flow. Dance, you parts of me, you living things, you\n atoms of my dust!\n\n\n He had torn Esponito's photo from a newspaper. Now he let the colored\n balls drop and stuck the picture on the end of the rod.\n\n\n \"This and that are one in kind. Servant rod, find me that!\"\n\n\n He stretched out the rod and turned on his heels. He sang and blanked\n his mind and listened to the tremors in his hands.\n\n\n Stop. Back right. Now the left. Too far. Down. Correct left....\n\n\n Here!\n\n\n He pressed a button on the rod. A tripod sprang out. A pair of sights\n flipped up. Carefully he sighted down the rod, out through the\n window-wall beside the table, to a grove of trees in the park.\nCreation roaring in his open head, divining rod in hand, he stormed\n out the door and down the hall. Lee and George hurried after him. The\n presence of their well known minds pleased him. There was George's\n unexpressed belief that he had \"mastered\" and guided the Power he\n feared. There was Lee's worry for him and her keen awareness of\n human realities. And there, too, were self-discipline, intelligence,\n affection, and a richness of experience and thought he expected to draw\n on for another forty years.\n\n\n And filling the world, pounding on the walls of existence, the Power.\nHis\npower. He, the master of the world! He who could uproot the\n trees, spin the earth, make the ground shake and change the colors of\n the sky.\n\n\n He felt George's clear-eyed, good-humored tolerance. A hypnotic command\n triggered in his mind. He saw a Roman Caesar ride in triumph and the\n slave behind him said, \"Caesar, remember you are mortal.\"\nMy\npower? It is a gift from the Fountain of Creation. Mine to use\n with the wisdom and restraint implanted by my teachers. Or else I'll\n be destroyed by\nmy\npower.\n\n\n He laughed and rolled into a cannon ball and hurled his body through\n the wood.\n\n\n \"Andy! Andy, you're losing us!\"\n\n\n He picked them up and towed them with him. The girl in the beer hall\n cried in his heart. The fox is many hills away and the hound grows\n impatient.\n\n\n They landed in a heap.\n\n\n George said, \"Andy, what the hell are you doing?\"\n\n\n \"I brought you down in a soft spot.\"\n\n\n \"You felt like an elephant running amok! Boy, you've got to be careful.\n Since you were a little boy I've taught you to watch every move. For a\n moment I don't think you knew how you felt.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" Sordman mumbled. \"That was close.\"\n\n\n \"Let's find the picture,\" Lee said. \"Has the drug worn off?\"\n\n\n \"Just about. The picture's over by that tree. It feels like it's\n rumpled up.\"\n\n\n After a minute's hunt, they found it. It had been rolled into a ball\n and tossed away.\n\n\n \"We're dealing with an amateur,\" Lee said. \"A Talent who was even\n half-developed would have burned this.\"\n\n\n Unrolled, the picture fell in half. It had been sliced with a blade.\n\n\n \"Let's walk back,\" Sordman said. \"Let's talk.\"\n\n\n They crossed a log bridge. He ran his hands along the rough bark\n and smelled the cool water of the stream. Most of the big park was\n wilderness, but here and there were pavilions, an outdoor theatre, open\n playing fields and beautifully planned gardens. A man could have a home\n surrounded by the shops and pleasures of civilized living and yet only\n be a ten-minute elevator ride from God's bounty.\n\n\n \"The fact the killer used the newspaper picture doesn't\nprove\nBedler\n was the real victim,\" George said. \"But it indicates it.\"\n\n\n \"Let's assume it's true,\" Sordman said, \"and see where it leads us.\"\n\n\n \"Bedler was married,\" Lee said. \"I remember that from our briefing.\"\n\n\n Sordman rabbit-punched a tree as he passed it. \"It was a one-year\n contract, and it ended two weeks ago.\"\n\n\n \"I smell jealousy,\" Lee said.\n\n\n \"The world is filled with it,\" George said. \"I favor short-term\n marriages. They're the only way a person can practice a difficult art\n and make mistakes without committing himself for life. But about half\n the mental breakdowns I used to get were due to the insecurities caused\n by a temporary contract. One party almost always hopes the marriage\n will somehow become permanent.\"\n\n\n \"Let's talk to Bedler's ex-wife,\" Sordman said.\nHer name was Jackie Baker. She was just over five feet tall and blonde.\n She wore glasses with green frames.\n\n\n Sordman liked big women but he had to admit this little creature made\n him feel like swatting and rubbing.\n\n\n She wore a sea-green kimono and bowed gracefully at the door.\n\n\n \"Citizen Baker, I'm Protector Andrew Sordman. May we talk to you?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, Protector. Welcome.\"\n\n\n They entered and he introduced Lee and George. After they exchanged\n bows, the girl offered them some wine. She took a bottle of clear Rhine\n wine from the cooler and asked George to open it. There were several\n journals on a throw table.\n\n\n \"Are you a doctor, Citizen?\" Lee asked.\n\n\n \"No, Politician. A medical technician.\"\n\n\n They drank the first glass of wine.\n\n\n \"Technician,\" George said, \"we have to ask you some questions. We'll\n try not to upset you.\"\n\n\n The girl closed her eyes. \"I'll try not to be upset. I hope you find\n whoever killed him. I'd like to find her.\"\n\n\n The girl felt lonely. She ached with unsatisfied needs. I'd like to\n lie with you and comfort you, Sordman thought. I'd like to hold you in\n my arms and drain all the tears you're holding back. But he couldn't.\n His contract with his wife had six months to run and no one committed\n adultery any more. \"When the rules are carefully tailored to human\n needs,\" Lee often said, \"there's no excuse for breaking them.\"\n\n\n \"Why 'her'?\" Lee asked. \"Why 'her' instead of 'him'?\"\n\n\n The girl looked at Sordman. \"Can't you just probe my mind? Do I have to\n answer questions?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid so,\" Sordman said. \"My Talent has its limits. I can't\n deep-probe everybody's mind, any more than a baseball pitcher can pitch\n all day.\"\n\n\n Lee said, \"Even if he could, our warrant says we can't probe more than\n four suspects.\"\n\n\n \"Now can you tell us why you think the killer is a woman?\" George asked.\nThe girl held out her glass and George filled it. \"Because he was the\n kind of man who made you want to kill him. He was understanding and\n loving. He made me feel like a princess all the time I lived with him.\n But he can't keep to one girl.\" She gulped down the whole glass. \"He\n told me so himself. He was so wonderful to live with I went insane\n every time he looked at another girl. I knew he was shopping for his\n next wife.\" She wiggled in her chair. \"Is that what you want to know?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" Sordman said. \"Do you know who he was interested in before\n he died?\"\n\n\n The girl had big, myopic eyes. \"Our contract ended sixteen days ago.\"\n She took a cigarette from inside her kimono. \"Protector Sordman, could\n I just talk to you?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Sordman said.\n\n\n Lee and George went to a coffee house on the next floor down.\n\n\n \"I want to talk to just you,\" the girl said. \"I feel safe with you. You\n make me feel right.\"\n\n\n \"It goes with being a Talent,\" Sordman said. \"Either we like people and\n let them know it or we crack.\"\n\n\n \"I know it's all right to tell you things. I love Joe. I broke the\n rules for him. I didn't avoid him for three months the way you're\n supposed to. I went everywhere I knew he'd be. I had to see him.\"\n\n\n Sordman stroked his beard. Mentally, he cuddled her in his arms and\n murmured comfort to her.\n\n\n She hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms around her body.\n\n\n \"Just before our marriage ended, I found out he was seeing Raven\n English as much as he could. He didn't break the rules. But when we\n went to dances he always danced with her once or twice. And she and\n her husband used to meet us in bars. After the contract expired, he\n couldn't see her much because she and her husband have another six\n months to go. But there was a dance last week and I saw the two of them\n disappear into the park. Raven's husband hunted all over for her. He\n looked horrible. I pitied him.\"\n\n\n \"Who's Raven English?\"\n\n\n \"She's a sadist. I know she is. She's just the type to do this. She\n likes to play with men and hurt them. Her poor husband is a nervous\n wreck. I know she killed Joe, Protector. She hates us!\"\n\n\n He stood up. The girl watched him with big eyes. He put his hand on her\n head.\n\n\n \"Sleep is a joy,\" he said.\n\n\n Unprepared, he couldn't have done that to many people. But she was a\n woman, which added to his influence, and totally exhausted.\nHe got off the vator and looked around for the coffee house. Dozens of\n people wandered the halls and the shops. As he walked down the hall,\n some of them looked away or got as far from him as they could. Others\n ignored him or found his presence reassuring or studied him curiously.\n\n\n A fat woman in a black kimono walked toward him. She had one hand on\n her hip and her eyes were narrowed and hard. Sordman smiled. He felt\n her fear and distrust, and her determination not to let such emotions\n conquer her.\n\n\n \"Good afternoon, Protector.\"\n\n\n \"Good afternoon, Citizen Mother.\"\n\n\n He felt her triumph and her pleasure with herself.\n\n\n His fellow humans often made him gawk in wonder. Some people say we're\n psychic cripples, he thought. And maybe we are. But we do our work and\n we enjoy ourselves. And we do dangerous things like putting bases on\n Venus and falling in love. Surrounded by death and danger, crippled\n though we are, we go on.\n\n\n He swelled with feeling. People smiled and glanced at each other or hid\n shyly from the organ chords of his emotion.\n\n\n An old man stepped in front of him.\n\n\n \"Monster! Freak!\"\n\n\n He was thin and perfectly dressed. Sordman stopped. God of Infinite\n Compassion, this is my brother....\n\n\n \"They ought to lock you up,\" the man said. \"They ought to keep you away\n from decent people. Get out of my head! Leave me alone!\"\n\n\n People stared at them. A small crowd gathered. Lee appeared in the door\n of the coffee house.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" Sordman told the people. \"It's all right.\" He started\n to go on.\n\n\n The man stepped in front of him. \"Leave me alone, freak. Let me think\n my own thoughts!\"\n\n\n \"Citizen, I haven't touched your mind.\"\n\n\n \"I felt it just then!\"\n\n\n \"It was no more than I could help. I'm sorry if I've hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"Go away!\"\n\n\n \"I'm trying to.\"\n\n\n \"Murderer! Mind witch!\"\n\n\n He was faced with a strong mind that valued its independence. Anything\n he did would be detected and resented.\n\n\n \"Citizens,\" he said, \"this man deserves your respect. No matter what\n a man does, he's bound to offend someone. This Citizen values his\n privacy—which is good—and therefore I make him angry. I hope the good\n my Talent lets me do outweighs the bad. Forgive me, brother.\"\n\n\n He stepped to one side. \"Leave him alone,\" someone said. \"Let the\n Protector work.\"\n\n\n \"Leave him alone, old man.\"\n\n\n \"\nI'm not an old man.\n\"\n\n\n \"No, you're not,\" Sordman said. \"I admire your courage.\" He walked on.\n Behind him the old man shouted curses.\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\" Lee said.\n\n\n \"Sure. Let's go in and sit down.\"\n\n\n There were just a few people in the coffee house. Sordman ordered and\n told them what he had learned.\n\n\n \"I wish you could probe everyone in the building,\" George said. \"All we\n get is gossip.\"\n\n\n \"The husband of this Raven English has a motive,\" Lee said. \"Why don't\n we visit her?\"\n\n\n \"I think we should.\" Sordman drank his coffee. \"Citizen English\n herself might have killed them.\"\n\n\n \"I doubt it,\" George said.\n\n\n \"It all sounds like a lot of talk,\" Sordman said. \"But we have to\n follow it up. This business is nothing but wearing out your legs\n running after every lead. If your legs are strong, you can run anybody\n down.\"\n\n\n They finished their coffee and cigarettes and trudged out.\nRaven English, one-year wife of Leonard Smith, did not meet them at the\n door with gracious bows. Instead, a wall panel by the door shot back.\n They stared at a square of one way glass.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" a girl's voice said.\n\n\n \"I'm Andrew Sordman, your Protector. I come on lawful business. May we\n enter?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Lee asked.\n\n\n \"Because I don't like witches. Keep out.\"\n\n\n \"We're hunting the killer,\" Sordman said. \"We're on your side. I've\n taken no drugs and made no preparations. You don't have to be afraid.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not afraid. I just don't want you in my home.\"\n\n\n \"You have to let us in,\" Lee said. \"Our warrant gives us entry into\n every room in this hotel. If we have to break the door down, we can.\"\n\n\n \"I hope we don't have to break the door down.\"\n\n\n \"You're getting fat,\" George said. \"You need the exercise.\"\n\n\n \"You won't break in,\" the girl said.\n\n\n Sordman crossed the hall to get a good start. \"I'm about to, Mylady.\"\n His shoulder filled the doorway behind him. This looks like fun, he\n thought. He liked to feel his body working.\n\n\n The door opened. A dark-haired, slender girl stood in the doorway. Her\n skin was brown and her lips were pink, unpainted flesh. She wore a red\n kimono.\n\n\n \"All right. Come in.\"\n\n\n \"Gladly,\" Sordman said.\n\n\n It was a three-room apartment, with the kitchen tucked into one wall of\n the parlor. A painting stood on an easel by the window. The window was\n a shoulder-high slit and from it, here on the hundred and forty-first\n floor, he could see across the park to the beach and the rolling\n Atlantic.\n\n\n God grant me self-control, he thought. If this is the killer, grant me\n self-control. He made his savage thoughts lie down and purred at the\n world.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry we have to force our way in,\" he said. \"And I'm sorry you\n don't approve of Talent. But please remember two men have died and a\n little girl may die, too. There are lots of panicky people in the Mark\n Twain. We've got to find the killer soon and you can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Why bother me?\" the girl said.\n\n\n \"This is awkward,\" Lee said. She stood erect but looked past the girl.\n She felt embarrassed. \"Someone told us you and Bedler were seeing each\n other.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, quit being prudish,\" George said. \"These things happen all the\n time.\" He turned to the girl. \"We were told you and Joe Bedler were\n making plans to get married when your present contract ends.\"\n\n\n \"That's a lie!\"\n\n\n Sordman laughed in his belly. No matter what the rules were, few women\n publicly admitted they had broken them. By the standards of the period\n from 1800 to 1990, the whole marriage system of the Twenty-First\n Century was immoral; but there were still prudes. And women still\n preserved the conventions.\n\n\n \"Who told you that?\" Raven English said. She frowned. \"Was it that\n Jackie Baker?\"\n\n\n \"Why her?\" George asked.\n\n\n \"Because she's a logical person for you to talk to and because it's the\n kind of thing she'd say.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sordman said.\n\n\n \"She ought to see a psycher! And that's why you came?\"\n\n\n \"We're not accusing you,\" Sordman said. \"But we've got to follow every\n lead.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Through their relationship, Lee symbolically helps Sordman to ", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_1", "options": ["feel smothered by her constant presence.", "flourish and grow as an individual.", "see the dark side of human nature.", "understand the meaning of real love."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the main belief that seems to ground Sordman more than any other?", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_2", "options": ["His love and devotion to God.", "His devotion to his friends.", "His love for the physical world.", "His search for the truth."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In order to ensure that he was actually full of confidence, not just pretending to be confident, Sordsman", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_3", "options": ["takes his drugs.", "prays.", "gets a drink from the bar.", "pulls on the strength of his friends."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When faced by the young, handsome man amongst the others with the young girl, what does Sordman attempt to make the young man focus on rather than his animosity towards Sordman?", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_4", "options": ["The young girl they are abusing.", "The other suspects;", "The murder that is being investigated.", "Sex."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Sordman turn to the fat, redheaded man as an ally in the situation with the girl?  ", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_5", "options": ["He knows that the man has a love for the girl and will protect her. ", "The man is sworn to protect the girl by law.", "He senses the man is afraid for the girl's well-being, and he wants to do the right thing.", "The man has always proved to be rational."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Aside from his faith, what helps Sordman achieve his ultimate talent?", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_6", "options": ["His bond with his friends.", "His love of nature.", "Drugs.", "His need to do the right thing."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is one of Sordman's greatest enjoyments?", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_7", "options": ["Spending time with his friends. ", "Communing with nature.", "The pleasure of being with a woman.", "Solving mysteries."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the one thing that made Sordman feel silly?", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_8", "options": ["Taking drugs.", "Accusing people of crimes they didn't commit.", "Ritualistic dancing", "His faith in God."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the main difference between The Esponito's marriage and The Bedler's marriage?", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_9", "options": ["The Esponito's were in a long-term marriage and The Bedler's weren't.", "The Bedler's were in a long-term marriage and The Esponito's weren't.", "The Bedler's were in love and The Esponito's weren't.", "The Esponito's were in an open marriage and The Bedler's weren't."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In the end, we find out _____ kills Bedler.", "question_unique_id": "51445_B2RB48N7_10", "options": ["John Esponito", "His wife.", "We never find out", "His lover."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/4/4/51445//51445-h//51445-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. 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{"article_id": "51268", "set_unique_id": "51268_Z1XR8LOF", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Girls From Earth", "year": 1970, "author": "Robinson, Frank M.", "topic": "Short stories; Science fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction; PS", "article": "THE GIRLS FROM EARTH\nBy FRANK M. ROBINSON\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nProblem: How can you arrange marriages with\n \nmen in one solar system, women in another—and\n \nneither willing to leave his own world?\nI\n\n\n \"The beasts aren't much help, are they?\"\n\n\n Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line\n tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.\n\n\n \"No,\" he grunted, \"they're not. They always balk at a time like this,\n when they can see it'll be hard work.\"\n\n\n Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack\n around his thick waist.\n\n\n \"Together now, Karl.\nOne! Two!\n\"\n\n\n They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the\n rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees,\n their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made\n no effort to come closer.\n\"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list.\"\n\n\n Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.\n\n\n \"That's what I've been thinking about,\" he said, worried.\n\n\n They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft\n bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened\n to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it\n solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling,\n rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or\n so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.\n\n\n \"How much time have we got, Karl?\"\n\n\n The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at\n them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help\n beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put\n down at Landing City.\n\n\n \"Two hours, maybe a little more,\" he stated hastily when Hill looked\n more worried. \"Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our\n numbers on the list.\"\n\n\n He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and\n threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his\n saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.\n\n\n Hill watched him curiously. \"What are you taking the furs for? This\n isn't the trading rocket.\"\n\n\n \"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and\n maybe\nshe'll\nappreciate the coverings then.\"\n\n\n \"You never would have thought of it yourself,\" Hill grunted. \"Grundy\n must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less\n you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them,\n they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the\n family-raising yourself.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't have to sign up,\" Karl pointed out. \"You could have applied\n for a wife from some different planet.\"\n\n\n \"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the\n farms and raise families.\"\n\n\n Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling\n up and headed into the thick forest.\nIt was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail\n and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making\n that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it\n would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning,\n somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his\n shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.\n\n\n And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family.\n He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.\n\n\n \"You going to raise a litter, Joe?\"\n\n\n Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the\n same thing.\n\n\n \"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill,\" Hill answered\n defensively. \"Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole\n them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell\n the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself.\"\n\n\n He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to\n him.\n\n\n \"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to\n have one for my wife to take care of, too.\"\n\n\n Karl chuckled. \"I don't think she'll have the time!\"\n\n\n They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands\n that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself\n on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy\n streets, and the small rocket port—a scorched thirty acres or so\n fenced off with barbed wire.\n\n\n Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave\n of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and\n bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked\n it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in\n clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the\n woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.\n\n\n The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the\n main path from the small side trails.\n\n\n Hill broke the silence first. \"I wonder what they'll be like.\"\n\n\n Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. \"They're Earthwomen, Joe.\nEarth!\n\"\n\n\n It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl\n had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He\n was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman.\n He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage\n of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket\n office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed\n disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted\n broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the\n stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing\ndefinite\nto\n offer, no real facts at all.\n\n\n Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few\n months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival\n spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles\n farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet;\n and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in\n yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.\n\n\n \"They say they're good workers,\" Hill said.\n\n\n Karl nodded. \"Pretty, too.\"\n\n\n They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing\n City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had\n been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as\n any city on any planet—maybe even have a population of ten thousand\n people or more.\n\n\n \"Joe,\" Karl said suddenly, \"what's supposed to make women from Earth\n better than women from any other world?\"\n\n\n Hill located a faint itch and frowned. \"I don't know, Karl. It's hard\n to say. They're—well, sophisticated, glamorous.\"\n\n\n Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he\n thought, rather hard to define.\n\n\n The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters\n for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There\n was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way\n through to see what had caused it.\n\n\n \"We saw this the last time we were here,\" Hill said.\n\n\n \"I know,\" Karl agreed, \"but I want to take another look.\" He was\n anxious to glean all the information that he could.\n\n\n It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The\n edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the\n last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever.\n She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to\n her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was\n provocative. A quoted sentence read: \"I'm from\nEarth\n!\" There was\n nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to\n which the colonial office was sending the women.\nShe was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe,\n and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet,\n but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?\n\n\n A loudspeaker blared.\n\n\n \"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers!\n All colonists....\"\n\n\n There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly\n moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little\n blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell\n them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a\n great imagination, nothing else.\n\n\n Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the\n landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome\n signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government\n pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went\n over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out\n and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in\n the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering\n how the girls from Earth would compare with them.\n\n\n He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like\n who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it\n landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of\n course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting\n acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined\n that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their\n farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way,\n till it was too late.\n\n\n \"Sandwich, mister? Pop?\"\n\n\n Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and\n wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten\n minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself\n straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker\n of exhaust flame.\n\n\n The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.\n\n\n \"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you....\"\n\n\n \"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest\n afterward....\"\n\n\n \"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture....\"\n\n\n \"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five....\"\n\n\n \"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers,\" Hill\n said. \"Maybe we could trade.\"\n\n\n Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just\n as good as depending on first impressions.\n\n\n There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted\n overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of\n fire.\n\n\n He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed\n aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look\n his best.\n\n\n The twinkling fire came nearer.\nII\n\n\n \"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher.\"\n\n\n Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.\n\n\n \"Please send him right in.\"\n\n\n That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come\n in whether Escher wanted him to or not.\n\n\n The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and\n Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem\n was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.\n\n\n MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes,\n just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology\n by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in\n browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.\n\n\n He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't\n easy—MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was\n the head of the department.\n\n\n Escher gave in first. \"Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have\n tossed in our laps now?\"\n\n\n \"You know the one—colonization problem. You know that when we first\n started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population\n took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers,\n the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to\n get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome\n than the female; the men left—but the women didn't. At least, not in\n nearly the same large numbers.\n\n\n \"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is\n now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means,\n ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't\n just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business\n and I'm not just using a literary phrase.\"\n\n\n He threw a paper on Escher's desk. \"You'll find most of the statistics\n about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to\n women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's\n quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a\n lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they\n wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?\"\n\n\n Escher shook his head blankly.\n\n\n \"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband,\" MacDonald\n continued, \"grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to\n improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've\n got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more\n silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the\n pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy—whatever that\n means—and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a\n violation or not.\"\n\n\n Escher looked bored. \"Not to mention the new prohibition which\n forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair\n tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks—if you'll pardon the\n expression—of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the\n solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize.\"\n\n\n MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.\n\n\n \"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your\n baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Perpetual motion machines are,\" Escher said quietly. \"And pulling\n yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless,\n women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should\n they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern\n conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored\n planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play\n footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them\n alive as not?\"\n\n\n \"What do you advise I do, then?\" MacDonald demanded. \"Go back to the\n Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of\n anything?\"\n\n\n Escher looked hurt. \"Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy.\"\n\n\n \"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay\n off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not\n necessarily the spirit.\"\n\n\n \"When do they have to have a solution?\"\n\n\n \"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the\n situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will\n happen then won't be good.\"\n\n\n \"All right, by then we'll have the answer.\"\n\n\n MacDonald stopped at the door. \"There's another reason why they want it\n worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for\n emigration to the colony planets is falling off.\"\n\n\n \"How come?\"\n\n\n MacDonald smiled. \"On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to\n emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?\"\n\n\n When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly\n tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization\n Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic\n level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per\n cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that\n level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine\n level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it\n didn't work, you took the lumps, too.\n\n\n He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications\n set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly\n and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space\n travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly.\n You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation,\n anyway.\n\n\n He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal\n chute. That would have to be the first to go.\n\n\n There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing,\n as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize.\n Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.\n\n\n He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read\n it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no\n solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would\n solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was\n still enough.\n\n\n Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to\n colonize who didn't\nwant\nto colonize.\n\n\n The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second\n point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.\n\n\n No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all—provided you held your nose,\n silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was\n such a thing as a moral code.\nIII\n\n\n Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the\n correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to\n begin.\n\n\n She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid\n her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint\n away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.\n\n\n She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you\n would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact\n mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't\n even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a\n fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly—but not\n pretty, either.\n\n\n Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the\n corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a\n race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.\n\n\n \"Going out tonight, Phyl?\"\n\n\n She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth.\n The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she\n would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.\n\n\n \"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse\n out.\"\n\n\n The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. \"Sure, Phyl,\n I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us—waiting for the phone\n to ring.\"\n\n\n Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting\n the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard\n sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure.\n Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a\n theatre.\n\n\n At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped\n and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in\n front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you\n should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and\n let yourself go.\n\n\n She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and\n went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on\n the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety—scientifically\n written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described\n love affairs to hold anybody's interest.\n\n\n It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room,\n getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to\n the floor.\n\n\n What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live\n vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a\n husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three\n years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many\n others—call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though\n heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping\n about.\n\n\n Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office\n that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge\n game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have\n joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the\n other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's\n life.\n\n\n But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a\n husband and family. She was kidding herself again.\n\n\n She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail\n slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the\n time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture\n clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....\n\n\n Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out\n the contents and spread it wide.\n\n\n She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on\n it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests\n at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue\n eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be\n attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was\n eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.\nIt was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the\n authorities immediately!\nBright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: \"Come to the\n Colonies, the Planets of Romance!\"\nWhoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying\n on....\nThe smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures.\n The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to\n women—a startling disproportion—the comfortable cities that weren't\n nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced\n qualifications.\n\n\n She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an\n artist's conception, but even so....\n\n\n And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where\n you had to battle disease and dirty savages.\n\n\n It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she\n wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the\n poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.\nBut the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had\n taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was\n up to her to notify the authorities!\nShe took another look at the poster.\n\n\n The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed\n it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain\n wrapper that the poster had come in.\nIV\n\n\n The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the\n edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon\n thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it\n look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She\n knew she would never be able to buy it.\n\n\n But she didn't intend to buy it.\n\n\n She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her.\n There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously\n embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was\n a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she\n had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.\n\n\n Time enough, at any rate.\n\n\n The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any\n hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it\n up and dropped it in her shopping bag.\n\n\n She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she\n felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she\n knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out\n to the end, to grasp any straw.\n\n\n \"Let go of me!\" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.\n\n\n \"Sorry, miss,\" the man said politely, \"but I think we have a short trip\n to take.\"\n\n\n She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up.\n She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a\n probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted\n her to steal, and then she'd be out again.\n\n\n They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.\n\n\n She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers\n had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.\n\n\n In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing\n a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies\n who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the\n presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated\n in from the corridor.\n\n\n \"Why did you steal it?\" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which,\n she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the\n department store lights.\n\n\n \"I don't have anything to say,\" she said. \"I want to see a lawyer.\"\n\n\n She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another\n plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.\n\n\n And she probably was. You had to do\nsomething\nnowadays. You couldn't\n just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the\n endless boring lectures on art and culture.\n\n\n \"Name?\" he asked in a tired voice.\n\n\n She knew the statistics he wanted. \"Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown\n hair and green eyes. Prints on file.\"\n\n\n The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left\n and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his\n fingers down one of the pages.\n\n\n The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought—six months and a\n fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for\n shoplifting.\n\n\n A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government\n suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could\n hear a little of what he said:\n\n\n \"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ...\n probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration.\"\n\n\n \"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a\n choice,\" the judge finally said. \"You can either go to the penitentiary\n for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony\n planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus.\"\n\n\n She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand\n dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in\n neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She\n could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing\n she could do about it.\n\n\n \"I wouldn't call that a choice,\" she said sourly. \"I'll ship out.\"\nV\n\n\n Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences,\n like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in\n soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the\n electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of\n security in an ever-changing world.\n\n\n She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady,\n thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the\n downtown stores.\n\n\n Well, maybe some day she would.\n\n\n But not today. And not tonight.\n\n\n The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a\n minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The\n conversation wasn't long.\n\n\n She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to\n get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same\n night.\n\n\n It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away,\n she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from\n other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels\n on the sidewalk.\n\n\n The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building\n than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the\n buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on\n the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man\n appeared in the doorway.\n\n\n \"Miss Carstens?\"\n\n\n She smiled pertly.\n\n\n \"We've been expecting you.\"\n\n\n She wondered a little at the \"we,\" but dutifully smiled and followed\n him in.\n\n\n The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment.\n When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at\n the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a\n battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of\n the girls sitting in them.\n\n\n She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.\n\n\n \"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never....\"\n\n\n The young man coughed politely. \"I'm afraid there's been no mistake.\n Full name, please.\"\n\n\n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he\n wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.\n\n\n \"Suzanne Carstens,\" the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.\n \"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't\n matter, though. Take a seat over there.\"\n\n\n She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.\n\n\n \"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've\n interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice.\n We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will\n pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The\n colonists need wives; they offer you—security.\"\n\n\n He stressed the word slightly.\n\n\n \"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay\n behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten\n thousand dollars.\"\n\n\n Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars\n and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had\n worked so hard for, her symbol of security.\n\n\n \"Well, what do you say?\" There was a dead silence. The young man\n from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. \"How about you, Miss\n Carstens?\"\n\n\n She smiled sickly and nodded her head. \"I\nlove\nto travel!\" she said.\n\n\n It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Which of the men seems to be most genuinely interested in meeting a wife that night and why?", "question_unique_id": "51268_Z1XR8LOF_1", "options": ["Karl because he has already professed his love for one of the women.", "Hill because he has already professed his love for one of the women.", "Hill because he is being thoughtful when it comes to her return accommodations.", "Karl because he is being thoughtful when it comes to her return accommodations."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Hill's fear when it comes to developing a relationship with his new wife?", "question_unique_id": "51268_Z1XR8LOF_2", "options": ["He is afraid she is not going to like his personality enough to fall in love with him.", "He does not want to get too attached to her because he is afraid she will be taken from him.", "He does not want to give her too many concessions because she will come to expect them, and she will not do any of the tasks for which he has procured a wife in order to do for him.", "He does not know how to act around a woman, and he is very insecure."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Karl is excited to have a wife so that", "question_unique_id": "51268_Z1XR8LOF_3", "options": ["she can talk to his mother and sisters so that he will not have to listen to their gossip any longer.", "he will have someone to be madly in love with eventually.", "he will have someone to talk to and help with daily activities.", "there will be someone to do his bidding at all times."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When they think about their prospective wives, both men", "question_unique_id": "51268_Z1XR8LOF_4", "options": ["almost dread the prospect of bringing her home as she will disrupt their life.", "change their minds and decide that it might be ok to be late so that they do not have to take one home.", "look forward to having someone to spend their golden years with.", "think of having a wife only for practical reasons and nothing more."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "One way women were \"persuaded\" to go to the colony is", "question_unique_id": "51268_Z1XR8LOF_5", "options": ["through propaganda making them feel old and if it was their final chance to get a man.", "through propaganda suggesting that the colony offered them a more glamorous lifestyle.", "through propaganda that made them feel as if it was the right thing to do for the future of the human race.", "through propaganda stating that if they did not, then the men would be forced to die alone."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "A second trick used to get women to go to the colony was", "question_unique_id": "51268_Z1XR8LOF_6", "options": ["by holding a lottery in which they believed the winning numbers would be given money, but, instead, they were giving a ride to the colony,", "simply by capturing her and taking her.", "arresting those who committed petty crimes and virtually giving them no other option.", "by telling them that if they went, they would have a wonderful life with some of the most attractive men in the universe."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When Phyllis finds the poster in her mail, she initially wants to", "question_unique_id": "51268_Z1XR8LOF_7", "options": ["alert the authorities because she believes her privacy is being invaded.", "hide because she feels she is being targeted to go to the colony and she has no intention of leaving.", "jump on a ship to the colony.", "do nothing, as she simply does not care about such nonsense."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Suzanne's biggest concern about leaving?", "question_unique_id": "51268_Z1XR8LOF_8", "options": ["How she is physically going to make the trip, as she is very ill.", "How long the trip will take.", "Will she find a man who truly loves her.", "She will never find a place to live as wonderful as what she is leaving behind."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/2/6/51268//51268-h//51268-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "43041", "set_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Double or Nothing", "year": 1962, "author": "Sharkey, Jack", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Science fiction; Inventors -- Fiction", "article": "DOUBLE or NOTHING\nBy JACK SHARKEY\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Stories of\n Imagination May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe mind quails before certain contemplations?\nThe existence of infinity, for instance.\nOr finity, for that matter.\nOr 50,000 batches of cornflakes dumped from the sky.\nI don't know why I listen to Artie Lindstrom. Maybe it's because at\n times (though certainly not—I hope—on as permanent a basis as Artie)\n I'm as screwy as he is. At least, I keep letting myself get sucked into\n his plans, every time he's discovered the \"invention that will change\n the world\". He discovers it quite a bit; something new every time.\n And, Artie having a natural mechanical aptitude that would probably\n rate as point-nine-nine-ad-infinitum on a scale where one-point-oh was\n perfection, all his inventions work. Except—\n\n\n Well, take the last thing we worked on. (He usually includes me in his\n plans because, while he's the better cooker-upper of these gadgets,\n I've got the knack for building them. Artie can't seem to slip a radio\n tube into its socket without shattering the glass, twist a screwdriver\n without gouging pieces out of his thumb, nor even solder an electrical\n connection without needing skin-grafts for the hole he usually burns in\n his hand.)\n\n\n So we're a team, Artie and me. He does the planning, I do the\n constructing. Like, as I mentioned, the last thing we worked on. He\n invented it; I built it. A cap-remover (like for jars and ketchup\n bottles). But not just a clamp-plus-handle, like most of the same\n gadgets. Nope, this was electronic, worked on a tight-beam radio-wave,\n plus something to do with the expansion coefficients of the metals\n making up the caps, so that, from anyplace in line-of-sight of her home,\n the housewife could shove a stud, and come home to find all the caps\n unscrewed on her kitchen shelves, and the contents ready for getting at.\n \n It did, I'll admit, have a nice name: The Teletwist.\n\n\n Except, where's the point in unscrewing caps unless you're physically\n present to make use of the contents of the jars? I mentioned this to\n Artie when I was building the thing, but he said, \"Wait and see. It'll\n be a novelty, like hula hoops a couple of decades back. Novelties always\n catch on.\"\nWell, he was wrong. When we finally found a manufacturer softheaded\n enough to mass-produce a few thousand of the gadgets, total sales for\n the entire country amounted to seventeen. Of course, the price was kind\n of prohibitive: Thirteen-fifty per Teletwist. Why would a housewife\n lay that kind of money on the line when she'd already, for a two-buck\n license, gotten a husband who could be relied upon (well, most of the\n time) to do the same thing for her?\n\n\n Not, of course, that we didn't finally make money on the thing. It was\n just about that time, you'll remember, that the Imperial Martian Fleet\n decided that the third planet from Sol was getting a bit too powerful,\n and they started orbiting our planet with ultimatums. And while they\n were waiting for our answer, our government quietly purchased Artie's\n patent, made a few little adjustments on his cap-twister, and the\nnext\nthing the Martians knew, all their airlocks were busily unscrewing\n themselves with nothing outside them except hungry vacuum. It was also\n the\nlast\nthing the Martians knew.\n\n\n So Artie's ideas seem to have their uses, all right. Only, for some\n reason, Artie never thinks of the proper application for his latest\n newfound principle. That neat little disintegrator pistol carried by the\n footsoldiers in the Three Day War (with Venus; remember Venus?) was a\n variation on a cute little battery-powered device of Artie's, of which\n the original function had been to rid one's house of roaches.\n\n\n At any rate—at a damned\ngood\nrate, in fact—the government always\n ended up paying Artie (and me, as his partner-confederate-cohort) an\n anything-but-modest fee for his patents. We weren't in the millionaire\n class, yet, but neither were we very far out of it. And we were much\n better off than any millionaires, since Artie had persuaded the\n government to let us, in lieu of payment for another patent of his\n (for his Nixsal; the thing that was supposed to convert sea-water into\n something drinkable, and did: Gin.), be tax-free for the rest of our\n lives.\n\n\n (It was quite a concession for the government to make. But then, the\n government-produced \"George Washington Gin\" is quite a concession in\n itself.)\n\n\n So I guess you could say I keep listening to Artie Lindstrom because\n of the financial rewards. I must admit they're nice. And it's kind of\n adventurous, when I'm working on Artie's latest brainstorm, to let\n myself wonder what—since I generally scrap Artie's prognosis for the\n gadget's future—the damned thing will\nactually\nbe used for.\n\n\n Or, at least, it\nwas\nkind of adventurous, until Artie started in on\n his scheme of three weeks ago: a workable anti-gravity machine. And now,\n I'm feeling my first tremors of regret that I ever hooked up with the\n guy. Because—Well, it happened like this:\n\"It looks great,\" I said, lifting my face from the blueprint, and\n nodding across the workbench at Artie. \"But what the hell does it do?\"\n\n\n Artie shoved a shock of dust-colored hair back off his broad, dull pink\n forehead, and jabbed excitedly with a grimy forefinger at the diagram.\n \"Can't you\ntell\n, Burt? What does\nthis\nlook like!\"\n\n\n My eyes returned to the conglomeration of sketchy cones beneath his\n flailing finger, and I said, as truthfully as possible, \"A pine forest\n on a lumpy hill.\"\n\n\n \"Those,\" he said, his tone hurt as it always was when I inadvertently\n belittled his draftmanship, \"are flywheels.\"\n\n\n \"Cone-shaped flywheels?\" I said. \"Why, for pete's sake?\"\n\n\n \"Only,\" he said, with specious casualness, \"in order to develop a\n centrifugal thrust that runs in a\nstraight line\n!\"\n\n\n \"A centr—\" I said, then sat back from the drawings, blinking. \"That's\n impossible, Artie.\"\n\n\n \"And why should it be?\" he persisted. \"Picture an umbrella, with the\n fabric removed. Now twirl the handle on its axis. What do the ribs do?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose they splay out into a circle?\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" he exulted. \"And if they\nimpeded\nfrom splaying out? If,\n instead of separate ribs, we have a hollow, bottomless cone of metal?\n Where does the force go?\"\n\n\n I thought it over, then said, with deliberation, \"In\nall\ndirections,\n Artie. One part shoving up-to-the-right, one part up-to-the-left, like\n that.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he said, his face failing to fight a mischievous grin. \"And\n since none of them move, where does the\nresultant\nforce go?\"\n\n\n I shrugged, \"Straight up, I guess—\" Then my ears tuned in belatedly on\n what I'd said, and a moment later I squeaked, \"Artie! Straight\nup\n!\"\nHe nodded eagerly. \"Or, of course, straight east, straight west, or\n whichever way the ferrule of this here theoretical umbrella was pointed\n at the time the twirling began. The point is, we can generate pure force\n in\nany\ndirection. What do you think? Can you build it?\"\n\n\n \"It'd be child's play. In fact, Artie, it's\ntoo\ndamned simple to be\n believed! What's the hitch? Why hasn't anyone tried it before\nnow\n?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" he said, his blue eyes dancing. \"Maybe no one ever thought\n of it before. You could sit down and twist a paper clip out of a hunk\n of soft wire, couldn't you? Easy as pie. But someone had to invent the\n thing, first. All the great inventions have been simple. Look at the\n wheel.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" I said, since I'd been sold on his gadget the moment\n I pictured that umbrella moving ferruleward like a whirling arrow.\n \"Still, it looks like you're getting something for nothing. A kind of\n by-your-own-bootstraps maneuver....\"\n\n\n \"An inventor,\" said Artie, quoting his favorite self-coined aphorism,\n \"must never think like a scientist!\"\n\n\n \"But\"—I said, more to stem the tide I expected than to really make a\n coherent objection.\n\n\n \"An inventor,\" he went dreamily onward, \"is essentially a dreamer; a\n scientist is an observer. An inventor tries to make a result he wants\n happen; a scientist tries to tell the inventor that the result cannot be\n achieved.\"\n\n\n \"Please. Artie. Don't tell me about the bee again.\"\n\n\n But Artie told me about the bumblebee, and how there were still some\n scientists who insisted, according to the principles of aerodynamics,\n that it was not constructed properly to enable it to fly. And about\n how men of this short-sighted ilk were still scoffing at the ancient\n alchemist's talk of the Philosopher's Stone for transmuting metals, even\n though transmutation of metals was being done every day in atomic piles.\n And how he'd theorized that there\nwas\nonce a genuine Philosopher's\n Stone, probably a hunk of pure U-235, that someone had managed to make,\n which might explain why so many alchemists (lacking, unfortunately, any\n knowledge of heavy radiations or Geiger counters) sort of died off in\n their quest for the stone.\nIt was nearly lunchtime when he finished his spiel, and I was kicking\n myself in my short-memoried brain for having let him get onto the\n subject, when abruptly the joyous glow behind his eyes damped its\n sparkle a bit.\n\n\n \"There\nis\none little hitch—\"\n\n\n \"I thought it looked too easy,\" I sighed, waiting for the clinker.\n \"Don't tell me it has to be made out of pure Gallium, which has the\n regrettable tendency to liquiefy at about thirty degrees centigrade? Or\n perhaps of the most elusive of its eleven isotopes?\"\n\n\n \"No, no, nothing like that,\" he murmured almost distractedly. \"It's the\n force-per-gram part that's weak.\"\n\n\n \"Don't tell me,\" I said unhappily, \"that this thing'll only generate\n enough force to lift itself?\"\n\n\n A feeble ghost of his erstwhile grin rode briefly across his lips.\n \"That's the way it works out on paper,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Which means,\" I realized aloud, \"that it's commercially useless,\n because what's the good of an anti-gravity machine that can't lift\n anything except\nitself\n! It falls into the class of lifeboats that\n float up to the gunwales in the water while still\nempty\n. Fun to watch,\n but impossible to use. Hell, Artie, if that's the setup, then this\n thing wouldn't be any more help to a space-aiming government than an\n aborigine's boomerang; it flies beautifully, but not if the aborigine\n tries to go\nwith\nit.\"\n\n\n \"However,\" he said, a bit more brightly, \"I've been wrong on paper\n before. Remember the bumblebee, Burt!\nThat\ntheory still holds up on\n paper. But the bee still flies.\"\n\n\n He had me, there. \"So you want I should build it anyhow, just on the\n off-chance that it\nwon't\nfollow the rules of physical logic, and will\n decide to generate a force above and beyond its own gravitic drag?\"\n\n\n \"That's it,\" he said happily. \"And even if it only manages to negate\n its own weight, we'll have an easier time ironing the bugs out of a\n model than we would out of a diagram. After all, who'd have figured that\n beyond\nMach I\n, all the lift-surfaces on a plane work in\nreverse\n?\"\n\n\n It wasn't, I had to admit, anything that an inventor could have\n reasonably theorized at the outset.... So I locked myself in the lab for\n a week, and built his gadget, while he spent his time pacing through his\n fourteen-room mansion across the way from the lab building (the \"way\"\n being the flat grassy region on Artie's estate that housed his swimming\n pool, private heliport, and movie theatre), trying to coin a nifty name\n for the thing. We both finished in a dead heat.\nI unlocked the door of the lab, blinked hard against the sting of warm\n yellow sunlight after a week of cool blue fluorescents, and just as I\n wheezed, \"Got it,\" Artie was counterpointing with, \"We'll call it The\nUuaa\n!\" (He made four syllables out of it.)\n\n\n \"The Oo-oo-\nah\n-ah?\" I glottaled. \"In honor of the fiftieth state, or\n what? I know 'aa' is a type of lava, but what the hell's 'uu', besides\n the noise a man makes getting into an overheated bath?\"\n\n\n Artie pouted. \"'Uuaa' is initials. For 'Up, up, and away!' I thought it\n was pretty good.\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Why feed free fodder to the telecomics? I can hear\n them now, doing monologues about people getting beri-beri flying from\n Walla Walla to Pago Pago on their Uuaas....\"\n\n\n \"So what would\nyou\ncall it!\" he grunted.\n\n\n \"A bust,\" I sighed, left-thumbing over my shoulder at the lab. \"It sits\n and twirls and whistles a little, but that's about the size of it,\n Artie.\"\n\n\n He spanieled with his eyes, basset-hounded with his mouth, and\n orangutaned with his cheeks, then said, with dim hope, \"Did you weigh\n it? Maybe if you weighed it—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, it lost, all right,\" I admitted. \"When I connected the batteries,\n the needle on the scale dropped down to zero, and stopped there. And I\n found that I could lift the machine into the air, and it'd stay where it\n was put, just whistling and whirling its cones. But then it started to\n settle.\" I beckoned him back inside.\n\n\n \"Settle? Why?\" Artie asked.\n\n\n \"Dust,\" I said. \"There's always a little dust settling out of the air.\n It doesn't weigh\nmuch\n, but it made the machine weigh at least what the\n dust-weight equalled, and down it went. Slow and easy, but down.\"\n\n\n Artie looked at the gadget, sitting and whistling on the floor of the\n lab, then turned a bleak-but-still-hopeful glance my way. \"Maybe—If we\n could make a\nguy\ntake on a cone-shape, and whirled him—\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I muttered. \"Bend over, grab his ankles, and fly anywhere in\n the world, with his torso and legs pivoting wildly around his peaked\n behind.\" I shook my head. \"Besides the manifestly undignified posturing\n involved, we have to consider the other effects; like having his\n eyeballs fly out.\"\n\n\n \"If—If we had a bunch of men lie in a circle around a kind of\n Maypole-thing, each guy clutching the ankles of the next one....\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'd be weightless, but they\nstill\nwouldn't go\nup\n,\" I\n said. \"Unless they could be towed, somehow. And by the time they\n landed, they'd be too nauseous to be of any use for at least three\n days. Always assuming, of course, that the weak-wristed member of the\n sick circlet didn't lose his grip, and have them end up playing mid-air\n crack-the-whip before they fell.\"\n\n\n \"So all right, it's got a couple of bugs!\" said Artie. \"But the\n principle's sound, right?\"\n\n\n \"Well—Yeah, there you got me, Artie. The thing\ncancels\nweight,\n anyhow....\"\n\n\n \"Swell. So we work from there,\" He rubbed his hands together joyously.\n \"And who knows what we'll come up with.\"\n\n\n \"\nWe\nnever do, that's for sure,\" I mumbled.\n\n\n But Artie just shrugged. \"I like surprises,\" he said.\nThe end of the day—me working, Artie inventing—found us with some\n new embellishments for the machine. Where it was originally a sort\n of humped metal box (the engine went inside the hump) studded with\n toothbrush-bristle rows of counter-revolving cones (lest elementary\n torque send the machine swinging the other way, and thus destroy the\n thrust-effect of the cones), it now had an additional feature: A helical\n flange around each cone.\n\n\n \"You see,\" Artie explained, while I was torching them to order from\n plate metal, \"the helices will provide\nlift\nas the cones revolve.\"\n\n\n \"Only in the atmosphere of the planet,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Sure, I know. But by the time the outer limits of the air are reached,\n the machine, with the same mass-thrust, will have less gravity-drag\n to fight, being that much farther from the Earth. The effect will be\n cumulative. The higher it gets, the more outward thrust it'll generate.\n Then nothing'll stop it!\"\n\n\n \"You could be right,\" I admitted, hammering out helix after helix on an\n electric anvil (another gadget of Artie's; the self-heating anvil—The\n Thermovil—had begun life as a small inspiration in Artie's mind for a\n portable toaster).\n\n\n It was just after sunset when we figured the welds were cool enough so\n we could test it. Onto the scale it went again, I flicked the toggle,\n and we stood back to watch the needle as the cones picked up speed.\n Along with the original whistling sound made by the cones we began to\n detect a shriller noise, one which abruptly became a genuine pain in the\n ear. As Artie and I became somewhat busy with screaming (the only thing\n we could think of on the spur of the moment to counteract the terrible\n waves of noise assaulting our tympana), it was all at once much easier\n to see the needle of the scale dropping toward zero, as the glass disc\n facing the dial dissolved into gritty powder, along with the glass panes\n in every window in the lab, the house, the heliport, and the movie\n theatre. (Not to mention those of a few farmhouses a couple of miles\n down the highway, but we didn't find that out till their lawyers showed\n up with bills for damages.)\n\n\n Sure enough, though, the thing lifted. Up it bobbed, like a metal\n dirigible with agonizing gas pains, shrieking louder by the second.\n When the plaster started to trickle and flake from the walls, and the\n fillings in my teeth rose to a temperature just short of incandescence,\n I decided it was time to cancel this phase of the experiment, and, with\n very little regret, I flung a blanket-like canvas tarpaulin up and over\n the ascending machine before it started using its helices to screw into\n the ceiling. The cones bit into the tarpaulin, tangled, jammed, and the\n machine—mercifully noiseless, now—crashed back onto the scale, and\n lost a lot of symmetry and a couple of rivets.\n\n\n \"What's Plan C?\" I said to Artie.\n\n\n \"\nQuiet!\n\" he said, either because I'd interrupted his thinking or\n because that was our next goal.\nThe next four days were spent in the arduous and quite tricky business\n of reaming acoustically spaced holes along the flanges. Artie's theory\n was that if we simply (\"simply\" was his word, not mine) fixed it so\n that the sound made by each flange (anything whirly with a hole or two\n in it is bound to make a calculated noise) was of the proper number of\n vibrations to intermesh with the compression/rarefaction phases of the\n sounds made by the other flanges, a veritable sphere of silence would be\n thereby created, since there'd be no room for any sound waves to pass\n through the already crowded atmosphere about the machine.\n\n\n \"It'll make less noise than a mouse in sneakers drooling on a blotter!\"\n enthused Artie, when I had it rigged again, and ready to go.\n\n\n \"Still,\" I said uncertainly, \"whether we\nhear\nit or not, all that\n soundwave-energy has to do\nsomething\n, Artie. If it turns ultrasonic,\n we may suddenly find ourselves in a showerbath of free electrons and\n even\nworse\nsubatomic particles from disrupted air molecules. Or the\n lab might turn molten on us. Or—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, turn it\non\n, Burt!\" said Artie. \"That's just a chance we have to\n take.\"\n\n\n \"Don't see why we\nhave\nto take it....\" I groused, but I'm as curious\n as the next man, so I turned it on. (I could have arranged to do it by\n remote control, except for two pressing deterrents: One—At a remote\n point of control, I wouldn't be able to watch what, if anything,\n the machine did, and Two—Who knows where the\nsafe\nspot is where\n soundwaves are concerned? With some sonic forces, you're safer the\nnearer\nyou get to the source.) So, like I said, I turned it on.\n\n\n Silence. Beautiful, blissful, silence. There before us twirled the rows\n of shiny cones, lifting slowly into the air, and there was nothing\n to hear at all. Beside me, Artie's lips moved, but I couldn't catch\n a syllable. This time around, we'd looped a rope through a few metal\n grommets in the base of the machine, and as it rose, Artie slipped the\n trailing ends under his arms from behind, and proceeded to lash it\n across his chest, to test the thing's lift-power. As he fumbled with the\n knot, I shouted at him, \"Use a firm hitch!\"\nNothing came out, but Artie wasn't a bad lip-reader. He scowled, and\n his lips made a \"\nWhat?!\n\" motion, so I repeated my caution. Next thing\n I knew, he was taking a poke at me, and I, to fend him off, ended up\n wrestling on the floor with him, while the untended machine burred its\n way into the ceiling, until the engine overheated and burned away the\n electrical insulation on the wires, and the machine, plus a good two\n feet square of lab-ceiling, once more descended to demolish the scale.\n\n\n \"—your language!\" Artie was snarling, as sound returned.\n\n\n \"All I said was 'Use a firm hitch!'\" I pleaded, trying to shove his\n shins off my floor-pinned biceps.\n\n\n Artie stared at me, then rocked off my prostrate body, convulsed in\n a fit of laughter. \"Say it silently in front of a mirror, sometime,\"\n he choked out. Before I had time to see what he was talking about,\n I smelled smoke, above and beyond that engendered by the scorched\n insulation.\n\n\n I ran to the door, and opened it to observe the last glowing,\n crackling timbers of the house, the theatre, and the heliport vanish\n into hot orange sparks, in the grip of a dandy ring of fire that—in\n a seventy-yard path—had burned up everything in a sixty-five to\n hundred-thirty-five yard radius of the lab.\n\n\n \"I told you those soundwaves had to do something,\" I said. \"Ready to\n give up?\"\n\n\n But Artie was already staring at the debris around the scale and making\n swift notes on a memo pad....\n\"It looks awfully damned complex—\" I hedged, eight days later,\n looking at the repaired, refurbished, and amended gadget on the table.\n \"Remember, Artie, the more parts to an invention, the more things can go\n wrong with it. In geometric progression....\"\n\n\n \"Unh-uh,\" he shook his head. \"Not the more parts, Burt. The more\nmoving\nparts. All we've done is added a parabolic sound-reflector, to\n force all the waves the cones make down through a tube in the middle of\n the machine. And we've insulated the tube to keep extraneous vibration\n from shattering it with super-induced metal fatigue.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" I said, \"but about that\ninsulation\n, Artie—\"\n\n\n \"You got a\nbetter\nidea?\" he snapped. \"We tried rubber; it charred\n and flaked away. We tried plastics; they bubbled, melted, extruded,\n or burned. We tried metal and mineral honeycombs; they distorted,\n incandesced, fused or vaporized. Ceramic materials shattered. Fabrics\n tore, or petrified and cracked. All the regular things failed us. So\n what's wrong with trying something new?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing, Artie, nothing. But—\nCornflakes\n?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we sogged 'em down good with water, right? And they've still got\n enough interstices between the particles to act as sound-baffles, right?\n And by the time they get good and hot and dry, they'll cook onto the\n metal, right? (Ask anyone who ever tried to clean a pot after scorching\n cereal just how hard they'll stick!) And even when most of them flake\n away, the random distribution of char will circumvent any chance the\n soundwaves have of setting up the regular pulse-beat necessary to\n fatigue the metal in the tube, okay?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, sure, Artie, it's okay, but—\nCornflakes\n?\"\n\n\n \"I take it your objections are less scientific than they are esthetic?\"\n he inquired.\n\n\n \"Well, something like that,\" I admitted. \"I mean, aw—For pete's sake,\n Artie! The patent office'll laugh at us. They'll start referring us to\n the copyright people, as inventors of cookbooks!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not,\" he said philosophically. \"The thing\nstill\nmay not\nwork\n,\n you know.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\nthere's\none bright spot, anyhow!\" I agreed, fiddling with the\n starting switch. \"So okay, I'm game if you are.\"\n\n\n \"Let 'er rip,\" he pontificated, and I flicked the switch.\nIt worked beautifully. Not even a faint hum. The only way we could tell\n it was working was from the needle on the—rebuilt again—scale, as it\n dropped lazily down to the zero mark. Our ears didn't sting, no glass\n went dusting into crystalline powder, and a quick peek through the door\n showed no ring of fire surrounding the lab.\n\n\n \"We may just have\ndone\nit!\" I said, hopefully, as the silver-nosed\n machine began to float upward (We hadn't\nhad\nto mount the parabolic\n reflector in the position of a nose-cone, but it made the thing look\n neater, somehow.)\n\n\n It seemed a little torpid in its ascent, but that could be credited to\n the extra weight of the reflector and cornflakes, not to mention the\n fact that the helices had to suck all their air in under the lip of the\n silvery nose-cone before they could thrust properly. But its rise was\n steady. Six inches, ten inches—\n\n\n Then, at precisely one foot in height, something unexpected happened.\n Under the base of the machine, where the sound-heated air was at its\n most torrid, a shimmering disc-like thing began to materialize, and\n warp, and hollow out slightly, and beside it, a glinting metal rod-thing\n flattened at one end, then the flat end went concave in the center and\n kind of oval about the perimeter, and something brownish and shreddy\n plopped and hissed into the now-very-concave disc-like thing.\n\n\n \"Artie—!\" I said, uneasily, but by then, he, too, had recognized the\n objects for what they were.\n\n\n \"Burt—\" he said excitedly. \"Do you realize what we've done? We've\n invented a\nsyntheticizer\n!\"\n\n\n Even as he was saying it, the objects completed their mid-air\n materialization (time: five seconds, start to finish), and clattered\n and clinked onto the scale. We stood and looked down at them: A bowl of\n cornflakes and a silver spoon.\n\n\n \"How—?\" I said, but Artie was already figuring it out, aloud.\n\n\n \"It's the soundwaves,\" he said. \"At ultrasonic, molecule-disrupting\n vibrations, they're doing just what that Philosopher's Stone was\n supposed to: Transmuting. Somehow, we didn't clean out the reflector\n sufficiently, and some of the traces of our other trial insulations\n remained inside. The ceramics formed the bowl, the metals formed the\n spoon, the cornflakes formed the cornflakes!\"\n\n\n \"But,\" I said logically (or as logically as could be expected under the\n circumstances), \"what about the rubber, or the fabrics?\"\nArtie's face lit up, and he nodded toward the machine, still hovering at\n one foot above the scale. In its wake, amid the distorting turbulence of\n the sound-tortured air, two more objects were materializing: a neatly\n folded damask napkin, and a small rubber toothpick. As they dropped down\n to join their predecessors, the machine gave a satisfied shake, and\n rose steadily to the two-foot level. I was scribbling frantically in my\n notebook:\nBowl + cereal + spoon: 5 seconds. Lag: 10 seconds. Napkin +\n toothpick: 3 seconds. Total synthesizing time: 18 seconds. Allowance for\n rise of machine per foot: 2 seconds.\n\"Burt—!\" Artie yelled joyously, just as I completed the last item,\n \"Look at that, will you?!\"\n\n\n I looked, and had my first presentiment of disaster. At two feet, the\n machine was busily fabricating—out of the air molecules themselves, for\n all I knew—\ntwo\nbowls,\ntwo\nspoons, and\ntwo\nbowlfuls of cereal.\n\n\n \"Hey, Artie—\" I began, but he was too busy figuring out this latest\n development.\n\n\n \"It's the altimeter,\" he said. \"We had it gauged by the foot, but it's\n taking the numerical calibrations as a kind of output-quota, instead!\"\n\n\n \"Look, Artie,\" I interrupted, as twin napkins and toothpicks dropped\n down beside the new bowls on the table where the scale lay. \"We're going\n to have a little problem—\"\n\n\n \"You're telling\nme\n!\" he sighed, unhappily. \"All those damned\nrandom\nfactors! How many times did the machine have to be repaired after each\n faulty test! What thickness of ceramics, or fabric, or rubber, or metal\n remained! What was the precise distribution and dampness of each of\n those soggy cornflakes! Hell, Burt, we may be\nforever\ntrying to make a\n duplicate of this!\"\n\n\n \"Artie—\" I said, as three toothpick-napkin combinations joined the\n shattered remains of triple bowl-cereal-spoon disasters from the\n one-yard mark over the scale, \"that is\nnot\nthe problem I had in mind.\"\n\n\n \"Oh?\" he said, as four shimmering discs began to coalesce and shape\n themselves. \"What, then?\"\n\n\n \"It's not that I don't appreciate the side-effect benefits of free\n cornflake dinners,\" I said, speaking carefully and somberly, to hold\n his attention. \"But isn't it going to put a crimp in our anti-gravity\n machine sales? Even at a mere mile in height, it means that the spot\n beneath it is due for a deluge of five-thousand-two-hundred-eighty bowls\n of cornflakes. Not to mention all those toothpicks, napkins and spoons!\"\n\n\n Artie's face went grave. \"Not to mention the\n five-thousand-two-hundred-seventy-nine of the same that the spot beneath\n would get from the gadget when it was just one foot\nshort\nof the mile!\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I said, calculating rapidly as the five-foot mark produced\n a neat quintet of everything, a quintet which crashed noisily onto the\n ten lookalikes below it as the machine bobbed silently to the six-foot\n mark, \"we have one interesting thing in our favor: the time element.\"\n\n\n \"How so?\" said Artie, craning over my shoulder to try and read my lousy\n calligraphics on the pad.\n\"Well,\" I said, pointing to each notation in turn, \"the first batch,\n bowl-to-toothpick, took twenty seconds, if we include the time-lapse\n while the machine was ascending to the one-foot mark.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh,\" he nodded. \"I see. So?\"\n\n\n \"So the second batch took double. Forty seconds. Not only did it require\n thirty-six seconds for the formation of the stuff, it took the machine\n twice as many seconds to reach the two-foot mark.\"\n\n\n \"I get it,\" he said. \"So I suppose it took three times the base number\n for the third batch?\"\n\n\n \"Right. A full minute. And the materialization of the objects is—Boy,\n that's noisy!\" I interrupted myself as batch number six came smashing\n down. \"—always at a point where the objects fit into a theoretical\n conical section below the machine.\"\n\n\n \"How's that again?\" said Artie.\n\n\n \"Well, bowl number one formed just below the exhaust vent of the central\n cylinder. Bowls two and three, or—if you prefer—bowl-batch two,\n formed about six inches lower, edge to edge, at the cross-section of an\n imaginary cone (whose rather truncated apex is the exhaust vent) that\n seems to form a vertical angle of thirty degrees.\"\n\n\n \"In other words,\" said Artie, \"each new formation comes in a spot\n beneath this cone where it's possible for the new formations to\n materialize side-by-side, right?\" When I nodded, he said, \"Fine. But so\n what?\"\n\n\n \"It means that each new materialization occurs at a steadily increasing\n height, but one which—\" I calculated briefly on the pad \"—is never\n greater than two-thirds the height of the machine itself.\"\n\n\n Artie looked blank. \"Thank you very kindly for the math lesson,\" he said\n finally, \"but I still don't see what you are driving at, Burt. How does\n this present a problem?\"\n\n\n I pointed toward the un-repaired hole in the lab ceiling, where the\n machine, after dutifully disgorging the number-seven load, was slowly\n heading. \"It means that unless we grab that thing before it gets too\n much higher, the whole damn planet'll be up to its ears in cornflakes.\n And the one-third machine-height gap between artifacts and machine means\n that we can't even use the mounding products to climb on and get it.\n We'd always be too low, and an\nincreasing\ntoo-low at that!\"\n\n\n \"Are you trying to say, in your roundabout mathematical way, let's grab\n that thing, fast?\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" I said, glad I had gotten through to him. \"I would've said as\n much sooner, only you never listen until somebody supplies you with all\n the pertinent data on a crisis first.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why do the narrator and Artie make such a great (or horrible) pair?", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_1", "options": ["They are both of the mindset that the inventions will better the world, and it is their duty.", "They both believe that keeping America at the forefront of the race for technology is for the betterment of the country,", "Artie's love for invention and the narrator's love for the adventure of what the invention will bring make them unstoppable.", "They are driven by a need based on pure greed."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who is the more practical of the two, Artie or the narrator, and why?", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_2", "options": ["The narrator is more practical because he listens to reason and tries to think through all possibilities that could occur.", "The narrator is more practical because he is a man of science.", "Artie is more practical because he listens to reason and tries to think through all possibilities that could occur.", "Artie is more practical because he is a man of science."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who tends to buy the pair's inventions even after they do not work correctly.", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_3", "options": ["Their parents.", "The government.", "The narrator buys them so that Artie does not get into trouble", "Their competitors."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Due to selling their inventions, the pair", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_4", "options": ["Have gone broke because they cannot recoup enough of their investment.", "Have become very well off.", "Have become millionaires many times over.", "Have remained the same wealth-wise."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "As far as the invention process goes, ", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_5", "options": ["The narrator goes through the entire process on his own and then he calls in Artie to check his work.", "Artie builds what the narrator thinks up.", "The narrator builds what Artie thinks up.", "Artie goes through the entire process on his own, and then he calls in the narrator to check his work.  "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Artie loves to discuss the story of the bumblebee because", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_6", "options": ["some inventors believe that they should not be able to fly even to that day, proving inventors don't always know what they are talking about.", "some scientists do not believe that they die after they sting, proving that scientists don't always know what they are talking about.", "some inventors do not believe that they die after they sting, proving that inventors don't always know what they are talking about.", "some scientists believe that they should not be able to fly even to that day, proving scientists don't always know what they are talking about."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What would Artie like to name their latest invention?", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_7", "options": ["The Oo -oo- ah -ah, which stands for Other outfield's airplane afterburner.", "The Uuaa, which stands for Up, under, and away.", "The Oo -oo- ah -ah, which stands for Other one's after airplane.", "The Uuaa, which stands for Up up and away"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What are the two doing when the machine busts through the ceiling?", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_8", "options": ["They are simply standing and watching it in awe.", "They were fighting.", "They were on the phone to the contact person who was planning to purchase it from them.", "They were arguing about who was going to get to name the machine."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the differentiation between each new set of items that the machine produced?", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_9", "options": ["They were all the same.", "Each set took twice as long to produce, so the machine was twice as high in the air as the one before it.", "Each set was twice as large as the one before it.", "Each set was twice as small as the one before it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the narrator seem to offer a scientific explanation to Artie as to what their next course of action should be as the machine was rising out of their reach?", "question_unique_id": "43041_5NX6FIT5_10", "options": ["That is the only type of logic Artie will listen to.", "Artie insists that the narrator only speaks to him in such a fashion.", "Artie won't listen at all, so the narrator just starts rambling scientific mumbo jumbo.", "The narrator does not know how to simplify the answer."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/3/0/4/43041//43041-h//43041-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50928", "set_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Hot Planet", "year": 1962, "author": "Clement, Hal", "topic": "PS; Mercury (Planet) -- Fiction; Explorers -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "HOT PLANET\nBy HAL CLEMENT\n\n\n Illustrated by FINLAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMercury had no atmosphere—everyone knew\n\n that. Why was it developing one now?\nI\n\n\n The wind which had nearly turned the\nAlbireo's\nlanding into a\n disaster instead of a mathematical exercise was still playing tunes\n about the fins and landing legs as Schlossberg made his way down to\n Deck Five.\n\n\n The noise didn't bother him particularly, though the endless seismic\n tremors made him dislike the ladders. But just now he was able to\n ignore both. He was curious—though not hopeful.\n\n\n \"Is there anything at all obvious on the last sets of tapes, Joe?\"\n\n\n Mardikian, the geophysicist, shrugged. \"Just what you'd expect ... on\n a planet which has at least one quake in each fifty-mile-square area\n every five minutes. You know yourself we had a nice seismic program set\n up, but when we touched down we found we couldn't carry it out. We've\n done our best with the natural tremors—incidentally stealing most of\n the record tapes the other projects would have used. We have a lot of\n nice information for the computers back home; but it will take all of\n them to make any sense out of it.\"\n\n\n Schlossberg nodded; the words had not been necessary. His astronomical\n program had been one of those sabotaged by the transfer of tapes to the\n seismic survey.\n\n\n \"I just hoped,\" he said. \"We each have an idea why Mercury developed\n an atmosphere during the last few decades, but I guess the high school\n kids on Earth will know whether it's right before we do. I'm resigned\n to living in a chess-type universe—few and simple rules, but infinite\n combinations of them. But it would be nice to know an answer sometime.\"\n\n\n \"So it would. As a matter of fact, I need to know a couple right now.\n From you. How close to finished are the other programs—or what's left\n of them?\"\n\n\n \"I'm all set,\" replied Schlossberg. \"I have a couple of instruments\n still monitoring the sun just in case, but everything in the revised\n program is on tape.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Tom, any use asking you?\"\n\n\n The biologist grimaced. \"I've been shown two hundred and sixteen\n different samples of rock and dust. I have examined in detail twelve\n crystal growths which looked vaguely like vegetation. Nothing was alive\n or contained living things by any standards I could conscientiously\n set.\"\n\n\n Mardikian's gesture might have meant sympathy.\n\n\n \"Camille?\"\n\n\n \"I may as well stop now as any time. I'll never be through. Tape didn't\n make much difference to me, but I wish I knew what weight of specimens\n I could take home.\"\n\n\n \"Eileen?\" Mardikian's glance at the stratigrapher took the place of the\n actual question.\n\n\n \"Cam speaks for me, except that I could have used any more tape you\n could have spared. What I have is gone.\"\n\n\n \"All right, that leaves me, the tape-thief. The last spools are in the\n seismographs now, and will start running out in seventeen hours. The\n tractors will start out on their last rounds in sixteen, and should be\n back in roughly a week. Will, does that give you enough to figure the\n weights we rockhounds can have on the return trip?\"\nThe\nAlbireo's\ncaptain nodded. \"Close enough. There really hasn't been\n much question since it became evident we'd find nothing for the mass\n tanks here. I'll have a really precise check in an hour, but I can\n tell right now that you have about one and a half metric tons to split\n up among the three of you.\n\n\n \"Ideal departure time is three hundred ten hours away, as you all know.\n We can stay here until then, or go into a parking-and-survey orbit at\n almost any time before then. You have all the survey you need, I should\n think, from the other time. But suit yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"I'd just as soon be space-sick as seasick,\" remarked Camille Burkett.\n \"I still hate to think that the entire planet is as shivery as the spot\n we picked.\"\n\n\n Willard Rowson smiled. \"You researchers told me where to land after ten\n days in orbit mapping this rockball. I set you just where you asked. If\n you'd found even five tons of juice we could use in the reaction tanks\n I could still take you to another one—if you could agree which one. I\n hate to say 'Don't blame me,' but I can't think of anything else that\n fits.\"\n\n\n \"So we sit until the last of the tractors is back with the precious\n seismo tapes, playing battleship while our back teeth are being\n shaken out by earthquakes—excuse the word. What a thrill! Glorious\n adventure!\" Zaino, the communications specialist who had been out of a\n job almost constantly since the landing, spoke sourly. The captain was\n the only one who saw fit to answer.\n\n\n \"If you want adventure, you made a mistake exploring space. The only\n space adventures I've heard of are second-hand stories built on\n guesswork; the people who really had them weren't around to tell about\n it. Unless Dr. Marini discovers a set of Mercurian monsters at the last\n minute and they invade the ship or cut off one of the tractors, I'm\n afraid you'll have to do without adventures.\" Zaino grimaced.\n\n\n \"That sounds funny coming from a spaceman, Captain. I didn't really\n mean adventure, though; all I want is something to do besides betting\n whether the next quake will come in one minute or five. I haven't even\n had to fix a suit-radio since we touched down. How about my going out\n with one of the tractors on this last trip, at least?\"\n\n\n \"It's all right with me,\" replied Rowson, \"but Dr. Mardikian runs the\n professional part of this operation. I require that Spurr, Trackman,\n Hargedon and Aiello go as drivers, since without them even a minor\n mechanical problem would be more than an adventure. As I recall it, Dr.\n Harmon, Dr. Schlossberg, Dr. Marini and Dr. Mardikian are scheduled to\n go; but if any one of them is willing to let you take his or her place,\n I certainly don't mind.\"\n\n\n The radioman looked around hopefully. The geologists and the biologist\n shook their heads negatively, firmly and unanimously; but the\n astronomer pondered for a moment. Zaino watched tensely.\n\n\n \"It may be all right,\" Schlossberg said at last. \"What I want to get\n is a set of wind, gas pressure, gas temperature and gas composition\n measures around the route. I didn't expect to be more meteorologist\n than astronomer when we left Earth, and didn't have exactly the right\n equipment. Hargedon and Aiello helped me improvise some, and this is\n the first chance to use it on Darkside. If you can learn what has to be\n done with it before starting time, though, you are welcome to my place.\"\nThe communicator got to his feet fast enough to leave the deck in\n Mercury's feeble gravity.\n\n\n \"Lead me to it, Doc. I guess I can learn to read a home-made\n weathervane!\"\n\n\n \"Is that merely bragging, or a challenge?\" drawled a voice which had\n not previously joined the discussion. Zaino flushed a bit.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Luigi,\" he said hastily. \"I didn't mean it just that way. But I\n still think I can run the stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Likely enough,\" Aiello replied. \"Remember though, it wasn't made just\n for talking into.\" Schlossberg, now on his feet, cut in quickly.\n\n\n \"Come on, Arnie. We'll have to suit up to see the equipment; it's\n outside.\"\n\n\n He shepherded the radioman to the hatch at one side of the deck and\n shooed him down toward the engine and air lock levels. Both were silent\n for some moments; but safely out of earshot of Deck Five the younger\n man looked up and spoke.\n\n\n \"You needn't push, Doc. I wasn't going to make anything of it. Luigi\n was right, and I asked for it.\" The astronomer slowed a bit in his\n descent.\n\n\n \"I wasn't really worried,\" he replied, \"but we have several months yet\n before we can get away from each other, and I don't like talk that\n could set up grudges. Matter of fact, I'm even a little uneasy about\n having the girls along, though I'm no misogynist.\"\n\n\n \"Girls? They're not—\"\n\n\n \"There goes your foot again. Even Harmon is about ten years older than\n you, I suppose. But they're girls to me. What's more important, they no\n doubt think of themselves as girls.\"\n\n\n \"Even Dr. Burkett? That is—I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Even Dr. Burkett. Here, get into your suit. And maybe you'd better\n take out the mike. It'll be enough if you can listen for the next\n hour or two.\" Zaino made no answer, suspecting with some justice that\n anything he said would be wrong.\n\n\n Each made final checks on the other's suit; then they descended\n one more level to the airlock. This occupied part of the same deck\n as the fusion plants, below the wings and reaction mass tanks but\n above the main engine. Its outer door was just barely big enough to\n admit a spacesuited person. Even with the low air pressure carried\n by spaceships, a large door area meant large total force on jamb,\n hinges and locks. It opened onto a small balcony from which a ladder\n led to the ground. The two men paused on the balcony to look over the\n landscape.\n\n\n This hadn't changed noticeably since the last time either had been out,\n though there might have been some small difference in the volcanic\n cones a couple of miles away to the northeast. The furrows down the\n sides of these, which looked as though they had been cut by water but\n were actually bone-dry ash slides, were always undergoing alteration as\n gas from below kept blowing fresh scoria fragments out of the craters.\nThe spines—steep, jagged fragments of rock which thrust upward from\n the plain beyond and to both sides of the cones—seemed dead as ever.\n\n\n The level surface between the\nAlbireo\nand the cones was more\n interesting. Mardikian and Schlossberg believed it to be a lava sheet\n dating from early in Mercury's history, when more volatile substances\n still existed in the surface rocks to cut down their viscosity when\n molten. They supposed that much—perhaps most—of the surface around\n the \"twilight\" belt had been flooded by this very liquid lava, which\n had cooled to a smoother surface than most Earthly lava flows.\n\n\n How long it had stayed cool they didn't guess. But both men felt sure\n that Mercury must have periodic upheavals as heat accumulated inside\n it—heat coming not from radioactivity but from tidal energy. Mercury's\n orbit is highly eccentric. At perihelion, tidal force tries to pull it\n apart along the planet-to-sun line, while at aphelion the tidal force\n is less and the little world's own gravity tries to bring it back to\n a spherical shape. The real change in form is not great, but a large\n force working through even a small amount of distance can mean a good\n deal of energy.\n\n\n If the energy can't leak out—and Mercury's rocks conduct heat no\n better than those of Earth—the temperature must rise.\n\n\n Sooner or later, the men argued, deeply buried rock must fuse to magma.\n Its liquefaction would let the bulk of the planet give farther under\n tidal stress, so heat would be generated even faster. Eventually a\n girdle of magma would have to form far below the crust all around the\n twilight strip, where the tidal strain would be greatest. Sooner or\n later this would melt its way to the surface, giving the zone a period\n of intense volcanic activity and, incidentally, giving the planet a\n temporary atmosphere.\n\n\n The idea was reasonable. It had, the astronomer admitted, been\n suggested long before to account for supposed vulcanism on the moon.\n It justified the careful examination that Schlossberg and Zaino gave\n the plain before they descended the ladder; for it made reasonable\n the occasional changes which were observed to occur in the pattern of\n cracks weaving over its surface.\n\n\n No one was certain just how permanent the local surface was—though\n no one could really justify feeling safer on board the\nAlbireo\nthan\n outside on the lava. If anything really drastic happened, the ship\n would be no protection.\n\n\n The sun, hanging just above the horizon slightly to the watcher's\n right, cast long shadows which made the cracks stand out clearly;\n as far as either man could see, nothing had changed recently. They\n descended the ladder carefully—even the best designed spacesuits are\n somewhat vulnerable—and made their way to the spot where the tractors\n were parked.\n\n\n A sheet-metal fence a dozen feet high and four times as long provided\n shade, which was more than a luxury this close to the sun. The\n tractors were parked in this shadow, and beside and between them were\n piles of equipment and specimens. The apparatus Schlossberg had devised\n was beside the tractor at the north end of the line, just inside the\n shaded area.\n\n\n It was still just inside the shade when they finished, four hours\n later. Hargedon had joined them during the final hour and helped\n pack the equipment in the tractor he was to drive. Zaino had had no\n trouble in learning to make the observations Schlossberg wanted, and\n the youngster was almost unbearably cocky. Schlossberg hoped, as they\n returned to the\nAlbireo\n, that no one would murder the communications\n expert in the next twelve hours. There would be nothing to worry about\n after the trip started; Hargedon was quite able to keep anyone in his\n place without being nasty about it. If Zaino had been going with Aiello\n or Harmon—but he wasn't, and it was pointless to dream up trouble.\n\n\n And no trouble developed all by itself.\nII\n\n\n Zaino was not only still alive but still reasonably popular when\n the first of the tractors set out, carrying Eileen Harmon and Eric\n Trackman, the\nAlbireo's\nnuclear engineer.\n\n\n It started more than an hour before the others, since the\n stratigrapher's drilling program, \"done\" or not, took extra time. The\n tractor hummed off to the south, since both Darkside routes required a\n long detour to pass the chasm to the west. Routes had been worked out\n from the stereo-photos taken during the orbital survey. Even Darkside\n had been covered fairly well with Uniquantum film under Venus light.\n\n\n The Harmon-Trackman vehicle was well out of sight when Mardikian and\n Aiello started out on one of the Brightside routes, and a few minutes\n later Marini set out on the other with the spacesuit technician, Mary\n Spurr, driving.\n\n\n Both vehicles disappeared quickly into a valley to the northeast,\n between the ash cones and a thousand-foot spine which rose just south\n of them. All the tractors were in good radio contact; Zaino made sure\n of that before he abandoned the radio watch to Rowson, suited up and\n joined Hargedon at the remaining one. They climbed in, and Hargedon set\n it in motion.\n\n\n At about the same time, the first tractor came into view again, now\n traveling north on the farther side of the chasm. Hargedon took this as\n evidence that the route thus far was unchanged, and kicked in highest\n speed.\n\n\n The cabin was pretty cramped, even though some of the equipment had\n been attached outside. The men could not expect much comfort for the\n next week.\n\n\n Hargedon was used to the trips, however. He disapproved on principle\n of people who complained about minor inconveniences such as having\n to sleep in spacesuits; fortunately, Zaino's interest and excitement\n overrode any thought he might have had about discomfort.\n\n\n This lasted through the time they spent doubling the vast crack in\n Mercury's crust, driving on a little to the north of the ship on the\n other side and then turning west toward the dark hemisphere. The\n route was identical to that of Harmon's machine for some time, though\n no trace of its passage showed on the hard surface. Then Hargedon\n angled off toward the southwest. He had driven this run often enough\n to know it well even without the markers which had been set out with\n the seismographs. The photographic maps were also aboard. With them,\n even Zaino had no trouble keeping track of their progress while they\n remained in sunlight.\n\n\n However, the sun sank as they traveled west. In two hours its lower rim\n would have been on the horizon, had they been able to see the horizon;\n as it was, more of the \"sea level\" lava plain was in shadow than not\n even near the ship, and their route now lay in semi-darkness.\n\n\n The light came from peaks projecting into the sunlight, from scattered\n sky-light which was growing rapidly fainter and from the brighter\n celestial objects such as Earth. Even with the tractor's lights it was\n getting harder to spot crevasses and seismometer markers. Zaino quickly\n found the fun wearing off ... though his pride made him cover this fact\n as best he could.\n\n\n If Hargedon saw this, he said nothing. He set Zaino to picking up\n every other instrument, as any partner would have, making no allowance\n for the work the youngster was doing for Schlossberg. This might, of\n course, have had the purpose of keeping the radioman too busy to think\n about discomfort. Or it might merely have been Hargedon's idea of\n normal procedure.\n\n\n Whatever the cause, Zaino got little chance to use the radio once they\n had driven into the darkness. He managed only one or two brief talks\n with those left at the ship.\nThe talks might have helped his morale, since they certainly must have\n given the impression that nothing was going on in the ship while at\n least he had something to do in the tractor. However, this state of\n affairs did not last. Before the vehicle was four hours out of sight of\n the\nAlbireo\n, a broadcast by Camille Burkett reached them.\n\n\n The mineralogist's voice contained at least as much professional\n enthusiasm as alarm, but everyone listening must have thought promptly\n of the dubious stability of Mercury's crust. The call was intended for\n her fellow geologists Mardikian and Harmon. But it interested Zaino at\n least as much.\n\n\n \"Joe! Eileen! There's a column of what looks like black smoke rising\n over Northeast Spur. It can't be a real fire, of course; I can't see\n its point of origin, but if it's the convection current it seems to\n be the source must be pretty hot. It's the closest thing to a genuine\n volcano I've seen since we arrived; it's certainly not another of those\n ash mounds. I should think you'd still be close enough to make it out,\n Joe. Can you see anything?\"\nThe reply from Mardikian's tractor was inaudible to Zaino and Hargedon,\n but Burkett's answer made its general tenor plain.\n\n\n \"I hadn't thought of that. Yes, I'd say it was pretty close to the\n Brightside route. It wouldn't be practical for you to stop your run now\n to come back to see. You couldn't do much about it anyway. I could go\n out to have a look and then report to you. If the way back is blocked\n there'll be plenty of time to work out another.\" Hargedon and Zaino\n passed questioning glances at each other during the shorter pause that\n followed.\n\n\n \"I know there aren't,\" the voice then went on, responding to the words\n they could not hear, \"but it's only two or three miles, I'd say. Two\n to the spur and not much farther to where I could see the other side.\n Enough of the way is in shade so I could make it in a suit easily\n enough. I can't see calling back either of the dark-side tractors.\n Their work is just as important as the rest—anyway, Eileen is probably\n out of range. She hasn't answered yet.\"\n\n\n Another pause.\n\n\n \"That's true. Still, it would mean sacrificing that set of seismic\n records—no, wait. We could go out later for those. And Mel could take\n his own weather measures on the later trip. There's plenty of time!\"\n\n\n Pause, longer this time.\n\n\n \"You're right, of course. I just wanted to get an early look at this\n volcano, if it is one. We'll let the others finish their runs, and when\n you get back you can check the thing from the other side yourself. If\n it is blocking your way there's time to find an alternate route. We\n could be doing that from the maps in the meantime, just in case.\"\n\n\n Zaino looked again at his companion.\n\n\n \"Isn't that just my luck!\" he exclaimed. \"I jump at the first chance\n to get away from being bored to death. The minute I'm safely away, the\n only interesting thing of the whole operation happens—back at the\n ship!\"\n\n\n \"Who asked to come on this trip?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not blaming anyone but myself. If I'd stayed back there the\n volcano would have popped out here somewhere, or else waited until we\n were gone.\"\n\n\n \"If it is a volcano. Dr. Burkett didn't seem quite sure.\"\n\n\n \"No, and I'll bet a nickel she's suiting up right now to go out and\n see. I hope she comes back with something while we're still near enough\n to hear about it.\"\n\n\n Hargedon shrugged. \"I suppose it was also just your luck that sent you\n on a Darkside trip? You know the radio stuff. You knew we couldn't\n reach as far this way with the radios. Didn't you think of that in\n advance?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think of it, any more than you would have. It was bad luck,\n but I'm not grousing about it. Let's get on with this job.\" Hargedon\n nodded with approval, and possibly with some surprise, and the tractor\n hummed on its way.\n\n\n The darkness deepened around the patches of lava shown by the driving\n lights; the sky darkened toward a midnight hue, with stars showing\n ever brighter through it; and radio reception from the\nAlbireo\nbegan to get spotty. Gas density at the ion layer was high enough so\n that recombination of molecules with their radiation-freed electrons\n was rapid. Only occasional streamers of ionized gas reached far over\n Darkside. As these thinned out, so did radio reception. Camille\n Burkett's next broadcast came through very poorly.\n\n\n There was enough in it, however, to seize the attention of the two men\n in the tractor.\nShe was saying: \"—real all right, and dangerous. It's the ... thing I\n ever saw ... kinds of lava from what looks like ... same vent. There's\n high viscosity stuff building a spatter cone to end all spatter cones,\n and some very thin fluid from somewhere at the bottom. The flow has\n already blocked the valley used by the Brightside routes and is coming\n along it. A new return route will have to be found for the tractors\n that ... was spreading fast when I saw it. I can't tell how much will\n come. But unless it stops there's nothing at all to keep the flow away\n from the ship. It isn't coming fast, but it's coming. I'd advise all\n tractors to turn back. Captain Rowson reminds me that only one takeoff\n is possible. If we leave this site, we're committed to leaving Mercury.\n Arnie and Ren, do you hear me?\"\n\n\n Zaino responded at once. \"We got most of it, Doctor. Do you really\n think the ship is in danger?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I can only say that\nif\nthis flow continues the\n ship will have to leave, because this area will sooner or later be\n covered. I can't guess how likely ... check further to get some sort\n of estimate. It's different from any Earthly lava source—maybe you\n heard—should try to get Eileen and Eric back, too. I can't raise\n them. I suppose they're well out from under the ion layer by now.\n Maybe you're close enough to them to catch them with diffracted waves.\n Try, anyway. Whether you can raise them or not you'd better start back\n yourself.\"\n\n\n Hargedon cut in at this point. \"What does Dr. Mardikian say about that?\n We still have most of the seismometers on this route to visit.\"\n\n\n \"I think Captain Rowson has the deciding word here, but if it helps\n your decision Dr. Mardikian has already started back. He hasn't\n finished his route, either. So hop back here, Ren. And Arnie, put that\n technical skill you haven't had to use yet to work raising Eileen and\n Eric.\"\n\n\n \"What I can do, I will,\" replied Zaino, \"but you'd better tape a recall\n message and keep it going out on. Let's see—band F.\"\n\n\n \"All right. I'll be ready to check the volcano as soon as you get back.\n How long?\"\n\n\n \"Seven hours—maybe six and a half,\" replied Hargedon. \"We have to be\n careful.\"\n\n\n \"Very well. Stay outside when you arrive; I'll want to go right out in\n the tractor to get a closer look.\" She cut off.\n\n\n \"And\nthat\ncame through clearly enough!\" remarked Hargedon as he swung\n the tractor around. \"I've been awake for fourteen hours, driving off\n and on for ten of them; I'm about to drive for another six; and then\n I'm to stand by for more.\"\n\n\n \"Would you like me to do some of the driving?\" asked Zaino.\n\n\n \"I guess you'll have to, whether I like it or not,\" was the rather\n lukewarm reply. \"I'll keep on for awhile, though—until we're back in\n better light. You get at your radio job.\"\nIII\n\n\n Zaino tried. Hour after hour he juggled from one band to another. Once\n he had Hargedon stop while he went out to attach a makeshift antenna\n which, he hoped, would change his output from broadcast to some sort\n of beam; after this he kept probing the sky with the \"beam,\" first\n listening to the\nAlbireo's\nbroadcast in an effort to find projecting\n wisps of ionosphere and then, whenever he thought he had one, switching\n on his transmitter and driving his own message at it.\n\n\n Not once did he complain about lack of equipment or remark how much\n better he could do once he was back at the ship.\n\n\n Hargedon's silence began to carry an undercurrent of approval not\n usual in people who spent much time with Zaino. The technician made no\n further reference to the suggestion of switching drivers. They came\n in sight of the\nAlbireo\nand doubled the chasm with Hargedon still at\n the wheel, Zaino still at his radio and both of them still uncertain\n whether any of the calls had gotten through.\n\n\n Both had to admit, even before they could see the ship, that Burkett\n had had a right to be impressed.\n\n\n The smoke column showed starkly against the sky, blowing back over the\n tractor and blocking the sunlight which would otherwise have glared\n into the driver's eyes. Fine particles fell from it in a steady shower;\n looking back, the men could see tracks left by their vehicle in the\n deposit which had already fallen.\n\n\n As they approached the ship the dark pillar grew denser and narrower,\n while the particles raining from it became coarser. In some places the\n ash was drifting into fairly deep piles, giving Hargedon some anxiety\n about possible concealed cracks. The last part of the trip, along the\n edge of the great chasm and around its end, was really dangerous;\n cracks running from its sides were definitely spreading. The two men\n reached the\nAlbireo\nlater than Hargedon had promised, and found\n Burkett waiting impatiently with a pile of apparatus beside her.\n\n\n She didn't wait for them to get out before starting to organize.\n\n\n \"There isn't much here. We'll take off just enough of what you're\n carrying to make room for this. No—wait. I'll have to check some of\n your equipment; I'm going to need one of Milt Schlossberg's gadget's, I\n think, so leave that on. We'll take—\"\n\n\n \"Excuse me, Doctor,\" cut in Hargedon. \"Our suits need servicing, or at\n least mine will if you want me to drive you. Perhaps Arnie can help you\n load for a while, if you don't think it's too important for him to get\n at the radio—\"\n\n\n \"Of course. Excuse me. I should have had someone out here to help me\n with this. You two go on in. Ren, please get back as soon as you can. I\n can do the work here; none of this stuff is very heavy.\"\n\n\n Zaino hesitated as he swung out of the cab. True, there wasn't too\n much to be moved, and it wasn't very heavy in Mercury's gravity,\n and he really should be at the radio; but the thirty-nine-year-old\n mineralogist was a middle-aged lady by his standards, and shouldn't be\n allowed to carry heavy packages....\n\n\n \"Get along, Arnie!\" the middle-aged lady interrupted this train of\n thought. \"Eric and Eileen are getting farther away and harder to reach\n every second you dawdle!\"\nHe got, though he couldn't help looking northeast as he went rather\n than where he was going.\n\n\n The towering menace in that direction would have claimed anyone's\n attention. The pillar of sable ash was rising straighter, as though\n the wind were having less effect on it. An equally black cone had\n risen into sight beyond Northeast Spur—a cone that must have grown\n to some two thousand feet in roughly ten hours. It had far steeper\n sides than the cinder mounds near it; it couldn't be made of the same\n loose ash. Perhaps it consisted of half-melted particles which were\n fusing together as they fell—that might be what Burkett had meant by\n \"spatter-cone.\" Still, if that were the case, the material fountaining\n from the cone's top should be lighting the plain with its incandescence\n rather than casting an inky shadow for its entire height.\n\n\n Well, that was a problem for the geologists; Zaino climbed aboard and\n settled to his task.\n\n\n The trouble was that he could do very little more here than he could\n in the tractor. He could have improvised longer-wave transmitting\n coils whose radiations would have diffracted a little more effectively\n beyond the horizon, but the receiver on the missing vehicle would\n not have detected them. He had more power at his disposal, but could\n only beam it into empty space with his better antennae. He had better\n equipment for locating any projecting wisps of charged gas which might\n reflect his waves, but he was already located under a solid roof of the\n stuff—the\nAlbireo\nwas technically on Brightside. Bouncing his beam\n from this layer still didn't give him the range he needed, as he had\n found both by calculation and trial.\n\n\n What he really needed was a relay satellite. The target was simply too\n far around Mercury's sharp curve by now for anything less.\n\n\n Zaino's final gesture was to set his transmission beam on the lowest\n frequency the tractor would pick up, aim it as close to the vehicle's\n direction as he could calculate from map and itinerary and set the\n recorded return message going. He told Rowson as much.\n\n\n \"Can't think of anything else?\" the captain asked. \"Well, neither can\n I, but of course it's not my field. I'd give a year's pay if I could.\n How long before they should be back in range?\"\n\n\n \"About four days. A hundred hours, give or take a few. They'll be\n heading back anyway by that time.\"\n\n\n \"Of course. Well, keep trying.\"\n\n\n \"I am—or rather, the equipment is. I don't see what else I can do\n unless a really bright idea should suddenly sprout. Is there anywhere\n else I could be useful? I'm as likely to have ideas working as just\n sitting.\"\n\n\n \"We can keep you busy, all right. But how about taking a transmitter up\n one of those mountains? That would get your wave farther.\"\n\n\n \"Not as far as it's going already. I'm bouncing it off the ion layer,\n which is higher than any mountain we've seen on Mercury even if it's\n nowhere near as high as Earth's.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph. All right.\"\n\n\n \"I could help Ren and Dr. Burkett. I could hang on outside the\n tractor—\"\n\n\n \"They've already gone. You'd better call them, though, and keep a log\n of what they do.\"\n\n\n \"All right.\" Zaino turned back to his board and with no trouble raised\n the tractor carrying Hargedon and the mineralogist. The latter had been\n trying to call the\nAlbireo\nand had some acid comments about radio\n operators who slept on the job.\n", "questions": [{"question": "As the story opens, what unusual event is taking place on the surface of the planet very frequently?", "question_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM_1", "options": ["There is a hurricane.", "There is a snowstorm.", "A severe tidal wave.", "Earthquakes."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What has made Schlossberg feel akin to a high school student in terms of his experience as a scientist?", "question_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM_2", "options": ["He does not understand why Mercury has changed suddenly.", "He was unequipped to handle the demands of this journey from the start.", "He cannot figure out the issue that is keeping their ship from being operational.", "He is unable to get the radio connection to work so he can communicate with his entire team."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "For the crew, what is the difference between waiting on the planet's surface or in space for departure?", "question_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM_3", "options": ["If they wait on the planet, they could be harmed by the seismic activity that is occurring.", "It is safer to wait in space because that is more stable. ", "There really is no difference to their safety one way or the other.", "It is safer to wait on the surface because it is more stable.  "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to the Captian, what is the problem with having the desire to go on a space adventure?", "question_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM_4", "options": ["They will never be able to share their adventure with anyone because they are unable to speak of what occurs while they are on their mission.", "That desire, accompanied by space sickness, will make a person go mad, and they will never be able to coherently speak of their time in space.", "That desire often pulls the person away from their family and friends and becomes their only obsession in life.", "If anyone has ever truly had a space adventure, they have not lived to tell about it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the communications expert want to go exploring with them one last time?", "question_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM_5", "options": ["He is bored and does not want to be left behind.", "He doesn't want to go, per se.  He is forced to go on every mission.", "He knows it is an adventure of a lifetime.", "He must perform maintenance on the communications system if they are to be able to contact anyone from their home planet."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How is the orbit of the planet described at this time?", "question_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM_6", "options": ["tranquil", "stable", "diverse", "scary"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What, do they decide will give Mercury a temporary atmosphere?", "question_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM_7", "options": ["Nothing", "What is the equivalent of volcanic activity.", "Global warming", "An increased amount of Carbon dioxide due to the visitors"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is staying in the ship no safer than staying on the planet's surface?", "question_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM_8", "options": ["They are able to run if invaders get to them outside of the ship.", "Deadly gasses are apt to enter the ship.", "It is always safer inside than it is outside.", "If something erupted, the shit would not survive the heat from the lava."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What makes Zaino hesitate when he gets off of the tractor.", "question_unique_id": "50928_X6Q07ZFM_9", "options": ["He instinctually wants to help the woman who has been left to do \"man's work.\"", "He is alarmed by what is going on on the planet's service.", "He is afraid the tractor is going fall into a hole.", "He does not really want to go back to the ship."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/2/50928//50928-h//50928-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51210", "set_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "I, the Unspeakable", "year": 1956, "author": "Sheldon, Walter J.", "topic": "Names, Personal -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS; Authoritarianism -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction", "article": "I, the Unspeakable\nBy WALT SHELDON\n\n\n Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"What's in a name?\" might be very dangerous\n\n to ask in certain societies, in which sticks\n\n and stones are also a big problem!\nI fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed.\n I must have blushed in my sleep.\n\n\n \"\nDo it!\n\" she said. \"\nPlease do it! For me!\n\"\n\n\n It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound\n of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it\n was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.\n\n\n I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living\n machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things\n were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.\n\n\n I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the\n chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning\n nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun\n to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had\n been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just\n swung a decimal or two our way.\n\n\n I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and\n looked at myself. New wrinkles—or maybe just a deepening of the old\n ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.\n\n\n I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of\n Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing\n research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other\n jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed\n every possible thing in my favor.\n\n\n Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to\n keep on plugging, making the rounds.\n\n\n I'd go out again today.\n\n\n The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and\n then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.\n\n\n As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck,\n catching the glowlight. My identity tag.\n\n\n Everything came back in a rush—\n\n\n My name. The dream and\nher\nvoice. And her suggestion.\nWould I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk,\n the terrible risk?\nYou remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then;\n how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody\n made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records\n were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.\n\n\n The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and\n they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous\n nonconform.\n\n\n If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't\n complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the\n night.\n\n\n There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the\n population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations\n were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good\n of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.\n\n\n The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was\n a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled\n longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty\n much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war.\n They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment\n with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.\n\n\n We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody\n now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters.\n Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to\n address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try\n to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to\n Stateleader, \"Good morning, A-A-A-A.\" They say, \"Good morning, Aaaa.\"\n\n\n Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel.\n Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was\n still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and\n be psycho-scanned.\n\n\n Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.\n\n\n A four letter word.\n\n\n Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.\n\n\n Mine was.\n\n\n It was unspeakable.\n\n\n The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my\n sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to\n qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space\n drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and\n turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.\n\n\n I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter\n combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably\n embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked\n and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his\n secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and\n registered it himself.\n\n\n I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient\n organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work\n was important—magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta\n reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the\n answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars—and\n there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important\n Persons.\n\n\n Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment\n would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic\n was just not to answer.\nThe chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.\n\n\n \"Er—old man,\" he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my\n name, \"I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would\n you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.\"\n\n\n \"Nutrition kits?\nMe?\nOn nutrition kits?\"\n\n\n \"Well, I—er—know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had\n the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it\n justifies.\"\n\n\n Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report\n had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there\n were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out,\n you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to.\n Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications\n and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But\n if I should infract—deliberately infract—it would enable the chief to\n let me go. The equivalent of resigning.\n\n\n \"I'll infract,\" I said. \"Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll\n infract.\"\n\n\n He looked vastly relieved. \"Uh—fine,\" he said. \"I rather hoped you\n would.\"\n\n\n It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an\n N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book.\n I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but\n basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the\n state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.\n\n\n But I didn't know what I was in for.\n\n\n I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to\n department—any place where they might use a space drive expert. A\n pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my\n specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they\n saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as\n they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....\nA few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.\n\n\n And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say\n it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic\n needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds\n attractive.\n\n\n But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go\n to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take\n your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes\n your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package—and then\n he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the\n State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.\n\n\n \"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll\n check it later.\"\n\n\n You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter.\n No more packages.\n\n\n Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and\n with my name I\ncouldn't\nget a post.\n\n\n Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to\n change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting\n change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.\n\n\n That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it\n suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional,\n provocative tone.\n\n\n Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice—to\nher\n—in a moment.\n\n\n I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness.\n I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join\n no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I\n dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely\n submit any findings for publication—not with my name attached. A\n pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.\n\n\n But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.\nFunny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I\n remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a\n Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it\n for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual\n double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.\n\n\n He said, \"Of course you understand that we must submit your\n application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths\n with you, and that she has the right to refuse.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I understand that.\"\n\n\n \"M'm,\" he said, and dismissed me with a nod.\n\n\n I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew\n no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a\n mating booth with him.\n\n\n The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts\n of wild schemes.\n\n\n I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to\n Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate\n planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted.\n Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild\n irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be\n willing to risk that. Well, almost....\n\n\n About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream\n there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it\n I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the\n sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of\n course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed\n an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.\n\n\n The next night I heard the woman's voice again.\n\n\n \"\nTry it\n,\" she said. \"\nDo it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed.\n There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up\n that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please—for me.\n\"\nShe was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making\n heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon\n to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.\n\n\n And I heard the voice nearly every night.\n\n\n It hammered away.\n\n\n \"\nWhat if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the\n miserable existence you're leading now!\n\"\n\n\n One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this\n idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.\n\n\n She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, \"\nConsult the cybs\n in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll\n find a way.\n\"\n\n\n Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month,\n I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I\n thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my\n fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be\n busy—desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't\n want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.\n\n\n I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got\n up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the\n location of the nearest Govpub office.\n\n\n I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.\nII\n\n\n Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was\n underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed\n pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a\n bit. Think about it. Compose myself.\n\n\n At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a\n plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on\n and get close to the speaker and I did.\n\n\n The cyb's mechanical voice—they never seem to get the \"th\" sounds\n right—said, \"This is Branch Four of the Office of Government\n Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as\n thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard\n phraseology.\"\n\n\n Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my\n knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate\n efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,\n \"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment,\n change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally\n referred to as nomenclature.\"\n\n\n There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and\n brought the memory tubes in.\n\n\n Then the cyb said, \"Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult\n alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n I started to turn away and the cyb said, \"Information on tanks is\n military information and classified. State authorization for—\"\n\n\n I switched it off.\nNumbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the\n proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through\n the glowlit corridors.\n\n\n N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very\n high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls.\n Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There\n was an information desk in the center of the room.\n\n\n I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.\n\n\n There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive\n girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her\n features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde—but she had\n something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense\n of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It\n seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which\n even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.\n\n\n And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.\n\n\n I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common\n sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this\n thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments\n and discomforts. It had to be done.\n\n\n I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could\n have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the\n shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks\n topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt\n suddenly and disturbingly pleased.\n\n\n \"What information is desired?\" she asked. Her voice was standard—or\n was it?\n\n\n Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.\n\n\n I used colloquial. \"I want to get the dope on State Serial\n designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they\n might be changed.\"\n\n\n She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, \"Name? Address? Post?\"\n\n\n I froze. I stood there and stared at her.\n\n\n She looked up and said, \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I—er—no post at present. N/P status.\"\n\n\n Her fingers moved on the steno.\n\n\n I gave her my address and she recorded that.\n\n\n Then I paused again.\n\n\n She said, \"And your name?\"\n\n\n I took a deep breath and told her.\n\n\n I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I\n couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and\n noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse\n color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more\n than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and\n dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the\n top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking\n stupid, meeting her stare—\nShe looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little\n longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.\n\n\n \"All right,\" she said finally, \"I'll make a search.\"\n\n\n She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk\n and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away.\n She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, \"Information\n desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me.\"\n\n\n Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement\n of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged\n and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost\n beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and\n was heartily ashamed of myself.\n\n\n I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full\n authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the\n realization hardly scared me at all.\n\n\n She led me down one of the long passageways.\n\n\n A few moments later I said, \"Don't you sometimes get—well, pretty\n lonely working here?\" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved\n behavior, but I couldn't help it.\n\n\n She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, \"Not\n terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time.\"\n\n\n \"You don't get many visitors, then.\"\n\n\n \"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who\n come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript\n room. The—er—social habits of the pre-atomic civilization.\"\n\n\n I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their\n ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside\n her. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n\n\n \"L-A-R-A 339/827.\"\n\n\n I pronounced it. \"Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too.\"\nShe didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint\n spot of color on her cheek.\n\n\n I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one\n of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have,\n but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard,\n unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the\n psycho-scan.\n\n\n We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure\n just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not\n actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the\n left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her,\n knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.\n\n\n For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly.\n I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our\n eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.\n\n\n She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.\n\n\n After that she was very business-like.\n\n\n We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them\n and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched\n her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked\n on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out\n information.\n\n\n She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at\n it and turned to me. \"You can take this along and study it,\" she said,\n \"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be—a little difficult.\"\n\n\n She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, \"I didn't think it\n would be easy.\"\n\n\n \"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial\n under any circumstances is Opsych.\"\n\n\n \"Opsych?\" You can't keep up with all these departments.\n\n\n \"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go\n from a lower to higher E.A.C.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get it, exactly.\"\n\n\n As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just\n an overtone. \"Well,\" she said, \"as you know, the post a person is\n qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment\n Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to\n Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect\n him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C,\n he is permitted a new number.\"\n\n\n I groaned. \"But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!\"\n\n\n \"It looks very uncertain then.\"\n\n\n \"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on\n Marscol—or—in the hell of the pre-atomics!\"\n\n\n She looked amused. \"What did you say your E.A.C. was?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right. Sorry.\" I controlled myself and grinned. \"I guess this\n whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s\n even gone down.\"\n\n\n \"That might be your chance then.\"\n\n\n \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your\n number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to\n justify a change.\"\n\n\n \"By the State, he might!\" I punched my palm. \"Only how do I get to him?\"\n\n\n \"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for\n a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course.\n Just a moment.\"\n\n\n She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed\n slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was\n in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his\n office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One\n containing the Opsych offices.\n\n\n We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of\n me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with\n everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples\n again.\n\n\n I tried to keep the conversation going. \"Do you think it'll be hard to\n get a travel permit?\"\n\n\n \"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day\n tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it\n if you hold out long enough.\"\n\n\n I sighed. \"I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought\n to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you\n can make it impossible?'\"\nShe started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into\n the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.\n\n\n A second later, as I came along, I saw why.\n\n\n There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had\n that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric\n clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.\n\n\n I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they\n kept looking at me.\n\n\n Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the\n exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth,\n tracking us.\n\n\n I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my\n smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her\n again—but of course I didn't dare.\nIII\n\n\n I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into\n them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping\n pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to\n feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.\n\n\n I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing\n time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the\n following morning.\n\n\n In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at\n theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping\n around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and\n got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a\n drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to\n the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem\n political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of\n Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led\n by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker\n than water. Standard.\n\n\n There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless\n forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in\n a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up\n with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.\n\n\n And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for\n the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere\n in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere\n beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go\n there....\n\n\n Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a\n verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had\n unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The\n poem went:\n\nWherever I go,\nI\ngo too,\nAnd spoil everything.\n\n That was it. The story of mankind.\n\n\n I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I\n didn't sleep for a long, long time.\n\n\n Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice\n again. The low, seductive woman's voice—the startling, shocking voice\n out of my unconscious.\n\n\n \"\nYou have taken the first step\n,\" she said. \"\nYou are on your way\n to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of\n conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only\n answer....\n\"\nI didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I\nthought\nobjections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my\n life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew\n no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might\n have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed,\n stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within\n me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not\n even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....\n\n\n \"\nThe woman, Lara, attracts you\n,\" said the voice.\n\n\n I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the\n voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with\n it.\n\n\n \"\nTake her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and\n know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way.\n\"\n\n\n The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.\n\n\n I woke writhing and in a sweat again.\n\n\n It was morning.\n\n\n I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center\n One.\n\n\n The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats\n for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied\n myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there\n was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic\n decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with\n life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and\n sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who\n hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching\n existence from the earth today.\n\n\n I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of\n the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners\n in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather\n non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two\n Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and\n I could see the prisoners' faces.\n\n\n They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet\n their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.\n\n\n They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar\n emotional display.\n\n\n I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding\n hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were\n wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy,\n quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a\n smile.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the unspeakable thing that the title refers to?", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_1", "options": ["The dreams that the main character has.", "The narrator's name.", "The acts that the narrator commits.", "The planet's name."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What finally motivates the speaker to go to the government about his issue?", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_2", "options": ["He is curious as to what they will do when he presents his dilemma.", "He is tired of being mistaken for someone else.", "It was his mother's dying wish.", "The woman in his dream persuades him."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Now that he possesses this four-letter name, how has his life changed?", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_3", "options": ["He meets many more women than before.", "He has virtually lost his entire life, and he is virtually shunned by society.", "He is allowed to go to the front of every line.", "People with his name are considered special, and he never has to wait in line for anything."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "If he actually goes through with trying to get a name change, what is he afraid could happen?", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_4", "options": ["He could be arrested and sent to an institution", "He will be dishonoring his parents.", "He will never dream of the woman again.", "He will lose his job."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is one major drawback he feels his name causes?", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_5", "options": ["He cannot find a woman willing to have sex with him, and he is dying to attempt to procreate.", "He is unable to qualify for the position that would put him in close proximity to the woman he dreams of.. ", "His name is always called last, so he spends the majority of his time waiting in line.", "His name is always called last, so he spends the majority of his time waiting in line."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The woman who waits on the main character", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_6", "options": ["reminds him of the woman he dreams about", "is rude and refuses to assist him.", "reminds him of his mother who he just lost because she was so kind to him,", "ultimately turns him in to the authorities because what he is trying to do is illegal."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the main character get so embarrassed in front of the woman at the counter?", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_7", "options": ["He tells her he reminds her of his mother who just died.", "He tells her he dreams about her.", "He has to tell her his name.", "He belches in her face when she asks him a question."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What type of unauthorized behavior does the main character engage in with the clerk?", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_8", "options": ["He tries to have sex with her.", "He discusses his dead mother, which is prohibited.", "He asks her out on a date.", "He asks her personal questions."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What almost distracts the main character enough to forget why he came to the government office in the first place?", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_9", "options": ["His fear of retaliation from the authorities.", "All he can think about is the woman who will be in his dreams that night.", "He cannot take his eyes off of the clerk.", "All he can think about is his mother."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In the end, what does the couple the main character observes make him realize?", "question_unique_id": "51210_BULKF6TX_10", "options": ["No matter where you go, as long as you have the one you love with you, nothing else matters.", "He is glad he is not tied down to someone else.", "He is going to the institution and he is scared.", "He is going to ask out the clerk the next time he sees her."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/2/1/51210//51210-h//51210-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51398", "set_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Growing up on Big Muddy", "year": 1954, "author": "De Vet, Charles V.", "topic": "Explorers -- Fiction; Science fiction; Extrasolar planets -- Fiction; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Short stories; Diseases -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction", "article": "Well, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby\n\n talk messages to his mother ship! He was—\nGROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY\nBy CHARLES V. DE VET\n\n\n Illustrated by TURPIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nKaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending\n minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby\n talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this\n last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual\n about it?\n\n\n He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as\n they should.\n\n\n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER,\n LET USNS KNOW.\nSS II\n\n\n Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape\n thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large\n drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout\n ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.\n\n\n \"Damn this climate!\" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. \"Doesn't it ever do\n anything here except rain?\"\n\n\n His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And\n why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been\n doing during that time?\n\n\n Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture\n from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out\n when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he\n was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the\n job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle\n alone—or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or\n no chance of his being able to find either here.\n\n\n Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and\n brought them out where he could look at them:\n\n\n The mother ship,\nSoscites II\n, had been on the last leg of its\n planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout\n ship—the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the\n exploring of new worlds—and set itself into a giant orbit about this\n planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.\n\n\n The\nSoscites II\nhad to maintain its constant speed; it had no means\n of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop.\n Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an\n orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle\n a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.\n\n\n Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here\n forever.\n\n\n That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing\n recently.\n\n\n A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the\n tape in his hand. Baby talk....\nOne thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He\n turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its\n bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last\n several messages—both those sent and those received. He pulled it out\n impatiently and began reading.\n\n\n The first was from himself:\n\n\n YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT\n WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND\n A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.\n\n\n VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE.\n FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER.\n BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF\n ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER\n THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER.\n WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW\n I REPAIR SCOUT.\n\n\n SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN\n HOUR AGO.\nSMOKY\n\n\n The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time\n was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for\n two-way exchange.\n\n\n DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO\n KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU\n DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT\n CAME OUT WAS \"DATA INSUFFICIENT.\" TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL\n ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING\n EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.\nSS II\n\n\n Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report\n followed:\n\n\n ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO\n HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS.\n THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.\nSMOKY\n\n\n The ship's next message read:\n\n\n INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US\n ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.\nSS II\n\n\n His own reply perplexed Kaiser:\n\n\n LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK?\n DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?\nSMOKY\n\n\n The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:\n\n\n WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO\n REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE\n SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?\nSS II\n\n\n The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:\n\n\n TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY\n LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO\n\n\n The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the\n last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they\n decided to humor him.\n\n\n OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER,\n LET USNS KNOW.\nSS II\n\n\n That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.\n\n\n He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though\n convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his\n forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.\n\n\n He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at\n the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty\n hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the\n communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.\n\n\n SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND\n HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR\n BOTH.\nSMOKY\n\n\n Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried\n to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and\n wakefulness—he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.\n\n\n It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back\n home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had\n realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love\n him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And\n though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain,\n she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by\n persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by\n caring for their house only in a slovenly way.\n\n\n Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married.\n His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight\n in helping his sister torment Kaiser.\nKaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an\n hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still\n five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck\n and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.\n\n\n After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of\n Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a\n heavy drizzle now.\n\n\n Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest\n against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots\n and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with\n a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll\n over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.\n\n\n The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.\n\n\n Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid\n ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside\n the ship, the \"octopus\" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae,\n extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded\n temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary\n conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and\n all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.\n\n\n Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide,\n sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there,\n he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a\n higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw\n them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.\nOne old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture\n of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps\n a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his\n toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that\n might have been a greeting—or a warning to the others that a stranger\n approached.\n\n\n The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery\n body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms\n to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in\n three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick,\n with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave\n his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish\n smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.\n\n\n The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling\n slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm\n forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main\n group.\nThey had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now\n most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and\n piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults.\n Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their\n lips and drew into their mouths.\n\n\n They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it\n was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The\n proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.\n\n\n Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing\n his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his\n breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear.\n One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser\n gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to\n display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take\n much more of this.\n\n\n A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and\n they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The\n entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase,\n or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors\n followed.\n\n\n They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with\n an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had\n few natural enemies.\n\n\n Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and\n came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three\n haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their\n construction more closely this time.\n\n\n They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built\n of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How\n they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser\n did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and\n all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to\n have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.\n\n\n The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a\n circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others\n were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until\n the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next\n above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof.\n They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found\n them dark and dank—and as smelly as the natives themselves.\n\n\n The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and\n he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and\n returned to the scout.\n\n\n The\nSoscites II\nsent little that helped during the next twelve hours\n and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the\n scout.\n\n\n The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for\n a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent\n inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the\n fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.\nOpening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had\n to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet\n metal back into place with a small crowbar—the best leverage he had on\n hand—but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way\n to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it\n the rest of the day.\n\n\n That evening, Kaiser received information from the\nSoscites II\nthat\n was at least definite:\n\n\n SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T\n LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU\n HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE—SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND\n WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND\n WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!\nSOSCITES II\n\n\n Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:\n\n\n WHAT THE HELL?\n\n\n SMOKY\nSoscites II's\nnext communication followed within twenty minutes and\n was signed by the ship's doctor:\n\n\n JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET\n THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER\n THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT\n INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST\n CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD\n SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING\n ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN\n WE FINISH WITH SAM.\nJ. G. ZARWELL\n\n\n Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that\n his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk\n and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very\n little clear thought, for several hours—until the next communication\n came in:\n\n\n WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND\n APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN\n EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU\n WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.\n\n\n CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT\n KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND\n MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY.\n THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS\n THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE\n YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED\n THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.\n\n\n SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT\n BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.\nSS II\nKaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about\n the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close\n friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in\n space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people\n here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he\n would have been more contented living in a crowded city.\n\n\n His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because\n he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work\n well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked\n him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they\n respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.\n\n\n The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He\n hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized—and fell\n instantly asleep.\n\n\n The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:\n\n\n SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH\n DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.\n\n\n FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN\n LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION\n CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND\n PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.\n\n\n SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE\n COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE\n BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH\n YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN\n GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS\n IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.\n\n\n WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS.\n IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT\n WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.\nSS II\n\n\n By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and\n anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish\n better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he\n set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea\n occurred to him.\n\n\n Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in\n his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would\n supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow\n drops—and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding\n stopped.\n\n\n That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.\n\n\n Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing\n his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him\n that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but\n the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried\n reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood\n out sharp and clear!\n\n\n Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the\n symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort\n of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he\n waited. The result surprised and pleased him.\n\n\n The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture\n on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been\n here.\n\n\n As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature\n 102, humidity 113—just about the same as it had been on earlier\n readings.\nDuring the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged\n messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at\n repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.\n\n\n He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed\n to drop off to sleep immediately—and awake at the exact times he\n had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in\n straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a\n subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the\n symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really\n important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming\n discouraged.\n\n\n At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He\n sent out a terse message to the\nSoscites II\n:\n\n\n TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE\n INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS\n ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL,\n BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND\n IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN\n IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.\nSMOKY\n\n\n Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires,\n a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed\n that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at\n the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he\n wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant\n horseshoe. He intended to find out.\n\n\n Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the\n doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on\n his shoulders and began his journey—in the opposite direction from the\n first native settlement.\n\n\n He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise\n had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the\n river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This\n group was decidedly more advanced than the first!\n\n\n They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change\n was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was\n more subdued, less repugnant.\n\n\n By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to\n understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and\n called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The\n first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a\n gesture of friendship.\n\n\n The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned\n part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.\n\n\n The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed\n the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him\n and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.\nAs dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the\n native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react\n to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by\n his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at\n peace with this world.\n\n\n Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise\n of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in\n case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the\n beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as\n it went.\n\n\n The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of\n shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in\n the water when he arrived and were very friendly.\n\n\n That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded\n around as he swam—they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency—and\n often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had\n difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he\n neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and\n pulled him under.\n\n\n Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was\n clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him\n helpless. They sank deeper.\n\n\n When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of\n bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee\n up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the\n surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his\n feet hit the river bottom.\n\n\n As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and\n seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying\n to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but\n there was none. He shrugged helplessly.\n\n\n There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here—if they\n had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for\n them—and he packed and started back to the scout.\n\n\n Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed\n the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and\n now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist,\n he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his\n bare skin were pleasant to feel.\n\n\n When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The\n tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free\n it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling\n the equipment to the ground.\n\n\n Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in\n the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly\n his eyes widened.\nMoving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment\n through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator,\n as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped\n place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.\n\n\n Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine\n casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried\n again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The\n metal beneath yielded slightly—but he felt the palms of his hands\n bruise against the lever.\n\n\n Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted.\n His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased\n tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried\n again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly—until the fuel pump\n hung free!\n\n\n Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution\n rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its\n anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.\n\n\n He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to\n read the two messages waiting for him.\n\n\n The first was quite routine:\n\n\n REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL\n WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME\n MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE\n COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.\n\n\n TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME\n ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE\n SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES'\n AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU\n INFORMED.\n\n\n GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.\nSS II\n\n\n The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note\n of uneasiness in it.\n\n\n SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION\n ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.\nSS II\n\n\n Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had\n covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to\n sleep.\n\n\n In the morning, another message was waiting:\n\n\n VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS\n QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.\nSS II\nKaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the\nSoscites II\nbe\n experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they\n were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a\n suggestion of urgency—there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of\n information.\n\n\n Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser.\n He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time.\n And the\nSoscites II\nwould not complete its orbit of the planet for\n two weeks yet.\n\n\n Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used\n to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the\n vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went\n back inside.\n\n\n Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the\n captain himself:\n\n\n WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR\n SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!\nH. A. HESSE, CAPT.\n\n\n Kaiser pushed the last of his meal—which he had been eating with his\n fingers—into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his\n hands with it and dropped it to the floor.\n\n\n He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding\n the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for\n serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only\n to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment.\n It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from\n the ship on his trip.\nThe tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and\n when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to\n the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other\n seal-people here.\n\n\n And they were almost human!\n\n\n The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup—that\n was little changed from the first he had found—as in their obviously\n greater intelligence.\n\n\n This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked.\n Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he\n slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them.\n Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly\n alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these\n had no odor—only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet\n him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.\n\n\n Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes\n of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.\n\n\n One was a female.\n\n\n They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he\n understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He\n tried saying \"tent\" and \"wire\" and \"tarp\" as he handled each object,\n but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused\n himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was\n fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to\n carry on a limited conversation.\n\n\n The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until\n Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached\n the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.\nBefore he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the\n communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment,\n then returned and read the message on the tape:\n\n\n STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.\n\n\n IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.\n\n\n WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE\n PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS\n WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU—TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS\n PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.\n\n\n THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW—WHEN YOU HAVE\n FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE—IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR\n MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY\n INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE\n INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE\n BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.\n\n\n DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!\nSS II\n\n\n Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the\n communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.\n\n\n When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank.\n She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her\n throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They\n ran, still laughing, into the water.\n\n\n Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the\n past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why was Kaiser unable to find someone to help him repair his ship?", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_1", "options": ["All of the other mechanics have moved to other places.", "No one on that planet speaks the common language used to repair interplanetary divices.", "He is the only person alive who knows how to fix this ship.", "He is the closest thing to intelligent life, he feels, on the planet."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When Kaiser recovers from his illness, what is he surprised to have found?", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_2", "options": ["The seal people took care of him.", "He had been recorded speaking baby talk to no one in particular.", "Another crew came to take him home.", "He repaired the ship in his sleep;"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Initially, what type of interactions does Kaiser have with the seal people?", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_3", "options": ["He inquires as to whether or not one of them can help repair his ship.", "He simply observes them, and he is not overly impressed.", "He has no interaction with this, and he knows there is something off about them", "He was embraced by them, and they spent lots of time together during his time on their planet."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Kaiser's main motivation for becoming a space pilot?", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_4", "options": ["It was space pilot or die, as he committed adulty.", "His sense of adventure.", "He knew if he didn't leave he was going to have an affair.", "He wanted away from his bad marriage."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was one indicator to Kaiser that the seal people were below average intelligence?", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_5", "options": ["They smelled and never took baths.", "They did not know how to fix his ship.", "They had yet to discover fire.", "They had not invented the wheel."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Kaiser is truly disappointed at his own inability to prepare the ship because", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_6", "options": ["He now wishes he had always listened in class.", "It was one of those problems that were so simple, that coming up with a solution should have been an elementary task.", "One of the seal people eventually fixed it. and he knew he was a superior lifeform.", "He took an entire training session on this particular issue."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do the people from the home base tell Kaiser that should have alarmed him?", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_7", "options": ["His wife had filed for divorce while he was away.", "He had been invaded by another lifeform.", "He was speaking baby talk while he was sick because it reminded him of his mother.", "The seal people were planning to attack him."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What ultimately is the cause of Kaiser speaking baby talk while he was sick?", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_8", "options": ["His symbiote did it thinking it would bring him comfort.", "Someone was playing a joke on him.", "He was reverting to his childhood to self-soothe.", "He had a fever that made him partially insane."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When Kaiser still cannot fix the ship, he decides to", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_9", "options": ["Ask the seal people for help anyway.", "give up.", "go on the hunt for more intelligent life on the planet.", "see if he can find any literature hidden on the ship that could help him figure the dilemma out."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The second group of seal people", "question_unique_id": "51398_ARB7PASE_10", "options": ["are the ones who damaged Kaiser's ship without his knowledge.", "are just like the initial group of seal people: they smell offensive and they seem to have the intelligence of a small child.", "seem to be more intelligent than the second group, even to the point where the anti-social Kaiser wants to spend time with them.", "are much more aggressive and hostile."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/9/51398//51398-h//51398-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50827", "set_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Orphans of the Void", "year": 1958, "author": "Shaara, Michael", "topic": "Robots -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; PS; Extrasolar planets -- Fiction", "article": "Orphans of the Void\nBy MICHAEL SHAARA\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nFinding a cause worth dying for is no\n \ngreat trick—the Universe is full of them. Finding\n \none worth living for is the genuine problem!\nIn the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of\n a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood\n counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any\n significance in the number. He had no idea.\n\n\n \"What do you make of it?\" he asked.\n\n\n Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to\n scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n\n\n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all\n built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways,\n maybe?\"\n\n\n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered\n stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n\n\n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n\n\n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's\n not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it\n much of a civilization.\"\n\n\n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n\n\n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.\n\n\n Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great\n age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old—\ntoo\nold.\n He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone\n ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed\n that the buildings had no airlocks.\n\n\n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n\n\n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n\n\n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These\n things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And\n you can see that the rock itself is native—\" he indicated the ledge\n beneath their feet—\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n\n\n \"How long?\"\n\n\n Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n\n\n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n\n\n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled\n wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n\n\n Steffens whistled.\n\n\n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell\n from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind\nat least\nseveral thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a\n fraction of that force.\"\n\n\n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in\n interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first\n uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was\n an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.\n\n\n Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built\n these had been in space for thousands of years.\n\n\n Which ought to give\nthem\n, thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of\n a good head-start.\nWhile the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens\n remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly\n at the walls.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n\n\n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was\n roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears\n at each other,\nthat\nlong ago. And this planet is only a parsec from\n Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these\n get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"\n\n\n He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they\n now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n \"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n\n\n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized\n now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n\n\n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last?\n There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need\n to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left\nsomething\nbehind. The only reason they would need a camp would be—\"\n\n\n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"\n\n\n Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it\n go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black\n midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n\n\n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n\n\n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The\n third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but\nit\nhas a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n\n\n \"How about moons?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\nThe third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close,\n and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly,\n in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the\n clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the\n misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight\n zone.\n\n\n The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a\n hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors\n had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing,\n but he had to try.\n\n\n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning,\n moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark\n outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n\n\n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n\n\n After a while he saw a city.\n\n\n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and\n they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when\n he saw that the city was dead.\n\n\n He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces\n rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center\n of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in\n diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n\n\n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and\n headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun.\n The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then\n there were more cities—all with the black depression, the circular\n stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n\n\n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for\n there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred\n years.\n\n\n The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were\n down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became\n apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n\n\n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends\n from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n\n\n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around\n to the daylight side.\n\n\n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the\n radiation suits.\"\n\n\n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to\n this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one\n of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then,\n thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was\n that Ball's question be answered.\n\n\n When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.\n\n\n Nothing alive but robots, he thought,\nrobots\n. He adjusted to full\n close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.\n Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n\n\n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the\n eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a\n single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,\n he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now\n almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of\n the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the\n most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n\n\n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight\n of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the\n alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He\n tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.\n\n\n The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"\n\n\n Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly\n at Steffens.\n\n\n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite\n possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and\n see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n\n\n \"\nCan\nwe go down?\"\n\n\n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot\n constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his\n fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all.\n They could be the natives.\"\n\n\n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of\n them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n \"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the\n screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n\n\n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed\n to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking\n for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of\n human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very\n clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this\n robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the\n other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of\n duty.\n\n\n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him,\n that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and\n gone.\n\n\n He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought\n opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an\n outpost?\nAn outpost!\nHe turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was\n lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and\n stirred up trouble....\n\n\n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away.\n A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n\n\n \"\nGreetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our\n desire is only to serve....\n\"\n\"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously\n through shocked lips.\n\n\n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens\n was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.\n\n\n \"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is\n only to serve.\"\n\n\n And then the robots sent a\npicture\n.\n\n\n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took\n shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone\n against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots.\n With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the\n hanging arms of its side, of its\nright\nside, and extended it toward\n Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n\n\n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized\n right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The\n robot mind had helped.\n\n\n When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He\n waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of\n the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if\n they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more\n happened, he began to lose his fear.\n\n\n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back.\n He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good\n measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking\n hands.\n\n\n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what\nthey\nhad said, and\n explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n\n\n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered\n baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order\n someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and\nthink\na message?\n\n\n No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n\n\n \"We request—we respectfully request permission to land upon your\n planet.\"\nSteffens had not realized that there were so many.\n\n\n They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit.\n\n\n \"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now\n Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was\n less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less\ninterested\n, as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission\n to land.\"\n\n\n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He\n tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they\nshould\nseem inhuman. But....\n\n\n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n\n\n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above,\n jets throbbing gently.\n\n\n \"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"\n\n\n Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n\n\n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete\n access to your mind, and would perhaps be—dismayed—to learn that\n we have been gathering information from you. We must—apologize.\n Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only\n that information was taken which is necessary for communication\n and—understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your\n request.\"\n\n\n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed\n as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he\n retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.\n\n\n The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way\n different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots\n was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens\n guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake,\n because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The\n picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen,\n had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and\n the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary\n lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed\n almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to\n examine the first robot in detail.\n\n\n It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen.\n The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of\n the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the\n metal chest. Symbols in row upon row—numbers, perhaps—were upon the\n chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued\n in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the\n base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was\n a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on\n the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude\n that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at\n that, although the answer seemed illogical.\n\n\n It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.\n\n\n Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"\n\n\n Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope\n you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We\n have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said\n haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n\n\n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n\n\n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you.\n Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am\n not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to\n convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe\n that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n\n\n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was\n disconcerted.\n\n\n \"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are—curious.\"\n It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend.\n Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n\n\n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely\n metallic, and that of the\nMakers\n, which would appear to be somewhat\n more like yours. I am not a—doctor—and therefore cannot acquaint you\n with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are\n interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be\n of assistance.\"\n\n\n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while\n Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously,\n were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\"\n Steffens decided, were probably just that—doctor-robots, designed\n specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.\n\n\n The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question\n he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n\n\n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n\n\n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't\n really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke\n with difficulty.\n\n\n \"The Makers—are not here.\"\n\n\n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and\n went on:\n\n\n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n\n\n Could that be\npain\nin its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the\n spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n\n\n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been\n killed.\n\n\n He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the\n midst of a radiation so lethal that\nnothing\n,\nnothing\ncould live;\n robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n\n\n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n\n\n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as\n well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the\n free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere—good God, how old\n were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots,\n then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black\n wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n\n\n Were they immortal?\n\"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n\n\n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot\n was referring.\n\n\n \"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots\n continued waiting patiently.\n\n\n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n\n\n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the\n calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of\n age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n\n\n Steffens tried to understand that.\n\n\n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if\n you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the\n first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.\n\n\n \"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added,\n pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of—Peb—is seventeen\n years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some\n thirty-eight years.\"\n\n\n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about\n fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot,\n Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen\n and plant life would have been needed. Unless—\n\n\n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n\n\n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n\n\n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n\n\n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n\n\n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as\n if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.\n\n\n \"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the—\" another pause for\n a word—\"by the\nFactory\n.\"\n\n\n \"The Factory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n\n\n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n\n\n \"Would you prefer to use your—skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"\n\n\n It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went\n along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other\n side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of\n dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in\n a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling\n in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved\n outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance—moving around\n their birthplace.\nThe Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was\n usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon\n team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the\n strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those\n buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have\n to be cleared up before they could leave.\n\n\n Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came\n near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling\n that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots\n that he did little thinking.\n\n\n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as\n unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great\n shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a\n bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors\n knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by\n the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize\n that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and\n it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were\n needed.\n\n\n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.\n\n\n At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.\n\n\n He had a vague idea of the robot's history—more, perhaps, then they\n knew themselves—but he refrained from forming an opinion until\n Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing\n philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n\"What do you\ndo\n?\" Steffens asked.\n\n\n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very\n little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at\n birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that\n knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural\n sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is\n to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much\n more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n\n\n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the\n robots expected the Makers to do so.\n\n\n Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had\n surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n\n\n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then.\n But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n\n\n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else\n would we have been built?\"\n\n\n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to\n Elb, was no question at all.\n\n\n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have\n known—that the Makers were gone and would never come back—he was a\n long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the\n back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a\n faith.\n\n\n But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the\n structure of human society, and the robot—a machine which did not eat\n or sleep—listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens\n mentioned God.\n\n\n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n\n\n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:\n\n\n \"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you\n were the Makers returning—\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the\n seeming disappointment he had sensed—\"but then we probed your minds\n and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being,\n unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even—\" Elb caught\n himself—\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled\n over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology,\n but it seemed to have a peculiar—\" Elb paused for a long while—\"an\n untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n\n\n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n\n\n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The\n Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them\n who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.\n\n\n It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.\n\n\n But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What clue does Steffens pick up on that initially leads him to believe that no humans inhabit the planet they land on?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_1", "options": ["He notices that the air is hard to breathe, but there are no airlocks on any of the buildings, making it impossible for anyone to live there.", "He was warned of a plague that broke out there some time ago that killed all of civilization.", "He knew that the planet had been bombed, and all of the people perished. ", "There is no source of water on the planet."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Bal speculate that it has probably taken over 10,000 years to cause the marks they find on the rocks?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_2", "options": ["It takes water that long to wear rock down to the point those are.", "It takes rocks rubbing against one another that long to wear down that far.", "It takes fire that long to wear rock down to the point those are.  ", "It takes wind that long to wear rock down the point those are"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What frightens Steffens and Ball in regards to the structures that they discover on the planet?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_3", "options": ["They are proof that man has inhabited the planet for thousands of years, and they have no record of man living there.", "There are no structures to house their spacecraft in order to make the necessary repairs to return home.", "They had heard old wive's tales their whole lives about the structures being haunted, and they believed that they were sure to encounter spirits while there.", "They realize that who (or what) ever built the structures had been traveling space for thousands of years longer than man, making them uneasy about what they might encounter, as that civilization had to be much more advanced than man."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Steffens's crew looking for on the planet they land on?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_4", "options": ["A source of water for the rest of the human race", "A planet that can be inhabited by humans.", "A refuge where humans can escape the terrible conditions they are currently required to live under.", "A source of food for the rest of the human race."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What makes the ship's crew speechless?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_5", "options": ["They are found exactly what they were looking for on this planet, and they did not have words to express their joy and gratitude.", "They noticed an alien race that had never been discovered to their knowledge, and they were in awe.", "They realized that they were doomed to die on that planet, and they were all devastated.", "They saw that the planet appeared to have been devastated by war, and that was something that mankind had not experienced in many hundred years."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Steffens's initial reaction regarding the robots?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_6", "options": ["They are inferior to the other robots he's encountered.  ", "they were clearly the cause of the devastation on that planet.", "The robots will be helpful guides to understanding the planet.", "They were perfectly engineered.  "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Steffens believe he can get around the law in regards to making contact with the robots?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_7", "options": ["He was the person in charge of making the laws and changing them.  ", "The law enforcers will never know.", "Even though they are forbidden to make contact with other races, he didn't think robots would fall under the category of being \"a race.\"", "His father was the person in charge of making the laws and changing them."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the internal conflict that Steffens faces in regards to making contact with the robots?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_8", "options": ["He is afraid to put the lives of his crew in danger because of all of the unknown factors surrounding the planet and the robots.", "He is afraid if he does, then he will be punished for breaking the law, but if he doesn't make contact, he will be punished for neglecting his duties.", "He is afraid if he does, then Ball will be punished for breaking the law and not reporting him for making contact, or Ball will be punished because he does report Steffens because that would have discouraged him from doing his duty.", "He is afraid if he does, everyone on the ship will be punished for breaking the law, but if they don't make contact, everyone will be punished for neglecting their duties."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Once the men land, how do the robots seem to change?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_9", "options": ["They seem disinterested in the men.", "They suddenly do not know how to communicate with the men.", "They become afraid of the men.", "They become hostile towards the men.  "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What seems to make the robots feel sadness?", "question_unique_id": "50827_RM648BEX_10", "options": ["When they find out the humans are planning to leave.", "When they discuss how long The Makers have been away.", "When they discuss the death of the makers.", "When they became aware that they were robots and not human."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/2/50827//50827-h//50827-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51167", "set_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Butterfly 9", "year": 1958, "author": "Keith, Donald", "topic": "Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction; Kidnapping -- Fiction; Science fiction; Husband and wife -- Fiction; PS; Engineers -- Fiction", "article": "Butterfly 9\nBy DONALD KEITH\n\n\n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nJeff needed a job and this man had a job to\n \noffer—one where giant economy-size trouble\n \nhad labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\nI\n\n\n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table.\n Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n\n\n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff\n as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your\n supper.\"\n\n\n \"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't\n talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and\n fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and\n yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n\n\n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like\n popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n\n\n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost\n your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young\n yet.\"\nJeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished\n he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the\n mustachioed man at the next table.\n\n\n The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his\n confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n\n\n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I\n think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n\n\n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts.\n We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n\n\n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n\n\n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just\n in the mood.\"\n\n\n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk\n about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"\n\n\n He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building\n being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that\n if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought\n it for two thousand.\"\n\n\n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n \"But since we can't—\"\n\n\n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them,\n grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n\n\n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman,\n with extra gall.\n\n\n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n\n\n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n \"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five\n years. Maybe I help you.\"\n\n\n He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was\n yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized\n the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n\n\n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952.\n Is that what you really mean?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n\n\n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we\n started home.\"\nAnn laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's\n chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a\n psycho—but sort of an inspired one.\"\n\n\n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people.\n I join you.\"\n\n\n He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with\n an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n\n\n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not\n take trip to another time?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n\n\n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we\n talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n\n\n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n4-D TRAVEL BEURO\n\n Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even\n spells it different.\"\n\n\n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you come from the future?\"\n\n\n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n\n\n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man\n didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and\n force.\n\n\n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added\n persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n\n\n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every\n day. I look damaged?\"\n\n\n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and\n his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff\n politely agreed that he did not look damaged.\n\n\n Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?\n\n\n Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"\n\n\n Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like\n grace of his short, broad body.\n\n\n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got\n some gimmick.\"\n\n\n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n \"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's\n kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\nII\n\n\n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a\n good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the\n whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm\n dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.\n\n\n Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine\n metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a\n flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n\n\n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to\n Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n\n\n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n \"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for\n some daffy religious sect.\"\n\n\n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader\n said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n\n\n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the\n next room, after a glance at Snader's key.\n\n\n The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut\n after them.\n\n\n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the\n walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle\n of the ceiling and two movie screens—or were they giant television\n screens?—occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n\n\n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an\n arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word\nAnte\n, and to\n the right with the word\nPost\n.\nJeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One\n appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like\n a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left\n wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined\n corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n\n\n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it\n for?\"\n\n\n \"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n\n\n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of\n time, I suppose?\"\nInstead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed\n a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled\n toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in\n the picture waved back.\n\n\n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n\n\n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth\n dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n\n\n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed\n them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the\n chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture\n surged past.\n\n\n Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have\n criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work.\n Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove\n reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when\n he get there. Put him to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n\n\n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n\n\n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some\n day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n\n\n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the\n fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to\n know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"\n\n\n Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n\n\n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and\n disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n\n\n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his\n instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in\n the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky\n figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds,\n he was recognizable as Snader—and as the picture brought him forward,\n he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n\n\n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took\n other carrier back here.\"\n\n\n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How\n did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"\n\n\n \"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again.\n\n\n Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"\n\n\n \"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember?\n Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would—\"\n\n\n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was\n moving through a room numbered 724.\n\n\n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n\n\n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by\n a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\nAgain there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a\n bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of\n the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous\n club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.\n\n\n \"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.\n\n\n Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.\n\n\n \"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"\n\n\n \"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He\n glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And\n the street—\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n \"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\nIII\n\n\n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The\n car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff\n knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957—nor in any earlier\n year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the\n mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n\n\n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we\n escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"\n\n\n She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a\n minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n\n\n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned\n forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us\n into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n\n\n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he\n shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n\n\n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit\n back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"\n\n\n As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty\n of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were.\n The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite\n Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him\n from a fork in the freeway.\n\n\n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new,\n but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift—\"\n\n\n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up\n in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center,\n ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize\n it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.\n\n\n Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a\n commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's\n have some answers before we go any further.\"\n\n\n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n\n\n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n\n\n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as\n well go in and see what's there.\"\n\n\n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a\n corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\nA tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them\n heartily.\n\n\n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this\n our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.\n\n\n \"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.\n\n\n Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"\n\n\n \"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr.\n Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not\n yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well\n understood in your time, are they not?\"\n\n\n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. You are an expert in—ah—colored television, I think.\"\n\n\n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n\n\n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You\n will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n\n\n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\nBullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this!\n You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract,\n but you do what I say!\"\n\n\n \"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n\n\n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the\n way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your\n knowledge.\"\n\n\n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate\n permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen\n has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can\n make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you\n to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n\n\n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He\n wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange\n streets. But he put on a bold front.\n\n\n \"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work\n for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and\n stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n\n\n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen\n chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go\n on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here—Butterfly 9, ask for\n Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow\n pre-noon.\"\n\n\n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n\n\n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it.\n For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"\n\n\n \"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics—or practical jokers.\" He\n looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was\n no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\nHer hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off\n their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n\n\n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of\n neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they\n expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n\n\n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann\n glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where\n are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't\n even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are\n dressed—it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"\n\n\n \"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He\n pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n\n\n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same\n jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff\n pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit\n chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what\n clearly were hamburgers—though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n\n\n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n\n\n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate\n in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.\n\n\n When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked\n at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two\n dollar bills.\n\n\n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n\n\n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n \"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n\n\n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's\n no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you\n want? This is all I have.\"\n\n\n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one\n of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a\n policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.\n\n\n \"What's the rasper?\" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their\n checks, eyed Jeff curiously.\n\n\n \"I guess I'm in trouble,\" Jeff told him. \"I'm a stranger here and I got\n something to eat under the impression that my money was legal tender.\n Do you know where I can exchange it?\"\nThe officer picked up the dollar bill and fingered it with evident\n interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. \"United States of\n America,\" he read aloud. \"What are those?\"\n\n\n \"It's the name of the country I come from,\" Jeff said carefully.\n \"I—uh—got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further\n than I thought. What's the name of this place?\"\n\n\n \"This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you\n must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know\n about this country.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Where'd you learn to speak\n Federal, if you come from so far?\"\n\n\n Jeff said helplessly, \"I can't explain, if you don't know about the\n United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where\n they know about foreign exchange?\"\n\n\n The policeman scowled. \"How'd you get into this country, anyway? You\n got immigrate clearance?\"\n\n\n An angry muttering started among the bystanders.\n\n\n The policeman made up his mind. \"You come with me.\"\n\n\n At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high\n counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men\n whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to\n listen.\n\n\n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or\n lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n\n\n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n\n\n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in\n something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I\n do—more or less—but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong\n in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm\n so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n\n\n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.\n\n\n The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and\n got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n\n\n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you\n advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n\n\n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his\n wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which\n Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave\n doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n\n\n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night.\n Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned\n and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down\n in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he\n hesitated.\n\n\n In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately\n he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the\n big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow\n brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\nIV\n\n\n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a\n little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n\n\n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's\n barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release,\n if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n\n\n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm\n ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"\n\n\n \"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man\n claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n\n\n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen\n isn't getting me out of here.\"\n\n\n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday—you've\n gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to\n understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie\n film. A film never changes. Space does—and time does. For example, if\n a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to\n find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n\n\n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil\n War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"\n\n\n \"If you go back to the time you call 1865—which is most easily\n done—you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or\n that war.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n\n\n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at\n Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day\n of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you\n grasp the difference between the two?\"\n\n\n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you\n speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space—say, a lake\n in the mountains—how do you identify that place? By looking for\n landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain\n peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?\"\n\n\n \"So far. Keep talking.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why is Ann initially disappointed with Jeff?", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_1", "options": ["He does not want to talk to Snader, but she is interested in what he has to say.", "He is overmedicating.", "He refuses to take his medication.", "He lost his lease and job."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Snader explain the interworkings of time travel?", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_2", "options": ["He says that it's like walking through an invisible wall.  ", "He says that it is not for him to explain, and Jeff will have to ask the higher authorities to explain it.", "He says that it is too technical to explain. Basically, all Jeff needs to know is that it does, in fact, work.", "He says that it's not like a movie, never changing.  Time and space are always changing."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In their initial conversation, what does Snader say that startles Jeff?", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_3", "options": ["Snader tells Jeff that if he does not agree to go with him, Ann's life is in danger.", "He calls Jeff by name.", "Snader tells Jeff that he is being hired by a corporation to give them a particular technology before anyone else can use it.", "Snader tells Jeff he is going back in time to fix a problem, and if doesn't the world could end."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Snader convince Jeff to agree to go with him back in time?", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_4", "options": ["He tells him he will be able to see Ann's father again.", "He tells Jeff that he is going to save the world.", "He tells Jeff that if he does not go, Ann will get hurt.", "He tells Jeff he has nothing to lose."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Once in the room where the time travel is to begin, what does Snader speak of that should have served as a warning for Jeff to turn back?", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_5", "options": ["Snader doesn't speak anymore at all, and that was a warning in and of itself.", "Snader tells Jeff about how small changes he makes in the past can change the future.", "Snader tells Jeff that prisoners are forced to time travel rather than be executed.", "Snader tells Jeff about the mission he was brought to do and how it is very dishonest and amoral."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about Jeff's comment, \"Fun, hey? Like Alice Through the Looking-Glass.\"", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_6", "options": ["Alice does not have fun because she is captured by the queen and the queen of the land they ended up in is about to hold them captive, as well.   ", "Alice does not have fun because the queen cuts off her head, and they are about to be in mortal danger, too.", "Alice does not have fun because a monster actually comes through the mission and tries to kill her. They will not have a fun adventure either.", "Alice didn't go through a looking-glass.  She fell down a rabbit hole, and they are about to fall down one, as well."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How could the changes between Jeff and Ann tell they are no longer in their time?", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_7", "options": ["There is no noticeable difference, and they are never convinced that they have gone to a different time.", "The changes between the two time periods are very subtle.  In many ways, they would have not noticed some of them if they hadn't been trying to find a difference to see if they were in the past.", "There are no similarities between the two times.", "The way the couple dresses is futuristic in comparison to the people they see in the past."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the one constant that Jeff notices between the two periods?", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_8", "options": ["The natural objects of the area are the same.", "There are virtually no similarities.", "Everything is the same.", "The language has remained constant."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the purpose of bringing Jeff to the past?", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_9", "options": ["He has knowledge of how to create a vehicle that revolutionizes the world, and a businessman wants that technology before anyone else can get it.", "He holds the key to a cure for an impending epidemic.", "He has knowledge of how to create a cellular device, and a businessman wants that technology before anyone else can get it.", "He has knowledge of how to create a colored television and a businessman wants that technology before anyone else can get it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Bullen know that Jeff and Ann would get arrested if they left on their own?", "question_unique_id": "51167_XG9YXME3_10", "options": ["He knows that their currency will not be accepted, so they have no money to live on, and that will eventually cause them trouble with the law.", "He called the police and told them that the couple was illegally in the country,", "There were wanted posters of the couple everywhere.", "He knew that their language would give away their secret."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/6/51167//51167-h//51167-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51184", "set_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Inside Earth", "year": 1964, "author": "Anderson, Poul", "topic": "Revolutionaries -- Fiction; PS; Spy stories; Science fiction", "article": "INSIDE EARTH\nBy POUL ANDERSON\n\n\n Illustrated by DAVID STONE\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nObviously, no conqueror wants his subjects to\n\n revolt against his rule. Obviously? This one\n\n would go to any lengths to start a rebellion!\nI\n\n\n The biotechnicians had been very thorough. I was already a little\n undersized, which meant that my height and build were suitable—I\n could pass for a big Earthling. And of course my face and hands and so\n on were all right, the Earthlings being a remarkably humanoid race.\n But the technicians had had to remodel my ears, blunting the tips and\n grafting on lobes and cutting the muscles that move them. My crest had\n to go and a scalp covered with revolting hair was now on the top of my\n skull.\n\n\n Finally, and most difficult, there had been the matter of skin color.\n It just wasn't possible to eliminate my natural coppery pigmentation.\n So they had injected a substance akin to melanin, together with a virus\n which would manufacture it in my body, the result being a leathery\n brown. I could pass for a member of the so-called \"white\" subspecies,\n one who had spent most of his life in the open.\n\n\n The mimicry was perfect. I hardly recognized the creature that looked\n out of the mirror. My lean, square, blunt-nosed face, gray eyes,\n and big hands were the same or nearly so. But my black crest had\n been replaced with a shock of blond hair, my ears were small and\n immobile, my skin a dull bronze, and several of Earth's languages were\n hypnotically implanted in my brain—together with a set of habits and\n reflexes making up a pseudo-personality which should be immune to any\n tests that the rebels could think of.\n\n\n I\nwas\nEarthling! And the disguise was self-perpetuating: the hair\n grew and the skin color was kept permanent by the artificial \"disease.\"\n The biotechnicians had told me that if I kept the disguise long enough,\n till I began to age—say, in a century or so—the hair would actually\n thin and turn white as it did with the natives.\n\n\n It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be\n restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as\n much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete\n and scarless. I'd be human again.\n\n\n I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly\n garments—rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and\n heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as\n felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a\n claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even\n to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort\n of man, an educated atavist.\n\n\n I went out of the hospital with the long swinging stride of one\n accustomed to walking great distances.\nThe Center was busy around me. Behind me, the hospital and laboratories\n occupied a fairly small building, some eighty stories of stone and\n steel and plastic. On either side loomed the great warehouses, military\n barracks, officers' apartments, civilian concessions, filled with the\n vigorous life of the starways. Behind the monstrous wall, a mile to my\n right, was the spaceport, and I knew that a troopship had just lately\n dropped gravs from Valgolia herself.\n\n\n The Center swarmed with young recruits off duty, gaping at the sights,\n swaggering in their new uniforms. Their skins shone like polished\n copper in the blistering sunlight, and their crests were beginning to\n wilt a little. All Earth is not the tropical jungle most Valgolians\n think it is—northern Europe is very pleasant, and Greenland is even a\n little on the cold side—but it gets hot enough at North America Center\n in midsummer to fry a shilast.\n\n\n A cosmopolitan throng filled the walkways. Soldiers predominated—huge,\n shy Dacors, little slant-eyed Yangtusans, brawling Gorrads, all the\n manhood of Valgolia. Then there were other races, blue-skinned Vegans,\n furry Proximans, completely non-humanoid Sirians and Antarians.\n They were here as traders, observers, tourists, whatever else of a\n non-military nature one can imagine.\n\n\n I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior\n breed to be kicked around misses the whole point of Empire. If, indeed,\n Earth's millions were an inferior breed, I wouldn't have been here at\n all. Valgol needs an economic empire, but if all we had in mind was\n serfdom we'd be perfectly content with the plodding animal life of\n Deneb VII or a hundred other worlds.\n\n\n I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal,\n and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was\n to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one.\nThere were plenty of Terries—Terrestrials—around, of course, moving\n with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and\n arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the\n habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak\n Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save\n for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes\n suggesting those of civil functionaries at home.\n\n\n I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study,\n and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating,\n because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians\n and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the\n ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are.\n They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate.\n\n\n I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took\n me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as\n far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings\n around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but\n General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, \"Hello,\n Coordinator.\"\n\n\n The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading\n his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. \"Ah, yes. I'm\n glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started—\"\n He extended a silver galla-dust box. \"Sniff? Have a seat, Conru.\"\n\n\n I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of\n papers on his desk and leafed through them. \"Umm-mm, only fifty-two\n years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man\n like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan\n business....\"\n\n\n I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You\n couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was\n as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being\n with my ex-countrymen.\n\n\n The Coordinator shrugged. \"Well, if you can carry this business\n off—fine. If you fail, you may die quite unpleasantly. That's their\n trouble, Conru: you wouldn't be regarded as an individual, but as a\n Valgolian. Did you know that they even make such distinctions among\n themselves? I mean races and sub-races and social castes and the like;\n it's keeping them divided and impotent, Conru. It's also keeping them\n out of the Empire. A shame.\"\nI knew all that, of course, but I merely nodded. Coordinator Vorka was\n a wonderful man in his field, and if he tended to be on the garrulous\n side, what could I do? I said, \"I know that, sir. I also know I was\n picked for a dangerous job because you thought I could fill the role.\n But I still don't know exactly what the job is.\"\n\n\n Coordinator Vorka smiled. \"I'm afraid I can't tell you much more\n than you must already have guessed,\" he said. \"The anarch movement\n here—the rebels, that is—is getting no place, primarily because of\n internal difficulties. When members of the same group spit epithets\n at each other referring to what they consider racial or national\n distinctions which determine superiority or inferiority, the group is\n bound to be an insecure one. Such insecurity just does not make for a\n strong rebellion, Conru. They try, and we goad them—but dissention\n splits them constantly and their revolutions fizzle out.\n\n\n \"They just can't unite against us, can't unite at all. Conru, you know\n how we've tried to educate them. It's worked, too, to some extent.\n But you can't educate three billion people who have a whole cultural\n pattern behind them.\"\n\n\n I winced. \"Three billion?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Earth is a rich planet, Conru, and a fairly crowded one at\n the same time. Bickering is inevitable. It's a part of their culture,\n as much as cooperation has been a part of ours.\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"We learned the hard way. The old Valgol was a poor planet\n and we had to unite to conquer space or we could not have survived.\"\n\n\n The Coordinator sniffed again at his silver box. \"Of course. And we're\n trying to help these people unite. They don't have to make the same\n mistakes we did, long ago. They don't have to at all. Get them to hate\n us enough, get them to hate us until all their own clannish hatreds\n don't count at all.... Well, you know what happened on Samtrak.\"\n\n\n I knew. The Samtraks are now the entrepreneurs of the Empire, really\n ingenious traders, but within the memory of some of our older men they\n were a sore-spot. They didn't understand the meaning of Empire any more\n than Earth does, and they never did understand it until we goaded them\n into open rebellion. The very reverse of divide and rule, you might\n say, and it worked. We withdrew trading privileges one by one, until\n they revolted successfully, thus educating themselves sociologically in\n only a few generations.\nVorka said, \"The problem of Earth is not quite that simple.\" He leaned\n back, made a bridge of his fingers, and peered across them at me. \"Do\n you know precisely what a provocateur job is, Conru?\"\n\n\n I said that I did, but only in a hazy way, because until now my work\n had been pretty much restricted to social relations on the more\n advanced Empire planets. However, I told him that I did know the idea\n was to provoke discontent and, ultimately, rebellion.\n\n\n The Coordinator smiled. \"Well, that's just the starter, Conru. It's a\n lot more complex than that. Each planet has its own special problems.\n The Samtraks, for example, had a whole background of cutthroat\n competition. That was easy: we eliminated that by showing them what\nreal\ncutthroat competition could be like. But Earth is different.\n Look at it this way. They fight among themselves. Because of their\n mythical distinctions, not realizing that there are no inferior races,\n only more or less advanced ones, and that individuals must be judged as\n individuals, not as members of groups, nations or races. A planet like\n Earth can be immensely valuable to the Empire, but not if it has to be\n garrisoned. Its contribution must be voluntary and whole-hearted.\"\n\n\n \"A difficult problem,\" I said. \"My opinion is that we should treat all\n exactly alike—\nforce\nthem to abandon their unrealistic differences.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly!\" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was\n pretty elementary stuff. \"We're never too rough on the eager lads\n who come here from Valgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even\n encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down.\"\n\n\n I told him I had met one.\n\n\n \"Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads\n will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military\n service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all\n Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these\n colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild\n stories about brutality on our part. Not enough to make everybody mad\n at us, or even a majority—the rumored tyranny has always happened to\n someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting\n mad, and that's the class we want.\"\n\n\n \"The leaders,\" I chimed in. \"The idealists. Brave, intelligent,\n patriotic. The kind who probably wouldn't be a part of this racial\n bickering, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the Coordinator. \"We'll give them the ammunition for\n their propaganda. We've\nbeen\ndoing it. Result: the leaders get mad.\n Races, religions, nationalities, they hate us worse than they hate each\n other.\"\nThe way he painted it, I was hardly needed at all. I told him that.\n\n\n \"Ideally, that would be the situation, Conru. Only it doesn't work\n that way.\" He took out a soft cloth and wiped his forehead. \"Even the\n leaders are too involved in this myth of differences and they can't\n concentrate all their efforts. Luron, of course, would be the other\n alternative—\"\n\n\n That was a very logical statement, but sometimes logic has a way of\n making you laugh, and I was laughing now. Luron considered itself our\n arch-enemy. With a few dozen allies on a path of conquest, Luron\n thought it could wrest Empire from our hands. Well, we let them play.\n And each time Luron swooped down on one of the more primitive planets,\n we let them, for Luron would serve as well as ourselves in goading\n backward peoples to unite and advance. Perhaps Luron, as a social\n entity, grew wiser each time. Certainly the primitive colonials did.\n Luron had started a chain reaction which threatened to overthrow the\n tyranny of superstition on a hundred planets. Good old Luron, our\n arch-enemy, would see the light itself some day.\n\n\n The Coordinator shook his head. \"Can't use Luron here. Technologies are\n entirely too similar. It might shatter both planets, and we wouldn't\n want that.\"\n\n\n \"So what do we use?\"\n\n\n \"You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that\n they want to fight, you—\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I told him. \"Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so\n soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all—\"\n\n\n The Coordinator put his hand down flat. \"Nothing of the sort. They\nmust\nfight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary,\n until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are\ntotally\nagainst us.\"\n\n\n I stood up. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n He waved me back into the chair. \"You'll be lucky to understand it\n by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to\n another ... that is, if you come out of this one alive.\"\n\n\n I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead.\n\n\n \"We have some influence in the underground movement, as you might\n logically expect. The leader is a man we worked very hard to have\n elected.\"\n\n\n \"A member of one of the despised races?\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"The best we could do at this point was to help elect someone from a\n minority sub-group of the dominant white race. The leader's name is\n Levinsohn. He is of the white sub-group known as Jews.\"\n\"How well is this Levinsohn accepted by the movement?\"\n\n\n \"Considerable resistance and hostility,\" the Coordinator said. \"That's\n to be expected. However, we've made sure that there is no other\n organization the minority-haters can join, so they have to follow\n him or quit. He's able, all right; one of the most able men they\n have, which helps our aims. Even those who discriminate against Jews\n reluctantly admire him. He's moved the headquarters of the movement\n out into space, and the man's so brilliant that we don't even know\n where. We'll find out, mainly through you, I hope, but that isn't the\n important thing.\"\n\n\n \"What is?\" I asked, baffled.\n\n\n \"To report on the unification of Earth. It's possible that the anarch\n movement can achieve it under Levinsohn. In that case, we'll make sure\n they win, or think they win, and will gladly sign a treaty giving Earth\n equal planetary status in the Empire.\"\n\n\n \"And if unity hasn't been achieved?\"\n\n\n \"We simply crush this rebellion and make them start all over again.\n They'll have learned some degree of unity from this revolt and so the\n next one will be more successful.\" He stood up and I got out of my\n chair to face him. \"That's for the future, though. We'll work out our\n plans from the results of this campaign.\"\n\n\n \"But isn't there a lot of danger in the policy of fomenting rebellion\n against us?\" I asked.\n\n\n He lifted his shoulders. \"Evolution is always painful, forced evolution\n even more so. Yes, there are great dangers, but advance information\n from you and other agents can reduce the risk. It's a chance we must\n take, Conru.\"\n\n\n \"Conrad,\" I corrected him, smiling. \"Plain Mr. Conrad Haugen ... of\n Earth.\"\nII\n\n\n A few days later, I left North America Center, and in spite of the\n ominous need to hurry, my eastward journey was a ramble. The anarchs\n would be sure to check my movements as far back as they could, and my\n story had better ring true. For the present, I must\nbe\nmy role, a\n vagabond.\n\n\n The city was soon behind me. It was far from other settlement—it is\n good policy to keep the Centers rather isolated, and we could always\n contact our garrisons in native towns quickly enough. Before long I was\n alone in the mountains.\n\n\n I liked that part of the trip. The Rockies are huge and serene, a fresh\n cold wind blows from their peaks and roars in the pines, brawling\n rivers foam through their dales and canyons—it is a big landscape,\n clean and strong and lonely. It speaks with silence.\n\n\n I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great\n truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was\n Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he\n looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been\n laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which\n the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule\n itself.\n\n\n I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of\n Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the\n talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent!\n\n\n \"Their taxes are killing me,\" said the owner. \"What the hell incentive\n do I have to produce if they take it away from me?\" I nodded, but\n thought:\nYour kind was paying more taxes in the old days, and had\n less to show for it. Here you get your money back in public works and\n universal security. No one on Earth is cold or hungry. Can you only\n produce for your own private gain, Earthling?\n\"The labor draft got my kid the other day,\" said the foreman. \"He'll\n spend two good years of his life working for them, and prob'ly come\n back hopheaded about the good o' the Empire.\"\nThere was a time\n, I thought,\nwhen millions of Earthlings clamored\n for work, or spent years fighting their wars, gave their youth to a\n god of battle who only clamored for more blood. And how can we have a\n stable society without educating its members to respect it?\n\"I\nwant\nanother kid,\" said the female cook. \"Two ain't really enough.\n They're good boys, but I want a girl too. Only the Eridanian law says\n if I go over my quota, if I have one more, they'll sterilize me! And\n they'd do it, the meddling devils.\"\nA billion Earthlings are all the Solar System can hold under decent\n standards of living without exhausting what natural resources their own\n culture left us\n, I thought.\nWe aren't ready to permit emigration; our\n own people must come first. But these beings can live well here. Only\n now that we've eliminated famine, plague, and war, they'd breed beyond\n reason, breed till all the old evils came back to throttle them, if we\n didn't have strict population control.\n\"Yeah,\" said her husband bitterly. \"They never even let my cousin have\n kids. Sterilized him damn near right after he was born.\"\nThen he's a moron, or carries hemophilia, or has some other hereditary\n taint\n, I thought.\nCan't they see we're doing it for their own good?\n It costs us fantastically in money and trouble, but the goal is a level\n of health and sanity such as this race never in its history dreamed\n possible.\n\"They're stranglin' faith,\" muttered someone else.\nAnyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission\n be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or\n antisocial nonsense? The old \"free\" Earth was not noted for liberalism.\n\"We want to be free.\"\nFree? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds\n and nationalisms on each other—and on the Galaxy—to wallow in\n barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our\n works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be\n demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is\n Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!\n\"We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either—\"\nThat's up to nobody else but you!\nI couldn't get much specific information, but then I hadn't expected\n to. I collected my pay and drifted on eastward, talking to people of\n all classes—farmers, mechanics, shopowners, tramps, and such data as I\n gathered tallied with those of Intelligence.\n\n\n About twenty-five per cent of the population, in North America at\n least—it was higher in the Orient and Africa—was satisfied with the\n Imperium, felt they were better off than they would have been in the\n old days. \"The Eridanians are pretty decent, on the whole. Some of 'em\n come in here and act nice and human as you please.\"\n\n\n Some fifty per cent was vaguely dissatisfied, wanted \"freedom\" without\n troubling to define the term, didn't like the taxes or the labor draft\n or the enforced disarmament or the legal and social superiority of\n Valgolians or some such thing, had perhaps suffered in the reconquest.\n But this group constituted no real threat. It would tend to be passive\n whatever happened. Its greatest contribution would be sporadic rioting.\n\n\n The remaining twenty-five per cent was bitter, waiting its chance,\n muttering of a day of revenge—and some portion of this segment was\n spreading propaganda, secretly manufacturing and distributing weapons,\n engaging in clandestine military drill, and maintaining contact with\n the shadowy Legion of Freedom.\n\n\n Childish, melodramatic name! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a\n certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement\n was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting,\n its activities mounted almost daily.\nThe illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated\n stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that\n some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to\n spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't\n trace such a well-organized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and\n jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so—\nThe day is coming.... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your\n shackles.... Stand by for freedom!\nI stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native\n cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old\n settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got\n a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill.\n\n\n I was Conrad Haugen, Norwegian-American, assigned to a spaceship by the\n labor draft and liking it well enough to re-enlist when my term was\n up. I had wandered through much of the Empire and had had a great deal\n of contact with Eridanians, but was most emphatically not a Terrie. In\n fact, I thought it would be well if the redskin yoke could be thrown\n off, both because of liberty and the good pickings to be had in the\n Galaxy if the Empire should collapse. I had risen to second mate on an\n interstellar tramp, but could get no further because of the law that\n the two highest officers must be Valgolian. That had embittered me and\n I returned to Earth, foot-loose and looking for trouble.\nI found it. With officer's training and the strength due to a home\n planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at\n all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who\n thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with\n the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible.\n The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside.\nThey'd let\nthis\nloose among the stars\n!\nAfter that I was one of the boys and Riley was my best friend. We went\n out together, wenching and drinking, raising hell in the cold dirty\n canyons of steel and stone which the natives called streets.\nValgolia,\n Valgolia, the clean bare windswept heights of your mountains, soughing\n trees and thunderous waters and Maara waiting for me to come home!\nRiley often proposed that we find an Eridanian and beat him to death,\n and I would agree, hiccupping, because I knew they didn't go alone\n into native quarters any more. I sat in the smoky reek of the bars,\n half deafened by the clatter and raucousness called music, trying not\n to think of a certain low-ceilinged, quiet tavern amid the gardens of\n Kalariho, and sobbed the bitterness of Conrad Haugen into my beer.\n\n\n \"Dirty redskins,\" I muttered. \"Dirty, stinking, bald-headed, sons of\n bitches. Them and their god-damn Empire. Why, y'know, if 't hadn' been\n f' their laws I'd be skipper o' my own ship now. I knew more'n that\n slob o' a captain. But he was born Eridanian—God, to get my hands on\n his throat!\"\n\n\n Riley nodded. Through the haze of smoke I saw that his eyes were\n narrowed. He wasn't drunk when he didn't want to be, and at times like\n this he was suddenly as sober as I was, and that in spite of not having\n a Valgolian liver.\n\n\n I bided my time, not too obviously anxious to contact the Legion. I\n just thought they were swell fellows, the only brave men left in the\n rotten, stinking Empire; I'd sure be on their side when the day came. I\n worked in the mill, and when out with the boys lamented the fact that\n we were really producing for the damned Eridanians, we couldn't even\n keep the products of our own sweat. I wasn't obtrusive about it, of\n course. Most of the time we were just boozing. But when the talk came\n to the Empire, I made it clear just where I stood.\nThe winter went. I continued the dreary round of days, wondering how\n long it would take, wondering how much time was left. If the Legion\n was at all interested, they would be checking my background right now.\n Let them. There wouldn't be much to check, but what there was had been\n carefully manufactured by the experts of the Intelligence Service.\n\n\n Riley came into my room one evening. His face was tight, and he plunged\n to business. \"Con, do you really mean all you've said about the Empire?\"\n\n\n \"Why, of course. I—\" I glanced out the window, as if expecting to\n see a spy. If there were any, I knew he would be native. The Empire\n just doesn't have enough men for a secret police, even if we wanted to\n indulge in that sort of historically ineffective control.\n\n\n \"You'd like to fight them? Like really to help the Legion of Freedom\n when they strike?\"\n\n\n \"You bet your obscenity life!\" I snarled. \"When they land on Earth,\n I'll get a gun somewhere and be right there in the middle of the battle\n with them!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Riley puffed a cigaret for a while. Then he said, \"Look, I\n can't tell you much. I'm taking a chance just telling you this. It\n could mean my life if you passed it on to the Eridanians.\"\n\n\n \"I won't.\"\n\n\n His eyes were bleak. \"You damn well better not. If you're caught at\n that—\"\n\n\n He drew a finger sharply across his throat.\n\n\n \"Quit talking like a B-class stereo,\" I bristled. \"If you've got\n something to tell me, let's have it. Otherwise get out.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, sure. We checked up on you, Con, and we think you're as good a\n prospect as we ever came across. If you want to fight the Eridanians\n now—\njoin the Legion\nnow—here's your chance.\"\n\n\n \"My God, you know I do! But who—\"\n\n\n \"I can't tell you a thing. But if you really want to join, memorize\n this.\" Riley gave me a small card on which was written a name and\n address. \"Destroy it, thoroughly. Then quit at the mill and drift to\n this other place, as if you'd gotten tired of your work and wanted to\n hit the road again. Take your time, don't make a beeline for it. When\n you do arrive, they'll take care of you.\"\n\n\n I nodded, grimly. \"I'll do it, Mike. And thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Just my job.\" He smiled, relaxing, and pulled a flask from his\n overcoat. \"Okay, Con, that's that. We'd better not go out to drink,\n after this, but nothing's to stop us from getting stinko here.\"\nIII\n\n\n Spring had come and almost gone when I wandered into the little Maine\n town which was my destination. It lay out of the way, with forested\n hills behind it and the sea at its foot. Most of the houses were old,\n solidly built, almost like parts of the land, and the inhabitants were\n slow-spoken, steady folk, fishermen and artisans and the like, settled\n here and at home with the darkling woods and the restless sea and the\n high windy sky. I walked down a narrow street with a cool salt breeze\n ruffling my hair and decided that I liked Portsboro. It reminded me of\n my own home, twenty light-years away on the wide beaches of Kealvigh.\n\n\n I made my way to Nat Hawkins' store and asked for work like any\n drifter. But when we were alone in the back room, I told him, \"I'm\n Conrad Haugen. Mike Riley said you'd be looking for me.\"\n\n\n He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"\n\n\n \"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,\" he\n smiled. \"There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.\n But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made\n them in the names of many people.\"\n\n\n \"But you—\"\n\n\n \"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.\"\n\n\n He could. He put me through the mill in the next few\n nights—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,\n psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He\n did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service\n had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very\n thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.\n\n\n In the end he said, still calmly, \"This is amazing. You have an\n IQ well over the borderline of genius, an astonishing variety of\n assorted knowledge about the Empire and about technical subjects, and\n an implacable hatred of Eridanian rule—based on personal pique and\n containing self-seeking elements, but no less firm for that. You're out\n for yourself, but you'll stand by your comrades and your cause. We'd\n never hoped for more recruits of your caliber.\"\n\n\n \"When do I start?\" I asked impatiently.\n\n\n \"Easy, easy,\" he smiled. \"There's time. We've waited fifty years; we\n can wait a while longer.\" He riffled through the dossier. \"Actually,\n the difficulty is where to assign you. A man who knows astrogation, the\n use of weapons and machines, and the Empire, who is physically strong\n as a bull, can lead men, and has a dozen other accomplishments, really\n seems wasted on any single job. I'm not sure, but I think you'll do\n best as a roving agent, operating between Main Base and the planets\n where we have cells, and helping with the work at the base when you're\n there.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What type of medical procedure does the narrator have in order to make his skin look more like the Earthlings?", "question_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS_1", "options": ["He is given an injection that basically injects him with a permanent dye to make his skin change color.", "He is given an injection that basically gives him a disease to make his skin change color.", "He is given an injection that basically gives him hormones that will make his skin change color.", "He is given an injection that basically gives him vitamins to make his skin change color."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the first clue the narrator gives that his planet runs on a much bigger scale than Earth? ", "question_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS_2", "options": ["There are 3 trillion people on his planet, and it has harnessed the technology to expand the planet's surface in order to accommodate them.", "There, one city will span over 1,000 miles and still be considered small.", "He speaks about the small hospital where he was a patient, and he comments that it only has about 80 stories.", "The inhabitants of this planet are two to three times larger than humans, so they would have to have things on a grander scale to support their size."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the narrator's purpose on Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS_3", "options": ["He is to go there and incite a war that will, no doubt end with his planet taking over Earth, and that is critical for the survival of his people.", "He is to go there and incite a war where the Earthlings destroy themselves.", "He is to go there in order to help get a particular candidate elected to office, and because he is \"in their pocket,\" they will be able to take over Earth. ", "He is to go there and incite a war that will, no doubt, end the disconnect between the people of Earth."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is so strange about the approach he is ordered to take in reference to Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS_4", "options": ["He is ordered to go to Earth and being to colonize after he marries their ", "He is ordered to murder the current president so that the politician his people are backing can take over.", "He is ordered to go to Earth as himself in hopes of being captured.  They believe that will be the only way to get intel from the Earthlings.", "He is ordered to get the people of Earth to come together by way of their hatred for his people, putting them in harm's way if the Earthlings decide to attract, but they are willing to sacrifice themself for the betterment of the universe."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The goal for infiltrating Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS_5", "options": ["They plan to stop Earthlings from feeling any one subset is superior to the other.", "They plan to take over and either kill or enslave all the Earthlings.", "They plan to teach the Earthlings how to properly cultivate their land for the betterment of the universe.", "They are fulfilling a prophecy that was set forth millennia ago."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When being briefed on his mission, what information does he receive that seems to surprise him the most?", "question_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS_6", "options": ["They expect him to live like a homeless person.", "The number of people who live on Earth.", "The amount of time he is to spend on Earth.", "The number of Earthlings they expect him to bring back on his return trip."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the narrator hope to achieve by sharing his backstory with the Earthlings he meets?", "question_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS_7", "options": ["He wants them to feel sorry for the life he has had to live.", "He wants to scare them.", "He is hoping to make them angry enough to act.", "He wants them to gain a true respect for the Empire."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the irony behind the bond the narrator and Riley develop?", "question_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS_8", "options": ["The narrator ends up beating Riley to the point where he blacks out, and then Riley found respect for the narrator.", "The narrator took a job promised to Riley, but that just made Riley want to become a better person.", "They are on total opposite sides of the fence when it comes to the fate of Earth.", "The narrator took Riley's girlfriend from him, but they just became closer through the experience."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is ironic about the psychologist's findings in regards to the tests he ran on the narrator.", "question_unique_id": "51184_C5ZCS1MS_9", "options": ["He tells the narrator that he knew what his true mission was all along, he just made him endure the test because he deserved the torture the tests cause.", "The psychologist isn't a psychologist at all.  He was sent by the Empire to ensure the narrator didn't talk about his mission.", "He decides that the narrator is fit for the exact same mission the Empire sent him on.", "He tells Riley that his time on Earth has contributed to the contraction of a rare disease, and though he saved others, he is going to die."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/8/51184//51184-h//51184-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51336", "set_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "What is POSAT?", "year": 1958, "author": "Smith, Phyllis Sterling", "topic": "Secret societies -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; PS", "article": "What is POSAT?\nBy PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOf course coming events cast their shadows\n\n before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\nThe following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several\n magazines:\nMASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\nWhat is the secret source of those profound\n\n principles that can solve the problems of life?\n\n Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\nDo not be a leaf in the wind! YOU\n\n can alter the course of your life!\nTap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\nThe Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\nPOSAT\nan ancient secret society\n\n\n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all,\n similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the\n name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the\n familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and\n mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip\n the attached coupon and send for the booklet—sometime—when a pen or\n pencil was nearer at hand.\n\n\n Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of\nYour\n Life and Psychology\nthat had been abandoned on his seat in the bus.\n He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n \"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly\n liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe\n it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he\n had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n\n\n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement\n was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine.\n The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always\n liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading\n would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what\n the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.\n\n\n It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.\n\n\n He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that\n some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his\n brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that\n couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n\n\n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his\n attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small\n black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr\n atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the\n printed matter that accompanied it.\n\n\n \"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter\n was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted\n it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted\n lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it.\n He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and\n promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was\n entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his\n other letters.\n\n\n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in\n response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information\n than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more\n volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the\n key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would\n merely fill out the enclosed form.\n\n\n Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.\n\n\n Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.\n\n\n \"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty,\n handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n\n\n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as\n she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's\n that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n\n\n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n\n\n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she\n suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our\n money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n\n\n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with\n correct answers!\"\n\n\n \"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.\n\n\n His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he\n had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap.\n When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a\n position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older\n industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place\n to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was\n hope for the future.\n\n\n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the\n other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind\n alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence\n in them.\n\n\n Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"\n\n\n She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by\n one. \"Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of\n some sort.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me,\" worried\n Don. \"Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered\n a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common\n household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a\n daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent\n exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use\n as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too\n dangerous to be passed on?'\"\n\n\n \"Could they be a spy ring?\" asked Betty. \"Subversive agents? Anxious to\n find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're\n so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?\"\n\n\n Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:\n\n\n We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to\n us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the\n requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After\n Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable\n secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal\n interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand\n Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this\n arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make\n another appointment for you.\n\n\n The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one\n for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the\n laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his\n research problems home with him and worried over them half the night,\n they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for\n pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was\n in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a\n whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n\n\n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be\n disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been\n sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her\n about it without telephoning.\nSince the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home!\nBut it was impossible!\n\n\n He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the\n envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him,\n unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number\n of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given\n them!\n\n\n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some\n perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the\n directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of\n the university. Or—or—\"\n\n\n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His\n laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble\n of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that\n particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own,\n POSAT had unearthed the information.\n\n\n His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.\n\n\n It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.\n\n\n She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step\n into the next room—\"\n\n\n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n\n\n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the\n shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and\n the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing.\n The rug—Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum.\n The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were\n surely old masters—of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he\n recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the\n artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian.\n Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities\n of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of\n Operational Circuit Analysis.\n\n\n The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with\n the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another\n door.\n\n\n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye\n level—that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend\n over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently\n there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those\n days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n\n\n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube\n held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his\n scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the\n light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a\n muffled thud.\nNow I've done it!\nthought Don with dismay. But at least the tube\n hadn't shattered.\n\n\n In fact—it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact,\n even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the\n brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support\n the tube.\n\n\n There were no wires!\n\n\n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between\n trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two\n or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it\n minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n\n\n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never\n seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held\n one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as\n experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the\n radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.\n\n\n Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still\n be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material\n and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient,\n self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this\n moment!\nBut this is impossible!\nhe thought.\nWe're the only company that's\n working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual\n production!\nAnd even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it\n have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society,\n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n\n\n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper\n and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have\n asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the\n F.B.I. Even now—\n\n\n With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and\n stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it\n impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His\n impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n\n\n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had\n entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light\n bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still\n as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer\n seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was\n distressingly ominous.\n\n\n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal\n expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage\n to find.\n\n\n She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.\n\n\n \"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There\n could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely\n through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n\n\n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had\n spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n\n\n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated\n wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense\n that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain\n semitransparent?\n\n\n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as\n the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't—couldn't—be allowed to\n leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place\n alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!\n\n\n \"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.\n\n\n Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.\n\n\n \"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n\n\n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n\n\n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part\n of his personal collection—which, incidentally, he bought from the\n artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for\n power here in the laboratory.\"\n\n\n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was\n hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian—\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I\n really don't know too much about them.\"\n\n\n \"But how could a man alive\ntoday\nbuy paintings from an artist of the\n Renaissance?\"\n\n\n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements\n claim—an\nancient\nsecret society. Our founder has been dead for over\n four centuries.\"\n\n\n \"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years,\n however.\"\n\n\n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's\n start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the\n classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the\n pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years\n ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a\n super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not\n in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of\n years.\n\n\n \"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was\n one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia,\n and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course\n of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand\n years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the\n civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.\n\n\n \"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was\n a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager\n heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling\n physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his\n principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the\n quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what\n we call Maxwell's equations—although, of course, he antedated Maxwell\n by centuries—developed the special and general theories of relativity,\n the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he\n mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding\n energy of nuclei—\"\n\n\n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It\n hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed\n cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet—there sat the\n reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction\n of Don's glance.\n\n\n \"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed\n his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw\n the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could\n not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his\n knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about\n him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states,\n intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his\n time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker\n with a lighted fuse.\n\n\n \"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He\n didn't think so. No one else in his age could have\nderived\nthe\n knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo.\n Michelangelo. There were men capable of\nlearning\nhis science, even as\n men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded\n this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries\n and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He\n urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them\n safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as\n possible.\"\n\n\n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that\n it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have\n walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four\n hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a\n little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"\n\n\n \"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n\n\n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men.\n So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had\n come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know\n that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based\n on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of\n simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only\n our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n\n\n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\nDon's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm\n of possibility.\n\n\n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread\n before him.\n\n\n \"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred\n years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have\n uncovered in that time!\"\n\n\n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n \"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've\n undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a\n fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are\n other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until\n you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n\n\n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as\n they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization\n so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n\n\n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his\n heart sank.\n\n\n \"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.\n\n\n \"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"\n\n\n Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that!\n But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is\n to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely\n disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this\n building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached\n the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if\n they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!\n\n\n \"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were\n invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we\n know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do\n yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be\n safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might\n be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though,\n at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we\n want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well,\n and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want,\n a powerful motivator.\"\n\n\n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of\n applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We\n enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in\n line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep,\n if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if\n they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we\n can act when the time finally comes.\n\n\n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last\n resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we\n put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate\n them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's\n good practice for us.\n\n\n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't\n answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n\n\n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him.\n He had one more question.\n\n\n \"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the\n stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n\n\n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n\n\n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why do people seem to not take note of the POSAT ads?", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_1", "options": ["They are so small and usually only found in the back of publications where no one reads, so no one really sees them.", "They have saturated the market with their ads, and they have been around for so long that no one pays attention to them anymore.", "You have to have special glasses to even see them, so they are not noticed.", "They are written so that only certain people can understand them, so no one pays attention to them."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Bill Evans REALLY looking for when he applied for POSAT?", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_2", "options": ["A job.  He knew with their connections, they could help him find work.", "He is looking for hope.  He is going through such a rough time, he feels they might give him something to hold on to.", "A wife.  He knew that being a member of POSAT would make him attractive to women.  It would give him social status.", "He wants the answers that they are promising."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Miss Elizabeth Arnable wants to join POSAT because", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_3", "options": ["Her father and sister are members, so she wants to become one in order to follow tradition.", "she wants to feel accepted by something...anything.", "They share the same beliefs she does: cats are deities.", "she wants to know the answers they promise."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Donald Alford fills out the POSAT form for what reason?", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_4", "options": ["He wants the answers they promise.", "His wife dared him to.", "His wife encouraged him to.", "He simply does it out of curiosity."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Out of the three applicants, which one was reluctant to fill out the next part of the application POSAT mails to them and why?", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_5", "options": ["Don Alford.  It is asking him questions he is really not comfortable answering.", "Miss Elizabeth Arnable.  She is afraid they will not find her interesting, and she really has nothing to add to the application.", "Donald Alford.  His wife convinced him that they want the national secrets he carries.", "Bill Evens.  He now has all the hope he needs with his new dream job.  He doesn't see a point."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Don so shocked to receive correspondence \n from POSAT at his office?", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_6", "options": ["They SHOULD NOT have any idea where works based on their correspondence.", "He is afraid his wife will think he is keeping secrets when she finds out they sent it to the office.  He asked them specifically NOT to send anything to his work.", "His boss does not like the employees to do any sort of personal business at work.", "He was embarrassed for the people at his job to know he had an interest in POSAT"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the deciding factor in Don's decision to keep his appointment with POSAT?", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_7", "options": ["He needed to give them a piece of his mind for sending that letter to his job after he had specifically asked them not to do that.", "They told him if he didn't then they would hurt his wife.", "His curiosity about them was even greater after they sent the letter to his job.  He had to find out what they were all about.", "His wife once again encourages him."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In the waiting room, Don finds something so unbelievable that he ", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_8", "options": ["picks up the thing that surprises him and tries to steal it, but he is stopped when he cannot get out of the door.", "tries to simply leave the building, but the doors are locked.", "faints.", "calls the authorities."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When he sees the atomic reactor, Don is not as shocked by its presence as he is", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_9", "options": ["to see how little coverage there is protecting the people from the radiation it produces.", "amazed by the fact that it fits inside the building.", "is shocked to see how many people are working on it.  It should only take one.", "the fact that they did this in secrecy when Don's company was the only one with the technology to build such a thing."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Don ultimately agree to become a member of POSAT?", "question_unique_id": "51336_5D1PFNN0_10", "options": ["He believes that smart men should rule the world.", "He knows that he can never leave the building unless he agrees to join them.", "His wife's influence.", "They proved they could do the things they claim by finding the right way to motivate him to join, just the way they do all the people they need to join them"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/3/51336//51336-h//51336-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51534", "set_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Self Portrait", "year": 1950, "author": "Wolfe, Bernard", "topic": "Princeton University -- Fiction; Diary fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Cybernetics -- Fiction; Science fiction; PS", "article": "Self Portrait\nBy BERNARD WOLFE\n\n\n Illustrated by MARTIN SCHNEIDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction November 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIn the credo of this inspiringly selfless\n \ncyberneticist, nothing was too good for his colleagues\n \nin science.\nMuch\ntoo good for them\n!\nOctober 5, 1959\nWell, here I am at Princeton. IFACS is quite a place,\nquite\na place,\n but the atmosphere's darned informal. My colleagues seem to be mostly\n youngish fellows dressed in sloppy dungarees, sweatshirts (the kind\n Einstein made so famous) and moccasins, and when they're not puttering\n in the labs they're likely to be lolling on the grass, lounging in\n front of the fire in commons, or slouching around in conference rooms\n chalking up equations on a blackboard. No way of telling, of course,\n but a lot of these collegiate-looking chaps must be in the MS end,\n whatever that is. You'd think fellows in something secret like that\n would dress and behave with a little more dignity.\n\n\n Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I\n was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it\n way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day\n I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the\n pre-faded kind.\nOctober 6, 1959\nMet the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut,\n wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd\n thought to change into my dungarees before the interview.\n\n\n \"Parks,\" he said, \"you can count yourself a very fortunate young man.\n You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the\n Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch\n in some of the background of the place.\"\n\n\n That would be most helpful, I said. I wondered, though, if he was as\n naive as he sounded. Did he think I'd been working in cybernetics labs\n for going on six years without hearing enough rumors about IFACS to\n make me dizzy? Especially about the MS end of IFACS?\n\n\n \"Maybe you know,\" he went on, \"that in the days of Oppenheimer and\n Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies.\n It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and\n physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets,\n egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows\n what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up\n around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency,\n so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon\n as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in\n our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced\nCybernetics\nStudies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now,\npret\n-ty keen.\"\n\n\n I said I'd bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into?\n\n\n \"Sure thing,\" he said. \"You're going to take charge of a very important\n lab. The Pro lab.\" I guess he saw my puzzled look. \"Pro—that's short\n for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal.\n With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs\n which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually\n we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy\n pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on\n you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge.\"\n\n\n I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to\n meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around\n cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the\n hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting\n that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into\nthat\nend of\n things.\n\n\n \"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" the boss insisted. \"You're first and foremost a talented\n neuro man, and that's exactly what we need in the Pro department.\n There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous\n mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and\n electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about MS,\n forget it fast—it's not a proper subject of conversation for you. The\n loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get\n into with loose talk. Remember that.\"\n\n\n I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice.\n\n\n Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.\n\n\n \"You can't get away from it,\" he said. \"E=MC\n 2\n is in a tree trunk\n as well as in a uranium atom or a solar system. When you're hacking\n away at a particular tree, though, you don't think much about such\n intangibles—like any good, untheoretical lumberjack, you're a lot\n more concerned with superficialities, such as which way the grain\n runs, how to avoid the knots, and so on. It's very restful. So long\n as a cyberneticist is sawing and chopping, he's not a sliver of\n uncontaminated cerebrum contemplating the eternal slippery verities of\n gravity and electromagnetism; he's just one more guy trying to slice\n up one more log. Makes him feel he belongs to the human race again.\n Einstein, you know, used to get the same results with a violin.\"\n\n\n Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.\n\n\n \"Bravo, Goldie,\" he said. \"Let us by all means pretend that we belong\n to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old\n saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!\"\n\n\n I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste\n and—as I might have guessed—it was Len Ellsom. He was just as\n surprised as I was.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"if it isn't Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in\n Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs.\"\n\n\n After M. I. T. I\nhad\nspent some time out in California doing\n neuro-cyber research, I explained—but what was\nhe\ndoing here? I'd\n lost track of him after he'd left Boston; the last I'd heard, he'd been\n working on the giant robot brain Remington-Rand was developing for the\n Air Force. I remembered seeing his picture in the paper two or three\n times while he was working on the brain.\n\n\n \"I was with Remington a couple of years,\" he told me. \"If I do say\n so myself, we built the Air Force a real humdinger of a brain—in\n addition to solving the most complex problems in ballistics, it could\n whistle\nDixie\nand, in moments of stress, produce a sound not unlike\n a Bronx cheer. Naturally, for my prowess in the electronic simulation\n of I.Q., I was tapped for the brain department of these hallowed\n precincts.\"\n\n\n \"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"\n\n\n He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty\n conscience. I'll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole\n episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed\n book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He's\n right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It's the\n usual Ellsom charm, I suppose.\n\n\n The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He's still\n trying to get my goat; he knows how much I've always hated to be called\n Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at\n Len's wisecracks.\nOctober 18, 1959\nThings are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here's how I get the picture.\n\n\n A year ago, the boss laid down a policy for the lab: begin with legs\n because, while the neuro-motor systems in legs and arms are a lot\n alike, those in legs are much simpler. If we build satisfactory legs,\n the boss figures, we can then tackle arms; the main difficulties will\n have been licked.\n\n\n Well, last summer, in line with this approach, the Army picked out\n a double amputee from the outpatient department of Walter Reed\n Hospital—fellow by the name of Kujack, who lost both his legs in a\n land mine explosion outside Pyongyang—and shipped him up here to be a\n subject in our experiments.\n\n\n When Kujack arrived, the neuro boys made a major decision. It didn't\n make sense, they agreed, to keep building experimental legs directly\n into the muscles and nerves of Kujack's stumps; the surgical procedure\n in these cine-plastic jobs is complicated as all getout, involves a\n lot of pain for the subject and, what's more to the point, means long\n delays each time while the tissues heal.\n\n\n Instead, they hit on the idea of integrating permanent metal and\n plastic sockets into the stumps, so constructed that each new\n experimental limb can be snapped into place whenever it's ready for a\n trial.\nBy the time I took over, two weeks ago, Goldweiser had the sockets\n worked out and fitted to Kujack's stumps, and the muscular and\n neural tissues had knitted satisfactorily. There was only one hitch:\n twenty-three limbs had been designed, and all twenty-three had been\n dismal flops. That's when the boss called me in.\n\n\n There's no mystery about the failures. Not to me, anyhow. Cybernetics\n is simply the science of building machines that will duplicate and\n improve on the organs and functions of the animal, based on what we\n know about the systems of communication and control in the animal. All\n right. But in any particular cybernetics project, everything depends\n on just how\nmany\nof the functions you want to duplicate, just how\nmuch\nof the total organ you want to replace.\n\n\n That's why the robot-brain boys can get such quick and spectacular\n results, have their pictures in the papers all the time, and become\n the real glamor boys of the profession. They're not asked to duplicate\n the human brain in its\nentirety\n—all they have to do is isolate and\n imitate one particular function of the brain, whether it's a simple\n operation in mathematics or a certain type of elementary logic.\n\n\n The robot brain called the Eniac, for example, is exactly what its\n name implies—an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, and\n it just has to be able to integrate and compute figures faster and\n more accurately than the human brain can. It doesn't have to have\n daydreams and nightmares, make wisecracks, suffer from anxiety, and\n all that. What's more, it doesn't even have to\nlook\nlike a brain or\n fit into the tiny space occupied by a real brain. It can be housed\n in a six-story building and look like an overgrown typewriter or an\n automobile dashboard or even a pogo stick. All it has to do is tell you\n that two times two equals four, and tell you fast.\n\n\n When you're told to build an artificial leg that'll take the place\n of a real one, the headaches begin. Your machine must not only\nlook\nlike its living model, it must\nalso\nbalance and support, walk, run,\n hop, skip, jump, etc., etc.\nAlso\n, it must fit into the same space.\nAlso\n, it must feel everything a real leg feels—touch, heat, cold,\n pain, moisture, kinesthetic sensations—\nas well as\nexecute all the\n brain-directed movements that a real leg can.\n\n\n So you're not duplicating this or that function; you're reconstructing\n the organ in its totality, or trying to. Your pro must have a full set\n of sensory-motor communication systems, plus machines to carry out\n orders, which is impossible enough to begin with.\n\n\n But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only\nequal\nthe\n real thing, it must be\nsuperior\n! That means creating a synthetic\n neuro-muscular system that actually\nimproves\non the nerves and\n muscles Nature created in the original!\n\n\n When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last\n week—it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot\n bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser\n said something that made an impression on me.\n\"They don't want much from us,\" he said sarcastically. \"They just want\n us to be God.\"\n\n\n I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.\n\n\n Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.\n\n\n \"As I see it,\" I said, \"there are two sides to the problem, the\n kinesthetic and the neural. We're making definite progress on the K\n side—I've worked out a new solenoid system, with some miniature motors\n tied in, and I think it'll give us a leg that\nmoves\ndamned well. I\n don't know about the N side, though. It's pretty tough figuring out\n how to hook the thing up electrically with the central nervous system\n so that the brain can control it. Some sort of compromise system of\n operation, along mechanical rather than neural lines, would be a lot\n simpler.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" the boss said with a smile, \"that it's stumping you.\"\n\n\n I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"\n\n\n \"Do you know him?\" the boss said. \"Good man. One of the best\n brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere.\"\n\n\n I explained that Len had gotten his degree at M.I.T. the year before I\n did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the\n Remington-Rand ballistics computer.\n\n\n \"He did indeed,\" the boss said, \"but that's not the half of it. After\n that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a\n matter of fact, that's why he's here.\"\n\n\n I said I hadn't heard about the chess player.\n\n\n \"As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington\n put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you\n won't hear any more about it from me.\"\n\n\n I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself.\n If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain\n capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to\n something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not\n having guessed it before.\n\n\n Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to\n happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess\n player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain\n that's useful in military strategy.\nThat's\nwhat Len Ellsom's in the\n middle of.\n\n\n \"Really brilliant mind,\" the boss said after we'd sawed for a while.\n \"Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't\n that your impression?\"\n\n\n \"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.\n\n\n \"If we're pals,\" he said, \"come on and have a beer with me.\"\n\n\n There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we\n drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as\n we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them\n in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong\n records.\n\n\n \"Sorry, kid,\" he said. \"I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but\n can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy\n ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on\n this side of the tracks.\" Len has always been very snobbish about my\n interest in folk music.\n\n\n I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.\n\n\n \"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.\n\n\n \"It is\nnot\nsomething personal,\" he said, mimicking me. \"Guess I can\n tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years\n because I've been scared for three years. Been scared for three years\n because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess.\"\n\n\n A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said.\n\n\n \"Didn't tell you the whole truth the other day,\" Len mumbled. \"I\ndid\nwork on the Remington-Rand computer, sure, but I didn't come to IFACS\n directly from that. In between I spent a couple years at the Bell\n Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon—or, rather, to begin with there was\n Norbert Wiener back at M.I.T.—it's complicated....\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" I said, \"are you sure you want to talk about it?\"\n\n\n \"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve,\" he said belligerently.\n \"Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at\n the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those\n two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for\n Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern,\n no, Von\nNeu\nmann and\nMor\nganstern. You remember, they did a\n mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker,\n tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their\n findings in a volume you certainly know,\nThe Theory of Games\n.\n\n\n \"Well, that got Wiener started. You may remember that when he founded\n the science of cybernetics, he announced that on the basis of the\n theory of games, it was feasible to design a robot computing machine\n that would play a better than average game of chess. Right after that,\n back in '49 or maybe it was '50, Claude Shannon of the Bell Labs said\n Wiener wasn't just talking, and to prove it he was going to\nbuild\nthe robot chess player. Which he proceeded withforth—forthwith—to\n do. Sometime in '53, I was taken off the Remington-Rand project and\n assigned to Bell to work with him.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to start back,\" I cut in. \"I've got a lot of work to\n do.\"\n\n\n \"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"\n\n\n What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt\n happy.\n\n\n \"Listen, Ollie,\" he said, \"for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy\n Scout for once in your life.\"\n\n\n If he was going to insult me—\n\n\n \"No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any\n five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied\n behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the\n champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given\n birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you\n find that terrifying?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all,\" I said. \"\nYou\nmade the machine, didn't you? Therefore,\n no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel\n proud to have devised a powerful new tool.\"\n\n\n \"Some tool,\" he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly\n understand what he was saying. \"The General Staff boys in Washington\n were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good\n reason—they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most\n complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form\n of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the\n globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets\n this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned\n involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble.\n\n\n \"In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind\n of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with\n everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up IFACS and handed us a\n top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player\n that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole\n campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war.\n\n\n \"We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports\n from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on\n the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic\n overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the\n units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty\n tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell\n you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago.\"\n\n\n So\nthat\nwas the secret of MS! The most extraordinary machine ever\n devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of\n excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider.\n\n\n \"Why all the jitters?\" I said. \"This could be the most wonderful tool\n ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether.\"\n\n\n Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space.\n Then he turned to me.\n\n\n \"Steve Lundy has a cute idea,\" he said. \"He was telling me about it\n this afternoon. He's a bum, you see, but he's got a damned good mind\n and he's done a lot of reading. Among other things, he's smart enough\n to see that once you've got your theory of games worked out, there's\n at least the logical possibility of converting your Eniac into what\n he calls a Strategy Integrator and Computer. And he's guessed, simply\n from the Pentagon's hush-hush policy about it, that that's what we're\n working on here at IFACS. So he holds forth on the subject of Emsiac,\n and I listen.\"\n\n\n \"What's his idea?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"He thinks Emsiac might eliminate war, too, but not in the way a\n Boy Scout might think. What he says is that all the industrialized\n nations must be working away like mad on Emsiac, just as they did on\n the atom bomb, so let's assume that before long all the big countries\n will have more or less equal MS machines. All right. A cold war gets\n under way between countries A and B, and pretty soon it reaches the\n showdown stage. Then both countries plug in their Emsiacs and let them\n calculate the date on which hostilities should begin. If the machines\n are equally efficient, they'll hit on the same date. If there's a\n slight discrepancy, the two countries can work out a compromise date by\n negotiation.\n\n\n \"The day arrives. A's Emsiac is set up in its capital, B's is set up\n in\nits\ncapital. In each capital the citizens gather around their\n strategy machine, the officials turn out in high hats and cut-aways,\n there are speeches, pageants, choral singing, mass dancing—the ritual\n can be worked out in advance. Then, at an agreed time, the crowds\n retreat to a safe distance and a committee of the top cyberneticists\n appears. They climb into planes, take off and—this is beautiful—drop\n all their atom bombs and H-bombs on the machines. It happens\n simultaneously in both countries, you see. That's the neat part of it.\n The occasion is called International Mushroom Day.\n\n\n \"Then the cyberneticists in both countries go back to their vacuum\n tubes to work on another Emsiac, and the nuclear physicists go back to\n their piles to build more atom bombs, and when they're ready they have\n another Mushroom Day. One Mushroom Day every few years, whenever the\n diplomatic-strategic situation calls for it, and nobody even fires a\n B-B gun. Scientific war. Isn't it wonderful?\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "How can the reader initially tell that the narrator feels a sort of discontent towards the others he works with? ", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_1", "options": ["He does not like the fact that they are only in the position they are in because their rich families paid their way in.", "He does not seem to approve of the way they dress or how they appear to be lazy.", "He doesn't appreciate the way that they speak to him?", "He speaks of their inferior intelligence."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does his boss feel that the narrator has come to work at what is probably the most important place on Earth?", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_2", "options": ["They are in charge of training the most important scientists in the world.", "They are doing groundbreaking work in many scientific areas.", "They are the last place where free thought is allowed in America.", "They are charged with developing a cure for a plague that has started to kill off the human race."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Both the narrator and his boss express displeasure when it comes to what sort of people?", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_3", "options": ["Religious people who rely on God rather than science.", "Athletic people who do not have to be able to think in order to achieve advancement, just rely on their athletic ability.", "Creatives like artists and actors.", "Freethinkers like poets."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is the narrator disappointed when he finds out what his work assignment is to be?", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_4", "options": ["He wanted to work alone, but he was assigned a crew to assist him.", "He wanted to work directly under his supervisor.", "He wanted to be in charge of the weapon-making program.", "He wanted to work on the mysterious MS project."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the narrator resent Len Ellsom?", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_5", "options": ["Len is rich, and he is not afraid to remind the narrator that he is poor.", "He doesn't.  They have been friends since college.", "Len took his place on the football team in college.", "Len took the narrator's girl, and now he has the job the narrator wanted."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "For the narrator's project, who is their test subject?", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_6", "options": ["A chimp named Ollie.", "A double amputee from the Army.", "An alien that they have captured and are holding to experiment on.", "Captives from the opposing side during the last great war."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the narrator feel people in his field of science should be the \"rock stars\" of the science world and receive all the recognition and praise that is heaped on to those in neurosciences?", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_7", "options": ["Neuroscientists have it easier because not that many people are in need of brain surgery as they do artificial limbs, making the narrator's field much more in demand.", "Honestly, he doesn't care.  He just doesn't like neuroscientists because Len works in that field, and he hates him.", "Neuroscientists are not as talented.", "Neuroscientists only have to worry about getting one component to work in order to be successful.  People in the narrator's field have to focus on multiple things, and if they all don't work in unison, then the project doesn't work.  That makes them twice as successful when it does."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The narrator compares people's expectations for him to", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_8", "options": ["slaves because they have to work for little money and no recognition.", "God because of what they expect them to be able to achieve.", "a bunch of losers who cannot get anything right.", "The neuroscientists who were able to get a robot to beat the world's chess champion."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Len credit for being the start of his drinking problem?", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_9", "options": ["Taking the narrator's girl.", "When he lost his parents.", "The day a robot he helped to create beat the world's chess champion.", "Knowing that the country was going to war again soon."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the narrator say Len should be proud?", "question_unique_id": "51534_60CCDSJD_10", "options": ["The success they had with the robot brain was a direct reflection of his own brain.", "He helped to contribute to creating a safer world.", "He got the girl of his dreams when he took the narrator's girlfriend.", "He has the job he always wanted."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/5/3/51534//51534-h//51534-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51075", "set_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "A Stone and a Spear", "year": 1954, "author": "Jones, Raymond F.", "topic": "PS; Scientists -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Weapons -- Fiction", "article": "A Stone and a Spear\nBY RAYMOND F. JONES\n\n\n Illustrated by JOHN BUNCH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction December 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGiven: The future is probabilities merging into one certainty.\n\n Proposition: Can the probabilities be made improbables\n\n so that the certainty becomes impossible?\nFrom Frederick to Baltimore, the rolling Maryland countryside lay under\n a fresh blanket of green. Wholly unaware of the summer glory, Dr.\n Curtis Johnson drove swiftly on the undulating highway, stirring clouds\n of dust and dried grasses.\n\n\n Beside him, his wife, Louise, held her blowing hair away from her face\n and laughed into the warm air. \"Dr. Dell isn't going to run away.\n Besides, you said we could call this a weekend vacation as well as a\n business trip.\"\n\n\n Curt glanced at the speedometer and eased the pressure on the pedal. He\n grinned. \"Wool-gathering again.\"\n\n\n \"What about?\"\n\n\n \"I was just wondering who said it first—one of the fellows at Detrick,\n or that lieutenant at Bikini, or—\"\n\n\n \"Said\nwhat\n? What are you talking about?\"\n\n\n \"That crack about the weapons after the next war. He—whoever it\n was—said there may be some doubt about what the weapons of the next\n war will be like, but there is absolutely no doubt about the weapons of\n World War IV. It will be fought with stones and spears. I guess any one\n of us could have said it.\"\n\n\n Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"\n\n\n \"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.\n\n\n \"Nobody claims to have figured him out. They laugh a little at him now.\n They eat his gifts willingly enough, but consider him slightly off his\n rocker. He still has all his biological talents, though. I've never\n seen or tasted vegetables like the ones he grows.\"\n\n\n \"And the brass at Detrick doesn't think he's gone soft in the head,\n either,\" she added much too innocently. \"So they ordered you to take\n advantage of his invitation and try to persuade him to come back.\"\n\n\n Curt turned his head so sharply that Louise laughed.\n\n\n \"No, I didn't read any secret, hush-hush papers,\" she said. \"But it's\n pretty obvious, isn't it, the way you rushed right over to General\n Hansen after you got the invitation?\"\n\n\n \"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.\n\n\n His sign was visible for a half mile:\nYOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT\n\n Eat the Best\n\n EAT DELL'S VEGETABLES\n\n\n \"Dr. Hamon Dell, world's foremost biochemist—and truck farmer,\" Curt\n muttered as he swung the car off the highway.\n\n\n Louise stepped out when the tires ceased crunching on the gravel lane.\n She scanned the fields and old woods beyond the ancient but preserved\n farmhouse. \"It's so unearthly.\"\n\n\n Curt followed. The song of birds, which had been so noticeable before,\n seemed strangely muted. The land itself was an alien, faintly greenish\n hue, a color repulsive to more than just the eyes.\n\n\n \"It must be something in this particular soil,\" said Curt, \"something\n that gives it that color and produces such wonderful crops. I'll have\n to remember to ask Dell about it.\"\n\n\n \"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"\n\n\n From somewhere behind the house came the sound of a truck engine. Curt\n took Louise's arm and led her around the trim, graveled path.\n\n\n The old farmhouse had been very carefully renovated. Everywhere was\n evidence of exquisite care, yet the cumulative atmosphere remained\n uninviting, almost oppressive. Curt told himself it was the utter\n silence, made even more tense by the lonely chugging of the engine in\n back, and the incredible harsh color of the soil beneath their feet.\nRounding the corner, they came in sight of a massive tank truck. From\n it a hose led to an underground storage tank and pulsed slowly under\n the force of the liquid gushing through it. No one was in sight.\n\n\n \"What could that be for?\" asked Louise.\n\n\n \"You've got me. Could be gasoline, but Dell hasn't any reason for\n storing that much here.\"\n\n\n They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended\n the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross\n section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported\n the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight\n distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a\n depth of an inch or more.\n\n\n \"They must haul liquid lead in that thing,\" said Curt.\n\n\n \"It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up.\" Louise glanced out\n over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust\n plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other\n vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between\n them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered\n the farm from the rear.\n\n\n A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from\n around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure.\n\n\n \"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that. It brings liquid fertilizer to pump into my irrigation\n water, that's all. No mystery. Let's go on to the house. After you're\n settled we can catch up on everything and I'll tell you about the\n things I'm doing here.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the man we saw?\" asked Curt. \"He looks as if his health is\n pretty precarious.\"\n\n\n \"That's Brown. He came with the place—farmed it for years for my uncle\n before I inherited it. He could grow a garden on a granite slab. In\n spite of appearances, he's well enough physically.\"\n\n\n \"How has your own health been? You have—changed—since you were at\n Detrick.\"\n\n\n Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"\n\n\n \"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dell, it's not as simple as that.\" Curt raised a hand and let it\n fall wearily. They had been over this so many times before. \"Weapon\n designers are no more responsible than any other agents of society.\n It's pure neurosis to absorb the whole guilt of wars yet unfought\n merely because you happened to have developed a potential weapon.\"\n\n\n Dell touched the massive dome of his skull. \"Here within this brain of\n mine has been conceived a thing which will probably destroy a billion\n human lives in the coming years. D. triconus toxin in a suitable\n aerosol requires only a countable number of molecules in the lungs of\n a man to kill him. My brain and mine alone is responsible for that\n vicious, murderous discovery.\"\n\n\n \"Egotism! Any scientist's work is built upon the pyramid of past\n knowledge.\"\n\"The weapon I have described exists. If I had not created it, it would\n not exist. It is as simple as that. No one shares my guilt and my\n responsibility. And what more do they want of me now? What greater\n dream of mass slaughter and destruction have they dreamed?\"\n\n\n \"They want you,\" said Curt quietly, \"because they believe we are not\n the only ones possessing the toxin. They need you to come back and help\n find the antitoxin for D. triconus.\"\n\n\n Dell shook his head. \"That's a blind hope. The action of D. triconus is\n like a match set to a powder train. The instant its molecules contact\n protoplasm, they start a chain reaction that rips apart the cell\n structure. It spreads like fire from one cell to the next, and nothing\n can stop it once it's started operating within a given organism.\"\n\n\n \"But doesn't this sense of guilt—unwarranted as it is—make you\nwant\nto find an antitoxin?\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I succeeded? I would have canceled the weapon of an enemy.\n The military would know he could nullify ours in time. Then they would\n command me to work out still another toxin. It's a vicious and insane\n circle, which must be broken somewhere. The purpose of the entire\n remainder of my life is to break it.\"\n\n\n \"When you are fighting for your life and the enemy already has his\n hands about your throat,\" Curt argued, \"you reach for the biggest rock\n you can get your hands on and beat his brains in. You don't try to\n persuade him that killing is unethical.\"\n\n\n For an instant it seemed to Curt that a flicker of humor touched the\n corners of Dell's mouth. Then the lines tightened down again.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"\n\n\n \"You might say that we would be in the rock business,\" replied Dell.\n \"Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about\n another's throat, but it\nshould\nbe. Those who want power and\n domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a\n long time since they had to.\n\"Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight\n their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains.\n We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was\n honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and\n because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world\n because science was a universal language.\n\n\n \"What a horrible joke that turned out to be! Today we are the terror of\n the world. The war-makers built us fine laboratories, shining palaces,\n and granted every whim—for a price. They took us up to the hills and\n showed us the whole world and we sold our souls for it.\n\n\n \"Look what happened after the last war. Invading armies carried off\n prize Nazi brains like so much loot, set the scientists up in big new\n laboratories, and these new mercenaries keep right on pouring out\n knowledge for other kings and emperors.\n\n\n \"Their loyalty is only to their science. But they can't experiment for\n knowledge any more, only weapons and counter-weapons. You'll say I'm\n anti-war, even, perhaps, anti-American or pro-Russian. I am not against\n just wars, but I am against unjust slaughter. And I love America too\n much to let her destroy herself along with the enemy.\"\n\n\n \"Then what are we to do?\" Curt demanded fiercely. \"What are we to do\n while enemy scientists prepare these same weapons to exterminate\nus\n?\n Sure, it's one hell of a mess. Science is already dead. The kind you\n talk about has been dead for twenty years. All our fine ideals are\n worthless until the politicians find a solution to their quarrels.\"\n\n\n \"Politicians? Since when did men of science have to wait upon\n politicians for solutions of human problems?\" Dell passed a hand over\n his brow, and suddenly his face contorted in pain.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Curt exclaimed, rising.\n\n\n \"Nothing—nothing, my boy. Some minor trouble I've had lately. It will\n pass in a moment.\"\n\n\n With effort, he went on. \"I wanted to say that already you have come\n to think of science being divided into armed camps by the artificial\n boundaries of the politicians. Has it been so long ago that it was\n not even in your lifetime, when scientists regarded themselves as one\n international brotherhood?\"\n\n\n \"I can't quarrel with your ideals,\" said Curt softly. \"But national\n boundary lines do, actually, divide the scientists of the world into\n armed camps.\"\n\"Your premises are still incorrect. They do not deliberately war on\n each other. It is only that they have blindly sold themselves as\n mercenaries. And they can be called upon to redeem themselves. They can\n break their unholy contracts.\"\n\n\n \"There would have to be simultaneous agreement among the scientists of\n all nations. And they are men, influenced by national ideals. They are\n not merely ivory-tower dabblers and searchers after truth.\"\n\n\n \"Do you remember me five years ago?\" Dell's face became more haggard,\n as if the memory shamed him. \"Do you remember when I told the atomic\n scientists to examine their guts instead of their consciences?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. You certainly\nhave\nchanged.\"\n\n\n \"And so can other men. There is a way. I need your help desperately,\n Curt—\"\n\n\n The face of the aging biochemist contorted again with unbearable pain.\n His forehead beaded with sweat as he clenched his skull between his\n vein-knotted hands.\n\n\n \"Dell! What is it?\"\n\n\n \"It will pass,\" Dr. Dell breathed through clenched teeth. \"I have some\n medicine—in my bedroom. I'm afraid I'll have to excuse myself tonight.\n There's so much more I have to say to you, but we'll continue our talk\n in the morning, Curt. I'm sorry—\"\n\n\n He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I hope it's not that!\"\nIt seemed to Curt that he had slept only minutes before he was roused\n by sounds in the night. He rolled over and switched on the light. His\n watch said two o'clock. Louise raised up in sharp alarm.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"I thought I heard something. There it is again!\"\n\n\n \"It sounds like someone in pain. It must be Dell!\"\n\n\n Curt leaped from the bed and wrestled into his bathrobe. As he hurried\n toward Dell's room, there was another deep groan that ended in a\n shuddering sob of unbearable agony.\n\n\n He burst into the scientist's room and switched on the light. Dell\n looked up, eyes glazed with pain.\n\n\n \"Dr. Dell!\"\n\n\n \"Curt—I thought I had time left, but this is as far as I can go—Just\n remember all I said tonight. Don't forget a word of it.\" He sat up\n rigidly, hardly breathing in the effort of control. \"The responsibility\n for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the doors of the\n scientist mercenaries. Don't allow it, Curt. Get them to abandon the\n laboratories of the warriors. Get them to reclaim their honor—\"\n\n\n He fell back upon the pillow, his face white with pain and shining with\n sweat. \"Brown—see Brown. He can tell you the—the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go for a doctor,\" said Curt. \"Who have you had? Louise will stay\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't bring a doctor. There's no escaping this. I've known it for\n months. Wait here with me, Curt. I'll be gone soon.\"\n\n\n Curt stared with pity at the great scientist whose mind had so\n disintegrated. \"You need a doctor. I'll call a hospital, Johns Hopkins,\n if you want.\"\n\n\n \"Wait, maybe you're right. I have no phone here. Get Dr. Wilson—the\n Judge Building, Towson—find his home address in a phone book.\"\n\n\n \"Fine. I'll only be a little while.\"\n\n\n He stepped to the door.\n\n\n \"Curt! Take the lane down to the new road—behind the farm. Quicker—it\n cuts off a mile or so—go down through the orchard—\"\n\n\n \"All right. Take it easy now. I'll be right back.\"\n\n\n Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.\n\n\n He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas\n station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned\n himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment he glimpsed a\n spark of light far ahead.\n\n\n Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at\n the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he\n got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But\n there should be a telephone, at least.\n\n\n He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within.\n\n\n The door swung wide.\n\n\n \"I wonder if I could use your—\" Curt began. He gasped. \"Brown! Dell's\n dying—we've got to get a doctor for him—\"\n\n\n As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"\n\n\n Curt moved slowly forward. Brown closed the door behind him and\n motioned toward a closed door at the other end of a short hall. They\n opened it and stepped into a dimly lighted room.\nCurt's eyes slowly adjusted and he saw what seemed to be a laboratory.\n It was so packed with equipment that there was scarcely room for the\n group of twelve or fifteen men jammed closely about some object with\n their backs to Curt and Brown.\nBrown shambled forward like an agitated skeleton, breaking the circle.\n Then Curt saw that the object of the men's attention was a large\n cathode ray screen occupied by a single green line. There was a pip on\n it rising sharply near one side of the two-foot tube. The pip moved\n almost imperceptibly toward a vertical red marker over the face of the\n screen. The men stared as if hypnotized by it.\nThe newcomers' arrival, however, disturbed their attention. One man\n turned with an irritable growl. \"Brown, for heaven's sake—\"\n\n\n He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught\n sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.\n\n\n \"Who is this? What's he doing here?\"\n\n\n The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp\n collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen\n calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.\n\n\n \"This is Curtis Johnson,\" said Brown. \"He got lost looking for a doctor\n for Dell.\"\n\n\n A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. \"Your coming\n is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about\n it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.\"\n\n\n The man indicated a chair.\n\n\n \"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—\n\n\n \"I'm not staying,\" Curt insisted. \"You can't prevent me from helping\n Dell without assuming responsibility for his death. I demand you let me\n call.\"\n\n\n \"You're not going to call,\" said Sark wearily. \"And we assumed\n responsibility for Dell's death long ago. Sit down!\"\n\n\n Slowly Curt sank down upon the chair beside the stranger. There was\n nothing else to do. He was powerless against Brown's gun. But he'd\n bring them to justice somehow, he swore.\n\n\n He didn't understand the meaning of the slowly moving pattern on the\n 'scope face, yet, as his eyes followed that pip, he sensed tension in\n the watching men that seemed sinister, almost murderous. How?\n\n\n What did the inexorably advancing pip signify?\nNo one spoke. The room was stifling hot and the breathing of the circle\n of men was a dull, rattling sound in Curt's ears.\n\n\n Quickly then, gathering sudden momentum, the pip accelerated. The\n circle of men grew taut.\n\n\n The pip crossed the red line—and vanished.\n\n\n Only the smooth green trace remained, motionless and without meaning.\n\n\n With hesitant shuffling of feet, the circle expanded. The men glanced\n uncertainly at one another.\n\n\n One said, \"Well, that's the end of Dell. We'll soon know now if we're\n on the right track, or if we've botched it. Carlson will call when he's\n computed it.\"\n\n\n \"The end of Dell?\" Curt repeated slowly, as if trying to convince\n himself of what he knew had happened. \"The pip on the screen—that\n showed his life leaving him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Sark. \"He knew he had to go. And there are perhaps hundreds\n more like him. But Dell couldn't have told you of that—\"\n\n\n \"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"\n\n\n \"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.\n\n\n \"An American city,\" said Sark, hurrying his words now. \"Any city. They\n are all alike. Ruin. Death. This one died thirty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Curt complained, bewildered. \"Thirty years—\"\n\n\n \"At another point in the Time Continuum,\" said Sark. \"The future. Your\n future, you understand. Or, rather,\nour\npresent, the one you created\n for us.\"\n\n\n Curt recoiled at the sudden venom in Sark's voice. \"The\nfuture\n?\" That\n was what they had in common with Dell—psychosis, systematic delusions.\n He had suspected danger before; now it was imminent and terrifying.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you are one of those who regard your accomplishments with\n pride,\" Sark went on savagely, ignoring or unaware of Curt's fear and\n horror. \"That the hydrogen bombs smashed the cities, and the aerosols\n destroyed the remnants of humanity seems insignificant to you beside\n the high technical achievement these things represent.\"\n\n\n Curt's throat was dry with panic. Irrelevantly, he recalled the\n pain-fired eyes of Dell and the dying scientist's words: \"The\n responsibility for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the\n doors of the scientist mercenaries—\"\n\n\n \"Some of us\ndid\nmanage to survive,\" said Sark, glaring at the scene\n of gaunt rubble. Curt could see the veins pounding beneath the thin\n flesh of his forehead. \"We lived for twenty years with the dream of\n rebuilding a world, the same dream that has followed all wars. But at\n last we knew that the dream was truly vain this time. We survivors\n lived in hermetically sealed caverns, trying to exist and recover our\n lost science and technology.\n\n\n \"We could not emerge into the Earth's atmosphere. Its pollution with\n virulent aerosols would persist for another hundred years. We could\n not bear a new race out of these famished and rickety bodies of ours.\n Unless Man was to vanish completely from the face of the Earth, we had\n only a single hope. That hope was to prevent the destruction from ever\n occurring!\"\n\n\n Sark's eyes were burning now. \"Do you understand what that means? We\n had to go\nback\n, not forward. We had to arm to fight a new war, a war\n to prevent the final war that destroyed Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"Back? How could you go back?\" Curt hesitated, grasping now the full\n insanity of the scene about him. \"How have you\ncome\nback?\" He waited\n tautly for the answer. It would be gibberish, of course, like all the\n mad conversation before it.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How do Curt and Louise differ in their opinions about the war?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_1", "options": ["Curt is anti-war.  Period.  Louise is a patriot and believes whatever the country as a whole believes. ", "Curt is a patriot and believes whatever the country as a whole believes.  Louise is anit-war.  Period.", "Curt believes that the war is relevant, and that is why he is so preoccupied with it.  Louise is put off by all of the talks about the war.  The way Curt carries on makes her feel hopeless.", "Curt believes that there is no point in the war, therefore, there is no point in discussing it.  Louise believes that it is the ONLY thing they should be concerned with."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Dell leave his position?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_2", "options": ["He was fired.", "He was ready to get away from the city and move to his uncle's farm to carry on the family tradition in agriculture.", "He wanted to wash his hands of everything he was involved in through work because too many lives had been lost due to his scientific breakthroughs.", "He retired, as his time had been served."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Curt the one sent to try to get Dell to return to work?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_3", "options": ["Dell knows that if Curt comes, Louise will come, too.  Dell is in love with Louise, and they are really hoping that she can get him to come back.", "Curt is the only person Dell has had contact with since his departure, so they feel that he is the only choice.", "They know that Curt and Dell are friends, and Curt is the only one who might hold enough influence over Dell to get him to agree to return.", "Curt is known for being able to persuade people one way or the other.  If they will not listen to reason, he carries a gun just in case."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What do Curt and Louise find to be very unusual about Dell's farmland?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_4", "options": ["It is a strange, unpleasant color.", "There is a huge expanse of land,  but much of it appears to be like a desert, which is not conducive for gardening or the area of the country they are in.", "It is the lushest patch of land they have ever seen.  It is obvious why his veggies are superior to any other.", "There doesn't appear to be enough land for Dell to be able to produce the number of veggies he grows and distributes."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Upon seeing Dell, what surprises Curt the most?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_5", "options": ["Dell looks sick.  Very sick.", "Dell has hired a person who is obviously some form of a disease carrier, and that man is involved in the production of food others consume.", "Dell looks so much more healthy and happy than Curt ever thought possible.  He is struggling with whether or not to try and pressure Dell to return.", "Dell had taken a wife and not told Curt about it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Dell not want to come back in order to finish the work that he began?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_6", "options": ["He is being held on his farm by a cult, and if he leaves, they will not only kill Dell, they will also kill his friends.", "He doesn't have a real reason.  He is just \"over it.\"", "He knows that once he gives them what they want, they will add on to it and want even more.  Leading to mass destruction eventually.", "He has dementia, and he knows he will be unable to perform his duties."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How do Dell's and Curt's views differ in relation to the work that they do?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_7", "options": ["Curt believes that there has never been any real importance in their work.  Dell sees all of the relevancy in it, and he is proud to be part of it.", "Dell believes that there has never been any real importance in their work.  Curt sees all of the relevancy in it, and he is proud to be part of it.", "Dell is of the mindset that you cannot hold the people who create the technology used to kill people during wartime.  They did not make the call to use it, so they cannot be responsible.  Curt believes just the opposite. He believes that they are ultimately more responsible than anyone.", "Curt is of the mindset that you cannot hold the people who create the technology used to kill people during wartime.  They did not make the call to use it, so they cannot be responsible.  Dell believes just the opposite. He believes that they are ultimately more responsible than anyone."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Curt tell Dell he is full of himself?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_8", "options": ["Dell feels that he is the best farmer in the region, and he does not know why he has waited so long to do this work.", "Dell knows he was the best scientist in the country.  He is not surprised that they want him to come back.  He knows they cannot function without him, and he is proud of that.", "Dell believes that he was smarter than anyone involved in his project, and he left because someone was trying to challenge his intelligence.  He refused to stand for it, so he left knowing that they would beg him to return.", "Dell feels he is solely responsible for the mass destruction caused by the war.  Curt tells him that he didn't do it alone.  There was a team of scientists working on the project."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Dell invite Curt to come to his farm?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_9", "options": ["He needs to like Curt know that upon his death, Curt will inherit the farm.", "He knows his time is limited, and he wants Curt to take over the work he was currently involved in.", "He knows that Curt will bring Lousie, and he is in love with her.", "He is isolated on the farm, and he just wanted to visit with his old friend."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Dell finally agree to allow Curt to go get a doctor for him?", "question_unique_id": "51075_L5KED60I_10", "options": ["He is very sick, and he knows that seeking medical attention is his only hope.", "Dell sees it as the opportunity to send Curt to the people he will be working with after Dell dies, so he gives Curt the directions to their location and tells him that is how to get to the doctor.", "Dell is afraid that he will not be able to pay the doctor for his services, and he is embarrased.", "Dell does not want Curt and Lousie to see him in such a state, so it will get them out of the house so he can die alone."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/0/7/51075//51075-h//51075-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50571", "set_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Green Odyssey", "year": 1964, "author": "Farmer, Philip José", "topic": "Adventure stories; PS; Science fiction", "article": "THE GREEN ODYSSEY\nby Philip José Farmer\n\n\n Make friends fast.\n\n —\nHandbook For The Shipwrecked\nBallantine Books\n\n New York\n\n\n Copyright 1957, by\n\n Philip José Farmer\n\n\n Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 57-10603\n\n Printed in the United States of America\n\n\n Ballantine Books, Inc.\n\n 101 Fifth Avenue,\n\n New York 3, N. Y.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any\n\n evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\n\n This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.\n\n\n So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with\n a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to\n the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But\n he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the\n \"traveling islands,\" the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna\n peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan\n with unnerving malevolence.\n\n\n And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.\n\n\n Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.\n\n\n That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.\n\n\n The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.\n\n\n Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.\n\n\n Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.\n\n\n \"Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air?\n These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that\n means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy:\nA demon will come, claiming\n to be an angel\n. No doubt about these two! Just to show you their\n subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now,\n there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most\n clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in.\"\n\n\n Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her\n red-painted mouth open and wet. \"Oh, has he burned them already? What a\n shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while.\"\n\n\n Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.\n\n\n Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.\n\n\n Miran cleared his throat, adjusted his violet turban and yellow robes,\n pulled gently at the large gold ring that hung from his nose and said,\n \"It took me a month to get back from Estorya, and that is very good\n time indeed, but then I am noted for my good luck, though I prefer to\n call it skill plus the favor given by the gods to the truly devout.\n I do not boast, O gods, but merely give you tribute because you have\n smiled upon my ventures and have found pleasing the scent of my many\n sacrifices in your nostrils!\"\n\n\n Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he\n felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe\n tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would\n divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her\n clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would\n be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that\n the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast.\n If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically\n have had uncontested control.\n\n\n \"These two demons were very tall, like your slave Green, here,\" said\n Miran, \"and they could not speak a word of Estoryan. Or at least they\n claimed they couldn't. When King Raussmig's soldiers tried to capture\n them they brought from the folds of their strange clothes two pistols\n that only had to be pointed to send silent and awesome and sure death.\n Everywhere men dropped dead. Panic overtook many, but there were brave\n soldiers who kept on charging, and eventually the magical instruments\n became exhausted. The demons were overpowered and put into the Tower\n of Grass Cats from which no man or demon has yet escaped. And there\n they will be until the Festival of the Sun's Eye. Then they will be\n burnt....\"\n\n\n From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.\n\n\n There was a big difference between reading about such people and\n actually living among them. A history or a romantic novel could\n describe how unwashed and diseased and formula-bound primitives were,\n but only the too-too substantial stench and filth could make your gorge\n rise.\n\n\n Even as he stood there Zuni's powerful perfume rose and clung in heavy\n festoons about him and slithered down his nostrils. It was a rare and\n expensive perfume, brought back by Miran from his voyages and given to\n her as a token of the merchant's esteem. Used in small quantities it\n would have been quite effective to express feminine daintiness and to\n hint at delicate passion. But no, Zuni poured it like water over her,\n hoping to cover up the stale odor left by\nnot\ntaking a bath more than\n once a month.\n\n\n She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"\n\n\n \"Diamonds, emeralds, rubies!\" cried Miran, kissing his hand and rolling\n his eye ecstatically. \"I tell you, the Estoryans are rich beyond our\n dreams! Jewels flow in their marketplaces like drops of water in a\n cataract! Ah, if only the Emperor could be induced to organize a great\n raiding fleet and storm its walls!\"\n\n\n \"He remembers too well what happened to his father's fleet when he\n tried it,\" growled the Duke. \"The storm that destroyed his thirty ships\n was undoubtedly raised by the priests of the Goddess Hooda. I still\n think that the expedition would have succeeded, however, if the late\n Emperor had not ignored the vision that came to him the night before\n they set sail. It was the great god Axoputqui, and he said....\"\n\n\n There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.\n\n\n But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2\nThe Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many\n times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet\n via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when\n escape was so near!\n\n\n So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.\n\n\n How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.\n\n\n Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"\n\n\n Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"\n\n\n Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.\n\n\n The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya\n were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea\n of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a\n freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to\n leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency\n shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and\n was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After\n wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up\n by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby\n garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect\n a reward. Taken to the capital city of Quotz, Green had almost been\n freed because there was no record of his being anybody's property. But\n his tallness, blondness and inability to speak the local language had\n convinced his captors that he must have wandered down from some far\n northern country. Therefore if he wasn't a slave he should be.\n\n\n Presto, changeo! He was. And he'd put in six months in a quarry and a\n year as a dock worker. Then the Duchess had chanced to see him on the\n streets as she rode by, and he'd been transferred to the castle.\n\n\n The streets were alive with the short, dark, stocky natives and the\n taller, lighter-complexioned slaves. The former wore their turbans of\n various colors, indicating their status and trade. The latter wore\n their three-cornered hats. Occasionally a priest in his high conical\n hat, hexagonal spectacles and goatee rode by. Wagons and rickshaws\n drawn by men or by big, powerful dogs went by. Merchants stood at the\n fronts of their shops and hawked their wares in loud voices. They sold\n cloth, grixtr nut, parchment, knives, swords, helmets, drugs, books—on\n magic, on religion, on travel—spices, perfumes, ink, rugs, highly\n sugared drinks, wine, beer, tonic, paintings, everything that went to\n make up their civilization. Butchers stood before open shops where\n dressed fowl, deer and dogs hung. Dealers in birds pointed out the\n virtues of their many-colored and multi-songed pets.\n\n\n For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.\n\n\n Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.\n\n\n He averted his eyes from the Pens and looked at the other side of\n the street, where the walls of the great warehouses towered. Workmen\n swarmed around them, and cranes, operated by gangs pushing wheels like\n a ship's capstan, raised or lowered big bundles. Here, he thought, was\n a business opportunity for him.\n\n\n Introduce the steam engine. It'd be the greatest thing that ever hit\n this planet. Wood-burning automobiles could replace the rickshaws.\n Cranes could be run by donkey-engines. The ships themselves could have\n their wheels powered by steam. Or perhaps, he thought, rails could be\n laid across the Xurdimur, and locomotives would make the ships obsolete.\n\n\n No, that wouldn't work. Iron rails cost too much. And the savages that\n roved over the grassy plains would tear them up and forge weapons from\n them.\n\n\n Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.\n\n\n \"ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,\n a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.\n\n\n The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.\n\n\n The captain of a ship had purchased her, but here again the law came\n to her rescue. He could not take her out of the country, and she again\n refused to leave. By now she had purchased several businesses—slaves\n were allowed to hold property and even have slaves of their own—and\n she knew that her two boys by the Duke would be valuable later on, when\n they'd go to live with him.\n\n\n The temple sculptor had used her as his model for his great marble\n statue of the goddess of Fertility. Well he might, for she was a\n magnificent creature, a tall woman with long, richly auburn hair, a\n flawless skin, large russet brown eyes, a mouth as red and ripe as a\n plum, breasts with which neither child nor lover could find fault, a\n waist amazingly slender considering the rest of her curved body and her\n fruitfulness. Her long legs would have looked good on an Earthwoman and\n were even more outstanding among a population of club-ankled females.\n\n\n There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.\n\n\n He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.\n\n\n Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you\n know he's an affectionate boy and worships you, and it's absurd to\n say that in your country grown men don't kiss boys that old. You're\n not in your country—what a strange, frigid, loveless race must live\n there—and even if you were you might overlook their customs to show\n some tenderness to the boy. Come on back to our house and I'll bring up\n some of that wonderful Chalousma wine that came in the other day out of\n the cellar——\"\n\n\n \"What was a ship doing in your cellar?\" he said, and he whooped with\n laughter. \"By all the gods, Amra, I know it's been two days since I've\n seen you, but don't try to crowd forty-eight hours' conversation into\n ten minutes, especially your kind of conversation. And quit scolding me\n in front of the children. You know it's bad for them. They might pick\n up your attitude of contempt for the head of the house.\"\n\n\n \"I? Contempt? Why, I worship the ground you walk on! I tell them\n continually what a fine man you are, though it's rather hard to\n convince them when you do show up and they see the truth. Still....\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "How does Alen end up as the head servant to the Duke and Duchess?", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_1", "options": ["He inherited the job when his father died. It is a position passed on through the generations.", "His wife spends too much money, so he had to get a better job in order to be able to support her spending habits in addition to her multiple children by different men.", "The Dutches is attracted to him, and basically wants to use him as her \"pleasure servant.\"", "He applied and was most qualified for the job."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Almost as soon as Alan arrives on the planet, in the area, what happens to him that \"adds insult to injury.\"", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_2", "options": ["He makes enemies with the Dutchess's dog, thus making his life more difficult.", "He is forced into slavery.", "He plans his escape.", "He meets and marries his wife."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Alen end up on that planet?", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_3", "options": ["He went to visit and never felt the need to return to Earth.", "He is sent as a spy from Earth.", "He was sent to fulfill an arrangement between his family and his wife's family.", "He crash-landed."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What hope did Alen luck on to as the story opens?", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_4", "options": ["He lucked on to find out about the downed spaceship, now he has hope he can once again return home.", "He lucked on to some free time to spend with his wife, and his wife is his only hope for happiness.", "He lucked onto not being bitten by the dog because the dog bites him regularly, and he started to that day, as well, but was stopped.", "He lucked on to his position with the Duke and Duchess, and that gave him hope for a secure future."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why are the people on this planet so afraid of the two \"visitors?\"", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_5", "options": ["They are simply afraid of the unknown surrounding the visitors.", "They are not afraid of them at all.  In fact, they are excited that they are there because they believe they will fulfill the prophecy.  ", "They are afraid they carry disease.", "They are afraid of an ancient prophecy that says someone will claim to be there for one reason, and then destroy them."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How do the people on this planet determine if someone is a demon?", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_6", "options": ["They hold them for two years, and if they don't change into demon form in that time, then they are not demons.", "They torture them until the demon shows itself.", "They keep them under distant surveillance to see if they reveal themselves in private.", "They put them through a battery of psychological exams, and those exams will identify whether or not they are demons."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happens to Alen if the Dutchess decides that she doesn't want him around anymore?", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_7", "options": ["He will be put back into the slave pool.", "He will be put to death under the guise that he was trying to have an affair with the Dutchess.", "He will lose his job, and he will become homeless.", "His wife and family will pay the price by losing their lives."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Alen afraid for the Dutchess to speak during breakfast as the men are discussing the \"visitors?\"", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_8", "options": ["He is afraid she will change the subject, and on Wednesdays, the woman gets to chose the topic.", "He is afraid she will change the subject, and at breakfast, the woman gets to chose the topic.", "He is afraid that she is going to disclose that he is plan to escape, as he confided in her the previous night.", "He is afraid that she is going to reveal their affair."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Alan hate the perfume that the Dutchess wears?", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_9", "options": ["She wears too much of it, and it mixes with her body odor.", "She only wears it when she wants to have sex with him, so he associates it with how bad he feels when he is forced to cheat on his wife.", "It reminds him of his wife.", "His mother wore the same scent."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Out of all of his wife's children, how many of them are Alen's?", "question_unique_id": "50571_1XKO4A2N_10", "options": ["0", "3", "2", "1"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/5/7/50571//50571-h//50571-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50774", "set_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Contagion", "year": 1965, "author": "MacLean, Katherine", "topic": "Science fiction; PS; Diseases -- Fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction", "article": "CONTAGION\nBy KATHERINE MacLEAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMinos was such a lovely planet. Not a\n\n thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food,\n\n perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\nIt was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The\n forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a\n wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf\n shadows.\n\n\n The hunt party of the\nExplorer\nfiled along the narrow trail, guns\n ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries\n of strange birds.\n\n\n A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.\n\n\n \"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.\n\n\n But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.\n\n\n This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.\n\n\n Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to\n Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n\n\n \"English?\" gasped June.\n\n\n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to\n you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass\n twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\nJune looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the\n tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles\n of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already\n settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not\n on the map.\"\n\n\n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We\n have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"\n\n\n Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name\n is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and\n George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n\n\n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n \"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos\n before.\"\n\n\n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June\n could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded\n steel.\n\n\n \"What—what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.\n\n\n He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.\n\n\n June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"\n\n\n Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.\n\n\n \"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two\n years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead\n families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all\n related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way\n people can look.\"\nPlague.\n\"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n\n\n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting\n sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to\n do about it.\"\n\n\n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for\n some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.\n\n\n Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"\n\n\n Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.\n\n\n \"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.\n\n\n \"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.\n\n\n \"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.\n\n\n Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.\n\n\n \"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.\n\n\n In the\nExplorer\n, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers,\n was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes\n so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused\n chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing\n could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to\n the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n\n\n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had\n been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human\n treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and\n interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding\n against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.\n\n\n Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.\n\n\n All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of\n allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\nJune stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped\n off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a\n wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n\n\n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n\n\n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he\n asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally\n get something to eat?\"\n\n\n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully,\n using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n\n\n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled\n chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go\n jump in the lake?\"\n\n\n \"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.\n\n\n \"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.\n\n\n \"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a\n fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half\n of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces,\n the sound of unfamiliar voices.\nThey climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich\n subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria\n was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship\n had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had\n the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound\n absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each\n table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n\n\n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June\n could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of\n conversation.\n\n\n \"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in.\n He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n\n\n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three\n heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in\n the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose\n tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four\n different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n\n\n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a\n table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are\n saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages,\n for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n\n\n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the\n shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"\n\n\n Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.\n\n\n There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.\n\n\n June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"\n\n\n Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n \"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n\n\n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You\n hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of\n those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n\"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n\n\n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different\n amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the\n carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until\n you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then\n you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"\n\n\n Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.\n\n\n \"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—\"\nShe listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the\n explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to\n Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and\n hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells\n have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence,\n hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n\n\n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes.\n He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand\n generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien\n indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the\n cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n\n\n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution\n in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where\n they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he\n had taken them from.\"\n\n\n \"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"\n\n\n The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the\n hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle\n with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before\n returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on\n the hour or run the risk of disease.\nReno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a\n mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their\n mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\"\n They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over\n to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.\n\n\n Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.\n\n\n \"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all.\n Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia.\n Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some\n temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n\n\n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her\n field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with\n laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall,\n then abruptly lightened.\n\n\n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous\n Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man.\n It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon\n and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous\n vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero\n out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.\n\n\n She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join\n them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual\n lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n\n\n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they\n passed he lightly touched her arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile,\n and knew that he had heard.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the first clue the author gives the reader that the characters are probably in a hostile environment?", "question_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP_1", "options": ["As the story opens, the narrator speaks about the characters' craft being shot down.", "As the story opens, the narrator speaks about an animal that has been stalking the characters.", "As the story opens, the first thing the narrator talks about is the plague.", "As the story opens, the first thing the narrator tells us about the characters is that they have their guns out and ready, just in case."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why can the people on the spacecraft not go outside?", "question_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP_2", "options": ["The planet's inhabitants are hostile.", "They are not sure if the environment is safe, as they are escaping a plague that spans the universe.", "They are prisoners, and they are not allowed off of the ship.", "There are too many wild animals who are waiting to rip them apart."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the first thing that the ship's crew finds shocking about Patrick?", "question_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP_3", "options": ["He speaks the same language they do.", "He is the ruler of this planet, and he came to find them himself,", "He has twisted, human-like features, but he is clearly not human.", "He is a doctor, too."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What shocks Patrick about the ship's crew?", "question_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP_4", "options": ["They appear to be human", "They all have such different facial features. ", "They are all doctors, too.", "They all speak the same language that he does."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to Patrick, why do the people on this planet look the way they do?", "question_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP_5", "options": ["They have a shallow gene pool", "Radiation.", "They are a product of gene mutation.", "They had to mate with the original inhabitants on the island."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Patrick have to go through a battery of tests as soon as he enters the ship?", "question_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP_6", "options": ["They have to make sure that he does not have a disposition to murder  people", "They want to make sure he is intelligent enough to be able to interact with their people.", "They want to make sure that he is actually who he says he is, and he was sent to meet them for legitimate reasons.", "They have to make sure that he is not carrying the plague."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is surprising about the way June reacts to Pat?", "question_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP_7", "options": ["She is obviously attracted to him, though she is in a committed relationship with someone else.", "She is afraid of him because the people of his planet are known for their inhumanity towards strangers.", "She does not trust him at all.", "She wants to stay on the planet with him because they need a doctor."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happens to the hampsters?", "question_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP_8", "options": ["They all die", "They all become pregnant.", "Most of them die.", "Nothing.  They all show that Patrick does not carry the plague."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Pat reveal about the food that he consumed on the ship?", "question_unique_id": "50774_PBM8Q8TP_9", "options": ["He will be unable to digest it.", "It was the only \"human food\" he'd ever consumed.", "He poisoned it.", "He thought it was the best thing he'd ever had the pleasure of tasting."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/7/7/50774//50774-h//50774-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50566", "set_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Falcons of Narabedla", "year": 1964, "author": "Bradley, Marion Zimmer", "topic": "Science fiction; PS", "article": "Somewhere on the Time Ellipse Mike Kenscott became Adric;\n\n and the only way to return to his own identity was to find\n\n the Keep of the Dreamer, and loose the terrible\nFALCONS of NARABEDLA\nBy Marion Zimmer Bradley\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds\n\n May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nContents\nCHAPTER ONE\n\n Voltage—from Nowhere!\nSomewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream.\n\n\n I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. \"There's your\n eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday.\" I started to reel\n in my line, knowing what my brother's next move would be. \"Get the\n camera, and we'll try for a picture.\"\n\n\n We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird\n of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy\n was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest,\n his eyes glued in the image-finder. \"Golly—\" he whispered, almost\n prayerfully, \"six foot wing spread—maybe more—\"\n\n\n The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to\n leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The\n eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the\n cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its\n beak—\n\n\n A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"\n\n\n I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"\n\n\n I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.\n\n\n I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I\n started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.\n\n\n \"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"\n\n\n \"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"\n\n\n Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.\n\n\n It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.\n\n\n It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas.\n\n\n I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it\n too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time\n we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his\n log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.\n\n\n \"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the\n vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—\" his jaw\n grew stubborn, \"the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to\n have something for the record.\"\n\n\n I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated\n me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division\n and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up\n those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook\n while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they\n could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of\n that.\n\n\n The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.\n\n\n I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions\n together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"\n\n\n \"Try another station;\" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the\n buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel\n light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. \"And\n reception was perfect at noon,\" I told him, \"You were listening to the\n news.\" I took my hand away again. \"I don't want to blow the thing up.\"\n\n\n Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light\n glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the\n room ... \"now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth\n or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...\" the noise of mixed\n applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering\n through the rooms of the cabin.\n\n\n \"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!\"\n\n\n My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.\n\n\n The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"\n\n\n Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.\n\n\n I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.\n\n\n \"Rhys!\nRhys!\nThat is the man!\"\nCHAPTER TWO\n\n Rainbow City\n\"\nYou are mad\n,\" said the man with the tired voice.\n\n\n I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a huge abyss of caverned\n space; chasmed, immense, limitless. Vaguely, through a sleeping\n distance, I heard two voices. This one was old and very tired.\n\n\n \"You are mad. They will know. Narayan will know.\"\n\n\n \"Narayan is a fool,\" said the second voice.\n\n\n \"Narayan is the Dreamer,\" the tired voice said. \"He is the Dreamer, and\n where the Dreamer walks he will know. But have it your way. I am very\n old and it does not matter. I give you this power, freely—to spare\n you. But Gamine—\"\n\n\n \"Gamine—\" the second voice stopped. After a long time, \"You are old,\n and a fool, Rhys,\" it said. \"What is Gamine to me?\"\n\n\n Bodiless, blind, I drifted and swayed and swung in the sound of the\n voices. The humming, like a million high-tension wires, sang around\n me and I felt myself cradled in the pull of a great magnet that\n held me suspended surely on nothingness and drew me down into the\n field of some force beneath. Far below me the voices faded. I swung\n free—fell—plunged downward in sickening motion, head over heels, into\n the abyss....\n\n\n My feet struck hard flooring. I wrenched back to consciousness with a\n jolt. Winds blew coldly in my face; the cabin walls had been flung back\n to the high-lying stars. I was standing at a barred window at the very\n pinnacle of a tall tower, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched\n flickeringly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face, a\n lean tired old face beneath a peaked hood, in the moment before my\n knees gave way and I fell, striking my head against the bars of the\n window.\n\n\n I was lying on a narrow, high bed in a room filled with doors and bars.\n I could see the edge of a carved mirror set in a frame, and the top\n of a chest of some kind. On a bench at the edge of my field of vision\n there were two figures sitting. One was the old grey man, hunched\n wearily beneath his robe, wearing robes like a Tibetan Lama's, somber\n black, and a peaked hood of grey. The other was a slimmer younger\n figure, swathed in silken silvery veiling, with a thin opacity where\n the face should have been, and a sort of opalescent shine of flesh\n through the silvery-sapphire silks. The figure was that of a boy or a\n slim immature girl; it sat erect, motionless, and for a long time I\n studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it\n rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft\n sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to\n the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The\n blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby's drinking-cup, at me. I took\n it in my hand hesitated—\n\n\n \"Neither drug nor poison,\" said the blue-robe mockingly, and the voice\n was as noncommittal as the veiled body; a sexless voice, soft alto, a\n woman's or a boy's. \"Drink and be glad it is none of Karamy's brewing.\"\n\n\n I tasted the liquid in the mug; it had an indeterminate greenish look\n and a faint pungent taste I could not identify, although it reminded me\n variously of anise and garlic. It seemed to remove the last traces of\n shock. I handed the cup back empty and looked sharply at the old man in\n the Lama costume.\n\n\n \"You're—Rhys?\" I said. \"Where in hell have I gotten to?\" At least,\n that's what I meant to say. Imagine my surprise when I found myself\n asking—in a language I'd never heard, but understood perfectly—\"To\n which of the domains of Zandru have I been consigned now?\" At the same\n moment I became conscious of what I was wearing. It seemed to be an\n old-fashioned nightshirt, chopped off at the loins, deep crimson in\n color. \"Red flannels yet!\" I thought with a gulp of dismay. I checked\n my impulse to get out of bed. Who could act sane in a red nightshirt?\n\n\n \"You might have the decency to explain where I am,\" I said. \"If you\n know.\"\n\n\n The tiredness seemed part of Rhys voice. \"Adric,\" he said wearily. \"Try\n to remember.\" He shrugged his lean shoulders. \"You are in your own\n Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.\" His voice\n sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite\n of the weird surroundings, the phrase \"under restraint\" had struck\n home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.\n\n\n The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic\n voice. \"While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be\n explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use\n to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at\n home, in Narabedla.\"\n\n\n I shook my head. Nightshirt or no nightshirt, I'd face this on my feet.\n I walked to Rhys; put my clenched hands on his shoulders. \"Explain\n this! Who am I supposed to be? You called me Adric. I'm no more Adric\n than you are!\"\n\n\n \"Adric, you are not amusing!\" The blue-robe's voice was edged with\n anger. \"Use what intelligence you have left! You have had enough\nsharig\nantidote to cure a\ntharl\n. Now. Who are you?\"\n\n\n The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"\n\n\n \"It is real,\" said Rhys, compassion in his tired face. \"He has been\n very far on the Time Ellipse, Gamine. Adric, try to understand. This\n was Karamy's work. She sent you out on a time line, far, very far into\n the past. Into a time when the Earth was different—she hoped you would\n come back changed, or mad.\" His eyes brooded. \"I think she succeeded.\n Gamine, I have long outstayed my leave. I must return to my own\n tower—or die. Will you explain?\"\n\n\n \"I will.\" A hint of emotion flickered in the voice of Gamine. \"Go,\n Master.\"\n\n\n Rhys left the room, through one of the doors. Gamine turned impatiently\n to me again. \"We waste time this way. Fool, look at yourself!\"\n\n\n I strode to a mirror that lined one of the doors. Above the crimson\n nightshirt I saw a face—not my own. The sight rocked my mind. Out of\n the mirror a man's face looked anxiously; a face eagle-thin, darkly\n moustached, with sharp green eyes. The body belonging to the face that\n was\nnot\nmine was lean and long and strongly muscled—and not\n quite human. I squeezed my eyes shut. This couldn't be—I opened my\n eyes. The man in the red nightshirt I was wearing was still reflected\n there.\n\n\n I turned my back on the mirror, walking to one of the barred windows\n to look down on the familiar outline of the Sierra Madre, about a\n hundred miles away. I couldn't have been mistaken. I knew that ridge\n of mountains. But between me and the mountains lay a thickly forested\n expanse of land which looked like no scenery I had ever seen in my\n life. I was standing near the pinnacle of a high tower; I dimly saw the\n curve of another, just out of my line of vision. The whole landscape\n was bathed in a curiously pinkish light; through an overcast sky I\n could just make out, dimly, the shadowy disk of a watery red sun.\n Then—no, I wasn't dreaming, I really did see it—beyond it, a second\n sun; blue-white, shining brilliantly, pallid through the clouds, but\n brighter than any sunlight I had ever seen.\n\n\n It was proof enough for me. I turned desperately to Gamine behind me.\n \"Where have I gotten, to? Where—\nwhen\nam I? Two suns—those\n mountains—\"\n\n\n The change in Gamine's voice was swift; the veiled face lifted\n questioningly to mine. What I had thought a veil was not that; it\n seemed to be more like a shimmering screen wrapped around the features\n so that Gamine was faceless, an invisible person with substance but\n no apprehensible characteristics. Yes, it was like that; as if there\n was an invisible person wearing the curious silken draperies. But the\n invisible flesh was solid enough. Hands like cold steel gripped my\n shoulders. \"You have been back? Back to the days before the second sun?\n Adric, tell me; did Earth truly have but one sun?\"\n\n\n \"Wait—\" I begged. \"You mean I've travelled in time?\"\n\n\n The exultation faded from Gamine's voice imperceptibly. \"Never mind. It\n is improbable in any case. No, Adric; not really travelling. You were\n only sent out on the Time Ellipse, till you contacted some one in that\n other Time. Perhaps you stayed in contact with his mind so long that\n you think you are he?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not Adric—\" I raged. \"Adric sent me here—\"\n\n\n I saw the blurring around Gamine's invisible features twitch in a\n headshake. \"It's never been proven that two minds can be interchanged\n like that. Adric's body. Adric's brain. The brain convolutions, the\n memory centers, the habit patterns—you'd still be Adric. The idea that\n you are someone else is only an illusion of your conscious mind. It\n will wear off.\"\n\n\n I shook my head, puzzled. \"I still don't believe it. Where am I?\"\n\n\n Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you meant that—\" a mournfulness breathed in the soft\n contralto. A sudden fury blazed up in me from nowhere. \"And what right\n have you to pry for that old fool Rhys? Get back to your own place,\n then, spell-singer—\" I broke off, appalled. What was I saying? Worse,\n what did I mean by it? Gamine turned. The sexless voice was coldly\n amused. \"Adric spoke then. Whoever sits in the seat of your soul, you\n are the same—and past redemption!\" The robes whispered sibilantly on\n the floor as Gamine moved to the door. \"Karamy is welcome to her slave!\"\n\n\n The door slammed.\n\n\n Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.\n\n\n Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore.\n Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid\n it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment\n in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the\n mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like\n a leaping fish. \"Lord of the Crimson Tower.\" Well, I looked it. There\n had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it,\n and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I\n stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of\n the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly\n and a man stood looking at me.\n\n\n He was young and would have been handsome in an effeminate way if his\n face had not been so arrogant. Lean, somehow catlike, it was easy to\n determine that he was akin to Adric, or me, even before the automatic\n habit of memory fitted name and identity to him. \"Evarin,\" I said,\n warily.\n\n\n He came forward, moving so softly that for an uneasy moment I wondered\n if he had pads like a cat's on his feet. He wore deep green from head\n to foot, similar to the crimson garments that clothed me. His face had\n a flickering, as if he could at a moment's notice raise a barrier of\n invisibility like Gamine's about himself. He didn't look as human as I.\n\n\n \"I have seen Gamine,\" he said. \"She says you are awake, and as sane as\n you ever were. We of Narabedla are not so strong that we can afford to\n waste even a broken tool like you.\"\n\n\n Wrath—Adric's wrath—boiled up in me; but Evarin moved lithely\n backward. \"I am not Gamine,\" he warned. \"And I will not be served like\n Gamine has been served. Take care.\"\n\n\n \"Take care yourself,\" I muttered, knowing little else I could have\n said. Evarin drew back thin lips. \"Why? You have been sent out on the\n Time Ellipse till you are only a shadow of yourself. But all this is\n beside the point. Karamy says you are to be freed, so the seals are off\n all the doors, and the Crimson Tower is no longer a prison to you. Come\n and go as you please. Karamy—\" his lips formed a sneer. \"If you call\nthat\nfreedom!\"\n\n\n I said slowly, \"You think I'm not crazy?\"\n\n\n Evarin snorted. \"Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What\n is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good\n hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the\n Toymaker. I need little. But you—\" his voice leaped with contempt,\n \"you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the\n coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!\"\n\n\n I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words\n seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his\n face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, \"The falcon\n flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.\"\n He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. \"As\n I say, if you call that freedom.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "When the story opens, Mike kills an eagle, which is perplexing to his brother.  As the story progresses, what insight is given into is possible motivation?", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_1", "options": ["His bout with electricity has completely messed up his thought process and ability to reason.", "His instinct to kill the bird stems from his life in the other universe.", "He wants to do everything he can to upset his brother because his brother is the cause of all of Mike's issues.", "He knows that eagles are going to cause the end of society as we know it."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did Mike's employers blame for the explosion?", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_2", "options": ["They blamed an electrical storm.", "Mike's inability to perform his job.", "Another country's spies had booby-trapped the area and caused the explosion.", "Mike's lack of sleep - he had been awake for several days at the time of the explosion."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the official report given in terms of the explosion and Mike's injuries?", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_3", "options": ["He tried to kill himself by electrocuting himself.", "He was the victim of a foreign attack.", "He was struck by lightning.", "He was attacked so because a competitor attempted to get secrets from him, and when Mike refused to give them the information, they hurt him."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does might not believe that electricity didn't have anything to do with the reason he ended up in the hospital.6", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_4", "options": ["He knows the truth behind his injury.", "The amount of electricity they claimed he was exposed to would have killed, not injured, him.", "He healed far too quickly for his injury to have been brought about by electricity.", "Electricity would not have caused him to be branded."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was one of the side effects that Mike \"suffered from\" due to his injury?", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_5", "options": ["He knows things now that he didn't know before, and he never had the opportunity to learn them.", "He was unable to walk.", "He has amnesia.", "He now believes that there is a conspiracy in the works, and they will eventually kill him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What proof does Mike offer Andy to show him that he is not crazy about his current relationship with electricity?", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_6", "options": ["He shows Andy what happens when he touches the radio.", "He powers the electricity for the entire house with his mind.", "He lights up a lightbulb with just his finger.", "He kills another eagle with electricity that he shoots from his hands."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When Mike receives the final electric shock in the cabin, what seems to happen?", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_7", "options": ["He becomes super-powered.", "He becomes completely insane and dangerous.", "He dies because of the amount of electricity that shocked him, but he comes back to life somehow.", "He makes contact with someone from a different universe or time."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When he awakens, what has happened to Mike?", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_8", "options": ["He realized that he has killed Andy.", "He is in the middle of nowhere, and he doesn't know how he got there or how to get back home.", "He appears to be in a parallel universe.", "The government is experimenting on him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When Rhys tried to explain to Mike what has occurred, what does Mike try to cling to?", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_9", "options": ["His identity as a human.", "His identity as an American.", "His identity as Mike.", "His identity as Adric."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who does Adric's brother blame for Adric's actions?", "question_unique_id": "50566_K7NZQUI6_10", "options": ["He blames Adric because he will do anything for Karamy.", "He blames Andy for not stopping Mike.", "He blames himself for not stopping Adric.", "He blames Mike because the power he has over electric has somehow managed to split the universe."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/5/6/50566//50566-h//50566-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50998", "set_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Delay in Transit", "year": 1960, "author": "Wallace, F. L. (Floyd L.)", "topic": "Interstellar travel -- Fiction; PS; Science fiction; Artificial intelligence -- Fiction; Inventions -- Fiction", "article": "DELAY IN TRANSIT\nBy F. L. WALLACE\n\n\n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAn unprovoked, meaningless night attack is\n \nterrifying enough on your own home planet, worse\n \non a world across the Galaxy. But the horror\n \nis the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n\"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high.\n Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you.\n Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"\n\n\n \"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.\n\n\n Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk.\n It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he\ncould\nwalk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n\n\n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was\n peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was\n at a definite disadvantage.\n\n\n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in\n mind.\"\n\n\n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look\n unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and\n stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside,\n he might find safety for a time.\n\n\n Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.\n\n\n That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give\n the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various\n reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called\n Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own,\n say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the\n proper approach, either.\n\n\n \"Weapons?\"\n\n\n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long\n knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n\n\n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in\n semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could\n die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of\n protection himself.\n\n\n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on\n tenuous evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Let's have it anyway.\"\n\n\n \"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For\n some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n\n\n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand\n star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n\n\n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a\n transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he\n had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here.\n He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't\n unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as\n reliable as they might be.\n\n\n Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?\n\n\n Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.\n\n\n He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the\n rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it\n unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility\n and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the\n near amphibians who created it.\n\n\n A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport\n tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made\n life dangerous for a human—Venice revised, brought up to date in a\n faster-than-light age.\n\n\n Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely\n flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the\n ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout\n the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly\n and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human—Cassal shivered.\n If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No\n investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had\n certainly picked the right place.\n\n\n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal\n was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by.\n What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.\n\n\n \"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"\n\n\n Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.\n\n\n He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"\n\n\n \"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"\n\n\n Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"\n\n\n Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of\n a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately,\n his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance,\n the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His\n opponent gasped and broke away.\n\n\n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got\n him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's\n afraid.\"\n\n\n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some\n didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent\n fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n\n\n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near\n the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't\n move.\n\n\n \"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?\n\n\n Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.\n\n\n Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the\n boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n\n\n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him.\n Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly\n trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he\n was forced to the ground.\n\n\n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps\n rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping\n by way of water.\n\n\n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man\n I've ever been strangled by.\"\n\n\n \"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the\n basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I\n checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n\n\n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted\n Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't\nwanted\nto kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the\n police.\n\n\n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second\n time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was\n successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He\n squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n\n\n Something, however, was missing—his wallet.\n\n\n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle.\n Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.\n\n\n It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the\n supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police.\n Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It\n contained more money than his wallet had.\n\n\n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it\n was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece\n of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he\n now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for\n another tab.\n\n\n A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell.\n Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word,\n STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\nThe old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling\n precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the\n door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The\n technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed\n on the door.\nTRAVELERS AID BUREAU\n\n Murra Foray, First Counselor\n\n\n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The\n old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n\n\n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed\n help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.\n\n\n Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a\n maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable.\n Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he\n managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n\n\n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer\n everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be\n available for consultation.\"\n\n\n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he\n asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n\n\n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n \"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n\n\n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to\n the first counselor.\"\n\n\n \"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the\n screen.\n\n\n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n\n\n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly\n supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him,\n Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of\n him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and\n answers. One thing he drew the line at—why he wanted to go to Tunney\n 21 was his own business.\n\n\n The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed,\n that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average,\n rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the\n chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\nShe glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth.\n Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales\n engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n\n\n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of\n customer relations.\"\n\n\n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows\n arched.\n\n\n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"\n\n\n He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n\n\n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can\n guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study\n under them.\"\n\n\n Close—but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not\n necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could\n build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even\n less likely.\n\n\n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21\n that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies\n that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he\n could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that\n could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag\n could set its own price, which could be control of all communications,\n transport, trade—a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of\n all that.\n\n\n His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher\n to come to Earth,\nif he could\n. Literally, he had to guess the\n Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition,\n the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their\n arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working\n for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as\n Dimanche was a key factor.\n\n\n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n\n\n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've\n been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n 21.\"\n\n\n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the\n screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \"\nRickrock C\narrived\n yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"\n\n\n \"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will\n the next ship arrive?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n\n\n He didn't answer.\n\"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation,\n is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've\n covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything\n within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer\n distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly,\n Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on\n or near Godolph. Within the next five years—maybe.\"\nHe blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local\n transportation, star-hopping?\"\n\n\n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"\n\n\n \"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the\n emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help\n you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification\n tab.\"\n\n\n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual\n speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood\n made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it\n plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n\n\n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it\n with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"\n\n\n She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any\n part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier\n for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't\nremember\nyour real name and where you put your identification—\" She\n arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His\nreal\nname!\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n\n\n Presently she returned.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"\n\n\n \"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you\n don't believe it, send back to—\" He stopped. It had taken him four\n months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for\n a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances\n such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for\n anything.\n\n\n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The\n spaceport records indicate that when\nRickrock C\ntook off this\n morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who\n had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became\n clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten\n it.\n\n\n \"No doubt it wasn't,\" she said wearily. \"Outsiders don't seem to\n understand what galactic travel entails.\"\n\n\n Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second\n transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond\n the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably.\nShe was still speaking: \"Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without\n stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is\n impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken\n off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently\n needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years\n pass before he learns it's never coming.\n\n\n \"If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't\n vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend\n on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time,\n credit established, lost identification replaced—\"\n\n\n \"I've traveled before,\" he interrupted stiffly. \"I've never had any\n trouble.\"\n\n\n She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was\n more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited\n number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide—why, no\n man would arrive at his predetermined destination.\n\n\n But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare\n galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a\n giant room. Or could you?\n\n\n For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship,\n was the comparison too apt? It might be.\n\n\n \"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to\n be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n \"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third\n ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They\n don't encourage immigration.\"\n\n\n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a\n passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of\n having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when\n his money was gone.\n\n\n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n\n\n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"\n\n\n \"I won't,\" he promised grimly.\nThe woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his\n estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he.\n Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that\n he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first\n counselor.\n\n\n \"We're a philanthropic agency,\" said Murra Foray. \"Your case is\n special, though—\"\n\n\n \"I understand,\" he said gruffly. \"You accept contributions.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that\n you'll have to compromise your standard of living.\" But she named a sum\n that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any\n appreciable time.\n\n\n He stared at her unhappily. \"I suppose it's worth it. I can always\n work, if I have to.\"\n\n\n \"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do\n business with Godolphians.\"\n\n\n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n\n\n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special\n knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly—\"\n\n\n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The\n instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large.\n From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that\n information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he\n could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can\n always find something in that line.\"\n\n\n \"A scientist, maybe,\" murmured Murra Foray. \"But in this part of the\n Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't\n yet gained practical experience.\" She shook her head. \"You'll do better\n as a salesman.\"\n\n\n He got up, glowering. \"If that's all—\"\n\n\n \"It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot\n provided for that purpose as you leave.\"\n\n\n A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle,\n swung open. The agency was efficient.\n\n\n \"Remember,\" the counselor called out as he left, \"identification is\n hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery.\"\n\n\n He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was\n also eminently practical.\n\n\n The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable\n contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the\n bureau.\n\"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the\n first counselor had named.\n\n\n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle,\n attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n\n\n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n\n\n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n\n\n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing\n about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n\n\n \"Any other information?\"\n\n\n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached\n her. I got out as fast as I could.\"\n\n\n \"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless,\n it sounded depressing.\n\n\n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as\n electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n\n\n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly\n inquisitive at times.\n\n\n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on\n the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man\n was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed\n every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was\n removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him.\n He turned and peered.\n\n\n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.\n\n\n \"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting\n for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n \"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency.\n Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency\n were new.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor\n resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one\n didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n\n\n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n\n\n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed\n overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.\n\n\n Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job,\n afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He\n shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but\n he didn't intend to depend on that alone.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How does Cassal know the intentions of the man who is following him?", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_1", "options": ["He knows the man's intention because Cassal has spies all over the planet looking out for him.", "He is aware of the man's intentions because Dimanche, a device he developed, can get signals from others and interpret their emotions in various ways.", "Dimanche, his companion, is a mind reader.", "The man has been stalking him for months, and he has finally caught up to him.  He has left Cassal letters and messages saying that he plans to kill him as soon as he finds him alone."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What seems to be the stalker's issue with Cassal? ", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_2", "options": ["He just wants to get Cassal's ID in order to have Cassal's security clearance.", "He is upset that Cassal is stuck on his planet.", "He wants to kill him to keep Cassal from mass-producing a device like Dimanche.", "He wants the secrets behind his creations."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the stalker feel in regards to killing Cassal?", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_3", "options": ["He feels guilty about it, but he realizes that it's either Cassal or him.", "He is filled with rage and ready to attack.", "He is excited by the prospect of murdering someone.", "He is indifferent to killing him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Cassal's weapon against his stalker?", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_4", "options": ["A lighter that has been converted into a stiletto.", "He has no weapon.   He just wants the stalker to believe he has one.", "A lighter.", "A knife."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Dimanche help Cassal fight the stalker?", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_5", "options": ["He shoots the stalker while Cassal grapples with him.", "He stabs the stalker while Cassal grapples with him.", "He helps Cassal attack the stalker.", "He tells Cassal exactly when and how to move against the stalker."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What critical mistake does Dimanche make in regards to the stalker?", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_6", "options": ["He tells Cassal to kill the wrong man.", "He tells Cassal that he is not dead, but he actually is, and Cassal does not hide the body, resulting in his arrest.", "He tells Cassal that he is dead, but he is not, and he escapes.", "He tells Cassal the wrong location of the stalker, and the stalker escapes unharmed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Cassal hope to achieve by going to the Travelers Aid Bureau?", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_7", "options": ["He hopes to seek immunity.", "He hopes that he is able to acquire safe passage to his destination.", "He hopes that he is able to procure employment until he is able to leave the planet.", "He hopes to get his ID back."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How is the First Counselor close to right about why Cassal is trying to get to Tunney 21?", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_8", "options": ["She thinks he is going there to study under the best scientists in the universe, but, in fact, as he is the best scientist in the universe, he is going there to instruct the others.", "She thinks he is going there to study under the best scientists in the universe, but that is just a cover, as he is trying to escape before they find out he murdered the man who was stalking him.", "She thinks he is going there to study under the best scientists in the universe, but he is going there to deliver Dimanche to them.", "She thinks he is going there to study under the best scientists in the universe.  In reality, he believes that he is pretty much one of the best there is, but there is one particular scientist that he needs to bring back with him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happened to Cassal's transport to Tunney 21?", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_9", "options": ["It left for the planet the day before and it will be years, if he is lucky, before another ship returns going to that planet.", "He is banned from going to Tunney 21, and no one will take him there.", "It has been waiting for him, but he only has a short time to get to it before it leaves him.", "His stalker got on the transport to Tunney 21 using his ID and murdered everyone on board, so he is now wanted."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the First Counselor mention to Cassal about the instantaneous radio?", "question_unique_id": "50998_NNYYUWWN_10", "options": ["Cassal knows things in regards to the radio that he is not telling her, and he cannot leave until he does.", "She feels that the technology needed for the radio should never come to fruition because it will set the world back thousands of years if it falls into the wrong hands.", "She knows Cassal is in charge of the technology involved in creating the radio.", "The radio would be a wonderful solution to many of the communication issues across the universe, thus causing travel around the universe to be simplified."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/9/9/50998//50998-h//50998-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "50802", "set_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "A City Near Centaurus", "year": 1958, "author": "Doede, William R.", "topic": "PS; Archaeologists -- Fiction; Extinct cities -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction", "article": "A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe city was sacred, but not to its gods.\n \nMichaelson was a god—but far from sacred!\nCrouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his\n burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n\n\n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the\n Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he\n saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.\n\n\n He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man\n was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were\n known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually\n natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of\n the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent,\n though uneducated.\n\n\n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the\n ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of\n time to wonder about him.\n\n\n He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings\n before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge\n with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square\n buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges\n connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind\n after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony\n surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets\n and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller\n buildings.\n\n\n Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"\n\n\n The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short,\n even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up\n and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet\n dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n\n\n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said,\n chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it\n beautiful?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a\n child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n\n\n \"You must go.\"\n\n\n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am keeper of the city.\"\n\n\n \"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was,\n said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n\n\n \"The spirits may return.\"\n\n\n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his\n trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say,\n some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n\n\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons,\n and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n\n\n \"Leave!\"\n\n\n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in\n anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly\n serious.\n\n\n \"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know\n that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half\n covered with sand and dirt.\"\n\n\n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The\n sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He\n glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n \"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy\n the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of\n change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now,\n or be killed.\"\nHe turned and walked off, not looking back.\n\n\n Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.\n\n\n He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell\n of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered\n through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness,\n dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in\n the sun.\n\n\n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although\n this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ...\n although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back\n there to worry about him.\n\n\n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His\n friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at\n least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a\n thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly,\n without effort save a flicker of thought.\n\n\n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"\n\n\n Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he\n relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n\n\n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill\n you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer\n than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like\n a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n\n\n \"What rooms?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were\n bedrooms.\"\n\n\n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was\n sixty or seventy years old, at least.\n\n\n \"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be\n educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some\n sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n\n\n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the\n native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n\"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive\n god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old\n streets.\"\n\n\n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing\n I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian\n tombs—none can hold a candle to this.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n\n\n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names\n you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n\n\n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n\n\n \"Maota.\"\n\n\n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build\n a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just\n outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may\n decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago\n and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and\n evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n\n\n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like\n a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.\n\n\n \"You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They\n must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come\n here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who\n lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged\n and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their\n foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n\n\n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his\n body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his\n heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.\n\n\n The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.\n\n\n The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought\n a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind\n sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the\n sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n\n\n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over\n the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted\n at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the\n writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the\n writing.\n\n\n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n\n\n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the\n length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not\n Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he\n stooped and picked up the book again.\n\n\n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had\n touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring\n in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n\n\n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall,\n fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring\n God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already\n destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the\n artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.\n\n\n I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They\n say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's\n see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand\n lifetimes.\n\n\n And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those\n years!\n\n\n He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery\n of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger\n against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered\n the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\"\n off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along\n the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over\n its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an\n exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\nThe clock was warm.\nHe felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there\n were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not\n be. Half a million years—and here was warmth!\n\n\n He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No\n mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He\n stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling.\n Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason.\n He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled\n through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street\n until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for\n air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n\n\n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could\n be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss\n of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail\n of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n\n\n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\nWhen he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.\n\n\n Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in\n the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair,\n familiar to Michaelson.\n\n\n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n\n\n \"For what?\"\n\n\n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n\n\n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try\n to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n\n\n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"\n\n\n He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n\n\n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked\n like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its\n appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n\"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held\n it up for Maota to see.\n\n\n \"What about the book?\"\n\n\n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n\n\n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what\nkind\nof book? You have seen it. It\n is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it\n talks.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n\n\n \"Poetry.\"\n\n\n \"Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history?\n Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a\n subject worthy of a book.\"\n\n\n Maota shook his head. \"One does not study a dead culture to learn how\n they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must\n kill you now, so I can get some rest.\"\n\n\n The old man raised the gun.\n\"Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon.\" He pointed to the spot\n behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. \"I can move faster than\n you can fire the gun.\"\n\n\n Maota nodded. \"I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will\n kill you anyway.\"\n\n\n \"I suggest we negotiate.\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"\n\n\n Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand\n and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile,\n brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n\n\n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n\n\n \"Negotiate.\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not\n twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far\n away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n\n\n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just\n disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n\n\n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer\n toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.\n\n\n \"Wait!\"\n\n\n \"Now what?\"\n\n\n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n\n\n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n\n\n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n\n\n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n\n\n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items\n around.\"\n\n\n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand\n against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed\n through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for\n a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle\n softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but\n his desire to hear the book was strong.\nOld Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the\n syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been\n a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley,\n Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n\n\n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in\n sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.\n\n\n \"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.\n\n\n Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.\n\n\n There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the\n total destruction they might have caused.\n\n\n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n\n\n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and—they could not see how\n deep—stared at them.\n\n\n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book\n is gone!\"\n\n\n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\nBoth men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically\n for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or\n care.\n\n\n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area\n around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n\n\n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.\n\n\n \"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It\n talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I\n used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n\n\n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n\n\n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n\n\n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n\n\n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with\n songs.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n \"\nYou\nkilled it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying\n forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too\n weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.\n\n\n When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've\n disgraced myself.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some\n reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n\n\n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night\n when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take\n them we lose forever.\"\n\n\n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never\n heard of negotiation?\"\n\n\n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One\n either loves them, or kills them.\"\n\n\n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you are.\" Maota looked up, very sure. \"Mortals cannot step\n from star to star like crossing a shallow brook.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that.\n Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would\n ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit\n me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day\n I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than\n that.\"\nMaota laughed, then sobered quickly. \"You lie.\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"If I had this machine, could I travel as you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll kill you and take yours.\"\n\n\n \"It would not work for you.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n\n\n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred\n hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking\n half-heartedly again for the book.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human.\n Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n\n\n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's\n face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we\n could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We\n have finished, you and I.\"\n\n\n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n\n\n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n\n\n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the\n city?\"\n\n\n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n\n\n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n\n\n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of\n the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed\n against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading\n to a particular building.\n\n\n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you\n suppose happened to this race?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me.\"\n\n\n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know\n how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not\n die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n\n\n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth\n dimension?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death.\n I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people\n who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science,\n who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the\n face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n\n\n \"And what?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the\n streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now\n I will do so.\"\n\n\n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched\n whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it\n then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n\n\n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay\n still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more\n carefully. No question about it.\n\n\n The old man was dead.\nFeeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside\n the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and\n gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's\n body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the\n knoll.\n\n\n Here he buried him.\n\n\n But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that\n the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense\n more complete than death.\n\n\n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came\n to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building\n with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination.\n Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n\n\n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all\n evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He\n had to know if the machine would work for him.\n\n\n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows\n over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old\n man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but\n determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the\n button.\n\n\n The high-pitched whine started.\n\n\n Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes;\n nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only\n like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left\n or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no\n direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking\n through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n\n\n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win\n after all.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did you.\"\n\n\n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be\n anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"\n\n\n Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the\n old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life\n force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body\n different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread\n stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n\n\n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried.\n I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication\n with you. No one can go back.\"\n\n\n Michaelson decided he try.\n\"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n\n\n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and\n gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and\n gave his most violent command.\n\n\n At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then\n it struck him.\nHe was standing up!\nThe cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference\n between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where\n he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind,\n leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the\n \"clock\" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place.\n\n\n To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result\n as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence.\n\n\n \"You devil!\" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger,\n irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable.\n \"I said you were a god. I said you were a god.\nI said you were a\n god...!\n\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why is the old man furious at the \"Earthgod?\"", "question_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D_1", "options": ["He has invaded sacred grounds, and now demons will be released on the planet.", "He has broken one of the rules of his people by using his hidden mechanism to teleport within the city.", "He has invaded sacred grounds, angering the spirits who might one day return.", "He has invaded sacred grounds, and he is planning to steal many of the artifacts and return to Earth with them."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The old man tells Michaelson that something as simple _____ can cause irreparable changes for the spirits.", "question_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D_2", "options": ["Thinking aboutt entering the ancient area.", "His breath.", "Touching a book.", "Stepping off the path created in the area."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Michaelson responds to the old man's pleas by", "question_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D_3", "options": ["Wrecking the city.", "Throwing a book at the old man.", "Continuing to explore the city just as he intended.", "Doing as he is asked."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In terms of discoveries, Michaelson believes that this city", "question_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D_4", "options": ["he is unsure at the moment.  He needs to investigate further before he is able to accurately deduce the finding.", "makes all other discoveries pale in comparison.", "is a decent find, but he has discovered many, many famous places.", "pales in comparison to others he has seen."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Michaelson want to do with the city?", "question_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D_5", "options": ["He wants to open it up as a tourist attraction.", "He wants it to remain hidden from the population.", "He wants to preserve the items he finds and put them on display for all to see.", "He wants to become its next keeper like Maota."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the last thing that Maota wants?", "question_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D_6", "options": ["He does not want Michaelson to be his successor.", "He does not want the ancient ones to return to see Michaelson's plan in place.", "He does not want to reveal to Michaelson all of the secrets he has been entrusted with.", "He does not want to die before the ancient ones return."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Maota cry when the book was lost?", "question_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D_7", "options": ["He knew the ancient ones would have revenge on him for the loss of the book.", "He is sad that such a book is now lost forever, never to be shared with others.", "He is crying tears of joy because Michaelson will never have possession of the book now.", "He thought that the book actually loved him for taking care of it all those years."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Maota feel that the book was the perfect way to try and learn from the dead culture?", "question_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D_8", "options": ["As a book of poetry, it shows how they thought and what they felt deeply about.", "It was a book of history.  It clearly let them know what their civilization was all about.", "It was full of their math and scientific reason.  It was perfect to compare to modern ideas.", "As a book of poetry, it gave insight into their language structure."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Maota's ultimate fate it to", "question_unique_id": "50802_JFO38K7D_9", "options": ["Live the remainder of his time with Michaelson preserving the city.", "Die at the hands of the ancient ones because of Michaelson.", "Leave his body and have the ability to exist anywhere, even on other planets.", "Die at the hands of Michaelson because he would not cooperate."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/0/8/0/50802//50802-h//50802-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51321", "set_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Prime Difference", "year": 1972, "author": "Nourse, Alan Edward", "topic": "Robots -- Fiction; Science fiction; Impostors and imposture -- Fiction; Short stories; PS; Husband and wife -- Fiction", "article": "PRIME DIFFERENCE\nBy ALAN E. NOURSE\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBeing two men rolled out of one would solve\n \nmy problems—but which one would I be?\nI suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he\n gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n\n\n Understand now—I've got nothing against marriage or any thing\n like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American\n Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw\n a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman\n like Marge—\n\n\n It's so\npermanent\n.\n\n\n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the\n Blissful 'Fifties—but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968,\n and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got\n their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse\n Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if\n I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n\n\n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man\n has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n\n\n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep\n Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.\n\n\n Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes\n and a shape that could set your teeth chattering—but that was where\n the dream stopped.\n\n\n She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long\n enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was\n crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling\n detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband,\n which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly\n headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half\n she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we\n got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\nMaybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to\n envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live\n with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a\n while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.\n\n\n I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't\n even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give\n Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab\n Center in a week.\n\n\n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found\n out when Jeree came along.\n\n\n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled\n around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an\n executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As\n a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of\n secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any\n work—just to sit there.\n\n\n Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying\n anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was\n there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the\n opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n\n\n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over\n during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my\n mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n\n\n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n\n\n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's\n five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n\n\n Marge had quite a spy system.\n\n\n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.\n\n\n \"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself\n mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n\n\n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong\n at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no\n stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n\n\n Harry Folsom administered the\ncoup de grace\nat coffee next morning.\n \"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your\n problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n\n\n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be\n ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a\n thing. It's—it's indecent.\"\n\n\n Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to\n think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not\n even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a\n friend who knows a guy—\"\n\n\n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped\n my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n\n\n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n\n\n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n\n\n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\nIt was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime,\n Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the\n nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.\n\n\n From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the\n use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license\n for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a\n high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even\n then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to\n have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance\n exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how,\n why, and under what circumstances.\n\n\n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n\n\n But everybody knew that if you\nreally\nwanted a personal Prime with\n all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black\n market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be\n done.\n\n\n Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got\n lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with\n a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse\n off lower Broadway.\n\n\n \"Ah, yes,\" the little man said. \"Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting\n you.\"\nI didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the\n place. \"I've been told you can supply me with a—\"\n\n\n He coughed. \"Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible.\" He fingered\n his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. \"Busy executives often\n come to us to avoid the—ah—unpleasantness of formal arrangements.\n Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the\n merchandise ourselves—\" He wiped his hands on his trousers. \"Now were\n you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?\"\n\n\n I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door\n for Utility models.\n\n\n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful\n workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically\n complete circuit duplication. Very useful for—ah—close contact work,\n you know. Social engagements, conferences—\"\n\n\n I was shaking my head. \"I want a\nSuper\nDeluxe model,\" I told him.\n\n\n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication.\n Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be—awkward, shall we say. Very\n awkward—\"\n\n\n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were\n any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.\n\n\n \"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our\n laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I\n can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n\n\n The blanks weren't very impressive—clay and putty and steel, faceless,\n brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all\n sorts. He was thorough—embarrassingly thorough, in fact—but finally\n he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n\n\n And that was all there was to it.\nPractical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the\n Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it\n once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought\n him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design,\n artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with\n the modern Ego Primes we have today.\n\n\n I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked\n outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty\n woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the\n recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime\n when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked\n in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a\n tired look on his face.\n\"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like\n a nursing mother.\n\n\n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly.\n Nothing flabby about it.\n\n\n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I\n said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n\n\n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.\n\n\n George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded\n neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought\n what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The\n only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime\n did.\n\n\n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make\n the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders,\n he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my\n signature. It would hold up in court.\n\n\n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted\n girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time\n I chose, he'd do that, too.\n\n\n George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on\n the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same\n mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical\n difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression\n buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop\n George Prime dead in his tracks.\n\n\n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a\n pile of gears.\n\n\n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.\n\n\n Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it\n up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's\n natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes\n it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be\n confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough,\n and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent\n enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate\n him for it, but he'll win.\n\n\n With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a\n corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in\n the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\nAt first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she\n said. I told her I didn't\nwant\nher to clean it up. She could clean\n the whole house as often as she chose, but\nI\nwould clean up the\n workshop.\n\n\n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a\n strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood\n shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next.\n A wrench would be back on the rack—upside down, of course. An open\n paint can would have a cover on it.\n\n\n I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I\n swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun.\n\n\n So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while\n to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door\n routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a\n battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It\n was that predictable.\n\n\n She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore\n her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more.\n\n\n As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win.\n\n\n Eventually.\n\n\n If you're\nreally\npersistent.\n\n\n Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.\n\n\n We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.\n\n\n \"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"\n\n\n George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model,\n remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this\n cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous.\n I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n\n\n So I did.\n\n\n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very\n cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after\n a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is.\n As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was\n wonderful.\n\n\n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the\n accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n\n\n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a\n reputation for myself around the office.\n\n\n Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the\n novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It\n took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable\n program.\n\n\n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n \"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky\n around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime\n cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely\n trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n\n\n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to\n quick-step some questions about my work at the office—there was no\n way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular\n two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the\n meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.\n\n\n But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.\n\n\n One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really\n meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which\n happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by\n candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly\n because I liked it.\n\n\n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old\n times.\nVery\nold times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge\n again—really\nlooking\nat her, watching the light catch in her hair,\n almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not\n glint.\n\n\n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night,\n she was practically ravishing.\n\n\n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the\n workshop.\n\n\n \"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"\n\n\n \"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"\n\n\n The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was\n beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control—I\n could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for\n a complete recircuiting—but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice\n job.\n\n\n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized\n with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss,\n despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After\n dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and\n said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by\n the fire.\n\n\n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living\n room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair\n I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite\n perfume.\n\n\n \"Georgie?\" she said.\n\n\n \"Uh?\"\n\n\n \"Do you still love me?\"\n\n\n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I\n still—\"\n\n\n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n\n\n \"Mm. I guess I've—uh—got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that\n perfume!\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n\n\n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep—\"\n\n\n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her\n voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.\n\n\n The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.\n\n\n It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep\n a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a\n four-day hangover.\n\n\n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting\n blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first\n logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly\n what he'd done.\n\n\n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all\n right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the\n laboratory could take him.\n\n\n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got\n to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that\n check of mine that had just bounced.\n\n\n \"What check?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"The one you wrote to cash yesterday—five hundred dollars—against\n your regular account, Mr. Faircloth.\"\n\n\n The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that\n account. I told the man so rather bluntly.\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir. That is, you\ndid\nuntil last week. But all these checks\n you've been cashing have emptied the account.\"\n\n\n He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one\n of them.\n\n\n \"What about my special account?\" I'd learned long before that an\n account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy.\n\n\n \"That's been closed out for two weeks.\"\n\n\n I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared\n at the ceiling and tried to think things through.\n\n\n I came up with a horrible thought.\n\n\n Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get\n away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n\n\n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started\n down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir,\n not\nMrs.\nFaircloth.\nYou\nbought two tickets. One way. Champagne\n flight to Bermuda.\"\n\n\n \"When?\" I choked out.\n\n\n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven\n o'clock—\"\n\n\n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know\n what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question\n now that he was out of control—\nway\nout of control. And poor Marge,\n all worked up for a second honeymoon—\n\n\n Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent.\n\n\n Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of\n grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n\n\n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n\n\n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n\n\n \"But I thought—I mean the ticket office—\"\n\n\n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes,\n almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go\n running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n\n\n \"Then—you knew?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing\n him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of\n his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to\n run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n\n\n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n\n\n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek\n against my chest.\n\n\n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He\n was like you, but he wasn't\nyou\n, darling. And all I ever want is you.\n I just never appreciated you before....\"\n\n\n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George\n Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what\n did you do with him?\"\n\n\n \"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot\n him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more.\n We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n\n\n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the\n Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have\n been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully\n porous, the old Marge was\nnever\nlike this—\n\n\n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt\n the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really\n happened.\n\n\n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n\n\n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\nMarge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the\n laugh was on her, after all.\n\n\n As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes\n Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty\n sad by comparison.\n\n\n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers.\n As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n\n\n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any\n slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n\n\n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll\n go to Hawaii.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the narrator's main issue with marriage in general?", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_1", "options": ["The wife never does as she is told.", "The husband is expected to do too much, while the wife is not expected to do anything other than keep the house clean.", "Wives are allowed to see other men, but husbands must remain faithful, according to the law.", "It lasts forever."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What has kept him from divorcing his wife?", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_2", "options": ["It will be too costly", "He really loves her.", "It is illegal to divorce.", "Why divorce her when he can be with other women on the side AND have someone at home to take care of him?"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is one word to describe the narrator?", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_3", "options": ["Honest.", "Loyal.", "Adulterer.", "Slow."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What finally pushed the narrator into getting an Ego Prime?", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_4", "options": ["His boss basically forced him to get one so if the boss got caught with his Ego Prime, then he would be able to turn the narrator in for his, as well.", "He was over his wife's nagging, and with an Ego Prime, he could hang with the guys and get away from her/", "He is sick of his life, and he wants to run away.  The Ego Prime is the only way to do this and not draw attention to himself.", "He just had to have an affair with his new secretary."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What type of Ego Prime does the narrator decide to go with?", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_5", "options": ["The Super Deluxe model because he wanted to get EVERYTHING available in a Prime, and he couldn't worry about the cost.", "The deluxe model because he wanted to be able to have almost all of the bells and whistles available, but he still needed to be able to afford it.", "The base model because the price was so steep.", "He got the mid-range model.  It was exactly what he needed."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the narrator decide that the Prime is going to work perfectly in his place?", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_6", "options": ["Marge ignores the Prime, just like she ignores him.", "They are fighting within minutes.", "Marge loves on the Prime the same way she loves on him.", "Marge goes directly to bed without any interaction with the Prime, as she would normally do with him, as well."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "After having multiple affairs, what does the narrator slowly begin to realize?", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_7", "options": ["The Prime is working to make Marge fall in love with him again.", "He realizes that he was a bad husband all along and that Marge was not to blame for their issues.", "He might actually have some feelings for Marge after all.", "The Prime is not doing its job at all, and Marge is on the verge of finding out. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the narrator see that makes him go crazy?", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_8", "options": ["The Prime has been spying on him all along, and he is going to go to jail for breaking the law.", "Marge is having an affair with another man/", "Marge is becoming intimate with the Prime.", "The Prime has been sleeping with his secretary."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the narrator finally realize that there is a real issue going on.", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_9", "options": ["Marge tells him that she is in love with the Prime, and he needs to move out.", "He finds the Prime locked in the closet, and the Prime refuses to go back around Marge because she really is a beast.", "He loses his job and the Prime is the one who takes his place.", "He goes to take money out of his accounts, but they are all drained."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the irony at the end of the story?", "question_unique_id": "51321_5ZUMK6QQ_10", "options": ["The narrator's need for an affair makes him lose more than just his marriage.", "The narrator says that husbands just need to be listened to and to feel important.  That is also the only thing that a wife needs, as well. ", "It takes the narrator having multiple affairs to realize that Marge was all he ever needed or wanted.", "The narrator bought the prime to solve his problems, but he just caused him more."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/3/2/51321//51321-h//51321-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "49838", "set_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Jack of No Trades", "year": 1961, "author": "Smith, Evelyn E.", "topic": "Parapsychology -- Fiction; PS; Families -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "Jack of No Trades\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by CAVAT\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nI was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd\n psee otherwise psomeday!\nI walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of\n fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n\n\n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled\n through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"\n\n\n I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"\n\n\n Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"\n\n\n \"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father\n reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe\n telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It\n was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n \"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n\n\n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n \"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n\n\n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level,\n because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n\"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched\n in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way\n upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I\n must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts,\n please.\"\n\n\n She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"\n\n\n I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the\n back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n\n\n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him—\nstop\nhim! He's\n hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n\n\n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it,\n Sylvia.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over\n myself a-tall.\"\n\n\n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned\n woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her\n the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to\n probe anyone without permission.\"\n\n\n \"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father\n suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at\n the cure-all?\"\n\n\n Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times\n and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the\n time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly\n be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a\n machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\nNow that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever\n got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.\n Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents\n these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted\n into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the\n population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't,\n like me—psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no\n physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg\n grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if\n you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.\n\n\n \"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my\n youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n\n\n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I\n must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n\n\n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what\n was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n\n\n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could\n answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she\n called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food\n floating ahead of him.\n\n\n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my\n sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.\n\n\n \"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test\n for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\nI smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who\n really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim.\n I know you're trying to be kind, but—\"\n\n\n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it.\n Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim\n scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his\n extracurricular prognostications too far.\"\n\n\n Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes.\n After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he\n wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather\n Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.\n\n\n Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.\n\n\n Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there\n were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents\n would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of\n their own community standing.\n\n\n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always\n said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take\n care of the house.\"\n\n\n And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a\n techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough,\n those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke\n down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement\n robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a\n constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of\n a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine\n could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of\n my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway,\n they would just do it all over again when they got home.\n\n\n So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to\n take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and\n couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was\n telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even\n if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got\n nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can\n get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a\n hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound\n tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n\n\n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting,\n which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being\n considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't\n even do anything like that.\n\n\n About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were\n out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't\n want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me\n and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they\n were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest\n Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\nI didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of\n attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me\n without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have\n done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.\nI wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago—before people\n started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with\n radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous\n monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been\n latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I\n don't know why I say\nwe\n—in 1960 or so, I might have been considered\n superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.\n\n\n Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything\n useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found\n a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers\n geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the\n time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just\n barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres\n drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive\n had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the\n stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.\n\n\n I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people\n couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running\n around—not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior\n wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent\n in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of\n power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was\n that power?\n\n\n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be,\n explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none\n productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself.\n As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably\n nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative. Yet, from\n time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my\n knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent\n psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?\n\n\n I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people\n liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature.\n Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at\n home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings,\n able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could\n with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more\n sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any\n household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody\n noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness\n as well as extrasensory imbecility.\n\n\n However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.\n\n\n \"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n \"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n\n\n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my\n enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep\n their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n \"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship\n says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and\n left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a\n pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial\n ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n\n\n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"\n\n\n \"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace,\n but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n\n\n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but\n we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military\n techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back\n with reinforcements—if such were its intention—in less than six\n months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though\n we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the\n aliens' armament.\n\n\n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would\n be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits\n of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths\n to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the\n outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the\n first place.\n\n\n Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.\n\n\n \"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.\n\n\n I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever\n worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers\n aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but\n I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman\n abilities—normal human abilities, rather.\n\n\n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so\n strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n\n\n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My\n name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.\n\n\n No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I\n started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed\n when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a\n tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent\n unconcern.\n\n\n \"Hey, quit that!\" the windee yelled. \"You're making it too tight! I'll\n be mortified!\"\n\n\n So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only\n a low-grade telesensitive—just a poetess—so I had nothing to worry\n about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of\n Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she\n got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and\n she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable\n a position herself.\n\n\n However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.\n\n\n She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on—now's your\n chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\nGritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had\n pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the\n right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's\n eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed\n face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as\n if some super-psi had plucked them from me.\n\n\n The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like\n that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I\n wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking\n so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping\n wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not\n even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n\n\n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I\n could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my\n patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound,\n no wound at all—just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole\n again. Not even a scar.\n\n\n \"Wha—wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"\n\n\n He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I\n was frightened, too—too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do\n anything but stare witlessly at him.\n\n\n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing\n astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n\n\n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they\n were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in\n the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and\n shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole\n thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have\n imagined all those horrors.\n\n\n But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them\n almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it.\n There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in\n seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it\n would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n\n\n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and\n I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son—\" and she said\n the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it—\"the\n greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And\n Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.\n\n\n I felt ... well, good.\n\"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my\n mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she\n was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to\n make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n \"The ability to heal\nis\nrecorded in history, only we never paid much\n attention to it.\"\n\n\n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n\n\n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I\n had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch\n of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I\n guess.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's\n probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n\n\n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other\n deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of\n them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive,\n and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and\n effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital\n just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the\n world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise\n the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I\n wouldn't be able to do even that.\n\n\n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but\n Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm\n your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n\n\n I looked at her. \"You are?\"\n\n\n \"I—I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with\n apprehension.\n\n\n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can\n tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to\n say. But right now—\" I clapped her arm—\"there's a job to be done.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have\n time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were\n waiting for me.\n\n\n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough\n sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to\n show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit\n thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those\n powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.\n\n\n I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know\n that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently\n disfigured. In a sense, they were—well, my children; I felt a warm\n glow of affection toward them.\n\n\n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the\n hospital soon leaked out—during all those years of peace, the\n government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets—and\n people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\nThe government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might\n attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on\n Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The\n human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And\n it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than\n they wanted to risk me.\n\n\n Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President,\n generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other\n obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I\n began to love everybody.\n\n\n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\"\n Lucy asked me one day.\n\n\n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that.\n Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n\n\n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are\n you jealous, Lucy?\"\n\n\n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to\n an end, you know, and—\"\n\n\n It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you\n mean—\"\n\n\n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to\n them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to\n have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n\n\n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed\n that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness,\n were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being\n light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off\n and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the\n equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from\n the Centaurians again.\n\n\n Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then\n I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary—only\n the Vice President this time—had thanked me on behalf of a grateful\n country. I wasn't needed any more.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How does Kevin behave in regards to his lack of abilities?", "question_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG_1", "options": ["He is so resentful and angry that he tries to hurt everyone he can to make himself feel better.", "He is and very resentful and angry.  He feels worthless and he knows that he is an embarrassment to his family. ", "He's happy to be without them because he doesn't have as much responsibility as the other members of his family.", "He takes it with a grain of salt.  It doesn't really bother him too much."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Kevin believes that the only time his family is honest about the way they feel about him is", "question_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG_2", "options": ["when they are talking in their sleep, which is a side effect of their powers.", "all the time.  There is no reason for them to be dishonest about their feelings.  He knows that they love him, and they embrace his differences.", "when they are all drunk.  Everyone speaks freely then.", "when he makes them angry."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does his father feel may be a cause for Kevin's lack of powers?", "question_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG_3", "options": ["Something is mentally wrong with him.", "He doesn't think anything is wrong with him.  His father has simply accepted Kevin as he is.", "Something is physically wrong with him.", "He really has powers, he just refuses to let anyone know."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Kevin do for a living?", "question_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG_4", "options": ["He is a doctor.", "He basically just sits at home and monitors the robots to make sure none of them need care.", "He tutors people in reading.", "He works at his mom's practice."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Kevin read so much?", "question_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG_5", "options": ["He has always enjoyed the feel of a book in his hand and the smell of the old paper as he reads. ", "He does it to spite his family.  They disapprove of reading, so he does it to get at them.", "Because he does not have abilities, he cannot receive the television broadcasts, so he has nothing else to do.", "He likes gaining knowledge."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Kevin is probably the only person on the planet who", "question_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG_6", "options": ["does not have any powers.", "is happy that there is going to be a war.", " will never have a girl because of his lack of powers.", "is the sole family member without powers who is part of an entire family with powers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is discovered about Kevin that makes him so special?", "question_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG_7", "options": ["he takes on to becoming a medic naturally, and he becomes very good at it.", "he finds out that he is the only person in the whole world with healing powers.", "he is the only person without powers who is able to make a woman with powers fall in love with him.", "he is the sole family member without powers who is part of an entire family with powers."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to Kevin, he is THE most powerful person in the universe because", "question_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG_8", "options": ["he was able to go from being a complete nothing to the world's answer to all of their turmoil in a short time, and the world cannot make it without him.", "he is part of a family that is powerful, and his newfound talent puts him above the rest.", "all other powers that others possess are meaningless without the essential component of life, and he was a giver of life.", "he can heal.  Period."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Lucy jealous?", "question_unique_id": "49838_LPSQFGUG_9", "options": ["She is jealous that he spends more of his energy working than he does with her.", "She is jealous of Kevin's powers.", "She is jealous of his new nurse.", "She is jealous of his relationship with his family."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/4/9/8/3/49838//49838-h//49838-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "20060", "set_unique_id": "20060_KNL0M1TH", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching", "year": "1997", "author": "Joel Achenbach", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n         As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n         Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n         I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action. \n\n         And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n         Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n         I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership. \n\n         The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n                         1. Don't start thinking like George Will.              \n\n         Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\" \n\n         His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n         So that's the next tip: \n\n                         2. Get more, and bigger, televisions.              \n\n         If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n         Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged. \n\n         \"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n                         3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails.              \n\n         Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n                         4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.              \n\n         (Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n         Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room. \n\n         Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n         Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors. \n\n         \"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n         Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n         The point of all this is: \n\n                         5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the                 name of the \"announcer.\"              \n\n         The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n         In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever. \n\n         In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n         In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n         When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n                         6. Expand your zone of attention.              \n\n         In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n         Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially. \n\n         Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n         \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n         \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n                         7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the                 squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind.              \n\n         Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years: \n\n                         8. Prepare.              \n\n         \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n         It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n         Life is a competition. Be a champion.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does the speaker worry about concerning the amount of sports he watches on television each week?", "question_unique_id": "20060_KNL0M1TH_1", "options": ["He was an athlete in school, and watching too many sporting events tends to put him in depression thinking about what might have been.", "He does not like that it is taking away from his time with his family.", "He has a gambling problem, and the amount of sporting events he watches per week have a direct correlation with the amount of money he ends up losing each week.", "He realizes that the time he spends watching sporting events is not doing anything to help advance his life in any sort of way."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "He vows that he is going to teach his wife and children how to watch sports. How does he follow through with that?", "question_unique_id": "20060_KNL0M1TH_2", "options": ["He encourages his kids to get involved in sports.", "He takes them to several live sporting events.", "He gets experts in the field of sports broadcasting to help shed light on the right way to go about watching a sports program.", "He decides that he will play sports himself so that they will see the value in it.  "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the speaker, in essence, do to watching sports through the actions he takes in regards to discovering the proper way to watch sporting events?", "question_unique_id": "20060_KNL0M1TH_3", "options": ["He finds a way to get his family engaged in watching with him, thus making it more of a family-friendly experience.", "He finds the right formula necessary for all sports viewers to get the most out of their watching experience.", "He makes the experience more exciting because they now understand that in order to really take in an event, it needs to be watched from multiple angles at the same time.", "He has basically taken the fun out of watching sports because he has turned it into some sort of an analytical event rather than an event where people can cut loose and enjoy themselves for a few hours."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the narrator say people enjoy watching sports?", "question_unique_id": "20060_KNL0M1TH_4", "options": ["They are able to enjoy raw barbarism for a few hours.", "They allow for the true competitive spirit to emerge in people.", "They are meaningless and let people escape for a while.", "They like the fact that they are able to see all of the preparation and hard work that goes into every game."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Essentially, those who view sporting events need to", "question_unique_id": "20060_KNL0M1TH_5", "options": ["train for watching an event prior to the event itself and ensure that the conditions for viewing are optimum.", "just sit down and take the game as it comes.  Stop trying to make so much out of it.", "only watch the events with like-minded people, otherwise, the game will more than likely be ruined by the negative energy of the nay-sayers.", "stop.  They rot your brain and waste your time."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "If you are watching a game from home, you ", "question_unique_id": "20060_KNL0M1TH_6", "options": ["you are watching a produced and directed event and only seeing what those behind the camera want you to see.", "are lucky that you don't have to deal with all of the nuts that attend the games live.", "should be ready to analyze the game or else you are a roughing, as sports should not just be about the event itself.  If it is then you need to research the correct way to view an event.", "should use it as family time and bond with your children over the game."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The narrator says that, when you have done your research on a game, then", "question_unique_id": "20060_KNL0M1TH_7", "options": ["you will be able to show everyone how smart you are and wow them by knowing information about the people behind the scenes like the directors and producers of the game.", "you should be more apt to fully enjoy it.", "you really don't even need to watch sports because you are totally defeating the purpose of what it means to watch an event: escaping from reality for a while.", "you are nothing more than a nerd and don't need to watch sports anyway."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the narrator seem to be opposed to watching hockey?", "question_unique_id": "20060_KNL0M1TH_8", "options": ["He can't find anything about the game that makes him feel smarter than everyone else, so it should be avoided.", "He does not want his family to watch a game that erupts in fights so often.", "He believes that the rules don't make sense, so he can't see the point in it.", "He cannot deal with the violence that is associated with the game."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20035", "set_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Masked and the Unmasked", "year": "1999", "author": "David Edelstein", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Masked and the Unmasked \n\n         Paul Thomas Anderson's \n\n               Magnolia                 takes place on a dark night of the soul in the City of Angels. A patriarch is dying. No, hold on, this is a three-hour movie: Two patriarchs are dying. Rich geezer Jason Robards is slipping in and out of a coma on a bed with an oxygen tube up his nose while his minky young wife (Julianne Moore) acts out her despair at losing an old man she thought she'd married for his money. The geezer's nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) listens to his semi-coherent monologues then decides to get in touch with the dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to \"turn women into sperm receptacles\" and to leave behind their \"unmanly\" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this night, since a female TV journalist (April Grace) has uncovered the history he has determinedly concealed and is eating through his mask of machismo on camera. \"We may be through with the past,\" says someone, \"but the past isn't through with us.\" \n\n         The second dying paterfamilias is Philip Baker Hall as the host of a quiz show for bright kids. He bursts in on his estranged daughter (Melora Walters) with news of his imminent demise, but the addled girl for some reason (three guesses) won't have anything to do with him. His visit sends her into a cocaine-snorting frenzy, which is interrupted by a policeman (John C. Reilly) checking out her deafening stereo: \"You've been doing some drugs today?\" After 10 minutes, it isn't clear whether this dweebish flatfoot is interrogating her or trying to ask for a date--or whether he even knows. Meanwhile ( Magnolia could have been titled Meanwhile ), an aging ex-quiz-kid celebrity (William H. Macy) gets fired from his job and goes looking for the love he never had, while a contemporary quiz-kid celebrity (Jeremy Blackman) tries to make his father (Michael Bowen) understand that he wants to be loved for himself and not his TV achievements--even if that means peeing in his pants on-camera. \n\n         What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything. \n\n         OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything. \n\n         What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion. \n\n         The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin. \n\n         The title card of                    The Talented Mr. Ripley                 is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs. \n\n         Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on. \n\n         Minghella is a thoughtful man and a snazzy craftsman, but by the end of Ripley , I wasn't sure what had attracted him to this material. What does a vaguely masochistic humanist see in Patricia Highsmith? The novel's Ripley (and the Ripley of René Clément's 1960 Purple Noon , Alain Delon) isn't so palpably out of his depth. With a bit of polish he can pass for a playboy, and the bad fun is watching him do anything to keep from accepting the swinish Dickie's view of him as an eternal loser. Damon's Ripley is an eternal loser, an anti-chameleon, and so conscientiously dreary that he lets Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic little melodrama needs. He's trying to inflate it into tragedy, where Highsmith's setups are too cold and shallow to be tragic. The old biddy herself would have thought this ending stinks. \n\n         Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head. \n\n         That whole act is reproduced in the funny, frustrating Kaufman biopic                    Man on the Moon                , but not on the Tonight Show . Kaufman (Jim Carrey) does it onstage at a tiny club. We don't know where it came from or what the thinking was behind it. He brings down the house (lots of shots of people smiling and laughing), then goes out for a drink with a potential manager (Danny DeVito), who tells him, \"You're insane--but you might also be brilliant.\" That's about as close to analysis as the picture gets. \n\n         As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It meshed with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) but seemed odd with Mozart ( Amadeus , 1984) and disastrous with Valmont ( Valmont , 1989). With Andy Kaufman, it seems not so much wrong as beside the point. Where did the rage in Kaufman come from, and at what point did it kill the comedy? More important: Did Kaufman himself consider some of his experiments failures, or had his aesthetic finally become so punk/pro-wrestling that he thought driving people crazy was enough? As Jared Hohlt  in                    Slate                , the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical synthesis of warmth and aggression--and then gets cut down at his prime. That's not just bogus; it's false to the conflicts that ate Kaufman alive. \n\n         The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's \"channeling\" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light. \n\n         Anyone who reads                    Angela's Ashes                 is torn down the middle--appalled by the misery and deaths of small children and yet exhilarated, even turned on, by the cadences of Frank McCourt. His alcoholic father starved him of real food but filled his head with the kind of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it turns into a lifeless slide show. There's no flow, no connective tissue between episodes. After the 80 th teensy scene goes by, you realize the movie isn't just botched: It doesn't even exist. Emily Watson suffers prettily, but whatever she's thinking stays in her head, and Robert Carlyle is so mopily present that you don't have a clue why such an earnest fellow would drink so many lives away. (The horror of the father McCourt describes is that he's not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?\n", "questions": [{"question": "According to the narrator, how does the director get an honest performance out of Tom Cruise?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R_1", "options": ["He basically allows Cruise to do as he pleases.  He is a natural actor, and he does not need much in the way of direction.", "He allows Cruise to adlib the entire piece, thus allowing him to act like his natural self.", "He turns Cruise's natural mannerisms into his character's actual personality.", "He doesn't.  The last time Cruise gave a real performance was on Oprah's couch."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to the narrator, _____ could quite possibly be the death of the characters.", "question_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R_2", "options": ["aloneness", "being detached ", "selfishness", "sadness"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to the narrator, who is a better Mr. Ripley and why?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R_3", "options": ["The novel's Ripley is more believable because he is more believable than Damon because the novel's character seems to fit in and not be a huge loser like the way Damon portrays him to be.", "Neither because Ripley is just not a good character.", "They are equally matched, and Damon plays him exactly right.", "Damon's Ripley is more believable because he is more believable than the novel's character because Damon's Ripley seems to fit in and not be a huge loser like the way the novel portrays him to be."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Andy Kaufman original as a comedian?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R_4", "options": ["He could make Johnny Carson laugh and impress him, which was no easy feat.", "He was someone who could be classified along with the likes of Jim Carrey is not often someone like that comes along.", "He did great impressions that no one else could pull off.", "You never knew who he was going to be from one moment to the next, and he was convincing at whomever he was being at the time."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the narrator say is incorrect about Kaufman's biopic?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R_5", "options": ["The movie shows that he was more into comedy than wrestling, but it was actually the other way around.", "The way that he is portrayed as being such an off-the-wall comedian.  He wasn't as humorous as he was depicted to be.", "The movie shows that he died at the peak of his career, but in actuality, he died at a very strange time in his career, and it could have been the point where he actually began to fail.", "Kaufman was really a sad man, not the way they showed him to be in the movie."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the narrator seem to think about Jim Carrey as Kaufman?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R_6", "options": ["Carrey did a decent job, but they could have gone with a better actor more suited for serious roles.", "He did an amazing job, almost as though he embodied Kaufman throughout the movie.", "He does not understand how \"The Cable Guy\" could have been chosen to portray such a comedy legend.  Carrey was a joke.", "Carrey was awful.  He is a hit-and-miss actor at best, and this was a miss."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the narrator's opinion of Angela's Ashes? ", "question_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R_7", "options": ["He thought that it was amazing, and it accurately depicted the horrible life McCourt lived during his childhood.", "With the talented actors in the movie, it was set up to be great, but it didn't sing like McCort's prose.", "He was hoping for more because the memoir was great.", "He thought that the movie was garbage, and it was a disgrace to the book."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who steps in and saves the characters in Magnolia?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R_8", "options": ["The police officer played by John C. Riley.", "A hero who remains anonymous throughout the story.", "Family.", "Tom Cruise's character."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Ripley end up going to find Dickie?", "question_unique_id": "20035_7OXXZ40R_9", "options": ["He is in love with Dickie, and he goes to find him to let him know his true feelings.", "He passes himself off as one of Dickie's former classmates from Prinston, and Dickie's father sends Ripley to find him.", "He volunteers to go find him because he sees it as an opportunity to travel.", "He is a private detective, and he is hired to find Dickie."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20049", "set_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "If At First You Don't Secede", "year": "1997", "author": "Alex Heard", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "If At First You Don't Secede \n\n                         Forget the Alamo!              \n\n         This sounds crass, but I can't deny it: I desperately wanted the standoff at the Republic of Texas trailer-trash compound to last longer than it did--for selfish reasons. \n\n         Not weeks longer, mind you. Just a few hours. Just long enough for me to get there . Having missed all the famous government vs. fringe standoffs--Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Montana Freemen--I was determined to go and bear witness this time. I would find out at last if mysterious U.N.-dispatched \"black helicopters\" really buzz around at these things like giant hell-spawned bumblebees. I would document the local movements of guts-and-glory militia reinforcements. (A militia offensive of some sort was widely rumored on the Net, where one rabid militia man wrote: \"WE HAVE HAD A BELLY FULL OF THE FBI, BATF, DEA, ETC. ETC. ... Lock and Load, prepare to Rock and Roll.\") It sounds silly now, but militia trouble did seem plausible at Fort Davis. Wednesday, April 30, three days after the siege began, several heavily armed Republic of Texas members were apprehended at a truck stop near Pecos, Texas, about 90 miles from the action. \n\n         Alas, none of it was to be. I took off from Newark, N.J., at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, May 3. After landing in El Paso, I called a militia contact who had agreed to ask around about possible right-wing bivouacs. (I even brought camping gear!) Things looked \"hot\" when I left--from inside his \"embassy,\" ROT leader Richard McLaren was busily faxing out apocalyptic maydays--but his hot blood turned to pink Jell-O. \n\n         \"Hey!\" said my contact. \"Guess you heard. It's over.\" \n\n         \"What? No! McLaren was talking so tough.\" \n\n         \"Well, he came out.\" \n\n         While I groaned, he described the final hours. McLaren had swallowed the old negotiator's bait of surrender \"with honor.\" The lawmen treated him like the head of a brave conquered nation. He would be allowed to press in court his claim that the Republic of Texas had been illegally annexed by the United States in 1845. Then he would go to jail for many years. Not the best of deals, but he obviously preferred it to Plan B: getting shot. \n\n          Irented a car and putted around morosely, listening to the radio and mulling over my options. Texas lawmen were boasting, justifiably, about the happy outcome. Yes, there was one tiny glitch--two ROT activists had somehow slipped away--but that was no problem. A drawling official said these fugitives were not experienced in the back country, so they would be easy pickings. For my part, I knew there would be little left to see. The militia would \"stand down.\" Even the trailer compound--which had been tricked out with Swiss Family Robinson-style self-defense gizmos--was still off-limits to the media. \n\n         There was, however, one notable event left: Sunday, members of the other factions of the Republic of Texas were holding a big rally in Kilgore, to make clear that the movement would live on. (The republic, as you probably know, contains three competing clans.) I unfolded my map. Hmmm. Kilgore was way over by Louisiana. Even at 75 miles per hour, I could count on driving at least 12 hours, making it just in time for the opening gavel at 1 p.m. \n\n         Was it worth it? \n\n         No, but what else could I do--go see the Carlsbad Caverns? I buckled up and hit the road. \n\n                         My Countries, Right or Wrong              \n\n         The trip was worth it, at least in terms of understanding what motivates Republic of Texas believers. What motivates them is: They're nuts. All of them. \n\n         That word is somewhat loaded, so I should be more precise. ROT members are nuts like the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels were nuts. They don't drool or wear their shirts backward, but they do expend insane amounts of energy on ridiculous \"politics,\" dissipating most of it through meaningless infighting and petty posturing. Are they evil, hateful nuts? No. I kind of liked most of them. They would be fun people to go fishing with. \n\n          Unfortunately, they have this other hobby: seceding from the union. And, being Texans, they have enough guns and ammo to potentially make matters not so cute. Most non-McLarian ROT members publicly disavow violence, but the possibility always lurks. Groups like the Republic of Texas exist in a murky gray zone where relatively harmless right-wing bigmouths meet the frightening shriekers of renegade militias, raising the question: At what point does nutty end and scary begin? \n\n          You can never tell, but Richard Keyes III is a good example of how quickly A can become Z. Keyes is the 21-year-old McLaren follower who actually carried out the kidnapping and shooting that started the whole Fort Davis mess. He's originally from Kansas--so, to find out more about him, I called a county police detective there who tracks the far right. He'd heard of him only once, in a nutty-but-funny context. Keyes filed papers earlier this year demanding that Kansas return portions of the state to the rightful ownership of the Republic of Texas. Tee-hee. Next thing you know, however, he emerged as a serious shoot-'em-up guy. \n\n         As for the meeting, it was simply funny-nutty, but it became all too clear that the republic's separatist fantasies will live on. A few hundred boisterous Texans--mostly men, middle-aged or above, with a fair number of angry young rednecks and dotty old women--filled the cramped banquet room of a run-down motor lodge in \"downtown\" Kilgore. Crowding one side of a long dais were frowning representatives of the two non-McLarian Republics of Texas. One is headed by David Johnson of Odessa, Texas. He didn't show up, but some of his \"council\" members did--they were gray, natty, and grumpy, like Baptist deacons. The other faction is under the sway of Archie Lowe, a long-haired guy who looks like an amiable Harley rider and whose followers are a tiny bit more young and with-it. The Archies' current agenda includes a quest for \"international recognition\" and the convening of a \"Constitutional Convention\" this July. \n\n         The meeting itself was extremely hard to follow. After generic introblab, the floor was opened to \"the people,\" a platoon of Brave New World Epsilons who lined up behind a floor microphone and took turns huffing and ranting. Among the highlights: \n\n         A very pale young man stood up and said that Judgment Day was coming unless the Republic of Texas succeeded. Then he started crying. \n\n         A stocky guy in a red shirt and a Republic of Texas cap stood and dramatically announced that he was the driver of one of the two vehicles detained by authorities in Pecos. It was all a gross injustice, of course. Yes, he and four ROT colleagues were traveling with full packs, semiautomatic weapons, pistols, radios, and plenty of ammo, but he said they were merely going to Kermit, Texas, to \"hunt wild hogs.\" But Pecos is not on the way if you're going to Kermit from Garland. I asked him later: Why was he there? \"I was curious about what was going on,\" he said. \"On a personal level.\" \n\n         A gap-toothed old woman yelped that the federal government is \"getting boxcars prepared with some kind of leg irons in 'em to fasten you into place to ship you to concentration camps.\" \n\n          OK, perhaps quoting the old woman is a cheap shot. Then again, I heard similar effusions from a high official--Jim Warmke, a wiry, sun-burnished old guy in a mustard-colored Western suit who serves as \"secretary of commerce and trade\" for the Branch McLarian remnant. I liked Jim, and I just hope his nuttiness stays \"funny,\" but I have to wonder. When we met he extended a huge sandpapery hand and said: \"Howdy! Jim Warmke. W-A-R-M-K-E. Hot lock, warm key.\" We talked about McLaren--\"The man is a genius; he has a 160 IQ\"--and I raised the question of violence. Given that the federal government and the state are always and forever going to kick ass in U.S. vs. Republic confrontations, when would a patriot like Jim feel justified in picking up a gun and charging? \n\n         And with such overwhelming odds, why would he do that? \n\n         \"You'll not know how close some came,\" he said eerily. \"I can tell you that the militias have but one methodology in mind. They do not intend to assemble 10-, 20-, 50,000 armed men in one spot and allow napalm to destroy them! There is a tactic called 'targets of availability.' What that means is ... Your interpretation would be terrorism. There is no one that can control that. There is no government could control that.\" \n\n         Bomb talk! Did he hear about specific targeted sites? \n\n         \"I have suspicions, but I'll not answer that based on suspicions.\" \n\n         After Jim left, two Archie-faction ROT men scurried over and nervously assured me that Jim was a kook. Great. Why didn't I feel reassured? \n\n                         The Joke Stops Here              \n\n         Monday, I finally visited Fort Davis on the way back to El Paso, just to get a feel for the place. Things sounded quite sparky on the radio. Early that morning, reports said that someone fired at the bloodhounds, and that lawmen were closing in. I arrived about 2 p.m. and roosted for a while by the police roadblock at the entrance to the Davis Mountain Resort subdivision. In the distance rose the stark, rocky, mesquite-covered peaks that define this area. A couple of dozen sunburned, siege-weary reporters were hanging around in cars, and one explained that the resort itself was miles and miles away. Whatever was happening, we wouldn't be able to see it or hear it. \n\n         I took off and stopped for gas in the nearby town of Valentine. Inside I met an old codger named Clifford Beare, who had recently retired from the Jeff Davis County sheriff's department. I asked him if it would be hard for runaways to hide in treeless mountains. \n\n         \"Well, I guess, but you could hide. There's a lot of caves and stuff.\" \n\n         Did he think these guys would get caught? \n\n         \"I think they will,\" he said. \"Yes I do.\" \n\n          He was half right. About that time one fugitive, believed to be Mike Matson, was getting shot to death in a gun battle. The other, Keyes, appears to have got away, and Tuesday, the authorities scaled back the search for him, making vague noises about the terrain and wild animals finishing him off. \"He can ... only have a finite amount of food and water,\" said Mike Cox, who has been the state's spokesman throughout the siege. \n\n         What? Of all these people, Keyes is the only survivor who demands to be taken seriously. He started the violence; he never gave up; and he went out ready to blast away and die. They better hope something gets him, because if he does stagger out of those mountains alive, he's going to be biblically, nuttily, and unfunnily pissed.\n", "questions": [{"question": "The narrator was hoping for the stand-off to last a bit longer out of selfishness.  How does he support his reasoning?", "question_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32_1", "options": ["He missed witnessing all of the other worthwhile government standoffs, he simply did not want to miss this little piece of history.", "He has missed the majority of historical occurrences because they happened before he was born.", "if the standoff is still occurring when he gets there, then he might get some much-needed time away from home, depending on how long the standoff lasts.", "If the standoff is occurring when he gets there, he will have something to bolster his career,"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How is McLaren treated by the police officials who take him in?", "question_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32_2", "options": ["They treat him poorly, and they make fun of his ideals.", "He was treated like some sort of folk hero, and he was treated very well.", "They beat him within an inch of his life \"on accident,\" but it was really because he put all of their lives in danger.", "They simply did their jobs. no more, no less."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why do the officials believe that the escapees will not be hard to locate?", "question_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32_3", "options": ["The two who escaped cannot stay away from the spotlight that long, even if it means that they will go to prison.", "The two men were inexperienced survivalists, so they did not stand much of a chance.", "The two who escaped cannot stay away from their families for too long, so they will be headed home sooner rather than later.", "The law officials were planning to go in after them, and they are very familiar with the terrain."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Even though the narrator misses the standoff, what does he have an opportunity to attend?", "question_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32_4", "options": ["He has a chance to go to a rally hosted by the ROT.", "He can go visit the ROT members in jail.", "the court proceedings for the ROT members.", "He has the chance to go to an interview with all those involved."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the conclusion he draws about all of the members of the ROT?", "question_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32_5", "options": ["They are all friendly people who are very knowledgeable about why they believe Texas should still be declared a republic.", "They are a sad group of individuals who make an even more sad faction.", "They don't really have the convictions that they claim to have.  They are just attention seakers.", "They are all crazy as they can be;"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the irony about Richard Keys?", "question_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32_6", "options": ["He is fighting for the ROT and he's not even from Texas.", "He is too young to be caught up in all of this craziness, but his father has pulled him into the lifestyle.  He has no say over his life.", "He is the most dangerous one of the bunch, and he is not even arrested.", "He is taking the fall for others, and he really didn't do enough to get into trouble."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the narrator call the meeting \"funny-nutty?\"", "question_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32_7", "options": ["It's funny to see grown men cry over being so impassioned on a topic that will amount to absolutely nothing.", "The guy who speaks about getting arrested for carrying weapons yet takes no responsibility for his actions is the craziest, funniest thing the narrator has ever heard in his entire life.", "The people tell jokes in between speakers.  The speakers are nutty, and the jokes are funny.", "They are all a bunch of nuts, and you cannot take a thing they say seriously."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Warnke believe that the narrator will think of the plans they have in order to get Texas back where she belongs?", "question_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32_8", "options": ["He believes the narrator will not take it seriously until he sees the plan in action.", "He believes that the narrator won't take any stock in it one way or the other, so it doesn't really matter.", "He believes the narrator will see it as an actor of terrorism.", "He believes that the narrator will believe that the plan is dangerous and will report them for the plot."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the narrator afraid will happen if Keyes does, in fact, make it out of hiding?", "question_unique_id": "20049_30HAGE32_9", "options": ["Keyes will try to do his best to put an end to the ROT once and for all.", "If he makes it out, he will come out pissed and ready to take revenge.", "He is the most dangerous of all of the people involved, so he does not want to really even think of the devastation that could be caused.", "Keyes will not make it out alive, as the authorities will make sure of it."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20057", "set_unique_id": "20057_0LTJ2MOU", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "Big-Bang Theology", "year": "1998", "author": "Jim Holt", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Big-Bang Theology \n\n         Did God cause the big bang? That is what half a dozen new books about science and religion--whose authors range from a Reagan-administration official to an Israeli physicist to an elementary-particle-theorist-turned-Anglican-priest--are saying. The fact that the universe abruptly exploded into existence out of apparent nothingness some 15 billion years ago, they submit, means it must have had a supernatural creator. A couple of months ago the same claim was enthusiastically aired at a Washington conference sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center under the rubric \"Beyond the Death of God,\" with eminent thinkers such as Fred Barnes, Mona Charen, and Elliott Abrams in attendance. And the idea received a sympathetic hearing on William F. Buckley's show Firing Line a few weeks ago .              \n\n         The idea that only God could have caused the big bang is scarcely new. In fact, the big bang is probably the only idea in the history of science that was ever resisted because of its pro-God import. \n\n         For much of the modern era, scientists followed Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton in believing the cosmos to be eternal and unchanging. But in 1917, when Albert Einstein applied his theory of relativity to space-time as a whole, his equations implied that the universe could not be static; it must be either expanding or contracting. This struck Einstein as grotesque, so he added to his theory a fiddle factor called the \"cosmological constant\" that eliminated the implication and held the universe still. \n\n         It was an ordained priest who took relativity to its logical conclusion. In 1927, Georges Lemaître of the University of Louvain in Belgium worked out an expanding model of the universe. Reasoning backward, he proposed that at some definite point in the past it must have originated from a primeval atom of infinitely concentrated energy. Two years later, Lemaître's model was confirmed by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who had observed that the galaxies everywhere around us were receding. Both theory and empirical evidence pointed to the same verdict: The universe had an abrupt beginning in time. \n\n          Churchmen rejoiced. Proof of the biblical account of creation had dropped into their laps. Pope Pius XII, opening a conference at the Vatican in 1951, declared that this scientific theory of cosmic origins bore witness \"to that primordial 'Fiat lux ' uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation. ... Hence, creation took place in time, therefore there is a creator, therefore God exists!\" \n\n         Marxists, meanwhile, gnashed their teeth. Quite aside from its religious aura, the new theory contradicted their belief in the infinity and eternity of matter--one of the axioms of Lenin's dialectical materialism--and was accordingly dismissed as \"idealistic.\" The Marxist physicist David Bohm rebuked the developers of the theory as \"scientists who effectively turn traitor to science, and discard scientific facts to reach conclusions that are convenient to the Catholic Church.\" Atheists of a non-Marxist stripe were also recalcitrant. \"Some younger scientists were so upset by these theological trends that they resolved simply to block their cosmological source,\" commented the German astronomer Otto Heckmann, a prominent investigator of cosmic expansion. The dean of the profession, Sir Arthur Eddington, wrote, \"The notion of a beginning is repugnant to me ... I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang. ... The expanding Universe is preposterous ... incredible ... it leaves me cold .\" \n\n         Even some believing scientists were troubled. The cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle simply felt that an explosion was an undignified way for the world to begin, rather like \"a party girl jumping out of a cake.\" In a BBC interview in the 1950s, Hoyle sardonically referred to the hypothesized origin as \"the big bang.\" The term stuck. \n\n         Einstein overcame his metaphysical scruples about the big bang not long before his death in 1955, referring to his earlier attempt to dodge it by an ad hoc theoretical device as \"the greatest blunder of my career.\" As for Hoyle and the rest of the skeptics, they were finally won over in 1965, when two scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey accidentally detected a pervasive microwave hiss that turned out to be the echo of the big bang (at first they thought it was caused by pigeon droppings on their antenna). If you turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white-speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the cosmogonic event. What greater proof of the reality of the big bang--you can watch it on television! \n\n         Since the '60s, scientists have been busy working out, and feuding over, the details of the big-bang cosmology. But God is not in the details--his existence is deducible from the mere fact that there is a world at all. So goes the cosmological argument , one of the three traditional arguments toward a Supreme Being. (Click to read the ontological argument and the teleological argument .) \n\n          The reasoning starts off like this: \n\n         1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.              \n\n         2) The universe began to exist.              \n\n         3) Therefore the universe has a cause of its existence. (Click to learn more about the surprising Islamic origins of this argument and what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say about it.) \n\n         There are many options for attacking the logic of this cosmological argument, and contemporary opponents of theism have tried them all. \n\n         If everything needs a cause for its existence, then so does God. (More frequently heard in the form \"But Mummy, who made God?\") This objection fails because it gets Premise 1 wrong. The premise does not say that everything needs a cause but that everything that begins to exist does. God never began to exist--he is eternal. So he does not need a cause for his existence. \n\n                         Maybe the universe had a natural cause. But the big bang could not have been caused by prior physical processes. That is because it began with pointlike singularity , which, according to relativity theory, is not a \"thing\" but a boundary or an edge in time. Since no causal lines can be extended through it, the cause of the big bang must transcend the physical world. \n\n          Well, then, perhaps it had no cause at all. It is hard to think of a principle more amply confirmed by our experience than that things do not just pop into existence uncaused. No one can really pull a rabbit out of a hat. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Yet something of the sort does seem to happen in the quantum world, where, owing to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, tiny \"virtual particles\" spontaneously appear and disappear all the time. An entire universe could do the same, claim some cosmologists. Calling themselves \"nothing theorists,\" they have produced models showing how the cosmos could have burst into being all by itself out of a patch of \"false vacuum,\" or a 3-D geometry of zero volume, or--in the case of Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University--literally nothing at all (this took Vilenkin four pages of math). So the universe is summoned out of the void by the laws of physics. But this can't be right. The laws of physics are just a set of equations, a mathematical pattern. They cannot cause the world to exist. As Stephen Hawking has written, \"A scientific theory ... exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean).\" \n\n                         Just because the universe is temporally finite does not mean it had a beginning. Speaking of Hawking, this is his famous \"no boundary\" proposal. \"So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator,\" Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time . \"But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning or end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?\" In Hawking's quantum cosmology, the pointlike singularity of the big bang is replaced by a smooth hemisphere in which space and time are commingled. \"Time zero\" becomes an arbitrary point, not a true beginning; it is no more a boundary than the North Pole is. \n\n         Hawking's proposal is extremely popular with laymen who are hostile to the cosmological argument, judging from the mail I get. Apparently they enjoy being baffled by \"imaginary time,\" a theoretical fiction Hawking uses to redescribe the big bang so that there is no beginning. In real time there still is a beginning. Sometimes Hawking says that imaginary time is \"earlier\" than real time, which is a logical contradiction; sometimes he suggests it might be more real than real time, which is an absurdity. \n\n         OK, so the universe had a beginning, and hence a First Cause, which is, moreover, transcendent. How does it follow that this cause is God, or even God-like? Now there is an acute question. Philosopher Thomas Nagel has suggested that something humanly inconceivable lies behind the big bang. What, if anything, can really be inferred about the First Cause? Well, suppose that it were something mechanical. An ideal machine produces its effect either always or never; it does not just suddenly start to operate at some moment, unless someone gives it a kick. If a mechanical cause produced the universe at time T, there is no reason it should not have done so at time T minus 1. The argument can be repeated to T minus infinity: A mechanical cause would have either produced the universe from eternity or not at all. But the universe was created at one moment out of an infinity of other indistinguishable moments. This implies that the moment was freely chosen, and hence that the creator had a will, and to that extent a personal nature. And power. \n\n         Yet the big-bang cosmology has one unwelcome consequence for theists. It seems to suggest that the Creator was a bungler. A singularity is inherently lawless. Anything at all can come out of one. It is exceedingly unlikely that a big-bang singularity should give rise to a universe whose conditions are precisely suitable for life, let alone the best of all possible worlds. As the American philosopher Quentin Smith has pointed out, \"If God created the universe with the aim of making it animate, it is illogical that he would have created as its first state something whose natural evolution would lead with high probability only to inanimate states .\" The only way God could have ensured the appearance of creatures in his own image was by repeatedly intervening and making adjustments to steer the evolution of the world away from lifeless disaster. But \"a competent Creator does not create things he immediately or subsequently needs to set aright,\" observes Smith. (Remember, we are talking about the universe's physical infrastructure, not sinners with free will.) \n\n         So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil's Bible . Turning to Genesis I read: \"In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "What helps to support the idea that God actually was the cause of the Big Bang Theory?", "question_unique_id": "20057_0LTJ2MOU_1", "options": ["God is \"the cause\" of everything.  Period", "All of the brilliant scientific minds support the theory that God did, in fact, cause the Big Bang.", "Because the universe exploded into existence, something supernatural had to be behind it, hence God caused it.", "Science and religion are finally starting to see eye to eye on most things when it comes to creation."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is unique about the Big Bang Theory in relation to the Christian religion?", "question_unique_id": "20057_0LTJ2MOU_2", "options": ["It is the only scientific theory to have no opinion as far as religion is concerned.", "It is the only scientific theory that opposes Christian beliefs.", "The Big Band is definitive proof that God created the universe without any debate.", "It is the only respected scientific theory that seems to go hand and hand with Christianity."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What did Hubble have to add to the theory? ", "question_unique_id": "20057_0LTJ2MOU_3", "options": ["He had \"no dog in the fight,\" so he had no opinion one way or the other.", "The universe seemed to appear out of no where.", "God created the universe without a doubt.", "He believed that the telescope he invented could catch a glimpse of heaven, given credence to the theory that God and the Big Bang go hand in hand,"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The theory that Poe presented in the 50s basically said:", "question_unique_id": "20057_0LTJ2MOU_4", "options": ["Scientists are only there to do satan's work.", "No scientist will ever believe in a religious view in regards to the origins of the universe.", "Because creation took place in time, there had to be a creator, and that creator is God.", "No one should be debating this issue.  God created the universe just as the Bible states."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What problems do Marxists have with the new opinion that God created the universe through the Big Bang?", "question_unique_id": "20057_0LTJ2MOU_5", "options": ["They have no problems with it at all, as it just proves that scientists simply stick with the science, regardless of what it may prove in the end.", "It blows away their theory that the universe has gone on for infinity and was not simply created.", "There should only be a \"now,\" not a beginning.", "They decided that they were no longer going to dwell on creation."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who is of the school of thought that those tying the Big Bang theory to religion and God creating the universe were, in effect, turning their back on science and just doing the church's bidding?", "question_unique_id": "20057_0LTJ2MOU_6", "options": ["Hubble.", "Einstein.", "The Marxists.", "Creationists"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the title \"Big Bang\" come about?", "question_unique_id": "20057_0LTJ2MOU_7", "options": ["Einstein compared the idea to someone jumping out of a cake.", "Einstein said that is the sound that must have been made when the universe was created.", "Sir Fred Hoyle said that is the sound that must have been made when the universe was created.", "Sir Fred Hoyle compared the idea to someone jumping out of a cake."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is white noise from television in reality?", "question_unique_id": "20057_0LTJ2MOU_8", "options": ["something interfering with the antenna's signal.", "People trying to connect from the other side, which has been proven through this theory.", "part of it is the residual effects of the bang.", "interference with microwaves."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20062", "set_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "Eyes on the Prize", "year": "1998", "author": "David Edelstein", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Eyes on the Prize \n\n         These days, studios are inordinately attentive to my viewing habits. As a member of the National Society of Film Critics, which votes a slate of year-end prizes, I'm fielding calls from eager publicists who want to make sure I've seen all those award-worthy movies featuring all those award-worthy performances. I've tried to stay mum, so as to keep my voting options open, but it's hard for a guy brimming with opinions to be circumspect. Beloved ? A worthy effort. Oprah? Worthiness incarnate; I feel unworthy even to sit in judgment. Meryl Streep in Dancing at Lughnasa ? Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters ? Leonardo DiCaprio in Celebrity ? Damn worthy actors. (I enthused about DiCaprio when the sour Celebrity opened the New York Film Festival in September; since it shows up in theaters this week, you might want to click here so that I don't have to quote myself.) \n\n         Streep should be awarded a rubber chicken for irradiating us with her yokel devotion in One True Thing (1998), but in Dancing at Lughnasa she goes a long way toward winning back her good (well, pretty good) name. As Kate Mundy, the stick-in-the-mud schoolteacher who presides over four younger, unmarried sisters in 1936 Donegal, Ireland, she holds her facial muscles tense and signals with her eyes her exhaustion from keeping them so fiercely in place. It is a terrible responsibility, upholding her society's values and preventing her siblings and Michael, the illegitimate son of her youngest sister, Christina (Catherine McCormack), from descending into chaos and impoverishment. Not to mention the fact that she's regarded by all as a stupid goose--or, as they call her in town, mocking her sexlessness, \"the gander.\" \n\n         Streep's performance is layered and compelling, but the film doesn't click. Closely based on Brian Friel's play, it wilts in translation the way Friel's potent but static dramas always do. On stage, every character, every prop, every interjection has a precise symbolic function; on film, those elements no longer stand out in relief. In Dancing at Lughnasa (it's pronounced LOO-nassa), the sisters reside in a sterile and repressive Ireland--but one in which the pagan past continues to bubble up, most visibly in the harvest feast of Lughnasa, when peasants take to the hills to build fires, drink to even greater excess than usual, and dance orgiastically. The rite is liberating but also frightening: Remove a cork from a bottle so pressurized, and the contents are apt to explode. \n\n         The story, narrated by the now-grown Michael in the shopworn manner of The Glass Menagerie , is set in motion by the return of the boy's Uncle Jack (Michael Gambon) from Africa, where he has toiled as a missionary priest. Delusional, barely remembering his English, Jack becomes a rambling (and, to the local priest, horrific) spokesman for paganism, encouraging all his sisters to emulate Christina and have \"children of love.\" \n\n          There isn't much else in the way of a plot. Kate's position at the school, which is overseen by the local priest, is imperiled by the subversive presence of her brother. Michael's handsome dad (Rhys Ifans) roars back on a motorcycle to flirt with marriage to Christina: Will he stay or go fight the Fascists in Spain? Each sister chafes in her own way under Kate's oppressive rule--especially Rose (Sophie Thompson), the \"simple\" one, who might or might not be having an affair with a man whose wife and children have abandoned him for London. A weaving factory is opening nearby and threatens the household income. In venerable Chekhovian fashion, what happens on the surface only hints at the titanic plates that shift beneath, but the actresses--especially Streep, Thompson, Kathy Burke, and Brid Brennan--are supreme at conveying what's at stake. They create an indelibly glowering ensemble. \n\n         So why isn't Dancing at Lughnasa more involving? It's probably because the director, Pat O'Connor, can't tell the difference between images that express Friel's themes and Hibernian wallpaper, and because his idea of expansive, pictorial beauty proves no substitute for Friel's powerfully compressed stage pictures. In the theater, the radio that crackles on and off signals a world elsewhere; and when it's repaired and the stage is flooded with music and the sisters--beaten down, confronted with only the grimmest of economic and social prospects--begin to dance and then lose themselves in the freedom of the dance, the moment is truly cathartic. On-screen it means the movie's almost over. \n\n         People think I'm kidding when I say that my favorite film is The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but I can't imagine how I'd have survived an especially grisly puberty without the comfort of watching Boris Karloff express his anguish to an uncomprehending world through a misshapen body and halting language. Few films have ever offered so inspired a blend of sentimentality, Grand Guignol horror, and sophisticated camp, or such deliriously inventive laboratory bric-a-brac. The film's director, James Whale, has long been venerated for this and other droll '30s entertainments, among them The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933). Lately, he has also been scrutinized for being openly homosexual in an era when gay directors, such as George Cukor, kept that part of their lives rigidly compartmentalized. But not even David Ehrenstein in his trenchantly gossipy new book on the Hollywood closet, Open Secret , wants to make the case that Whale was penalized for his sexual preferences. If anything, the director seems to have suffered from a surfeit of dignity, proving too proud to overcome the loss of a powerful patron and a couple of ambitious flops. Comfortably rich, he took to painting and traveling before a series of strokes drove him to drown himself in his swimming pool--a suicide, though that fact was concealed from the public for 25 years. \n\n                         Gods and Monsters , based on Father of Frankenstein , a novel by Christopher Bram, explores the last days of the director (Ian McKellen) through the prism of a (fictional) friendship with a handsome, muscular, and heterosexual groundskeeper, Boone (Brendan Fraser). Critics have been unanimous in predicting statuettes in McKellen's future. Why? The movie is psychologically thin, artistically flabby, and symbolically opaque. Whale's Frankenstein films weren't personal testaments, but in Gods and Monsters they're raided for murky fantasy sequences. In one, the groundskeeper is the monster staggering around with Whale in his arms; in another, Whale is laid out on a laboratory slab being operated on by the groundskeeper. What's the metaphor? The script, meanwhile, is the stuff of bad two character plays, with spurious excuses for conflict (Boone storms out when Whale speaks tenderly of the naked, young men who once populated his pool) and a long, climactic monologue about a (fictional) wartime trauma that ostensibly shocked Whale into keeping his past under wraps. In Bram's novel, Boone is vaguely dangerous, a plausible suspect in Whale's death, but Fraser plays him (ingratiatingly) as a lovable lunk, and the conception removes whatever tension the material might have had. \n\n         As Whale, McKellen wears his elegance lightly. His face is fascinatingly two tiered: lean in long shot, in close-up its features distend to the point of acromegaly, the mouth going slack with lust. But Whale's plangent ruminations are slack as well: \"I've spent much of my life outrunning the past, and now it floods all over,\" he tells Boone, in what is surely the most generic line for a \"memory play\" ever written. \"Something about your face makes me want to tell the truth.\" All this mawkishness would likely have annoyed the real Whale, who exited the world on his own terms and steered clear, in his art, of banality. \n\n         W>aking Ned Devine is this year's stab at The Full Monty (1997), which made more than $100 million and even snagged an Oscar nomination. Set in a quaint olde Irish seacoast village, it tells the story of an elderly lottery player, Jackie O'Shea (Ian Bannen), who learns that one of his fifty-odd neighbors holds the winning ticket to a 7 million pound drawing. By a process of elimination, he and his buddy Michael O'Sullivan (David Kelly) end up at the remote stone house of Ned Devine--whom they find dead in his armchair with the ticket between his fingers, the shock of his windfall having felled him. As Devine has no living relations, it makes sense for the impoverished old men to cook up a scheme by which Michael will assume the dead fisherman's identity, and the pair will divide the money between themselves. \n\n         It was no surprise to read that Kirk Jones, the film's writer and director, doesn't hail from a small town in the Irish Republic or anywhere close. He makes TV commercials in London. Deciding he'd like to make an eccentric regional comedy with universal themes, he journeyed to a village in Ireland, set himself up in the pub, and took notes on what he saw and heard. Then he wrote a script that's one part Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), one part Preston Sturges' Christmas in July (1940), and about five parts synthetic whimsy. \n\n         The movie is a passable entertainment--call it The Half Monty . It has standard issue (but funny) farcical sight gags and a score of panpipes to provide the requisite undercurrent of Celtic melancholy. There's a witchy Margaret Hamilton type (Eileen Dromey) who rides some sort of electric wheelchair and attempts to spoil the whole caper. There's also a stock ingénue (Susan Lynch) who loves the town's endearing pig farmer (James Nesbitt) but won't marry him because he smells so bad--and I'm not oversimplifying. Waking Ned Devine might have been a snooze if Jones hadn't stocked it with a slew of old actors with magically lived-in visages. The owlish Bannen can twinkle without looking dear--there's something saturnine in that face. As his Ed Norton-ish sidekick, Kelly walks off--or, rather, rides off--with the picture, his skeletal frame planted buck naked on a motorcycle as he rushes to reach Devine's house before the man from the lottery. I see a future for elderly male actors willing to shed their clothes for laughs, but I don't see myself in the audience. \n\n         The term \"slice of life\" has come to mean dreary naturalism, but for the superb Richard LaGravenese, who wrote and directed Living Out Loud , that slice includes fantasy, fairy tale connections, sultry musical interludes, bridges that lead out, and bridges that lead nowhere. The movie, one of the year's most pleasant surprises, is the antithesis of Todd Solondz's Happiness , a humanist's answer to Solondz's evident conviction that life is all dead ends. When her cardiologist husband (Martin Donovan) leaves her, Judith Nelson (Holly Hunter) goes out into the world, her pain making her receptive to everything and everyone--from the elevator man (Danny DeVito) who returns her friendship with uninvited amorousness to the torch singer (Queen Latifah) who takes her to after-hours clubs, where she dances ecstatically with young women. Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you. The movie made me remember why I like Holly Hunter. (I don't always remember.) Her delivery isn't moist--it's prickly and blunt, and she can jabber convincingly, so that the jabbering takes on a life of its own and leaves her (sometimes horrified) in the dust. I might even vote for her.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why, according to the narrator, is it hard for him to remain \"low key\" during this important time as a movie critic?", "question_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF_1", "options": ["He really doesn't care what he says or who says it to.", "He is naturally opinionated, and he has a tendency to expose too much secretive information about how he might have voted.", "He wants to let everyone know his decision so they will leave him alone.", "He is naturally talkative, and he has a tendency to expose too much secretive information about how he might have voted."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where does the narrator seem to take issue the most with Streep's movie?", "question_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF_2", "options": ["The director is to blame because he was unable to capture the symbolism in the original ext and apply it to the movie.", "There are no redeeming qualities to the movie at all.", "The acting in general is just not good.", "The actors try, but they cannot save the movie."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does he think about the plot of the movie?", "question_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF_3", "options": ["It is hollow.", "It follows the original text well.", "It is decent enough and easy to follow.", "They try to stuff too much into a short movie."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why do people think he is joking when he tells them what is favorite movie is?", "question_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF_4", "options": ["It is Young Frankenstein.  It is not serious enough for a critic to choose as his favorite movie.", "His favorite movie is Silence of the Lambs.  What movie critic would choose a movie about serial killers as their favorite, even if it won an Academy award?", "Frankenstein is his favorite movie.  No one believes that because who is going to pick an old black and white horror film as their favorite, especially a movie critic?", "The Bride of Frankenstein is his favorite movie and no one believes that because it received no critical recognition overall."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is his main issue with the movie Gods and Monsters?", "question_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF_5", "options": ["Ian McKellan is not strong enough in the role.", "Brenden Fraiser is too likable.", "The movie does not reach the depth that the original text did, and much was lost to the viewer because of that.", "He did not appreciate the gay undertones of the movie."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does he believe that The Bride of Frankenstein never gets the critical acclaim it was due?", "question_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF_6", "options": ["The majority of viewing audiences just could not appreciate it for what it was.", "The director was openly gay, and in the 30s, that was completely unacceptable.", "There were not enough big-name actors in it.", "The director was sick when was directing it, so it was not done as well as it could have been."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does he compare Waking Ned Devine to?", "question_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF_7", "options": ["A half-attempt at an Englishman trying to write a movie about the Irish", "A piece of European garbage.", "An old man's version of Boogie Nights.", "\"The Half-Monty.\"  It tries to achieve what The Full Money does, but it falls short."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In Living Out Loud, what actor does he seem to appreciate the most?", "question_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF_8", "options": ["Martin Donovan", "Holly Hunter", "Queen Latifah", "Danny DeVito"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Out of all of he actor in all of the movies, who does the narrator think he might end up giving his vote to?", "question_unique_id": "20062_PT0QVHVF_9", "options": ["Holly Hunter", "Ian McKellan", "Meryl Streep", "Danny DeVito"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20063", "set_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "Kosovo Con Games", "year": "1999", "author": "William Saletan", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Kosovo Con Games \n\n         For weeks, critics of the war in Yugoslavia have pronounced it unwinnable. The atrocities continue unabated , they say. Air power alone will never get the job done. It's another Vietnam. President Clinton has blown it. Everything we do makes the situation worse. Whether Clinton and his allies can win the war remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: They can't win the debate over the war as long as critics are allowed to rig it with the following hidden premises: \n\n                         A. Selective Scrutiny              \n\n                         1. Policies. Critics observe that many things have gone badly since the air war began: Ethnic Albanians have been killed and expelled from Kosovo and anti-American nationalism has grown in Russia. It's easy to associate bad outcomes with the current policy. But critics seldom apply the same kind of scrutiny to alternative policies. If NATO had forsworn the use of force against the Serbs, what would the Serbs ultimately have done to the Kosovar Albanians? If NATO had launched a ground war, what would Russia be doing now? If, as critics observe, the Serbs have managed to cleanse Kosovo in less than four weeks, what difference could NATO have made by beginning a ground force buildup (which takes considerable time) a month ago? \n\n                         2. Policy-makers. American reporters think their job is to examine U.S. policy-makers not foreign policy-makers. So they discount Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's behavior as an objective consequence of Clinton's subjective decisions. When Serbian ethnic cleansing follows NATO bombing, reporters treat the Serbian action not as the product of free will but as a reaction determined by NATO's action. So while journalists on the ground report on Serbian atrocities, journalists in the studios and the newsrooms in effect pass the blame to NATO and Clinton. \n\n         This bias has produced a bizarre blame-America-first spin on the right. \"We have ignited the very human rights catastrophe the war was started to avoid,\" declared Pat Buchanan on Face the Nation . Columnist Arianna Huffington compared Kosovo to Waco, arguing that just as Clinton's actions six years ago \"precipitated\" the murder-suicides by the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, his intervention in Kosovo \"has unwittingly produced one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of the 20 th century.\" While some conservatives allege that Clinton's unnecessary belligerence provoked the Serbs to ethnic cleansing, others say his timidity about using ground troops \"emboldened\" the Serbs to the same effect. Clinton even gets the blame for Russian hostility. On Meet the Press , Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., accused Clinton of \"pushing Russia into a corner and putting them in a position where they're no longer able to do anything but to react in an aggressive way towards our action.\" \n\n                         3. Moral actors. When the Serbs butcher another 50 Kosovar Albanians or drive another 100,000 out of Kosovo, it's a dog-bites-man story. When NATO bombs what it thought was a military convoy and instead hits a caravan of civilian refugees, killing scores, it's a man-bites-dog story. For several days, the media treated the casualties caused by NATO as the lead story from Kosovo, overshadowing far greater casualties caused during that time by the Serbs. \"This may have cost NATO the moral high ground,\" declared John McLaughlin, invoking the moral-equivalence formula usually despised by conservatives. Meanwhile, the Serbs' role in pushing the refugees onto the road in the middle of a war zone was scarcely mentioned. \n\n                         B. Sleight-of-Hand Inferences              \n\n                         4. Unachieved to unachievable. Today's media report news instantaneously and expect it to be made instantaneously as well. In less than two weeks, their verdict on the bombing of Yugoslavia leapt from unfulfilled objectives to failure to impossibility. Since air power hasn't brought the Serbs to their knees in four weeks, the media conclude that it never will. Congressional Republicans have decided it's \"doomed to failure,\" according to Fred Barnes. Never mind that under NATO's plan, the bombing will become more severe each week. \n\n                         5. Vietnam to Kosovo. Critics constantly compare Kosovo to Vietnam. They infer two lessons from Vietnam: that \"gradual escalation\" never works and that \"bombing\" can't break an enemy's will. The trick in invoking such analogies is to ignore the differences: that the war in Kosovo is being waged by 19 countries against one; that no superpower is willing to prop up the targeted country; and that today's air power and surveillance are vastly more precise than the \"bombing\" technology used in Vietnam. \n\n                         6. Sinner to sin. Critics on the right argue that because Clinton is untrustworthy, so is the war. As George Will put it last week, the contempt of court citation against Clinton for falsely denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky is \"a timely reminder of the mendacity that drenches his presidency, including his Balkan policy.\" Meanwhile, critics on the left argue that because the United States failed to intervene in Rwanda, its intervention in Kosovo is morally suspect and probably racist. \n\n                         C. Hidden Dichotomies              \n\n                         7. Empirical/moral. Centuries ago, scientific philosophers invented a strict separation between talking about the way the world is and talking about the way it ought to be. Today's media, following this premise, separate \"editorial\" from \"news\" judgments. The only standard by which \"news\" organizations feel comfortable evaluating a policy is success or failure, not right or wrong. So the media's consensus about Kosovo is that NATO's policy is \"not working.\" As Tim Russert put it to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott on Meet the Press , \"The atrocities continue. What success can you point to that any of your strategy has worked?\" The alternative perspective goes overlooked: that the question is what NATO must do, that atrocities are a challenge rather than a verdict, and that NATO should persevere precisely because they continue. \n\n                         8. Political/military. Critics say Clinton should have destroyed Serbian TV networks by now and never should have sworn off ground troops. They deride these as \"political decisions\" and mock NATO for refusing to bomb Milosevic's palace because it contains cultural treasures, including a Rembrandt. \"The idea that Italy and Greece object to ground troops and therefore we shouldn't do what is necessary to win this war, is, in my view, ridiculous,\" protested Bill Kristol on This Week . But what's the definition of winning? Clinton and other NATO leaders say they're not just seeking a one-time victory over Milosevic. They're trying to develop what is essentially an international policing consortium. This is a political as well as military project. It entails compromising with allies who are more cautious about applying force and authorizing targets. Otherwise, the United States would have to police the world alone, which is unsustainable politically (thanks in part to vociferous opposition from many of these same critics), not to mention militarily. \n\n                         9. Harm/help. Skeptics maintain that the bombing isn't helping the Kosovars. \"I don't care about dropping any more bridges into the Danube River,\" Buchanan fumed on Face the Nation . \"I don't know how that helps those people\" in Kosovo. The question, he argued, should be \"What is the best way to help these people and save these lives? Not how we can bomb another oil plant or oil refinery.\" Minutes later, host Bob Schieffer ended the show by noting that the Kosovars were still being purged and asking \"whether what we are doing is doing any good.\" \n\n         This dichotomy rules out the fallback strategy that NATO and U.S. officials have articulated from the outset: to make the cost of Milosevic's \"victory\" outweigh the rewards. Conservatives used to defend this concept (which they called \"deterrence\") when it was preached and practiced by President Reagan. If the punishment you administer to the current troublemaker fails to stop him, the theory goes, at least it will make the next troublemaker think twice. \n\n                         D. Self-Fulfilling Doubts              \n\n                         10. Practical futility. The pundits' verdict is in: The war is \"doomed\" and \"already lost.\" On Late Edition , Wolf Blitzer observed that Milosevic \"doesn't give, after a month of this, any impression that he is backing down.\" Quoting a report that U.S. military leaders see no sign \"that Milosevic is changing his strategy or about to break,\" Russert asked Talbott, \"Are we losing this war?\" Other talking heads asserted that NATO is \"not united\" and won't be able to \"stand up\" as the conflict wears on. \"Time is not on our side,\" warned former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft on Late Edition . \"It is going to be very difficult to keep the alliance together.\" \n\n         Of course, the best way to assure that Milosevic doesn't break, that NATO comes apart, and that the United States loses the war is to predict that Milosevic won't break, that NATO will come apart, and that the United States will lose the war. These predictions bolster the Serbs' morale while undermining NATO's. As Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., observed on Face the Nation , \"Patience and resolve are as important a weapon today as actually the airstrikes are.\" \n\n                         11. Moral authority. Rather than call Clinton a liar, many pundits pass this off as a widespread perception by others. They call it a \"moral authority\" and \"public relations\" problem, asking how it will \"impact\" his \"ability to lead\" Americans and NATO in war. \"There is a common drum beat on the airwaves,\" a reporter asked Clinton on April 15, \"that you, personally, lack the moral authority to be commander in chief.\" New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd warned that Clinton \"does not inspire\" great \"loyalty,\" adding, \"He may have a conflict of interest if he sends in ground troops. It would be hard to save his skin and their skin at the same time.\" By questioning Clinton's moral authority in this pseudo-objective way, journalists destroy what's left of his moral authority. \n\n                         12. NATO credibility. Self-styled hawks fret that NATO will lose the war and thereby expose its impotence. This \"lumbering and clumsy\" alliance, incapable of \"managing such brush fires as Kosovo,\" could \"lose the Kosovo war in a month against the ruin of a rump state,\" warned columnist Charles Krauthammer. \"If the perception is that for 26 days tiny little Yugoslavia ... has withstood NATO and the United States,\" asked Russert, will NATO and the United States be exposed as \"a paper tiger\"? Russert's guest, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., grimly intoned, \"Many are predicting that this will be the funeral of NATO.\" And all because, in Krauthammer's words, Clinton \"staked the survival of the most successful alliance in history on bright new academic ideas cooked up far from the battlefields on which they now flounder.\" \n\n         Having defined anything less than the total recapture of Kosovo and the restoration of its refugees as a failure, Clinton's critics are ensuring that such failure will be interpreted as catastrophically as possible. As for their suggestion that NATO's credibility is too precious to be risked in war, you can understand their reluctance. Even tough guys have their Rembrandt.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the war is Yougoslavia compared to continually?", "question_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y_1", "options": ["The Civil War", "WWII", "The British American War", "Vietnam"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who does everyone blame for the tragedy of this was?", "question_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y_2", "options": ["Bill Clinton", "Pat Buchanan", "Hillary Clinton", "Monica Lewinsky"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the real reason for blaming the person everyone feels to be responsible for the war?", "question_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y_3", "options": ["Monica Lewinsky caused the whole affair", "Hillary allowed Bill to have an affair.", "Bill had an affair. That made him look like he was unfit for the presidency.", "Pat Buchanan should have spoken out about the affair sooner."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to Buchanan, what has Clinton done or caused through this war?", "question_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y_4", "options": ["A need for Buchanan to take over the office.", "A need for him to be removed from office.", "Provoked the Serbs into ethnic cleansing.", "Economic disaster worldwide."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What might have turned the tables as far as the moral high ground goes in this skirmish?", "question_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y_5", "options": ["The Kosovo troops kills 10s of thousands of Serbs, causing them to lose the moral high ground.", "The Serbs kill 10s of thousands of people from Kosovo, causing them to lose the moral high ground.", "The Americans make an error and bombed a bunch of civilians causing them to lose the moral high ground.", "NATO made an error and bombed a bunch of civilians, causing them to lose moral footing."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How is this was comparable with Vietnam?", "question_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y_6", "options": ["Americans have stepped in to fight.", "There's not a lot to be compared when you really analyze it.", "Innocent people are caught in the crossfire, and those are the only two wars that's ever happened in.", "The same sort of tactics were used in both."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does everyone deem Clinton untrustworthy?", "question_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y_7", "options": ["He is a typical politician.", "His war tactics are sneaky.", "He is clearly racist.", "He denied having an affair, but he actually did."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who is the key factor in determining the ethics surrounding the war?", "question_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y_8", "options": ["The media", "The Pope", "The President", "NATO"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The media determined that Serbia wasn't taken out in ____ that they would not be defeated.  Why does this matter?", "question_unique_id": "20063_YG5TEP6Y_9", "options": ["2 week.  It doesn't.", "1 week.  It was expected.", "4 weeks.  The media says they will never win the war because it's taking too long.", "3 weeks.  It shows that they are weak."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20030", "set_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "You Don't Tug on the Avenger's Cape", "year": "1999", "author": "Jeffrey Goldberg", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "You Don't Tug on the Avenger's Cape \n\n         Greetings, oh frustrated and bone-weary consumer! It is I, the great Shopping Avenger, who has pledged himself to the betterment of all humankind, or at least to that portion of humankind that shops at Circuit City and rents trucks from U-Haul. \n\n         The Shopping Avenger has much to discuss today: You will hear the tale of a Hasidic rabbi who suffered greatly at the hands of TWA, but who, due to his mystical and gentle nature, sought not the help of lawyers but instead the help of Shopping Avenger, who is a part-time kabalist and runs special discounts for clergy every Tuesday, and you will also learn the winning answer to the recent contest question \"How much Turtle Wax constitutes a year's supply of Turtle Wax?\" \n\n         But first, the Shopping Avenger would like to tell his own tale of consumer woe. Many of you might find this a shocking statement, but even the Shopping Avenger sometimes gets smacked upside the head by the evil forces of rampant capitalism. Granted, this seldom happens when the Shopping Avenger is wearing his cape and codpiece and special decals, but the Shopping Avenger seldom ventures outside the Great Hall of Consumer Justice in his cape and codpiece and special decals, on account of the fact that he doesn't want to get arrested. \n\n         What you should know is that by day the Shopping Avenger is a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan magazine, and it is in this guise that the Shopping Avenger sometimes finds himself holding the short end of the consumer stick. Whatever that means. \n\n         Take the following incident, which occurred at Heathrow airport, which, I am told, is somewhere in Europe. The Shopping Avenger, who was scheduled to transit home from the Middle East through Heathrow, was feeling ill and generally fed up at the end of his trip and so decided to upgrade himself, using his own money, to business class. The total cost of the ticket: $1,732. Remember that exorbitant sum. \n\n         The first flight, out of the Middle East, left late and arrived even later at Heathrow, though not too late to make the connection. However, the Shopping Avenger and several other passengers were met at the gate by a British Airways agent, who said that there was no time to make the connection, which was leaving from a different terminal. Technically, he admitted, there was enough time, but since British Airways was committed to \"on-time departures,\" the plane's doors would be closing early. The Shopping Avenger argued in his mild-mannered manner that British Airways did not, in fact, have a commitment to \"on-time departures\" because the originating flight did not depart on time. The Shopping Avenger received no answer to this statement. Instead, the Shopping Avenger was booked onto a later flight and so asked the agent if he could use a British Airways telephone to call Mrs. Shopping Avenger, who would be waiting for him at the other end. The agent directed the Shopping Avenger to the British Airways business-class lounge, where a telephone would be made available to him. \n\n         You, of course, know what happened next. The Shopping Avenger was told by a very nasty airline employee that only first-class passengers would be allowed to use the telephone. When the Shopping Avenger argued, in an increasingly less mild-mannered manner, that the call was necessitated by a British Airways screw up and, therefore, British Airways should pay for the call, he was told that pay phones could be found outside the lounge. This was when Shopping Avenger stated very loudly that for $1,732, he should be allowed to make a two-minute phone call. And it was the weekend! Weekend calling rates, for Pete's sake! \n\n         But British Airways is an insufferably greedy little company, and so the Shopping Avenger was given no recourse but to invoke the power of his high office. The Shopping Avenger asked this nasty lady if she had ever heard of the Shopping Avenger. To the Shopping Avenger's dismay, this was her answer: \"No.\" \n\n         What about                    Slate                 magazine? \"No.\" \n\n         Well, whatever. The Shopping Avenger, while not identifying himself as the Shopping Avenger--this would have meant changing into his codpiece and cape in the business-class lounge--informed this poorly informed British Airways employee that the Shopping Avenger was America's foremost consumer advocate (this is a lie, but she's English, so what does she know?) and that the Shopping Avenger would hear about this treatment and seek vengeance. \n\n         Well, did her tune ever change. Not exactly her tune--she remained as mean as a ferret, but she did let Shopping Avenger use her telephone. \n\n         The moral of this story for the world's airlines: Penny-pinching might make you rich, but it also gets you blasted in                    Slate                 magazine. The other moral: Superheroes should never travel without their codpiece under their pants. \n\n         There is only one airline the Shopping Avenger believes understands the fundamentals of customer service, and that is Southwest Airlines. But more on that in the next episode. First, this month's U-Haul outrage. The following letter contains perhaps the funniest story the Shopping Avenger has heard about U-Haul, and by now the Shopping Avenger has received upward of 6.7 million complaints about U-Haul. The story comes from one Susan Hwang: \n\n         \"A year ago, I, too, reserved a truck at U-Haul and get this--they said someone with my SAME NAME--Susan Hwang is really common--and going to the SAME SUBURB of Chicago, picked up my truck. Amazing!! They had to rent a bigger truck to me, which, of course cost more and at that point, they have you by the balls.\" \n\n         At least the anatomically confused Susan Hwang got her truck. Most of the Shopping Avenger's correspondents wind up having to rent from Ryder and Budget, who seem to keep extra trucks on hand in order to benefit from U-Haul's nefarious practice of overbooking. \n\n         On a semi-positive note, the Shopping Avenger did finally hear from Johna Burke, the U-Haul spokeswoman, who apologized for the inconvenience caused K., the . (For other U-Haul horror stories, click .) K., you'll recall, was left standing in the U-Haul parking lot when a credit-card reservation he'd made was dishonored by U-Haul. \"Mr. K.'s two day rental reservation should have been honored so long as he provided us with his credit card number, which we will assume was the case. This is what we at U-Haul call a 'confirmed reservation.' \" \n\n         Burke's letter, though, is filled with what we at Shopping Avenger call \"bullshit.\" \n\n         \"Once we have a confirmed reservation we should have moved heaven and earth to see that Mr. K.'s two day reservation was filled,\" Burke wrote. \n\n         Yes, of course they should have--but they never do. This is not Burke's fault. She is simply paid to explain the inexplicable. The Shopping Avenger has received 164--no exaggeration for effect in this instance--letters so far from people who say they had confirmed reservations with U-Haul, only to show up and find no truck waiting for them. The Shopping Avenger would like to hear from more--to show Burke and the bossmen at U-Haul the hollowness of their concept of \"confirmed reservations.\" \n\n         One more thing before we get to our tale of rabbinical woe: the winning answer to the recent contest question \"How much Turtle Wax comprises a year's supply of Turtle Wax?\" \n\n         Fifty-eight of you wrote in, 48 with the correct answer, which is, of course: \"Depends upon how many Turtles you wanna wax,\" in the words of one of our winners, Samir Raiyani. Or, as another of our winners, Karen Bitterman, wrote, it \"depends on the size of the turtle--and whether or not you park it in a covered space.\" \n\n         Unfortunately, because so many of you wrote in with the more or less correct answer, the Shopping Avenger is unable to award the contest prize, which was to be a year's supply of Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat. \n\n         Now to our hapless rabbi, Rabbi S., who wrote the Shopping Avenger seeking worldly justice in his case against TWA. The story of Rabbi S. is entirely typical of the airline industry--a minor problem made enormous by the cruelty and ignorance of employees who are, in theory, hired by the greedheads who run the airlines to take care of passengers. \n\n         Rabbi S., his wife, and kids arrived at Kennedy airport in time for his flight to Detroit, parked curbside, unloaded their luggage, and proceeded to the check-in counter. There the rabbi asked a TWA representative if he could leave his luggage by the counter for his wife to check in while he parked the car, to which he received a positive response and left to go park. No one told him, though, that he must first show his driver's license to the ticket agent.              \n\n         The ticket agent refused to check the rabbi's bags once he left, telling the wife that \"security reasons\" forbade him from checking the luggage of ticket holders who were not present. But then she told Rabbi S.'s wife: \"If you want, you can pay an extra $100 for the extra bags\"--i.e., charge his luggage to her ticket. \n\n         \"How could it be a security issue,\" Rabbi S. wrote the Shopping Avenger, \"if they're ready to take money for the bags?\" \n\n         Rabbi S. was running late (Kennedy airport is not a parking-friendly place), and his wife refused to check her bags without his bags. She was then told that she would miss the flight, and then her children began crying, and then she began crying. \n\n         Rabbi S. finally made it back to Terminal 25 minutes before the flight was scheduled to depart. His wife handed him one baby and took the other to the gate. \"The woman at the counter treated me like a piece of dirt,\" he wrote. \"First she said she's not sure whether the flight is still open. Then she took more than five minutes to look around and find someone who said, 'Yeah, I think we just closed it a minute ago.' ... In the meantime, my wife went to the gate and the people at the gate told her there's plenty of time for me--and let her wait outside the gate for me for another 15 minutes. Alas, my wife didn't realize that [I] could not come because of the luggage issue and the haughtiness of the people downstairs.\" \n\n         At the ticket counter, Rabbi S. was told that he wouldn't make this flight and that he should book himself on another. His wife and one of his children, meanwhile, got on the flight to Detroit. Rabbi S. had TWA book him on another flight, a Delta flight, and he schlepped--that's the only word for it--to the Delta terminal, only to be told that his was a \"voluntary\" transfer--he was late for his TWA flight--and so therefore he would have to pay an additional $300. \"My fault!?!? I'm thinking to myself, 'If your people would have been competent enough to tell me that I should show my license and courteous enough to put the luggage on for my wife, then I would be on a flight now with my family to Detroit, not roaming an airport with a starving baby being sent on a wild goose chase.\" \n\n         Here the story becomes as confusing as the Book of Leviticus, but suffice it to say that TWA continued to torture Rabbi S. for another day--finally forcing him to buy a new $400 ticket. \n\n         \"I have never in my life been treated so horribly,\" Rabbi S. wrote. \n\n         The Shopping Avenger contacted Jim Brown, a TWA spokesman, to discuss Rabbi S.'s case. To his surprise--the Shopping Avenger has not had very good experiences on TWA--Brown investigated the complaint and wrote: \"TWA has issued a credit for the value of Rabbi S.'s ticket for $244. In addition, a Customer Relations representative has been communicating with the rabbi on this incident and is sending him the difference between that ticket and the cost of a new ticket, $219, plus a letter of apology for the behavior of our representatives at Kennedy Airport. She is also enclosing four travel coupons valued at $75 each.\" \n\n         Brown, however, had no explanation for the behavior at the Kennedy ticket counter--entirely typical behavior that often makes the already unpleasant air travel experience completely unbearable. \n\n         In the next episode, the Shopping Avenger will tell the story of Southwest Airlines, the only airline that seems to actually care about customer service. But the Shopping Avenger needs your help! Keep those airline stories coming--and all those other stories, too--except computer stories. Let me say again, the Shopping Avenger does not fix computers. \n\n         One final request: The Shopping Avenger would like to hear from anyone who has actually eaten Rice-a-Roni and from anyone who could explain why it is known as \"the San Francisco treat.\" \n\n         Onward, shoppers!\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does the narrator call himself the \"Shopping Avenger?\"\n", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_1", "options": ["He exposes companies who give shoddy customer service, exposing them to the public, through his collum.", "He takes revenge on those who shoplift.", "He attacks stores and services that overcharge consumers.", "He ensures that everyone receives the best customer service available. but only when he is wearing his cape."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What story does the Shopping Avenger open within this week's collum?", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_2", "options": ["He speaks about an incident at Circut City.", "He speaks about his personal experience with horrible customer service.", "He speaks about a Rabbi who has a bad experience with TWA.", "He speaks about a woman's experience with U-Haul."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In his own experience this week, what industry was involved?", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_3", "options": ["Airline", "Electronics", "Moving", "Computer"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "After spending an additional $1,732 on a ticket, what happens that outrage the Shopping Avenger the most?", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_4", "options": ["He is not allowed to use the phone to call his wife to let her know not to pick him up at the airport at the time he told her because there was a delay.", "He is not given anything to eat on a flight that took close to an entire day.", "He does not get a direct flight home.", "He was not allowed to upgrade to first class even after he paid for it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The Shopping Avenger is not afraid to admit", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_5", "options": ["He will blast a business for giving him, or anyone else for that matter, poor customer service when they could have just as easily given them outstanding service.", "He hates to fly, and it makes him cry sometimes.", "He had to call his wife or he would have been in big trouble with her.", "He is not always on the side of the customer."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Where did U-Haul drop the customer service ball?", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_6", "options": ["They gave the wrong person the wrong truck.", "They were not open the day of the customer's reservation.", "They had an attitude with a customer because he asked too many questions.", "They overbooked, leaving a customer without a truck even though he had a \"confirmed reservation.\""], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What industry do the Rabbi's customer services issues occur with?", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_7", "options": ["Air travel.", "Moving.", "General electronics.", "Computers"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was the Shopping Avenger not able to award anyone with a year's supply of Rice -a-Roni?", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_8", "options": ["Too many people got the answer correct.", "There was really never a prize available.", "No one answered the trivia question correctly.", "The person who did answer it correctly did not put their identifying information on their answer, so they could not be contacted."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the problem with the Rabbi?", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_9", "options": ["Has racially profiled, and he was separated from his wife and children for hours to go through TWA processing.", "He was not given the whole story by a customer service agent when he asked an important question, and he ended up having to spend money out of his pocket to correct their mistake.", "He was told he could not drop his wife and kids off, so they took the shuttle to the airport and the shuttle broke down (due to no fault of his own), and he had to pay for a different flight.", "He was mistaken for a terrorist and was detained."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "After the Shopping Avenger intervened, what was the result for the Rabbi?", "question_unique_id": "20030_JRDUBXGP_10", "options": ["Nothing.  TWA refused to speak with him.", "The rabbi was given a public apology on a local new channel in hopes to fix the relationship with the Jewish community that the TWA obviously strained.  ", "The Rabbi was given a letter of apology.", "The rabbi had already been refunded part of his money, was working on getting the rest back, and he was getting vouchers for him and his family to be able to fly when and wherever they chose to go.  He also got a letter of apology."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20040", "set_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "Eastern Europe", "year": "1997", "author": "Franklin Foer", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Eastern Europe \n\n         Eight years after the Berlin Wall's collapse, how meaningful are the political and economic differences that once divided Eastern and Western Europe? Herewith, a primer on the transition to democracy and capitalism in the old Soviet bloc and former Soviet Republics. \n\n         Statistics gauging economic change since communism's collapse are deceptive. All countries initially foundered. Only since 1993, with the onset of widespread privatization of economic activity, have most of them grown. However, even post-1993 averages (compiled by the U.S. Agency for International Development from international lending-agency data) may be misleading in evaluating economic success. Take Albania, which averaged 8.4 percent growth during this period--and attribute much (perhaps all) of its measured growth to a massive Ponzi scheme, which collapsed this winter, bringing down the entire Albanian economy. \n\n                         Central Europe              \n\n                         Czech Republic ( 2.7 percent growth--measured for all countries as average annual GDP change since 1993--75 percent private-sector share of GDP in 1996. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power; free media.) Despite economic growth and the lowest unemployment in Eastern Europe , the Czech economy has suffered a recent setback. In the last six months, several of the nation's biggest banks collapsed because of loose lending and fraud. To reassure foreign investors, last week conservative Prime Minister Václav Klaus announced a 5 percent cut in government spending. Opposition Social Democrats may use Klaus' austerity program to mobilize growing discontent. Chain-smoking President Václav Havel's failing health is another concern. Though Havel's position is largely ceremonial, he helps give credibility to the widely mistrusted bureaucracy and police. \n\n          \n\n            Hungary                 (1.25 percent growth; 73 percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power; constitutional protection for the media and minorities.) Because it privatized early and aggressively, Hungary has attracted $15 billion in foreign investment since 1989 --more than any other Eastern European nation. To curry favor with NATO and the European Union, for the last two years its centrist government (led by Gyula Horn, also an ex-Communist) has battled popular nationalist parties. It installed Western-style legal protections for minorities and gave up long-standing claims to Transylvania, the Hungarian-populated section of Romania. \n\n          \n\n            Poland                 (5.25 percent growth; 60 percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power; no state-run media.) It is considered Eastern Europe's greatest economic success . Poland's government privatized more cautiously than Hungary's or the Czech Republic's. Western fears about the 1995 election of ex-party apparatchik Aleksander Kwasniewski as president (displacing Lech Walesa, who calls him the \"red spider\") have been allayed by Kwasniewski's support for further privatization and his enthusiasm for NATO expansion. (This summer Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic will probably be invited to join the alliance.) Amid much protest from the right wing, Kwasniewski's government restored the legal rights to abortion and divorce removed by the Walesa government. \n\n                         Romania                 (4.7 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy relatively weak: free and fair elections; state-controlled media.) Communist Party boss (ostensibly a social democrat) Ion Iliescu ruled between a mob's execution of longtime strongman Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 and his own loss of an election last year. His successor, a geology professor named Emil Constantinescu, promised rapid privatization and protection for an independent media. Romania is jockeying to be included in NATO expansion , but nobody takes its candidacy seriously. \n\n                         Slovakia                 (3.65 percent growth; 70 percent private. Democracy relatively weak: free elections; strong state security force; state-pressured media.) Inheriting the most depressed regions of former Czechoslovakia and a massive, outmoded arms-manufacturing industry, it fared badly after its 1992-1993 split with the Czech Republic. Slovakia has had less success than other Central European countries at ousting corrupt Communist bosses from its bureaucracy. Prime Minister Vladimír Meciar is accused of having orchestrated the kidnapping of the Slovakian president's son, among other charges. \n\n                         The Balkans              \n\n                         Albania                 (8.4 percent growth; 75 percent private. Democracy weak: widespread police killings and beatings; no free elections; state-controlled media.) Between 50 percent and 90 percent of the country invested nearly $3 billion in a Ponzi scheme that collapsed this winter. When the government failed to fulfill promises to compensate investors, rioters pillaged the capital, Tirana, and battled government-organized militias. So far the staunchly anti-Communist government has relied on repression to survive the crisis. \n\n          \n\n            Bosnia                 (No economic data. Democracy weak: elections held last September amid accusations of fraud.) Thoroughly destroyed by war , it is economically devastated and ethnically divided. The Dayton Accord separates the country into two provinces: the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Federation and the Serbian Republika Srpska. Serbian and Croatian minorities complain they will not get a fair shake in the Muslim-majority state. The U.S. military will leave Bosnia at the end of this year. \n\n          \n\n            Bulgaria                 (-2 percent growth; 45 percent private. Democracy weak: no elections until this month.) Bulgaria's economy remains socialist . Price controls are drastic: McDonald's restaurants in Bulgaria sell the cheapest Big Macs in the world, and oil costs the same as in Saudi Arabia. Shortages and slipping wages sparked street protests this winter that forced the ruling socialists to hand power over to a caretaker government. A centrist coalition won elections this month. Emigration to Western Europe has been significant : Five hundred thousand people have left Bulgaria (total population, 9 million) since 1989. \n\n          \n\n            Croatia                 (0.15 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy questionable: allegations of electoral fraud; authoritarian but popular government; little repression of media.) Since Yugoslavia's disintegration, Franjo Tudjman, a right-wing dictator, has exploited Croatian nationalist sentiments. Demonstrations this winter against Tudjman quickly dissipated (at the time, he was being treated in the United States for cancer--he may not live much longer). Despite rampant war profiteering and a large state presence in the economy, growth has been steady, and Tudjman remains popular . \n\n          \n\n            Macedonia ( -3.2 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections, though minority groups claim oppression. ) Though Macedonia avoided the Balkan War, ethnic tensions and instability are a problem. Last year, the country's liberal, pro-West president was seriously injured in a car-bomb attack. A Greek minority demands that Macedonia, with its ethnically Albanian majority, be absorbed into Greece. \n\n                         Serbia                 (No economic data. Democracy weak: corruption during elections; state-controlled media.) Slobodan Milosevic, an old party boss, has retained power since 1989, appealing to Serbian chauvinism to elude liberal reforms. War, hyperinflation, and unemployment , however, have recently undermined his popularity. Two months of street protests this winter were said to presage his ouster. His concession of the opposition's demands (recognition of local election results and reopening of nonstate-run media), however, ultimately solidified Milosevic's control. \n\n                         Slovenia                 (3.5 percent growth; 45 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections; constitutional protection for the media and minorities.) The most Western, liberal, and independent of the former Yugoslav republics, Slovenia escaped the Balkan War unscathed . Unlike the other agriculture-dependent Balkan economies, Slovenia has a significant manufacturing sector, much of it high-tech. Its per capita income is already higher than those of Portugal and Greece, members of the EU. However, because of its reluctance to privatize, foreign investment is scant, and growth has been lower than predicted. \n\n                         The Baltics              \n\n                         Estonia                 (-1.25 percent growth; 75 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: safeguards against police abuse and state interference in the media.) Thanks to Finnish and Swedish investment, Estonia is the most prosperous Baltic state , though its recovery did not begin until 1995. Russia still maintains military bases near its border, and Estonia relies on Russian oil and gas. But Estonia has been increasingly defiant: It switched official allegiance from the Russian to the Greek Orthodox Church, criticized Russia's war in Chechnya, and imposed requirements that make it difficult for its Russian-speaking minority to become citizens. \n\n                         Latvia                 (-3.1 percent growth; 60 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections; successful transfer of power.) Economists predict the country will soon benefit from its tight controls on inflation , which have stymied short-term growth. For the last two years, Latvia has been governed by a six-party \"rainbow coalition.\" \n\n                         Lithuania                 (-4.2 percent growth; 65 percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power.) After flirting with a return to communism, party bosses retook power in 1992. The conservative Vytautas Landsbergis--musicologist, former chess champion, and post-Communist Lithuania's first prime minister (between 1991 and 1992)--was re-elected last year. The economy has foundered since the Soviet Union's collapse. \n\n                         Western Soviet Republics              \n\n                         Belarus                 (-7.8 percent growth; 15 percent private. Democracy nonexistent: no independent judiciary; repressive state security apparatus; state-controlled media.) The most Soviet of the former Soviet republics, it is ruled by Alexander Lukashenko , a dictator who recently consolidated his personal control over the country's media and secret police. He has enhanced the country's ties to Russia, vociferously opposes NATO expansion, and alleges that fledgling opposition movements are CIA plants (there is no evidence of this). \n\n                         Moldova                 (-8.6 percent growth; 40 percent private. Democracy relatively weak: free elections; hostility toward minorities; government interference with press.) Initially touted as a model of reform, Moldova is now in a shambles. A rebellion by Ukrainian and Russian-speaking minorities ended in 1992, with the Romanian-speaking majority government retaining control over only half of the country. It was the center of a recently shut-down Internet porn scam that charged unwitting customers, mainly Americans, the cost of a long-distance call to Moldova when they downloaded dirty pictures. \n\n                         Ukraine                 (-14.8 percent growth; 40 percent private. Democracy weak: widespread corruption and organized crime.) Fifty percent of the economy is invested in the black market to avoid taxes (as high as 89 percent) and corrupt government officials--largely former Communists who require under-the-table payments. Consequently, foreigners have only reluctantly invested $700 million--the same amount as in Estonia, which is only a fraction of the size of Ukraine. The government disbanded its nuclear arsenal in 1994 after a U.S. payment of $400 million. Despite nationalist hostility toward Russia, Ukraine remains too dependent to do anything more than grumble about the Russian military's continued use of its ports. \n\n          \n\n            Transcaucasian Republics              \n\n                         Armenia                 (1.03 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy weak: allegations of election fraud; arbitrary arrests; restrictions on freedom of press.) Alienated by its Muslim neighbors--Turkey to the west, Iran to the south, and Azerbaijan to the east--Armenia aligns itself with Georgia and Russia (which keeps 12,000 troops on Armenia's border). An influential Armenian-American diaspora helps the country get more U.S. aid per capita                 than any country except Israel . Since 1994, it has been ruled by an autocratic intellectual, who has banned opposition parties and controls the media. \n\n                         Azerbaijan                 (-13.5 percent growth; 25 percent private. Democracy nonexistent: widespread corruption; no free elections; repression of minorities.) A recent cease-fire ended the Muslim government's six-year war with Armenia over control of a Christian enclave in the northeast part of the country. Afterward, oil companies scrambled to tap its prodigious reserves. Before the Soviets took over, Azerbaijan was a boom country that attracted hundreds of European speculators. The government has been unstable--done in by a series of coups and the continued rule of Communist bosses. \n\n                         Georgia                 (-15.75 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy fairly strong: free elections but continued human-rights abuses, including torture and forced confessions.) Western expectations for Georgia--the highly regarded former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze is the president--have been disappointed. The government battles rebels from Abkhazia, a Muslim province in the country's northwest. Russia still maintains thousands of troops in Georgia. Only last year did the country begin to emerge from a severe depression, but it still lacks consistent electricity in Tbilisi, its capital.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What do the most successful governments seem to have in common?", "question_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE_1", "options": ["They practice, or at least try to practice, democracy, they have free elections, and the even more successful ones have protection in place for the media.  They are run much like a", "They are a combination of how the old regime ran things and a pseudo-democratic society.", "They allow for corruption in the government, and they do not allow their citizens to participate in any sort of decision-making.", "They still clean to their old ways of doing things."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The Czech Republic's President is more of a figurehead for the country than an actual political ruler, but he helps to give the country credibility.  With that in mind, what should he stop doing?", "question_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE_2", "options": ["Paying for prostitutes.  It leaves the wrong message for the people, and he stands the chance of getting a disease.", "Putting too much stock in what NATO has to say.  it is not good for the people.", "Chain-smoking.  If he dies before the country establishes itself as a world power, it will set them back.", "Consorting with other governments that are not like-minded."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What things seem to set Poland apart from the other countries mentioned?", "question_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE_3", "options": ["They put much of their energy in privatizing and they have restored many permissions that had been taken away by the previous government like being able to end your marriage.", "They want to be part of having their own independence.  They tend to make sure that things are managed much in the way they always have been, and the government does not really care about the opinion of the people.", "They are steeped in mafia traditions, and every political decision that they make is ultimately made by the leaders of the mafia, not the elected officials who are more figureheads.", "Very little sets them apart.  They are not extraordinary in any way and have made nothing more than marginal success as an independent country."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Romania seems to have all of the right ideas as far as what it takes to run a successful country, but what is keeping them from doing so?", "question_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE_4", "options": ["They are still under mob rule.", "They have no real leader who is willing to do everything it takes in order to follow through with the ideas that have been put before them.", "The people just do not have the buy-in into the government to care enough to help make a change.  They don't trust the government.  They try to keep to themselves.", "No one takes their ideas seriously."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What seems to be holding Slovakia back from becoming a more productive country?", "question_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE_5", "options": ["Slovakia would rather just fight than try and act like a respectable government.", "The people are not interested in politics, also they do not try to push for change.", "Though it has some good ideas in place, the odds have been stacked against this country from its inception.  It took in the poorest part of the Czech Republic, it cannot seem to rid its political faction of corruption, and its ruler is into shady work trades.", "They went from being a very rich part of the Czech Republic to a poor country on its own. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Albania's major setback?", "question_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE_6", "options": ["Like so many countries in the region, their people just do not seem to care about having a functional government.  ", "They were unable to get corruption out of their government.", "Almost the entire country was scammed out of millions, making them an even more poor country than where they began.  And they were NEVER well off.", "They had to go to war with another country and they not only lost the war, but they also lost a large percentage of its population, and they have not been able to recover."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Many of the countries that do not have successful governments have allowed for free elections.  How has this not helped some of them to become more productive and successful countries?", "question_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE_7", "options": ["Many of those countries have concluded that the elections were rigged.", "Many more factors than just allowing people to vote for government officials factor into what makes for a successful country.", "They do not have the economic intelligence on whole to make the country run regardless of ", "While voting is open to the people, not enough of them care to vote."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What seems to be the biggest issue holding Macedonia back from being a successful, thriving country?", "question_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE_8", "options": ["It appears to be a combination of issues between the different ethnicities in the country to the point where one of its most promising leaders was severely injured in a car bombing due to said issues.", "The oppressed minority does not participate in any sort of government activity, thus they do not have a voice.", "While they try to be forward-thinking in some ways, others they are unable to let go of, and this is what is holding them back.", "They want to be absorbed by Greece so that they do not have to have the responsibility of governing themselves."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is shocking about the capital city of Georga?", "question_unique_id": "20040_Q9GFICPE_9", "options": ["They do not have water on a regular basis.", "They will not allow certain ethnicities or religions into the city.", "They do not have electricity on a regular basis.", "They do not even have a real capital city,"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20054", "set_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "The Other L-Word", "year": "1997", "author": "Jacob Weisberg", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "The Other L-Word \n\n \n \n What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation  \n By Charles Murray  \n Broadway Books; 192 pages; $20 \n\n Libertarianism: A Primer \n By David Boaz \n The Free Press; 336 pages; $23 \n \n          Are libertarians on a roll? If you begin with the recent election to Congress of Ron Paul, a former Libertarian presidential candidate; note the emergence of cyberlibertarians as a political constituency; factor in the collapse of communism; and quote Bill Clinton's admission that \"the era of big government is over,\" you have what sounds like a compelling case. There are other signs as well: the rise of the Cato Institute as one of the leading Washington think tanks; and the general accrual of credibility to what, 20 years ago, was a fringe-y movement of Ayn Rand devotees and risqué Republicans. \n\n         Yet, there is an equally strong argument to be made that the United States is only moving toward libertarian-style minimalist government in the same way that you get closer to Paris when you drive east to the supermarket. Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne got less than 500,000 votes in 1996. This was an increase over 1992 but only a slight improvement upon the Libertarian vote in 1988, and a far weaker performance than in 1980. Meanwhile, leaders of the Christian right, whose aims are antithetical to those of libertarians, make the plausible claim that it is they who are winning converts and influence by the day. And if Clinton now knows to eschew \"big government,\" members of the Republican Congress elected in 1994 have also learned their lesson about attempting to make government truly smaller. \n\n         The appearance of these two books counts as an entry in the plus side of the ledger. Each attempts to make libertarianism more respectable and popular. They are pitched, however, at different audiences. Charles Murray is a conservative trying to persuade other conservatives that the absence of restraint will in fact make people more moral. He rather reluctantly defends the legalization of drugs, prostitution, and pornography, and concedes that government has to play some more-than-minimal role. David Boaz, an official at the Cato Institute, sees libertarianism as neither conservative nor liberal, and aims to convert everyone. But while he is more ecumenical, Boaz is far more extreme. If you insist on keeping national parks or old-age pensions, he has some advice on the least bad way to run these things--but, given his druthers, he wouldn't run them at all. \n\n          Murray's more laconic account is based upon a classical liberal argument: Force is bad; cooperation is good; government is force; ergo, the only legitimate functions of government are to enforce voluntary agreements, and to prevent force and fraud. Murray accepts, though, that there also exist limited \"public goods.\" The two he names are environmental protection and education. These exceptions to the rule of the minimal state are probably necessary to make libertarianism palatable to mainstream conservatives. The problem is that they require an admission--which Murray never makes directly--that decisions made by a democratic government within the boundaries of a constitution are not merely \"force\" but also \"cooperation,\" albeit with a certain degree of legitimate coercion. \n\n         In an attempt to distinguish those public purposes that are tolerable from those that aren't, Murray posits that, to be valid, public goods either have to be \"nonexclusive\"--interventions from which everyone benefits--or else must arise to counter \"externalities,\" costs passed on to others that, in practical terms, cannot be compensated, as in the case of the chemical incinerator that pollutes the air. What this scheme leaves unclear is why education and the environment are valid public goods while other efforts he opposes--insuring elderly people against poverty, say, or providing national health insurance--are not. Education and the environment are not purely nonexclusive goods. Some people who either don't have children or who don't like to visit national parks--or both--will be taxed to pay for them. And if the standard of nonexclusivity is not absolute, then programs Murray rejects, such as welfare and Medicare, can reasonably qualify. Anyone may fall upon hard times, and most people anticipate being around long enough to benefit from nationalized health care for the elderly. \n\n         Murray's next strategy is to try a series of more pragmatic arguments against government action. To show how little sense regulations make, he proposes a thought experiment. Why not give consumers a choice, he asks, about whether to use regulated or unregulated products (unregulated products, he stipulates, would have to be labeled as such). This merely demonstrates that Murray has failed to understand his own argument about externalities as a basis for public goods. The point of regulation is not merely to protect consumers, but to protect innocent third parties. Of course consumers would be better off if the government gave them the right to buy appliances built by polluting factories and low-cost child labor. (In fact, consumers already can, so long as the pollution and child labor are foreign and not domestic.) These regulations exist for the benefit of those who live downstream from the factory and the children who would otherwise be working inside it. \n\n         Or, to take an example of regulation employed by Murray, consider the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. Murray says there is no reason to keep people from harming themselves. But speed limits don't just prevent people who willingly take the risk of driving faster and more dangerously from hurting themselves. They improve the odds for the children in the back seat, and for the safe driver in the opposite lane, whom the reckless driver might plow into. With this example, Murray undercuts himself in another way. He says regulation only gets more onerous over time. But the national speed limit is an example of precisely the opposite point. In most states you can now drive 65 or 70 on freeways. Like many conservatives, Murray high-dudgeons himself into the Jeane Kirkpatrick position of ascribing historical inevitability to a trend that is actually in the midst of reversal. \n\n          Murray involves himself in more serious contradictions by drawing in arguments from his earlier books, each of which presents a different case against public action to fight poverty. In Losing Ground (1984), the work that made him famous, he contended that government anti-poverty programs had done much to create the underclass. In The Bell Curve (1994), he said that some people--namely blacks--were genetically inferior, a condition that government could do nothing about. In What It Means to Be a Libertarian , he says government intervention is morally wrong. \n\n         He means these arguments to be mutually reinforcing: Government social programs don't work; they can't work on account of human nature; and if by chance they do work, they're morally unjustified anyhow. But this triple argument in the triple alternative actually obliterates itself. In The Bell Curve , Murray contends that government can't really help people. In the version of that argument given in What It Means , he asserts that \"most government interventions are ineffectual\" because \"modern society has the inertia of a ponderous freight train.\" But if government can't reroute the freight train in a better direction, it's hard to see how it can derail it. The metaphor undermines the Losing Ground Murray, the guy who writes that \"[u]ntil the government began masking the social costs created by large numbers of fatherless children, civilized communities everywhere stigmatized illegitimacy.\" The \"futility\" thesis--government can't help--and the \"perversity\" thesis--government makes problems worse instead of better--are at odds. If government can't do anything, how can it do so strongly the opposite of what it intends? \n\n         Dimly aware of this problem, Murray brings in a more sweeping illegitimacy thesis--government is unjustified--to trump all the others. But this exposes his underlying bias, which casts doubt on the critiques of government in both Losing Ground and The Bell Curve . The three Murrays play a kind of fugue throughout this book. In fact, there seems to be a fourth Murray struggling to get out. This is the Charles Murray who says late in the book that he half-supports the idea of a negative income tax--a guaranteed income for everyone. This would seem to violate all the aforementioned principles. It would create a powerful incentive (of the kind attacked in Losing Ground ) for people not to work; it would be an attempt to help people who The Bell Curve says can't be helped anyway; and it would certainly violate What It Means to Be a Libertarian 's admonition against forcing people to pay for dubious public goods. What Murray likes about the idea is that it would finally discharge society's obligation to members of the underclass. They might not be better off, but they would have to quit bellyaching. Combined with a new, heartfelt attack on civil-rights laws (Murray says bad, prejudicial discrimination is inseparable from good, economically sensible discrimination), this passage leaves one with the sense that in declaring himself a libertarian, Murray has not yet removed the final veil. \n\n         David Boaz has written a more stimulating, more consistent, and more dogmatic book. After a long history of libertarian ideas, he proposes a version of Murray's basic argument, which he calls the \"nonagression axiom\"--no one can use force against anyone else. That's it. Unlike Murray, Boaz draws no exception for public goods. He does not pander to political reality by accepting large expenditures for national defense, environmental regulation, or publicly funded education. He does not believe in national parks (\"private stewards\" will exercise \"proper stewardship\"). Nor does he believe in military conscription in wartime (\"[t]he libertarian believes that people will voluntarily defend a country worth defending\"). \n\n         Though this version of libertarianism seems to flirt with anarchism, Boaz isn't worried about disarray. In the absence of malign government intervention, there will emerge what he calls \"spontaneous order.\" Boaz's model for this is the Internet. He neglects, of course, the fact that the Internet began life as a federal defense project. But the real question Boaz begs is why the laws he thinks are necessary for society to function, including fair chunks of the U.S. Constitution, count as \"spontaneous\" and good while everything else is defined as coercion. Capitalism may arise spontaneously, but the Bill of Rights is as much a man-made construct as the food-stamp program. \n\n          In the end, it is futile to argue with this view. Boaz has worked out every possible detail of his libertarian heaven in an utterly comprehensive and slightly mad way. He takes pains to say he is not offering a plan for a perfect society, merely a \"framework for utopia\" (the phrase is Robert Nozick's). But his heart is clearly with the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, who wrote: \"Without law or compulsion, men would dwell in harmony.\" \n\n         Murray, too, is afflicted with millenarianism. \"That America is not the land of universal plenty it should have become is for many libertarians, including me, the source of our deepest anger about what big government has done to this country,\" he writes at one point. He offers instead \"a society that is prosperous and virtuous, but one that is exciting and fun as well.\" I was reminded of the famous passage where Marx writes that in the Communist future, every worker will spend part of his day fishing, part writing poetry, and only part working at his lathe. Marx believed that the state would wither away. Libertarians believe men must wither it. But really, their utopias are not so different. They share a wishful vision of human perfectibility dressed up as an idea of justice.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Of the two top libertarians in America, who seems to be more consistent in their delivery and why?", "question_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5_1", "options": ["Boaz's anthem is no one can use force against anyone else. He does not even believe in the military because he believes that if the people have something worth fighting for when that time comes, they will do it, not having the need for a military.", "Murray believes that the government, though not needed at all, should assist with things like public education.", "Charles Murry has written three books on the subject, and they all deal with the same concepts.  He believes that, while he may not agree with several of the ideals that he would make legal in society, the fact that the people are not restrained by governmental rule will make them behave more morally than before", "David Boaz feels that Murray has many good ideas, and he has based much of his theories of Murray's."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Murray writes three books and in each of those books,", "question_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5_2", "options": ["his consistencies show that he has not tried to \"poke holes\" in all of these theories, as each book seems to simply be a repeat of the last and offers no improvement to show that his thoughts have evolved based on changing times, needs, and feedback received from others.", "he contradictions himself in virtually every main point he makes, and when taken in together, his theories do not make any sense.", "he is consistent across the board with his theories.", "his contradictions are everpresent, and yet, he does his best to explain why the government is useless, and he can actually do that effectively."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Through his statements and theories on the government, which of the two seem to be racist?", "question_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5_3", "options": ["Murray - says that government programs do not work because they only work for minorities, therefore, no one should have access to them.", "Boaz - says that only a group of true Americans can make this idea turn into a reality.", "Murray - in one of his books, says that some people (African Americans) are inferior to the rest of society, and there is no need for government assistance because they are beyond help.", "Boaz - He believes that libertarianism will only work if all people band together in order to develop a bond with the country, and the only way that can happen is for all races to deny their cultures and embrace what it means to be an American."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Boaz believe will happen with the people when there is a lack of government rule?", "question_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5_4", "options": ["He believes that there will inevitably be skirmishes breaking out, possibly even wars, but they will all work themselves out in the end, making for a better society for all.", "Eventually, society will work the kinks out on its own.  It may take some time, but it will be worth making it happen without the hindrance of government rule.", "\"spontaneous order\" will take hold - basically, man will govern himself appropriately because that's what he is supposed to do.", "While nothing is perfect, the society he pushes for is about as close to perfect as a society will ever be.  The people just need to buy into the society they are a part of."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How is Boaz's theory fundamentally different from Murray's?", "question_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5_5", "options": ["Boaz took Murray's theory, emulated it, and then perfected it.  Murray's is still a work in progress.", "Murray took Boaz's theory, emulated it, and then perfected it.  Murray's is still a work in progress.", "Murray clearly has not thought through his theory well enough, as holes can be poked all through it,", "Boaz clearly has not thought through his theory well enough, as holes can be poked all through it,"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How can you break down Murray's theory of libertarianism into a few words?", "question_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5_6", "options": ["A government can be used when it is necessary.  But only then,  Not on a daily basis.", "Government is for and by the people", "Force = bad.  Agreement = good. Governement use force.", "No governenment is a good governemnent."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Two areas Murry feel need to be addressed by the government and they need to regulate are ", "question_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5_7", "options": ["religion and the economy", "welfare programs and education", "education and the environment.", "the environment and welfare programs."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Boaz'z version of libertarianism to be almost akin to?", "question_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5_8", "options": ["No form of governement at all.", "Democracy", "Anarchism", "Communism"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Boaz believes that America should not just be prosperous and righteous, it should also be", "question_unique_id": "20054_NVMQ8XG5_9", "options": ["a model for other countries to show what liberalism can be like", "a martyr for the rest of humanity", "perfect.", "a cool place to live. always offering adventure."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "20033", "set_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": " Martin Scorsese", "year": "1999", "author": "A.O. Scott", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Martin Scorsese \n\n         The first reviews of Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead are the latest evidence of the director's status as a critical favorite. This is not because the notices have been uniformly glowing--it's been some time since a Scorsese picture won unanimous praise from reviewers--but because Scorsese remains, almost uniquely among American directors, an embodiment of the beleaguered idea that filmmaking, and therefore film criticism, can be a serious, important, life-and-death matter. Here, for instance, is Roger Ebert, all thumbs: \n\n                         To look at Bringing Out the Dead --to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film--is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply. Scorsese is never on autopilot, never panders, never sells out, always goes for broke; to watch his films is to see a man risking his talent, not simply exercising it. He makes movies as well as they can be made.              \n\n         Never? Always? This is pure ideology--which is not to say that it isn't, to some extent, true. Even Scorsese's weaker films bristle with energy and intelligence. But look closely at what Ebert says: To be reminded of the power of film as a medium is not quite the same as being moved by a particular film, and Bringing Out the Dead is, for all its hectic pacing and breakneck intensity, an oddly unmoving experience. Yes, you think, movies can touch us urgently and deeply. Why doesn't this one? If Scorsese makes movies as well as they can be made, why does one so often feel that his movies--especially over the last decade or so--could have been better? \n\n         Above all, to look at Bringing Out the Dead is to be reminded of a lot of other Scorsese films. Critics have noted its similarities with Taxi Driver , Scorsese's first collaboration with screenwriter Paul Schrader (who also wrote The Last Temptation of Christ and the later drafts of Raging Bull ). Both movies feature a disturbed outsider cruising the nightmarish, as-yet-ungentrified streets of Manhattan in search of redemption. In place of Sport, Harvey Keitel's suave, vicious pimp in the earlier film, Bringing Out the Dead features Cy, a suave, vicious drug dealer played by Cliff Curtis. The mood here is a good deal softer: The scabrous nihilism of Taxi Driver is no longer as palatable--or, perhaps, as accurate in its response to the flavor of the times or the mood of its creators--as it was in 1976. Nicolas Cage's Frank Pierce saves Cy from a death as gruesome as the one De Niro's Travis Bickle visited on Sport, and when Frank does take a life (in the movie's best, most understated scene), it's an act of mercy. \n\n         Aside from these parallels and variations, there's plenty in Bringing Out the Dead to remind you that you're watching a Scorsese picture. There's voice-over narration. There's an eclectic, relentless rock 'n' roll score and a directorial cameo--this time Scorsese provides the disembodied voice of an ambulance dispatcher. There are jarring, anti-realist effects embedded in an overall mise en scène of harsh verisimilitude. And, of course, there is the obligatory religious imagery--the final frames present a classic Pietà, with Patricia Arquette (whose character is named Mary) cradling Cage, the man of sorrows, in her arms. To survey Scorsese's oeuvre is to find such echoings and prefigurations in abundance. Look at Boxcar Bertha , a throwaway piece of apprentice-work he made for schlock impresario Roger Corman in the early '70s (if you've never seen it, imagine Bonnie and Clyde remade as an episode of Kung Fu ), and then look at The Last Temptation of Christ , the controversial, deeply personal rendering of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel which infuriated some Christians a decade and a half later. Different as they are, both films prominently feature 1) a crucifixion and 2) Barbara Hershey naked. \n\n         Well, that may be a coincidence. But it's hard to think of an active director who has produced such an emphatically cross-referenced body of work who seems not so much to repeat himself (though he does some of that) as to make movies by recombining a recognizable and fairly stable set of narrative, thematic, and stylistic elements. In other words, Scorsese is the last living incarnation of la politique des auteurs.              \n\n         That old politique --the auteur theory, in plain English--was first articulated in the 1950s by a group of French critics, many of whom went on to become, as directors, fixtures of the Nouvelle Vague . In a nutshell, the theory--brought to these shores in 1962 by Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris--held that, like any work of art, a film represents the vision of an individual artist, almost always the director. The artists who populated the auterist canon--Howard Hawks and John Ford, pre-eminently--had labored within the constraints of the studio system. But even their lesser films, according to auterist critics, could be distinguished from mere studio hackwork by the reiteration of a unique cinematic vocabulary and by an implicit but unmistakable sense of solitary genius in conflict with bureaucratic philistinism. \n\n         The auteur theory was quickly challenged, most notably by Pauline Kael, who shredded Sarris in the pages of Film Quarterly . But the \"new Hollywood\" of the '70s--with Kael as its champion, scold, and Cassandra--was dominated by young directors who attained, thanks to the collapse of the old studios, an unprecedented degree of creative autonomy, and who thought of themselves as artists. What resulted, as Peter Biskind shows in his New Hollywood dish bible Easy Riders, Raging Bulls , was an epidemic of megalomania, sexual libertinism, money-wasting, and drug abuse--as well as a few dozen classics of American cinema. \n\n         The avatars of the New Hollywood were mostly \"movie brats\"--socially maladroit, nerdy young men (and they were, to a man, men) who shared a fervid, almost religious devotion to cinema. Scorsese, a runty, asthmatic altar boy from New York City's Little Italy who traded Catholic seminary for New York University film school, was arguably the purest in his faith. Unlike Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, or Steven Spielberg, \"St. Martin\" (as Biskind calls him) did not see directing as a route to world domination but as a priestly avocation, a set of spiritual exercises embedded in technical problems. Scorsese's technical proficiency won him some early breaks. While making Who's That Knocking at My Door , his earnest, autobiographical first feature, independently, Scorsese was hired to edit Woodstock into a coherent film. His success (more or less) led to more rock 'n' roll editing assignments--a traveling sub-Woodstock \"festival\" called Medicine Ball Caravan ; Elvis on Tour --and then to Boxcar Bertha , which allowed him to join the Directors Guild and gave him the chance to make Mean Streets . That movie helped launch the careers of Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, and taught generations of would-be tough guys the meaning of the word \"mook.\" \n\n         Kael called Mean Streets \"a triumph of personal film-making,\" and even though it may be the single most imitated movie of the past 30 years--cf The Pope of Greenwich Village, State of Grace, Federal Hill, Boyz N the Hood , etc.--it has lost remarkably little of its freshness and power. Watching it, you feel that you are seeing real life on the screen, but real life heightened and shaped by absolute artistic self-assurance. Or, to quote Kael again, \"Mean Streets never loses touch with the ordinary look of things or with common experience. Rather, it puts us in closer touch with the ordinary, the common, by turning a different light on them.\" \n\n         This kind of realism marks Scorsese's next two films, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore --his best piece of directing-for-hire, and one of the half-forgotten gems of the period--and Taxi Driver , both of which were critically and commercially successful. But the medium-budget, artisanal, personal filmmaking of the early '70s soon gave way to grander visions. To be a New Hollywood director was to flirt with hubris. Biskind's book, accordingly, concludes with a litany of spectacular flameouts: Coppola's Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, Spielberg's 1941 , William Friedkin's Sorcerer, and, of course, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate . According to Mardik Martin, Scorsese's erstwhile writing partner (as quoted by Biskind): \"The auteur theory killed all these people. One or two films, the magazines told them they were geniuses, that they could do anything. They went completely bananas. They thought they were God.\" Scorsese's own Götterdämmerung came with New York, New York , a hugely ambitious jazz epic starring De Niro and Liza Minelli (Scorsese's mistress at the time), and the first of a series of flops that continued with Raging Bull and The King of Comedy . \n\n         Of these three, Raging Bull has been singled out for vindication. It's the highest-ranking of the three Scorsese films on the American Film Institute's Top 100 list, and it's widely considered to be his masterpiece. But it remains exceedingly hard to watch, not so much because of the repulsiveness of De Niro's Jake La Motta as because of its overall sense of aesthetic claustrophobia. It's a movie lacquered by its own self-importance, so bloated with the ambition to achieve greatness that it can barely move. If it convinces you it's a masterpiece, it does so by sheer brute force. \n\n                         Raging Bull is undone by its own perfectionism. New York, New York and The King of Comedy stand up rather better, in my opinion, in spite of their obvious flaws. (So does The Last Waltz , a documentary of the Band's last concert done simultaneously with New York, New York , thanks to the magic of cocaine.) For one thing, New York, New York is virtually the only Scorsese movie (aside from \"Life Lessons,\" his crackerjack contribution to the Coppola-produced anthology film New York Stories ) to have at its center the relationship between a man and a woman. For another, it ends with Liza Minelli parading through a series of phantasmagoric stage sets singing a pointedly ironic song called \"Happy Endings\"--a sequence every bit as dazzling (and as mystifying) as the ballet from An American in Paris . Just as Mean Streets is an unparalleled demonstration of the power of film to convey reality, \"Happy Endings\" is a celebration of film's magical ability to create it. A moviegoer's dream, but good luck seeing it on the big screen. \n\n         For its part, The King of Comedy , a creepy reprise of Taxi Driver --played, this time, for laughs--is a movie made before its time, back when celebrity-stalking was a piquant metaphor for our cultural ills, rather than the focus of our cultural life. De Niro and Sandra Bernhard kidnap Jerry Lewis (playing, brilliantly, a famous late-night talk show host), Bernhard steals the movie, and the ending is guaranteed to provoke long, excruciating arguments about the difference between fantasy and reality. \n\n         In Biskind's account of the tragedy of the New Hollywood, Spielberg is the villain, Hal Ashby the martyr, and Scorsese the scarred survivor. After the failures of the early '80s, he picked himself up and made some more movies: the quirky, proto-Indie downtown comedy After Hours , The Color of Money (a respectable sequel to The Hustler ), and his long dreamed of The Last Temptation of Christ . His fortunes revived with GoodFellas , which was hailed as a return to form, and floundered again with The Age of Innocence , one of his periodic attempts--like The Last Waltz , Temptation and, most recently, Kundun --to defy expectation. Next came Casino, one of his periodic attempts to defy the expectation that he would defy expectations. Casino blends Raging                 Bull with GoodFellas and can be interpreted as a wry allegory of Hollywood in the '70s--a time when \"guys like us\" (i.e., the free-lancing gangsters played by De Niro and Joe Pesci) were allowed to run things without interference. Of course, they got too greedy, screwed everything up, and the big corporations turned their playground into Disneyland. At the end, De Niro's character, the scarred survivor, picks himself up and goes back to work. \n\n         Scorsese keeps working too--upcoming projects include Gangs of New York , with Leonardo DiCaprio, and a Dean Martin biopic starring Tom Hanks. His extracurricular good works--overseeing the re-release of classics such as El Cid and Belle de Jour , campaigning for film preservation, narrating a BBC documentary on his favorite movies--are testament to his abiding faith. But his movies more often than not feel cold and mechanical. They substitute intensity for emotion and give us bombast when we want passion. Why do we go to the movies? Pauline Kael used to say it was to be caught up, swept away, surfeited by sensation, and confronted by reality. Some of us keep going to Scorsese's movies because we still want to believe in that, and we leave wondering whether he still does.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is different about Martin Scorsese, according to Roger Ebert?", "question_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5_1", "options": ["He is always on point with everything he produces.", "He has never made a bad movie.", "He very rarely \"phones it in.\"", "He takes risks in every movie he makes."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the narrator use Bringing out the Dead, one of Scorsese's lesser films, as the basis for this article?", "question_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5_2", "options": ["More than likely it had just been released at the time this article was written.", "It is his worst film, which goes to show that he doesn't really make BAD films even when they aren't GREAT.", "It is, without a doubt, his best and well-known film,", "The all-star cast is one that everyone can relate to, so it is an easy film to use to discuss his career."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "One theme or element that you can guarantee will appear in a Sc0rsese film is", "question_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5_3", "options": ["A classical music soundtrack.", "Viscous death", "The main character will have a parallel to Scorsese's life.", "Religion"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Sorcsese choose to become a director?", "question_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5_4", "options": ["He had an arrogance about him that made him want to expose the world to his genius.  ", "He became a director to share his art and creativity with the world, whether he became liked and famous or not.", "He felt it would help him to take over the world, metaphorically, of course.", "He was just in it for the money."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What movie got him into the Director's Guild, thus getting his food into the door, so to speak, as a serious Hollywood director?", "question_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5_5", "options": ["Taxi Driver", "Mean St", "The Pope of Greenwich Village", "Boxcar Bertha"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Raging Bull considered to be a hard film to watch?", "question_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5_6", "options": ["It tends to come at the viewer with a force that tells the viewer that it is a great movie, and it smothers the view with its intention.", "It is almost too perfect and it draws out emotion you are not accustomed to finding in a movie.", "No one can understand the real message of the movie.", "DeNiro is not a great actor at this time in his career, in fact, he can be \"cringe-worthy.\""], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "After having a few movies that were not blockbuster hits, he came back with", "question_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5_7", "options": ["The King of Comedy", "The Last Temptation of Christ", "Goodfellas", "Happy Endings"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What might be considered a flaw in Scorcese's movies?", "question_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5_8", "options": ["They are too full of passion and emotion.", "They have more emotion than intensity.", "They have more intensity than emotion", "They are too full of intensity and nothing else."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the narrator say of the movie \"The King of Comedy.\"", "question_unique_id": "20033_CE73CVI5_9", "options": ["It was a copout because it was simply a comedic version of Taxi Driver", "It was too dark to be considered a comedy.", "He was a movie that could have come out 20 years later and the world might have been ready for me.", "It was when Scorsese seemed to take a turn for the worst as a director."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "51662", "set_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Breakdown", "year": 1956, "author": "Kastle, Herbert D.", "topic": "Psychological fiction; Post-apocalyptic fiction; PS; Farmers -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories", "article": "BREAKDOWN\nBy HERBERT D. KASTLE\n\n\n Illustrated by COWLES\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine June 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on\n for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house\n two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to\n admit he was sick\nthat\nway—in the head!\n\n\n Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were\n moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his\n mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching\n the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear.\n A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was\n based on nothing.\n\n\n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were\n chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except\n that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only\n a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields\n remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to\n waste....\nDavie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing\n stronger each day from helping out after school.\nHe turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"\n\n\n She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n\n\n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part\n of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n\n\n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her\n eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he\n remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n\n\n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just\n for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could—\"\n\n\n \"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to\n hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't\n be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins,\n who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n\n\n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They\n had no son, never had a son. And Timkins—he'd died and they'd gone to\n his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n\n\n He himself just couldn't remember it.\n\n\n He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a\n dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last\n night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all\n the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a\n son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they\nhad\nhad a son, and he'd\n died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\nHe went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen,\n Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate.\n Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\"\n he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock\n for his own table!\"\n\n\n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of\n multi-pro.\"\n\n\n \"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through\n a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste\n any meat there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current\n crisis, you know.\"\n\n\n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one\n could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished\n quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.\n\n\n He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside\n of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn\n floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that\n was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he\n leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward\n staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the\n way I had my barn....\"\n\n\n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless\n panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it\nwas\nhis barn!\n\n\n He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.\n\n\n He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard,\n moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him.\nThe car.\nHe hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice\n to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n\n\n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than\n Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And\n the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it\n was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\nHe whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor\n shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n\n\n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and\n all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.\n\n\n He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should\n a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start\n losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n\n\n He was at the supply bin—like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with\n a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines\n and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and\n they left it—or whatever they allowed you—with a bill. You paid the\n bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt\n and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some\n money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn.\n It came out just about even.\n\n\n He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had\n ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it\n into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A\n television program guide.\n\n\n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n\n\n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only\n one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to\n her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing\n last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n\n\n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark\n Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"\n\n\n \"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward,\n and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the\n stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and\n saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there\n and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right)\n and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was\n wrong. The windows were wrong.\n\n\n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\nEdna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to\n the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the\n pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right.\n They had only a dozen or so now.\n\n\n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?\n\n\n Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n\n\n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face\n that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and\n lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and\n went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to\n regulations—one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water\n twice a week.\n\n\n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be\n showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our\n livestock, Edna?\"\n\n\n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"\n\n\n He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.\n\n\n \"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"\n\n\n He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n\n\n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n\n\n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet\n cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n\n\n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He\n looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a\n bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road\n was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over\n from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty.\n Once there'd been cars, people....\n\n\n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't\n help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.\n\n\n He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But\n he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n\n\n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of\n wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find\n that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved\n out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n\n\n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be\n reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't\n know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n\n\n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.\n\n\n His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire\n head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's\n mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved\n forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to\n leave his headache and confusion behind.\n\n\n He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He\n raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off\n to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached\n the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. \"Phineas Grotton\n Farm.\" He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his\n head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north.\n He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he\n was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers.\n Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But\n anything like that would've gotten around.\n\n\n Was he forgetting again?\nWell, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He\n opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and\n rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after\n the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county—old Wallace Elverton's\n place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed\n as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get\n along without crops for years more.\n\n\n He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure\n why, but ... everything was wrong.\n\n\n His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went\n sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another\n fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by\n three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had\n Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n\n\n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way.\n He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but\n fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back.\n Yes, there\nwas\na slight inward curve.\n\n\n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured\n the best way to get to the other side.\n\n\n The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they\n used to say back when he was a kid.\nIt took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got\n over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed\n beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand.\n He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n\n\n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He\n listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure\n he was heading in the right direction.\n\n\n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n\n\n Flooring!\n\n\n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and\n glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a\n sick laugh, so he stopped it.\n\n\n He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked.\n More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound\n growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had\n before in Cultwait County.\nHis entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to\n a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat.\n He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under\n the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the\n moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n\n\n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised\n damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n\n\n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly,\n until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him,\n and shut his eyes and mind to everything.\n\n\n Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.\n\n\n Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately—a long time\n lately?\nThe ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by\n flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where\n there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where\n that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons.\n And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of\n Crossville. And after that....\nHe was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here\n he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could\n it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to\n forget things he'd known all his life?\n\n\n He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was\n beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on\n the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard.\n There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his\n family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks\n heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his\n voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get\n you!\"\nHe rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three\n children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A\n moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n\n\n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n\n\n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n\n\n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.\n\n\n Was this how a man's mind went?\n\n\n He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and\n people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or\n four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of\n New England he'd seen in magazines.\n\n\n He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with\n a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his\n clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood,\n and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming\n in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth\n sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and\n shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and\n went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet\n strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw\n it—a car.\nA car!\nIt was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at\n all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined,\n tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations,\n Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"\n\n\n He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Am I going to jail?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where then?\"\n\n\n \"The doctor's place.\"\n\n\n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm.\n Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know\n about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n\n\n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the\n path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.\n\n\n When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen\n or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of\n doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in\n at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two\n hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster\n walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital,\n or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he\n didn't see or hear people.\n\n\n He did hear\nsomething\n; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came\n along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down\n somewhere.\nThey went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless\n room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there,\n putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred\n years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n\n\n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected\n one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or\n sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n\n\n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little\n treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n\n\n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain\n again.\n\n\n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with\n the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let\n them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his\n scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he\n would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so\n as to know whether or not he was insane.\n\n\n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n\n\n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the\n insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n\n\n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"\n\n\n The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"\n\n\n \"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.\n\n\n His son said, \"Please, Dad....\"\n\n\n \"No! I want to talk to someone\nsane\n! You and Petey and I—we're all\n insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land,\n any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded\n by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know\n nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand?\n I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most\n were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway.\n Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later.\n I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of\n the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave\n you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we\n don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big\n crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all,\nsanity\n! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace\n and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"\n\n\n He choked and stopped.\n\n\n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his\n brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and\n remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to\n check south and east; on\nall\nsides if that fence continued to curve\n inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.\n\n\n And this wasn't Iowa.\nThe explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to\n save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and\n there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people\n left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had\n come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife\n and his two sons....\nSuddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the\n greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the\n switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he\n got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and\n came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only\n one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n\n\n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.\n\n\n Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"\n\n\n Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been\n worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought\n maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n\n\n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill\n a pig!\"\n", "questions": [{"question": "Even upon the story's climax, what's the one question Harry wants to be answered more than any other?", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_1", "options": ["He want to know who was responsible for brainwashing his wife.", "He wants to understand why he is the only one who seems to grasp something \"not right\" in the world.", "He wants to know whose memories he continues to intercept.", "He wants to know Davie's fate, good or bad."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "In virtually every \"memory' Harry has of his farm, how does it consistently differ from this reality?", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_2", "options": ["He recalls the wife he had, but she is totally different from his current wife.", "He consistently remembers his farm to be on a much grander scale, and now there are fewer animals, less equipment, and less production.", "He remembers all of the workers he used to have on the farm, and they are no longer there.  ", "He consistently remembers his farm being desolate and unsuccessful, and now, his farm is prosperous."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Harry is won't ride Plum on the street because ", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_3", "options": ["he is fearful of being run down by another vehicle.", "he knows it's against the law, and though he doesn't know the punishment, he knows that sentence is to be feared.", "he is fearful his neighbors will report him.", "he knows it's against the law, and he is ashamed to break the law."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "At what point in Harry's journey do things start to feel odd?", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_4", "options": ["When he crosses to Grotten's farm, he feels things are off because the the Grottens, who were friends of his in the past, reported him for trespassing to the police.", "When he crosses to Grotten's farm, he feels things are off, but he is unsure why.", "When he crosses to Grotten's farm, he feels things are off because that's where his farm should be.", "When he crosses to Grotten's farm, he feels things are off due to the drastic change in terrain."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "During his journey, Harry becomes more alarmed each time ___ changes.", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_5", "options": ["the day ", "the terrain", "his breathing", "the sky"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "On his return journey, Harry", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_6", "options": ["turns himself in to the police.", "realizes he needs to see the doctor if he ever expects to feel better.", "makes the mistake of trying to return by way of town, setting him on a collision course with the police.", "meets new people from his county and shares his returning memories with them."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "For a moment, Harry believes \"everyone in the world\" included", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_7", "options": ["only this direct next-door neighbors and his wife.", "everyone but himself because he didn't reside in the same realm.", "no one.", "people and animals."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the doctor take a few minutes to talk to Harry?", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_8", "options": ["Harry's earnestness made the doctor want to hear him out before administering the treatment that would alter him forever.", "He knows Harry is the only other sane person in the world aside from him and his two sons, so he wants a conversation with him, even if it's brief.", "The doctor feels the conversation will absolve him of the guilt that accompanies executing lawbreakers.", "Regardless of the consensus, the doctor wants to make sure that Harry is actually insane before giving him shock therapy. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "For the doctor, the irony of being a survivor ", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_9", "options": ["is that it was all for nothing.", "is sacrificing his life as a member of society before the \"big event\" occurred.", "is being forced to kill so many others who survived so he and his sons can live.", "causes so much guilt he takes his own"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The doctor knows Harry will be ok", "question_unique_id": "51662_BBZHKQN0_10", "options": ["temporarily.  Once memories begin to return, keeping them at bay forever is impossible.", "because his treatments always work.", "when he reveals their location is on an arc, and he is perplexed.", "when he asks about Davie just as he leaves."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/6/6/51662//51662-h//51662-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "51194", "set_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Made to Measure", "year": 1961, "author": "Gault, William Campbell", "topic": "Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Robots -- Fiction; Husband and wife -- Fiction; PS; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "Made to Measure\nBy WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT\n\n\n Illustrated by L. WOROMAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSomewhere is an ideal mate for every man\n\n and woman, but Joe wasn't willing to bet\n\n on it.  He was a man who rolled his own!\nThe pressure tube locks clicked behind them, as the train moved on. It\n was a strange, sighing click and to Joe it sounded like, \"She's not\n right—she's not right—she's not right—\"\n\n\n So, finally, he said it. \"She's not right.\"\n\n\n Sam, who was riding with him, looked over wonderingly. \"Who isn't?\"\n\n\n \"Vera. My wife. She's not right.\"\n\n\n Sam frowned. \"Are you serious, Joe? You mean she's—?\" He tapped his\n temple.\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I mean she's not what I want.\"\n\n\n \"That's why we have the Center,\" Sam answered, as if quoting, which he\n was. \"With the current and growing preponderance of women over men,\n something had to be done. I think we've done it.\"\n\n\n Sam was the Director of the Domestic Center and a man sold on his job.\n\n\n \"You've done as well as you could,\" Joe agreed in an argumentative way.\n \"You've given some reason and order to the marital competition among\n women. You've almost eliminated illicit relations. You've established\n a basic security for the kids. But the big job? You've missed it\n completely.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sam said. \"That's a very small knife you've inserted between\n my shoulder blades, but I'm thin-skinned.\" He took a deep breath.\n \"What, in the opinion of the Junior Assistant to the Adjutant Science\n Director, was the\nbig\njob?\"\n\n\n Joe looked for some scorn in Sam's words, found it, and said, \"The big\n job is too big for a sociologist.\"\n\n\n Sam seemed to flinch. \"I didn't think that axe would fit alongside the\n knife. I underestimated you.\"\n\n\n \"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\" Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. \"I'm going to make a\n perfect wife.\" He tapped his own chest. \"For me, just for me, the way I\n want her. No human frailties. Ideal.\"\n\n\n \"A perfect robot,\" Sam objected.\n\n\n \"A wife,\" Joe corrected. \"A person. A human being.\"\n\n\n \"But without a brain.\"\n\n\n \"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people.\n Nothing.\"\n\"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's\n inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them.\nI'm\na person. I\n think I'm—discerning and sensitive.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sam said. \"Let's drop the subject.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you're talking nonsense. A person without faults is not a\n person. And if—it or he—she were, I don't think I'd care to know him\n or her or it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally. You're a sentimentalist. You've seen so much misery, so\n much human error, so much stupidity that you've built up your natural\n tolerance into a sloppy and unscientific sentimentality. It happens to\n sociologists all the time.\"\n\n\n \"Joe, I'm not going to argue with you. Only one thing I ask. When\n you—break the news to Vera, break it gently. And get her back to the\n Center as quickly as you can. She's a choice, rare number.\"\n\n\n Joe said nothing to that. Sam looked miserable. They sat there,\n listening to the swishing, burring clicks of the airlocks, two\n friends—one who dealt with people and had grown soft, the other who\n dealt with machines and might not have grown at all.\n\n\n As the car rose for the Inglewood station, Sam looked over, but Joe's\n eyes were straight ahead. Sam got up and out of the seat.\n\n\n There was a whispering sigh of escaping air and the sunlight glare of\n the Inglewood station, synthetic redwood and chrome and marble.\n\n\n Sam was out of the cylindrical, stainless steel car and hurrying for\n the Westchester local when Joe came out onto the platform. Sam was\n annoyed, it was plain.\n\n\n Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I mean.\"\nJoe was silent. The coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on\n Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway.\n\n\n \"You're awfully quiet,\" Vera said.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Her voice was suddenly strained. \"Sam didn't try to sell\n you—\"\n\n\n \"A new wife?\" He looked at her. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\n \"You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't\n I—darling, is there—?\" She broke off, looking even more miserable\n than Sam had.\n\n\n \"I don't intend to trade you in,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She took a deep breath.\n\n\n He didn't look at her. \"But you're going back to the Center.\"\n\n\n She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or\n ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse.\n\n\n \"It's not your fault,\" he said, after a moment. \"I'm not going to get\n another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be.\"\n\n\n \"I've tried so hard,\" she said. \"Maybe I tried too hard.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said, \"it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be\n delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want a reasonable man,\" she said quietly. \"I want you, Joe.\n I—I loved you.\"\n\n\n He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. \"Loved?\n Did you use the past tense?\"\n\n\n \"I used the past tense.\" She started to get out on her side of the car.\n \"I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\n \"But I do,\" he told her. \"Is this love something you can turn on and\n off like a faucet?\"\n\n\n \"I don't care to explain it to you,\" she said. \"I've got to pack.\" She\n left the car, slammed the door, and moved hurriedly toward the house.\n\n\n Joe watched her. Something was troubling him, something he couldn't\n analyze, but he felt certain that if he could, it would prove to be\n absurd.\n\n\n He went thoughtfully into the living room and snapped on the telenews.\n He saw troops moving by on foot, a file of them dispersed along a\n Brazilian road. He turned the knob to another station and saw the\n huge stock market board, a rebroadcast. Another twist and he saw a\n disheveled, shrieking woman being transported down some tenement steps\n by a pair of policemen. The small crowd on the sidewalk mugged into the\n camera.\n\n\n He snapped it off impatiently and went into the kitchen. The dinette\n was a glass-walled alcove off this, and the table was set. There was\n food on his plate, none on Vera's.\nHe went to the living room and then, with a mutter of impatience, to\n the door of the back bedroom. She had her grips open on the low bed.\n\n\n \"You don't have to leave tonight, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"You're being very unreasonable.\"\n\n\n \"Am I?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't trying to be intentionally cruel.\"\n\n\n \"Weren't you?\"\n\n\n His voice rose. \"Will you stop talking like some damned robot? Are you\n a human being, or aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I am,\" she said, \"and that's why I'm going back to the\n Center. I've changed my mind. I want to get registered. I want to find\n a\nman\n.\"\n\n\n She started to go past him, her grip in her hand. He put a hand on her\n shoulder. \"Vera, you—\"\n\n\n Something flashed toward his face. It was her slim, white hand, but it\n didn't feel slim and white. She said, \"I can see now why you weren't\n made\nSenior\nAssistant to the Adjutant Science Director. You're a\n stupid, emotionless mechanic. A machine.\"\n\n\n He was still staring after her when the door slammed. He thought of the\n huge Domestic Center with its classes in Allure, Boudoir Manners, Diet,\n Poise, Budgeting. That vast, efficient, beautifully decorated Center\n which was the brain child of Sam Tullgren, but which still had to deal\n with imperfect humans.\n\n\n People, people, people ... and particularly women. He rose, after a\n while, and went into the dinette. He sat down and stared moodily at his\n food.\n\n\n Little boys are made of something and snails and puppydogs' tails. What\n are little girls made of? Joe didn't want a little girl; he wanted\n one about a hundred and twenty-two pounds and five feet, four inches\n high. He wanted her to be flat where she should be and curved where she\n should be, with blonde hair and gray-green eyes and an exciting smile.\n\n\n He had a medical degree, among his others. The nerves, muscles, flesh,\n circulatory system could be made—and better than they were ever made\n naturally. The brain would be cybernetic and fashioned after his own,\n with his own mental background stored in the memory circuits.\n\n\n So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh\n and blood. The spark, now—what distinguished the better-grade robots\n from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated\n mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life.\nFor the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in\n the Department.\n\n\n \"Something special?\" Pete asked. \"Not just a local skin graft? What\n then?\"\n\n\n \"A wife. A perfect wife.\"\n\n\n Pete's grin sagged baffledly. \"I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?\"\n\n\n \"In all ways.\" Joe's face was grave. \"Someone ideal to live with.\"\n\n\n \"How about Vera? What was wrong with her?\"\n\n\n \"A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb,\n exactly, but—\"\n\n\n \"But not perfect. Who is, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"My new wife is going to be.\"\n\n\n Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind\n of skin Joe had specified.\n\n\n They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They\n seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and\n incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's\n engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready.\n\n\n Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior\n assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a\n jerk, in Joe's book.\n\n\n This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"\n\n\n Slightly raised eyebrows.\n\n\n \"More?\"\n\n\n \"Completely human, except she will have no human faults.\"\n\n\n Cool smile. \"Wouldn't be human, then, of course.\"\n\n\n \"\nHuman, but without human faults, I said!\n\"\n\n\n \"You raised your voice, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"I did.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the Senior Assistant. Junior Assistants do not raise their voices\n to Senior Assistants.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you might be deaf, as well as dumb,\" Joe said.\n\n\n A silence. The granite face of Burke was marble, then steel and finally\n chromium. His voice matched it. \"I'll have to talk to the Chief before\n I fire you, of course. Department rule. Good afternoon.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell.\"\nJoe went back to his desk and burned. He started with a low flame and\n fed it with the grievances of the past weeks. When it began to warm his\n collar, he picked up his hat and left.\n\n\n Click, burr, click went the airlocks. Very few riders, this time of\n the afternoon. The brain would go in, intact, and then the knowledge\n instiller would work during the incubation period, feeding the\n adolescent memories to the retentive circuits. She would really spend\n her mental childhood in the mold, while the warmth sent the human spark\n through her body.\n\n\n Robot? Huh! What did they know? A human being, a product of science, a\nflawless\nhuman being.\n\n\n The rise, the big hiss of the final airlock, and Inglewood. Joe stood\n on the platform a second, looking for his car, and then realized she\n wasn't there. She hadn't been there for a week, and he'd done that\n every night. Silly thing, habit. Human trait.\n\n\n Tonight, he'd know. The flesh had been in the mold for two days. The\n synthetic nerves were plump and white under the derma-ray, the fluxo\n heart was pumping steadily, the entire muscular structure kept under\n pneumatic massage for muscle tone.\nHe'd thought of omitting the frowning muscles, but realized it would\n ruin the facial contours. They weren't, however, under massage and\n would not be active.\n\n\n And the mind?\n\n\n Well, naturally it would be tuned to his. She'd know everything he\n knew. What room was there for disagreement if the minds were the same?\n Smiling, as she agreed, because she couldn't frown. Her tenderness, her\n romanticism would have an intensity variable, of course. He didn't want\n one of these grinning simperers.\n\n\n He remembered his own words: \"Is this love something you can turn\n on and off like a faucet?\" Were his own words biting him, or only\n scratching him? Something itched. An intensity variable was not a\n faucet, though unscientific minds might find a crude, allegorical\n resemblance.\n\n\n To hell with unscientific minds.\n\n\n He went down to the basement. The mold was 98.6. He watched the\n knowledge instiller send its minute current to the head end of the\n mold. The meter read less than a tenth of an amp. The slow, plastic\n pulse of the muscle tone massage worked off a small pump near the foot\n of the mold.\n\n\n On the wall, the big master operating clock sent the minute currents\n to the various bodily sections, building up the cells, maintaining the\n organic functions. In two hours, the clock would shut off all power,\n the box would cool, and there would be his—Alice. Well, why not Alice?\n She had to have a name, didn't she?\nWarmth, that was the difference between a human and a robot, just\n warmth, just the spark. Funny he'd never thought of it before. Warmth\n was—it had unscientific connotations. It wasn't, though.\n\n\n He went upstairs and fried some eggs. Twice a day, for a week, he had\n fried eggs. Their flavor was overrated.\n\n\n Then he went into the living room and snapped on the ball game.\n\n\n Martin was on third and Pelter was at bat. On the mound, the lank form\n of Dorffberger cast a long, grotesque shadow in the afternoon sun.\n Dorffberger chewed and spat and wiped his nose with the back of his\n glove. He looked over at third and yawned.\n\n\n At the plate, Pelter was digging in. Pelter looked nervous.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Bet that Dorffberger fans him. He's got the Indian sign on\n Pelter.\"\n\n\n Then he realized he was talking to himself. Damn it. On the telenews\n screen, Dorffberger looked right into the camera and nodded. He was\n winding up, and the director put the ball into slow motion. Even in\n slow motion, it winged.\n\n\n \"Ho-ho!\" Joe said. \"You can't hit what you can't see.\"\n\n\n Pelter must have seen it. He caught it on the fat part of the bat,\n twisting into it with all his hundred and ninety pounds. The impact\n rattled the telenews screen and the telescopic cameras took over.\n They followed the ball's flight about halfway to Jersey and then the\n short-range eyes came back to show Pelter crossing the plate, and\n Martin waiting there to shake his hand.\n\n\n Joe snapped off the machine impatiently. Very unscientific game,\n baseball. No rhyme or reason to it. He went out onto the porch.\n\n\n The grass was dry and gray; he'd forgotten to set the sprinkler\n clock, Vera's old job. Across the street, Dan Harvey sat with his\n wife, each with a drink. Sat with his human wife, the poor fish. They\n looked happy, though. Some people were satisfied with mediocrities.\n Unscientific people.\n\n\n Why was he restless? Why was he bored? Was he worried about his job?\n Only slightly; the Chief thought a lot of him, a hell of a lot. The\n Chief was a great guy for seniority and Burke had it, or Joe would\n certainly have been Senior Assistant.\n\n\n The stirring in him he didn't want to analyze and he thought of\n the days he'd courted Vera, going to dances at the Center, playing\n bridge at the Center, studying Greek at the Center. A fine but too\n well-lighted place. You could do everything but smooch there; the\n smooching came after the declaration of intentions and a man was bound\n after the declaration to go through with the wedding, to live with his\n chosen mate for the minimum three months of the adjustment period.\nAdjustment period ... another necessity for humans, for imperfect\n people. Across the street, the perfectly adjusted Harveys smiled at\n each other and sipped their drinks. Hell, that wasn't adjustment, that\n was surrender.\n\n\n He got up and went into the living room; fighting the stirring in him,\n the stirring he didn't want to analyze and find absurd. He went into\n the bathroom and studied his lean, now haggard face. He looked like\n hell. He went into the back bedroom and smelled her perfume and went\n quickly from the house and into the backyard.\n\n\n He sat there until seven, listening to the throb from the basement.\n The molecule agitator should have the flesh firm and finished now,\n nourished by the select blood, massaged by the pulsating plastic.\n\n\n At seven, she should be ready.\n\n\n At seven, he went down to the basement. His heart should have been\n hammering and his mind expectant, but he was just another guy going\n down to the basement.\n\n\n The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"\n\n\n \"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.\n\n\n Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly,\n \"Well, none of us are perfect, I guess.\"\n\n\n Alice smiled and answered, \"Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities\n in marriage.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. \"I don't quite understand, dear. In\n any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have\n adjusted very well.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't adjusted,\" Alice said smilingly. \"You've surrendered.\"\n\n\n Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of red-green\n and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled.\n\n\n Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, \"Well, I never—\"\n\n\n \"Of all the—\" Dan Harvey said.\n\n\n Joe rose and said, \"Must get to bed, got to get to bed.\"\n\n\n \"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"\n\n\n \"You need just a touch of deception, just a wee shade of it.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, Joe.\"\n\n\n So she had tact.\n\n\n He went to the office with very little of the absurdity mood stirring\n in him. He'd had a full breakfast, naturally.\n\n\n At the office, there was a note on his desk:\nMr. Behrens wants to see\n you immediately.\nIt bore his secretary's initials. Mr. Behrens was the\n Chief.\n\n\n He was a fairly short man with immense shoulders and what he'd been\n told was a classical head. So he let his hair grow, and had a habit\n of thrusting his chin forward when he listened. He listened to Joe's\n account of the interview with Burke.\n\n\n When Joe had finished, the Chief's smile was tolerant. \"Ribbing him,\n were you? Old Burke hasn't much sense of humor, Joe.\"\n\n\n Joe said patiently, \"I wasn't ribbing him. I took her out of the mold\n last night. I ate breakfast with her this morning. She's—beautiful,\n Chief. She's ideal.\"\n\n\n The Chief looked at him for seconds, his head tilted.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Heat, that's what does it. If you'd like to come for dinner\n with us tonight, Chief, and see for yourself—\"\n\n\n The Chief nodded. \"I'd like that.\"\nThey left a little early to avoid the crowd in the tube. Burke saw them\n leaving, and his long face grew even longer.\n\n\n On the trip, Joe told his boss about the cybernetic brain, about his\n background and his beliefs stored in the memory circuits, and the boss\n listened quietly, not committing himself with any comments.\n\n\n But he did say, \"I certainly thought a lot of Vera. You wouldn't have\n to warm her in any incubating mold.\"\n\n\n \"Wait'll you see this one,\" Joe said.\n\n\n And when she walked into the living room at home, when she acknowledged\n the introduction to the Chief, Joe knew the old boy was sold. The Chief\n could only stare.\n\n\n Joe took him down to the basement then to show him the molecule\n agitator, the memory feeder, the instillers.\n\n\n The old boy looked it over and said, quite simply, \"I'll be damned!\"\n\n\n They went up to a perfect dinner—and incident number two.\n\n\n The Chief was a sentimentalist and he'd just lost a fine friend. This\n friend was his terrier, Murph, who'd been hit by a speeding car.\n\n\n The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.\n\n\n \"She can't frown,\" Joe explained. \"The muscles are there, but they need\n massage to bring them to life.\" He paused. \"I wanted a smiling wife.\"\n\n\n The Chief inhaled heavily. \"There are times when a smile is out of\n order, don't you think, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"It seems that way.\"\n\n\n It didn't take long. Massage, orientation, practice, concentration. It\n didn't take long, and she was so willing to cooperate. Golly, she was\n agreeable. She was more than that; she voiced his thoughts before he\n did. Because of the mental affinity, you see. He'd made sure of that.\nShe could frown now and she had enough deception to get by in almost\n any company. These flaws were necessary, but they were still flaws and\n brought her closer to being—human.\nAt the office on Saturday morning, Sam Tullgren dropped in. Sam said,\n \"I've been hearing things, Joseph.\"\n\n\n \"From Vera? At the Center?\"\n\n\n Sam shook his head. \"Vera's been too busy to have much time for the\n director. She's our most popular number.\" Sam paused. \"About the new\n one. Hear she's something to see.\"\n\n\n \"You heard right. She's practically flawless, Sam. She's just what a\n man needs at home.\" His voice, for some reason, didn't indicate the\n enthusiasm he should have felt.\n\n\n Sam chewed one corner of his mouth. \"Why not bring her over, say,\n tonight? We'll play some bridge.\"\n\n\n That would be something. Two minds, perfectly in harmony, synchronized,\n working in partnership. Joe's smile was smug. \"We'll be there. At\n eight-thirty.\"\n\n\n Driving over to Westchester that night, Joe told Alice, \"Sam's a\n timid bidder. His wife's inclined to overbid. Plays a sacrificing\n game when she knows it will gain points. Our job will be to make her\n oversacrifice.\"\n\n\n Sam's eyes opened at sight of her; his wife's narrowed. Joe took pride\n in their reaction, but it was a strange, impersonal pride.\n\n\n They had a drink and some small talk, and settled around the table. It\n was more like a seance than a game.\n\n\n They bid and made four clubs, a heart. Sam's wife got that determined\n look. With the opposition holding down one leg of the rubber, she\n figured to make the next bid a costly one.\n\n\n She won it with six diamonds, and went down nine tricks, doubled. Sam\n started to say something, after the debacle, but one look at his wife's\n anguished countenance stopped him short of audibility.\n\n\n Sam said consolingly, \"I'm such a lousy bidder, dear. I must have given\n you the wrong idea of my hand.\"\nNext time, Sam made up for his timidity. Sam, with one heart in his\n hand, tried a psychic. \"One heart,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n Sam knew there was a good chance the hearts were in the oppositions'\n hands, and this looked like a fine defensive tactic.\n\n\n However, his wife, with a three-suit powerhouse, couldn't conceive of a\n psychic from Sam. She had need of only a second round stopper in hearts\n and a small slam in no trump was in the bag. She had no hearts, but\n timid Sam was undoubtedly holding the ace-king.\n\n\n She bid six no-trump, which was conservative for her. She didn't want\n to make the mistake of having Sam let the bid die.\n\n\n Joe had the ace, king, queen and jack of hearts and a three to lead to\n Alice's hand. Alice finished up the hearts for a total of seven tricks,\n and this time it was Mrs. Tullgren who opened her mouth to speak.\n\n\n But she remembered Sam's kindness in the former hand, and she said,\n \"It was all my fault, darling. To think I couldn't recognize a\n psychic, just because it came from you. I think we're overmatched,\n sweet.\" She paused to smile at Joe. \"Up against the man who invented\n the comptin-reduco-determina.\" She added, as an afterthought, \"And his\n charming, brilliant new wife.\"\n\n\n Which brought about incident number three.\n\n\n Alice turned to Mrs. Tullgren sweetly and asked, \"Don't you really\n understand the comptin-reduco-determina?\"\n\n\n \"Not even faintly,\" Mrs. Tullgren answered. She smiled at Alice.\n\n\n The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she agreed.\n\n\n \"I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\n She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were\n bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she\n could frown.\n\n\n She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense.\n\n\n Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the\n same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old\n jokes with the same inflection he always used.\n\n\n Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the\n comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why\n should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?\n", "questions": [{"question": "Society's attitude towards women seems to be", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_1", "options": ["if they speak out against their husbands,  they should be detained and reprogramed for their insurance.", "if a man is unhappy with a woman, if he has allowed for enough time, he should have the ability to \"trade her in.\"", "that they should be revered.", "every man deserves the perfect woman, and she should be \"made to order\" to achieve that goal."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Joe's motivation for opting to enter a relationship with his new wife?", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_2", "options": ["She is wealthy, and he knows money will be nothing they ever have to concern themselves with.", "She is beautiful, and he wants to be able to finally have that \"trophy wife\" he has always dreamed of.", "He has designed her to be the perfect woman, custom-made for him.", "His former wife hates this new woman, and he can think of no better way to get back at his former wife for the way she treated him."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Joe builds Alice to ensure", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_3", "options": ["she is the most aesthetically pleasing woman in existence.", "she will never leave him.", "she is smart and lacks sentimentality and the ability to be deceitful.", "she can defend herself physically against any other human."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What seems to be everyone's opposition to Joe's creation?", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_4", "options": ["His wife was a good woman, and he did her so wrong that nothing he could create will be close to her.", "He does too much for personal gain.", "Playing \"God\" always comes with dire consequences.", "Joe misses the point that \"perfection\" is not a quality a human can or should possess."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Joe designs Alice to be unable to smile.  Why is this an issue?", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_5", "options": ["Not every reaction warrants a smile.", "She is not always happy, and that is confusing to others who see a smile when she is actually angry, which she normally is.", "Her smile is not pretty enough for her face, and this makes Joe dislike her.", "She cannot show others she is serious. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "After Alice becomes a part of his life", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_6", "options": ["Joe admits that he made a mistake by creating her.", "Joe becomes world-famous for his invention.", "Joe opens a company that creates the perfect woman for any man who has the money to buy her.", "Joe longs for Vera."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Joe's boss is a \"sentimentalist\" because", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_7", "options": ["he expresses that he really liked Vera and he will miss spending time with her.", "he misses when Joe was a child.", "he misses his own wife by meeting Joe's new wife.", "he misses the simpler times when a man could meet a woman naturally rather than have her built."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to Joe what sets his new wife apart from others of her kind?", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_8", "options": ["The warmth she possesses.", "She is far more intelligent.", "Her physical strength is beyond other women.", "She is far more beautiful."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The first time he openly admits that he misses Vera's presence, even slightly is", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_9", "options": ["When she is not there to pick him up from work.", "When he wants to have his first social interaction with another couple, and he does not feel Alice can ever learn social graces.", "When he sees her with another man.", "When he wakes up and sees she is not there."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Joe feels the obvious solution to make Alice truly perfect is to ", "question_unique_id": "51194_S9APLLIH_10", "options": ["make it to where she knows exactly what he knows.", "send her to training where she can hone her skills that are slightly lacking.", "pull the plug on Alice.  Perfection cannot be achieved.", "make sure she has ONLY the qualities of Vera that he enjoyed."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/1/1/9/51194//51194-h//51194-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "20036", "set_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7", "batch_num": "13", "writer_id": "1014", "source": "Slate", "title": "Triumph of the Middlebrow?", "year": "1999", "author": "Gerald Early", "topic": "Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage", "article": "Triumph of the Middlebrow?              \n\n         This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the black liturgical occasions we now have on the calendar that beg for special schoolchild reports of one sort or another: the King holiday, Black History Month, Black Music Month, Kwanzaa, Malcolm X's birthday, Juneteenth), and while not every school does all of this, most schools must do some of this. (And this, of course, has nothing to do with the occasional racial killing or major protest that took place or may be taking place somewhere that require a report and discussion in a current-events or social-studies class.) Moreover, blacks cannot be left out of Women's History Month or Veteran's Day or, for the truly daring, Gay Appreciation Month. So, a book like Africana is bound to get a great deal of use, to be sold to virtually every school, public, and university library in the country, as well as to a number of churches, to say nothing of the private homes that will have a copy right next to the Britannica . (In some more Afrocentric black homes, it may replace the Britannica entirely, that Eurocentric collection of lies, although Britannica has become as multicultural as everyone else these days.) Those of us who have labored in the field of black studies (politically incorrectly such as the present author or very much politically correctly like a good many very good scholars) are heartened by this commercial venture. Indeed, it would be disheartening, as well as entirely untrue, if one were to think that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral imperative.) \n\n         It is good to know that, partly through the energetic offices of Henry Louis Gates, black studies can, as it were, pay its way these days and not be dependent for its existence on a kind of political and cultural moralism on the part of whites and a kind of fetishlike piety on the part of blacks. It can be, alas, a business of an entirely good sort or needful sort, justifying itself in the marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of \"the coming of the white man\") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture. Encyclopedias, after all, are middlebrow, bourgeois books that tend, in the end, not to promote intellectual inquiry on the part of the people who use them but rather to stifle it. Children tend to copy verbatim from such books without ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the official record books): as the final arbiter, as that which settles all arguments. Why, for goodness' sake, would anyone actually read a book like this? Knowledge, in the instance of the definitive reference book, becomes entombed and sanctified, very much serving the anti-intellectual ends of the middlebrow, who want not to encounter knowledge and to wrestle with it but to store it as an authority on the bookshelf. \n\n         But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both white and black, feel bad if they don't know something about the history and culture of African-descended people, in much the same way they feel bad, inadequate, if they don't know something about opera or a bit about Impressionist painting or if they have never seen a film by D. W. Griffith or Fritz Lang. How terrible at a party to discover that one has never seen The Grand Illusion --one of the all-time great films--or that one has not read, alas, a Toni Morrison novel or one does not own a Wynton Marsalis album. (The truly knowing coves own albums by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, no less, and do reports for their book clubs on the blues.) What most thinking people in black studies find dangerous about the middlebrow apotheosis of the field is that it usually leads to the enshrinement of what Jacques Barzun calls thought-clichés, half-truths or non-truths that are accepted as the truth because someone said so in some reference book like Africana . Thought-clichés are like narcotics; people love them because they relieve them of the very thing they do not wish to do in any case, that is, think, think hard, and think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy projections. Thought-clichés confirm one's stupidity and one's laziness. With all the goodwill in the world, a book like Africana cannot help but produce thought-clichés; it is, indeed, why most people will consult such a work, to find them and be comforted by them. No intellectual or scholar can, therefore, be fully at ease with a work of this sort, no matter his or her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach. \n\n         Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of black studies, that define the field and its major players. Building a canon is very important to Gates, and it is, without question, an important pedagogical pursuit. A field must have order and it must have pioneers and heroes. It is also a power pursuit. He who defines the field controls it, in a manner of speaking. Some are jealous that Gates wants this sort of power. Others find it unseemly. I think Gates is wasting his considerable talents in the pursuit of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he has flooded the market with first-rate black reference books in such short order. It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the field marshals to have hustled together this army of academics and to have gotten the work from them on time or nearly so. They deserve much credit for this. Most academics would have felt lucky to have finished this enterprise in 10 years. \n\n         That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book. \n\n         But the history of the publication of this book is only incompletely told by the editors. After 1970, when black studies was established on the white college campus, a number of reference books about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not by Du Bois' dream in any respect but by the rise of multiculturalism and black studies as intellectual industries in the United States after 1970. The increasing professionalization of black studies made this book possible, more scholars in the field, both black and white, being produced since 1970, more scholarship being produced. This book was also made possible by the rise of professionalism among African-Americans since the 1960s and the rise of a black middle class that has demanded more artifacts and objects, more \"education\" about its experience (more institutionalization of it, in other words, and more orthodoxy about its significance), that are all meant to reinforce its sense of identity, its psychological well-being, its sense of race mission, all important reasons for the existence of black studies, but all clearly anti-intellectual. In other words, the forces that brought this book into existence had little enough to do with Du Bois--although evoking him is of critical importance to the book's audience as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with a black point of view with ever-increasing regularity--and a great deal to do with the shift that has taken place within the black population of the United States in the last 25 years and the dramatic change in its status. This book is the product of both a strong movement toward the intellectualization of black experience among an elite and the anti-intellectualization of black experience by the public at large (earnest and respectful of black experience as it has now generally become) and those who cater to the public's access to intellectual material by rounding off the rough edges and making it thoroughly anti-intellectual by designing and evoking certain emotional markers about \"struggle\" and \"resistance.\" \n\n         I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.\n", "questions": [{"question": "The tone of this piece suggests the writer feels", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_1", "options": ["Africana is a work that is to be studied and revered by not just the black community but the world at large.", "Africana is an invaluable study of black culture and history.", "Africana was written to placate the black community and others seeking knowledge of black history, but it does not offer an earnest depth to it, evident by the short amount of time taken to produce it.", "the authors should be regarded as pioneers in black studies."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The writer seems to feel that Africana", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_2", "options": ["is the book the black community has been waiting for.", "is directly aligned with DuBois's vision.", "was written to \"cash in\" on the need for anthological work on black history while giving Middle America an opportunity to \"understand\" the plight of the black people.", "is not historically accurate."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The writer feels Gates is THE pioneer of works on black America", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_3", "options": ["because he cares more for relating black history than financial gain.", "because he has dedicated his life to informing the American public on black history.", "because he is knowledgeable and a powerful man", "every field of study must have one, and it would seem Gates has been appointed as such."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Regarding the amount of time it took to compile this work, the writer of this piece", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_4", "options": ["believes it is a marvel and Gates himself should be studied for this triumph.", "thinks it was done in just the right amount of time.", "thinks it took Gates far too long to produce such an insignificant piece.", "almost mocks Gates, as if it was thrown together."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "By discussing the works of Du Bois in the introduction", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_5", "options": ["Gates alienates his reader.", "Gates pays homage to him.", "attempts to lend credence to his work.", "Gates negates his own work."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The writer is adamant that Gates and his contributors", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_6", "options": ["have written a polished, complete history.", "do not offer a complete history.", "should be studied themselves for producing such a powerful history.", "should be heralded as the pioneers that they are."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The writer's tone seems to be", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_7", "options": ["angry.", "joyful.", "almost sarcastic.", "sincere."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The writer believes Africana was produced", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_8", "options": ["to fulfill a need to educate the world about the history of black culture, and it does it well.", "to satisfy a need to provide middle America with a history of black culture.", "for no valid reason.", "to show that black historians were more than capable of recording the history of their culture."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In comparison to Du Bois, the writer believes Gates", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_9", "options": ["is on the same level as Du Bois.", "is has taken his cue and is following on the same path.", "is not of the same ilk.", "is better at his craft than Du Bois."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The writer believes that", "question_unique_id": "20036_KB5XKUU7_10", "options": ["Gates work is selfless though this contribution", "Gates wants to thank Du Bois for all he did for him through his works.", "Gates is self-serving.", "Gates writes this anthology to educate and inform, nothing else."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "", "license": "https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt"}
{"article_id": "60624", "set_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Two Whole Glorious Weeks", "year": 1964, "author": "Mohler, Will", "topic": "PS; Catskill Mountains Region (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Camps -- Fiction; Short stories; Vacations -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "TWO WHOLE GLORIOUS WEEKS\nBy WILL WORTHINGTON\nA new author, and a decidedly unusual\n \nidea of the summer camp of the future:\n \nhard labor, insults, and hog kidneys!\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1958.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country\n outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the\n first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower\n rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when\n you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp\n and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows,\n under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though\n directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your\n belly-button.\n\n\n It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the\n way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and\n of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new\n experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as\n advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.\n\n\n We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already.\n\n\n The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and\n massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which\n extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on\n either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There\n were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the\n gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:\nSilence!—No admission without\n \nauthority—No smoking!\n***\nMORTON'S MISERY FARM\n***\n30 acres of swamp—Our own rock\n \nquarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry\nHarshest dietary laws in the\n \nCatskills\nA small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky,\n well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform\n came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened\n to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.\n\n\n \"Read and sign, shnook!\" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty\n boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate.\n\n\n The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed\n the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible\n about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical\n complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were\n paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away.\n\n\n Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the\n bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garments we had\n seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear.\n\n\n \"Strip and pack your clothes here, shnooks,\" said the woman with the\n empty suitcase. We did, though it was pretty awkward ... standing there\n in the aisle of the bus with those two gorgons staring at us. I started\n to save out a pack of cigarettes, but was soon disabused of this idea.\n The older of the two women knocked the pack from my hand, ground it\n under her heel on the floor and let me have one across the face with\n what I am almost certain must have been an old sock full of rancid hog\n kidneys.\n\n\n \"What the hell was that?\" I protested.\n\n\n \"Sock fulla hog kidneys, shnook. Soft but heavy, know what I mean? Just\n let us do the thinkin' around here. Git outa line just once an' you'll\n see what we can do with a sock fulla hog kidneys.\"\n\n\n I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I\n wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of\n cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white\n cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping\n as I had in forty years.\nThe ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from\n the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way\n delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small\n door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the\n ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and\n giggled.\n\n\n Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.\n\n\n \"You'll be sah-reeeee,\" he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under\n a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing\n in the center of the cheerless little circle.\n\n\n \"Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!\" barked the guard.\n The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the\n rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed.\n\n\n We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently\n and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who\n has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked\n attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating\n integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity\n excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into\n some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the\n gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the\n image.\n\n\n The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny\n phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark,\n overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the\n bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would\n cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about\n the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the\n healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the\n inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening\n malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred\n years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered\n such a specimen.\n\n\n \"I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to,\" he\n said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound\n relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl—something not yet\n language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise,\n clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope\n was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting\n misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and\n the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp,\n immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even\n contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man.\n\n\n \"What did you do on the Outside, shnook?\" he snapped at me.\n\n\n \"Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of\n work a month,\" I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of\n humility.\n\n\n \"Hah! Another low-hour man. I don't see how the hell you could afford\n to come here. Well, anyway—we've got work for climbers like you. Real\n work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy\n in a place like this—ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I\n can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport\n yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. Don't\n forget that!\"\n\n\n Remembering, I looked down quickly, but not before one of the matrons\n behind me had fetched me a solid clout on the side of the head with her\n sap.\n\n\n \"Mark 'em and put 'em to work,\" he barked at the guards. Two uniformed\n men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind\n the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid\n fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted\n my eyes and tried to look blank.\n\n\n \"This is indelible,\" one of them explained. \"We have the chemical to\n take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so.\"\n\n\n When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and\n advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. \"There is a\n choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the\n stump-removal detail, the manure pile....\"\n\n\n \"How about the steam laundry?\" I asked, prompted now by the cold sound\n of a sudden gust of rain against the wooden side of the building.\nSplukk!\nwent the guard's kidney-sock as it landed on the right hinge\n of my jaw. Soft or not, it nearly dropped me.\n\n\n \"I said there\nis\na choice—not\nyou have\na choice, shnook. Besides,\n the steam laundry is for the ladies. Don't forget who's in charge here.\"\n\n\n \"Who\nis\nin charge here, then?\" I asked, strangely emboldened by the\n clout on the side of the jaw.\nSplukk!\n\"That's somethin' you don't need to know, shnook. You ain't\n gonna sue nobody. You signed a\nrelease\n—remember?\"\n\n\n I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then,\n behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. \"Stop that! Oh\n stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy lady,\" said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. \"I\n won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable.\"\n\n\n I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say\n honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember\n with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.\n\n\n \"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.\n\n\n My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect.\nIt must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went\n gently haywire. I was conducted to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain,\" which\n turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk\n overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the\n larger trees.\n\n\n A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and\n tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant\n that his voice did not command the entire scene. \"\nHut-ho! hut-ho!\n Hut-ho HAW!\n\" he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose\n number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at\n their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant.\n\n\n I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least,\n coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must\n have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed,\n was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site\n to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards\n distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with\n the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile.\n Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower\n seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling\n another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels\n were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object\n which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether\n redundant to explain this rule.\n\n\n I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean\n enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the\n strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I\n do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous\n alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.\n\n\n My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the\n point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had\n dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being\nin\nor\nwith\nsomething. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked\n through.\n\n\n Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.\n\n\n If I had hoped for respite after \"supper,\" it was at that time that I\n learned not to hope. Back to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\" we went, and\n under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor\n of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one,\n slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from\n the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time\n softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a\n monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an\n undifferentiated man. I experienced change.\n\n\n I knew now that my identity, my ego, was an infinitesimal thing which\n rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms,\n more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones,\n as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came\n down and the manure bags broke and we scrabbled with our hands to\n refill new ones.\n\n\n The raucous alarm sounded again, and a voice which might have been that\n of a hospital nurse or of an outraged parrot announced that it was time\n for \"Beddy-by.\" And in a continuous, unbroken motion we slogged into\n another long building, discarded our coveralls, waded through a shallow\n tank of cloudy disinfectant solution and were finally hosed down by\n the guards. I remember observing to myself giddily that I now knew how\n cars must feel in an auto laundry. There were clean towels waiting for\n us at the far end of the long building, but I must have just blotted\n the excess water off myself in a perfunctory way, because I still felt\n wet when I donned the clean coverall that someone handed me.\n\n\n \"Beddy-by\" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like\n ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three\n feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find\n no real release in \"Beddy-by\"—only another dimension of that abiding\n stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned,\n croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way\n as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember\n that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging\n directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak\n beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty\n that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do\n with the virtues of endless toil, the importance of thrift, and the\n hideous dangers lurking in cigarette smoking and needless borrowing.\n\n\n I am happy to report that I do not remember them more specifically\n than this, but I was probably more impressed by the delivery than the\n message delivered. I could not imagine where they had discovered these\n women. During their performance, some sense of duration was restored to\n me; while I could be certain of nothing pertaining to the passage of\n time, it is not possible that the Cheer-Up period lasted less than two\n hours. Then they let us go to the latrine.\n\n\n After a breakfast of boiled cabbage and dry pumpernickel crusts—more\n savory than you might imagine—we were assigned to our work for the\n day. I had expected to return to the manure pile, but got instead the\n rock quarry. I remember observing then, with no surprise at all, that\n the sun was out and the day promised to be a hot one.\n\n\n The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same\n futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock\n had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then\n reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other\n end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced\n working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of\n trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have\n never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered\n a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of\n the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again.\n\n\n It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I\n had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed:\n her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist,\n and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative\n in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within\n me—microscopically but unmistakably.\n\n\n She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had\n passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in\n the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad\n to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks\n and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to\n us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that\n no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been\n shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle,\n when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of\n conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter,\n when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would\n exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the\n fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.\n\n\n The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning\n just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones,\n swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over\n us as though selecting one for slaughter.\n\n\n When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold,\n incisive tone that \"there will be no rest periods, no chow, no\n 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock.\"\n He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long\n enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task\n before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our\n own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers\n and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film\n must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.\n\n\n \"Why—this thing is nothing but a huge writing slate,\" I said to a\n small, bald inmate beside me. He made a feeble noise in reply. The\n Captain left, and the only other guard now relaxed in the shade of a\n boulder nearly fifty yards away. He was smoking a forbidden cigar.\n Suddenly and unaccountably, I felt a little taller than the others,\n and everything looked unnaturally clear. The slab was less than six\n inches wide at the top!\n\n\n \"If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself.\n We'll be through here before sundown,\" I heard myself snap out. The\n others, accustomed now to obeying any imperative voice, fell to with\n crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. \"Use them as levers,\" I said.\n \"Don't just flail and hack—pry!\" No one questioned me. When all of the\n tools were in position I gave the count:\n\n\n \"\nOne—two—HEAVE!\n\"\n\n\n The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then\n fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust\n settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was\n already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm\n that was new.\n\n\n Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine\n and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work\n would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped\n me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his\n face, and I had grown to fear novelty.\n\n\n \"You had a moment,\" he said, simply and declaratively. \"You didn't miss\n it, did you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I replied, not fully understanding. \"No, I didn't miss it.\"\n\n\n \"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?\n\n\n \"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you\n prefer,\" said the Captain.\nBertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in\n the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the\n moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes,\n that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron\n whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma\n of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.\n\n\n We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor\n of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our\n three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers,\n our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our\n library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all\n impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.\n\n\n I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of\n brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and\n desserts—an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than\n the nearest dumb-waiter door. And we will both become softer, heavier,\n a little less responsive.\n\n\n When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off\n our breath, we will step into our flying platform and set its automatic\n controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted\n tours to the Himalayas now, or to the \"lost\" cities of the South\n American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We\n will bide our time, much as others do.\n\n\n But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month\n at Central Computing and Control; Bertha has her endless and endlessly\n varying work on committees (the last one was dedicated to the abolition\n of gambling at Las Vegas in favor of such wholesome games as Scrabble\n and checkers).\n\n\n We cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails,\n when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the\n vision of year's end and another glorious vacation.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why was Mr. Devoe fascinated by the Captain?", "question_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C_1", "options": ["His precise, sharp voice did not match his gaunt appearance.", "He was amazingly plump in such a harsh environment.", "He was particularly cruel.", "His inhuman drawl was hard to understand."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Bertha and the narrator are…", "question_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C_2", "options": ["Brother and sister of the Devoe family", "Poor prisoners", "A well-to-do married couple", "An adventurous young couple"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which word best describes Mr. and Mrs. Devoe’s demeanor when they first arrived at Morton’s Misery Farm?", "question_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C_3", "options": ["Triumphant", "Fatigued", "Giddy", "Apprehensive"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Mr. Devoe’s “moment”?", "question_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C_4", "options": ["Meeting Bertha for their first 15-minute visit", "Being impressed by the Cheer Up Entertainment", "Being branded as Number 109", "Leading others in a difficult team task at the rock quarry"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why would someone choose to go “on vacation” to Morton’s Misery Farm?", "question_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C_5", "options": ["To overcome a sense of void in an otherwise pampered life", "To visit new places on a budget", "As an alternative to prison for breaking the law", "To feel first-hand how those less fortunate live"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following would be an approved reason to leave Morton’s Misery Farm?", "question_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C_6", "options": ["Local weather such as flooding", "Request of the resident", "Death of a family member", "Petition signed by a court"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The road leading to Morton’s Misery Farm was likely described as “corduroy” because…", "question_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C_7", "options": ["It was winding and long", "It had pits and potholes", "It was brown and muddy", "It had deep ruts which caused the tires to blow out"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Mr. and Mrs. Devoe had reviewed an advertisement for Morton’s Misery Farm, but it did not include:", "question_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C_8", "options": ["Pricing information", "Allowance for severe violence", "Conditions of release", "Photographs"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Mr. Devoe nearly cried at one point because he...", "question_unique_id": "60624_WGIM8N2C_9", "options": ["Was not allowed to leave", "Saw his wife being harassed", "Was not allowed to smoke", "Was not allowed to see his wife"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/0/6/2/60624//60624-h//60624-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "59418", "set_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Happy Clown", "year": 1960, "author": "Jones, Alice Eleanor", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; Conformity -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Short stories", "article": "The Happy Clown\nBY ALICE ELEANOR JONES\nThis was a century of peace, plethora and\n \nperfection, and little Steven was a misfit,\n \na nonconformist, who hated perfection.\n \nHe had to learn the hard way....\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSteven Russell was born a misfit, a nonconformist, and for the first\n five years of his life he made himself and his parents extremely\n unhappy. The twenty-first century was perfect, and this inexplicable\n child did not like perfection.\n\n\n The first trouble arose over his food. His mother did not nurse\n him, since the doctors had proved that Baby-Lac, and the soft\n rainbow-colored plastic containers in which it was warmed and offered,\n were both a vast improvement on nature. Steven drank the Baby-Lac, but\n though it was hard to credit in so young a child, sometimes his face\n wore an expression of pure distaste.\n\n\n A little later he rejected the Baby Oatsies and Fruitsies and Meatsies,\n and his large half-focused eyes wept at the jolly pictures on the\n jarsies. He disliked his plastic dish made like a curled-up Jolly\n Kitten, and his spoon with the Happy Clown's head on the handle. He\n turned his face away determinedly and began to pine, reducing his\n mother to tears and his father to frightened anger.\n\n\n The doctor said cheerily, \"There's nothing the matter with him. He'll\n eat when he gets hungry enough,\" and Steven did, to a degree, but not\n as if he enjoyed it.\n\n\n One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie\n Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in\n it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were\n old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more\n than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, \"I couldn't give\n them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!\"\n They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what\n they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one\n small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's\n great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished\n them and furtively put them back.\n\n\n This year Steven cried, \"Ma!\" stretching out his hands toward the\n silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly\n clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head.\n \"No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old\n things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart.\"\n\n\n Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth\n and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly\n spoon to play with. At meal-time he would not be parted from them, and\n Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the\n sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived\n and grew fat.\n\n\n Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang\n him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until\n they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement\n trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months,\n without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she\n bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy\n Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a\n smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did\n not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed\n on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the\n floor.\nHarriet said worriedly to her husband, \"I don't know what could be the\n matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!\"\n\n\n Richard tried to comfort her. \"Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it.\"\nSteven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon\n and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau\n drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate\n them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from\n the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the\n evening Happy Clown.\n\n\n The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He\n was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets\n and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand\n of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been\n several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed:\n the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when\n he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious\n laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere.\n He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers\n to buy, and one was entirely certain that he used them all himself.\n\n\n He gave one much more than advertising, though. Some of his nightly\n gems of wisdom (he called them nuggets) were really wonderful; they\n made one think. A favorite nugget, which people were always writing\n in and asking him to repeat, went like this: \"We're all alike inside,\n folks, and we ought to be all alike outside.\" The Happy Clown's\n viewers were not children and adults, they were kiddies and folks.\n\n\n After the Happy Clown went off the air the happy kiddies went to bed,\n to lie for a while looking at the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie,\n until, lulled by the joggler, they went gently to sleep. After that\n came the cowboys and spacemen, carryovers for any happy kiddies with\n insomnia. For really meaty programs one had to stay up past ten.\n Then the spectaculars began, and the quiz shows, and the boxing and\n wrestling.\n\n\n Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.\n\n\n His parents thought it was very cunning of him to look at the printing\n like that, so wisely, as if he could read it! He said once to Harriet,\n \"I can read it,\" but she said, \"Oh, Stevie, you're teasing Mumsie!\"\n and looked so frightened at this fresh peculiarity that the child said\n gravely, \"Yes, teasing.\" He wished he had a silent book. He knew there\n were such things, but there were none at home. There were few silent\n books anywhere. There were none in kiddie-garden.\n\n\n Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.\n\n\n The kiddie-garden monitor had to report of him to his unhappy parents\n that he was uncooperative and anti-social. He would not merge with\n the group, he would not acquire the proper attitudes for successful\n community living, he would not adjust. Most shocking of all, when the\n lesson about the birdsies and beesies was telecast, he not only refused\n to participate in the ensuing period of group experimentation, but lost\n color and disgraced himself by being sick in his corner. It was a\n painful interview. At the end of it the monitor recommended the clinic.\n Richard appreciated her delicacy. The clinic would be less expensive\n than private psychiatry, and after all, the manager of a supermarket\n was no millionaire.\n\n\n Harriet said to Richard when they were alone, \"Dickie, he isn't\n outgrowing it, he's getting worse! What are we going to do?\" It was a\n special tragedy, since Harriet was unable to have any more kiddies, and\n if this one turned out wrong ...\n\n\n Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five.\n\n\n The psychiatrist said, \"Oh, but we're going to be friends, Stevie,\n and friends always use nicknames, don't they? My name's William, but\n everybody calls me Willie. You can call me Uncle Willie.\"\n\n\n The boy said politely, \"I'd rather not, please.\"\n\n\n The doctor was undismayed. \"I want to help you. You believe that, don't\n you, Stevie?\"\n\n\n The child said, \"Steven. Do I have to lie down?\"\n\n\n The doctor said agreeably, \"It's more usual to lie down, but you may\n sit up if you want to. Why don't you like kiddie-garden, Steven?\"\n\n\n The boy sat up and regarded him warily. The doctor had a kind face, a\n really kind face in spite of all those shining teeth, and Steven was\n only five years old, after all, and there was nobody to talk to, and he\n was desperately unhappy. Perhaps.... He said, \"You'll tell them.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head. \"Nothing goes farther than this room,\n Stevie—Steven.\"\n\n\n The child leaned forward, pressing his knees together, hugging himself\n with his arms, bowing his head. His position was almost foetal. He\n said, \"I'm never by myself. They never let me be by myself.\"\n\n\n The psychiatrist said reasonably, \"But nobody can live by himself,\n Stevie.\" He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not\n correct him again. \"You have to learn to live with other people, to\n work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn\n is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's\n always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by\n yourself.\"\n\n\n The boy looked up and said starkly, \"Never?\"\n\n\n The gleaming teeth showed. \"But why should you want to?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, \"Stevie, long before you\n were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time.\n Do you know why?\"\n\n\n The boy shook his head.\n\n\n \"It was because people were different from each other, and didn't\n understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn\n how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able\n to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by\n visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"You mean the Happy Tours.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't\n that be fun?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"If I could go alone.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked at him sharply. \"But you can't. Try to understand,\n Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other\n people?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"All the time—not all the\ntime\n.\"\n\n\n The doctor repeated patiently, \"Why?\"\n\n\n Steven looked at the doctor and said a very strange thing. \"They touch\n me.\" He seemed to shrink into himself. \"Not just with their hands.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head sadly. \"Of course they do, that's just—well,\n maybe you're too young to understand.\"\n\n\n The interview went on for quite a while, and at the end of it Steven\n was given a series of tests which took a week. The psychiatrist had\n not told the truth; what the boy said, during the first interview and\n all the tests, was fully recorded on concealed machines. The complete\n transcript made a fat dossier in the office of the Clinic Director.\n\n\n At the end of the tests the Director said seriously to Steven's\n parents, \"I'll be frank with you. You have a brilliant kiddie\n here—right now he has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old—but\n brilliance has to be channeled in the right direction. Just now—well,\n frankly, it's channeled in the wrong direction. We'll give it a year or\n so, and then if things don't clear up I'm afraid we'll have to correct\n him.\"\n\n\n Richard said through dry lips, \"You mean a Steyner?\"\n\n\n The Director nodded. \"The only thing.\"\n\n\n Harriet shuddered and began to cry. \"But there's never been anything\n like that in our family! The disgrace—oh, Dickie, it would kill me!\"\n\n\n The Director said kindly, \"There's no disgrace, Mrs. Russell.\n That's a mistaken idea many people have. These things happen\n occasionally—nobody knows why—and there's absolutely no disgrace in a\n Steyner. Nothing is altered but the personality, and afterward you have\n a happy normal kiddie who hardly remembers that anything was ever wrong\n with him. Naturally nobody ever mentions it.... But there's no hurry;\n in the case of a kiddie we can wait a while. Bring Stevie in once a\n week; we'll try therapy first.\"\n\n\n Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.\n\n\n They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,\n popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the\n dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction\n of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He\n enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his\n mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory.\n\n\n Steven did well at Television Arts, soon taking more leads than was\n customary in School productions, which were organized on a strictly\n repertory basis. He did not stay to graduate, being snatched away in\n his first year by a talent scout for a popular daytime serial, \"The\n Happy Life.\"\n\n\n \"The Happy Life\" recounted the trials of a young physician, too\n beautiful for his own good, who became involved in endless romantic\n complications. Steven was given the lead, the preceding actor having\n moved up to a job as understudy for the Jolly Kitten, and was an\n immediate success. For one thing he looked the part. He was singularly\n handsome in a lean dark-browed way and did not need flattering makeup\n or special camera angles. He had a deep vibrant voice and perfect\n timing. He could say, \"Darling, this is tearing me to pieces!\" with\n precisely the right intonation, and let tears come into his magnificent\n eyes, and make his jaw muscles jump appealingly, and hold the pose\n easily for the five minutes between the ten-minute pitch for Marquis\n cigarettes which constituted one episode of \"The Happy Life.\" His fan\n mail was prodigious.\n\n\n If Steven had moments of bewilderment, of self-loathing, of despair,\n when the tears were real and the jaw muscles jumped to keep the mouth\n from screaming, no one in the Happy Young Men's dormitory where he\n slept ever knew it.\n\n\n He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.\n\n\n There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An\n underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted,\n and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were\n kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They\n all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity\n and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in,\n full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully\n advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and\n gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could\n appreciate what a wonderful world it was.\n\n\n Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none\n while he was acting in \"The Happy Life\" until Denise Cottrell joined\n the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young\n woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable\n dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They\n mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the\n exile.\n\n\n For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking\n intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces,\n and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and\n laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after\n much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel\n children. Denise said soberly, \"They'd better be clever, because\n they'll have to learn to hide.\"\n\n\n They made love in Denise's apartment when her roommate\n Pauline—Polly—was out, as awkwardly as if there had never been any\n group experimentation or happy affairs. Denise said wonderingly, \"When\n you really love someone it's all new. Isn't that strange?\" and Steven\n said, kissing her, \"No, not strange at all.\"\n\n\n He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand\n miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that\n Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the\n wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise\n had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East\n at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, \"I'm being terribly\n conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like.\"\nWhile they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented\n opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current\n Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and\n Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, \"Give it all\n you got, kid; it's the chance of the century.\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"Sure, Joey,\" and allowed his sensitive face to register\n all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular\n of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy\n Clown—but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to\n despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with\n Denise, to some country place where they could be relatively free of\n pressure.\n\n\n Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at\n once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone,\n looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, \"Oh,\n Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They\n took her to the hospital!\"\n\n\n Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the\n receiver slack in his hand. He said, \"What's the matter with her? Which\n hospital?\"\n\n\n \"Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour.\" Polly began to cry. \"Oh, Stevie, I feel\n so—\"\n\n\n \"I'll go right over.\" He cut her off abruptly and went.\n\n\n The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but\n rarely fatal complications ... but under the anesthetic she talked,\n revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown\n cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to\n raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While\n Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of\n Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done.\n\n\n At last the doctor came out to him and said what was always said in\n such cases. \"It was necessary to do something—you understand, no\n mention—\" and for a moment Steven felt so ill that he was grateful\n for the little ampoule the doctor broke and held under his nose. They\n always carried those when they had to give news of a Steyner to\n relatives or sweethearts or friends.\n\n\n The doctor said, \"All right now? Good .... You'll be careful, of\n course. She may be conscious for a minute; there's no harm in it yet,\n she won't move or touch the—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n He was still feeling ill when they let him in to see Denise. He sat\n down beside her bed and spoke to her urgently. \"Denise, talk to me.\n Please, Denise!\"\n\n\n She opened her eyes, looked at him drowsily and smiled. \"Oh, Stevie,\n I'm so glad you came. I've been wanting you, darling.\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"Denise—\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why do you call me that? Call me Denny. Did you get the\n part, darling?\"\n\n\n He drew back a little. \"Yes, I got it.\"\n\n\n She gave him a radiant smile. \"That's wonderful! I'm so proud of you,\n Stevie.\" She slept again.\n\n\n That night in the HYM dormitory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet,\n tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come.\nSteven went to see Denise every day though after the first time she\n was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation\n until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to\n know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted\n appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave\n her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of\n himself as she would need or understand.\n\n\n For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly\n examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like\n her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him.\n Some censor or other—perhaps it was the censor of love—had kept her\n from even saying his name.\n\n\n For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was\n a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him\n like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some\n stubborn pride in him refused it.\n\n\n When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until\n the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and\n more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it\n was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body\n without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie\n sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men,\n turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on\n wires.\n\n\n He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.\n\n\n Steven was running a little fast tonight. The engineer made stretching\n motions with his hands to slow him down, but he used up all his\n material, even the nugget, with three minutes to spare. Then he said,\n \"All right, folks, now I have a special treat for you,\" and moved\n quickly to the center mike. Before the sponsors, or the engineers, or\n the studio audience, or anybody in the whole American nation knew what\n was happening, he began rapidly to talk.\n\n\n He said, \"Are you all happy? You are, aren't you?—everybody's happy,\n because you're all sheep! All sheep, in a nice safe pasture. All\n alike—you eat alike and dress alike and think alike. If any of you has\n an original thought you'd better suppress it, or they'll cut it out of\n you with a knife.\" He leaned forward and made a horrible face at the\n camera. Under the jolly makeup and the artful padding, his mouth was\n shockingly twisted, and tears were running out of his eyes. \"A long\n sharp knife, folks!\" He paused momentarily to recover his voice, which\n had begun to shake. \"Go on being happy, go on being sheep. Wear the\n clothesies, and eat the foodsies, and don't dare think! Me—I'd rather\n be dead, and damned, and in hell!\"\n\n\n Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind\n him the broken hearts of three nurses and one female physician, and\n went home to his parents. During his convalescence they were patient\n with him and passionately kind. In spite of the disgrace they felt, a\n disgrace that would never be mentioned, they loved him even better than\n before, because now he was irrevocably like them.\n\n\n Denise was lost to him. The outburst in the studio, and the Steyner,\n and the loss of the Happy Clown part were cumulatively too much for\n her. She broke the engagement and was heard to say that Stevie Russell\n had proved himself an absolute fool. He was miserable over it, though\n he had only a hazy idea of what he had done or why Denny should\n suddenly be so unkind to him.\n\n\n The Happy Clown incident had passed off well—immediately after\n it occurred, a powerful battery of comedians, including the Jolly\n Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, forgetting rivalries to rally 'round\n in a crisis, went on the air to insure that it passed off well. They\n made certain that every viewer should regard the whole thing as a\n tremendously funny if rather mystifying joke. The viewers fell in with\n this opinion easily and laughed about the sheep joke a good deal,\n admiring the Happy Clown's sense of humor—a little sharp, to be sure,\n not so folksy and down-to-earth as usual, but the Happy Clown could do\n no wrong. They said to each other, \"He laughed till he cried, did you\n notice? So did I!\" For a while teenagers addressed each other as, \"Hi,\n sheep!\" (girls were, \"Hi, lamb!\"), and a novelty company in Des Moines\n made a quick killing with scatter pins fashioned like sheep and/or\n lambs.\n\n\n But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner—and\n of course that part of it was never openly discussed—sponsors had\n long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to\n let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any\n particular desire to be an actor.\n\n\n Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among\n the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise\n after a while and met a girl named Frances—Franny—whom he loved and\n who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house\n with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they\n bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not\n want to miss the Happy Clown.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Which of the following signifies that Steven was a nonconformist?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_1", "options": ["He went to college.", "He enjoyed old silver utensils.", "He acted as the Happy Clown.", "He used nicknames for people and objects."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Denise and Steven split up?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_2", "options": ["He had happy affairs with other girls.", "They moved thousands of miles away from each other.", "She couldn’t understand his breakdown.", "He was unhappy that she had changed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is not a value of the Happy Clown society?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_3", "options": ["Harmony is promoted through interaction with others.", "The world is a wonderful place to be appreciated.", "One should honor and respect the past.", "Society should be perfect."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do people learn from doing a “Happy Tour”?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_4", "options": ["How to work and earn a living", "How to speak another language", "How to understand and live in harmony with others", "How to express one’s opinions"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the “group experimentation”?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_5", "options": ["The Styner", "Kiddie-garden classes", "Re-education / counseling", "Sexual relations"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does every person and object have a nickname?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_6", "options": ["To sound cute", "To sound like children", "To promote friendship and harmony", "To confuse outsiders"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How old was Steven when he started therapy?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_7", "options": ["Five, but acts older", "An adult", "Fifteen, but acts younger", "Twelve"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was it “wise” for Steven to appear unintelligent?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_8", "options": ["To attend college", "To blend in and hide his true self", "To be accepted for acting roles", "To please the sponsors"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Steven a lonely man?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_9", "options": ["He couldn’t find like-minded people.", "He had a Styner.", "He traveled a lot.", "He couldn’t find a spouse / partner."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Denise given the Styner?", "question_unique_id": "59418_SO19DO2O_10", "options": ["To relieve her appendicitis", "To make her forget about Steven", "To help her forget Steven’s outburst", "To correct her rebellious thinking"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/9/4/1/59418//59418-h//59418-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "29170", "set_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Hoofer", "year": 1960, "author": "Miller, Walter M.", "topic": "Science fiction; PS; Short stories", "article": "A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\nthe\n \nhoofer\nby ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\nA space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?\nThey all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n\n\n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n\n\n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"\n\n\n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n\n\n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n\n\n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n\n\n \"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n\n\n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n\n\n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n\n\n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n\n\n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n\n\n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\nWith a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n\n\n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n\n\n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n\n\n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"\n\n\n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n\n\n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n\n\n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n\n\n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close—close\n to home and woman and child.\n\n\n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n\n\n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n\n\n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same:\nOne more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake—enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\nAnd she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n\n\n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n\n\n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n\n\n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"\n\n\n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.\n\n\n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.\n\n\n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n\n\n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up.\n\n\n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n\n\n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n\n\n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n\n\n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n\n\n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n\n\n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while—rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes—all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\nEverything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that\nall\nways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n\n\n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n\n\n It was a baby crying.\n\n\n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n\n\n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\nMake the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\nBut that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n\n\n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.\n\n\n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nSeptember 1955.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Which of the following is *not* a direct consequence of spending extensive time in space?", "question_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB_1", "options": ["Swollen hands", "Bad vision", "Imbalance", "Fear of open spaces"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is a “hoofer”?", "question_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB_2", "options": ["Someone who hitches rides from others", "Someone who walks long distances", "Someone who works on a farm", "Someone who lives on Earth"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Parker’s financial situation?", "question_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB_3", "options": ["He’s retired and ready to buy a farm.", "He needs to continue working in space to support his family.", "He worked overtime and has saved a large sum for his family.", "He worked overtime but gambled the money away."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a “tumbler”?", "question_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB_4", "options": ["Someone who drinks too much", "Someone who frequently gets in fights", "Someone who drives a car", "Someone who works in space"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is most likely to happen next in the story?", "question_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB_5", "options": ["Parker will stay home for a few months and then go back out to space.", "Parker will open a business with the money he’s saved.", "Parker will be taken in by Marie’s family.", "Parker will buy a farm for his family to live on."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does Hooky know Parker?", "question_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB_6", "options": ["They lived on neighboring farms.", "Hooky replaced Parker on the spaceship.", "Hooky lived with the family of Parker’s wife.", "Parker met him at a bar."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Parker’s forehead get injured?", "question_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB_7", "options": ["Hitting a fence post", "Fighting in the bar", "Fighting on the bus", "Falling into a cement pit"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were people tolerant of Parker on the bus?", "question_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB_8", "options": ["They were scared of him.", "They understood the challenges he faced.", "They were friends of Marie’s.", "They wanted money from him."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is Big Bottomless?", "question_unique_id": "29170_H9KOYSPB_9", "options": ["Space", "Despair", "Ocean", "Brand of Gin"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/9/1/7/29170//29170-h//29170-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "32890", "set_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Home is Where You Left It", "year": 1968, "author": "Marlowe, Stephen", "topic": "Short stories; Space colonies -- Fiction; PS; Science fiction", "article": "HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\nBy ADAM CHASE\n[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\nHow black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\nOnly the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n\n\n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n\n\n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n\n\n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"\n\n\n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n\n\n \"The Kumaji—\"\n\n\n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n\n\n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n\n\n \"But you stayed here—\"\n\n\n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n\n\n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n\n\n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n\n\n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n\n\n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—\"\n\n\n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n\n\n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n\n\n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n\n\n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n \"I'm one of you.\"\n\n\n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n\n\n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n\n\n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n\n\n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n\n\n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n\n\n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n\n\n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n\n\n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n\n\n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n\n\n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"\n\n\n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n\n\n \"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n\n\n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n\n\n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n\n\n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n\n\n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n\n\n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n\n\n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"\n\n\n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n\n\n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\nDarkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n\n\n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n\n\n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n\n\n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing.\n\n\n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"\n\n\n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n\n\n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n\n\n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n\n\n Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n\n\n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n\n\n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Tobias initially greeted Steve with…", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_1", "options": ["Relief", "Hostility", "Confusion", "Joy"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How long had it been since Steve was in his home village?", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_2", "options": ["Five years", "Ten years", "Six months", "One year"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was the old man in the village?", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_3", "options": ["The villagers left and forgot him.", "He helped the enemy and was outcast as a traitor.", "He decided to stay and fight to protect his home.", "He was too frail to travel with the others."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "At the rate the villagers are walking, how long will it take to reach Oasis City 500 miles away?", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_4", "options": ["About one year", "Five more days", "About one week", "About one month"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Mary slap Jeremy?", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_5", "options": ["He insulted her.", "He insulted her father.", "He tried to touch her.", "He admitted to harming her father."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Steve pretend to kill Tobias?", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_6", "options": ["To win over Mary", "To distract the guard", "To punish him for his betrayal", "To enact revenge"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Tobias’ final dying wish?", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_7", "options": ["For the family fortune to be returned", "To be known as a hero", "For the Kumaji to be held accountable", "For Mary to live happily with Steve"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why are the villagers going to Oasis City?", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_8", "options": ["To gather an army for revenge against the Kumajis", "To seek help and transportation to a new home", "To get their money back", "To rejoin relatives who live there"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What resource was in short supply among the caravan?", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_9", "options": ["Water", "Weapons", "Camels", "Food"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What are thlots?", "question_unique_id": "32890_QB8LVSHH_10", "options": ["Kumaji patrol vehicles", "Desert transport animals", "A type of weapon", "Desert prey for food"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/2/8/9/32890//32890-h//32890-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "25644", "set_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Man Who Hated Mars", "year": 1957, "author": "Garrett, Randall", "topic": "Short stories; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; PS; Science fiction; Escapes -- Fiction", "article": "To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of\n a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be\n boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do\n all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he\n wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only—\nThe Man Who Hated Mars\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\n“I want\n you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in\n a trembling voice.\n\n\n He was addressing his request\n to a thin woman sitting\n behind a desk that seemed\n much too big for her. The\n plaque on the desk said:\nLT. PHOEBE HARRIS\n\n TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris glanced\n at the man before her for only\n a moment before she returned\n her eyes to the dossier on the\n desk; but long enough to verify\n the impression his voice\n had given. Ron Clayton was a\n big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous\n man.\n\n\n He said: “Well? Dammit,\n say something!”\n\n\n The lieutenant raised her\n eyes again. “Just be patient\n until I’ve read this.” Her voice\n and eyes were expressionless,\n but her hand moved beneath\n the desk.\nThe frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space.\n\n\n Clayton froze.\nShe’s yellow!\nhe thought. She’s turned on\n the trackers! He could see the\n pale greenish glow of their\n little eyes watching him all\n around the room. If he made\n any fast move, they would cut\n him down with a stun beam\n before he could get two feet.\n\n\n She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”\n\n\n “But it isn’t fair! The most\n I’d have got on that frame-up\n would’ve been ten years. I’ve\n been here fifteen already!”\n\n\n “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t\n be done. You’re here. Period.\n Forget about trying to get\n back. Earth doesn’t want\n you.” Her voice sounded\n choppy, as though she were\n trying to keep it calm.\n\n\n Clayton broke into a whining\n rage. “You can’t do that!\n It isn’t fair! I never did anything\n to you! I’ll go talk to the\n Governor! He’ll listen to reason!\n You’ll see! I’ll—”\n\n\n “\nShut up!\n” the woman\n snapped harshly. “I’m getting\n sick of it! I personally think\n you should have been locked\n up—permanently. I think this\n idea of forced colonization is\n going to breed trouble for\n Earth someday, but it is about\n the only way you can get anybody\n to colonize this frozen\n hunk of mud.\n\n\n “Just keep it in mind that\n I don’t like it any better than\n you do—\nand I didn’t strong-arm\n anybody to deserve the\n assignment!\nNow get out of\n here!”\n\n\n She moved a hand threateningly\n toward the manual controls\n of the stun beam.\n\n\n Clayton retreated fast. The\n trackers ignored anyone walking\n away from the desk; they\n were set only to spot threatening\n movements toward it.\n\n\n Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.\n\n\n Fifty-two. Space Transport\n Ship Fifty-two.\n\n\n Probably bringing another\n load of poor suckers to freeze\n to death on Mars.\n\n\n That was the thing he hated\n about Mars—the cold. The\n everlasting damned cold! And\n the oxidation pills; take one\n every three hours or smother\n in the poor, thin air.\n\n\n The government could have\n put up domes; it could have\n put in building-to-building\n tunnels, at least. It could have\n done a hell of a lot of things\n to make Mars a decent place\n for human beings.\n\n\n But no—the government\n had other ideas. A bunch of\n bigshot scientific characters\n had come up with the idea\n nearly twenty-three years before.\n Clayton could remember\n the words on the sheet he had\n been given when he was sentenced.\n\n\n “Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home.\n\n\n The Recreation Building\n was just ahead; at least it\n would be warm inside. He\n pushed in through the outer\n and inner doors, and he heard\n the burst of music from the\n jukebox. His stomach tightened\n up into a hard cramp.\n\n\n They were playing Heinlein’s\nGreen Hills of Earth\n.\n\n\n There was almost no other\n sound in the room, although\n it was full of people. There\n were plenty of colonists who\n claimed to like Mars, but even\n they were silent when that\n song was played.\n\n\n Clayton wanted to go over\n and smash the machine—make\n it stop reminding him.\n He clenched his teeth and his\n fists and his eyes and cursed\n mentally.\nGod, how I hate\n Mars!\nWhen the hauntingly nostalgic\n last chorus faded away,\n he walked over to the machine\n and fed it full of enough coins\n to keep it going on something\n else until he left.\n\n\n At the bar, he ordered a\n beer and used it to wash down\n another oxidation tablet. It\n wasn’t good beer; it didn’t\n even deserve the name. The\n atmospheric pressure was so\n low as to boil all the carbon\n dioxide out of it, so the brewers\n never put it back in after\n fermentation.\n\n\n He was sorry for what he\n had done—really and truly\n sorry. If they’d only give him\n one more chance, he’d make\n good. Just one more chance.\n He’d work things out.\n\n\n He’d promised himself that\n both times they’d put him up\n before, but things had been\n different then. He hadn’t really\n been given another chance,\n what with parole boards and\n all.\n\n\n Clayton closed his eyes and\n finished the beer. He ordered\n another.\n\n\n He’d worked in the mines\n for fifteen years. It wasn’t\n that he minded work really,\n but the foreman had it in for\n him. Always giving him a bad\n time; always picking out the\n lousy jobs for him.\n\n\n Like the time he’d crawled\n into a side-boring in Tunnel\n 12 for a nap during lunch and\n the foreman had caught him.\n When he promised never to\n do it again if the foreman\n wouldn’t put it on report, the\n guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate\n to hurt a guy’s record.”\n\n\n Then he’d put Clayton on\n report anyway. Strictly a rat.\n\n\n Not that Clayton ran any\n chance of being fired; they\n never fired anybody. But\n they’d fined him a day’s pay.\n A whole day’s pay.\n\n\n He tapped his glass on the\n bar, and the barman came\n over with another beer. Clayton\n looked at it, then up at\n the barman. “Put a head on\n it.”\n\n\n The bartender looked at\n him sourly. “I’ve got some\n soapsuds here, Clayton, and\n one of these days I’m gonna\n put some in your beer if you\n keep pulling that gag.”\n\n\n That was the trouble with\n some guys. No sense of humor.\n\n\n Somebody came in the door\n and then somebody else came\n in behind him, so that both\n inner and outer doors were\n open for an instant. A blast\n of icy breeze struck Clayton’s\n back, and he shivered. He\n started to say something, then\n changed his mind; the doors\n were already closed again,\n and besides, one of the guys\n was bigger than he was.\n\n\n The iciness didn’t seem to\n go away immediately. It was\n like the mine. Little old Mars\n was cold clear down to her\n core—or at least down as far\n as they’d drilled. The walls\n were frozen and seemed to\n radiate a chill that pulled the\n heat right out of your blood.\n\n\n Somebody was playing\nGreen Hills\nagain, damn them.\n Evidently all of his own selections\n had run out earlier than\n he’d thought they would.\n\n\n Hell! There was nothing to\n do here. He might as well go\n home.\n\n\n “Gimme another beer,\n Mac.”\n\n\n He’d go home as soon as he\n finished this one.\n\n\n He stood there with his eyes\n closed, listening to the music\n and hating Mars.\n\n\n A voice next to him said:\n “I’ll have a whiskey.”\nThe voice sounded as if the\n man had a bad cold, and Clayton\n turned slowly to look at\n him. After all the sterilization\n they went through before they\n left Earth, nobody on Mars\n ever had a cold, so there was\n only one thing that would\n make a man’s voice sound\n like that.\n\n\n Clayton was right. The fellow\n had an oxygen tube\n clamped firmly over his nose.\n He was wearing the uniform\n of the Space Transport Service.\n\n\n “Just get in on the ship?”\n Clayton asked conversationally.\n\n\n The man nodded and grinned.\n “Yeah. Four hours before\n we take off again.” He poured\n down the whiskey. “Sure cold\n out.”\n\n\n Clayton agreed. “It’s always\n cold.” He watched enviously\n as the spaceman ordered\n another whiskey.\n\n\n Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.\n\n\n “Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”\n\n\n “Not much. We only keep it\n at six pounds in the ships.\n Half helium and half oxygen.\n Only thing that bothers me is\n the oxy here. Or rather, the\n oxy that\nisn’t\nhere.” He took\n a deep breath through his\n nose tube to emphasize his\n point.\n\n\n Clayton clamped his teeth\n together, making the muscles\n at the side of his jaw stand\n out.\n\n\n Parks didn’t notice. “You\n guys have to take those pills,\n don’t you?”\n\n\n “Yeah.”\n\n\n “I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.\n\n\n “Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.\n\n\n Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.\n\n\n “Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”\n\n\n “Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”\n\n\n “Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”\n\n\n “Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.\n\n\n “Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.\n\n\n “And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.\n\n\n The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.\n\n\n Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”\n\n\n Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.\n\n\n The medic in the sick bay\n fired two shots from a hypo-gun\n into both arms, but Clayton\n ignored the slight sting.\n\n\n “Where am I?”\n\n\n “Real original. Here, take\n these.” He handed Clayton a\n couple of capsules, and gave\n him a glass of water to wash\n them down with.\n\n\n When the water hit his\n stomach, there was an immediate\n reaction.\n\n\n “Oh, Christ!” the medic\n said. “Get a mop, somebody.\n Here, bud; heave into this.”\n He put a basin on the table\n in front of Clayton.\n\n\n It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”\n\n\n Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”\n\n\n The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.\n\n\n It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.\n\n\n “Well, that’s all, Cartwright.\n You can report to\n Kissman in the kitchen.”\n\n\n The First pressed a button\n on his desk and spoke into the\n intercom. “Who was on duty\n at the airlock when the crew\n came aboard last night? Send\n him up. I want to talk to him.”\n\n\n Then the quartermaster officer\n led Clayton out the door\n and took him to the kitchen.\n\n\n The ship’s driver tubes\n were pushing it along at a\n steady five hundred centimeters\n per second squared acceleration,\n pushing her steadily\n closer to Earth with a little\n more than half a gravity of\n drive.\nThere wasn’t much for\n Clayton to do, really. He helped\n to select the foods that\n went into the automatics, and\n he cleaned them out after each\n meal was cooked. Once every\n day, he had to partially dismantle\n them for a really thorough\n going-over.\n\n\n And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.\n\n\n No, by God! He wouldn’t\n go back to that frozen mud-ball!\n He’d stay on Earth,\n where it was warm and comfortable\n and a man could live\n where he was meant to live.\n Where there was plenty of\n air to breathe and plenty of\n water to drink. Where the\n beer tasted like beer and not\n like slop. Earth. Good green\n hills, the like of which exists\n nowhere else.\n\n\n Slowly, over the days, he\n evolved a plan. He watched\n and waited and checked each\n little detail to make sure nothing\n would go wrong. It\ncouldn’t\ngo wrong. He didn’t want\n to die, and he didn’t want to\n go back to Mars.\n\n\n Nobody on the ship liked\n him; they couldn’t appreciate\n his position. He hadn’t done\n anything to them, but they\n just didn’t like him. He didn’t\n know why; he’d\ntried\nto get\n along with them. Well, if they\n didn’t like him, the hell with\n them.\n\n\n If things worked out the\n way he figured, they’d be\n damned sorry.\n\n\n He was very clever about\n the whole plan. When turn-over\n came, he pretended to\n get violently spacesick. That\n gave him an opportunity to\n steal a bottle of chloral hydrate\n from the medic’s locker.\n\n\n And, while he worked in the\n kitchen, he spent a great deal\n of time sharpening a big carving\n knife.\n\n\n Once, during his off time,\n he managed to disable one of\n the ship’s two lifeboats. He\n was saving the other for himself.\n\n\n The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.\n\n\n He grinned. There was a\n way. He simply had to drag\n them outside and jam the door\n lock. He took the key from the\n Engineer, inserted it, turned\n it, and snapped off the head,\n leaving the body of the key\n still in the lock. Nobody would\n unjam it in the next four minutes.\n\n\n Then he began to run up\n the stairwell toward the good\n lifeboat.\n\n\n He was panting and out of\n breath when he arrived, but\n no one had stopped him. No\n one had even seen him.\n\n\n He clambered into the lifeboat,\n made everything ready,\n and waited.\n\n\n The signal bombs were not\n heavy charges; their main\n purposes was to make a flare\n bright enough to be seen for\n thousands of miles in space.\n Fluorine and magnesium\n made plenty of light—and\n heat.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, there was\n no gravity. He had felt nothing,\n but he knew that the\n bombs had exploded. He\n punched the LAUNCH switch\n on the control board of the\n lifeboat, and the little ship\n leaped out from the side of the\n greater one.\n\n\n Then he turned on the\n drive, set it at half a gee, and\n watched the STS-52 drop behind\n him. It was no longer\n decelerating, so it would miss\n Earth and drift on into space.\n On the other hand, the lifeship\n would come down very\n neatly within a few hundred\n miles of the spaceport in\n Utah, the destination of the\n STS-52.\n\n\n Landing the lifeship would\n be the only difficult part of\n the maneuver, but they were\n designed to be handled by beginners.\n Full instructions\n were printed on the simplified\n control board.\nClayton studied them for\n a while, then set the alarm to\n waken him in seven hours and\n dozed off to sleep.\n\n\n He dreamed of Indiana. It\n was full of nice, green hills\n and leafy woods, and Parkinson\n was inviting him over to\n his mother’s house for chicken\n and whiskey. And all for free.\n\n\n Beneath the dream was the\n calm assurance that they\n would never catch him and\n send him back. When the\n STS-52 failed to show up,\n they would think he had been\n lost with it. They would never\n look for him.\n\n\n When the alarm rang,\n Earth was a mottled globe\n looming hugely beneath the\n ship. Clayton watched the\n dials on the board, and began\n to follow the instructions on\n the landing sheet.\n\n\n He wasn’t too good at it.\n The accelerometer climbed\n higher and higher, and he felt\n as though he could hardly\n move his hands to the proper\n switches.\n\n\n He was less than fifteen\n feet off the ground when his\n hand slipped. The ship, out of\n control, shifted, spun, and\n toppled over on its side,\n smashing a great hole in the\n cabin.\n\n\n Clayton shook his head and\n tried to stand up in the wreckage.\n He got to his hands and\n knees, dizzy but unhurt, and\n took a deep breath of the fresh\n air that was blowing in\n through the hole in the cabin.\n\n\n It felt just like home.\nBureau of Criminal Investigation\n\n Regional Headquarters\n\n Cheyenne, Wyoming\n\n 20 January 2102\nTo: Space Transport Service\n\n Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52\n\n Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer\n\n\n Dear Paul,\n\n\n I have on hand the copies\n of your reports on the rescue\n of the men on the disabled\n STS-52. It is fortunate that\n the Lunar radar stations could\n compute their orbit.\n\n\n The detailed official report\n will follow, but briefly, this is\n what happened:\n\n\n The lifeship landed—or,\n rather, crashed—several miles\n west of Cheyenne, as you\n know, but it was impossible\n to find the man who was piloting\n it until yesterday because\n of the weather.\n\n\n He has been identified as\n Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled\n to Mars fifteen years ago.\n\n\n Evidently, he didn’t realize\n that fifteen years of Martian\n gravity had so weakened his\n muscles that he could hardly\n walk under the pull of a full\n Earth gee.\n\n\n As it was, he could only\n crawl about a hundred yards\n from the wrecked lifeship before\n he collapsed.\n\n\n Well, I hope this clears up\n everything.\n\n\n I hope you’re not getting\n the snow storms up there like\n we’ve been getting them.\n\n\n John B. Remley\n\n Captain, CBI\nTHE END\nTranscriber’s Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1956.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why do the people on Mars have to take pills?", "question_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX_1", "options": ["To survive in low pressure", "To be able to breathe", "To prevent them from getting sick", "To stay warm in the cold"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Clayton's very first reaction to Parks was:", "question_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX_2", "options": ["envy that he was able to buy whiskey.", "curiosity about his oxygen tube.", "annoyance that he let cold air in through both doors.", "fascination with his Luna story."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Clayton realized he didn't like Mars...", "question_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX_3", "options": ["when he met with the parole board.", "when he arrived.", "when he was working in the mines.", "when he committed robbery."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Clayton enter Sharks alone?", "question_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX_4", "options": ["Clayton didn't want Parks to know the true ingredients of Martian Gin.", "Sharks is wary of strangers.", "Clayton didn't want Parks to know the true cost of Martian Gin.", "Parks was too drunk."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the First Officer call to speak with the airlock duty crew member?", "question_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX_5", "options": ["For him to explain how Clayton got aboard the ship.", "For him to show Clayton around the ship.", "For him to take Clayton to sick bay.", "For him to take Clayton to the kitchen."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Clayton failed to think through what part of his escape plan?", "question_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX_6", "options": ["How he would be able to decapacitate the engineers.", "How to keep the STS-52 from catching him.", "How he would be able to steer and maneuver the lifeboat.", "How we would be able to run away once he landed on Earth."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happened when Clayton boarded the STS-52?", "question_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX_7", "options": ["He was caught and put in the hold.", "He went to sick bay.", "He took Parkinson's place in the kitchen.", "He passed out behind some crates."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What did Parks do that pushed Clayton over the edge?", "question_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX_8", "options": ["Got them both kicked out of the Recreation Building", "Talked about his life in Indiana", "Told Clayton he's stupid for not going home", "Kept playing the \"Green Hills of Earth\" on the jukebox"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "When Clayton fought with Parks, he...", "question_unique_id": "25644_LJ0AJNPX_9", "options": ["thought he had just knocked him out.", "left him at his place to sleep it off.", "left him to die.", "put clothes on him to keep him warm."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/5/6/4/25644//25644-h//25644-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "31612", "set_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Very Secret Agent", "year": 1958, "author": "Wolf, Mari", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; Short stories; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Telepathy -- Fiction", "article": "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE VERY SECRET AGENT\nBY MARI WOLF\nIllustrated by Ed Emsh\nPoor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how\n was he supposed to understand what goes on in a woman's mind\n when the male of the same species didn't even know?\nIn their ship just beyond the orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking\n at each other.\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said. \"I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right\n now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have\n any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded.\"\n\n\n \"You contacted the factory?\" Nagor asked.\n\n\n \"Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a\n new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger\n Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But\n not one knows anything about what it is.\"\n\n\n Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in\n the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor\n considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception.\n He frowned.\n\n\n \"What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The\n supervisors? The technicians?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said flatly. \"They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make\n contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of\n what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield.\"\n\n\n \"Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?\"\n\n\n \"Shielded. All ten thousand of them. Of course I haven't checked all\n of them yet, but—\"\n\n\n \"Do it,\" Nagor said grimly. \"We've got to find out what that weapon\n is. Or else get out of this solar system.\"\n\n\n Riuku sighed. \"I'll try,\" he said.\nSomeone put another dollar in the juke box, and the theremins started\n in on Mare Indrium Mary for the tenth time since Pete Ganley had come\n into the bar. \"Aw shut up,\" he said, wishing there was some way to\n turn them off. Twelve-ten. Alice got off work at Houston's at twelve.\n She ought to be here by now. She would be, if it weren't Thursday.\n Shield boosting night for her.\n\n\n Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"\n\n\n She shook her bandanaed head, slid onto the stool beside him and\n crossed her knees—a not very convincing sign of femininity in a woman\n wearing baggy denim coveralls. \"Aren't you going to buy me a drink,\n honey?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure.\" He glanced over at the bartender. \"Another beer. No, make\n it two.\" He pulled the five dollars out of his pocket, shoved it\n across the bar, and looked back at Alice, more closely this time. The\n ID badge, pinned to her hip. The badge, with her name, number,\n department, and picture—and the little meter that measured the\n strength of her Mind Shield.\n\n\n The dial should have pointed to full charge. It didn't. It registered\n about seventy per cent loss.\n\n\n Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind.\n\n\n \"Oh, hi, Joan. No, I'm all right. Just a little dizzy for a moment. A\n hangover? Of course not. Not on a Friday.\"\n\n\n Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink\n straw, her hair does, and of course she thinks it's beautiful....\n\"I'd better get down to my station. Old Liverlips will be ranting\n again. You oughta be glad you have Eddie for a lead man. Eddie's cute.\n So's Dave, over in 77. But Liverlips, ugh....\"\n\n\n She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of\n names:\nMaisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean\n Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again,\n I'll—I'll kill her....\n\"Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of\n course I'm ready to go to work.\"\nLiverlips, that's what you are. And\n still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as\n sloppy as you are....\nGood, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever\n it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but\n let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were,\n and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even\n before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding\n boost.\n\n\n He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of\n course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was\n nothing to look forward to.\n\n\n Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out\n what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside\n the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of\n the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly.\n\n\n Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the\n work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and\n Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73.\n\n\n \"Hey, how'd you make out?\" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure\n none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her,\n then went on. \"Did you get away with it?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Alice said. \"And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked\n in.\"\n\n\n She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and\n reached out for the pan of 731 wires. \"You know, it's funny. Pete's\n not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that,\n but oh, what he does to me.\" She filled the 731 plug with solder and\n reached for the white, black, red wire.\n\n\n \"You'd better watch out,\" Lois said. \"Or Susan's going to be doing\n something to you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, her.\" Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin,\n worked the wire down into position. \"What can she do? Pete doesn't\n give a damn about her.\"\n\n\n \"He's still living with her, isn't he?\" Lois said.\n\n\n Alice shrugged....\nWhat a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be,\n sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of\n them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe\n was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked\n him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her\n working nights....\nAlice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and\n started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time,\n did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight.\n\n\n \"Junior kept me up all night last night,\" Lois said. \"He's cutting a\n tooth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Coralie said, \"It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right\n after Mike was born....\"\n\n\n Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.\n\n\n Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.\n\n\n The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and\n Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent\n is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything.\n\n\n The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or\n something....\n\n\n Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for\n lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her\n mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary.\n\n\n At the end of the shift he had learned nothing. Nothing about the\n weapon, that is. He had found out a good deal about the sex life of\n Genus Homo—information that made him even more glad than before that\n his was a one-sexed race.\nWith work over and tools put away and Alice in the restroom gleefully\n thinking about the red Friday night tag she was slipping onto her ID\n badge, he was as far from success as ever. For a moment he considered\n leaving her, looking for another subject. But he'd probably not be\n able to find one. No, the only thing to do was stay with her, curl\n deep in her mind and go through the Shielding boost, and later on....\n\n\n The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.\n\n\n He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"\n\n\n \"So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby.\n Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar.\"\nFear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe\n Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad.\n I'd sure hate to have him mad at me....\n\"Let's go for a spin, baby. Out in the suburbs somewhere. How about\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Well—why sure, Pete....\"\n\n\n Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"\n\n\n \"Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete\n Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here.\"\n\n\n Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under\n the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what—it\n was cute.\n\n\n \"What makes you think I know anything more than you do?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, gee.\" She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight\n that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway.\n \"You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before\n they go out.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this\n kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything.\n\n\n \"It's a simple enough gadget,\" Pete Ganley said. \"A new type of force\n field weapon that the enemy can't spot until it hits them. They don't\n even know there's an Earth ship within a million miles, until\nBingo\n!...\"\n\n\n She drank it in, and in her mind Riuku did too. Wonderful integration,\n wonderful. Partial thought control. And now, he'd learn the secret....\n\n\n \"You really want to know how it works?\" Pete Ganley said. When she\n nodded he couldn't help grinning. \"Well, it's analogous to the field\n set up by animal neurones, in a way. You've just got to damp that\n field, and not only damp it but blot it out, so that the frequency\n shows nothing at all there, and then—well, that's where those\n Corcoran assemblies you're soldering on come in. You produce the\n field....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"\n\n\n \"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....\n\n\n But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....\n\n\n Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.\n\n\n \"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"\n\n\n Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"\n\n\n She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.\n\n\n ...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.\n\n\n \"Have you found out anything, Riuku?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n Silence. Then: \"We've lost another ship. Maybe you'd better turn her\n loose and come on back. It looks as if we'll have to run for it, after\n all.\"\n\n\n Defeat. The long, interstellar search for another race, a race less\n technologically advanced than this one, and all because of a stupid\n Earth female.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Nagor,\" he said. \"Her boy friend knows. I'll find out. I'll\n make her listen to him.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Nagor said doubtfully. \"All right. But hurry. We haven't much\n time at all.\"\n\n\n \"I'll hurry,\" Riuku promised. \"I'll be back with you tonight.\"\n\n\n That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"\n\n\n \"In a little while. Just a little while.\" Stop thinking about Susan,\n you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything\n out of that man by having hysterics....\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Alice cried bitterly, \"you've been leading me on all the\n time. You don't love me. You'd rather have\nher\n!\"\n\n\n \"That's not so. Hell, baby....\"\nHe's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own\n throat when I act like that....\n\"Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink,\n okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Oh, sure.\"\n\n\n She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\"\n\n\n \"That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a\n duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the\n frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—\"\n\n\n She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now.\n\n\n \"Nagor, I'm getting it,\" Riuku called. \"I'll bring it all back with\n me. Just a minute and I'll have it.\"\n\n\n \"How does it work, honey?\" Alice Hendricks said.\n\n\n \"You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated\n between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful,\n by—\"\n\n\n \"It's coming through now, Nagor.\"\n\n\n \"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"\n\n\n He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"\n\n\n \"You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to\n you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've\n been hearing!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the detective who was driving said. \"And those pictures we\n took last night weren't bad either.\"\n\n\n \"Susan, I can explain everything....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—\"\n\n\n Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make\n her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't\n hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage\n her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.\n\n\n \"Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!\" Alice Hendricks cried.\n\n\n \"Why, let me get my hands on you....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"\n\n\n \"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....\n\n\n \"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.\n\n\n The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why were the aliens not able to make telepathic connection with important Earthlings? ", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_1", "options": ["The earthlings did not have enough telepathic ability ", "The earthlings were using a technology that blocked their thoughts ", "The aliens could not get close enough in distance to the earthlings ", "The earthlings never left a secure location "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were the people Riuku was initially able to contact not of use to him? ", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_2", "options": ["They did not work at the factory", "They were too mentally shielded", "They were trained to clear their minds when contacted ", "They were only concerned with social issues between one another "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Alice skip her shield boosting on Thursday night? ", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_3", "options": ["So that she could see Pete", "To avoid seeing Susan ", "So that she could see Susan at   shield boosting on Friday", "Because her shield was still 70% of the way full "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Pete prefer Alice to Susan? ", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_4", "options": ["Alice was willing to skip the shield boosting ", "Alice was more intelligent ", "Alive was more physically attractive ", "Alice took more risks "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Riuku able to integrate with Alice’s thoughts? ", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_5", "options": ["Alice was preoccupied by thinking about Pete", "Riuku and the alien ship reached a close enough physical distance ", "Alice fell asleep and let her guard down ", "Alice had skipped shield boosting the previous day "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Riuku initially not able to gain any information from Alice?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_6", "options": ["She did not know any important information", "She underwent shield boosting and her shield was too strong ", "She was aware of Riuku’s presence ", "She was preoccupied with interpersonal matters "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Riuku unable to physically control Alice despite being telepathically linked? ", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_7", "options": ["Humans lacked the telepathic capacity to be fully controlled ", "He would reveal his presence to the Earthmen by doing so ", "Her mind shield was at too strong of a level ", "He was in the orbit of Mars and too physically far away from Earth "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Alice able to get away with going to shield charging on the wrong night? ", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_8", "options": ["Paula helped her distract the guards responsible for keeping track of everyone ", "She swapped a different color tag onto her ID badge", "Riuku helped guide her thoughts so that she could fool the guards ", "Her shield was still almost fully charged "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How was Susan able to determine what was happening between Pete and Alice ", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_9", "options": ["By following them ", "By hiring private investigators ", "By bugging Pete’s copter", "All of the other answers are correct "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Riuku trapped in Alice’s mind when Nagor left?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TREGUPE9_10", "options": ["Riuku was too fully integrated to break free", "Nagor was punishing Riuku for failing his mission", "Riuku no longer wanted to leave Earth", "Nagor could no longer hear Riuku and thought he was lost "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/1/6/1/31612//31612-h//31612-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "25629", "set_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Postmark Ganymede", "year": 1975, "author": "Silverberg, Robert", "topic": "Short stories, American; Science fiction, American; PS", "article": "Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.\n\n\n Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.\n\n\n It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"\n\n\n \"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"\n\n\n Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"\n\n\n \"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.\n\n\n He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.\n\n\n Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!\n\n\n It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.\n\n\n Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"\n\n\n \"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"\n\n\n \"The local native life,\" the\n colonist explained. \"They're\n about thirty feet long, a foot\n wide, and mostly mouth.\n There's a ring of them about\n a hundred yards wide surrounding\n the Dome. They can't get in and\n we can't get out—and we can't figure\n out any possible approach for\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty,\" Preston said.\n \"But why didn't the things\n bother you while you were\n building your Dome?\"\n\n\n \"Apparently they have a\n very long hibernation-cycle.\n We've only been here two\n years, you know. The iceworms\n must all have been\n asleep when we came. But\n they came swarming out of\n the ice by the hundreds last\n month.\"\n\n\n \"How come Earth doesn't\n know?\"\n\n\n \"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.\n\n\n \"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.\n\n\n His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"\n\n\n Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"\n\n\n Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.\n\n\n Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.\n\n\n He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.\n\n\n And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"\n\n\n The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"\n\n\n He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"\n\n\n \"Hero?\" Preston shrugged.\n \"All I did was deliver the\n mail. It's all in a day's work,\n you know. The mail's got to\n get through!\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did the chief make Preston a postman? ", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_1", "options": ["Preston had reached retirement age and the chief wanted him to have an easy job", "Preston had angered the chief ", "Preston was bad at being a patrol man ", "Preston was experienced and being a postman was more difficult than expected "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Preston feel shame during his first mission as a postman? ", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_2", "options": ["He had failed to deliver the mail and complete his mission", "He was being escorted by two of his former patrolman colleagues ", "He navigated the convoy directly into the path of pirates", "He was responsible for the deaths of his former patrolman partners "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Preston continuously hit his ships controls during the encounter with the pirates?", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_3", "options": ["His weapons were malfunctioning ", "He was used to having weapons to fire as a former patrolmen ", "He was trying to contact his convoy but the connection was blocked ", "He was trying to increase his speed and run away from the pirates "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was Preston able to avoid the space pirates?", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_4", "options": ["He outran the pirate using his superior piloting skills ", "He destroyed the pirates ships using his extra fuel canister ", "His escorts sacrificed themselves so that he could escape", "He used his training as a patrolman and destroyed there ships"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Preston not able to directly land at the dome on Ganymede?", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_5", "options": ["The dome had been blocked by local wildlife ", "He was being pursued by space pirates", "He was not able to make contact with the local population", "Preston’s ship was running out of fuel"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were the citizens in the dome of Ganymede unable to contact outsides and warn them of the situation? ", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_6", "options": ["All of the citizens of Ganymede had perished ", "Their radio transmitter had been destroyed", "They were purposefully hiding from the space pirates ", "They were too far away from anyone to contact them"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was Preston able to get into the dome on Ganymede? ", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_7", "options": ["He snuck in using the distraction of the ice worms surrounding the dome ", "He blazed a path through the local wildlife using his spare fuel reserves", "He convinced the citizens to let him in despite their blockade ", "He was not able to enter the dome on Ganymede"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were the citizens of Ganymede reluctant to open the airlock for Preston? ", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_8", "options": ["They did not want to receive the mail that Preston had ", "They did not think his plan would work ", "They thought Preston might be a space pirate ", "All of the citizens were incapacitated "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the citizens of Ganymede thank Preston? ", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_9", "options": ["They allowed Preston to enter the dome", "They threw Preston a party ", "They provided Preston with supplies for his return trip", "Preston would not allow them to thank him?"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Preston’s attitude about his new position change throughout the story? ", "question_unique_id": "25629_IK077IP0_10", "options": ["He realized it was a difficult and honorable job ", "He realized it was an incredibly easy job ", "He realized that he was not qualified to be doing the job ", "He realized that the job was simply a temporary position"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/5/6/2/25629//25629-h//25629-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "29159", "set_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Acid Bath", "year": 1962, "author": "Garson, Bill", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "ACID BATH\nBy VASELEOS GARSON\nThe starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\nJon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n\n\n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n\n\n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n\n\n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n\n\n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n\n\n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n\n\n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n\n\n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n\n\n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n\n\n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n\n\n He glanced back finally.\n\n\n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n\n\n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n\n\n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n\n\n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n\n\n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n\n\n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n\n\n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n\n\n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n\n\n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n\n\n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n\n\n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n\n\n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n\n\n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n\n\n They were about the height of Karyl—six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n\n\n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n\n\n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n\n\n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n\n\n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n\n\n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n\n\n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n\n\n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n\n\n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n\n\n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n\n\n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n\n\n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n\n\n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n\n\n The thin fin—the cannon's sight—split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n\n\n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n\n\n He pressed the red button again.\n\n\n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n\n\n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n\n\n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n\n\n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled.\nJon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n\n\n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen,\n is it?—use it as protective\n metal.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n\n\n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n\n\n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n\n\n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n\n\n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n \"I couldn't understand.\"\n\n\n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n\n\n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n\n\n A green effulgence surrounded him.\nThere\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n\n\n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n\n\n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n\n\n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n\n\n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n\n\n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n\n\n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n\n\n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n\n\n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n\n\n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n\n\n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n\n\n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n\n\n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n\n\n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n\n\n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Enter your\"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n\n\n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n\n\n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n\n\n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n\n\n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n\n\n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n\n\n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n\n\n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n\n\n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n\n\n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n\n\n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n\n\n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n\n\n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\nThe\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up—but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n\n\n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n\n\n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n\n\n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n\n\n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n\n\n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n\n\n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n\n\n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n\n\n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n\n\n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n\n\n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n\n\n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n\n\n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n\n\n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n\n\n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n\n\n Would this torture—he chuckled—last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n\n\n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n\n\n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n\n\n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n\n\n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n\n\n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n\n\n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n\n\n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n\n\n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n\n\n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n\n\n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n\n\n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n\n\n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n\n\n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders—it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n\n\n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n\n\n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n\n\n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the—ah—hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n\n\n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n\n\n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n\n\n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n\n\n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n\n\n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\nStaying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n\n\n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n\n\n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n\n\n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n\n\n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n\n\n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n\n\n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n\n\n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n\n\n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n\n\n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n\n\n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n\n\n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n\n\n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n\n\n He sent out the call letters.\n\n\n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n\n\n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n\n\n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n\n\n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n\n\n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n\n\n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n\n\n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n\n\n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\nHe was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n\n\n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n\n\n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n \"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n\n\n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n\n\n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n\n\n The space captain grinned.\n\n\n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with\nwater\nto be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n\n\n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n\n\n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n\n\n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n\n\n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n\n\n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n\n\n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n\n\n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n\n\n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nPlanet Stories\nJuly 1952.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was the liquid that the steel-blues thought would kill Karyl?", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_1", "options": ["Water", "Hemlock", "Citric Acid", "R-dust "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were the steel-blues able to sneak up on Karyl?", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_2", "options": ["His alarm did not sound", "All of the other answers are correct ", "He was not paying attention ", "He was busy repairing his ship"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was Karyl able to out run the steel blues?", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_3", "options": ["His space suit gave him a boots of oxygen ", "His alarm sounded and gave him a large head start", "He was on guard and saw the steel-blues arrive ", "He was much faster than the steel-blues naturally "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How was Karyl able to return to the service station?", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_4", "options": ["He outran the steel-blues and reached the service station before they did ", "He returned after the steel-blues had been destroyed ", "He used a secret entrance to a tunnel", "He snuck past the steel-blues"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the steel blues believe that Karyl was becoming weak in their captivity? ", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_5", "options": ["Their torture was effective ", "The increased oxygen in the atmosphere", "The lack of food he was provided with ", "The steel-blues did not understand why he was becoming weak"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Karyl not concerned with the steel-blues presence outside of the service station?", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_6", "options": ["He knew that the service station was well hidden enough to not be found ", "There was an SP ship en route to the asteroid that would be arriving soon ", "He had an incredibly powerful atomic weapon that he was sure would destroy the steel-blues ", "The metal shielding the station was the strongest in the solar system "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were conventional human defenses and weapons useless against the steel-blues", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_7", "options": ["They had strong force fields surrounding them ", "They were made of metals much harder than humans had encountered ", "They were made of a jelly like substance that", "They were able to telepathically control humans "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How were the steel-blues able to communicate with Karyl? ", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_8", "options": ["They had technology that translated any spoken language for them ", "They had learned human language in preparation for their journey ", "They were not able to directly communicate with Karyl", "They were able to communicate telepathically "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were the steel-blues traveling into the solar-system? ", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_9", "options": ["To colonize new habitable planets for their species ", "To study the native life that existed there ", "To harvest a liquid found in the solar system that could\nbe used as a weapom", "To destroy the native life that existed there "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How was Karyl able to survive the torture by the steel-blues? ", "question_unique_id": "29159_UB02CD4J_10", "options": ["The excess oxygen in the atmosphere was keeping him alive ", "The knowledge that the SP ship would come save him gave him the strength to continue ", "By fasting from food he was able to gain immunity to the toxins ", "Neither of the liquids being provided to him were toxic to humans "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/9/1/5/29159//29159-h//29159-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "24949", "set_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Control Group", "year": 1959, "author": "Aycock, Roger D.", "topic": "Science fiction, American; PS; Short stories", "article": "\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\nCONTROL GROUP\nBy ROGER DEE\nThe\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the\nMarco Four\ndown at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had—as\n was usual and proper—no voice\n in the matter.\n\n\n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n\n\n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n\n\n \"And I think\nyou\nlive for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born—neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n\n\n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n\n\n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n\n\n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added\nas usual\n. \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n\n\n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the\nMarco Four\nout of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n\n\n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n\"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n\n\n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The\nMarco Four\n, Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n\n\n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n\n\n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\nStryker looked dubious.\n \"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n\n\n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n\n\n Stryker was not reassured.\n\n\n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n\n\n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n\n\n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n \"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n\n\n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'—we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n\n\n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n \"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n\n\n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n\n\n Gibson disagreed.\n\n\n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment—the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point—and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n\n\n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n\n\n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n \"then there's only one choice remaining—they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n\n\n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture—they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n\n\n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n\n\n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n\n\n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years—the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n\n\n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n \"It's high time I took my turn—and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the\nMarco\n Four\n.\n\n\n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the\nLament for Old Terra\nwith\n your accordion.\"\n\n\n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n\n\n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n\n\n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n\n\n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n \"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n\n\n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear—and\n as inflectionless—as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the\nMarco Four\n.\"\n\n\n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n\n\n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n \"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n\n\n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\nFarrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n\n\n \"\nContinuous fission?\nGood\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n\n\n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad\nmen\n? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n\n\n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end—\"\n\n\n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib—the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since—how\n long, Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n \"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n\n\n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk—\n\n\n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get\nhere\n?\"\n\n\n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n\n\n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not—\"\n\n\n \"\nAny problem posed by one\n group of human beings\n,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \"\ncan be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity\n.\"\n\n\n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\nHe waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n\n\n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n\n\n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n\n\n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us\nhow\n,\n we're ready to move.\"\n\n\n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n \"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars—our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n\n\n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\nGibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n\n\n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000—Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember—and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n\n\n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship\ncouldn't\nhave made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary—the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated—\"\n\n\n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n \"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n\n\n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n 3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n\n\n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n\n\n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\nBut uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n\n\n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs—what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n\n\n Suppose, he thought—and derided\n himself for thinking it—one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures\ndid\nsucceed?\n\n\n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n\n\n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n\n\n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down—\"\n\n\n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\nHe awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n\n\n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n\n\n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n\n\n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n\n\n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better—they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the\nMarco\nwould be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n\n\n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n\n\n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n\n\n \"A\ncreche\n,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n\n\n One of those old ventures\nhad\nsucceeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before—for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n\n\n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n\n\n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n\n\n The\nMarco Four\n, ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\nFarrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n\n\n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n\n\n He reached the\nMarco Four\nwith the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n\n\n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n\n\n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n\n\n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the\nMarco Four\ndown. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n\n\n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n\n\n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n\n\n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n\n\n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n\n\n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n\n\n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n \"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n\n\n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where\ndid\nthey come from?\"\n\n\n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n \"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n\n\n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here—they\n still don't know where\n they really are—by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n\n\n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n\n\n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n\n\n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n\n\n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal—if obsolete—background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n\n\n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n \"It's obvious enough,\n surely—hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Science Fiction Stories\nJanuary\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did the Stryker not want to land on Alphard Six immediately ", "question_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL_1", "options": ["He knew that there was a hostile Terran settlement on the planet ", "They were merely on a reconnaissance mission ", "The reclamation’s handbook stated not to do so ", "He knew that there were Hymenops on the planet "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How was the ship’s ZIT drive damaged? ", "question_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL_2", "options": ["In an attack by the Hymenops ", "By overuse because the crew had not landed for rest in too long of a time ", "In an attack by the hostile Terran colony ", "On accident when the Terran contact ship was destroyed"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Striker reluctant to contact the civilization on Alphard six?", "question_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL_3", "options": ["He thought they were hostile enough to attack the ship ", "He thought they were a trap set by the Hymenops", "He thought they would want to remain undisturbed", "He received direct orders from Gibson not too "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How was the crew sure that the life on Alphard Six was not a resurgent colony? ", "question_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL_4", "options": ["The Hymenops has destroyed all life in the sector ", "The planet was not hospitable for life ", "It had never been colonized in the first place ", "They had been contacted and told that such was the case "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was the crew sure that the attack from Alphard Six did not come from the Hymenops? ", "question_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL_5", "options": ["There were no signs of the Hymenops housing structures anywhere", "There had been no Hymenops in the sector for a long time ", "All of the other answers are correct ", "The type of weapon was too crude to be from the Hymenops "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was the society on Alphard Six generating power? ", "question_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL_6", "options": ["By using old Hymenops technology ", "By using the energy from the nearby star", "By converting their crashed ship", "By building nuclear power generators"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the crew think that it was impossible that an ancient Terran crew had settled Alphard Six?", "question_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL_7", "options": ["The Hymenops had destroyed all of the ancient settlers ", "They were using technology too advanced to be ancient Terrans ", "All of the other answers are correct ", "None of the rocket propulsion ships had ever made it to a habitable planet before"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Gibson reassure Farrell that they were not in danger after his ship had crashed? ", "question_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL_8", "options": ["The crew of the Marco Four had subdued the local settlers ", "The attack had been by an unmanned ship ", "They had landed in a deserted portion of the planet ", "The local settlers were hospitable and altruistic "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How were the Terrans able to reach and colonize Alphard Six? ", "question_unique_id": "24949_QBUKKNWL_9", "options": ["The rocket propulsion ship had succeeded in its mission ", "They had been captured and dropped off by the Hymenops ", "They had just arrived within the past few hundred years from a neighboring colony ", "They were not Terrans, but a very similar extraterrestrial race"], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/4/9/4/24949//24949-h//24949-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "29193", "set_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Dream Town", "year": 1964, "author": "Slesar, Henry", "topic": "Short stories; PS; Fantasy fiction", "article": "Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights!\ndream\n \ntown\nby ... HENRY SLESAR\nThe woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\nThe\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n \"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry—\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n\n\n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n \"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n\n\n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n\n\n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court—\"\n\n\n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n\n\n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n \"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n\n\n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n\n\n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n\n\n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n\n\n \"I really can't thank you\n enough—\"\n\n\n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n\n\n \"The what?\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n\n\n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n\n\n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\nHe\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n\n\n Then he went to sleep.\n\n\n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n\n\n \"Are you\nnakkid\n?\"\n\n\n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n\n\n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n \"What time is it?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n \"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n\n\n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n \"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n\n\n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n\n\n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"\nSally!\n\" Mom again, sterner.\n \"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you\never\ngonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n\n\n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n \"Good morning.\"\n\n\n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n\n\n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n\n\n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n\n\n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n \"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n\n\n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n \"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n The man scratched his ear.\n \"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n\n\n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n\n\n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n \"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n\n\n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\nAt\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n\n\n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He\nseemed\nokay.\"\n\n\n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n \"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n\n\n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n\n\n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n \"Don't you know\nnothin'\n?\"\n\n\n \"\nArma\ngon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister—\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n \"What's the name?\"\n\n\n \"Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n\n\n \"Dream? You mean this—Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n\n\n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n\n\n \"You mean—\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean\nyou\ndream about the same\n place?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n\n\n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n\n\n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n\n\n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n\n\n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n\n\n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n\n\n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\nThey\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n\n\n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n\n\n The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n\n\n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n \"Does\nshe\ndream about this—Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n\n\n \"And you, Mr.—\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n\n\n The fat man giggled.\n\n\n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n\n\n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n\n\n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\nThe\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n\n\n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n\n\n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n\n\n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n\n\n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n\n\n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n\n\n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n\n\n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n\n\n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n \"Now is it any of\nyour\nbusiness? I mean, is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n\n\n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n \"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n\n\n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n\n\n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n\n\n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n\n\n \"Please ...\"\n\n\n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n\n\n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n\n\n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n\n\n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable—\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n\n\n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n\n\n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.\n\n\n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n \"About my car—\"\n\n\n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n \"Your\ncar\n? Young man, ain't\n you got no\nrespect\n?\"\n\n\n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\nHe\n took a walk.\n\n\n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n\n\n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n\n\n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n\n\n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n\n\n \"You a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Thought so.\"\n\n\n Sol repeated the question.\n\n\n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n\n\n \"How—I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n\n\n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n\n\n That was that.\n\n\n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n\n\n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n\n\n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n\n\n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n\n\n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n\n\n He learned little.\nAt\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n\n\n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n \"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n\n\n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n \"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n\n\n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n\n\n Inside the house, she said:\n \"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n\n\n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n\n\n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something—\"\n\n\n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\nMr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n\n\n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n \"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n\n\n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n\n\n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit—it's\n sure interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n \"I guess it would be.\"\n\n\n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n\n\n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n\n\n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n\n\n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n\n\n Then sleep came.\nHe\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n\n\n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n\n\n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n\n\n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n\n\n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n\n\n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n \"Gimme my hat!\"\n\n\n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n\n\n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa!\nPa!\nLook who's here!\"\n\n\n Willie Dawes appeared.\nNo!\nSol thought. This was\nKing\nDawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n \"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n \"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now\nyou're\nin it, too.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n\n\n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So\nthat's\nthe\n snooper, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n \"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n\n\n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n\n\n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute—\"\n\n\n Charlie shouted.\n\n\n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough—\"\n\n\n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n\n\n The Knights stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n\n\n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered—would\n he ever awake?\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nJanuary 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why was Sol Becker initially wanting to spend the night at Mom’s house? ", "question_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4_1", "options": ["He had business with Mr. Dawes", "He needed a place to rest on his road trip to the wedding", "To find out more about Armagon", "Because his car had been stolen "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What excecution was Mom talking about at the beginning of the story? ", "question_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4_2", "options": ["Mr. Brundage’s execution ", "Mr. Dawes’ execution ", "Charlie’s exception ", "Mr. Becker’s execution "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the location of the “palace” mentioned in the story? ", "question_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4_3", "options": ["The courthouse of the town ", "A location in Armagon ", "The center square of the town ", "The location where the wedding was taking place "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Mr. Becker on a road trip? ", "question_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4_4", "options": ["To go to a friend’s wedding ", "To investigate the executions in Armagon", "To write a journalism piece on the town ", "To retrieve his stolen car "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did everyone in the town know what Armagon was? ", "question_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4_5", "options": ["Not everyone who lived in the town knew what Armagon was ", "The stories of Armagon were very popular in the town ", "They all visited Armagon when they slept ", "It was a secret location for the townspeople to meet "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were Mr. Dawes and Mr. Becker visiting the Sherrif?", "question_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4_6", "options": ["To alert the state police about Mr. Becker’s stolen car", "To alert the authorities about the recent murder ", "To try and stop the execution from occurring ", "To learn more about what Armagon was "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How had Mr. Brundage been killed? ", "question_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4_7", "options": ["He had been killed by the Sherrif ", "His wife had murdered him", "He had been executed at the courthouse in the town   ", "He had been killed in Armagon"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the townspeople react to Mr. Becker’s questions about Armagon? ", "question_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4_8", "options": ["They filled him in on the fact that it was a dream world ", "They pretended to not know what he was talking about ", "They refused to give him any information ", "They threatened him "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What happened to Mr. Becker when he arrived to Armagon? ", "question_unique_id": "29193_XMP8T9O4_9", "options": ["He was trapped there forever ", "He was made into a knight ", "He was abruptly woken up ", "He was killed "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/9/1/9/29193//29193-h//29193-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "99908", "set_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns", "year": 2017, "author": "Christopher Beanland", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services. \n\n Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale. \n\n But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures.  \n\n Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.\nHowever the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals. \n\n It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.\n\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces. \n\n \"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.  \n\n The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years. \n\n In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\" \n\n It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre. \n\n Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\" \n\n JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.\nEach UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"  \n\n Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker. \n\n Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads.  \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\" \n\n Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\" \n\n The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.     \n\n And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "The author's main purpose in this article is to:", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_1", "options": ["Provide an overview of the history and impact of the New Towns project in the UK.", "Compare and contrast New Towns and Old Towns in the UK.", "Highlight the contributions of well-known architects in post-war Britain.", "Celebrate the milestone birthdays of Milton Keynes and Harlow."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which is *not* an example of a New Town?", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_2", "options": ["Redditch", "Chelmsley Wood", "Peterlee", "Harlow"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is generally *not* included in a New Town design?", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_3", "options": ["Schools & transport centers", "Shops & factories", "Traditional architecture", "Landscaping & gardens"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Bournville known for?", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_4", "options": ["Its murals and public art", "Its post-industrial architecture", "Its massive town centre megastructure", "Its tree-lined streets and country gardens"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What impact did the New Towns Act have?", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_5", "options": ["It funded high-profile public art such as murals.", "It required the remodeling of existing structures.", "It provided support to build company towns.", "It provided support to build housing in post-war Britain."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What decision-making process was implemented in the design of most New Towns?", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_6", "options": ["Town councils hired developers through a bidding process.", "Capitalists purchased large swathes of property to create their own towns.", "Community-based committees reviewed and chose designs of top architects.", "Architects developed and implemented a complete vision of their own."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following was done to encourage residents to relocate to a New Town?", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_7", "options": ["Provided compensation through a relocation fee", "Spoke of its benefits on Robert Hughes' BBC series", "Charged high rents to build prestige", "Commissioned a pop song to sell the idea"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which was *not* considered a flaw of New Towns?", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_8", "options": ["Working class people had no say in the designs", "Neglect and lack of attention over time", "Government policies", "Lack of transportation for jobs"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which foreign city is a good example of modern New Town design?", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_9", "options": ["Canberra", "Mohenjo-daro", "Palmanova", "Alexandria"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Quotes from people who grew up in New Towns demonstrate that:", "question_unique_id": "99908_ZVHY5XEY_10", "options": ["New Towns were dangerous, unfriendly places for children.", "New Towns were largely mocked by residents.", "New Towns provided children with an idyllic childhood experience.", "New Towns were boring and isolating places to live."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/cities/new-towns", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99928", "set_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-openaccess", "title": "Open Access: Scope", "year": 2019, "author": "Peter Suber", "topic": "Open access article", "article": "Open Access: Scope\nAs we saw in chapter 1, any kind of content can in principle be OA. Any kind of content can be digitized, and any kind of digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. In that sense, the potential scope of OA is universal. Hence, instead of saying that OA applies to some categories or genres and not to others, it’s better to say that some categories are easier and some harder.\nOA is not limited to the sciences, where it is known best and moving fastest, but extends to the arts and humanities. It’s not limited to research created in developed countries, where it is most voluminous, but includes research from developing countries. (Nor, conversely, is it limited to research from developing countries, where the need is most pressing.) It’s not limited to publicly funded research, where the argument is almost universally accepted, but includes privately funded and unfunded research. It’s not limited to present and future publications, where most policies focus, but includes past publications. It’s not limited to born-digital work, where the technical barriers are lowest, but includes work digitized from print, microfiche, film, and other media. It’s not limited to text, but includes data, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code.\nThere are serious, practical, successful campaigns to provide OA to the many kinds of content useful to scholars, including:\n• peer-reviewed research articles\n• unrefereed preprints destined to be peer-reviewed research articles\n• theses and dissertations\n• research data\n• government data\n• source code\n• conference presentations (texts, slides, audio, video)\n• scholarly monographs\n• textbooks\n• novels, stories, plays, and poetry\n• newspapers\n• archival records and manuscripts\n• images (artworks, photographs, diagrams, maps)\n• teaching and learning materials (“open education resources” and “open courseware”)\n• digitized print works (some in the public domain, some still under copyright)\nFor some of these categories, such as data and source code, we need OA to facilitate the testing and replication of scientific experiments. For others, such as data, images, and digitized work from other media, we need OA in order to give readers the same chance to analyze the primary materials that the authors had. For others, such as articles, monographs, dissertations, and conference presentations, we need OA simply to share results and analysis with everyone who might benefit from them.\nA larger book could devote sections to each category. Here I focus on just a few.\n5.1 Preprints, Postprints, and Peer Review\nThroughout most of its history, newcomers to OA assumed that the whole idea was to bypass peer review. That assumption was false and harmful, and we’ve made good progress in correcting it. The purpose of OA is to remove access barriers, not quality filters. Today many peer-reviewed OA journals are recognized for their excellence, many excellent peer-reviewed toll-access journal publishers are experimenting with OA, and green OA for peer-reviewed articles is growing rapidly. Unfortunately many newcomers unaware of these developments still assume that the purpose of OA is to bypass peer review. Some of them deplore the prospect, some rejoice in it, and their passion spreads the misinformation even farther.\nAll the public statements in support of OA stress the importance of peer review. Most of the enthusiasm for OA is enthusiasm for OA to peer-reviewed literature. At the same time, we can acknowledge that many of the people working hard for this goal are simultaneously exploring new forms of scholarly communication that exist outside the peer-review system, such as preprint exchanges, blogs, wikis, databases, discussion forums, and social media.\nIn OA lingo, a “preprint” is any version of an article prior to peer review, such as a draft circulating among colleagues or the version submitted to a journal. A “postprint” is any version approved by peer review. The scope of green OA deliberately extends to both preprints and postprints, just as the function of gold OA deliberately includes peer review.\nWe could say that OA preprint initiatives focus on bypassing peer review. But it would be more accurate to say that they focus on OA for works destined for peer review but not yet peer reviewed. Preprint exchanges didn’t arise because they bypass peer review but because they bypass delay. They make new work known more quickly to people in the field, creating new and earlier opportunities for citation, discussion, verification, and collaboration. How quickly? They make new work public the minute that authors are ready to make it public.\nOA preprints offer obvious reader-side benefits to those tracking new developments. But this may be a case where the author-side benefits swamp the reader-side benefits. Preprint exchanges give authors the earliest possible time stamp to mark their priority over others working on the same problem. (Historical aside: It’s likely that in the seventeenth century, journals superseded books as the primary literature of science precisely because they were faster than books in giving authors an authoritative public time stamp.)\nPreprint exchanges existed before the internet, but OA makes them faster, larger, more useful, and more widely read. Despite these advantages, however, preprint exchanges don’t represent the whole OA movement or even the whole green OA movement. On the contrary, most green OA and most OA overall focuses on peer-reviewed articles.\nAs soon as scholars had digital networks to connect peers together, they began using them to tinker with peer review. Can we use networks to find good referees, or to gather, share, and weigh their comments? Can we use networks to implement traditional models of peer review more quickly or effectively? Can we use networks to do better than the traditional models? Many scholars answer “yes” to some or all of these questions, and many of those saying “yes” also support OA. One effect is a creative and long-overdue efflorescence of experiments with new forms of peer review. Another effect, however, is the false perception that OA entails peer-review reform. For example, many people believe that OA requires a certain kind of peer review, favors some kinds of peer review and disfavors others, can’t proceed until we agree on the best form of peer review, or benefits only those who support certain kinds of peer-review reforms. All untrue.\nOA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most traditional and conservative to the most networked and innovative. Some OA journals deliberately adopt traditional models of peer review, in order to tweak just the access variable of scholarly journals. Some deliberately use very new models, in order to push the evolution of peer review. OA is a kind of access, not a kind of editorial policy. It’s not intrinsically tied to any particular model of peer review any more than it’s intrinsically tied to any particular business model or method of digital preservation.\nWith one exception, achieving OA and reforming peer review are independent projects. That is, we can achieve OA without reforming peer review, and we can reform peer review without achieving OA. The exception is that some new forms of peer review presuppose OA.\nFor example,\nopen review\nmakes submissions OA, before or after some prepublication review, and invites community comments. Some open-review journals will use those comments to decide whether to accept the article for formal publication, and others will already have accepted the article and use the community comments to complement or carry forward the quality evaluation started by the journal. Open review requires OA, but OA does not require open review.\nPeer review does not depend on the price or medium of a journal. Nor does the value, rigor, or integrity of peer review. We know that peer review at OA journals can be as rigorous and honest as peer review at the best toll-access journals because it can use the same procedures, the same standards, and even the same people (editors and referees) as the best toll-access journals. We see this whenever toll-access journals convert to OA without changing their methods or personnel.\n5.2 Theses and Dissertations\nTheses and dissertations are the most useful kinds of invisible scholarship and the most invisible kinds of useful scholarship. Because of their high quality and low visibility, the access problem is worth solving.\nFortunately OA for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) is easier than for any other kind of research literature. Authors have not yet transferred rights to a publisher, no publisher permissions are needed, no publisher fears need be answered, and no publisher negotiations slow things down or make the outcome uncertain. Virtually all theses and dissertations are now born digital, and institutions expecting electronic submission generally provide OA, the reverse of the default for journal publishers.\nThe chief obstacle seems to be author fear that making a thesis or dissertation OA will reduce the odds that a journal will publish an article-length version. While these fears are sometimes justified, the evidence suggests that in most cases they are not.\nUniversities expecting OA for ETDs teach the next generation of scholars how easy OA is to provide, how beneficial it is, and how routine it can be. They help cultivate lifelong habits of self-archiving. And they elicit better work. By giving authors a foreseeable, real audience beyond the dissertation committee, an OA policy strengthens existing incentives to do rigorous, original work.\nIf a university requires theses and dissertations to be new and significant works of scholarship, then it ought to expect them to be made public, just as it expects new and significant scholarship by faculty to be made public. Sharing theses and dissertations that meet the school’s high standard reflects well on the institution and benefits other researchers in the field. The university mission to advance research by young scholars has two steps, not one. First, help students produce good work, and then help others find, use, and build on that good work.\n5.3 Books\nThe OA movement focuses on journal articles because journals don’t pay authors for their articles. This frees article authors to consent to OA without losing money. By contrast, book authors either earn royalties or hope to earn royalties.\nBecause the line between royalty-free and royalty-producing literature is bright (and life is short), many OA activists focus exclusively on journal articles and leave books aside. I recommend a different tactic: treat journal articles as low-hanging fruit, but treat books as higher-hanging fruit rather than forbidden fruit. There are even reasons to think that OA for some kinds of books is easier to attain than OA for journal articles.\nThe scope of OA should be determined by author consent, not genre. Imagine an author of a journal article who withholds consent to OA. The economic door is open but the author is not walking through it. This helps us see that relinquishing revenue is only relevant when it leads to consent, and consent suffices whether or not it’s based on relinquishing revenue. It follows that if authors of royalty-producing genres, like books, consent to OA, then we’ll have the same basis for OA to books that we have for OA to articles.\nEven if books are higher-hanging fruit, they’re not out of reach. Two arguments are increasingly successful in persuading book authors to consent to OA.\nRoyalties on most scholarly monographs range between zero and meager. If your royalties are better than that, congratulations. (I’ve earned book royalties; I’m grateful for them, and I wish all royalty-earning authors success.) The case for OA doesn’t ask authors to make a new sacrifice or leave money on the table. It merely asks them to weigh the risk to their royalties against the benefit of OA, primarily the benefit of a larger audience and greater impact. For many book authors, the benefit will outweigh the risk. The benefit is large and the realistic prospect of royalties is low.\nThere is growing evidence that for some kinds of books, full-text OA editions boost the net sales of the priced, printed editions. OA may increase royalties rather than decrease them.\nThe first argument says that even if OA puts royalties at risk, the benefits might outweigh the risks. The second argument says that OA might not reduce royalties at all, and that conventional publication without an OA edition might be the greater risk. Both say, in effect, that authors should be empirical and realistic about this. Don’t presume that your royalties will be high when there’s evidence they will be low, and don’t presume that OA will kill sales when there’s evidence it could boost them.\nBoth arguments apply to authors, but the second applies to publishers as well. When authors have already transferred rights—and the OA decision—to a publisher, then the case rests on the second argument. A growing number of academic book publishers are either persuaded or so intrigued that they’re experimenting.\nMany book authors want a print edition, badly. But the second argument is not only compatible with print but depends on print. The model is to give away the OA edition and sell a print edition, usually via print-on-demand (POD).\nWhy would anyone buy a print book when the full text is OA? The answer is that many people don’t want to read a whole book on a screen or gadget, and don’t want to print out a whole book on their printer. They use OA editions for searching and sampling. When they discover a book that piques their curiosity or meets their personal standards of relevance and quality, they’ll buy a copy. Or, many of them will buy a copy.\nEvidence has been growing for about a decade that this phenomenon works for some books, or some kinds of books, even if it doesn’t work for others. For example, it seems to work for books like novels and monographs, which readers want to read from beginning to end, or which they want to have on their shelves. It doesn’t seem to work for books like encyclopedias, from which readers usually want just an occasional snippet.\nOne problem is running a controlled experiment, since we can’t publish the same book with and without an OA edition to compare the sales. (If we publish a book initially without an OA edition and later add an OA edition, the time lag itself could affect sales.) Another variable is that ebook readers are becoming more and more consumer friendly. If the “net boost to sales” phenomenon is real, and if it depends on the ergonomic discomforts of reading digital books, then better gadgets may make the phenomenon disappear. If the net-boost phenomenon didn’t depend on ergonomic hurdles to digital reading, or didn’t depend entirely on them, then it might survive any sort of technological advances. There’s a lot of experimenting still to do, and fortunately or unfortunately it must be done in a fast-changing environment.\nThe U.S. National Academies Press began publishing full-text OA editions of its monographs alongside priced, printed editions in March 1994, which is ancient history in internet time. Over the years Michael Jensen, its director of web communications and director of publishing technologies, has published a series of articles showing that the OA editions increased the sales of the toll-access editions.\nIn February 2007, the American Association of University Presses issued a Statement on Open Access in which it called for experiments with OA monographs and mixed OA/toll-access business models. By May 2011, the AAUP reported that 17 member presses, or 24 percent of its survey respondents, were already publishing full-text OA books.\nThe question isn’t whether some people will read the OA edition without buying the toll-access edition. Some will. The question isn’t even whether more readers of the OA edition will buy the toll-access edition than not buy it. The question is whether more readers of the OA edition will buy the toll-access edition\nthan would have bought\nthe toll-access edition without the OA edition to alert them to its existence and help them evaluate its relevance and quality. If there are enough OA-inspired buyers, then it doesn’t matter that there are also plenty of OA-satisfied nonbuyers.\nBook authors and publishers who are still nervous could consent to delayed OA and release the OA edition only after six months or a year. During the time when the monograph is toll-access only, they could still provide OA excerpts and metadata to help readers and potential buyers find the book and start to assess it.\nEven the youngest scholars today grew up in a world in which there were more print books in the average university library than gratis OA books online. But that ratio reversed around 2006, give or take. Today there are many more gratis OA books online than print books in the average academic library, and we’re steaming toward the next crossover point when there will be many more gratis OA books online than print books in the world’s largest libraries, academic or not.\nA few years ago, those of us who focus on OA to journal literature were sure that journal articles were lower-hanging fruit than any kind of print books, including public-domain books. But we were wrong. There are still good reasons to make journal literature the strategic focus of the OA movement, and we’re still making good progress on that front. But the lesson of the fast-moving book-scanning projects is that misunderstanding, inertia, and permission are more serious problems than digitization. The permission problem is solved for public-domain books. Digitizing them by the millions is a titanic technical undertaking, but it turns out to be a smaller problem than getting millions of copyrighted articles into OA journals or OA repositories, even when they’re written by authors who can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA for new journal articles faces publisher resistance, print-era incentives, and misunderstandings in every category of stakeholders, including authors and publishers. As the late Jim Gray used to say, “May all your problems be technical.”\n5.4 Access to What?\nNot all the literature that researchers want to find, retrieve, and read should be called knowledge. We want access to serious proposals for knowledge even if they turn out to be false or incomplete. We want access to serious hypotheses even if we’re still testing them and debating their merits. We want access to the data and analysis offered in support of the claims we’re evaluating. We want access to all the arguments, evidence, and discussion. We want access to everything that could help us decide what to call knowledge, not just to the results that we agree to call knowledge. If access depended on the outcome of debate and inquiry, then access could not contribute to debate and inquiry.\nWe don’t have a good name for this category larger than knowledge, but here I’ll just call it research. Among other things, research includes knowledge and knowledge claims or proposals, hypotheses and conjectures, arguments and analysis, evidence and data, algorithms and methods, evaluation and interpretation, debate and discussion, criticism and dissent, summary and review. OA to research should be OA to the whole shebang. Inquiry and research suffer when we have access to anything less.\nSome people call the journal literature the “minutes” of science, as if it were just a summary. But it’s more than that. If the minutes of a meeting summarize a discussion, the journal literature is a large part of the discussion itself. Moreover, in an age of conferences, preprint servers, blogs, wikis, databases, listservs, and email, the journal literature is not the whole discussion. Wikipedia aspires to provide OA to a summary of knowledge, and (wisely) refuses to accept original research. But the larger OA movement wants OA to knowledge and original research themselves, as well as the full discussion about what we know and what we don’t. It wants OA to the primary and secondary sources where knowledge is taking shape through a messy process that is neither consistent (as it works through the clash of conflicting hypotheses) nor stable (as it discards weak claims and considers new ones that appear stronger). The messiness and instability are properties of a discussion, not properties of the minutes of a discussion. The journal literature isn’t just a report on the process but a major channel of the process itself. And not incidentally, OA is valuable not just for making the process public but for facilitating the process and making it more effective, expeditious, transparent, and global.\nTo benefit from someone’s research, we need access to it, and for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether the research is in the sciences or humanities. We need access to medical or physical research before we can use it to tackle a cure for malaria or devise a more efficient solar panel. We need access to an earthquake prediction before we can use it to plan emergency responses.\n                                         \n                                          And we need access to literary and philosophical research in order to understand a difficult passage in Homer or the strength of a response to epistemological skepticism.\nFor this kind of utility, the relevant comparison is not between pure and applied research or between the sciences and humanities. The relevant comparison is between any kind of research when OA and the same kind of research when locked behind price and permission barriers. Whether a given line of research serves wellness or wisdom, energy or enlightenment, protein synthesis or public safety, OA helps it serve those purposes faster, better, and more universally.\n5.5 Access for Whom?\nAnswer: human beings and machines.\n5.5.1 OA for Lay Readers\nSome have opposed OA on the ground that not everyone needs it, which is a little like opposing the development of a safe and effective new medicine on the ground that not every one needs it. It’s easy to agree that not everyone needs it. But in the case of OA, there’s no easy way to identify those who do and those who don’t. In addition, there’s no easy way, and no reason, to deliver it only to those who need it and deny it to everyone else.\nOA allows us to provide access to everyone who cares to have access, without patronizing guesswork about who really wants it, who really deserves it, and who would really benefit from it. Access for everyone with an internet connection helps authors, by enlarging their audience and impact, and helps readers who want access and who might have been excluded by central planners trying to decide in advance whom to enfranchise. The idea is to stop thinking of knowledge as a commodity to meter out to deserving customers, and to start thinking of it as a public good, especially when it is given away by its authors, funded with public money, or both.\nSome lobbyists for toll-access publishers argue, in good faith or bad, that the goal of OA is to bring access to lay readers. This sets up their counter-argument that lay readers don’t care to read cutting-edge research and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. Some publishers go a step further and argue that access to research would harm lay readers.\nThis is a two-step argument, that OA is primarily for lay readers and that lay readers don’t need it. Each step is false. The first step overlooks the unmet demand for access by professional researchers, as if all professionals who wanted access already had it, and the second overlooks the unmet demand for access by lay readers, as if lay readers had no use for access.\nOne reason to think the first step is put forward in bad faith is that it overlooks the very conspicuous fact that the OA movement is driven by researchers who are emphatic about wanting the benefits of OA for themselves. It also overlooks the evidence of wide and widespread access gaps even for professional researchers. (See section 2.1 on problems.)\nThe problem with the second step is presumption. How does anyone know in advance the level of demand for peer-reviewed research among lay readers? When peer-reviewed literature is toll-access and expensive, then lack of access by lay readers and consumers doesn’t show lack of demand, any more than lack of access to Fort Knox shows lack of demand for gold. We have to remove access barriers before we can distinguish lack of access from lack of interest. The experiment has been done, more than once. When the U.S. National Library of Medicine converted to OA in 2004, for example, visitors to its web site increased more than a hundredfold.\nA common related argument is that lay readers surfing the internet are easily misled by unsupported claims, refuted theories, anecdotal evidence, and quack remedies. Even if true, however, it’s an argument for rather than against expanding online access to peer-reviewed research. If we’re really worried about online dreck, we should dilute it with high-quality research rather than leave the dreck unchallenged and uncorrected.\nMany of us medical nonprofessionals—who may be professionals in another field—want access to medical research in order to read about our own conditions or the conditions of family members. But even if few fall into that category, most of us still want access for our doctors, nurses, and hospitals. We still want access for the nonprofit advocacy organizations working on our behalf, such as the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Cystinosis Research Network, or the Spina Bifida Association of America. And in turn, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and advocacy organizations want access for laboratory researchers. As I argued earlier (section 1.2), OA benefits researchers directly and benefits everyone else indirectly by benefiting researchers.\nA May 2006 Harris poll showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted OA for publicly funded research. 83 percent wanted it for their doctors and 82 percent wanted it for everyone. 81 percent said it would help medical patients and their families cope with chronic illness and disability. 62 percent said it would speed up the discovery of new cures. For each poll question, a fairly large percentage of respondents checked “neither agree nor disagree” (between 13 and 30 percent), which meant that only tiny minorities disagreed with the OA propositions. Only 3 percent didn’t want OA for their doctors, 4 percent didn’t want it for themselves, and 5 percent didn’t think it would help patients or their families.\nThe ratio of professional to lay readers of peer-reviewed research undoubtedly varies from field to field. But for the purpose of OA policy, it doesn’t matter what the ratio is in any field. What matters is that neither group has sufficient access today, when most research journals are toll-access. Professional researchers don’t have sufficient access through their institutional libraries because subscription prices are rising faster than library budgets, even at the wealthiest libraries in the world. Motivated lay readers don’t have sufficient access because few public libraries subscribe to any peer-reviewed research journals, and none to the full range.\nThe argument against access for lay readers suffers from more than false assumptions about unmet demand. Either it concedes or doesn’t concede that OA is desirable for professional researchers. If it doesn’t, then it should argue first against the strongest opponent and try to make the case against OA for professionals. But if it does concede that OA for professionals is a good idea, then it wants to build a selection system for deciding who deserves access, and an authentication system for sorting the sheep from the goats. Part of the beauty of OA is that providing access to everyone is cheaper and easier than providing access to some and blocking access to others. We should only raise costs and pay for the apparatus of exclusion when there’s a very good reason to do so.\n5.5.2 OA for Machines\nWe also want access for machines. I don’t mean the futuristic altruism in which kindly humans want to help curious machines answer their own questions. I mean something more selfish. We’re well into the era in which serious research is mediated by sophisticated software. If our machines don’t have access, then we don’t have access. Moreover, if we can’t get access for our machines, then we lose a momentous opportunity to enhance access with processing.\nThink about the size of the body of literature to which you have access, online and off. Now think realistically about the subset to which you’d have practical access if you couldn’t use search engines, or if search engines couldn’t index the literature you needed.\nInformation overload didn’t start with the internet. The internet does vastly increase the volume of work to which we have access, but at the same time it vastly increases our ability to find what we need. We zero in on the pieces that deserve our limited time with the aid of powerful software, or more precisely, powerful software with access. Software helps us learn what exists, what’s new, what’s relevant, what others find relevant, and what others are saying about it. Without these tools, we couldn’t cope with information overload. Or we’d have to redefine “coping” as artificially reducing the range of work we are allowed to consider, investigate, read, or retrieve.\nSome publishers have seriously argued that high toll-access journal prices and limited library budgets help us cope with information overload, as if the literature we can’t afford always coincides with the literature we don’t need. But of course much that is relevant to our projects is unaffordable to our libraries. If any problems are intrinsic to a very large and fast-growing, accessible corpus of literature, they don’t arise from size itself, or size alone, but from limitations on our discovery tools. With OA and sufficiently powerful tools, we could always find and retrieve what we needed. Without sufficiently powerful tools, we could not. Replacing OA with high-priced toll access would only add new obstacles to research, even if it simultaneously made the accessible corpus small enough for weaker discovery tools to master. In Clay Shirky’s concise formulation, the real problem is not information overload but filter failure.\nOA is itself a spectacular inducement for software developers to create useful tools to filter what we can find. As soon as the tools are finished, they apply to a free, useful, and fast-growing body of online literature. Conversely, useful tools optimized for OA literature create powerful incentives for authors and publishers to open up their work. As soon as their work is OA, a vast array of powerful tools make it more visible and useful. In the early days of OA, shortages on each side created a vicious circle: the small quantity of OA literature provided little incentive to develop new tools optimized for making it more visible and useful, and the dearth of powerful tools provided little extra incentive to make new work OA. But today a critical mass of OA literature invites the development of useful tools, and a critical mass of useful tools gives authors and publishers another set of reasons to make their work OA.\nAll digital literature, OA or toll access, is machine-readable and supports new and useful kinds of processing. But toll-access literature minimizes that opportunity by shrinking the set of inputs with access fees, password barriers, copyright restrictions, and software locks. By removing price and permission barriers, OA maximizes this opportunity and spawns an ecosystem of tools for searching, indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting, mashing-up, and other kinds of processing, not to mention myriad forms of crunching and connecting that we can’t even imagine today. One bedrock purpose of OA is to give these research-enhancing, utility-amplifying tools the widest possible scope of operation.\nIn this sense, the ultimate promise of OA is not to provide free online texts for human reading, even if that is the highest-value end use. The ultimate promise of OA is to provide free online data for software acting as the antennae, prosthetic eyeballs, research assistants, and personal librarians of all serious researchers.\nOpening research literature for human users also opens it for software to crunch the literature for the benefit of human users. We can even hope that OA itself will soon be old hat, taken for granted by a new generation of tools and services that depend on it. As those tools and services come along, they will be the hot story and they will deserve to be. Technologists will note that they all depend on OA, and historians will note that OA itself was not easily won.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is one main goal of increasing Open Access to research?", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_1", "options": ["Remove access barriers", "Bypass peer review", "Increase pay for authors and publishers", "Increase library budgets"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following is true:", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_2", "options": ["OA is easier in some categories or genres and is harder in others.", "OA is only for the sciences so that experiments can be tested and replicated.", "OA is only for publicly-funded research.", "OA is possible in some categories or genres and not others."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is untrue about pre-prints?", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_3", "options": ["Authors have a \"time stamp\" on their ideas.", "They are a version or draft of an article prior to peer review.", "They require a certain model of peer review.", "Readers are able to review the work more quickly."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "OA describes...", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_4", "options": ["a kind of editorial policy.", "a kind of business model.", "a kind of digital preservation.", "a kind of access."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Open review is...", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_5", "options": ["dependent on OA.", "a way to invite community comments before an article is accepted for publication.", "a way to invite community comments before peer review.", "a way to improve quality control."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Theses and dissertations suffer from...", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_6", "options": ["being difficult to publish OA.", "publisher discrimination.", "bias that they are not useful.", "low visibility."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The author contends that universities should...", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_7", "options": ["help young researchers get published in conventional journals.", "keep research private to avoid copyright issues.", "give researchers an audience beyond the dissertation committee.", "discourage OA for ETDs."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following is *not* an argument in favor of consent to OA for books:", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_8", "options": ["The author will not lose money since s/he isn't paid.", "Many readers still prefer a printed book even if OA is available.", "The benefit of a larger audience outweighs any risks.", "OA editions sometimes increase sales on the printed editions."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "With regard to mixed OA/toll-access models, which of the following best summarizes the author's position:", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_9", "options": ["It's risky because some readers of the OA edition will instead buy the toll-access edition.", "It's best to publish first, then give OA access later.", "There's opportunity because more people may buy the toll-access edition after hearing about and reviewing the OA copy.", "It's risky because some people will read the OA edition without buying the toll-access edition."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following is *not* espoused by the author?", "question_unique_id": "99928_RAO15D0A_10", "options": ["Peer review at OA journals can use the same standards and people as in toll-access journals.", "The internet created information overload.", "Knowledge is a public good.", "Lifting barriers allows others to find, use, and build on good research."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/u3zxluq1/release/2", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu"}
{"article_id": "99925", "set_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-openaccess", "title": "Open Access: Motivation", "year": 2019, "author": "Peter Suber", "topic": "Open access article", "article": "Open Access: Motivation\n2.1 OA as Solving Problems\nThere are lamentably many problems for which OA is part of the solution. Here are fifteen ways in which the current system of disseminating peer-reviewed research is deeply dysfunctional for researchers and their institutions, even if highly profitable for the largest conventional publishers. I’ve limited the list to those for which OA offers some hope of relief.\nWe are in the midst of a pricing crisis for scholarly journals. For four decades, subscription prices have risen significantly faster than inflation and significantly faster than library budgets. Subscription prices have risen about twice as fast as the price of healthcare, for most people the very index of skyrocketing, unsustainable prices. We’re long past the era of damage control and into the era of damage.\nWhen most peer-reviewed research journals are toll access, a pricing crisis entails an access crisis. Before the rise of OA, all peer-reviewed journals were toll access, and even today about three-quarters of peer-reviewed journals are toll access.\n                                                 \n                                                  When subscribers respond to skyrocketing prices by canceling subscriptions, access decreases. Cancellations mitigate one problem and aggravate another. A study by the Research Information Network in late 2009 found that 40 percent of surveyed researchers had trouble accessing journal literature at least once a week, and two-thirds at least once a month. About 60 percent said that access limitations hindered their research, and 18 percent said the hindrance was significant.\nEven the wealthiest academic libraries in the world suffer serious access gaps. When the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously for a strong OA policy in February 2008, Professor Stuart Shieber explained that cumulative price increases had forced the Harvard library to undertake “serious cancellation efforts” for budgetary reasons.\nAccess gaps are worse at other affluent institutions, and worse still in the developing world. In 2008, Harvard subscribed to 98,900 serials and Yale to 73,900. The best-funded research library in India, at the Indian Institute of Science, subscribed to 10,600. Several sub-Saharan African university libraries subscribed to zero, offering their patrons access to no conventional journals except those donated by publishers.\nThe largest publishers minimize cancellations by bundling hundreds or thousands of high-demand and low-demand journals into “big deals,” which reduce the bargaining power of libraries and the cost-cutting options available to them. On the plus side, big deals give universities access to more titles than they had before and reduce the average cost per title. But when libraries try to cancel individual titles that are low in quality or low in local usage, publishers raise the price on the remaining titles. Bundling gives libraries little room to save money with carefully targeted cancellations, and after a point forces them to cancel all or none.\nBy design, big deals are too big to cancel without pain, giving publishers leverage to raise prices out of proportion to journal costs, size, usage, impact, and quality. Without bundling, libraries would have responded to the pricing crisis with a devastating number of cancellations. With bundling, publishers protect even second-rate journals from cancellation, protect their own profits, and shift the devastation to library budgets.\nWhile the damage grows, the largest journal publishers earn higher profit margins than the largest oil companies. In 2010, Elsevier’s journal division had a profit margin of 35.7 percent while ExxonMobil had only 28.1 percent.\nBy soaking up library budgets, big deals harm journals from small nonprofit publishers excluded from the bundles. This exacerbates the problem for researchers because journals from these smaller publishers tend to be higher in quality and impact than the journals protected by the big deals (more in #11 below).\nTo top it off, most big deals include confidentiality clauses preventing universities from disclosing the prices they pay. The effect is to reduce bargaining and price competition even further. In 2009, three academics launched the Big Deal Contract Project to use state open-record laws to force disclosure of big-deal contracts with public universities. Elsevier went to court to block the release of its contract with Washington State University and lost.\nDuring the decades in which journal prices have been rising faster than inflation and faster than library budgets, libraries have cut into their book budgets to pay for journals. According to James McPherson, “In 1986 [academic] libraries spent 44 percent of their budgets on books and 56 percent on journals; by 1997 the imbalance had grown to 28 percent for books and 72 percent for journals.” Because academic libraries now buy fewer books, academic book publishers now accept fewer manuscripts. One result is that the journal crisis, concentrated in the sciences, has precipitated a monograph crisis, concentrated in the humanities.\nNew restrictions on electronic journals add a permissions crisis on top of the pricing crisis. For publishers of online toll-access journals, there are business reasons to limit the freedom of users to copy and redistribute texts, even if that leaves users with fewer rights than they had with print journals. But these business reasons create pernicious consequences for libraries and their patrons.\nAmong the results: When libraries pay for subscriptions to digital journals, they don’t buy or own their own digital copies but merely rent or license them for a period of time. If they cancel a subscription, they could lose access to past issues. They could violate the publishers’ copyrights if they make or hold copies for long-term preservation without special permission or payment, shifting the task of preservation more and more to publishers who are not preservation experts and who tend to make preservation decisions with only future market potential in mind. Libraries can’t migrate older content, such as journal backfiles, to new media and formats to keep them readable as technology changes, at least not without special permission or risk of liability. Some publishers don’t allow libraries to share digital texts by interlibrary loan and instead require them to make printouts, scan the printouts, and lend the scans. Libraries must negotiate for prices and licensing terms, often under nondisclosure agreements, and retain and consult complex licensing agreements that differ from publisher to publisher and year to year. They must police or negotiate access for walk-in patrons, online users off campus, and visiting faculty. They must limit access and usage by password, internet-protocol (IP) address, usage hours, institutional affiliation, physical location, and caps on simultaneous users. They must implement authentication systems and administer proxy servers. They must make fair-use judgment calls, erring on the side of seeking permission or forgoing use. They must explain to patrons that cookies and registration make anonymous inquiry impossible and that some uses allowed by law are not allowed by the technology.\nI make this list library-centric rather than user-centric because the pricing crisis has nearly killed off individual subscriptions. Most subscribers to toll-access journals are libraries, and most authorized readers of toll-access journals are library patrons.\nIn short, conventional publishers regard easy online sharing as a problem while researchers and libraries regard it as a solution. The internet is widening the gap between the interests of conventional publishers and the interests of researchers and research institutions.\nConventional publishers are adapting to the digital age in some respects. They’re migrating most print journals to digital formats\n                                                 \n                                                  and even dropping their print editions. They’re incorporating hyperlinks, search engines, and alert services. A growing number are digitizing their backfiles and integrating texts with data. But the revolutionary power to share content without price or permission barriers, to solve the pricing and permission crises at a stroke and liberate research for the benefit of all, is the one innovation they fear most.\nConventional publishers acquire their key assets from academics without charge. Authors donate the texts of new articles and the rights to publish them. Editors and referees donate the peer-review judgments to improve and validate their quality.\n                                         \n                                          But then conventional publishers charge for access to the resulting articles, with no exception for authors, editors, referees, or their institutions. Publishers argue that they add value to the submitted manuscripts, which is true. But other players in the game, such as authors, editors, and referees, add far more value than publishers. For funded research, the funding agency is another critical player. It too must pay for access to the resulting articles even when the cost of a research project is hundreds of thousands of times greater than the cost of publication. Among these five value-adders—authors, editors, referees, funders, and publishers—publishers add the least value and generally demand the ownership rights.\nConventional publishers use a business model that depends on access barriers and creates artificial scarcity. All publishers (conventional and OA) need revenue to cover their costs, but OA publishers use business models that dispense with access barriers and avoid artificial scarcity. Toll-access publishers contend that the OA business models are inadequate. We can debate that, for example, in light of the evidence that more than 7,500 peer-reviewed OA journals are finding ways to pay their bills, the fact that a growing number of for-profit OA publishers are already showing profits, and the fact that most of the money needed to support OA journals is currently tied up supporting toll-access journals. (See chapter 7 on economics.)\nBut in the end it doesn’t matter whether toll-access publishers are right or wrong to believe that their revenue requires access barriers. The deeper problem is that we donate time, labor, and public money to create new knowledge and then hand control over the results to businesses that believe, correctly or incorrectly, that their revenue and survival depend on limiting access to that knowledge. If toll-access publishers are right that they must erect access barriers to reimburse themselves, then the problem is that we allow them to be the only outlets for most peer-reviewed research. If they’re wrong about the need for access barriers, then the problem is that we tolerate their access barriers, even for publicly funded research and gifts from authors who write for impact and not for money.\nConventional publishers often criticize OA initiatives for “interfering with the market,” but scholarly publishing is permeated by state action, public subsidies, gift culture, and anticompetitive practices.\n                                                 \n                                                  All scholarly journals (toll access and OA) benefit from public subsidies. Most scientific research is funded by public agencies using public money, conducted and written up by researchers working at public institutions and paid with public money, and then peer-reviewed by faculty at public institutions and paid with public money. Even when researchers and peer reviewers work at private universities, their institutions are subsidized by publicly funded tax exemptions and tax-deductible donations. Most toll-access journal subscriptions are purchased by public institutions and paid with taxpayer money.\nLast and not least, publishers exercise their control over research articles through copyright, a temporary government-created monopoly.\nEvery scholarly journal is a natural mini-monopoly in the sense that no other journal publishes the same articles. There’s nothing improper about this natural mini-monopoly. It’s a side-effect of the desirable fact that journals don’t duplicate one another. But it means that toll-access journals compete for authors much more than they compete for subscribers. If you need an article published in a certain journal, then you need access to that journal. This is one reason why free and expensive journals can coexist in the same field, even at the same level of quality. The free journals don’t drive the expensive journals out of business or even drive down their prices. By weakening the competition for buyers, however, this natural monopoly weakens the market feedback that would otherwise punish declining quality, declining usage, and rising prices.\nLaid on top of this natural monopoly are several layers of artificial monopoly. One kind of evidence is that large commercial publishers charge higher prices and raise their prices faster than small, nonprofit publishers. Yet, the scholarly consensus is that quality, impact, and prestige are generally higher at the nonprofit society journals.\nLarge conventional publishers spend some of the money they extract from libraries on marketing and “content protection” measures that benefit publishers far more than users. Indeed, the content protection measures don’t benefit users at all and make the texts less useful.\nConventional for-profit journals can increase their profit margins by decreasing their rejection rates. Reducing the rejection rate reduces the number of articles a journal must peer review for each article it publishes.\nMost faculty and researchers are aware of access gaps in their libraries but generally unaware of their causes and unaware that the problems are systemic and worsening. (A common response: My research is very specialized, so naturally my library won’t have everything I need.) On the other hand, librarians are acutely aware of library budget crises, high journal prices, hyperinflationary price increases, bundling constraints, publisher profit margins, and the disconnect between prices paid and journal costs, size, usage, impact, and quality. Researcher oblivion to the problems facing libraries adds several new problems to the mix. It means that the players who are most aware of quality are generally unaware of prices, which Jan Velterop once called the “cat food” model of purchasing. It creates a classic moral hazard in which researchers are shielded from the costs of their preferences and have little incentive to adjust their preferences accordingly. It subtracts one more market signal that might otherwise check high prices and declining quality. And while researchers support OA roughly to the extent that they know about it, and have their own reasons to work for it, their general unawareness of the crisis for libraries adds one more difficulty to the job of recruiting busy and preoccupied researchers to the cause of fixing this broken system.\nThe fact that there are enough problems to motivate different stakeholders is a kind of good news. If the system were broken for buyers (librarians) but not for users (researchers), or vice versa, that would delay any fix even longer. Or it would create a pernicious trade-off in which any fix would help one group at the expense of the other. But the system is broken for both buyers and users, which makes them natural allies.\nFinally, even in the absence of perverse journal pricing practices, the subscription or toll-access business model would not scale with the growth of research or the growth of published knowledge. If prices were low today and guaranteed to remain low forever, the total price for the total literature would still be heading toward exponential explosion. This is easiest to see at the mythical University of Croesus, which can afford 100 percent of the literature today. In that respect, Croesus is far better off than any university in the real world. Let’s suppose that journal prices and the Croesus library budget increase at the same rate forever. For simplicity, let’s assume that rate is zero. They never grow at all, not even at the rate of inflation. Let’s assume that the growth of knowledge means that the journal literature grows by 5 percent a year, a common industry estimate. Croesus can afford full coverage today, but in twenty years it would have to spend 2.7 times more than it spends today for full coverage, in sixty years 18.7 times more, and in a hundred years 131.5 times more. But since Croesus can’t spend more than it has, in twenty years the coverage it could afford would drop from 100 percent to 37.7 percent, in sixty years to 5.4 percent, and in a hundred years to less than 1 percent.\nWe need a system of research dissemination that scales with the growth of research volume. The subscription or toll-access system scales negatively by shrinking the accessible percentage of research as research itself continues to grow.\nMoney would solve the access crisis if we had enough of it, and if the amount at our disposal grew in proportion to the growing volume and growing prices of the literature. But we don’t have nearly enough money, and the money we do have doesn’t grow nearly fast enough to keep pace with the volume or prices of the literature.\nToll-access publishers don’t benefit from access gaps and have their own reasons to want to close them. But they prefer the unscalable money solution, even if university budgets and national treasuries must be squeezed by law to find the funds. Crispin Davis, then-CEO of Elsevier, once argued that “the government needs to lay down guidelines on the proportion of university funds that should be set aside for the acquisition of books and journals, or even increase funding to ensure that universities can buy all the material they need.”\nAt some point we should trust the math more than special-interest lobbies. Among the many who have done the math, the University of California concluded that the subscription model for research journals is “incontrovertibly unsustainable.”\n2.2 OA as Seizing Opportunities\nEven if we had no pressing problems to solve, we’d want to take full advantage of the unprecedented power of digital technology to share knowledge and accelerate research. But we have both problems and opportunities, and we should acknowledge that. Too much of the OA discussion is grim, utilitarian, and problem-oriented. We should complement it with discussion that is joyful, curious, and opportunity-oriented. Serious problems don’t rule out beautiful opportunities, and one of the most beautiful opportunities facing OA is that certain strategic actions will solve serious problems and seize beautiful opportunities at the same time.\nHere’s a brace of those beautiful opportunities. The internet emerged just as journal subscription prices were reaching unbearable levels. The internet widens distribution and reduces costs at the same time. Digital computers connected to a global network let us make perfect copies of arbitrary files and distribute them to a worldwide audience at zero marginal cost. For 350 years, scholars have willingly, even eagerly, published journal articles without payment, freeing them to consent to OA without losing revenue. Unrestricted access to digital files supports forms of discovery and processing impossible for paper texts and for inaccessible or use-restricted digital texts. OA is already lawful and doesn’t require copyright reform. Now that the internet is at our fingertips, OA is within the reach of researchers and research institutions acting alone and needn’t wait for publishers, legislation, or markets. Authors, editors, and referees—the whole team that produces peer-reviewed research articles—can provide OA to peer-reviewed research literature and, if necessary, cut recalcitrant publishers out of the loop. For researchers acting on their own, the goal of complete OA is even easier to attain than the goal of affordable journals.\nA less obvious but more fundamental opportunity is that knowledge is\nnonrivalrous\n(to use a term from the economics of property). We can share it without dividing it and consume it without diminishing it. My possession and use of some knowledge doesn’t exclude your possession and use of the same knowledge. Familiar physical goods like land, food, and machines are all\nrivalrous\n. To share them, we must take turns or settle for portions. Thomas Jefferson described this situation beautifully in an 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson:\nIf nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea. . . . Its peculiar character . . . is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine.\nWe seldom think about how metaphysically lucky we are that knowledge is nonrivalrous. We can all know the same ideas, stories, tunes, plans, directions, and words without my knowledge blocking yours or yours blocking mine. We’re equally fortunate that speech is nonrivalrous, since it allows us to articulate and share our knowledge without reducing it to a rivalrous commodity.\nBut for all of human history before the digital age, writing has been rivalrous. Written or recorded knowledge became a material object like stone, clay, skin, or paper, which was necessarily rivalrous. Even when we had the printing press and photocopying machine, allowing us to make many copies at comparatively low cost, each copy was a rivalrous material object. Despite its revolutionary impact, writing was hobbled from birth by this tragic limitation. We could only record nonrivalrous knowledge in a rivalrous form.\nDigital writing is the first kind of writing that does not reduce recorded knowledge to a rivalrous object. If we all have the right equipment, then we can all have copies of the same digital text without excluding one another, without multiplying our costs, and without depleting our resources.\nI’ve heard physicists refer to the prospect of room-temperature superconductivity as a “gift of nature.” Unfortunately, that is not quite within reach. But the nonrivalrous property of digital information is a gift of nature that we’ve already grasped and put to work. We only have to stand back a moment to appreciate it. To our ancestors, the prospect of recording knowledge in precise language, symbols, sounds, or images without reducing the record to a rivalrous object would have been magical. But we do it every day now, and it’s losing its magic.\nThe danger is not that we already take this property for granted but that we might stop short and fail to take full advantage of it. It can transform knowledge-sharing if we let it.\nWe take advantage of this gift when we post valuable work online and permit free access and unrestricted use for every user with an internet connection. But if we charge for access, enforce exclusion, create artificial scarcity, or prohibit essential uses, then we treat the nonrivalrous digital file like a rivalrous physical object, dismiss the opportunity, and spurn the gift.\nWhen publishers argue that there is no access problem and that we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken, there are two answers. First, they’re wrong. There are deep and serious access problems. Publishers who really don’t know this should talk to the libraries who subscribe to their journals, and even more to the libraries who don’t. But second, leaving that quarrel entirely to one side, there are good reasons to pursue OA anyway.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What of the following is *not* one of the ways the author outlines that the dissemination system of peer-reviewed research is flawed.", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_1", "options": ["Conventional business models benefit from artificial scarcity.", "Digital access and formats has benefitted libraries and authors at the expense of big publishers.", "Access worldwide has decreased as journal tolls have skyrocketed.", "Nonprofit society journals are often of higher quality and prestige."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How are publisher \"bundle\" deals harmful to libraries?", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_2", "options": ["They reduce the average cost per title.", "They increase the titles available for purchase.", "They cause libraries not to cancel subscriptions.", "They prevent libraries from enacting targeted cancellations."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which is *not* an impact on libraries of restrictions on electronic journals?", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_3", "options": ["All users of the library must have the same access permissions.", "Cancelled subscriptions can prevent libraries from accessing past issues.", "Interlibrary loans must often be done with printed copies only.", "Technology changes require new formats and new permissions from publishers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of these stakeholders most often retain ownership rights to an article?", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_4", "options": ["The publisher", "The peer reviewers (referees)", "The author", "The funding agency"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the example from the University of Croesus help show?", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_5", "options": ["University budgets should be increased at the same rate as inflation.", "Typical growth of journal literature is usually estimated to be around 2.7% per year.", "Universities who can buy a full array of journals now will still be able to buy them at the same level in twenty years without a huge outlay of additional funds.", "The volume of published research is increasing which alone makes prices unsustainable."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which is an argument against OA digital access?", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_6", "options": ["The internet widens distribution and reduces cost.", "The current system is broken for both buyers and users.", "By publishing OA, researchers can avoid submitting their work for peer-review.", "OA is already legal under current copyright law."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "\"Knowledge is nonrivalrous\" means...", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_7", "options": ["everyone can benefit from it without reducing it for others.", "everyone can use it for their own ends, to the exclusion of others.", "whoever publishes it first sets the prices and access to it.", "everyone can use portions of it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How much of peer-reviewed journals remain toll-access today?", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_8", "options": ["75%", "30%", "90%", "50%"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The author compared the profit margins of the largest journal publishers to those of what industry?", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_9", "options": ["Stock brokerage firms", "Oil companies", "Real estate industry", "Law firms"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Research faculty and libraries generally don't work together to enact reform because:", "question_unique_id": "99925_8YKSVK6L_10", "options": ["Their needs are at odds.", "Researchers who know quality in their field are unaware of library prices.", "The libraries choose cheaper, less quality journals due to budget reasons.", "Researchers are largely against OA solutions."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ktf344br/release/2", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu"}
{"article_id": "99926", "set_unique_id": "99926_XDCXQ7CQ", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-openaccess", "title": "Open Access: Varieties", "year": 2019, "author": "Peter Suber", "topic": "Open access article", "article": "Open Access: Varieties\nThere are many ways to deliver OA: personal web sites, blogs, wikis, databases, ebooks, videos, audios, webcasts, discussion forums, RSS feeds, and P2P networks.\n \n                                          Unless creative thinking stops now, there will be many more to come.\nHowever, two delivery vehicles dominate the current discussion: journals and repositories.\nOA journals are like non-OA journals except that they’re OA. Making good on that exception requires a new funding model, but nearly everything else about the journal could be held constant, if we wanted to hold it constant. Some OA journals are very traditional except that they’re OA, while others deliberately push the evolution of journals as a category. (Some toll-access journals also push that evolution, if we don’t count stopping short of OA.)\nLike conventional, toll-access journals, some OA journals are first-rate and some are bottom feeders. Like conventional journals, some OA journals are high in prestige and some are unknown, and some of the unknowns are high in quality and some are low. Some are on solid financial footing and some are struggling. Also like conventional journals, most are honest and some are scams.\nAs early as 2004, Thomson Scientific found that “in each of the broad subject areas studied there was at least one OA title that ranked at or near the top of its field” in citation impact. The number of high-quality, high-impact OA journals has only grown since.\nUnlike toll-access journals, however, most OA journals are new. It’s hard to generalize about OA journals beyond saying that they have all the advantages of being OA and all the disadvantages of being new.\n \n                                          To be more precise: A disappointing number of OA journals don’t have all the advantages of being OA because they retain needless permission barriers. (See section 3.3 on gratis and libre OA.) At the same time, a heartening number of OA journals no longer suffer from the disadvantages of being new.\nLike conventional journal publishers, some OA journal publishers are for-profit and some are nonprofit. Like conventional publishers, there are a few large OA publishers and a long tail of small ones, although the largest OA publishers are small compared to the largest conventional publishers. Unlike conventional publishers, the profitable for-profit OA publishers have moderate rather than obscene profit margins.\nOA repositories are online collections or databases of articles. Unlike OA journals, OA repositories have no counterpart in the traditional landscape of scholarly communication. That makes them woefully easy to overlook or misunderstand.\nBy default, new deposits in OA repositories are OA. But most repositories today support\ndark deposits\n, which can be switched to OA at a later date. Most OA repositories were launched to host peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. But often they include other sorts of content as well, such as theses and dissertations, datasets, courseware, and digitized copies of works from the special collections of the hosting institution’s library. For scholars, repositories are better at making work OA than personal web sites because repositories provide persistent URLs, take steps for long-term preservation, and don’t disappear when the author changes jobs or dies.\n3.1 Green and Gold OA\nGold and green OA differ in at least two fundamental respects.\nFirst, OA journals and repositories differ in their relationship to peer review. OA journals perform their own peer review, just like conventional journals. Repositories generally don’t perform peer review, although they host and disseminate articles peer-reviewed elsewhere. As a result, gold and green OA differ in their support costs and in the roles they can play in the scholarly communications universe.\nTerminology\nThe OA movement uses the term\ngold OA\nfor OA delivered by journals, regardless of the journal’s business model, and\ngreen OA\nfor OA delivered by repositories.\nSelf-archiving\nis the practice of depositing one’s own work in an OA repository. All three of these terms were coined by Stevan Harnad.\nSecond, OA journals obtain the rights or permissions they need directly from the rightsholders, while repositories ask depositors to obtain the needed rights or permissions on their own. Even when the depositors are the authors themselves, they may already have transferred key rights to publishers. As a result, OA journals can generate permission for reuse at will, and OA repositories generally cannot. Hence, most libre OA is gold OA, even if it’s not yet the case that most gold OA is libre OA. (See more in section 3.3 on gratis and libre OA.)\nGold and green OA require different steps from authors. To make new articles gold OA, authors simply submit their manuscripts to OA journals, as they would to conventional journals. To make articles green OA, authors simply deposit their manuscripts in an OA repository.\nMost importantly, the green/gold distinction matters because if authors can’t make their work OA one way, they can make it OA the other way. One of the most persistent and damaging misunderstandings is that all OA is gold OA. Authors who can’t find a high-quality, high-prestige OA journal in their field, or whose submissions are rejected from first-rate OA journals, often conclude that they must give up on OA or publish in a second-rate journal. But that’s hasty. If they publish in the best toll-access journal that will accept their work, then—more often than not—they may turn around and deposit the peer-reviewed manuscript in an OA repository. Most toll-access publishers and toll-access journals give blanket permission for green OA, many others will give permission on request, and the numbers approach 100 percent when authors are subject to green OA mandates from their funding agencies or universities. (More in chapters 4 on OA policies and 10 on making your own work OA.)\nOne of the early victories of the OA movement was to get a majority of toll-access publishers and journals to give blanket permission for author-initiated green OA. But this victory remains one of the best-kept secrets of scholarly publishing, and widespread ignorance of it is the single most harmful consequence of green OA’s invisibility. Overlooking this victory reduces the volume of OA and creates the false impression that a trade-off between prestige and OA is common when in fact it is rare. Forgetting that green OA is compatible with conventional publishing also feeds the false impression that policies requiring green OA actually require gold OA and thereby limit the freedom of authors to submit work to the journals of their choice. (More in chapter 4 on policies.)\nMost publishing scholars will choose prestige over OA if they have to choose. The good news is that they rarely have to choose. The bad news is that few of them know that they rarely have to choose. Few realize that most toll-access journals permit author-initiated green OA, despite determined efforts to explain and publicize this early victory for green OA.\nThere are two reasons why OA is compatible with prestigious publication, a gold reason and a green one. The gold reason is that a growing number of OA journals have already earned high levels of prestige, and others are steadily earning it. If there are no prestigious OA journals in your field today, you could wait (things are changing fast), you could help out (by submitting your best work), or you could move on to green. The green reason why OA is compatible with prestige is that most toll-access journals, including the prestigious, already allow OA archiving. As noted, this “most” can become “all” with the aid of an effective OA policy. (See chapter 4 on policies.)\nThe most useful OA repositories comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), which makes separate repositories play well together. In the jargon, OAI compliance makes repositories\ninteroperable\n, allowing the worldwide network of individual repositories to behave like a single grand virtual repository that can be searched all at once. It means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant repository without knowing which repositories exist, where they are located, or what they contain. (OA and OAI are separate but overlapping initiatives.)\nMost of the major academic and nonacademic search engines crawl OA journals and OA repositories. For example, Google, Bing, and Yahoo all do this and do it from self-interest. These search engines now provide another method (beyond OAI-based interoperability) for searching across the whole network of repositories without knowing what exists where. A common misunderstanding sees OA repositories as walled gardens that make work hard to find by requiring readers to make separate visits to separate repositories to run separate searches. The reverse is true in two senses: OA repositories make work easier to find, and toll-access collections are the ones more likely to be walled gardens, either invisible to search engines or requiring separate visits and separate searches.\nDisciplinary\nrepositories (also called\nsubject\nrepositories) try to capture all the research in a given field, while\ninstitutional\nrepositories try to capture all the research from a given institution. Because both kinds tend to be OAI-compliant and interoperable, the differences matter very little for readers. Readers who want to browse a repository for serendipity are more likely to find useful content in a disciplinary repository in the right field than in an institutional repository. But most scholars find repository content by keyword searches, not by browsing, and through cross-archive searches, not through local single-repository searches.\nHowever, the differences between disciplinary and institutional repositories matter more for authors. On the one hand, institutions are in a better position than disciplines to offer incentives and assistance for deposit, and to adopt policies to ensure deposit. A growing number of universities do just that. On the other hand, scholars who regularly read research in a large disciplinary repository, such as arXiv for physics or PubMed Central for medicine, readily grasp the rationale for depositing their work in OA repositories and need less nudging to do so themselves. (More in chapter 4 on policies.)\nBecause most publishers and journals already give blanket permission for green OA, the burden is on authors to take advantage of it. In the absence of an institutional policy to encourage or require deposits, the spontaneous rate of deposit is about 15 percent. Institutions requiring deposit can push the rate toward 100 percent over a few years.\nThe reason the spontaneous rate is lower than the nudged, assisted, and mandated rate is rarely opposition to OA itself. Almost always it’s unfamiliarity with green OA (belief that all OA is gold OA), misunderstanding of green OA (belief that it violates copyright, bypasses peer review, or forecloses the possibility of publishing in a venerable journal), and fear that it is time-consuming. In this sense, author unfamiliarity and misunderstanding are greater obstacles to OA than actual opposition, whether from authors or publishers.\nThe remedies are already spreading worldwide: launching more OA journals and repositories, educating researchers about their gold and green OA options, and adopting intelligent policies to encourage gold OA and require green OA. (More in chapter 4 on OA policies.)\n3.2 Green and Gold as Complementary\nSome friends of OA focus their energy on green OA and some focus on gold OA. Some support both kinds about equally and have merely specialized. But some give one a higher strategic priority than the other. I’ll argue that green and gold OA are complementary and synergistic. We should pursue them simultaneously, much as an organism must develop its nervous system and digestive system simultaneously.\nFortunately, this synergy is served even by differences of opinion about its existence. The fact that some activists give green OA a higher priority than gold, and some the reverse, creates a natural division of labor ensuring that good people are working hard on each front.\nGreen OA has some advantages over gold OA. It makes faster progress, since it doesn’t require the launch of new peer-reviewed journals or the conversion of old ones. For the same reason, it’s less expensive than gold OA and can scale up quickly and inexpensively to meet demand, while the bulk of the money needed to scale up OA journals is still tied up in subscriptions to toll-access journals.\nGreen OA can be mandated without infringing academic freedom, but gold OA cannot. (More precisely, gold OA can’t be mandated without infringing academic freedom until virtually all peer-reviewed journals are OA, which isn’t on the horizon.) A green OA policy at a university can cover the institution’s entire research output, regardless of where authors choose to publish, while a gold OA policy can only cover the new articles that faculty are willing to submit to OA journals.\nGreen OA is compatible with toll-access publication. Sometimes this is because toll-access publishers hold the needed rights and decide to allow it, and sometimes because authors retain the needed rights. Well-drafted OA policies can ensure that authors always retain the needed rights and spare them the need to negotiate with publishers. (See chapters 4 on policies and 6 on copyright.)\nWhen the best journals in a field are toll-access—often the case today even if changing—green OA allows authors to have their cake and eat it too. Authors good enough to publish in the best journals may do so and still make their work OA, without waiting for high-prestige OA journals to emerge in their fields. When promotion and tenure committees create strong incentives to publish in venerable toll-access journals—often the case today even if changing—green OA allows authors to make their work OA without bucking institutional incentives or relinquishing institutional rewards.\nGreen OA works for preprints as well as postprints, while gold OA only works for postprints. For the same reason, green OA works for other kinds of work that peer-reviewed journals generally don’t publish, such as datasets, source code, theses and dissertations, and digitized copies of work previously available only in another medium such as print, microfiche, or film.\nOn the other side, gold OA has some advantages over green OA. Gold OA articles needn’t labor under restrictions imposed by toll-access publishers fearful of OA. Hence, gold OA is always immediate, while green OA is sometimes embargoed or delayed. Similarly, gold OA can always be libre, even if it doesn’t take sufficient advantage of this opportunity, while green OA seldom even has the opportunity. (See chapter 4 on policies.)\nGold OA provides OA to the published version, while green OA is often limited to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, without copy editing or final pagination. Making the OA edition the same as the published edition reduces the confusion caused by the circulation of multiple versions.\nGold OA performs its own peer review, without depending on toll-access journals to perform it. Hence support for gold OA supports the survival of peer review itself in case toll-access journals can no longer provide it.\nFinally, green OA may be a manageable expense, but gold OA can be self-sustaining, even profitable.\nLibrarians traditionally distinguish four functions performed by scholarly journals: Registration (time stamp), certification (peer review), awareness (distribution), and archiving (preservation). We know that green and gold OA are complementary as soon as we recognize that green is better than gold for registration (its time stamps are faster) and preservation, and that gold OA is better than green OA for certification (peer review).\nSome see green OA mainly as a tool to force a transition to gold OA. The idea is that rising levels of green OA will trigger the cancellation of conventional journals and pressure them to convert to gold OA. The growing volume of green OA might have this effect. Some publishers fear that it will, and some OA activists hope that it will. But it might not have this effect at all. One piece of evidence is that green OA hasn’t triggered journal cancellations in physics, where levels of green OA approach 100 percent and have been high and growing for nearly two decades. (More in chapter 8 on casualties.) Even if it did have this effect, however, it wouldn’t follow that it is the best strategy for advancing gold OA. There are good prospects for a peaceful revolution based on publisher consent and self-interest. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)\nMost importantly, however, we’ll still want green OA in a world where all peer-reviewed journals are OA. For example, we’ll want green OA for preprints and for the earliest possible time-stamp to establish the author’s priority. We’ll want green OA for datasets, theses and dissertations, and other research genres not published in journals. We’ll want green OA for the security of having multiple OA copies in multiple independent locations. (Even today, the best OA journals not only distribute their articles from their own web sites but also deposit copies in independent OA repositories.) At least until the very last conventional journal converts to OA, we’ll need green OA so that research institutions can mandate OA without limiting the freedom of authors to submit to the journals of their choice. We’ll even want OA repositories as the distribution mechanism for many OA journals themselves.\nA worldwide network of OA repositories would support one desirable evolution of what we now call journals. It would allow us to decouple peer review from distribution. Peer review could be performed by freestanding editorial boards and distribution by the network of repositories. Decoupling would remove the perverse incentive for peer-review providers to raise access barriers or impede distribution. It would also remove their perverse incentive to demand exclusive rights over research they didn’t fund, perform, write up, or buy from the authors.\nOn the other side, we’ll still want gold OA in a world where all new articles are green OA. High-volume green OA may not have caused toll-access journal cancellations yet, even in fields where green OA approaches 100 percent. But we can’t say that it will never do so, and we can’t say that every field will behave like physics in this respect. If peer-reviewed toll-access journals are not sustainable (see section 2.1), then the survival of peer review will depend on a shift to peer-reviewed OA journals.\nIt won’t matter whether toll-access journals are endangered by rising levels of green OA, by their own hyperinflationary price increases, or by their failure to scale with the rapid growth of new research. If any combination of these causes puts peer-reviewed toll-access journals in jeopardy, then peer review will depend on OA journals, which are not endangered by any of those causes. (In chapter 8 on casualties, we’ll see evidence that toll-access journal price increases cause many more cancellations than green OA does.)\nFinally, if all new articles are green OA, we’ll still want the advantages that are easier for gold OA than for green OA to provide: freedom from permission barriers, freedom from delays or embargoes, and freedom from ever-rising drains on library budgets.\nNeither green nor gold OA will suffice, long-term or short-term. That’s a reason to pursue both.\n3.3 Gratis and Libre OA\nSometimes we must speak unambiguously about two subspecies of OA. One removes price barriers alone and the other removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers. The former is\ngratis OA\nand the latter\nlibre OA\n.\nTo sharpen their definitions, we need a quick detour into fair use. In the United States, fair use is an exception to copyright law allowing users to reproduce copyrighted work “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . , scholarship, or research” (to quote the U.S. copyright statute).\nFair use has four characteristics that matter to us here. First, the permission for fair use is granted by law and needn’t be sought from the copyright holder. Or equivalently, the statute assures us that no permission is needed because fair use “is not an infringement of copyright.” Second, the permission is limited and doesn’t cover all the uses that scholars might want to make. To exceed fair use, users must obtain permission from the copyright holder. Third, most countries have some equivalent of fair use, though they differ significantly in what they allow and disallow. Finally, fair use is vague. There are clear cases of fair use (quoting a short snippet in a review) and clear cases of exceeding fair use (reprinting a full-text book), but the boundary between the two is fuzzy and contestable.\nGratis OA is free of charge but not more free than that. Users must still seek permission to exceed fair use. Gratis OA removes price barriers but not permission barriers.\nLibre OA is free of charge and also free of some copyright and licensing restrictions. Users have permission to exceed fair use, at least in certain ways. Because there are many ways to exceed fair use, there are many degrees or kinds of libre OA. Libre OA removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers.\nFortunately, we don’t always need these terms. Indeed, in most of this book I use “OA” without qualification. The generic term causes no trouble until we need to talk about differences between gratis and libre OA, just as “carbohydrate” causes no trouble until we need to talk about differences between simple and complex carbohydrates.\nI’m borrowing the gratis/libre language from the world of software, where it expresses the same distinction. If the terms sound odd in English, it’s because English doesn’t have more domesticated terms for this distinction. Their oddity in English may even be an advantage, since the terms don’t carry extra baggage, as “open” and “free” do, which therefore helps us avoid ambiguity.\nFirst note that the gratis/libre distinction is not the same as the green/gold distinction. The gratis/libre distinction is about user rights or freedoms, while the green/gold distinction is about venues or vehicles. Gratis/libre answers the question,\nhow open is it?\nGreen/gold answers the question,\nhow is it delivered?\nGreen OA can be gratis or libre but is usually gratis. Gold OA can be gratis or libre, but is also usually gratis. However, it’s easier for gold OA to be libre than for green OA to be libre, which is why the campaign to go beyond gratis OA to libre OA focuses more on journals than repositories.\nIf users encounter a full-text work online without charge, then they know it’s gratis OA. They don’t have to be told, even if they’d like to be told—for example, so that they don’t have to wonder whether they’re reading an illicit copy. But users can’t figure out whether a work is libre OA unless the provider (author or publisher) tells them. This is the purpose of a\nlicense\n, which is simply a statement from the copyright holder explaining what users may and may not do with a given work.\nWorks under “all-rights-reserved” copyrights don’t need licenses, because “all rights reserved” means that without special permission users may do nothing that exceeds fair use.\nThe default around the world today is that new works are copyrighted from birth (no registration required), that the copyright initially belongs to the author (but is transferrable by contract), and that the rights holder reserves all rights. Authors who want to provide libre OA must affirmatively waive some of their rights and use a license to tell users they’ve done so. For convenience, let’s say that an\nopen license\nis one allowing some degree of libre OA.\nAlthough the word “copyright” is singular, it covers a plurality of rights, and authors may waive some and retain others. They may do so in any combination that suits their needs. That’s why there are many nonequivalent open licenses and nonequivalent types of libre OA. What’s important here is that waiving some rights in order to provide libre OA does not require waiving all rights or waiving copyright altogether. On the contrary, open licenses presuppose copyright, since they express permissions from the copyright holder. Moreover, the rights not waived are fully enforceable. In the clear and sensible language of Creative Commons, open licenses create “some-rights-reserved” copyrights rather than “all-rights-reserved” copyrights.\nThe open licenses from Creative Commons (CC) are the best-known and most widely used. But there are other open licenses, and authors and publishers can always write their own. To illustrate the range of libre OA, however, it’s convenient to look at the CC licenses.\nThe maximal degree of libre OA belongs to works in the public domain. Either these works were never under copyright or their copyrights have expired. Works in the public domain may be used in any way whatsoever without violating copyright law. That’s why it’s lawful to translate or reprint Shakespeare without hunting down his heirs for permission. Creative Commons offers CC0 (CC-Zero) for copyright holders who want to assign their work to the public domain.\nThe CC Attribution license (CC-BY) describes the least restrictive sort of libre OA after the public domain. It allows any use, provided the user attributes the work to the original author. This is the license recommended by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval program for OA journals.\n \n                                          I support this recommendation, use CC-BY for my blog and newsletter, and request CC-BY whenever I publish in a journal.\nCC supports several other open licenses as well, including CC-BY-NC, which requires attribution and blocks commercial use, and CC-BY-ND, which requires attribution and allows commercial use but blocks derivative works. These licenses are not equivalent to one another, but they all permit uses beyond fair use and therefore they all represent different flavors of libre OA.\nWhile you can write your own open licenses or use those created by others, the advantage of CC licenses is that they are ready-made, lawyer-drafted, enforceable, understood by a large and growing number of users, and available in a large and growing number of legal jurisdictions. Moreover, each comes in three versions: human-readable for nonlawyers, lawyer-readable for lawyers and judges, and machine-readable for search engines and other visiting software. They’re extremely convenient and their convenience has revolutionized libre OA.\nThe best way to refer to a specific flavor of libre OA is by referring to a specific open license. We’ll never have unambiguous, widely understood technical terms for every useful variation on the theme. But we already have clearly named licenses for all the major variations on the theme, and we can add new ones for more subtle variations any time we want.\nA work without an open license stands or appears to stand under an all-rights-reserved copyright. If the rights holder privately welcomes uses beyond fair use, or has decided not to sue for certain kinds of infringement, ordinary users have no way to know that and are forced to choose the least of three evils: the delay of asking permission, the risk of proceeding without it, and the harm of erring on the side of nonuse. These are not only obstacles to research; they are obstacles that libre OA was designed to remove.\nThe BBB definition calls for both gratis and libre OA. However, most of the notable OA success stories are gratis and not libre. I mean this in two senses: gratis success stories are more numerous than libre success stories, so far, and most gratis success stories are notable. Even if they stop short of libre OA, they are hard-won victories and major advances.\nSome observers look at the prominent gratis OA success stories and conclude that the OA movement focuses on gratis OA and neglects libre. Others look at the public definitions and conclude that OA focuses on libre OA and disparages gratis. Both assessments are one-sided and unfair.\nOne hard fact is that gratis OA is often attainable in circumstances when libre OA is not attainable. For example, a major victory of the OA movement has been to persuade the majority of toll-access publishers and toll-access journals to allow green gratis OA. We’re very far from the same position for green libre OA. Similarly, most of the strong OA policies at funding agencies and universities require green gratis OA. A few require green libre OA, and green libre OA is growing for other reasons. But if these funders and universities had waited until they could muster the votes for a green libre policy, most of them would still be waiting. (See section 4.3 on the historical timing of OA policies.)\nA second hard fact is that even gratis OA policies can face serious political obstacles. They may be easier to adopt than libre policies, but in most cases they’re far from easy. The OA policy at the U.S. National Institutes of Health was first proposed by Congress in 2004, adopted as a mere request or encouragement in 2005, and strengthened into a requirement in 2008. Every step along the way was strenuously opposed by an aggressive and well-funded publishing lobby. Yet even now the policy provides only gratis OA, not libre OA. Similarly, the gratis OA policies at funders and universities were only adopted after years of patiently educating decision-makers and answering their objections and misunderstandings. Reaching the point of adoption, and especially unanimous votes for adoption, is a cause for celebration, even if the policies only provide gratis, not libre OA.\nThe Directory of Open Access Journals is the most authoritative catalog of OA journals and the only one limiting itself to peer-reviewed journals. But only 20 percent of titles in the DOAJ use CC licenses, and fewer than 11 percent use the recommended CC-BY license. Viewed the other way around, about 80 percent of peer-reviewed OA journals don’t use any kind of CC license. Some of these might use non-CC licenses with a similar legal effect, but these exceptions are rare. Simply put, most OA journals are not using open licenses. Most operate under all-rights-reserved copyrights and leave their users with no more freedom than they already had under fair use. Most are not offering libre OA. Even those wanting to block commercial use, for example, tend to use an all-rights-reserved copyright rather than an open license that blocks commercial use, such as CC-BY-NC, but allows libre OA in other respects.\nI’ve argued that it’s unfair to criticize the OA movement for disparaging gratis OA (merely on the ground that its public statements call for libre) or neglecting libre OA (merely on the ground that most of its success stories are gratis). But two related criticisms would be more just. First, demanding libre or nothing where libre is currently unattainable makes the perfect the enemy of the good. Fortunately, this tactical mistake is rare. Second, settling for gratis where libre is attainable makes the good a substitute for the better. Unfortunately, this tactical mistake is common, as we see from the majority of OA journals that stop at gratis when they could easily offer libre.\nLet’s be more specific about the desirability of libre OA. Why should we bother, especially when we may already have attained gratis OA? The answer is that we need libre OA to spare users the delay and expense of seeking permission whenever they want to exceed fair use. And there are good scholarly reasons to exceed fair use. For example:\nto quote long excerpts\n• to distribute full-text copies to students or colleagues\n• to burn copies on CDs for bandwidth-poor parts of the world\n• to distribute semantically-tagged or otherwise enhanced (i.e., modified) versions\n• to migrate texts to new formats or media to keep them readable as technologies change\n• to create and archive copies for long-term preservation\n• to include works in a database or mashup\n• to make an audio recording of a text\n• to translate a text into another language\n• to copy a text for indexing, text-mining, or other kinds of processing\nIn some jurisdictions, some of these uses may actually fall under fair use, even if most do not. Courts have settled some of the boundaries of fair use but by no means all of them, and in any case users can’t be expected to know all the relevant court rulings. Uncertainty about these boundaries, and increasingly severe penalties for copyright infringement, make users fear liability and act cautiously. It makes them decide that they can’t use something they’d like to use, or that they must delay their research in order to seek permission.\nLibre OA under open licenses solves all these problems. Even when a desirable use is already allowed by fair use, a clear open license removes all doubt. When a desirable use does exceed fair use, a clear open license removes the restriction and offers libre OA.\nWhen you can offer libre OA, don’t leave users with no more freedom than fair use. Don’t leave them uncertain about what they may and may not do. Don’t make conscientious users choose between the delay of seeking permission and the risk of proceeding without it. Don’t increase the pressure to make users less conscientious. Don’t make them pay for permission. Don’t make them err on the side of nonuse. Make your work as usable and useful as it can possibly be.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why is a new funding model needed for OA journals?", "question_unique_id": "99926_XDCXQ7CQ_1", "options": ["They are not peer-reviewed.", "They do not have subscription income.", "They do not have large circulations.", "They are often scams."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which is true about Open Access journals?", "question_unique_id": "99926_XDCXQ7CQ_2", "options": ["They struggle financially.", "Search engines do not crawl them.", "They can be high-quality or low-quality.", "They are only available in niche subjects."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What's a difference between green and gold OA?", "question_unique_id": "99926_XDCXQ7CQ_3", "options": ["One is self-archiving, and the other is not.", "One is considered very reliable, and the other less reliable.", "One is for OA journals, and the other is for OA repositories.", "One is peer-reviewed, and the other is not."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which of the following can remove both price and some permission barriers?", "question_unique_id": "99926_XDCXQ7CQ_4", "options": ["Gold OA", "Libre OA", "Gratis OA", "Green OA"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which of the following is *not* an advantage of libre OA licenses?", "question_unique_id": "99926_XDCXQ7CQ_5", "options": ["Allowing conscientious users to proceed without risk", "Encouraging users to err on the side of nonuse", "Spare researchers the delay of seeking permissions", "Removing doubt about permissibility of exceeding fair use"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is a commonality among all OA journals?", "question_unique_id": "99926_XDCXQ7CQ_6", "options": ["They are financially struggling.", "They are new.", "They are of poor quality.", "They infringe on academic freedom."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Green OA mandates from funding agencies or universities are increasingly common and benefit authors because:", "question_unique_id": "99926_XDCXQ7CQ_7", "options": ["They give more weight to authors seeking to deposit their work in repositories.", "They give more weight to authors seeking peer review.", "They give more options to authors since such policies also require gold OA.", "They give more weight to authors seeking acceptance to publish in toll-access journals."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "The author of this piece advocates for...", "question_unique_id": "99926_XDCXQ7CQ_8", "options": ["gold OA as more beneficial than green OA.", "green OA as more beneficial than gold OA.", "continuation of toll-access journals.", "pursuit of gold OA and green OA simultaneously."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/9i5oj5l9/release/2", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu"}
{"article_id": "99913", "set_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Strength in numbers", "year": 2017, "author": "Lucy Jones", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Strength in numbers\nThe year is 2027. Dorothy visits her GP about panic attacks she's been getting at work. Before prescribing any treatment, the doctor looks at her genetic history for markers that could affect her response to certain drugs. The GP is looking in particular for CYP2C19 polymorphism, which would mean Dorothy can't metabolise a group of medicines (SSRIs); and at the same time, she examines her patient's sequenced DNA to see if she carries the genetic mutation responsible for panic disorder. Dorothy is a heavy drinker and her doctor sees that she carries a risk gene for alcohol dependence. She considers a drug that could modulate the gene. Dorothy leaves with a smartwatch to log her daily life for the next week: her quality of sleep, diet, exercise, stress, mood and activity. \n\n In the room next door, Fred is talking to a specialist about his Parkinson's symptoms. He was prescribed a drug recently for the subtype of Parkinson's he has and, for the first time, there were no side effects. In the past, Fred and the specialist used trial and error to find the right medication. But ever since computers have been able to process exabytes of data, scientists have found patterns and trends that allow them to treat Parkinson's with greater efficiency. Better still, through using an app on his phone, Fred has realised that taking his medicine at night affected his sleep; so he's started taking it at lunchtime instead.  \n\n Valerie has a migraine again. Like many young people these days, she had her DNA sequenced for her 18th birthday and discovered that she's one of the 7 per cent of Europeans who can't convert codeine into morphine. She inherited her response to the drug from her mother. Valerie knows to mention this to her doctor who prescribes her a non codeine-based painkiller. The doctor also considers what impact Valerie's gut flora and microbiome might have on medication. \n\n At its simplest, precision medicine is ultra-tailored healthcare. When President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015, he put it this way: \"delivering the right treatments, at the right time, every time, to the right person.\"  \n\n Precision medicine, also known as personalised medicine, is being heralded as the next major breakthrough in healthcare. In Britain, the NHS is \"on a journey towards embedding a personalised medicine approach into mainstream healthcare.\" \n\n While medical care has always been tailored to the individual to an extent, the degree to which it can be personalised today is unprecedented because of new technology. Equipment that would have been the stuff of science fiction 20 years ago is now available in many universities. Three key advancements combine to make medicine more precise: patient-generated data through smartphones and wearable tech, genomic medicine and computer science. \n\n First, patients can quickly and easily log their daily symptoms with apps on their phones or wearable technology to understand their illnesses better. Detailed records also aid doctors in the way they treat patients and provide data for research. \n\n Second, technology is allowing us to sequence DNA at a faster rate and a cheaper cost than ever before; and scientists are understanding the genetic markers of disease at a significant rate. Estimates suggest the cost of sequencing the very first genome could have been as high as $1bn. By 2016, the cost had dropped below $1,500. The process now takes hours rather than weeks. \n\n Third, in the age of big data, computers are allowing scientists to analyse vast amounts of data with greater precision than ever before. Machine-learning algorithms accelerate analysis of data sets which result in rapid discoveries.\nPrecision medicine is charged by a need to address the sheer variety of people's reactions to things going wrong in their bodies. From neurological disorders to strokes, cancer to depression, infections to alcoholism, each patient is unique; so ultimately the treatment should be unique, too.  \n\n Parkinson's is one of the first diseases precision medicine is being applied to. It's a heterogeneous disease, which means there is a lot of variability in how patients progress. In its early stages, the disease can manifest itself with symptoms very different from the tremors most associated with it. Patients may have motion-related issues with walking, posture or movement of the fingers; but they may also experience cognitive and memory problems, depression or lose their sense of smell. Because the early signs are so varied, it is difficult to predict the progression in individual patients. \n\n Dr Duygu Tosun-Turgut of the University of California won the 2016 data challenge set by the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. Her aim was to discover whether the progression rate of Parkinson's disease could be predicted. If doctors could predict the speed of a patient's decline, it could affect both treatment and prognosis. It would also assist with clinical trials, as it is better to recruit patients in swift rather than slow decline. In these patients, changes and improvements – and therefore efficacy of treatment – are demonstrated more dramatically. \n\n To define the progression rate, Dr Tosun and her team looked at all the clinical data available, captured from multiple patient visits to clinics. This included, for example, the results of memory tests, the total number of times patients could sit down and stand up over a 30-second period or changes in sleeping habits and sense of smell. Dr Tosun then looked for a pattern using data-driven machine-learning algorithms. \n\n Two groups were identified. One was slow progressing and the other was fast progressing. The next step was to find out if there were any baseline assessments that could be used to predict the rate of progression. At this point they looked at genetic makeup, fluid biomarkers, imaging MRI data and other factors.  \n\n \"The body is a whole, everything is so connected. There might be something dominant but it affects other systems in the body. It's the same in the brain,\" says Dr Tosun.\nShe discovered that if patients arrived with more motor-related symptoms on their first visit, they would decline faster. She also identified a brain region with degenerated white matter fibres. She found that the more degenerated the structures were in these regions, the faster the patient declined. \n\n Data was collected from people with a family history of Parkinson's or those who exhibited early signs to see if the same measure could be used to detect the disease before the symptoms started appearing. The goal would be to intervene before the disease started to progress. \n\n \"It's very difficult to reverse neurodegeneration,\" says Dr Tosun. \"If [a patient is] progressing fast, or if they have the markers telling us they're going to progress fast, you need to progress faster.\" \n\n Now Dr Tosun has turned her focus on the earliest mechanisms that trigger neurodegeneration. If it is known what triggers the disease, there may be precautions people can take to avoid developing Parkinson's. \"It can be diet, supplements, physical activity or cognitive activity,\" she says. \n\n \"It's very important to understand everything about that patient,\" says Dr Tosun. \"Not just their symptoms: their environment, their background, the state of their brain and body. The more we learn about the patient, the more the we can model the disease and treatment better.\" \n\n With advancements in computer science, algorithms and hardware, scientists like Dr Tosun are at the point where they can look at all the data at one time to better understand disease, health, prognosis and treatment. Finding patterns will help answer different questions. \n\n The vast capacity of big data is crucial. Dr Beckie Port, senior research communications officer at Parkinson's UK, says, \"The more people you put in your experiments, the more you can iron out some of the complexities and start to see trends, It's going to be a mammoth mission to start teasing out individual factors that could be used for personalised medicine, but it's not impossible.\"\nPersonal technology – wearable tech such as fitbits and smartphone apps – is another important element in precision medicine. It is already being used in the field of Parkinson's. uMotif is a 'patient data capture platform' that allows patients with long-term conditions to track their symptoms using an app. A patient inputs information about symptoms every day, including non-motor symptoms. How did you sleep? What's your mood like today? How about stress levels? What did you eat? How's your pain? Do you have nausea? \n\n With this information, researchers and clinical teams can understand the disease better; and  patients can have more useful conversations with their clinicians. The patient becomes an active participant rather than a spectator. \"How you feel your Parkinson's is a very important thing in quality of life and good treatments,\" says uMotif's co-founder and chief executive Bruce Hellman.  \n\n The data capture for a major study into Parkinson's is just finishing. Over 4,221 people tracked their health for 100 days and donated the data to academic research. \n\n Already, the feedback suggests the technology is having a positive effect on individual lives. Since using the app, Mick, a Parkinson's patient, reports feeling more assured in talking about his condition with a neurologist because he has a record of what's been happening and how he's felt. \"It teaches you, 'Don't beat yourself up because you can't do what you used to do, look at what you\nare\ndoing',\" he says. \n\n Through plotting her feelings each day, Sam now realises that she was managing her life with Parkinson's better that she thought. She'd been getting anxiety attacks in the morning and it suddenly dawned on her that changing taking her medication from the evening to the morning might help ease the attacks. It worked. \"I'm in control of my health,\" she says. \n\n \"One of the problems people have,\" says Dr Port, \"is that when they go to the doctor's they may be having a very good or bad day but it might not reflect what they're like on an everyday basis, That snapshot the specialist sees could influence [the patient's] drugs for the next six months.\" \n\n \"People with Parkinson's often only visit a doctor twice a year,\" says Hellman, \"so knowing more about their health will help them to bridge the gap between health visits and better understand their symptoms. Health is done to you at the moment but in the future it should be done with you.\"\nThe 100,000 Genomes Project is planning to sequence 100,000 genomes from around 70,000 people. The largest national sequencing project of its kind in the world, it aims to create a new genomic medicine service here in the UK. At the time of writing, the 20,429 genomes that have so far been sequenced are split 50/50 between cancer and rare diseases. It covers a large geographical area: England already has 13 genomic medicine centres covering 85 NHS trusts.  \n\n \"Genomic medicine is right at the vanguard of personalised medicine,\" says Tom Fowler, deputy chief scientist and director of public health at Genomics England. He points out the role it can play in treating rare diseases, where unmet diagnostic needs are of paramount importance. \"For people with a lifetime of wondering why they or their child is affected, the benefit [of genomic medicine] is being able to answer that question. It also can improve existing or potential treatment and help with making reproduction choices.\" \n\n Thanks to genomoic medicine, numerous diagnoses have been possible. The gene mutation causing four-year-old Jessica's rare disease was identified by researchers after her parents spent years not knowing what was wrong. Jessica's treatment is simply a special diet that enhances glucose production in the brain. After a month on the regime, Jessica's parents \"noticed a big improvement in her speech, energy levels and general steadiness,\" according to consultant Maria Bitner-Glindzicz of Great Ormond Street hospital. \"Overall, she is better and brighter in herself and her parents don't worry about her having fits on a daily basis as they used to.\" \n\n The project anticipates a 25 per cent diagnostic rate in rare diseases but Fowler says the remaining 75 per cent don't just get put aside, the data goes into research environments where it will be worked on: \"It's the start, not the end, of the journey.\" \n\n A small group of Parkinson's patients is included in the 100,000 Genomes project because early onset Parkinson's is considered rare and it's more likely to contain a genetic factor. It is estimated that around 5 per cent of Parkinson's cases have a genetic link; but Dr Port thinks the role of genetics in the disease is probably a lot larger.\nThe challenge now is how to move this kind of healthcare into the mainstream as part of routine healthcare. Fowler hopes that will happen in the next five years. In 2015, in partnership with Health Education England, nine universities introduced master's degrees in Genomic Medicine. \"A legacy of upskilling staff so they understand information will make the long-lasting difference,\" says Fowler. \"If we build an infrastructure and workforce that can cope with genomic medicine, as new discoveries happen we've got the ability to adapt and take them on board.\" \n\n Genetic testing can already reveal the potential for future illness and allow for proactive and preventative decisions. When Angelina Jolie, for example, discovered she carried BRCA1, the genetic marker for breast cancer that her late mother carried, she had a double mastectomy. People with a BRCA1 mutation have a 65 per cent chance of developing breast cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute. \n\n At the moment the number of people who've had their genes sequenced is fractional but it could become more commonplace. Will everyone have genetic testing eventually? \"At the current time it's difficult to see how that would step out into the mainstream,\" says Fowler. \"There may well be a time where that is the case and we move towards it.\" The NHS wouldn't be expected to pay for that, he adds. \n\n People are already paying to have their genes tested. Companies like 23andMe of gene testing home-kit services, which offer the possibility of finding out if you have a genetic variant that could put you at risk for certain traits or conditions. They range from serious conditions (cancer, Alzheimer's) to traits (caffeine metabolism, alcohol flush reaction, coriander aversion and sensitivity to the sound of chewing). \n\n Critics of precision medicine say that the word 'precision' is an unrealistic, inflated, hyperbolic term. They caution that there are many things happening in the human body, as well as genetics. In the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Canadian doctor Dan Roden wrote, \"Patients are more than collections of genomes and gene-environment interactions; they are individuals influenced by experience, culture, education, upbringing, and innumerable other factors.\" \n\n Still, there have already been some major success stories in genomic medicine. Most recently, DNA sequencing has led to a 'miracle' drug that treats spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the most common genetic cause of death in childhood. The drug has recently been approved by the FDA. \n\n Combined with patient-generated data and computer-powered analysis of big data, precision medicine seems like an obvious next step. It will take time and cost money but once the task of digitising healthcare is finished, it promises a slicker, more efficient system with better diagnosis and treatment.  \n\n \"You can't assume everyone has average Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or depression. They have their own properties,\" says Dr Tosun. \"Precision Medicine is the solution, it's something we need to do.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Which of the following is not a main reason for the development of precision medicine:", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_1", "options": ["computers with greater speed and power", "new methods of genetic sequencing", "new data recording technology", "updated laws"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The foundation of precision medicine is a belief that:", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_2", "options": ["individuals benefit from specified treatment plans", "each system of the body works independently", "the course of a disease is similar in most people", "medical doctors must be the sole decision-makers"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What well-known figure is connected to a research foundation for Parkinson's disease?", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_3", "options": ["Angelina Jolie", "President Obama", "Michael J. Fox", "Dan Roden"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The best patients for clinical trials are those who...", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_4", "options": ["are in a late stage of disease.", "those whose conditions are progressing slowly.", "those whose conditions are progressing rapidly.", "have multiple conditions."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is a main challenge in the future of precision healthcare?", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_5", "options": ["Legal challenges", "Lack of research", "Barriers to widespread, routine adoption", "No available doctor training"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Precision medicine has first been utilized in the treatment of...", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_6", "options": ["Alcohol Dependence", "Breast Cancer", "Parkinson's Disease", "rare genetic disorders"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The neurodegeneration of Parkinson's Disease...", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_7", "options": ["can be prevented by changes in diet and supplements.", "can be prevented by an increase in physical activity.", "cannot be cured until more research is done.", "can be cured by an increase in cognitive activities."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "At this time, genetic testing can help an individual...", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_8", "options": ["know with certainty if they will develop cancer.", "determine a treatment plan for depression.", "identify potential risks for certain traits or conditions.", "predict if they will develop Alzheimer's disease when they get older."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The article did not address the role of ______ in genetic testing.", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_9", "options": ["cost", "patient benefits", "privacy concerns", "research"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does uMotif do?", "question_unique_id": "99913_XIU107VS_10", "options": ["Connects with a patient's body to automatically record their symptoms.", "Allows a patient to self-monitor and record symptoms.", "Allows a patient to communicate urgently with their doctors.", "Compiles reports for clinical trials without patient input."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/life-death/precision-medicine", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99906", "set_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Hold your nerves", "year": 2016, "author": "Ben Martynoga", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Hold your nerves\nStress wrecks too many days before they've even begun. It creeps up as soon as the alarm jerks you awake. Fingers reflexively unlock your phone. Emails bound in with a jolly ping: things you should have done last week; pointless meeting requests; bills to pay.  \n\n Over a gobbled breakfast you scan the headlines: wall-to-wall misery and pointlessness. On the train you turn to social media for relief. Gillian is funnier than you. Alex got promoted again. Laura's sunning herself in Thailand. You're here, packed in, surrounded but alone, rattling your way towards another overstretched day in an unfulfilling role. There's talk of redundancies and an appointment with the boss looms. Thoughts turn to your dream job. Your heart rate steps up again. Even if you had the energy to fill in the form, you wouldn't get the job. Besides, your sneezing neighbour's probably just infected you with the Zika virus. \n\n Stress. We know what it feels like, we can smell it on others, we complain about it most days. But what is it? Now that's a slippery question. \n\n Apparently, we're living through an epidemic of it. Latest figures from the UK government's Health and Safety Executive state that stress cost the economy nearly 10m working days last year. Forty-three per cent of all sick days were chalked up to stress. Across the Atlantic, a major 2014 survey conducted by radio network NPR showed that 49 per cent of Americans reported a major stress event in the last year. In 2013 US doctors wrote 76m unique prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs Xanax and Ativan. With the media pushing images of stress-induced heart disease, strokes, obesity, depression, ulcers and cancer, it's hard not to conclude that stress kills. \n\n But consider this: just a century ago nobody got stressed. They suffered with their nerves; got a touch of the vapours; they worried; but they were never stressed. Stress happened to metals subjected to powerful forces and to syllables in elocution classes. In fact, our current view of stress – what it is, what it feels like, and when it is harmful – evolved surprisingly recently. This matters. Recent research shows that the way we think about stress has a profound influence on how it affects us.\nThere is no doubt that prolonged, uncontrollable stress – particularly if suffered in childhood – can be profoundly corrosive and debilitating. But what of the familiar stresses of day-to-day life? Are they actually damaging you? Might the belief that stress is harmful be self-fulfilling? And what would a stress-free life really look like? Instead of turning in on ourselves and doing battle with our personal stress demons, might we be able to put their diabolic energy to good use?\nPull back for a moment from your daily hustle and you'll see that many of us are incurably hooked on stress. We thrive on it. We get a kick out of surviving the high-stakes presentation, meeting the deadline and overcoming our fears and prejudices. Watching a thriller, we're on the edge of our seats, pulses racing. Sports, on the field or on television, can propel us into \"fight or flight\" mode. Humanity's fascination with gambling hinges on stress. \n\n If the most skilled physiologists in the world could peer beneath the skin of a thrill-seeker on a rollercoaster and an out-of-their-depth job interview candidate, they'd struggle to tell them apart. Deep in the brain, they'd see a structure called the hypothalamus fired up. With each lurch of the ride or disarming question asked, the hypothalamus signals to the adrenal glands, which sit atop each kidney. The adrenals then squirt a shot of adrenaline into the bloodstream. In the background, the hypothalamus prods the pituitary gland, which passes a different message on to the adrenal gland. This ups the production of cortisol, the textbook 'stress hormone'. Flipping these key biological switches triggers the familiar bodily symptoms of stress: a pounding heart, raised blood pressure, dilated pupils, arrested digestion and a damped-down immune system. In both cases, the biological stress response would look very similar. \n\n Even if we could eliminate stress entirely, or smother it with pharmaceuticals, we wouldn't want to. To muzzle the stress response is to silence the good as well as the bad. At best, stress can motivate us to achieve more and fix the sources of our stress. Boredom is stressful in its own way: ask a caged lion, or an understimulated teenager. In fact, as animal psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder told New Scientist recently, boredom may exist to spur us back into activity. This half-forgotten idea, that some degree of stress can inspire and elevate, is common sense. It also has deep roots in the earliest scientific study of stress and stress responses. \n\n Back at the beginning of the 20th century, two American psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, wanted to know how stressing out lab mice affected their learning. They set the rodents navigational challenges and punished wrong turns with small electric shocks to the feet. In their terminology, larger electric currents caused greater 'arousal'. \n\n They spotted some consistent trends. When they gave mice an easy task (choosing between a black or a white tunnel, achieved by different lighting) the relationship between the strength of the shock and the speed of learning was simple. The greater the stressor, the quicker the mice learned to pick the right tunnel. \n\n When the challenge was subtler (differentiating between grey tunnels), the response was less straightforward. Weak shocks provided little impetus to learn, but as the zaps got stronger, the mice gradually upped their game. They focused on the task and remembered the consequences of wrong choices. Yet, at a certain point, the high stress levels that helped with the easy task became counterproductive. Overwhelmed, the mice skittered around at random, vainly trying to escape. \n\n On a graph, the relationship between stress and performance on onerous tasks traces an inverted U-shape. Some degree of stress helps, but there is a clear tipping point, beyond which stress becomes paralysing. These findings became the Yerkes-Dodson law.  \n\n This was all very well for mice, but could it be applied to the vagaries of human existence? According to Canadian-Austrian endocrinogist Hans Selye, the 'father of stress', it could. It was 10-times Nobel prize nominee Selye who first described the key glands, hormones and nerves of the biological stress response during the 1930s and 40s. Selye was also one of the first to apply the word 'stress' to human biology (he once quipped that he might have chosen a different word had his grasp of English been better).  \n\n For Selye, 'stress' described an all-purpose response the body had to any demand placed upon it. When stress is on the upswing of Yerkes and Dodsons' inverted-U performance curve, Selye calls it 'eustress'. This is where good teachers and managers should push their charges: to the sweet spot that separates predictable tedium from chaotic overload. When stress gets more persistent, unmanageable and damaging, Selye called it 'distress'. Eustress and distress have identical biological bases, they are simply found at different points on the same curve. \n\n We know this, but today stress has a terrible public image, often synonymous with distress. While some wear their stress as a badge of honour (\"I'm important enough to be stressed,\" they think), deep down even the most gung-ho City workers probably stress about their stress. And in painting stress as a beast, we grant it more destructive power.\nWhen did we come to view stress as the universal enemy? Mark Petticrew, Professor of Public Health Evaluation at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has sifted through a huge archive of historical tobacco industry documents. He revealed that a large proportion of stress research during the second half of the 20th century was funded, steered and manipulated by this most unexpected of benefactors. From the late 1950s, Hans Selye himself received hundreds of thousands of tobacco-stained dollars. He also allowed industry lawyers to vet his research and appeared in several pro-tobacco propaganda films.\n\"They put a massive, massive amount of money into it,\" Petticrew told me. \"This isn't a side story in the history of stress.\" \n\n Why were tobacco manufacturers so interested in stress? First of all cigarettes were marketed as a stress reliever. \"To anxiety… I bring relief,\" reads a 1930s advertisement for Lucky Strike. So if research could help them pin poor mental and physical health to stress, this sort of message would carry more weight. (Incidentally, the still widespread belief that smoking reduces anxiety appears to be wrong).  \n\n Later, as evidence that smoking caused cancer and heart disease piled up, the tobacco industry became hell-bent on proving that stress was an equally significant risk factor. They used the authority of Selye and several other leading stress researchers as a smokescreen (pardon the pun). \"Doubt is our product,\" read a leading tobacco industry executive's 1969 memo. And so doubt they sowed. Time and again they argued that stress was a major cause of disease. Those seeking to control tobacco were barking up the wrong tree, they claimed. \n\n It worked: they convinced the general public of the evils of stress and diverted public health research for at least a decade. With tobacco regulation and compensation payouts postponed, the profits kept rolling in.\nSo should we doubt the veracity and neutrality of all the foundational research into stress as disease? \"I wouldn't want to argue that stress doesn't exist, or that it isn't bad for your health and certainly your mental health,\" says Petticrew. \"But you can't ignore this story.\"\nHe goes on to describe concrete 'findings' that industry-funded researchers got wrong. Prominent among these was a link between coronary disease and people displaying so-called 'Type A' personality traits: competitiveness, ambition and anxiety. Such temperamentally 'stressed' people were especially likely to suffer heart attacks and, not coincidentally, to smoke. Then the association simply faded away.  \n\n \"Aside from the scientific weaknesses, which are many, Type A is a cultural artefact to some extent constructed by the tobacco lobby,\" says Petticrew. Despite its fragile foundations, the Type A myth persists today. Pettigrew calls such research, which continues to be published despite repeatedly negative findings, 'zombie science'.\nThe long shadow cast by decades of one-sided, propaganda-laced stress research has led many of us to believe that stress is a direct cause of heart attacks. But the British Heart Foundation's website clearly states, \"There is no evidence to suggest that stress causes coronary heart disease or heart attacks.\" Nor does it cause stomach ulcers: a bacterium called H. pylori does that. \n\n Yet the tobacco-funded researchers didn't get it all wrong. Stress does have clear causal links to some diseases, particularly mental illnesses including depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and addictive behaviour. High stress levels do appear to be a general risk factor for early death, particularly for middle-aged men. Moreover, we all know how unpleasant stress can be. From insomnia to binge eating and boozing, we respond to stress with all sorts of counterproductive and antisocial behaviours. And that's partly why the tone of messages we hear about stress matters so much. Humans are inherently suggestible and particularly vulnerable to warning messages about our health, especially when those messages seem to be backed by science. \n\n With mice in a cage, you can measure the tipping point – the precise current of the electric shock – where good stress becomes bad. You can see how many weeks of stress cause adrenal glands to enlarge and immune systems to wither. But when it comes to humankind, we don't need the lurking menace of a lion in the long grass to activate our stress response. We can do it perfectly well for ourselves. All it takes is a negative thought, the memory of an insult, or a vague feeling of unease. \n\n So, we can think our way into stress. And, as recent evidence shows, if we believe stress is going to hurt us, it is more likely to hurt us. This is one message emerging from the Whitehall II project, a long-term study of 10,000 UK government civil servants, set up in 1985 to study the social, economic and personal determinants of health and disease. A 2013 analysis of Whitehall II data concluded that people who believe stress adversely affects their health are more than twice as likely to suffer a heart attack, regardless of the amount of stress they appear to be under. \n\n There is a flipside to this gloomy news, though. If our thoughts and beliefs can switch on a damaging stress response, mightn't they also switch it off? Could the power of suggestion be a partial vaccination in the battle against the stress epidemic? This is the contention of Alia Crum, an ambitious young psychology professor at Stanford University. \n\n Crum is a flagbearer for the on-trend science of mindset manipulations. In 2007 she showed that if hotel chambermaids come to think of their work as exercise, they lose weight and their blood pressure falls, apparently without working any harder. And in 2011 Crum showed that if we consume a healthy snack dressed as a calorie-laden indulgence, the power of belief dupes our hormonal appetite system into feeling sated. \n\n More recently she turned her attention to our core beliefs about stress. Crum's unlikely collaborators were 388 employees of UBS bank, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. This was a time of turmoil, layoffs and uncertainty at the firm. Stress was rife. Crum wanted to know how these overworked bankers thought about stress and whether she could change their convictions. \n\n She split the bank workers into three groups. A small control group got no training. Over the course of a week, the other two groups were shown three different short training videos. Superficially the videos were similar: they talked about stress and its effects on mind and body. One group's films dealt with disease risk, anxiety, depression and distraction. They showed basketball ace LeBron James missing a decisive shot under pressure, implying stress is debilitating. In the other videos LeBron sinks his basket, the message being that stress sharpens attention, boosts cognition, enhances relationships and forces fresh perspectives: it is life-enhancing. \n\n The UBS staff subtly changed their views. The ‘stress is enhancing’ group took on a more positive stance and reported being more productive, focused and collaborative. They also reported less depression and anxiety, and even a reduction in symptoms like back pain and insomnia. Curiously, The ‘stress is debilitating’ group didn't get any worse, perhaps because they already shared the widespread pessimistic view of stress. \n\n Although the results aren't exactly transformative, it seems that by changing how we think about stress, we can temper the stress response. Over a lifetime of minor and major stresses, even relatively subtle drops in anxiety levels and a little less strain on the cardiovascular system could translate into significant boons for physical and psychological health. The inescapable conclusion is this: the human mind is a powerful gatekeeper to the stress response.\nBut we have to tread carefully here. UBS employees may have the freedom to choose a less stressful life, and find opportunity to reshape their stress mindsets. But what about those whose stress is delivered early and compounded by a lifetime of disadvantage and adversity? In his book The Health Gap, UCL Professor Sir Michael Marmot describes a prototypical young man growing up in a rundown part of Glasgow:\n\"Life expectancy 54 years, subject to physical and sexual abuse from a succession of male partners of his mother; moving house about once every 18 months; entering school with behavioural problems, which then led on to delinquency, gang violence, and spells in prison. At various times, psychiatrists labelled him as having personality disorder, anxiety, depression, and antisocial tendencies.\" \n\n To blame him for succumbing to his stressful circumstances and having the wrong mindset would be absurd. Marmot continues: \"It is true that tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and an appalling diet, along with liberal indulgence in violence, are major contributors to his ill health, but the causes of the causes are his tragic life history.\" \n\n Marmot describes why the conventional fixes to socioeconomic disadvantage – healthcare provision, lifestyle education, housing schemes, youth centres and the like – may be off beam. He argues instead that we need to look at the mind: \"The mind is the major gateway through which social circumstances lead to health inequalities. It is not what you have that is important for health, but what you can do with what you have.\"  \n\n Perhaps this is where the story of familiar workaday stress and the grinding strain of social injustice come together. Stress only gets under our skin when we can't see the end or spot the fix. It is only truly distressing when it feels out of control. So what, other than using Crum's mindset interventions, can we do to restore the critical feeling of empowerment? \n\n Most reports of the 'stress epidemic' paint stress as a private enemy: something to battle with, resist or evade. The industries that have emerged to combat stress – self-help, stress management, therapy and the like – doubtless help many to cope. But even their emphasis on 'coping' and 'resilience' inadvertently bolsters the 'stress is debilitating' mindset. These approaches also tend to promote personal introspection. Certainly, faced with personal challenges, family turmoil and professional adversity, many of us turn in on ourselves, insulating ourselves from the social world, which seems to be the source of so much stress.\nYet according to Yale psychologist Emily Ansell, looking up from your navel and reaching out a kindly hand to your fellow human beings can be surprisingly helpful. In a study published last year, Ansell and colleagues gave a group of 77 people a diary-like smartphone app. They asked them to record all the stressful incidents they encountered, and any minor acts of kindness they performed, during a 14-day period. These data show that gestures like holding doors for strangers and helping the elderly across the road buffer the effects of stress and make you feel measurably more positive.\n\"It's not just whether you're more altruistic than the next person,\" Ansell told NPR. \"It's that being more altruistic than usual can change your experience from day to day. It's all about doing more than your average.\" \n\n Mobile technology now helps us reach out directly to those buckling under stress. Koko is a slick app developed by a team at the MIT media lab, which puts the hive mind to work on counselling and therapy. Wired described it as, \"What you'd get if you were to combine the swiping gesture of Tinder, the anonymity of Whisper, the upvoting of Reddit, and the earnestness of old-fashioned forums.\" Koko users write on the app's digital noticeboard, giving short summaries of their stress and anxiety, ranging from workplace insecurities to more entrenched depression, anxiety and inner turmoil. Other, anonymous users then offer constructive ideas to rethink and reframe the problem. \n\n Launched last June, Koko is now used in 155 countries. The early signs are that it works. Amid the ocean of unproven and gimmicky 'stress-busting' apps out there, here is one that has some hard evidence behind it. In a 2015 clinical trial, Koko's web-based predecessor showed promise as a tool for managing depression. Koko has recently been repackaged, to help people tackle everyday stress, as well as depression. \n\n Koko co-creator Rob Morris thinks that giving advice may be even more beneficial than getting it. \"Helping others can help build feelings of self-efficacy. Many of our users describe feeling more empowered to help themselves after observing their successes when helping others,\" he tells me. \n\n While the acts of kindness recommended by psychologist Ansell and Koko's forum for constructive stress 'reframing' may only be behavioural tweaks, they could hint at where more fundamental solutions might lie. By emphasising the power of reaching out to others, they also remind us that loneliness is a uniquely toxic source of stress. It appears to be on the rise, especially in the developed world, where its cuts across age and social class. As UCLA Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry Steven Cole told Pacific Standard magazine, \"Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete.\"  \n\n Thrill-seekers, work-junkies and young lovers remind us that stress can be a source of great energy. But left unchecked it's often a frustrating and self-defeating power. What if we could learn to divert some of that potency away from our private battles and into forging connections with those around us? Positive interactions deliver a reward at the neurological level. They restore a sense of control and show that meaningful relationships are possible.  \n\n Give it a try as you struggle to work next Monday. See how it feels to lift some pushchairs, offer directions and return a few smiles. If you can make the time it also pays to aim higher: try volunteering or helping more vulnerable members of your community or family. Ansell's and other studies have shown that helping others cushions stress. Moreover, helpers often get more psychological and health benefits than those on the receiving end of that help. \n\n Michael Poulin, a professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo, is so convinced of this counterintuitive finding that he ended a recent academic paper with this proposition: \"At-risk populations are frequently advised to seek support from their social networks. A less common message, but one that perhaps deserves more prominence, is for them to support others as well.\" \n\n Poulin's hunch is that helping others works as the ultimate distractor: \"In disengaging from one's self-focused concerns to help others, the sources of stress on one's own life decrease in perceived importance and thus impact on one's own well-being.\" And it's no good just going through the motions; you've got to believe in what you are doing. \"Only if you genuinely commit to the goal of caring for another's welfare do you have cause to disengage [from your own stress].\" \n\n So how do we encourage prosocial behaviour throughout society, particularly at the underprivileged margins? According to Paul Piff, a social psychologist at UC Irvine, lower-class individuals in America tend to \"have less and give more\". They are more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful than their upper-class counterparts. It's possible that this tendency to reach out and muck in is a direct response to a life of chronic stress. In response to Piff's theory, Poulin suggests, \"We should perhaps really focus on encouraging prosocial behaviour among the well-off, potentially leading both to benefits for them – in terms of stress – and for the disadvantaged, who would presumably benefit from their generosity.\" \n\n From this outward-facing perspective, it's easy to see the value of social prescriptions. Although they are sometimes perceived as box-ticking exercises to complement the real work of providing homes, healthcare and jobs, the more delicate job of building a sense of community may actually be at the centre of the game. Development that is imposed from on high can increase a feeling of disempowerment. At times of pressure it is this more fragile sense of control that has the potential to convert stress into a constructive force rather than a destructive one.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does the author propose as the main source of stress in the majority of people?", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_1", "options": ["Monetary struggles", "Interpersonal relationships", "Disempowering government mandates", "The constant flow of small everyday issues "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the media’s general attitude towards stress?", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_2", "options": ["That is has no effect on one’s health ", "That is has a negative effect on one’s health ", "That it can have both positive and negative effects depending on the situation ", "That it has a positive effect on one’s health"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the author’s general attitude towards stress? ", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_3", "options": ["That is has a negative effect on one’s health ", "That it can have both positive and negative effects depending on the situation ", "That it has a positive effect on one’s health", "That it has no effect on one’s health "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author suggest as the cause for the increase in general stress levels in society? ", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_4", "options": ["An increase in the prescription and use of anti-anxiety drugs ", "Social media causing people to reflect on their own insecurities ", "A constant stream of negative news stories from the media", "A change in the mindset that we have about stress"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author believe that the difference physiologically between physically stressful and mentally stressful situations are?", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_5", "options": ["Physical stress is more dangerous than mental stress because of the risk of energy", "Physical stress is more stimulating and mental stress is more depressing", "Physical stress causes more physiological damage than mental stress does", "There is no physiological difference between the types of stress "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author argue as a benefit that stress may have?", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_6", "options": ["It reduces the risk of mental health disease", "It can be channeled as personal motivation", "It increases life expectancy ", "It decreases the risk of heart disease "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What did the research of Yerkes and Dodson reveal? ", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_7", "options": ["That stress did not effect the learning process of mice ", "That some degree of stress was a benefit, but too much was a detriment ", "That stress was detrimental to the learning process of mice ", "That stress was a benefit to the learning process of mice "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is it likely that “Type A” people had higher rates of heart disease?", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_8", "options": ["They were more anxious ", "They were more likely to smoke", "They were more likely to be stressed", "They were more ambitious "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a major reason for the exclusively negative view of stress that the public and media hold? ", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_9", "options": ["The proven links between heart disease and stress", "The research that lead to the Yerkes-Dodson theory", "Lobbying by the tobacco industries", "The increase in popularity of social media "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the author imply that the main way to reduce the physiological impact of stress is? ", "question_unique_id": "99906_TY8A5BIM_10", "options": ["By providing better physical healthcare to those effected by stress", "By reducing stress in general through social assistance programs ", "By dampening the stress response using prescribed drugs", "By changing the general public mindset around stress "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/life-death/a-little-stress-may-be-good-for-you", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99907", "set_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "How Scotland is tackling the democratic deficit, from the ground up", "year": 2017, "author": "Karin Goodwin", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "How Scotland is tackling the democratic deficit, from the ground up\nOn a chilly February morning in Glasgow, Stephanie Anthony and her three-year-old son Ilan are perching on a log in front of a small bonfire. They are making popcorn with kernels, using two sieves tied together with string, and are surrounded by a warm circle of toddlers, mums, dads, aunties, grannies and childminders from the local area. \n\n A few yards away, Monroe, two, is also 'cooking', sloshing earth and grass carefully in a saucepan in the mud kitchen. Preschoolers Reuben and Benjamin are making a woodchip path, wheeling little barrows back and forth from a large pile. On the adjoining meadow, dogs and their owners enjoy a stroll and a chat. A colourful signpost arrow points straight ahead for 'Wonderland'. \n\n It is an urban idyll of sorts. This piece of vacant land on the edge of Glasgow's residential west end – known as the Children's Wood and North Kelvin Meadow – would probably be a building site now if left up to Glasgow City Council. But in December, after a five-year campaign to keep it in use for the community as wild space, the Scottish Government overruled the local authority, which had granted permission for luxury flats to be built on the site. The sale of land to developer New City Vision was stopped in its tracks.  \n\n Campaigners are now looking at the possibility of community buy-out to ensure it continues to be used by local nurseries, primary and secondary schools – as well as the group's own forest schools, outdoor play, gardening groups and others.  \n\n \"I don't think the council realised how much it meant to us,\" says Anthony. \"We've fought so hard. But if local democracy had been working we wouldn't have had to fight against the lobbying of private companies.\"\nThere is a growing sense – from activities, academics and political commentators alike – that we are experiencing a clear democracy deficit. Questions are being raised about that the legitimacy of the politicians supposed to serve us. Does voting alone constitute democracy?\nAt the last general election, around two-thirds of those able to vote did so, while in local elections only about 26 per cent turn up to polling stations. And it is particularly the poor – and the young – who don't participate and for whom policies are not created.  \n\n The issue is brought into sharpest focus at a local level. Two years ago research by Scotland's first Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy claimed radical democracy reform was needed in response to \"unacceptable levels of inequality\". \n\n And it is in Scotland, where many became politically emboldened and active – sometimes for the first time – during the 2014 independence referendum, there is a growing movement to realise that reform. \n\n November saw the launch of Our Democracy: Act as if we own the place, a year-long coalition campaign that will see events held across Scotland to encourage citizens to imagine what their community would look like if they made the decisions, even for a day. Groups will then be encouraged to take steps to make those changes happen.  \n\n Willie Sullivan, director of the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, and author of The Missing Scotland, about the million-plus Scots who don't vote, claims the grassroots approach is key.\n\"Real democracy needs people to come together to debate and come up with ideas,\" he says. \"Yet simply voting doesn't allow for discussion or debate. \n\n \"The promise of democracy is that you all have an equal voice. Yet the greatest inequality is the inequality of power. That's part of the breakdown of trust. People know that there are some who can pull those levers of power while others cannot access them.\" \n\n Reports will be written up following each planned meeting – from Dundee to Inverness to Kirriemuir in Angus – and submitted to the Scottish government's consultation on the decentralisation of government. The scope for its plans is currently being finalised.  \n\n \"In Scotland we are always told to manage people's expectations,\" Sullivan says. \"But in this case we want to raise them, to give them confidence that we don't need to wait for permission. There is a bubbling feeling that maybe we can do it ourselves.\" \n\n Emily Cutts, who initiated the Children's Wood just after the birth of her second child, can relate to that. The power of positive thinking was crucial, she claims, in turning a waste ground into a nurturing place for the whole community.   \n\n \"Everything that we did was guerrilla,\" she says. \"My intention was to signal that we'd won from the beginning.\" Yet it was an uphill struggle. Councillors told them the planned development was a done deal, others said the Children's Wood was a nice idea that would never work.\nSo they set about making it official, registering the playgroup, getting nurseries and schools using the land and organising community events from storytelling to fireside songs. One of the most important things, according to Coutts, was to be optimistic. \"And even when it felt like we'd had a setback we also found solutions.\" \n\n Look around Glasgow – a city known for its fighting talk – and there is plenty to inspire. Kinning Park Complex, in the city's southside, is a former primary school turned community centre, which the council decided to close 21 years ago this May. The locals had other ideas, squatting the building for 55 days and saving it for the deprived areas surrounding it.  A few miles further south, Govanhill Baths started running its first swimming lessons 16 years ago last month. Here too it was a local community occupation, and a hard won campaign, that brought it back to life after council closure.  \n\n Robin McAlpine, director of the Common Weal, a \"think and do tank\" set up ahead of the Independence Referendum, has huge admiration for these campaigns and others like them. But the fact that they are needed at all makes him downright angry.  \n\n \"If you had a functioning local democracy you wouldn't need to fight like this,\" he says, fresh from the frustrations of trying to help a group in Aberdeen stop land being sold off to developers. They can't get legal advice and the odds are stacked against them. \n\n Examples of similar power imbalances litter the country. In Edinburgh campaigners in the Old Town are fighting on a range of fronts to stop what they see as the overdevelopment of the World Heritage site. And across Scotland – from Stirlingshire to Aberdeenshire and beyond – communities are fighting off development plans.\n\"If there's one thing that is truly exhausting it is taking on a bureaucracy when you don't have one of your own,\" says McAlpine. \"I've seen people burn out so many times. When you are campaigning for something like this you are always fighting against a better-resourced opponent.\" \n\n \"When you ask local politicians about it they say all people care about is getting their bins emptied. In fact they care deeply about other values, about their local area, families and communities. To say otherwise is just wrong.\" \n\n For him there is another way – participatory democracy that would see communities take on the issues that mattered – by establishing a Citizen's Assembly to act as a second chamber to the Scottish Parliament. In coming weeks Common Weal will launch a paper on the proposal in which they suggest selecting a random, representative sample of 73 members of the public to fulfil this role for at least one year. It is proposing a two-year trial that he says could help revolutionise democracy.  \n\n Interest in sortition, which sees citizens selected at random in response to the belief that power corrupts, is growing worldwide. But for its critics it's difficult to imagine what it would mean in practice.  \n\n At one charity in Govan, Glasgow's former shipbuilding area, a version of sorts already exists. Galgael, which aims to rebuild both individuals and the community through purposeful activity, from boat-building to carving and selling surplus timber, holds a monthly assembly for volunteers and staff, as part of its commitment to a democratic model. Though there is also a board, the important decisions are taken here. \n\n Galgael was founded in 1997 by Gehan Macleod and her visionary husband Colin, who died in 2005 aged just 39. It was born out of Pollok Free State, an early 90s treetop occupation Colin instigated to protest against the building of the M77 through the public woodlands in the city's Pollok Park. They failed to stop the road but succeeded in creating a community with new skills and purpose; and brought that back to Govan. \n\n Today Macleod is facilitating the assembly with warmth and honesty, helping identify issues and open up discussion with compassion and a lack of blame. Respectful disagreement is encouraged and solutions are jointly found. \n\n \"Our health is affected by decisions made on personal, professional and state levels,\" says Macleod, who also believes that the process of how decisions are made, not just their outcome, really matters.\nFor many in this room the experience of being heard has been life-changing. Michael O'Neill, who now lives in Clydebank but is originally from Govan, started volunteering here after being made redundant and suffering a breakdown of sorts.  \n\n \"I ended up just sitting in my house looking at the four walls and leaving my wife and two kids to get on with it,\" he says. Three years later he's working in the workshop, welding, cutting wood, delivery driving and whatever else needs doing. \"When you come here nobody judges you and you can speak your mind. If you make a mistake it's no big deal; it's how you learn. For me it's been like therapy. I think if places like this were widespread people would see life differently.\"  \n\n Up on the tiny Isle of Eigg, just south of Skye, Maggie Fyffe, secretary of the Eigg Heritage Trust, knows only too well the difference that community ownership makes. In June 2017, islanders will also celebrate the 20th anniversary of the community buy-out, which saw them go on to run their own affairs and develop the world's first completely renewable energy grid.  \n\n \"When the island was in private ownership we couldn't do anything,\" she says. \"In the nineties the island was pretty depressed. All that changed after the community buy-out. \n\n \"There's now a culture of self-sufficiency which has grown; there are endless small businesses up and running as well as large infrastructure projects.\" Young people are returning, building homes and having families. The future feels bright.  \n\n \"We are not perfect,\" she admits. \"Often it's a case of muddling through. But we are an example of how a bunch of ordinary people can run their own community. You don't know what you can do until you try, do you?\"  \n\n Back at the Children’s Wood, the playgroup is coming to a close. Toddlers clamber off rope swings, reluctantly part with wheelbarrows and wave goodbye to friends before winding their way through the trees on their way home for lunch. Some stop to splash in muddy puddles on the meadow; parents chat as they wait.  \n\n The community is now in talks with the council about a 25-year lease and is hopeful that it can start on plans to develop a meeting space, complete with solar panels and compost toilet, a treehouse village and wildflower planting to encourage biodiversity in the meadow.  \n\n Their eyes are also on the future; on a time when these pre-schools will watch their own children jump in puddles, hang out with their neighbours and be able to make sure it's the needs of the community that matter, first and foremost. That, campaigners claim, is what local democracy reform is really all about.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why are Stephanie Anthony and her son cooking over a fire?", "question_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2_1", "options": ["They are on vacation as a result of successful local government policies ", "They are making use of a public recreation and education space ", "They are burning the wood that was cleared to build a luxury apartment complex ", "They have fallen on hard times due to poor local government policies"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who does the author think most of the local political policies are being made for?", "question_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2_2", "options": ["The older and more upper class members of society", "The lower class ", "The younger members of society ", "The children "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was the public able to keep short-term use of the Children’s Wood?", "question_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2_3", "options": ["By initiating a community buy out before it could be developed ", "The Scottish National Government prevented it from being built on ", "The public was not able to continue using the land that was formerly the Children’s Wood", "The Glasgow City Council prevented it from being built upon "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author mean by the term “democracy deficit”", "question_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2_4", "options": ["The inability of local democracy to accurately reflect the will of the people ", "The rise of authoritarian politics in the developed world ", "The budget deficit that has been created by government \nspending ", "The lack of turnout by the public when voting for elections"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author imply that the solution to the “democracy deficit” issue is? ", "question_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2_5", "options": ["Curbing government spending on unnecessary programs ", "Increased voter turnout ", "More public involvement in the decision making process ", "Better funding for public assistance programs "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What did Emily Cutts believe to be the most important aspect of developing the community land?", "question_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2_6", "options": ["Securing funding", "Maintaining a positive attitude", "Garnering support from the public", "Convincing the Scottish National government"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the most frequent way that public spaces were being preserved in Scotland?", "question_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2_7", "options": ["Local councils preventing spaces from being closed and sold ", "Increasing the voter turnout during local elections ", "Community campaigns including squatting and occupation ", "National government intervention into the sale of public space "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why has the interest in sortition increased? ", "question_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2_8", "options": ["It allows decision making power to be concentrated to the more educated voters", "It allows decision making power to be dispersed more evenly ", "It prevents the takeover of public lands by private ownership", "It increases the power of the Scottish Parliament "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Macleod believe is the most important part of creating a community?", "question_unique_id": "99907_3WRRR5B2_9", "options": ["Fostering respectful conversations and involvement in the decision making process ", "Making better use of tax revenue for community projects ", "Increased number is voters in local election ", "Using the sortition process to randomly select Council members"], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/society/scottish-local-democracy", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99909", "set_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Moonshots for the Earth", "year": 2015, "author": "Lucy Jones", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Moonshots for the Earth\nAt the end of August, as the northern hemisphere's hottest summer on record drew to a close, a group of inventors, designers and engineers assembled in a grand stone castle an hour's drive west of Paris. Château de Millemont was hosting a five-week 'innovation camp' for the pioneers behind 12 new projects, chosen for their contribution to achieving a world without fossil fuels. POC21 (Proof of Concept) was set up as an active, grassroots foil to cop 21, the 21st UN Climate Change conference in Paris, which begins at the end of November.  \n\n \"Global emissions have doubled since the first UN climate summit in 1995,\" says the POC21 video, amid images of environmental catastrophe, so \"Let's move from talking to building a better tomorrow.\" The objective was to create workable open-source technology in the fields of energy, food and waste – life, basically.  \n\n Products that made it to the final 12 included a pedal tractor, a smartphone-controlled greenhouse and an antibacterial water filter. Daniel Connell, one of the chosen inventors, travelled to Paris from the UK for the event. He was picked because he'd created an impressive cost- and resource-efficient wind turbine design. You can make it for about £20 out of aluminium sheets, a bike wheel, rivets, washers and nuts and bolts.  \n\n \"It's entirely built from recycled or upcycled materials, and can be assembled by anybody with basic hand or power tools,\" says Dominik Wind, core organiser of POC21. \"While this makes his design a perfect fit for the people that need it most (the poor, the marginalised around the globe), it's also the perfect design to build upon: it's the basis to start from with more customised, possibly also more complex and more expensive iterations.\"  \n\n Connell has been creating prototype technologies and tutorials for solar and wind designs while moving around the world over the last 10 years, traversing Canada, France, India and Spain. A 3D animator by trade, he is self-taught – he describes the Solar Flower, a DIY solar energy collector he created, as \"my degree\" – and set out to make an existing design for a wind turbine cheap and easy for people to use. \"Technically, it could be $5 if you just pay for the rivets and get plates and a bike wheel for free,\" he said.  \n\n A seasoned squatter, Connell made his project possible by sifting through scrap heaps, fixing up bikes and living on a few pounds a day so he wouldn't have to work and could devote his time to the wind turbine. Connell's ethos is inspired by the self-sufficient communities he grew up in as a child in New Zealand, and that country's culture of ingenuity and making stuff. Since POC21, his product has improved and he's showing it to students, retirees and other people who want to get off grid via workshops.  \n\n Connell is one of a number of green inventors working to ease the world's transition to climate change. As wildfires spread, countries sink, species go extinct, floods and drought increase, seas rise, storms devastate, glaciers melt, crops fail, pollution decreases life expectancy and the potential for conflict grows, eyes look to the inventors, geniuses and entrepreneurs who surely can figure out a way of saving the planet.  \n\n When Pope Francis, in an unprecedented speech earlier this year, rejected market solutions for climate change, attacked \"unfettered capitalism\" and made a forceful moral plea, it raised the question: if individual behavioural changes aren't realistic or enough, can't technology provide a route out of the problem? Where is that technology? And is 'techno-utopianism' realistic in the context of the climate crisis?\nMajor companies are already divesting from fossil fuels – most recently the Rockefeller Foundation, the Church of England and Norway's £900bn sovereign wealth fund – as burnable reserves run out and the climate change threat becomes more apparent; but local attention is also turning to how to transition to a greener world.  \n\nIn the bowels of an east London theatre on a foggy Sunday afternoon a month or so after POC21, a panel discusses whether Hackney Council should divest its pensions away from fossil fuels. \"There is an energy transition happening,\" says Carbon Tracker's Luke Sussams. Dr David McCoy, an expert in global public health, says, \"We face an existential threat in terms of eco collapse… My 14-year-old daughter's future does not look good.\" He explains how global warming will affect disease patterns and prompt conflict over scarce resources. Yet there is some optimism about green developments in electric cars, renewable energies and Tesla's new battery technology.  \n\n Bill McKibben, the campaigner and author who brought global warming to public consciousness with his 1989 book The End of Nature, and more recently the founder of international pressure group 350.org, is positive and excited about innovation in the green world. \"The price of a solar panel dropped 75 per cent in the last six years,\" he said, speaking from his home in Vermont. \"The world's engineers are doing their job; and doing it extraordinarily well.\"  \n\n The move to renewable energy is under way. An Apollo-style research programme to make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels recently won the backing of Sir David Attenborough and high-profile businesspeople, politicians and economists. Even Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, has warned that the \"vast majority of reserves are unburnable\" if global temperature rises are to be limited to below 2C. But others think that it's not enough, and consider geoengineering to be the grand techno-fix.  \n\n First presented as a big-idea solution to climate change in the 1960s, geoengineering proposals range from the seemingly fantastical – brightening the clouds; stirring the seas to change their temperature and cool the Earth; turning the ocean into a gigantic bubble bath to reflect the sun; covering the deserts in mirrors and sending parasols into space; mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo – to the more mundane: removing carbon from atmosphere and storing it somewhere else.  \n\n Although a number of scientists and researchers – including the Royal Society, which held a geoengineering 'retreat' in Buckinghamshire in 2011 – think geoengineering is an option worth considering, no one is actually doing it yet. Well, apart from Russ George, the businessman, entrepreneur and \"DIY rogue geo-vigilante\" who dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific ocean, triggering a 10,000-sq-km plankton bloom (plankton blooms suck carbon out of the atmosphere). Though the efficacy of his actions is still unclear, George was criticised for eco-terrorism, and was said to have contravened UN conventions.  \n\nThe big problem with DIY geoengineering, and any geoengineering for that matter, is its potential for danger: we don't know what would happen. David Keith, a professor of engineering at Harvard who developed a giant air-sucking wall to capture carbon, told the New Yorker's Michael Specter, \"It is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on Earth.\"  \n\n On the other hand, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) doesn't seem, on the face of it, like playing god with our weather systems or trying, fruitlessly, to find a dimmer switch for the sun. A company called Skyonics claims its Skymine process can capture harmful pollutants and turn them into marketable products such as baking soda and bleach.  \n\n But to what extent can sucking carbon out of the air work? Sabine Mathesius, a climate modeller at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wanted to see what CDR could achieve if five gigatons (an enormous, hypothetical amount) of carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere each year. Simulations found that the impact of this level of removal would not be significant at all, especially in terms of protecting the ocean, which is acidified by human-produced CO2.  \n\n \"In the beginning I was surprised,\" she said. \"Like many people I also hoped that geoengineering could be a way to undo the harm we did with our CO2 emissions. But if you see how much CO2 we can get out of the atmosphere with the current technologies and what we are expected to emit in a business-as-usual scenario, you can already see that the impact of CO2 removal cannot be that big.\"  \n\n CDR could be used as a supporting measure to avoid the worst scenario if emissions are reduced at the same time, Mathesius concluded. \"What is not possible is just emitting the CO2 as usual and further expanding our industries and then using CDR to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Reducing emissions is the cheapest way to keep the CO2 levels low; and also the easiest way.\" More promising technologies, such as bioenergy with carbon capture or artificial trees, would also require fertile land or would cost astronomic amounts, Mathesius says. So where then would she place her hope in terms of a techno-fix to solve climate change? \"Clean energy to make it easier for people to emit less CO2.\"  \n\n Carbon capture and storage gets short shrift from McKibben. \"If you step back and think about it for a minute, it's silly,\" he says. \"You can do it, obviously, but can you do it at a cost that makes any kind of sense? You can't. No one's been able to yet. You're way better off just building the windmills in the first place. All it is is a solution designed to try and appease the power of the coal industry and offer them some kind of future.\"  \n\n Those looking into this techno-fix are quite clear that solar radiation management or carbon capture is no substitute for reducing carbon emissions anyway. Bodies such as the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI) and the Royal Society contain wary caveats, that geoengineering is not an alternative to reducing carbon consumption. McKibben calls them an \"absurd set of ideas where people throw up their hands and say, 'There's no way we can solve this problem, so instead let's fill the atmosphere with sulphur'.\"\nOn the last day of April, Elon Musk entered the stage at his Tesla Design Centre in Hawthorne, California to thumping dubstep, whoops and ripples of applause. The billionaire business magnate nodded to the crowd of adoring fans and set out his vision for a complete transformation of how the world works. His 20-minute speech explained how a new invention – the Powerwall battery – would advance a complete overhaul of the world's energy infrastructure. \"This is how it is today… it sucks,\" Musk began, gesturing to slides depicting factories belching out smoke.  \n\n The solution to getting from fossil fuel hell to a renewable-powered future, he explained, was his new product. Because \"existing batteries suck,\" he had developed the Tesla Powerwall: a wall-mounted, household battery on sale for $3,500 (£2,300). His statements were punctuated by cheers and screams from the crowd, especially when he revealed that the whole event had been powered by solar and Powerwall.  \n\n Musk believes that transitioning to electric cars and solar energy will contain the worst effects of climate change. His electric cars are improving all the time; the mass-market model is expected to be ready before 2020. Tesla open-sourced all its patents and technology in 2014 to encourage other people to advance the electric vehicle industry; and lots of major names in the automobile world have followed with designs for electric cars. \"We need the entire automotive industry to remake, and quickly,\" said McKibben. Musk has also proposed the Hyperloop, a new transport system he describes as \"a cross between Concorde, a railgun and a hockey table\".  \n\n Advances in batteries radically change the picture of renewable energy, electric cars and transport systems; and important improvements are happening. At the end of October 2015, a group of Cambridge scientists made a major breakthrough with a rechargeable super-battery that can hold five times more energy as those we're used to and can power a car from London to Edinburgh on a single charge.  \n\n Improved battery storage will change everything for green energy enthusiasts like Daniel Connell in the next few years. \"This is why, apart from [a lack of] political will, we don't have renewable energy: because storage levels don't reach grid level. But before the end of the decade they will,\" he explains.\nOne of the projects chosen for POC21, the French eco-castle retreat, was a design by a team from Berlin. Sunzilla, a diesel generator without diesel, fuelled by the sun, can be assembled by anyone. Germany is leading the way in the energy revolution with its\nenergiewende\n, driven by Green politicians and the support of local citizens. In 2014, just over a quarter of German energy came from renewable sources; in 2050, the goal is 80 per cent. The German Green Party politician Ralf Fücks, author of a new book called Green Growth, Smart Growth, is a techno-optimist with faith in society's ability to find a way out of the ecological crisis, although he cautions against the hubris of large-scale techno-fixes. Investment in green technologies and renewable energies are more realistic, he writes, than carbon capture and storage.  \n\n Fücks speak slowly, carefully and with an obvious delight in the natural world. \"Spider silk is a wonderful substance,\" he says at one point. \"It's more flexible than rubber and more solid than steel and we now have the skills to discover [its] molecular composition.\" He cites the smooth skin of the shark and the self-cleaning surface of the lotus blossom as examples of biological productivity we can learn from and use for our own purposes, while decreasing CO2 emissions.  \n\n But biomimicry is in its early stages, and renewables have already crossed to the point of no return, as Fücks puts it. On the plus side, though, costs for solar and wind power have decreased considerably over the last five years.  \n\n Fücks sees opportunities for young entrepreneurs and startups in a world without global celebrities such as Bill Gates or Richard Branson. The environmental reform of industrial society, in his view, demands a combination of big and small. There is room for more Elon Musks.  \n\n The world of food is fertile ground for big ideas and green tech innovation. Last summer saw the publication of new technology proposals to turn the waste shells of prawn, crab and lobster into nitrogen-rich chemicals for use, say, in pharmaceuticals, carbon sequestration and animal feed, which would avoid industrial production using fossil fuels.  \n\nFarmers, too, are innovating worldwide. In Devon, Rebecca Hosking is using new land management techniques to make a contribution to fighting climate change. She uses a grazing method that purposely locks atmospheric carbon back into the soil. Instead of ploughing, her long-grass grazing technique keeps carbon in the roots, ploughing release-carbon from soil into the atmosphere. The more organic matter there is in the ground, the more it can trap in the carbon.  \n\n \"Once you lock it in, and as long as you don't plough or let your grassland dry out, then the carbon stays in the soil,\" she says. \"You know that climate change is happening, we do our bit and suck out as much carbon as we can.\"  \n\n This method, which French farmers are also keen to implement, is similar in the way it works to a new, low-methane, genetically modified rice. SUSIBA2, the new rice, uses smaller roots, and produces less methane, one of the chief greenhouse gases. Scientists have also developed a feed supplement for dairy cows that could reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent.  \n\n Global warming is posing serious challenges to water supply; and we all know that the melting of glaciers is one detrimental effect of climate change. Cue another climate hero: Chewang Norphel, an 80-year-old retired civil engineer, has made 12 artificial glaciers in the last 30 years to provide water for the people of Ladakh, India. The Ice Man, as he is called, realised he could divert water through canals into frozen ice sheets, which would melt in spring and provide water for irrigation, agriculture and general local use. \"Getting water during the sowing period is the most crucial concern of the farmers because the natural glaciers start melting in the month of June and sowing starts in April and May,\" he told online news portal the Better India.  \n\n Ocean farmers are also growing kelp again to encourage a move away from environmentally costly meat-based diets. Indeed, 3D ocean farming proponents GreenWave quote a study that found a network of seaweed farms the size of Washington state could provide all the dietary protein for the entire world population.  \n\n Pope Francis's recent address sounded a note of caution around technology as a solution to climate change. \"Our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience,\" he said.  \n\n Bill McKibben believes the key is solving the \"structural systemic problem rooted in the balance of political power on our planet.\" To make a difference, he says, an individual must \"join with other people to build the kind of movement that can change those balances of power.\" In Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything, she writes about the Hollywood action movie narrative that tells us that, at the very last minute, some of us are going to be saved: \"Since our secular religion is technology, it won't be god that saves us but Bill Gates and his gang of super-geniuses at Intellectual Ventures.\"  \n\n But, while some techno-fixes recall the Greek hubris myth of Icarus, there is work to be done and hope to be found. Around the world, people are working to improve 3D printing technology and the usability of tutorials to explain how to make Connell's DIY wind turbine or the German Sunzilla. Demand Logic, a company based in London, is using data to sweep big, commercial buildings in the city and work out where energy savings can be made.  \n\n Of the UN Climate Conference in Paris, McKibben says it will be most interesting to see whether countries will come up with the money to help poor countries leapfrog technologically. But he maintains that engineers and innovators are focusing their efforts in the right place, speeding up the transition from fossil fuels. Despite the Pope's cautionary note, the industry of technology is crucial in the shift to a newly balanced planet. McKibben praised the good, cheap solar panels we already have, but said they could be much more efficient and easier to adopt. \"There's no shortage of crucial and interesting work for architects, engineers and financiers, and none of it requires telling yourself science fiction stories, the way that you have to if all you can think of is, 'Let's put a giant piece of film in space to block the sun'.\"\nPhotographs courtesy of POC21: first photograph published via Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0, second and third images via CC BY-SA 2.0\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was the goal of the assembly at Château Millemont? ", "question_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65_1", "options": ["To collaborate on technology that could be used to make more money using fossil fuels ", "To collaborate on technology that could address the problem of fossil fuels ", "To determine how to lower the prices of solar panels for consumers ", "To prepare for conflict that will be caused by resource strain due to global warming "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How was Daniel Cornell able to invent his version of the wind turbine?", "question_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65_2", "options": ["By living extremely frugally and spending all of his time and money on inventing", "By saving up money he made as a 3D animator ", "By garnering funds from a large group of investors", "By traveling to Canada and studying renewable energy technologies there "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the author imply that the impending climate doom and its consequences will be avoided? ", "question_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65_3", "options": ["By an international coalition of governments enacting favorable climate policies ", "By a drastic change in the lifestyle of the general public ", "By the ingenuity of inventors and other intelligent people creating new solutions ", "By allowing unfettered capitalism to create market solutions to climate change "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is an already tangible advancement in the field of renewable energy mentioned in the text? ", "question_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65_4", "options": ["Decreased pollution of the global environment ", "Decreased rate of global warming ", "Decreased cost of renewable energy technology ", "Decreased rate of fossil fuels consumption "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Russ George being accused of eco-terrorism? ", "question_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65_5", "options": ["His actions were not effective in reaching their goals ", "He intentionally increased the amount of carbon released by the ocean ", "He acted without international sanction ", "He intentionally increased the temperature of the ocean "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is currently the main limitation to renewable energy as the main energy source?", "question_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65_6", "options": ["Adequate power storage ", "Cost of renewable energy technology ", "Government resistance to change ", "The public’s resistance to change "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who does the author think will have to be responsible for making changes to address climate change?", "question_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65_7", "options": ["An international government coalition ", "A combination of inventors and the extremely wealthy ", "Inventors and entrepreneurs ", "The extremely wealthy"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How are farmers addressing the issues related to climate change?", "question_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65_8", "options": ["Using carbon dioxide removal technologies on their farms ", "Growing less produce and keeping less livestock ", "Adopting methods and crops that reduce greenhouse gas emissions ", "Investing in green energy with their pensions "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Pope Francis believe the climate crisis must be solved?", "question_unique_id": "99909_MWDXMR65_9", "options": ["By relying on the ultra rich to provide for the less fortunate ", "By electing government officials who put more of a focus on environmentalism ", "By using technology to slow the release of greenhouse gasses ", "By addressing the moral choices that led to the climate crises "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/margins/a-technological-fix-for-climate-change", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99904", "set_unique_id": "99904_F2RXQSWK", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Futures not of our making", "year": 2016, "author": "Jared Robert Keller", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Futures not of our making\nAfter listening to Travis Kalanick, CEO and co-founder of Uber, explain why his world-conquering ride-hailing service is ultimately better for drivers than the taxi industry, Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show, queried his grand plans: \"I know you talk about how good this is for drivers, but you said you want, like,\nself-driving\nUber cars… that's not for the driver, [you're] employing robots at that point. How is that helping livery drivers?\" Kalanick responded by shifting the conversation:\nGoogle is doing the driverless thing. Tesla is doing the driverless thing. Apple is doing the driverless thing. This is going to be the world. So a question for a tech company is, do you want to be part of the future or do you want to resist the future?\nDriverless cars are the future. If that doesn't appeal to you, blame automation; blame Silicon Valley. Don't blame Uber.  \n\n Now, Travis Kalanick's vision of the future may indeed come to fruition, and taxi drivers, long-haul truckers and (eventually) train conductors may in fact need to begin looking for new jobs. But what struck me about his oft-repeated response was the way that it so subtly but effectively controlled the narrative around automation and the future. By maintaining that the future is predetermined, Kalanick manoeuvred us, the public, into a position where we, too, are seemingly left with just two choices: resist that future, or embrace it.\nOf course, this is not the case: every technological advance involves human agency, and so there are choices available to us, but Kalanick's response circumvents this. We shouldn't get in the way of technological determinism. \n\n In the context of politics, Patricia Dunmire has written that such language works to \"supplant the notion of the future as the site of the possible with a conception of the future as inevitable\". This then limits the ability of people to \"imagine, articulate and realise futures\" different to ones handed down by those in power. \n\n My concern is that if we allow tech companies to similarly cast the future as determined, they can avoid engaging in a meaningful discussion about the consequences and implications of new technologies like self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI), or machine learning.\nUnsurprisingly, Kalanick is far from the first industry boss to frame the future of automation in this way. Industrialists, engineers and scientists in mid-20th-century America deployed many of these same narratives in similar attempts to control the discourse around technology and 'the future'. Examining how these narratives were deployed in the past can offer insight into how they are currently being used today – and what to do about it. \n\n The planners of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, for instance, took quite a deterministic view of the relationship between society and technological advance, which the guidebook for the fair encapsulated, in one of the great chapter headings of the 20th century: 'Science Finds – Industry Applies – Man Conforms'. \n\n The guidebook went on to explain: \"Science discovers, genius invents, industry applies, and man adapts himself to, or is moulded by, new things… Individuals, groups, entire races of men fall into step with the slow or swift movement of the march of science and industry.\" \n\n As well as conjuring images of a certain goose-stepping hyena scene from The Lion King, this description casts technological progress as the prime mover within society. Technological advancement is imagined as a train travelling briskly down the tracks toward a singular destination – a destination that will not only be revolutionary but unquestionably beneficial for all. The public just needs to climb aboard. \n\n The National Association of Manufacturers put its own unique spin on this well-worn metaphor in 1954 when it said: \"[G]eared to the smooth, effortless workings of automation, the magic carpet of our free economy heads for distant and undreamed of horizons. Just going along for the ride will be the biggest thrill on earth.\"\nYet, for as much as technological advances are often framed as revolutionary, they are also often framed as simply\nevolutionary\n. While new automative technologies like electric limit switches, photoelectric controls, or microprocessors were described as revolutionary advances that would greatly benefit industrialists and consumers alike, these same advances were also described as merely the next step in the slow and gradual evolution of industrial technique. \n\n Adopting this approach, a 1955 General Electric film/advertisement entitled This is Automation described recent advances in automation as the latest in long line of  \"natural evolution in industry\" that had \"worked to the advantage of everyone\".\nThis not only served to naturalise automatic processes at a time when the US Congress was meeting to discuss concerns about automation, it also served to rewrite the history of automation extending backward to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. \"Before the word automation was coined\", the film explained, advances in manufacturing \"seemed funny or fearful, depending on the viewpoint… The trouble was, some people thought of automation as a sudden thing – a revolutionary idea. But it isn't! It began nearly two hundred years ago\".\nThe message, then, was that automation was not new, and therefore need not be foreboding; what had benefited society in the past would benefit society in the future. After all, did not labourers in the 1950s enjoy better working conditions, shorter hours, and greater purchasing power compared to their equals a century before? The 'natural evolution' of automation would ensure that labourers in 2050 would be similarly better off. \n\n Such an account, however, makes no mention of the decades of work done by unions to secure those benefits or the legislation passed to ingrain certain rights as law. Two hundred years of automation are made to seem almost automatically beneficial. As a result, we're led to believe that the future of automation will require equally little in the way of regulation or action by labour unions. In a very real, very Orwellian sense, industry bosses who took such an approach were able to control the story of how automation unfolded in the past, and how it would unfold in the future. In the words of the Party: \"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past\".\nAccording to many mid-20th-century industry bosses, the only thing that could derail this better future were the pessimists and critics – the people who wanted to saddle America's economy with unnecessary and burdensome regulation. It was Henry Ford himself who, in a 1939 New York Times article celebrating the opening of the New York World's Fair, lambasted those who would resist the onward march of science. \"Despite every restriction that can be placed on it by so-called 'reformers',\" Ford wrote, \"the quest will continue – invention will go forward.\" \n\n In one of the most unintentionally delightful films from the 20th century the industrial manufacturing firm, Westinghouse, set out to confront these 'so-called reformers' with a feature-length film, The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair, released in 1939. Part drama and part corporate advertisement, the film sets up a struggle for the soul of the Middleton's cherubic young son, Bud. On one side is Nikolas Makaroff, an intellectual, European, artist type who is partial to quoting Karl Marx and refers to automation as \"Frankenstein's monster\". On the other is Jim Treadway, a good ol' American boy who passed up a chance to play pro (American) football in order to work for Westinghouse and who believes in the power of science, industry, progress and the American way. For good measure, the screenwriters also include a love triangle between Makaroff, the Middletons' daughter, Babs, and Treadway (her former flame).\nThe film opens with a gloomy radio announcement about the lack of jobs in Depression-era America, after which Bud laments his luck at being born into joblessness. \"Maybe it is difficult\", Mr Middleton interjects, \"but it's worse to be a quitter… You've heard all the\ntalkers\n, now I'm going to show you the\ndoers\n!\" And with that, the Middletons are off to the fair.\nThe two Middleton men soon meet up with Jim Treadway, whom Mr Middleton drafts to convince Bud of the great prospects for the future thanks to automation and technological advancement. The scenes that follow are notable for the way in which Treadway not only casts aside concerns about the future, but paints those with concerns as domineering, fact-averse, pessimists:\nMr. Middleton: \"Tell me Jim, do you honestly believe industry can make enough jobs in the future to take care of the young people that are coming along?\"\nJim Treadway: \"I think the problem's going to be the other way around. Industry will make so many jobs there won't be enough people to fill them.\"\nBud: *Scoff*\nJim Treadway: \"So you don't believe me do you?\"\nBud: \"From all I've heard…\"\nJim Treadway: [Crossing arms] \"You're liable to hear anything these days. Are you willing to sit back and let a lot of self-appointed leaders do your thinking for you?\"\nBud: \"Well they believe we're on the skids…\"\nJim Treadway: \"Yes, and the men who built this fair believe the opposite. And what's more they back up\ntheir\nbelief… with two hundred million dollars' worth of facts.\"\nBud: \"Well maybe the other side would, too, if they weren't busted.\"\nJim Treadway: \"And they'll stay that way. Until they learn that prosperity and pessimism don't travel together. But they're like you, Bud: they don't like facts.\"\nBud: \"Oh, I don't mind them, Jim.\"\nJim Treadway: \"Good, then I'll introduce you to a few. Come along.\"\n[Taking him warmly by the shoulder, Jim leads Bud off stage left].\nAfter an entire day of learning about the economic benefits of photoelectric cells, triodes, and oscilloscopes, Bud has had enough of pessimism. And after Nikolas Makaroff is exposed as a hypocrite, liar and coward, Babs returns to Treadway. The film and the fair for which it was produced are noteworthy for the way that the industrial, scientific, engineering, and business communities came together to directly combat the negative press surrounding technological advancement. \n\n In her analysis of the fair, the historian Sue Bix writes: \"In defining the future as a period characterised by wonderful revolutions in production, exhibitors effectively excluded discussion of any accompanying cost to workers.\" By doing so, they were able to avoid taking any substantive steps to address the concerns of labour unions and government bodies.\nThe fact that industry bosses from Henry Ford to Travis Kalanick have been deploying similar rhetoric for more than a century speaks to the success of these narratives, and to the extent to which these same industry bosses have largely been able to avoid engaging in meaningful discussions about the impact of automative technologies. Indeed, their success  makes it difficult to even imagine any alternatives. Such framing, according to the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, \"annihilates any future uncontained in the past and present\". \n\n Thankfully, however, a small number of writers and activists from this period offered up a few alternatives.  \n\n Take the example of the United Auto Workers' (UAW) union. A few years after Congress met to discuss concerns about automation and General Electric released its supporting film This is Automation\n,\nthe UAW put out its own film on the topic of automation, Push Buttons and People. The film challenges determinist framings of technological advancement by asking, \"Will whatever happens, happen automatically? Can we do anything?\"\nAfter showing footage of Walter Reuther, head of the UAW, testifying before Congress about the effects of automation, the film draws to a close and the narrator moves to sum up:\nWell, here we are back again with our original word: automation… You and I and a Senate Committee, and Walter Reuther, have had a discussion. Why? Because it's our common problem. The question is: what shall we do to succeed, to tame automation? We, you… the companies, the United States Senate…\nGiven that their jobs were on the line, it is understandable that the UAW described automation not as a train headed toward better shores, but as \"a word to strike terror in any human heart\" and as something to be confronted and 'tamed'. More importantly, however, the UAW also framed technological advancement as something that was contestable and open to discussion rather than predetermined. The film made a point of attempting to draw viewers into a conversation about how to proceed.\nOr take the ecologically-minded writer Peter van Dresser who, in a 1939 article in Harper's, rejected Aladdin-esque framings of technological advancement. The American people, according to Dresser, were all too ready to \"talk and think as if Scientific Technology [sic] were a kind of wilful genie whose gifts we must gratefully accept while we accommodate ourselves as best we can to his bad habits.\" Seeing to the social health of the nation would be impossible, Van Dresser argued, so long as people continued to accept \"utterly without criticism the blueprints for America's technological future formulated by the industrial empire-builders.\"\nYet despite these calls to action, America exited the 20th century having never settled these debates about the impact of automation. According to Sue Bix, what was missing was both the willpower to challenge dominant discourses about progress and a clearly articulated vision of how the public might be given a say in the development and adoption of automative technologies. \n\n As we continue to grapple with more questions about technological advancement today, now is the time to challenge dominant discourses and articulate our alternative visions of the future.  \n\n This will require taking steps to encourage an informed dialogue between tech companies, governments, non-profits, and the public. Along these lines, the Government Data Science Partnership recently developed a Data Science Ethical Framework which aims to help policymakers and data scientists \"think through some of the ethical issues which sit outside the law.\" Through public workshops and online surveys members of the public were encouraged to participate in the development of this framework. The partnership even commissioned the Data Dilemmas app in an attempt to provide members of the public with \"a way of learning about data science and the ethical trade-offs that government has to make in designing data science projects.\" It is far from perfect, but it is a start. \n\n On the industrial side, Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook joined forces this September to create the (absurdly-named) Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. The partnership was formed with the expressed purpose of serving as \"an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society\". The coming years will tell whether this is a genuine attempt to engage in meaningful dialogue or simply an effort to mollify public fears.\nChallenging these dominating narratives could also involve setting up dedicated commissions to examine the impact and implications of technological innovations. In a promising move, the House of Commons recently recommended that a commission on Artificial Intelligence be established at the Alan Turing Institute. With a remit to examine the \"social, ethical and legal implications of recent potential developments in AI\" and ensure that new AI systems are developed responsibly and transparently, the new commission would seem to be a step in the right direction. \n\n We need more efforts such as these, and we need them to become the rule rather than the exception. Otherwise, as Grosz warns, we may find ourselves implicated in futures not of our making. \n\n And finally, in closing, here's one last clip from the Middletons:\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How does Travis Kalanick justify self-driving cars being good for employees? ", "question_unique_id": "99904_F2RXQSWK_1", "options": ["He states that workers will keep their jobs after driverless cars are rolled out ", "He does not; he avoids the question ", "He uses hypothetical research ", "He points to existing examples "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How do those in power control the narrative about the future? ", "question_unique_id": "99904_F2RXQSWK_2", "options": ["By not allowing the media to speculate about the future ", "By espousing that the future has already been determined", "By partnering with tech companies to create inventions ", "By using machine learning "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What concept did the automotive industry  use to convince the public that automation was a benefit?", "question_unique_id": "99904_F2RXQSWK_3", "options": ["That the new technology would benefit both consumers and industrialists ", "That people would be able to work fewer hours in factories for the same money ", "That other countries used automation to their benefit ", "That automation had been around for centuries and had already improved people’s lives "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "From the point of view entrepreneurs and  industrialists, what is the biggest hinderance to progress?", "question_unique_id": "99904_F2RXQSWK_4", "options": ["Government over-regulation ", "Lack of government regulation ", "Lack of funding from investors ", "Decreased number of ideas from inventors "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What type of media was popular in pro-corporate propaganda in the 20th century? ", "question_unique_id": "99904_F2RXQSWK_5", "options": ["Radio", "Essays", "Cartoons ", "Film"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did corporate interests detract from critics of automations cost to the working class? ", "question_unique_id": "99904_F2RXQSWK_6", "options": ["By purposefully ignoring the issue", "By promoting unionization ", "By creating a plan to compensate workers who’s jobs were being automated ", "By rolling out the automation advancements very slowly without abrupt change "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does the author argue as the solution for automations potential problems? ", "question_unique_id": "99904_F2RXQSWK_7", "options": ["Staring a meaningful discussion of the potential consequences of automation ", "Mass unionization in fields that are in danger of being automated", "Government regulation to prevent abuse of automation technologies ", "Halting the progress of industrial automation "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who does the author think will have to be responsible for solving the potential issues surrounding automation? ", "question_unique_id": "99904_F2RXQSWK_8", "options": ["The public", "Tech companies and non-profits", "A combination of all of the other answers", "The government "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/forecasts/the-future-is-not-inevitable", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99918", "set_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1008", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Who can you trust in a post-truth world?", "year": 2017, "author": "Brennan Jacoby", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Who can you trust in a post-truth world?\nTrust has always been a dangerous business. Every instance of it brings the risk of let-down, disloyalty and betrayal. Still, in recent times, the vulnerability inherent in trust seems more pronounced. Technological advancements enabling increased access to information mean that awareness of corporate scandals, fake news and political lies has increased exponentially: Volkswagen; the Panama Papers; giving £350m a week to the NHS; Hillary's emails; the Pope's supposed support of Trump. The list goes on. Of course, our access to information also makes it easier to learn about the good being done in the world. But somehow scandal always lodges in the memory better than integrity. As a result, it is hard to resist being conditioned to expect that just about everything we read in the news or hear an 'expert' say will turn out to be a lie, politically motivated, or simply wrong.  \n\n This scepticism lies at the heart of our 'post-truth' and 'post-trust' times. And yet, just when truth is said to be irrelevant, and trust all but gone, those concepts feature heavily in contemporary social discourse. This is no coincidence. As the late philosopher Annette Baier said: \"We inhabit a climate of trust as we inhabit an atmosphere and notice it as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted.\" \n\n In this era of post-truth, scandals, falsity and deception have created a vacuum, leaving many of us all the more aware of just how scarce truth and trust seem to be.\nThat trust is more scarce is not just a perceived reality, but a measurable one. The PR firm Edelman has been assessing global levels of trust for the past 17 years. Their most recent Trust Barometer\nreports that:\nTwo-thirds of the countries surveyed are now 'distrusters'\nLess than 50 per cent trust in the mainstream institutions of business, government, media and NGOs to do what is right\nOver two-thirds of the general population do not have confidence that current leaders can address their country's challenges\nThe media is distrusted in more than 80 per cent of countries surveyed\nFor Edelman, these findings amount to a \"crisis of trust\" because they find a correlation between trust and societal functioning:\nWe have moved beyond the point of trust being simply a key factor in product purchase or selection of employment opportunity; it is now the deciding factor in whether a society can function. As trust in institutions erodes, the basic assumptions of fairness, shared values and equal opportunity traditionally upheld by 'the system' are no longer taken for granted.\nBecause of its relationship to social functioning, low levels of trust are, indeed, concerning. But if a reduction in trust means that fairness, shared values and justice are no longer taken for granted, the distrust that characterises so much of the world today could in fact be positive. For, while fairness, shared values and justice are necessary for societal well-being, they ought not to be taken for granted. Each historical stand against tyranny shows that the sustainability of values like justice and fairness requires them to be actively defended.\nThe world may be experiencing a crisis of trust. But the crisis cannot be that trust is merely low. For trust is not always best, and more trust is not always better. If the projects that trust enables collaborators to complete are corrupt, busting trust can be appropriate. Whistleblowers are good examples of this: in leaking secrets, they violate a trust, but for a good reason. Too much trust is also undesirable insofar as it enables the abuse of power. The checks and balances built into the American political system exist for this very reason: the relationship between citizens and such powerful leaders is not one that should be characterised solely by trust.   \n\n Just as trust is not always best, distrust, often thought to be a sign of interpersonal or societal dysfunction, can be appropriate. The key is to cultivate trust that tracks trustworthiness. If a boss, partner or government lacks the competence, motivation or good character needed to uphold the trust placed in them, distrust, rather than trust, is reasonable and appropriate. It is for this reason that the current low levels of trust are understandable. A rebuilding of trust may help society function more smoothly, but the current threat of ambiguous news and politicians who 'construct' their own truth make distrust, rather than trust, appropriate. \n\n While trust ought to track trustworthiness, there is at least one instance where trust may be well-placed despite the absence of trustworthiness: when one chooses to trust another for the sake of helping them cultivate trustworthiness, or because one loves them.  \n\n For example, just as a parent gives a pet to a child, not because they believe the child to be responsible, but to help teach them responsibility, trust can be given to others to help them develop trustworthiness. Also, in relationships characterised by a high degree of intimacy (such as marriages, partnerships and close friendships) to withhold trust because of another's faults goes against the very nature of the relationship. Part of what sets intimate relationships apart is the expectation that the trust in a friendship, partnership or marriage is strong enough, and generous enough, to withstand the imperfections and moments of untrustworthiness that occur in the relationship from time to time. It should be noted, however, that these opportunities to place trust well despite a lack of trustworthiness are more suited to interpersonal relationships than to the much less intimate engagement between the public and social institutions. It may be right to trust a partner because you love her, but it is less clear that one should trust a president or journalist with such generosity.\nIf the institutions that no longer enjoy healthy amounts of public trust are undeserving of it – that is, if they actually are untrustworthy – then the distrust reported by Edelman is well-placed. And if that is the case, then the responsibility for taking trust forward lies, at least in part, with the businesses, media groups, NGOs and governments that need to cultivate better trustworthiness and do the slow, challenging work of communicating that trustworthiness to the public. But, importantly, responsibility for cultivating well-placed trust in the post-truth era does not lie solely with those would-be trusted parties. Even if they cultivate integrity, and root out all deception in their ranks, levels of public trust may continue to ebb away. This is because distrust is quasi-perceptual; like spectacles, it frames what we see. And if left unchecked, a lingering distrust can cause one to withhold trust, even from those who really are deserving of it.  \n\n Not often discussed, this risk of misplaced distrust is the quiet threat of our post-truth era. For example, it is understandable to distrust the media production company WTO5 after they published the fabricated story that the Pope had endorsed Trump. Likewise, in the wake of its emissions scandal, it is reasonable to become sceptical of Volkswagen. But if that distrust is allowed to run amok, disposing one to be closed to new information suggesting WTO5 or Volkswagen have changed their ways and can now be trusted, it ceases to be reasonable. Distrust also becomes degraded when, as often happens, it mutates from local scepticism of a scandalised entity to a blanket concern about all related individuals or organisations. For example, one might move from distrusting Volkswagen to believing that all automobile manufacturers are bent on side-stepping emissions testing.  \n\n For trust to be well-placed, distrust must be valued as highly as trust. But in personal, professional and social life we must also take care to ensure that it is possible for untrusted parties to become appropriately trusted. Due to distrust's quasi-perceptual nature, this can be incredibly difficult. Instead, from the perspective of scepticism, all evidence about another individual or organisation can seem to support distrust.\nRemaining open to those we distrust is further complicated by the reality of hard feelings. When one is the direct victim of a betrayal, strong anger and resentment is normal. And when we hear about an act of betrayal committed against someone else, or when we read about an alleged scandal, indignation can also rush in. Such feelings can stop us from being willing to even consider evidence suggestive of reform on the part of the guilty party. Caught in bitterness, it is tempting to sacrifice the truth because it feels, at least in the moment, more satisfying to have our distrust confirmed. \n\n In the wake of violated trust, anger, resentment and indignation are appropriate. And bitterness is understandable. But they can fuel the spread of distrust, inhibiting the pursuit of truth and blocking what could be well-placed trust.  \n\n To take trust forward in this era of post-truth, then, social institutions must work to be worthy of public trust, but they should not be held solely responsible for the quality of public distrust. Each individual member of the public also has a role to play in ensuring their distrust does not run amok, which is difficult. But it can be done. \n\n An important first step to cultivating well-placed distrust is developing greater self-awareness. By understanding what is going on at the emotional level inside ourselves, we are better able to identify when distrust is fuelled by anger. Simply being aware that distrust can be misplaced can help with this. But we can also cultivate self-awareness in this area by pausing to consider the source of our distrust. Is it based on a well-established belief that the object of our distrust is in fact untrustworthy? Do we have good reason to think they actually lack competence or are unlikely to come through for us? Or is the distrust we are experiencing more strongly characterised by anger, a sense of injustice, or the desire to withhold something from the distrusted party?  \n\n It can be uncomfortable engaging with such questions because they make us look deep into what may be upsetting. Also, answering such questions truthfully requires humility, which can be difficult in the heat of anger. And so we may need to give ourselves ample time to critically assess our distrust. But taking the time to do so is vital for cultivating well-placed trust.\nIf, after reflecting, we find that our distrust is based on hard feelings, that doesn't necessarily mean it is misplaced and should be abandoned. But because hard feelings can cloud our perception of others, and so potentially be misplaced, something like forgiveness may be needed to allow a more objective distrust or trust to take its place. It is something like forgiveness that is needed here. Not all attempts to manage distrust will involve giving up hard feelings towards those who directly offended us and have sought restoration (both conditions usually thought to be necessary for forgiveness). But the step that is needed is like forgiveness because it involves letting go of hard feelings.  \n\n It is important to note that just because hard feelings are relinquished, it doesn't mean one will necessarily come to a place of trust; nor is that necessarily the goal. Rather, in identifying and giving up hard feelings, the aim is to position oneself so that any trust or distrust is held for good reason rather than being a knee-jerk emotional response. \n\n The reality of the post-truth era is that it is hard to know what to believe. And so even if institutions take steps to ensure their own trustworthiness, and members of the public also take responsibility for their own distrust, it may still be hard for trust to get started. For example, one may have rid themselves of all hard feelings toward social institutions, but still be unsure which facts about those institutions to believe, and so remain unsure if it is reasonable to trust them. However, a principle from the philosophy of trust can be helpful to take trust forward when facts are dubious: trust is a type of reliance, but it is not merely reliance. Understanding this distinction sheds light on how mere reliance can be used to scaffold trust in uncertain times. \n\n In all instances of trust, we rely on something or someone. But it is possible to rely without trusting. For example, in a rural part of the country, one might have to rely on a sole, local doctor for medical care despite suspecting him of lacking competence. Likewise, it is possible to rely on an individual or organisation while checking up on them, perhaps by fact-checking or making use of transparency initiatives. But trust cannot survive such checking. Once we begin such micromanaging, it becomes clear we do not really trust others to do what we are counting on them for.  \n\n Because it is possible to rely on others despite distrusting them, it is logically possible for the public to rely on social institutions despite being uncertain of how trustworthy those institutions really are. Such reliance in turn creates an opportunity for institutions to reveal their trustworthiness, or lack thereof, thus giving the public greater reason to trust or distrust.  \n\n Patient engagement with the National Health Service in the UK provides an example of how mere reliance can lead to trust. A 2006 Ipsos MORI study assessing patient and public satisfaction with the NHS found that while the public satisfaction with GP, inpatient, outpatient and accident and emergency services was below 60 per cent, patient satisfaction rose to 80 per cent and above. These findings suggest that something positive occurs as people actually engage with the NHS. It is not clear whether all those patients who reported satisfaction with the health service would have also said they found the NHS to be trustworthy; but by using the service, all of them did rely on it. And as they did so, they were given the opportunity to come to know more about the NHS and make a more educated decision about whether or not trust of that institution is warranted.  \n\n To rely is not the same as to trust. But because it is possible to rely while harbouring a good deal of distrust, engaging mere reliance in this time of post-truth provides one practical road to well-placed trust and distrust. \n\n Because trust is dangerous – because it always brings with it the risk of let-down and betrayal – it can be tempting to withhold trust until certainty about how governments and brands will behave is known, or until the complete veracity of a published fact has been checked. But it has never been possible to have complete certainty about what others will do. And the nature of scientific discovery means that facts are always changing. This does not mean that the fake news, corporate mismanagement and political deception that makes trust and truth so timely should be allowed to flourish. But the pursuit of well-placed trust should be tempered with the understanding that the human ability to gain certainty and control over life is limited. It is because of this very truth that trust matters at all.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does the author think the recent general trend in the public’s trust level in institutions is?", "question_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI_1", "options": ["Trust levels remained unchanged ", "Trust levels have gone down overall ", "Trust levels have gone up overall ", "Trust levels in some institutions have gone up while they have gone down in others "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author imply as the main reason for the changing in general public trust levels? ", "question_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI_2", "options": ["Increased access to potentially false information ", "An overuse of political propaganda ", "Decreased access to global information ", "A natural evolution in human nature "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author view as a positive outcome of the recent change in trust level in society?", "question_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI_3", "options": ["People are more cautious and less willing to taken risks ", "People assuming everything they hear or read in the media is a lie ", "It allows for a reevaluation of societal institutions such as justice ", "People no longer trust the government or large corporations to do the right thing"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When does the author think that distrust is justified?", "question_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI_4", "options": ["When someone or something proves themselves untrustworthy over time ", "When it is a matter that involves interpersonal relationships ", "When it is a matter involved with the American political system ", "The author implies that distrust should be the default "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When does the author think that unconditional trust is justified?", "question_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI_5", "options": ["When trust in an institution is first being built ", "The author implies that unconditional trust is the default", "When it is a matter involving the American political system ", "When it is a matter involving interpersonal relationships"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who does the author think is responsible for addressing the general mistrust in today’s society? ", "question_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI_6", "options": ["The general public ", "Large corporate institutions", "National governments ", "All of the other answers are correct "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the author imply that the public can help improve the general situation of trust in society? ", "question_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI_7", "options": ["By mistrusting as a default ", "By being more self-aware", "Be trusting as a default ", "By becoming more involved in the political process"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the author think that people will still interact with and rely on people and institutions that they find untrustworthy?", "question_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI_8", "options": ["Because most people are hypocritical", "Because most people are quick to forget scandals", "Out of a place of forgiveness", "Out of necessity"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author see as a major hindrance to trusting another person or institution? ", "question_unique_id": "99918_7YY52SJI_9", "options": ["Lack of other options for a necessity ", "Blind faith ", "Micromanagement ", "The mainstream media "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/society/the-future-of-trust-in-a-post-truth-world", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "60624", "set_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Two Whole Glorious Weeks", "year": 1964, "author": "Mohler, Will", "topic": "PS; Catskill Mountains Region (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Camps -- Fiction; Short stories; Vacations -- Fiction; Science fiction", "article": "TWO WHOLE GLORIOUS WEEKS\nBy WILL WORTHINGTON\nA new author, and a decidedly unusual\n \nidea of the summer camp of the future:\n \nhard labor, insults, and hog kidneys!\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1958.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country\n outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the\n first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower\n rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when\n you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp\n and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows,\n under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though\n directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your\n belly-button.\n\n\n It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the\n way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and\n of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new\n experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as\n advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.\n\n\n We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already.\n\n\n The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and\n massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which\n extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on\n either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There\n were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the\n gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:\nSilence!—No admission without\n \nauthority—No smoking!\n***\nMORTON'S MISERY FARM\n***\n30 acres of swamp—Our own rock\n \nquarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry\nHarshest dietary laws in the\n \nCatskills\nA small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky,\n well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform\n came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened\n to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.\n\n\n \"Read and sign, shnook!\" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty\n boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate.\n\n\n The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed\n the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible\n about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical\n complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were\n paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away.\n\n\n Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the\n bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garments we had\n seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear.\n\n\n \"Strip and pack your clothes here, shnooks,\" said the woman with the\n empty suitcase. We did, though it was pretty awkward ... standing there\n in the aisle of the bus with those two gorgons staring at us. I started\n to save out a pack of cigarettes, but was soon disabused of this idea.\n The older of the two women knocked the pack from my hand, ground it\n under her heel on the floor and let me have one across the face with\n what I am almost certain must have been an old sock full of rancid hog\n kidneys.\n\n\n \"What the hell was that?\" I protested.\n\n\n \"Sock fulla hog kidneys, shnook. Soft but heavy, know what I mean? Just\n let us do the thinkin' around here. Git outa line just once an' you'll\n see what we can do with a sock fulla hog kidneys.\"\n\n\n I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I\n wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of\n cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white\n cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping\n as I had in forty years.\nThe ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from\n the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way\n delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small\n door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the\n ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and\n giggled.\n\n\n Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.\n\n\n \"You'll be sah-reeeee,\" he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under\n a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing\n in the center of the cheerless little circle.\n\n\n \"Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!\" barked the guard.\n The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the\n rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed.\n\n\n We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently\n and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who\n has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked\n attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating\n integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity\n excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into\n some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the\n gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the\n image.\n\n\n The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny\n phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark,\n overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the\n bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would\n cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about\n the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the\n healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the\n inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening\n malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred\n years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered\n such a specimen.\n\n\n \"I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to,\" he\n said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound\n relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl—something not yet\n language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise,\n clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope\n was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting\n misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and\n the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp,\n immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even\n contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man.\n\n\n \"What did you do on the Outside, shnook?\" he snapped at me.\n\n\n \"Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of\n work a month,\" I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of\n humility.\n\n\n \"Hah! Another low-hour man. I don't see how the hell you could afford\n to come here. Well, anyway—we've got work for climbers like you. Real\n work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy\n in a place like this—ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I\n can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport\n yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. Don't\n forget that!\"\n\n\n Remembering, I looked down quickly, but not before one of the matrons\n behind me had fetched me a solid clout on the side of the head with her\n sap.\n\n\n \"Mark 'em and put 'em to work,\" he barked at the guards. Two uniformed\n men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind\n the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid\n fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted\n my eyes and tried to look blank.\n\n\n \"This is indelible,\" one of them explained. \"We have the chemical to\n take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so.\"\n\n\n When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and\n advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. \"There is a\n choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the\n stump-removal detail, the manure pile....\"\n\n\n \"How about the steam laundry?\" I asked, prompted now by the cold sound\n of a sudden gust of rain against the wooden side of the building.\nSplukk!\nwent the guard's kidney-sock as it landed on the right hinge\n of my jaw. Soft or not, it nearly dropped me.\n\n\n \"I said there\nis\na choice—not\nyou have\na choice, shnook. Besides,\n the steam laundry is for the ladies. Don't forget who's in charge here.\"\n\n\n \"Who\nis\nin charge here, then?\" I asked, strangely emboldened by the\n clout on the side of the jaw.\nSplukk!\n\"That's somethin' you don't need to know, shnook. You ain't\n gonna sue nobody. You signed a\nrelease\n—remember?\"\n\n\n I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then,\n behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. \"Stop that! Oh\n stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy lady,\" said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. \"I\n won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable.\"\n\n\n I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say\n honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember\n with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.\n\n\n \"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.\n\n\n My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect.\nIt must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went\n gently haywire. I was conducted to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain,\" which\n turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk\n overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the\n larger trees.\n\n\n A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and\n tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant\n that his voice did not command the entire scene. \"\nHut-ho! hut-ho!\n Hut-ho HAW!\n\" he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose\n number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at\n their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant.\n\n\n I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least,\n coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must\n have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed,\n was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site\n to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards\n distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with\n the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile.\n Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower\n seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling\n another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels\n were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object\n which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether\n redundant to explain this rule.\n\n\n I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean\n enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the\n strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I\n do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous\n alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.\n\n\n My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the\n point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had\n dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being\nin\nor\nwith\nsomething. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked\n through.\n\n\n Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.\n\n\n If I had hoped for respite after \"supper,\" it was at that time that I\n learned not to hope. Back to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\" we went, and\n under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor\n of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one,\n slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from\n the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time\n softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a\n monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an\n undifferentiated man. I experienced change.\n\n\n I knew now that my identity, my ego, was an infinitesimal thing which\n rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms,\n more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones,\n as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came\n down and the manure bags broke and we scrabbled with our hands to\n refill new ones.\n\n\n The raucous alarm sounded again, and a voice which might have been that\n of a hospital nurse or of an outraged parrot announced that it was time\n for \"Beddy-by.\" And in a continuous, unbroken motion we slogged into\n another long building, discarded our coveralls, waded through a shallow\n tank of cloudy disinfectant solution and were finally hosed down by\n the guards. I remember observing to myself giddily that I now knew how\n cars must feel in an auto laundry. There were clean towels waiting for\n us at the far end of the long building, but I must have just blotted\n the excess water off myself in a perfunctory way, because I still felt\n wet when I donned the clean coverall that someone handed me.\n\n\n \"Beddy-by\" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like\n ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three\n feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find\n no real release in \"Beddy-by\"—only another dimension of that abiding\n stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned,\n croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way\n as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember\n that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging\n directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak\n beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty\n that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do\n with the virtues of endless toil, the importance of thrift, and the\n hideous dangers lurking in cigarette smoking and needless borrowing.\n\n\n I am happy to report that I do not remember them more specifically\n than this, but I was probably more impressed by the delivery than the\n message delivered. I could not imagine where they had discovered these\n women. During their performance, some sense of duration was restored to\n me; while I could be certain of nothing pertaining to the passage of\n time, it is not possible that the Cheer-Up period lasted less than two\n hours. Then they let us go to the latrine.\n\n\n After a breakfast of boiled cabbage and dry pumpernickel crusts—more\n savory than you might imagine—we were assigned to our work for the\n day. I had expected to return to the manure pile, but got instead the\n rock quarry. I remember observing then, with no surprise at all, that\n the sun was out and the day promised to be a hot one.\n\n\n The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same\n futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock\n had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then\n reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other\n end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced\n working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of\n trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have\n never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered\n a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of\n the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again.\n\n\n It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I\n had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed:\n her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist,\n and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative\n in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within\n me—microscopically but unmistakably.\n\n\n She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had\n passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in\n the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad\n to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks\n and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to\n us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that\n no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been\n shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle,\n when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of\n conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter,\n when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would\n exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the\n fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.\n\n\n The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning\n just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones,\n swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over\n us as though selecting one for slaughter.\n\n\n When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold,\n incisive tone that \"there will be no rest periods, no chow, no\n 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock.\"\n He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long\n enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task\n before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our\n own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers\n and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film\n must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.\n\n\n \"Why—this thing is nothing but a huge writing slate,\" I said to a\n small, bald inmate beside me. He made a feeble noise in reply. The\n Captain left, and the only other guard now relaxed in the shade of a\n boulder nearly fifty yards away. He was smoking a forbidden cigar.\n Suddenly and unaccountably, I felt a little taller than the others,\n and everything looked unnaturally clear. The slab was less than six\n inches wide at the top!\n\n\n \"If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself.\n We'll be through here before sundown,\" I heard myself snap out. The\n others, accustomed now to obeying any imperative voice, fell to with\n crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. \"Use them as levers,\" I said.\n \"Don't just flail and hack—pry!\" No one questioned me. When all of the\n tools were in position I gave the count:\n\n\n \"\nOne—two—HEAVE!\n\"\n\n\n The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then\n fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust\n settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was\n already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm\n that was new.\n\n\n Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine\n and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work\n would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped\n me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his\n face, and I had grown to fear novelty.\n\n\n \"You had a moment,\" he said, simply and declaratively. \"You didn't miss\n it, did you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I replied, not fully understanding. \"No, I didn't miss it.\"\n\n\n \"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?\n\n\n \"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you\n prefer,\" said the Captain.\nBertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in\n the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the\n moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes,\n that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron\n whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma\n of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.\n\n\n We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor\n of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our\n three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers,\n our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our\n library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all\n impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.\n\n\n I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of\n brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and\n desserts—an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than\n the nearest dumb-waiter door. And we will both become softer, heavier,\n a little less responsive.\n\n\n When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off\n our breath, we will step into our flying platform and set its automatic\n controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted\n tours to the Himalayas now, or to the \"lost\" cities of the South\n American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We\n will bide our time, much as others do.\n\n\n But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month\n at Central Computing and Control; Bertha has her endless and endlessly\n varying work on committees (the last one was dedicated to the abolition\n of gambling at Las Vegas in favor of such wholesome games as Scrabble\n and checkers).\n\n\n We cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails,\n when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the\n vision of year's end and another glorious vacation.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the relationship between Bertha and Mr. Devoe?", "question_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI_1", "options": ["They are married.", "They are brother and sister.", "They are friends. ", "Mr. Devoe is Bertha’s father."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is ironic about the story?", "question_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI_2", "options": ["The characters want to leave their vacation. ", "The characters are disappointed in their vacation. ", "The characters go on a family vacation, but end up separated. ", "The characters do difficult manual labor for vacation."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What are the characters wanting to escape from?", "question_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI_3", "options": ["Daily stress and busyness ", "Idleness and boredom ", "Their jobs ", "Farm life "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What kind of life do the characters live when they are not on vacation?", "question_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI_4", "options": ["They are both philanthropists.", "They are both workaholics. ", "They live carefree, luxurious lives. ", "They live average, middle class lives. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to the Captain, why is Mr. Devoe “fortunate”?", "question_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI_5", "options": ["He awakens his brain by problem solving. ", "He is wealthy. ", "He gets to leave the farm early. ", "He got assigned an easier job."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What do the characters do on vacation?", "question_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI_6", "options": ["They are treated like prisoners and forced to do repetitive tasks. ", "They relax by the beach. ", "They are served alcohol and desserts by robots.", "They go to a historical museum and pretend to live in a different era. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which is NOT an option of work on the farm?", "question_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI_7", "options": ["clean the barn", "the rock quarry", "steam laundry", "the manure pile"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the tone in the beginning of the story?", "question_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI_8", "options": ["The tone is romantic because the characters are on a date.", "The tone is oddly cheerful in a bleak setting.", "The tone is optimistic as the characters begin their glorious vacation. ", "The tone is ominous to foreshadow the depressing tone later. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a theme of the story?", "question_unique_id": "60624_ENY4DLQI_9", "options": ["Hardship can make people appreciate what they have.", "An easy life is a happy life. ", "Advesity can bring people closer together. ", "There is value in experiencing adversity. "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/0/6/2/60624//60624-h//60624-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "59418", "set_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Happy Clown", "year": 1960, "author": "Jones, Alice Eleanor", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; Conformity -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Short stories", "article": "The Happy Clown\nBY ALICE ELEANOR JONES\nThis was a century of peace, plethora and\n \nperfection, and little Steven was a misfit,\n \na nonconformist, who hated perfection.\n \nHe had to learn the hard way....\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSteven Russell was born a misfit, a nonconformist, and for the first\n five years of his life he made himself and his parents extremely\n unhappy. The twenty-first century was perfect, and this inexplicable\n child did not like perfection.\n\n\n The first trouble arose over his food. His mother did not nurse\n him, since the doctors had proved that Baby-Lac, and the soft\n rainbow-colored plastic containers in which it was warmed and offered,\n were both a vast improvement on nature. Steven drank the Baby-Lac, but\n though it was hard to credit in so young a child, sometimes his face\n wore an expression of pure distaste.\n\n\n A little later he rejected the Baby Oatsies and Fruitsies and Meatsies,\n and his large half-focused eyes wept at the jolly pictures on the\n jarsies. He disliked his plastic dish made like a curled-up Jolly\n Kitten, and his spoon with the Happy Clown's head on the handle. He\n turned his face away determinedly and began to pine, reducing his\n mother to tears and his father to frightened anger.\n\n\n The doctor said cheerily, \"There's nothing the matter with him. He'll\n eat when he gets hungry enough,\" and Steven did, to a degree, but not\n as if he enjoyed it.\n\n\n One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie\n Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in\n it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were\n old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more\n than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, \"I couldn't give\n them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!\"\n They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what\n they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one\n small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's\n great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished\n them and furtively put them back.\n\n\n This year Steven cried, \"Ma!\" stretching out his hands toward the\n silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly\n clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head.\n \"No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old\n things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart.\"\n\n\n Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth\n and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly\n spoon to play with. At meal-time he would not be parted from them, and\n Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the\n sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived\n and grew fat.\n\n\n Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang\n him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until\n they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement\n trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months,\n without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she\n bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy\n Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a\n smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did\n not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed\n on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the\n floor.\nHarriet said worriedly to her husband, \"I don't know what could be the\n matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!\"\n\n\n Richard tried to comfort her. \"Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it.\"\nSteven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon\n and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau\n drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate\n them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from\n the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the\n evening Happy Clown.\n\n\n The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He\n was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets\n and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand\n of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been\n several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed:\n the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when\n he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious\n laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere.\n He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers\n to buy, and one was entirely certain that he used them all himself.\n\n\n He gave one much more than advertising, though. Some of his nightly\n gems of wisdom (he called them nuggets) were really wonderful; they\n made one think. A favorite nugget, which people were always writing\n in and asking him to repeat, went like this: \"We're all alike inside,\n folks, and we ought to be all alike outside.\" The Happy Clown's\n viewers were not children and adults, they were kiddies and folks.\n\n\n After the Happy Clown went off the air the happy kiddies went to bed,\n to lie for a while looking at the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie,\n until, lulled by the joggler, they went gently to sleep. After that\n came the cowboys and spacemen, carryovers for any happy kiddies with\n insomnia. For really meaty programs one had to stay up past ten.\n Then the spectaculars began, and the quiz shows, and the boxing and\n wrestling.\n\n\n Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.\n\n\n His parents thought it was very cunning of him to look at the printing\n like that, so wisely, as if he could read it! He said once to Harriet,\n \"I can read it,\" but she said, \"Oh, Stevie, you're teasing Mumsie!\"\n and looked so frightened at this fresh peculiarity that the child said\n gravely, \"Yes, teasing.\" He wished he had a silent book. He knew there\n were such things, but there were none at home. There were few silent\n books anywhere. There were none in kiddie-garden.\n\n\n Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.\n\n\n The kiddie-garden monitor had to report of him to his unhappy parents\n that he was uncooperative and anti-social. He would not merge with\n the group, he would not acquire the proper attitudes for successful\n community living, he would not adjust. Most shocking of all, when the\n lesson about the birdsies and beesies was telecast, he not only refused\n to participate in the ensuing period of group experimentation, but lost\n color and disgraced himself by being sick in his corner. It was a\n painful interview. At the end of it the monitor recommended the clinic.\n Richard appreciated her delicacy. The clinic would be less expensive\n than private psychiatry, and after all, the manager of a supermarket\n was no millionaire.\n\n\n Harriet said to Richard when they were alone, \"Dickie, he isn't\n outgrowing it, he's getting worse! What are we going to do?\" It was a\n special tragedy, since Harriet was unable to have any more kiddies, and\n if this one turned out wrong ...\n\n\n Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five.\n\n\n The psychiatrist said, \"Oh, but we're going to be friends, Stevie,\n and friends always use nicknames, don't they? My name's William, but\n everybody calls me Willie. You can call me Uncle Willie.\"\n\n\n The boy said politely, \"I'd rather not, please.\"\n\n\n The doctor was undismayed. \"I want to help you. You believe that, don't\n you, Stevie?\"\n\n\n The child said, \"Steven. Do I have to lie down?\"\n\n\n The doctor said agreeably, \"It's more usual to lie down, but you may\n sit up if you want to. Why don't you like kiddie-garden, Steven?\"\n\n\n The boy sat up and regarded him warily. The doctor had a kind face, a\n really kind face in spite of all those shining teeth, and Steven was\n only five years old, after all, and there was nobody to talk to, and he\n was desperately unhappy. Perhaps.... He said, \"You'll tell them.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head. \"Nothing goes farther than this room,\n Stevie—Steven.\"\n\n\n The child leaned forward, pressing his knees together, hugging himself\n with his arms, bowing his head. His position was almost foetal. He\n said, \"I'm never by myself. They never let me be by myself.\"\n\n\n The psychiatrist said reasonably, \"But nobody can live by himself,\n Stevie.\" He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not\n correct him again. \"You have to learn to live with other people, to\n work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn\n is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's\n always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by\n yourself.\"\n\n\n The boy looked up and said starkly, \"Never?\"\n\n\n The gleaming teeth showed. \"But why should you want to?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, \"Stevie, long before you\n were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time.\n Do you know why?\"\n\n\n The boy shook his head.\n\n\n \"It was because people were different from each other, and didn't\n understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn\n how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able\n to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by\n visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"You mean the Happy Tours.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't\n that be fun?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"If I could go alone.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked at him sharply. \"But you can't. Try to understand,\n Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other\n people?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"All the time—not all the\ntime\n.\"\n\n\n The doctor repeated patiently, \"Why?\"\n\n\n Steven looked at the doctor and said a very strange thing. \"They touch\n me.\" He seemed to shrink into himself. \"Not just with their hands.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head sadly. \"Of course they do, that's just—well,\n maybe you're too young to understand.\"\n\n\n The interview went on for quite a while, and at the end of it Steven\n was given a series of tests which took a week. The psychiatrist had\n not told the truth; what the boy said, during the first interview and\n all the tests, was fully recorded on concealed machines. The complete\n transcript made a fat dossier in the office of the Clinic Director.\n\n\n At the end of the tests the Director said seriously to Steven's\n parents, \"I'll be frank with you. You have a brilliant kiddie\n here—right now he has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old—but\n brilliance has to be channeled in the right direction. Just now—well,\n frankly, it's channeled in the wrong direction. We'll give it a year or\n so, and then if things don't clear up I'm afraid we'll have to correct\n him.\"\n\n\n Richard said through dry lips, \"You mean a Steyner?\"\n\n\n The Director nodded. \"The only thing.\"\n\n\n Harriet shuddered and began to cry. \"But there's never been anything\n like that in our family! The disgrace—oh, Dickie, it would kill me!\"\n\n\n The Director said kindly, \"There's no disgrace, Mrs. Russell.\n That's a mistaken idea many people have. These things happen\n occasionally—nobody knows why—and there's absolutely no disgrace in a\n Steyner. Nothing is altered but the personality, and afterward you have\n a happy normal kiddie who hardly remembers that anything was ever wrong\n with him. Naturally nobody ever mentions it.... But there's no hurry;\n in the case of a kiddie we can wait a while. Bring Stevie in once a\n week; we'll try therapy first.\"\n\n\n Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.\n\n\n They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,\n popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the\n dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction\n of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He\n enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his\n mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory.\n\n\n Steven did well at Television Arts, soon taking more leads than was\n customary in School productions, which were organized on a strictly\n repertory basis. He did not stay to graduate, being snatched away in\n his first year by a talent scout for a popular daytime serial, \"The\n Happy Life.\"\n\n\n \"The Happy Life\" recounted the trials of a young physician, too\n beautiful for his own good, who became involved in endless romantic\n complications. Steven was given the lead, the preceding actor having\n moved up to a job as understudy for the Jolly Kitten, and was an\n immediate success. For one thing he looked the part. He was singularly\n handsome in a lean dark-browed way and did not need flattering makeup\n or special camera angles. He had a deep vibrant voice and perfect\n timing. He could say, \"Darling, this is tearing me to pieces!\" with\n precisely the right intonation, and let tears come into his magnificent\n eyes, and make his jaw muscles jump appealingly, and hold the pose\n easily for the five minutes between the ten-minute pitch for Marquis\n cigarettes which constituted one episode of \"The Happy Life.\" His fan\n mail was prodigious.\n\n\n If Steven had moments of bewilderment, of self-loathing, of despair,\n when the tears were real and the jaw muscles jumped to keep the mouth\n from screaming, no one in the Happy Young Men's dormitory where he\n slept ever knew it.\n\n\n He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.\n\n\n There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An\n underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted,\n and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were\n kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They\n all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity\n and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in,\n full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully\n advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and\n gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could\n appreciate what a wonderful world it was.\n\n\n Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none\n while he was acting in \"The Happy Life\" until Denise Cottrell joined\n the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young\n woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable\n dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They\n mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the\n exile.\n\n\n For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking\n intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces,\n and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and\n laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after\n much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel\n children. Denise said soberly, \"They'd better be clever, because\n they'll have to learn to hide.\"\n\n\n They made love in Denise's apartment when her roommate\n Pauline—Polly—was out, as awkwardly as if there had never been any\n group experimentation or happy affairs. Denise said wonderingly, \"When\n you really love someone it's all new. Isn't that strange?\" and Steven\n said, kissing her, \"No, not strange at all.\"\n\n\n He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand\n miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that\n Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the\n wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise\n had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East\n at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, \"I'm being terribly\n conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like.\"\nWhile they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented\n opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current\n Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and\n Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, \"Give it all\n you got, kid; it's the chance of the century.\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"Sure, Joey,\" and allowed his sensitive face to register\n all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular\n of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy\n Clown—but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to\n despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with\n Denise, to some country place where they could be relatively free of\n pressure.\n\n\n Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at\n once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone,\n looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, \"Oh,\n Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They\n took her to the hospital!\"\n\n\n Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the\n receiver slack in his hand. He said, \"What's the matter with her? Which\n hospital?\"\n\n\n \"Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour.\" Polly began to cry. \"Oh, Stevie, I feel\n so—\"\n\n\n \"I'll go right over.\" He cut her off abruptly and went.\n\n\n The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but\n rarely fatal complications ... but under the anesthetic she talked,\n revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown\n cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to\n raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While\n Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of\n Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done.\n\n\n At last the doctor came out to him and said what was always said in\n such cases. \"It was necessary to do something—you understand, no\n mention—\" and for a moment Steven felt so ill that he was grateful\n for the little ampoule the doctor broke and held under his nose. They\n always carried those when they had to give news of a Steyner to\n relatives or sweethearts or friends.\n\n\n The doctor said, \"All right now? Good .... You'll be careful, of\n course. She may be conscious for a minute; there's no harm in it yet,\n she won't move or touch the—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n He was still feeling ill when they let him in to see Denise. He sat\n down beside her bed and spoke to her urgently. \"Denise, talk to me.\n Please, Denise!\"\n\n\n She opened her eyes, looked at him drowsily and smiled. \"Oh, Stevie,\n I'm so glad you came. I've been wanting you, darling.\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"Denise—\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why do you call me that? Call me Denny. Did you get the\n part, darling?\"\n\n\n He drew back a little. \"Yes, I got it.\"\n\n\n She gave him a radiant smile. \"That's wonderful! I'm so proud of you,\n Stevie.\" She slept again.\n\n\n That night in the HYM dormitory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet,\n tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come.\nSteven went to see Denise every day though after the first time she\n was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation\n until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to\n know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted\n appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave\n her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of\n himself as she would need or understand.\n\n\n For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly\n examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like\n her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him.\n Some censor or other—perhaps it was the censor of love—had kept her\n from even saying his name.\n\n\n For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was\n a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him\n like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some\n stubborn pride in him refused it.\n\n\n When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until\n the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and\n more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it\n was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body\n without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie\n sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men,\n turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on\n wires.\n\n\n He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.\n\n\n Steven was running a little fast tonight. The engineer made stretching\n motions with his hands to slow him down, but he used up all his\n material, even the nugget, with three minutes to spare. Then he said,\n \"All right, folks, now I have a special treat for you,\" and moved\n quickly to the center mike. Before the sponsors, or the engineers, or\n the studio audience, or anybody in the whole American nation knew what\n was happening, he began rapidly to talk.\n\n\n He said, \"Are you all happy? You are, aren't you?—everybody's happy,\n because you're all sheep! All sheep, in a nice safe pasture. All\n alike—you eat alike and dress alike and think alike. If any of you has\n an original thought you'd better suppress it, or they'll cut it out of\n you with a knife.\" He leaned forward and made a horrible face at the\n camera. Under the jolly makeup and the artful padding, his mouth was\n shockingly twisted, and tears were running out of his eyes. \"A long\n sharp knife, folks!\" He paused momentarily to recover his voice, which\n had begun to shake. \"Go on being happy, go on being sheep. Wear the\n clothesies, and eat the foodsies, and don't dare think! Me—I'd rather\n be dead, and damned, and in hell!\"\n\n\n Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind\n him the broken hearts of three nurses and one female physician, and\n went home to his parents. During his convalescence they were patient\n with him and passionately kind. In spite of the disgrace they felt, a\n disgrace that would never be mentioned, they loved him even better than\n before, because now he was irrevocably like them.\n\n\n Denise was lost to him. The outburst in the studio, and the Steyner,\n and the loss of the Happy Clown part were cumulatively too much for\n her. She broke the engagement and was heard to say that Stevie Russell\n had proved himself an absolute fool. He was miserable over it, though\n he had only a hazy idea of what he had done or why Denny should\n suddenly be so unkind to him.\n\n\n The Happy Clown incident had passed off well—immediately after\n it occurred, a powerful battery of comedians, including the Jolly\n Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, forgetting rivalries to rally 'round\n in a crisis, went on the air to insure that it passed off well. They\n made certain that every viewer should regard the whole thing as a\n tremendously funny if rather mystifying joke. The viewers fell in with\n this opinion easily and laughed about the sheep joke a good deal,\n admiring the Happy Clown's sense of humor—a little sharp, to be sure,\n not so folksy and down-to-earth as usual, but the Happy Clown could do\n no wrong. They said to each other, \"He laughed till he cried, did you\n notice? So did I!\" For a while teenagers addressed each other as, \"Hi,\n sheep!\" (girls were, \"Hi, lamb!\"), and a novelty company in Des Moines\n made a quick killing with scatter pins fashioned like sheep and/or\n lambs.\n\n\n But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner—and\n of course that part of it was never openly discussed—sponsors had\n long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to\n let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any\n particular desire to be an actor.\n\n\n Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among\n the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise\n after a while and met a girl named Frances—Franny—whom he loved and\n who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house\n with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they\n bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not\n want to miss the Happy Clown.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is a Steyner?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_1", "options": ["A surgery to remove the appendix. ", "The car Steven drives. ", "A lobotomy to make a person complacent.  ", "A form of therapy for anxiety. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How is Steven different?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_2", "options": ["He is addicted to television.", "He collects silver. ", "He is an actor. ", "He dislikes the lifestyle of his society and, therefore, does not fit in. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the relationship between Steven and Denise?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_3", "options": ["They are friends. ", "They were in love and engaged to be married.", "They dated casually. ", "They were married."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is ironic about the story?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_4", "options": ["Steven marries Denise. ", "A 5 year old dislikes television.", "Steven becomes the Happy Clown even though he despises it. ", "Steven breaks up with Denise after her surgery. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happens to Steven?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_5", "options": ["Doctors change his brain to make him happily ignorant. ", "He decides to conform so he can marry Franny.", "He lives in the countryside away from the rest of society. ", "He becomes the best Happy Clown there ever was."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which words best describe Steven’s society?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_6", "options": ["natural and healthy ", "blind conformity and sameness ", "unequal and unhappy ", "happy utopia"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is a theme of the story?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_7", "options": ["Ignorance is bliss. ", "Consumerism leads to a decline in intellect.", "Plastic is ruining society. ", "Extreme pressure to conform is oppressive. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happens during Denise’s appendicitis surgery?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_8", "options": ["There were complications and she nearly died.", "Under anesthesia, she unknowingly discloses her true feelings about the society.", "She has a reaction to anesthesia and loses her memory.", "Her personality changes after the surgery, and she becomes nonconformist and difficult. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Steven sleep on the floor as a child?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_9", "options": ["He doesn't like that his bed rocks back and forth. ", "His parents cannot afford a bed for Steven.", "He is afraid of the Happy Clown decorations on his bed.", "He doesn’t like the television attached to the bed that is always on. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is significant about the Happy Clown?", "question_unique_id": "59418_FJ9VCZ5U_10", "options": ["The Happy Clown is a show for children that teaches them to eat healthy. ", "The Happy Clown gives adults nostalgia for their happy childhoods. ", "The Happy Clown is propaganda to get people to buy more and think less. ", "The Happy Clown is mayor of the town. "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/5/9/4/1/59418//59418-h//59418-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "29170", "set_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Hoofer", "year": 1960, "author": "Miller, Walter M.", "topic": "Science fiction; PS; Short stories", "article": "A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\nthe\n \nhoofer\nby ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\nA space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?\nThey all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks\n on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.\n\n\n Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.\n\n\n \"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"\n\n\n He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"\n\n\n When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.\n\n\n \"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.\n\n\n \"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.\n\n\n \"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.\n\n\n The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n\n\n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n\n\n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.\n\n\n He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\nWith a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.\n\n\n Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"\n\n\n The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"\n\n\n \"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"\n\n\n The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.\n\n\n It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.\n\n\n When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.\n\n\n He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close—close\n to home and woman and child.\n\n\n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n\n\n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?\n\n\n Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same:\nOne more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake—enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\nAnd she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.\n\n\n It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...\n\n\n He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on.\n\n\n The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"\n\n\n The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.\n\n\n What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.\n\n\n The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.\n\n\n It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up.\n\n\n He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n\n\n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n\n\n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n\n\n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.\n\n\n \"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.\n\n\n Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while—rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes—all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\nEverything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that\nall\nways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n\n\n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n\n\n It was a baby crying.\n\n\n It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.\n\n\n The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\nMake the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\nBut that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.\n\n\n A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.\n\n\n He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nSeptember 1955.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How has time in space affected Hogey physically?", "question_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01_1", "options": ["He is blind and his skin is allergic to the sun. ", "He can’t walk with gravity and he sleeps standing up. ", "He aged faster in space; he has the body of an old man. ", "He has trouble walking with gravity, and his eyes and skin have been scorched by the sun. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Hogey mean when he says “I’m a tumbler”?", "question_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01_2", "options": ["He’s an alcoholic; he is always stumbling around because he’s drunk. ", "Tumbler is another word for gambler. ", "He has ambitious aspirations and doesn’t want to be tied down in a normal, mundane life. ", "Being a spacer is now part of his identity; his experience in space separates him from people who have not been in space. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Which is the best real-life analogy to Hogey’s situation?", "question_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01_3", "options": ["A workaholic who can’t make time for family. ", "A war veteran struggling to adjust to civilian life back home.", "An addict’s strained relationship with family. ", "An astronaut’s nostalgia for space after coming home."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who is Marie?", "question_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01_4", "options": ["Hogey’s sister", "The bus driver", "Hogey’s newborn daughter ", "Hogey’s wife of 6 years"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happened to the money Hogey earned in space?", "question_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01_5", "options": ["He spent it all on booze. ", "He lost it gambling.", "He put it in a savings account for a house. ", "The space program went bankrupt and Hogey didn’t get paid."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Hogey embarrassed to go home?", "question_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01_6", "options": ["He is afraid to tell his family that he lost $4800. ", "He knows his wife will be angry because he was unfaithful.", "He doesn’t want his family to see his gravity legs. ", "His father-in-law doesn’t like spacers. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the significance of the ending?", "question_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01_7", "options": ["Hogey gets his feet stuck in cement, symbolizing the way that he feels stuck in parenthood.  ", "Hogey cries out for help after getting stuck in cement, which indicates that he will get help from his family and be okay. ", "The dog finds Hogey passed out in the yard, but doesn’t recognize him. This shows how Hogey is out of place. ", "Hogey collapses, but he cannot tell if it is from his gravity legs or the alcohol. His inability to walk is symbolic of his inability to provide for his family. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Hogey wait a week before going home?", "question_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01_8", "options": ["He is avoiding his family responsibilities.", "He wants his body to adjust to Earth before seeing his wife.", "He gets lost on the bus.", "He was fired from the space station and doesn't want to tell his family. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a hoofer?", "question_unique_id": "29170_6LBL6W01_9", "options": ["A person who stays on Earth. ", "A slang term for astronaut. ", "Someone who works in Big Bottomless. ", "A wandering drunk. "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/9/1/7/29170//29170-h//29170-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "32890", "set_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Home is Where You Left It", "year": 1968, "author": "Marlowe, Stephen", "topic": "Short stories; Space colonies -- Fiction; PS; Science fiction", "article": "HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\nBy ADAM CHASE\n[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\nHow black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\nOnly the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.\n\n\n He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.\n\n\n He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.\n\n\n The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"\n\n\n \"They're gone. All gone.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n\n\n \"The Kumaji—\"\n\n\n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n\n\n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n\n\n \"But you stayed here—\"\n\n\n \"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about\n the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.\n\n\n \"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n\n\n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n\n\n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....\n\n\n \"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—\"\n\n\n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"\n\n\n Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.\n\n\n Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....\n\n\n \"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n \"I'm one of you.\"\n\n\n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"\n\n\n The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.\n\n\n \"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"\n\n\n For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....\n\n\n \"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"\n\n\n \"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.\n\n\n The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"\n\n\n At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.\n\n\n Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.\n\n\n \"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"\n\n\n Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n\n\n \"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n\n\n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.\n\n\n A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.\n\n\n On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"\n\n\n They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"\n\n\n \"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.\n\n\n The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"\n\n\n Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n\n\n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\nDarkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n\n\n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n\n\n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.\n\n\n Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing.\n\n\n The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"\n\n\n It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"\n\n\n \"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"\n\n\n \"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.\n\n\n Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"\n\n\n Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n\n\n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why did the people suddenly desert their homes?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_1", "options": ["The well dried out. ", "They finished building a spacecraft big enough for everyone to leave. ", "The Kumajis invaded the town. ", "The water in the well was poisoned. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What resource are the humans and Kumajis fighting over?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_2", "options": ["Water", "Clean air ", "Food", "Space travel technology"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Tobias’ intention for going to the Kumajis’ encampment?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_3", "options": ["He wanted to tell the Kumajis to go south to steer them off track.", "He wanted to persuade the Kumajis to stop attacking his people.", "He wanted to trade the whereabouts of his people in exchange for his money back. ", "He wanted to steal a spacecraft from the Kumajis."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Steve lie about Tobias’ intentions?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_4", "options": ["He wants to protect his reputation because he eventually did the right thing. ", "He knows that the people will turn on Mary for her father’s actions. ", "He owes Tobias for paying for his education on Earth. ", "He feels pity for Tobias because he lost his fortune. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the setting?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_5", "options": ["A city called Sirius on Mars. ", "In the middle of the desert in the Middle East on Earth. ", "Oasis City by a river on a planet called Sirius. ", "A small town in the desert on a planet called Sirius."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How is Steve different from the other characters?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_6", "options": ["He knows a trick on how to find water. ", "He can communicate with the Kumaji.", "He was born on Earth. ", "He left the colony while the others stayed. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a good description of Steve's childhood?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_7", "options": ["He had a very happy childhood. ", "He faced a lot of adversity.", "His family was very powerful. ", "He grew up wealthy. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Steve return to his childhood home?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_8", "options": ["He returns to see his parents. ", "He returns to see his aunt. ", "He returns to bring everyone to Earth. ", "He returns because he is broke. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a theme of the story?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_9", "options": ["There is always time to do the right thing. ", "Traitors do not deserve mercy.  ", "Each side to a conflict believes that they are doing the right thing. ", "You must never forget where you came from. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is the old Kumaji man included in the beginning of the story?", "question_unique_id": "32890_4NGK5Z13_10", "options": ["To show that the humans are actually the bad ones. ", "To show that the Kumaji are untrustworthy. ", "To show that not all Kumaji are bad. ", "To show that the Kumaji want peace. "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/2/8/9/32890//32890-h//32890-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "25644", "set_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Man Who Hated Mars", "year": 1957, "author": "Garrett, Randall", "topic": "Short stories; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; PS; Science fiction; Escapes -- Fiction", "article": "To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of\n a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be\n boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do\n all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he\n wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only—\nThe Man Who Hated Mars\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\n“I want\n you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in\n a trembling voice.\n\n\n He was addressing his request\n to a thin woman sitting\n behind a desk that seemed\n much too big for her. The\n plaque on the desk said:\nLT. PHOEBE HARRIS\n\n TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris glanced\n at the man before her for only\n a moment before she returned\n her eyes to the dossier on the\n desk; but long enough to verify\n the impression his voice\n had given. Ron Clayton was a\n big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous\n man.\n\n\n He said: “Well? Dammit,\n say something!”\n\n\n The lieutenant raised her\n eyes again. “Just be patient\n until I’ve read this.” Her voice\n and eyes were expressionless,\n but her hand moved beneath\n the desk.\nThe frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space.\n\n\n Clayton froze.\nShe’s yellow!\nhe thought. She’s turned on\n the trackers! He could see the\n pale greenish glow of their\n little eyes watching him all\n around the room. If he made\n any fast move, they would cut\n him down with a stun beam\n before he could get two feet.\n\n\n She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”\n\n\n “But it isn’t fair! The most\n I’d have got on that frame-up\n would’ve been ten years. I’ve\n been here fifteen already!”\n\n\n “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t\n be done. You’re here. Period.\n Forget about trying to get\n back. Earth doesn’t want\n you.” Her voice sounded\n choppy, as though she were\n trying to keep it calm.\n\n\n Clayton broke into a whining\n rage. “You can’t do that!\n It isn’t fair! I never did anything\n to you! I’ll go talk to the\n Governor! He’ll listen to reason!\n You’ll see! I’ll—”\n\n\n “\nShut up!\n” the woman\n snapped harshly. “I’m getting\n sick of it! I personally think\n you should have been locked\n up—permanently. I think this\n idea of forced colonization is\n going to breed trouble for\n Earth someday, but it is about\n the only way you can get anybody\n to colonize this frozen\n hunk of mud.\n\n\n “Just keep it in mind that\n I don’t like it any better than\n you do—\nand I didn’t strong-arm\n anybody to deserve the\n assignment!\nNow get out of\n here!”\n\n\n She moved a hand threateningly\n toward the manual controls\n of the stun beam.\n\n\n Clayton retreated fast. The\n trackers ignored anyone walking\n away from the desk; they\n were set only to spot threatening\n movements toward it.\n\n\n Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.\n\n\n Fifty-two. Space Transport\n Ship Fifty-two.\n\n\n Probably bringing another\n load of poor suckers to freeze\n to death on Mars.\n\n\n That was the thing he hated\n about Mars—the cold. The\n everlasting damned cold! And\n the oxidation pills; take one\n every three hours or smother\n in the poor, thin air.\n\n\n The government could have\n put up domes; it could have\n put in building-to-building\n tunnels, at least. It could have\n done a hell of a lot of things\n to make Mars a decent place\n for human beings.\n\n\n But no—the government\n had other ideas. A bunch of\n bigshot scientific characters\n had come up with the idea\n nearly twenty-three years before.\n Clayton could remember\n the words on the sheet he had\n been given when he was sentenced.\n\n\n “Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home.\n\n\n The Recreation Building\n was just ahead; at least it\n would be warm inside. He\n pushed in through the outer\n and inner doors, and he heard\n the burst of music from the\n jukebox. His stomach tightened\n up into a hard cramp.\n\n\n They were playing Heinlein’s\nGreen Hills of Earth\n.\n\n\n There was almost no other\n sound in the room, although\n it was full of people. There\n were plenty of colonists who\n claimed to like Mars, but even\n they were silent when that\n song was played.\n\n\n Clayton wanted to go over\n and smash the machine—make\n it stop reminding him.\n He clenched his teeth and his\n fists and his eyes and cursed\n mentally.\nGod, how I hate\n Mars!\nWhen the hauntingly nostalgic\n last chorus faded away,\n he walked over to the machine\n and fed it full of enough coins\n to keep it going on something\n else until he left.\n\n\n At the bar, he ordered a\n beer and used it to wash down\n another oxidation tablet. It\n wasn’t good beer; it didn’t\n even deserve the name. The\n atmospheric pressure was so\n low as to boil all the carbon\n dioxide out of it, so the brewers\n never put it back in after\n fermentation.\n\n\n He was sorry for what he\n had done—really and truly\n sorry. If they’d only give him\n one more chance, he’d make\n good. Just one more chance.\n He’d work things out.\n\n\n He’d promised himself that\n both times they’d put him up\n before, but things had been\n different then. He hadn’t really\n been given another chance,\n what with parole boards and\n all.\n\n\n Clayton closed his eyes and\n finished the beer. He ordered\n another.\n\n\n He’d worked in the mines\n for fifteen years. It wasn’t\n that he minded work really,\n but the foreman had it in for\n him. Always giving him a bad\n time; always picking out the\n lousy jobs for him.\n\n\n Like the time he’d crawled\n into a side-boring in Tunnel\n 12 for a nap during lunch and\n the foreman had caught him.\n When he promised never to\n do it again if the foreman\n wouldn’t put it on report, the\n guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate\n to hurt a guy’s record.”\n\n\n Then he’d put Clayton on\n report anyway. Strictly a rat.\n\n\n Not that Clayton ran any\n chance of being fired; they\n never fired anybody. But\n they’d fined him a day’s pay.\n A whole day’s pay.\n\n\n He tapped his glass on the\n bar, and the barman came\n over with another beer. Clayton\n looked at it, then up at\n the barman. “Put a head on\n it.”\n\n\n The bartender looked at\n him sourly. “I’ve got some\n soapsuds here, Clayton, and\n one of these days I’m gonna\n put some in your beer if you\n keep pulling that gag.”\n\n\n That was the trouble with\n some guys. No sense of humor.\n\n\n Somebody came in the door\n and then somebody else came\n in behind him, so that both\n inner and outer doors were\n open for an instant. A blast\n of icy breeze struck Clayton’s\n back, and he shivered. He\n started to say something, then\n changed his mind; the doors\n were already closed again,\n and besides, one of the guys\n was bigger than he was.\n\n\n The iciness didn’t seem to\n go away immediately. It was\n like the mine. Little old Mars\n was cold clear down to her\n core—or at least down as far\n as they’d drilled. The walls\n were frozen and seemed to\n radiate a chill that pulled the\n heat right out of your blood.\n\n\n Somebody was playing\nGreen Hills\nagain, damn them.\n Evidently all of his own selections\n had run out earlier than\n he’d thought they would.\n\n\n Hell! There was nothing to\n do here. He might as well go\n home.\n\n\n “Gimme another beer,\n Mac.”\n\n\n He’d go home as soon as he\n finished this one.\n\n\n He stood there with his eyes\n closed, listening to the music\n and hating Mars.\n\n\n A voice next to him said:\n “I’ll have a whiskey.”\nThe voice sounded as if the\n man had a bad cold, and Clayton\n turned slowly to look at\n him. After all the sterilization\n they went through before they\n left Earth, nobody on Mars\n ever had a cold, so there was\n only one thing that would\n make a man’s voice sound\n like that.\n\n\n Clayton was right. The fellow\n had an oxygen tube\n clamped firmly over his nose.\n He was wearing the uniform\n of the Space Transport Service.\n\n\n “Just get in on the ship?”\n Clayton asked conversationally.\n\n\n The man nodded and grinned.\n “Yeah. Four hours before\n we take off again.” He poured\n down the whiskey. “Sure cold\n out.”\n\n\n Clayton agreed. “It’s always\n cold.” He watched enviously\n as the spaceman ordered\n another whiskey.\n\n\n Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.\n\n\n “Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”\n\n\n “Not much. We only keep it\n at six pounds in the ships.\n Half helium and half oxygen.\n Only thing that bothers me is\n the oxy here. Or rather, the\n oxy that\nisn’t\nhere.” He took\n a deep breath through his\n nose tube to emphasize his\n point.\n\n\n Clayton clamped his teeth\n together, making the muscles\n at the side of his jaw stand\n out.\n\n\n Parks didn’t notice. “You\n guys have to take those pills,\n don’t you?”\n\n\n “Yeah.”\n\n\n “I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.\n\n\n “Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.\n\n\n Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.\n\n\n “Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”\n\n\n “Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”\n\n\n “Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”\n\n\n “Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.\n\n\n “Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.\n\n\n “And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.\n\n\n The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.\n\n\n Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”\n\n\n Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.\n\n\n The medic in the sick bay\n fired two shots from a hypo-gun\n into both arms, but Clayton\n ignored the slight sting.\n\n\n “Where am I?”\n\n\n “Real original. Here, take\n these.” He handed Clayton a\n couple of capsules, and gave\n him a glass of water to wash\n them down with.\n\n\n When the water hit his\n stomach, there was an immediate\n reaction.\n\n\n “Oh, Christ!” the medic\n said. “Get a mop, somebody.\n Here, bud; heave into this.”\n He put a basin on the table\n in front of Clayton.\n\n\n It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”\n\n\n Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”\n\n\n The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.\n\n\n It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.\n\n\n “Well, that’s all, Cartwright.\n You can report to\n Kissman in the kitchen.”\n\n\n The First pressed a button\n on his desk and spoke into the\n intercom. “Who was on duty\n at the airlock when the crew\n came aboard last night? Send\n him up. I want to talk to him.”\n\n\n Then the quartermaster officer\n led Clayton out the door\n and took him to the kitchen.\n\n\n The ship’s driver tubes\n were pushing it along at a\n steady five hundred centimeters\n per second squared acceleration,\n pushing her steadily\n closer to Earth with a little\n more than half a gravity of\n drive.\nThere wasn’t much for\n Clayton to do, really. He helped\n to select the foods that\n went into the automatics, and\n he cleaned them out after each\n meal was cooked. Once every\n day, he had to partially dismantle\n them for a really thorough\n going-over.\n\n\n And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.\n\n\n No, by God! He wouldn’t\n go back to that frozen mud-ball!\n He’d stay on Earth,\n where it was warm and comfortable\n and a man could live\n where he was meant to live.\n Where there was plenty of\n air to breathe and plenty of\n water to drink. Where the\n beer tasted like beer and not\n like slop. Earth. Good green\n hills, the like of which exists\n nowhere else.\n\n\n Slowly, over the days, he\n evolved a plan. He watched\n and waited and checked each\n little detail to make sure nothing\n would go wrong. It\ncouldn’t\ngo wrong. He didn’t want\n to die, and he didn’t want to\n go back to Mars.\n\n\n Nobody on the ship liked\n him; they couldn’t appreciate\n his position. He hadn’t done\n anything to them, but they\n just didn’t like him. He didn’t\n know why; he’d\ntried\nto get\n along with them. Well, if they\n didn’t like him, the hell with\n them.\n\n\n If things worked out the\n way he figured, they’d be\n damned sorry.\n\n\n He was very clever about\n the whole plan. When turn-over\n came, he pretended to\n get violently spacesick. That\n gave him an opportunity to\n steal a bottle of chloral hydrate\n from the medic’s locker.\n\n\n And, while he worked in the\n kitchen, he spent a great deal\n of time sharpening a big carving\n knife.\n\n\n Once, during his off time,\n he managed to disable one of\n the ship’s two lifeboats. He\n was saving the other for himself.\n\n\n The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.\n\n\n He grinned. There was a\n way. He simply had to drag\n them outside and jam the door\n lock. He took the key from the\n Engineer, inserted it, turned\n it, and snapped off the head,\n leaving the body of the key\n still in the lock. Nobody would\n unjam it in the next four minutes.\n\n\n Then he began to run up\n the stairwell toward the good\n lifeboat.\n\n\n He was panting and out of\n breath when he arrived, but\n no one had stopped him. No\n one had even seen him.\n\n\n He clambered into the lifeboat,\n made everything ready,\n and waited.\n\n\n The signal bombs were not\n heavy charges; their main\n purposes was to make a flare\n bright enough to be seen for\n thousands of miles in space.\n Fluorine and magnesium\n made plenty of light—and\n heat.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, there was\n no gravity. He had felt nothing,\n but he knew that the\n bombs had exploded. He\n punched the LAUNCH switch\n on the control board of the\n lifeboat, and the little ship\n leaped out from the side of the\n greater one.\n\n\n Then he turned on the\n drive, set it at half a gee, and\n watched the STS-52 drop behind\n him. It was no longer\n decelerating, so it would miss\n Earth and drift on into space.\n On the other hand, the lifeship\n would come down very\n neatly within a few hundred\n miles of the spaceport in\n Utah, the destination of the\n STS-52.\n\n\n Landing the lifeship would\n be the only difficult part of\n the maneuver, but they were\n designed to be handled by beginners.\n Full instructions\n were printed on the simplified\n control board.\nClayton studied them for\n a while, then set the alarm to\n waken him in seven hours and\n dozed off to sleep.\n\n\n He dreamed of Indiana. It\n was full of nice, green hills\n and leafy woods, and Parkinson\n was inviting him over to\n his mother’s house for chicken\n and whiskey. And all for free.\n\n\n Beneath the dream was the\n calm assurance that they\n would never catch him and\n send him back. When the\n STS-52 failed to show up,\n they would think he had been\n lost with it. They would never\n look for him.\n\n\n When the alarm rang,\n Earth was a mottled globe\n looming hugely beneath the\n ship. Clayton watched the\n dials on the board, and began\n to follow the instructions on\n the landing sheet.\n\n\n He wasn’t too good at it.\n The accelerometer climbed\n higher and higher, and he felt\n as though he could hardly\n move his hands to the proper\n switches.\n\n\n He was less than fifteen\n feet off the ground when his\n hand slipped. The ship, out of\n control, shifted, spun, and\n toppled over on its side,\n smashing a great hole in the\n cabin.\n\n\n Clayton shook his head and\n tried to stand up in the wreckage.\n He got to his hands and\n knees, dizzy but unhurt, and\n took a deep breath of the fresh\n air that was blowing in\n through the hole in the cabin.\n\n\n It felt just like home.\nBureau of Criminal Investigation\n\n Regional Headquarters\n\n Cheyenne, Wyoming\n\n 20 January 2102\nTo: Space Transport Service\n\n Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52\n\n Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer\n\n\n Dear Paul,\n\n\n I have on hand the copies\n of your reports on the rescue\n of the men on the disabled\n STS-52. It is fortunate that\n the Lunar radar stations could\n compute their orbit.\n\n\n The detailed official report\n will follow, but briefly, this is\n what happened:\n\n\n The lifeship landed—or,\n rather, crashed—several miles\n west of Cheyenne, as you\n know, but it was impossible\n to find the man who was piloting\n it until yesterday because\n of the weather.\n\n\n He has been identified as\n Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled\n to Mars fifteen years ago.\n\n\n Evidently, he didn’t realize\n that fifteen years of Martian\n gravity had so weakened his\n muscles that he could hardly\n walk under the pull of a full\n Earth gee.\n\n\n As it was, he could only\n crawl about a hundred yards\n from the wrecked lifeship before\n he collapsed.\n\n\n Well, I hope this clears up\n everything.\n\n\n I hope you’re not getting\n the snow storms up there like\n we’ve been getting them.\n\n\n John B. Remley\n\n Captain, CBI\nTHE END\nTranscriber’s Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1956.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What does Clayton dislike the most about Mars?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_1", "options": ["The food", "The beer", "The lack of oxygen", "The cold"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Clayton get on the spaceship back to Earth?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_2", "options": ["He pretends to be Parks by wearing his uniform and taking his identification. ", "He persuades Lieutenant Harris to let him go back to Earth.", "He is allowed to go back to Earth after finishing his 15 year sentence on Mars.", "He forges Lieutenant Harris’ signature on papers that say he can go back to Earth. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the relationship between Clayton and Parks?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_3", "options": ["They flew to Mars together.", "They are strangers who met in a bar.", "Parks is Clayton’s boss in the mines.", "They met in prison on Earth. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who is Parks?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_4", "options": ["He is a pilot for the STS-52 spaceship.", "He is the bartender in The Recreation Building.", "He is a steward on the STS-52 spaceship. ", "He is another convict colonist. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is likely to happen to Clayton?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_5", "options": ["He is sentenced to prison on Earth. ", "Parks’ mother welcomes Clayton to Indiana.", "He is shipped back to Mars.", "He is celebrated as a hero. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What likely happened to Parks?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_6", "options": ["He is charged with treason and sentenced to stay on Mars. ", "He dies from no oxygen. ", "His crewmates on the STS-52 find him. ", "He freezes to death."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Clayton on Mars?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_7", "options": ["He chose to go to Mars instead of going to prison on Earth. ", "He volunteered to colonize Mars. ", "He was sentenced to 10 years on Mars because the prisons on Earth were overcrowded.", "He chose to go to Mars and work in the mines because he thought it would pay well. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Clayton explain why he is on the STS-52?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_8", "options": ["He has finished his 10 year sentence on Mars. ", "He made a bet with Parks that he would be able to get on the ship.", "He has signed papers that say he can go back to Earth.", "Parks wanted to stay on Mars and asked Clayton to take his place on the ship."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What best describes Clayton?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_9", "options": ["He uses his cleverness to get out of bad situations.", "He is malicious to others for fun. ", "He uses humor to get other people to like him.", "He resorts to violence when he is treated unfairly. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is a theme of the story?", "question_unique_id": "25644_ILBLJG62_10", "options": ["Where there's a will, there's a way. ", "Desperation makes people behave immorally. ", "Extreme punishment changes people. ", "The grass is always greener on the other side. "], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/5/6/4/25644//25644-h//25644-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "31612", "set_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "The Very Secret Agent", "year": 1958, "author": "Wolf, Mari", "topic": "PS; Science fiction; Short stories; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Telepathy -- Fiction", "article": "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE VERY SECRET AGENT\nBY MARI WOLF\nIllustrated by Ed Emsh\nPoor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how\n was he supposed to understand what goes on in a woman's mind\n when the male of the same species didn't even know?\nIn their ship just beyond the orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking\n at each other.\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said. \"I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right\n now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have\n any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded.\"\n\n\n \"You contacted the factory?\" Nagor asked.\n\n\n \"Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a\n new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger\n Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But\n not one knows anything about what it is.\"\n\n\n Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in\n the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor\n considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception.\n He frowned.\n\n\n \"What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The\n supervisors? The technicians?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said flatly. \"They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make\n contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of\n what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield.\"\n\n\n \"Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?\"\n\n\n \"Shielded. All ten thousand of them. Of course I haven't checked all\n of them yet, but—\"\n\n\n \"Do it,\" Nagor said grimly. \"We've got to find out what that weapon\n is. Or else get out of this solar system.\"\n\n\n Riuku sighed. \"I'll try,\" he said.\nSomeone put another dollar in the juke box, and the theremins started\n in on Mare Indrium Mary for the tenth time since Pete Ganley had come\n into the bar. \"Aw shut up,\" he said, wishing there was some way to\n turn them off. Twelve-ten. Alice got off work at Houston's at twelve.\n She ought to be here by now. She would be, if it weren't Thursday.\n Shield boosting night for her.\n\n\n Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"\n\n\n She shook her bandanaed head, slid onto the stool beside him and\n crossed her knees—a not very convincing sign of femininity in a woman\n wearing baggy denim coveralls. \"Aren't you going to buy me a drink,\n honey?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure.\" He glanced over at the bartender. \"Another beer. No, make\n it two.\" He pulled the five dollars out of his pocket, shoved it\n across the bar, and looked back at Alice, more closely this time. The\n ID badge, pinned to her hip. The badge, with her name, number,\n department, and picture—and the little meter that measured the\n strength of her Mind Shield.\n\n\n The dial should have pointed to full charge. It didn't. It registered\n about seventy per cent loss.\n\n\n Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind.\n\n\n \"Oh, hi, Joan. No, I'm all right. Just a little dizzy for a moment. A\n hangover? Of course not. Not on a Friday.\"\n\n\n Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink\n straw, her hair does, and of course she thinks it's beautiful....\n\"I'd better get down to my station. Old Liverlips will be ranting\n again. You oughta be glad you have Eddie for a lead man. Eddie's cute.\n So's Dave, over in 77. But Liverlips, ugh....\"\n\n\n She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of\n names:\nMaisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean\n Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again,\n I'll—I'll kill her....\n\"Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of\n course I'm ready to go to work.\"\nLiverlips, that's what you are. And\n still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as\n sloppy as you are....\nGood, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever\n it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but\n let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were,\n and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even\n before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding\n boost.\n\n\n He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of\n course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was\n nothing to look forward to.\n\n\n Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out\n what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside\n the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of\n the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly.\n\n\n Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the\n work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and\n Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73.\n\n\n \"Hey, how'd you make out?\" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure\n none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her,\n then went on. \"Did you get away with it?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Alice said. \"And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked\n in.\"\n\n\n She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and\n reached out for the pan of 731 wires. \"You know, it's funny. Pete's\n not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that,\n but oh, what he does to me.\" She filled the 731 plug with solder and\n reached for the white, black, red wire.\n\n\n \"You'd better watch out,\" Lois said. \"Or Susan's going to be doing\n something to you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, her.\" Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin,\n worked the wire down into position. \"What can she do? Pete doesn't\n give a damn about her.\"\n\n\n \"He's still living with her, isn't he?\" Lois said.\n\n\n Alice shrugged....\nWhat a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be,\n sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of\n them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe\n was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked\n him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her\n working nights....\nAlice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and\n started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time,\n did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight.\n\n\n \"Junior kept me up all night last night,\" Lois said. \"He's cutting a\n tooth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Coralie said, \"It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right\n after Mike was born....\"\n\n\n Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.\n\n\n Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.\n\n\n The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and\n Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent\n is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything.\n\n\n The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or\n something....\n\n\n Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for\n lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her\n mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary.\n\n\n At the end of the shift he had learned nothing. Nothing about the\n weapon, that is. He had found out a good deal about the sex life of\n Genus Homo—information that made him even more glad than before that\n his was a one-sexed race.\nWith work over and tools put away and Alice in the restroom gleefully\n thinking about the red Friday night tag she was slipping onto her ID\n badge, he was as far from success as ever. For a moment he considered\n leaving her, looking for another subject. But he'd probably not be\n able to find one. No, the only thing to do was stay with her, curl\n deep in her mind and go through the Shielding boost, and later on....\n\n\n The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.\n\n\n He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"\n\n\n \"So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby.\n Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar.\"\nFear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe\n Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad.\n I'd sure hate to have him mad at me....\n\"Let's go for a spin, baby. Out in the suburbs somewhere. How about\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Well—why sure, Pete....\"\n\n\n Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"\n\n\n \"Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete\n Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here.\"\n\n\n Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under\n the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what—it\n was cute.\n\n\n \"What makes you think I know anything more than you do?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, gee.\" She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight\n that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway.\n \"You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before\n they go out.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this\n kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything.\n\n\n \"It's a simple enough gadget,\" Pete Ganley said. \"A new type of force\n field weapon that the enemy can't spot until it hits them. They don't\n even know there's an Earth ship within a million miles, until\nBingo\n!...\"\n\n\n She drank it in, and in her mind Riuku did too. Wonderful integration,\n wonderful. Partial thought control. And now, he'd learn the secret....\n\n\n \"You really want to know how it works?\" Pete Ganley said. When she\n nodded he couldn't help grinning. \"Well, it's analogous to the field\n set up by animal neurones, in a way. You've just got to damp that\n field, and not only damp it but blot it out, so that the frequency\n shows nothing at all there, and then—well, that's where those\n Corcoran assemblies you're soldering on come in. You produce the\n field....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"\n\n\n \"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....\n\n\n But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....\n\n\n Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.\n\n\n \"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"\n\n\n Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"\n\n\n She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.\n\n\n ...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.\n\n\n \"Have you found out anything, Riuku?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n Silence. Then: \"We've lost another ship. Maybe you'd better turn her\n loose and come on back. It looks as if we'll have to run for it, after\n all.\"\n\n\n Defeat. The long, interstellar search for another race, a race less\n technologically advanced than this one, and all because of a stupid\n Earth female.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Nagor,\" he said. \"Her boy friend knows. I'll find out. I'll\n make her listen to him.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Nagor said doubtfully. \"All right. But hurry. We haven't much\n time at all.\"\n\n\n \"I'll hurry,\" Riuku promised. \"I'll be back with you tonight.\"\n\n\n That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"\n\n\n \"In a little while. Just a little while.\" Stop thinking about Susan,\n you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything\n out of that man by having hysterics....\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Alice cried bitterly, \"you've been leading me on all the\n time. You don't love me. You'd rather have\nher\n!\"\n\n\n \"That's not so. Hell, baby....\"\nHe's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own\n throat when I act like that....\n\"Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink,\n okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Oh, sure.\"\n\n\n She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\"\n\n\n \"That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a\n duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the\n frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—\"\n\n\n She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now.\n\n\n \"Nagor, I'm getting it,\" Riuku called. \"I'll bring it all back with\n me. Just a minute and I'll have it.\"\n\n\n \"How does it work, honey?\" Alice Hendricks said.\n\n\n \"You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated\n between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful,\n by—\"\n\n\n \"It's coming through now, Nagor.\"\n\n\n \"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"\n\n\n He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"\n\n\n \"You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to\n you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've\n been hearing!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the detective who was driving said. \"And those pictures we\n took last night weren't bad either.\"\n\n\n \"Susan, I can explain everything....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—\"\n\n\n Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make\n her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't\n hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage\n her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.\n\n\n \"Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!\" Alice Hendricks cried.\n\n\n \"Why, let me get my hands on you....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"\n\n\n \"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....\n\n\n \"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.\n\n\n The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How was Alice able to get off work early in order to meet Pete at the bar?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_1", "options": ["She flirted with Tommy in order to distract him from the fact that she was leaving work earlier than normal.", "Every factory employee must go through a weekly Shielding process to boost their mind shields against the probing activities of their alien enemies. Alice switched out the marker identifying the day of her booster.", "Because her mind shield charge was in the safe zone, it was not necessary for her to complete the booster on any specific day, so long as she completed the charge before it reached the danger zone.", "Because of the factory requirement to receive the mind shield booster once a week, Alice simply changed her identifying marker to yellow to trick the guard into thinking she was part of the Friday group."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Riuku unable to break the bond with Alice's mind? ", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_2", "options": ["Because Alice's mind was weaker than Riuku's, it functioned as a kind of parasite that latched onto Riuku and would not allow him to escape.", "The power of Alice's sadness over losing Pete Ganley strengthened the connection between her mind and Rikuku's.", "The Shield booster had forged a permanent attachment to Alice's mind from which Riuku was unable to escape.", "The secret weapon developed in the factory was an enhancement to the Shield booster that trapped any enemies who had discovered a way around it."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were Pete and Alice pulled over by the police?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_3", "options": ["Susan had hired a detective to wire Pete's copter in order to expose his infidelity, and the detective pulled Pete over so that Susan could confront the two.", "The copter Pete had been using for his evening rendezvouses with Alice belonged to the company they both worked for, so the police pulled him over for a citation.", "Adultery was considered a social taboo, the discovery of which would be widely circulated in print media. Susan enjoyed this kind of exposure, so she hired the police to help her catch Pete and Alice in the act.", "The secret weapon developed in the factory had a special function that triggered an alarm when the Shield had been breached, so the police had discovered Riuku's plot."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was Riuku's overall feeling about Alice as the vessel for his probing activities?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_4", "options": ["As he spent more time inside Alice's mind, he found himself sympathizing more with humans and began to feel regret about his subversive behavior.", "He was annoyed by human sexuality and what he regarded as Alice's general uselessness when it came to uncovering helpful information about the secret weapon.", "Although he was irritated by her general ignorance about the identity of the secret weapon, its purpose, and its machinations, he found her natural curiosity to be useful in his fact-finding mission.", "He appreciated her flippancy with the rules that allowed him access to her mind and enabled him to easily control the questions she asked people that provided him with good information to report back to Nagor."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Pete say, \"The slip of a lip . . . \" before being cut off by Alice?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_5", "options": ["He wanted to warn Alice discreetly not to talk about their affair because he had learned that one of Susan's friends had seen them at the bar the night before, and he was worried about being exposed.", "He was growing suspicious of Alice's questions since she had never before shown a curiosity in his job; he worried she might have succumbed to alien probing.", "He was reminding Alice that it was forbidden for any factory employee to discuss any aspect of the workings of the factory in the name of Earth's defense.", "He wanted to prevent Alice from revealing too much information to him about the specific functions of her job soldering 731 wires."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was the essential function of the secret weapon being built in the factory?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_6", "options": ["It transmitted lethal pulse waves through Corcoran force fields designed and built by workers in the factory.", "It allowed Earth control over the minds of their alien enemies by utilizing force fields and a control panel headquartered in the factory.", "It was a force field that could be used to make Earth's spaceships undetectable by their alien enemies and make sneak attacks easier.", "It was a force field that was completely impervious to aggressive attacks by the alien enemies stationed just outside Earth's atmosphere."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why was Nagor in such a rush to leave their location close to Earth?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_7", "options": ["Because of Riuku's findings through Alice's mind, Nagor realized Earth was close to implementing their lethal weapon, so he wanted to ensure the safety of their fleet.", "Other ships in their fleet were beginning to disappear, suggesting Earth was systematically eliminating them by using the Corcoran force field weapon.", "The deadline previously agreed upon with Riuku was rapidly approaching, and Nagor knew extending their presence past the deadline would mean certain death.", "Like Riuku, he was irritated by the Shield technology employed by humans to protect themselves from alien probing, and he wanted to seek out other planets."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Alice's role in the development of the secret weapon?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_8", "options": ["She filled 731 plugs with solder and fused the wires into the correct position for Corcoran assemblies that ultimately helped produce a force field.", "She used a soldering iron to fuse together white, red, and yellow wires used in the assembly of the Corcoran force field.", "She filled plugs with solder and passed them along to Lois, Marge, and Coralie so that they could fuse them together with 731 wires.", "She worked with Lois, Marge, and Coralie at the Line 73 Plug table to inspect wires and plugs for eventual use in the Corcoran assemblies."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why do most of the girls seek jobs at the factory in spite of its secrecy?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_9", "options": ["It is a good place to meet and flirt with men like Pete and Tommy.", "It pays really well compared to similar jobs.", "Working at the factory is considered prestigious and offers better opportunities for advancement.", "They are allowed several breaks per shift and can take naps on the couch in the restroom lobby."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What does Alice discover about Pete Ganley?", "question_unique_id": "31612_TOJ8VVNZ_10", "options": ["He doesn't know as much about the development of the secret weapon as he pretends to know.", "His mind has also been taken over by an alien.", "He had been cheating on her with a large number of women.", "This is not the first time he has cheated on Susan."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/3/1/6/1/31612//31612-h//31612-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "25629", "set_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Postmark Ganymede", "year": 1975, "author": "Silverberg, Robert", "topic": "Short stories, American; Science fiction, American; PS", "article": "Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.\n\n\n Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.\n\n\n It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"\n\n\n \"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"\n\n\n Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"\n\n\n \"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.\n\n\n He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.\n\n\n Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!\n\n\n It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.\n\n\n Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"\n\n\n \"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"\n\n\n \"The local native life,\" the\n colonist explained. \"They're\n about thirty feet long, a foot\n wide, and mostly mouth.\n There's a ring of them about\n a hundred yards wide surrounding\n the Dome. They can't get in and\n we can't get out—and we can't figure\n out any possible approach for\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty,\" Preston said.\n \"But why didn't the things\n bother you while you were\n building your Dome?\"\n\n\n \"Apparently they have a\n very long hibernation-cycle.\n We've only been here two\n years, you know. The iceworms\n must all have been\n asleep when we came. But\n they came swarming out of\n the ice by the hundreds last\n month.\"\n\n\n \"How come Earth doesn't\n know?\"\n\n\n \"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.\n\n\n \"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.\n\n\n His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"\n\n\n Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"\n\n\n Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.\n\n\n Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.\n\n\n He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.\n\n\n And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"\n\n\n The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"\n\n\n He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"\n\n\n \"Hero?\" Preston shrugged.\n \"All I did was deliver the\n mail. It's all in a day's work,\n you know. The mail's got to\n get through!\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How did Preston save the Ganymede colony?", "question_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C_1", "options": ["He affixed a gas tank to the empty gun turret on his postal ship, dropped it on the mass of iceworms, and ignited them with the fire from his jets.", "He dumped fuel into the gun turrets mounted to the firing stud and dumped it over the mass of writhing iceworms covering the Ganymede Dome.", "He dove the mail ship into a mass of them, exploding his fuel tank, and burning the iceworms in the process. Due to his burning fuel tank, he was forced to make an emergency landing.", "He mounted a heavy gun on the firing stud and filled it with the spare ammo he found in crates in the back of the mail ship and used those rounds to kill the iceworms."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was most surprising to Preston about his new job?", "question_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C_2", "options": ["The fact that there were empty carts in the back of his mail ship that had previously been filled with ammo, and there were no gun turrets mounted to the firing stud.", "He had been assigned to deliver mail to Ganymede when he thought he would be dropping mail at Callisto.", "His first day delivering mail had been far more dangerous than his old assignment as Patrol man.", "He had not expected to have to pass through the Pirate Belt, but he was happy to have Mellors and Gunderson as part of his convoy."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Earth unaware of the iceworm situation on Ganymede?", "question_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C_3", "options": ["An iceworm had eaten through the long-range transmitter antenna, which was the only form of communication the Ganymede colony had with the outside world.", "It had been several months since the last mail dispatch had landed, and this was their primary form of communication with the Nome Spaceport in Alaska.", "An iceworm had destroyed the antenna for the transmitter with a wide enough range to reach Earth, so the colonists on Ganymede were stuck using the short-range transmitter.", "Their long-range radio was not able to transmit through the thick mass of iceworms that had covered the Dome, so they were forced to communicate with a short-range transmitter, which was highly ineffective."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Preston initially upset about his new assignment?", "question_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C_4", "options": ["He had not been consulted by the Chief prior to the assignment, so he felt that the re-assignment had come out of nowhere.", "Mail ships and Patrol ships were very different, and he did not have the proper training prior to his first deployment to Ganymede.", "He was embarrassed to be assigned to Postal because it was widely considered to be the easiest and least respectable kind of work available at Nome Spaceport.", "He was honored to be a Patrol man for many years and proud of the skills and abilities he used in that position. He felt being a mailman was beneath him."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happened when Gunderson, Mellors, and Preston encountered the pirate ships on the way to Ganymede?", "question_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C_5", "options": ["Preston maneuvered his mail ship into such a position that he was able to help Gunderson and Mellors destroy the first ship before being taken out by the second one.", "Preston took shelter behind their Patrol ships, and they destroyed the first pirate ship. However, the second pirate killed them both as Preston managed to escape.", "Gunderson and Mellors fought the one pirate ship that appeared suddenly and were quickly destroyed by it, giving Preston plenty of time to escape and make his way to Ganymede.", "After Gunderson was killed by the first pirate ship, Mellors ran head-first into the second ship, killing both him and the pirate. Preston was able to escape."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the Chief assign Preston to the Postal duty?", "question_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C_6", "options": [" The Chief had intel about the iceworms attacking Ganymede, and he trusted Preston to be able to maneuver his way through the Pirate Belt, destroy the iceworms, and get the mail delivered.", "Lieutenant Preston had gotten too comfortable as a Patrol man over the years, and the Chief felt it was time for him to take on a new kind of challenge.", "Captain Preston had worked for the Patrol for many, many years, so it was time for him to retire and make room for younger Patrol men.", "Lieutenant Preston was one of the best Patrol men, and he wanted someone who could protect themselves if the Patrol men failed to protect the mail ship."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why had the Chief been looking for Preston at Nome Spaceport in Alaska?", "question_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C_7", "options": ["He wanted him to get started on his journey to deliver mail to Ganymede.", "He wanted to offer an explanation for his decision to re-assign Preston from the Space Patrol Service to Postal, which Preston had been notified of via letter.", "He wanted him to join him for a drink at the Nome Spaceport bar before walking over to Administration and getting registered in the Postal department.", "He wanted to inform him of his re-assignment from the Space Patrol Service to Postal."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the representative from Ganymede tell Preston he can't land there to deliver his mail?", "question_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C_8", "options": ["When they first built the Dome, the iceworms were hibernating, but now they have surfaced and are attacking the colonists on the surface of the moon.", "The colonists of Ganymede are dealing with an infestation of iceworms from another planet that are attacking their Dome and have cut off their communications with Earth. ", "They are not familiar with Preston and are used to a different mail delivery representative, so when he makes contact with them, they are suspicious about his true identity.", "The colonists are under siege by hundreds of giant iceworms that are covering their Dome, effectively trapping them inside and preventing others from entering."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did his former Patrol sidekicks join Preston on his mission to Ganymede?", "question_unique_id": "25629_49EGT46C_9", "options": ["They wanted to show their solidarity to him, knowing that he would be upset about the transition from Patrol Service to Postal.", "They knew about the iceworm attack on Ganymede and wanted to join his convoy knowing that his new mail rig was not equipped with the proper equipment to protect itself.", "They were still Patrol men and assigned as his convoy to help protect him as they passed through the Pirate Belt since he didn't have any weapons on the mail ship.", "They were eager to hunt for pirate ships that they knew would be lying in wait to attack Preston's mail ship as it passed through."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/5/6/2/25629//25629-h//25629-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "29159", "set_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Acid Bath", "year": 1962, "author": "Garson, Bill", "topic": "PS; Short stories; Science fiction", "article": "ACID BATH\nBy VASELEOS GARSON\nThe starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\nJon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n\n\n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n\n\n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n\n\n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.\n\n\n By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n\n\n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n\n\n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n\n\n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n\n\n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.\n\n\n Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n\n\n He glanced back finally.\n\n\n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n\n\n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n\n\n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.\n\n\n The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n\n\n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n\n\n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n\n\n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n\n\n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.\n\n\n Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.\n\n\n He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n\n\n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n\n\n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n\n\n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n\n\n They were about the height of Karyl—six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.\n\n\n Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n\n\n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n\n\n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n\n\n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n\n\n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n\n\n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.\n\n\n He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n\n\n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n\n\n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n\n\n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n\n\n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n\n\n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.\n\n\n The thin fin—the cannon's sight—split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n\n\n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n\n\n He pressed the red button again.\n\n\n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.\n\n\n Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"\n\n\n \"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.\n\n\n He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled.\nJon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n\n\n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen,\n is it?—use it as protective\n metal.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.\n\n\n It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n\n\n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n\n\n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n\n\n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n \"I couldn't understand.\"\n\n\n \"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.\n\n\n \"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n\n\n A green effulgence surrounded him.\nThere\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n\n\n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n\n\n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n\n\n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?\n\n\n Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n\n\n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n\n\n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n\n\n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n\n\n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n\n\n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.\n\n\n And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?\n\n\n The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"\n\n\n \"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n\n\n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n\n\n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Enter your\"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n\n\n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.\n\n\n He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n\n\n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n\n\n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n\n\n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n\n\n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n\n\n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n\n\n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.\n\n\n A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the\n opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder\n that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a\n yellowish liquid.\n\n\n One of the tentacles reached into the\n opening and clasped the glass. The opening\n closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor\n appendages, moved toward Jon.\n\n\n He didn't like the looks of the liquid in\n the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some\n sort. He raised to his feet.\n\n\n He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared\n to blast the cylinder.\nThe\n cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his\n eyes jump in his head. He brought the\n stubray gun up—but he was helpless. The\n pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement,\n one of the tentacles had speared it\n from his hand and was holding it out of\n his reach.\n\n\n Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n\n\n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n\n\n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n\n\n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"\n\n\n The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n\n\n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n\n\n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n\n\n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n\n\n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n\n\n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.\n\n\n The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.\n\n\n \"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n\n\n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n\n\n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n\n\n Would this torture—he chuckled—last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n\n\n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.\n\n\n The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n\n\n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n\n\n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n\n\n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"\n\n\n \"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n\n\n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n\n\n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n\n\n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n\n\n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n\n\n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.\n\n\n Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.\n\n\n It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders—it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n\n\n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n\n\n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n\n\n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the—ah—hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n\n\n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"\n\n\n \"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n\n\n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n\n\n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n\n\n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\nStaying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n\n\n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship.\n\n\n The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n\n\n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n\n\n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n\n\n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n\n\n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.\n\n\n With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n\n\n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n\n\n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n\n\n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n\n\n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n\n\n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n\n\n He sent out the call letters.\n\n\n \"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n\n\n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n\n\n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n\n\n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n\n\n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n\n\n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.\n\n\n Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n\n\n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\nHe was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n\n\n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n\n\n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n \"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.\n\n\n \"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n\n\n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n\n\n The space captain grinned.\n\n\n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with\nwater\nto be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n\n\n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n\n\n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.\n\n\n \"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n\n\n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n\n\n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n\n\n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n\n\n \"Don't mind if I do.\"\n\n\n The water twinkled in the two glasses,\n winking as if it knew just what it had\n done.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nPlanet Stories\nJuly 1952.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What was Jon Karyl's job?", "question_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP_1", "options": ["He managed a service station for Earthships as Lone Watcher on an asteroid and warned Earth about any potential threats.", "As Lone Watcher, he patrolled Earth's Solar System, keeping watch for hostile spaceships that might attack.", "Jon Karyl was a Lone Watcher, which meant he visited service stations at different asteroids, fixing broken rocket engines and scanning the skies for enemy ships.", "As a Lone Watcher, he was responsible for maintaining a service station where ships could come to refuel and also keep an eye out for the dangerous, mind-reading Steel-Blues."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Jon know the Steel-Blues were not from Earth's solar system?", "question_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP_2", "options": ["Their steel-blue color betrayed their otherworldly origins.", "They had the distinct ability to read thoughts, which was not something that Earthmen or any other species in their solar system had the ability to do.", "They had eyes that wrapped around the backs of their heads, which wasn't a physical characteristic of Earthmen or any other species in their solar system.", "The blast from the service station's atomic cannon didn't harm their spaceship whatsoever--a quality foreign to anything he had ever seen."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did the Steel-Blues torture Jon Karyl?", "question_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP_3", "options": ["They forced him to drink water diluted with citric acid, since they were unable to determine his chemical composition and therefore assumed it would have the same negative effect on his body that it had on their own metalloid bodies.", "They made him ingest a lethal cocktail of liquid hemlock diluted with citric acid over the course of more than two weeks, which slowly ate away at his insides as he got weaker and weaker and tried to develop a plan to warn Space Patrol.", "They prevented him from eating, forced him to drink citric acid, and forced him to succumb to their insidious mind-reading techniques that they used to try to learn as much as possible about Space Patrol.", "They gave him a liquid form of hemlock diluted with citric acid, which slowly corroded his insides and led him to become very hungry over time."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Space Patrol 101 defeat the Steel-Blues and save Jon Karyl?", "question_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP_4", "options": ["They weakened their ship's defenses using a water-filled projectile and finished them off with an atomic weapon.", "They filled a projectile with water diluted by citric acid and used that to melt away the enemy ship's outer layer; SP-101 exploited this vulnerability and destroyed the ship with atomic shots.", "They chased the Steel-Blues into their force field, where they blasted the ship relentlessly with shots from the atomic cannon.", "They trapped the Steel-Blues using a force field and bombed them with a hollowed-out shell filled with water, which melted the ship and killed the Steel-Blues."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did the Steel-Blues come to Earth's solar system?", "question_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP_5", "options": ["They wanted to test their newly-designed torture technique on species they had not yet encountered in their travels.", "In order to expand their habitat and colonize more planets.", "They found Earthmen more susceptible to the practice of telepathy, and therefore they were easier to predict and subdue.", "They were seeking lifeforms that, like their own, were also composed largely of metals and could be easily harmed by water."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did the pursuant Steel-Blue neutralize Jon in the service station?", "question_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP_6", "options": ["It used one of its many blue tentacles to prevent Jon from shooting his stubray pistol and pinned him to the floor.", "It used its telepathic abilities to read Jon's mind and predict that he would make a quick grab for his stubray gun; because of this, it was able to stop Jon from escaping.", "It used a black box, which was some kind of weapon, to temporarily immobilize Jon so that he could be imprisoned.", "It used a black box to blast a hole in the rock surrounding Jon, thereby preventing his ability to move in any direction."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Jon find the service station?", "question_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP_7", "options": ["He used unique features of the landscape such as a small bush to help him locate the hidden entrance.", "He located it by triangulating his previous location at the rocket ship with the location of the Blue-Steel ship and his current location hidden amongst the brush.", "He stumbled upon the entrance amidst a dense thicket while on the rune from the pursuant Blue-Steels.", "He hid at the bottom of a ravine until the Blue-Steels had passed, and then opened the lock leading into the tunnel of the service station."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why were the Steel-Blues carrying around sheets of plastic and other kinds of equipment?", "question_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP_8", "options": ["They were materials used to construct the force field that protected their ship against the atomic cannon blasts that Jon attempted to use to defend the service station.", "They were materials used to build temporary residences and other necessary establishments as they began to colonize asteroids and other celestial bodies in the solar system.", "They used those materials to build a field station from which they conducted medical experiments upon Jon to examine the composition of his body and determine the appropriate torture.", "They used those materials to build a replica of Jon's service station to serve as a makeshift prison where they would observe the results of the liquid torture upon his body."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the Steel-Blues describe themselves as robots?", "question_unique_id": "29159_TU40VVEP_9", "options": ["They used telepathy to read Jon's thoughts and therefore learn to communicate with him through his own language. Since Jon thought they were robots, that's how they described themselves.", "Their cylindrical structures were comprised of a solid, steel metal impervious to any weapons found within Earth's solar system.", "They had been programmed to search the galaxy for other planets on which to expand their living space and to test out new methods of torture on other beings. They had a robotic commitment to their mission.", "Although they had flexible tentacles with which they grasped black boxes and operated other equipment, their torsos were metallic and solid with eyes stretching to the backs of their heads."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/9/1/5/29159//29159-h//29159-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "24949", "set_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Control Group", "year": 1959, "author": "Aycock, Roger D.", "topic": "Science fiction, American; PS; Short stories", "article": "\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\nCONTROL GROUP\nBy ROGER DEE\nThe\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the\nMarco Four\ndown at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had—as\n was usual and proper—no voice\n in the matter.\n\n\n \"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.\n\n\n \"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n\n\n \"And I think\nyou\nlive for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born—neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"\n\n\n \"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n\n\n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.\n\n\n \"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added\nas usual\n. \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n\n\n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the\nMarco Four\nout of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.\n\n\n Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n\"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"\n\n\n When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The\nMarco Four\n, Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n\n\n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n\n\n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\nStryker looked dubious.\n \"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"\n\n\n \"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n\n\n Stryker was not reassured.\n\n\n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n\n\n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"\n\n\n \"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n \"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n\n\n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'—we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"\n\n\n \"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n \"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n\n\n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n\n\n Gibson disagreed.\n\n\n \"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment—the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point—and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n\n\n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.\n\n\n \"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n \"then there's only one choice remaining—they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n\n\n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture—they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"\n\n\n Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"\n\n\n Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n\n\n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years—the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.\n\n\n \"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n \"It's high time I took my turn—and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the\nMarco\n Four\n.\n\n\n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the\nLament for Old Terra\nwith\n your accordion.\"\n\n\n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n\n\n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"\n\n\n Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n\n\n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n \"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n\n\n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear—and\n as inflectionless—as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the\nMarco Four\n.\"\n\n\n They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n\n\n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n \"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"\n\n\n The mechanical put a flexible\n gray finger upon an indicator\n graph derived from a composite\n section of detector meters. \"The\n power transmitted seems to be\n gross electric current conveyed\n by metallic cables. It is generated\n through a crudely governed\n process of continuous atomic\n fission.\"\nFarrell, himself appalled by\n the information, still found himself\n able to chuckle at Stryker's\n bellow of consternation.\n\n\n \"\nContinuous fission?\nGood\n God, only madmen would deliberately\n run a risk like that!\"\n\n\n Farrell prodded him with\n cheerful malice. \"Why say mad\nmen\n? Maybe they're humanoid\n aliens who thrive on hard radiation\n and look on the danger of\n being blown to hell in the middle\n of the night as a satisfactory\n risk.\"\n\n\n \"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end—\"\n\n\n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib—the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since—how\n long, Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n \"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"\n\n\n Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk—\n\n\n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get\nhere\n?\"\n\n\n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.\n\n\n \"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not—\"\n\n\n \"\nAny problem posed by one\n group of human beings\n,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \"\ncan be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity\n.\"\n\n\n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\nHe waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.\n\n\n \"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n\n\n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n\n\n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us\nhow\n,\n we're ready to move.\"\n\n\n \"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n \"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars—our records are\n complete from that time.\"\n\n\n Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\nGibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"\n\n\n \"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000—Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember—and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"\n\n\n \"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship\ncouldn't\nhave made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary—the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated—\"\n\n\n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n \"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"\n\n\n \"But the ship wasn't here in\n 3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n\n\n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"\n\n\n Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\nBut uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n\n\n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs—what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?\n\n\n Suppose, he thought—and derided\n himself for thinking it—one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures\ndid\nsucceed?\n\n\n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"\n\n\n Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n\n\n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down—\"\n\n\n Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\nHe awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.\n\n\n Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n\n\n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.\n\n\n Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n\n\n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better—they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the\nMarco\nwould be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.\n\n\n The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n\n\n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n\n\n \"A\ncreche\n,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.\n\n\n One of those old ventures\nhad\nsucceeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before—for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n\n\n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.\n\n\n He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n\n\n The\nMarco Four\n, ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\nFarrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.\n\n\n Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n\n\n He reached the\nMarco Four\nwith the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.\n\n\n He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n\n\n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n\n\n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the\nMarco Four\ndown. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n\n\n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"\n\n\n Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n\n\n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n\n\n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"\n\n\n \"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n\n\n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n \"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n\n\n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where\ndid\nthey come from?\"\n\n\n \"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n \"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n\n\n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here—they\n still don't know where\n they really are—by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"\n\n\n Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n\n\n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n\n\n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"\n\n\n \"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal—if obsolete—background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n\n\n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" said Gibson, surprised.\n \"It's obvious enough,\n surely—hard as they tried, the\n Bees never understood us\n either.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Science Fiction Stories\nJanuary\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "How did Gibson and Xavier discover Farrell had crashed?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_1", "options": ["Following the crash, the Alphardians flew to the Marco Four in a small boat used for emergency missions. The crew of the Marco Four thought this boat was a torpedo, but it turned out to just be the Alphardians offering their assistance.", "Gibson and Stryker had been monitoring Xavier and Farrell as they made their way to Alphard Six in separate ships, so they knew immediately when they both crashed.", "After devising a transceiver to tap into the frequency modulation of the Alphardians, they were able to understand their speech as the old Terran language and thereby learned about Farrell's crash.", "Since Xavier had been following Farrell in a separate ship, he witnessed the electrical blast that disabled Farrell's ship and led to his eventual capture."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "From where did the Alphardians originate?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_2", "options": ["They originally populated a Terran colony until they were hypnotized and essentially kidnapped as a control group for the Hymenops' human experimentations.", "Originally Terran settlers on Sirius, the Alphardians travelled for a thousand years to reach Alphard Six, where they established a new colony and developed their own language.", "The Alphardians were actually Terran colonists who had traveled a thousand years to reach Alphard Five, where they were captured by the Hymenops and brainwashed to do their bidding.", "The Alphardians had left Earth thousands of years prior for the express purpose of reaching Alphard Six, where they hoped to establish a new Terran colony."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who was Xavier and what was his significance to the crew of Marco Four?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_3", "options": ["Xavier was the ship's mechanic, whose vast knowledge of Hymenop history contributed to the positive identification of the mysterious ship on Alphard Six.", "Xavier was a mechanic who possessed a calm, quiet disposition and contributed his knowledge and expertise in a variety of ways during the mission.", "Xavier was a humanoid who understood the language of the Alphardians, and therefore his presence was essential when he was sent with Farrell to investigate Alphard Six.", "Xavier was a robot with an encyclopedic knowledge of Terran history who assisted the crew in a number of research and exploratory capacities during their mission."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Stryker feel justified in ordering Farrell to conduct reconnaissance of Alphard Six prior to landing?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_4", "options": ["Alphard Six is an unreclaimed planet, and therefore the crew of the Marco Four knows nothing about its atmosphere, inhabitants, or environment. They must be wary of potential threats.", "A torpedo-like shape explodes near their ship, which Stryker believes might have destroyed them if they'd ventured any nearer.", "Stryker lives and breathes the Reclamations Handbook; he doesn't believe in listening to the expertise of his crewmembers.", "Stryker is the captain of the Marco Four, and therefore he is responsible for giving orders to his crew based on decisions he believes are necessary."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who are the Hymenops and what is their role in the story?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_5", "options": ["The Hymenops are an ancient alien species that build large beehive-like structures on the planets they invade and colonize. They use these structures to conduct their human experiments.", "Also called Bees, the Hymenops are natives of Alphard Five and headquarter the operations of their human experimentations there.", "The Hymenops are an alien species that resemble bees. The hypnotized Terrans worship them as gods and revert to a childlike state when they are not in their presence.", "The Hymenops are a hostile, bee-like species that use their power of hypnosis to conduct experiments upon Terrans."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How does the crew first realize the inhabitants of Alphard Six are not Hymenops?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_6", "options": ["There are no beehive-like structures on Alphard Six, and the Hymenops prefer to use a different kind of weapon than the shape the crew believes was a torpedo.", "The Hymenops were not native to Alphard Six; rather, they made their home on Alphard Five so that they could use it as a base to observe their human experiments.", "When Farrell wakes up after his crash, he recognizes the white-smocked man that attends to him as an old Terran.", "When Xavier uses his magnoscanner to investigate the planet's surface, he discovers the existence of an old Terran spacecraft."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Farrell crash?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_7", "options": ["His helihopper was shot down by the torpedo they had earlier avoided when Stryker ordered Farrell to circle back and conduct the reconnaissance spiral.", "As he was flying towards the planet's surface, Farrell inadvertently intercepted an electromagnetic wave the Alphardians used to transmit their frequency modulations.", "Xavier accidentally ran into his helihopper because their communications were scrambled by the interception from the Alphardians' transceiver.", "Because they were largely a thing of the past, Farrell had forgotten about the existence of power lines, which the Alphardians used for their electricity, and he ran into one. This downed his helihopper."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did Stryker believe the Alphardians would be easily reclaimed?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_8", "options": ["Since the Hymenops wanted to observe them as a Terran control group, they were largely left unaltered by the Hymenops' hypnoses and therefore more susceptible to the reclamation process.", "The Hymenops' hypnotism had left the Alphardians' minds open and suggestible.", "Due to his devout study of the Reclamations Handbook, Stryker was confident he could implement the guidelines on Terrans in any configuration and be successful.", "The fact that they used the old language and dated technology indicated to Stryker that they were a simple-minded people and therefore likely more amenable to reclamation."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why doesn't Gibson believe the inhabitants of Alphard Six are migrant Terrans?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_9", "options": ["It was physically impossible for Terrans to survive a thousand-year journey from Earth to Alphard Six.", "He is suspicious of the hypnotic spell cast upon Terran groups by the Hymenops and worries that the inhabitants are another one of their hallucinations.", "Throughout all of their Reclamations missions, they had not discovered a single unreclaimed Terran colony that had progressed to traveling in space.", "He believes they are aliens from a system the crew of the Macro Four has yet to discover, beyond the old sphere of Terran exploration."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why did Stryker disallow Gibson from venturing to the surface of Alphard Six?", "question_unique_id": "24949_7DXP4NBC_10", "options": ["He was tired of him theorizing as to the hallucinatory nature of the things they had so far witnessed in the sky and on the surface of Alphard Six.", "Gibson needed to fix the computer that controlled the Macro Four's ability to conduct a Transfer jump quickly in case something went wrong.", "He wanted him to stay on the Macro Four in order to keep Xavier company by practicing dead languages and playing chess.", "Since Gibson had attended to the previous mission, Stryker wanted him to stay on the Macro Four while Farrell and Xavier took helihoppers to the planet's surface."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/4/9/4/24949//24949-h//24949-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "29193", "set_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "Gutenberg", "title": "Dream Town", "year": 1964, "author": "Slesar, Henry", "topic": "Short stories; PS; Fantasy fiction", "article": "Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights!\ndream\n \ntown\nby ... HENRY SLESAR\nThe woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\nThe\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n \"What is it? What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry—\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n\n\n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n \"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n\n\n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.\n\n\n \"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court—\"\n\n\n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n\n\n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n \"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n\n\n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"\n\n\n \"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n\n\n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n\n\n \"I really can't thank you\n enough—\"\n\n\n \"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n\n\n \"The what?\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n\n\n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.\n\n\n He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\nHe\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n\n\n Then he went to sleep.\n\n\n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n\n\n \"Are you\nnakkid\n?\"\n\n\n His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n\n\n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n \"What time is it?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n \"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"\n\n\n \"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n \"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n\n\n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n\n\n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"\nSally!\n\" Mom again, sterner.\n \"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you\never\ngonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n\n\n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n \"Good morning.\"\n\n\n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n\n\n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"\n\n\n He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n\n\n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n \"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n\n\n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n \"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n The man scratched his ear.\n \"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n\n\n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n\n\n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n \"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n\n\n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\nAt\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n\n\n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He\nseemed\nokay.\"\n\n\n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n \"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n\n\n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n\n\n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n \"Don't you know\nnothin'\n?\"\n\n\n \"\nArma\ngon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister—\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n \"What's the name?\"\n\n\n \"Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n\n\n \"Dream? You mean this—Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n\n\n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n\n\n \"You mean—\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean\nyou\ndream about the same\n place?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n\n\n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n\n\n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n\n\n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.\n\n\n Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n\n\n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n\n\n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\nThey\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n\n\n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"\n\n\n The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.\n\n\n A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n \"Does\nshe\ndream about this—Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n\n\n \"And you, Mr.—\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n\n\n The fat man giggled.\n\n\n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.\n\n\n The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.\n\n\n Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\nThe\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n\n\n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n\n\n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n\n\n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"\n\n\n \"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n\n\n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n\n\n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n\n\n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n\n\n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n \"Now is it any of\nyour\nbusiness? I mean, is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n\n\n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n \"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n\n\n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n\n\n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.\n\n\n \"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n\n\n \"Please ...\"\n\n\n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n\n\n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n\n\n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n\n\n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable—\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n\n\n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...\n\n\n He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.\n\n\n The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n \"About my car—\"\n\n\n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n \"Your\ncar\n? Young man, ain't\n you got no\nrespect\n?\"\n\n\n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\nHe\n took a walk.\n\n\n The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n\n\n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n\n\n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n\n\n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n\n\n \"You a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Thought so.\"\n\n\n Sol repeated the question.\n\n\n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n\n\n \"How—I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n\n\n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n\n\n That was that.\n\n\n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n\n\n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.\n\n\n \"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.\n\n\n Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n\n\n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n\n\n He learned little.\nAt\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n\n\n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n \"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n\n\n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n \"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n\n\n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n\n\n Inside the house, she said:\n \"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n\n\n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"\n\n\n \"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something—\"\n\n\n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\nMr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n\n\n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n \"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n\n\n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n\n\n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit—it's\n sure interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n \"I guess it would be.\"\n\n\n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n\n\n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n\n\n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.\n\n\n \"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...\n\n\n Then sleep came.\nHe\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n\n\n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n\n\n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n\n\n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n\n\n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n\n\n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n \"Gimme my hat!\"\n\n\n Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n\n\n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa!\nPa!\nLook who's here!\"\n\n\n Willie Dawes appeared.\nNo!\nSol thought. This was\nKing\nDawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n \"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n \"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now\nyou're\nin it, too.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"\n\n\n Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So\nthat's\nthe\n snooper, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n \"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n\n\n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n\n\n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute—\"\n\n\n Charlie shouted.\n\n\n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough—\"\n\n\n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n\n\n The Knights stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.\n\n\n Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered—would\n he ever awake?\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nJanuary 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is Umagum?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_1", "options": ["It is a kind of unusual breakfast food Mrs. Dawes prepares for Sol Becker.", "It is the name of the town where Sol Becker takes refuge after his car is stolen.", "It is the name of a mysterious dream world wherein the residents of the town gather at night for public executions.", "It is a mispronunciation of Armagon uttered by Mrs. Dawes at breakfast."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Sally ask Sol if he is \"nakkid\"?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_2", "options": ["He had slept on the couch with the towel he used to dry himself wrapped around his waist.", "\"Nakkid\" is a term used to describe strangers in the court of Armagon.", "She runs into the living room and catches him as he is undressing and preparing to go to bed.", "He had undressed the night before because his clothes were wet from getting soaked in the rain."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does Willie visit Sheriff Coogan?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_3", "options": ["He thinks Sheriff Coogan might have some information about the hoodlum who hijacked Sol's vehicle.", "He wants to introduce him to Sol in order to help him make a report about his stolen car.", "He believes Sheriff Coogan has some information about Mr. Brundage that was not known previously.", "He wants to remind him about the court that will be held that night in Armagon."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Mrs. Brundage upset?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_4", "options": ["She was protesting when Charlie, Sol, Willie, and Sheriff Coogan came to remove her husband's body from her home.", "Vincent had been killed the previous night by the Knights in Armagon.", "She didn't like Sol Becker asking her questions about Vincent Brundage's death.", "Her husband was sentenced to be killed the next time the Armagon court convened, and she felt he had done nothing wrong."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is an exelution?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_5", "options": ["An exelution is another mispronunciation said by Mrs. Dawes at the breakfast dinner when she is referencing events in Armagon. ", "An exelution is a mispronunciation of \"execution\" uttered by Sally several times as she excitedly anticipates events in Armagon.", "Sally pronounces \"execution\" as \"exelution\" because this is how the townspeople refer to the events that unfold in Amagon.", "Sheriff Coogan mispronounces \"execution\" as \"exelution\" because he is missing some teeth."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What happens to Sol Becker at the end of the story?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_6", "options": ["He is appointed a Knight of Armagon and welcomed to the fold by King Dawes.", "He escapes from his dream of Armagan and leaves the town.", "He is executed by the Knights of Armagon.", "He discovers that the hijacker had been sent by the townspeople in order to trap him there so he could be led to Armagon."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why do most of the townspeople Sol encountered throughout the story refuse to speak to Sol?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_7", "options": ["Sol is new to town and therefore unfamiliar with their Laws. They don't want to talk about Armagon with a stranger.", "They have been instructed to refer all questions regarding Armagon or the death of Brundage to Willie Dawes.", "They don't trust his intentions in the town, since nobody knows who he is and he might put them in some kind of danger.", "They don't believe his story about being hijacked and left out in the rain."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How did Mr. Brundage die?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_8", "options": ["He had been executed by the Knights in the court of Armagon.", "He died of a heart attack in his sleep in bed with Mrs. Brundage.", "He passed away peacefully in his sleep in his room above the Haircut Shave & Massage Parlor.", "The townspeople had gathered the night before to kill him in the town square because he broke one of the Laws."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who was Prince Regent?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_9", "options": ["Prince Regent was the ruler of Armagon and the overseer of the nightly court.", "Charlie went by \"Prince Regent\" because it made him feel more important amongst the townspeople.", "This was Willie Dawes' persona in the dream world of Armagon.", "This was Charlie's persona in the dream world of Armagon."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Who are the Knights of the Realm?", "question_unique_id": "29193_YELA6EDD_10", "options": ["It is the name of the gang of hoodlums to which the hijacker that stole Sol Becker's car belongs.", "A vigilante justice group self-appointed to enforce the town's laws. They kill Mr. Brundage.", "It is the primary governing body of the dream world of Armagon that includes Willie Dawes.", "A group of townspeople including Charlie who carries out executions in the dream town of Armagon."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "http://aleph.gutenberg.org/2/9/1/9/29193//29193-h//29193-h.htm", "license": "This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license."}
{"article_id": "99908", "set_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns", "year": 2017, "author": "Christopher Beanland", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services. \n\n Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale. \n\n But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures.  \n\n Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.\nHowever the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals. \n\n It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.\n\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces. \n\n \"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.  \n\n The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years. \n\n In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\" \n\n It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre. \n\n Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\" \n\n JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.\nEach UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"  \n\n Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker. \n\n Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads.  \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\" \n\n Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\" \n\n The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.     \n\n And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What problem did the New Towns solve?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_1", "options": ["Decaying infrastructure of old British cities. ", "Cultural conflict between rural and urban areas. ", "A lack of nature in urban areas. ", "Affordable housing"], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the author’s attitude toward New Towns?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_2", "options": ["The author thinks New Towns were good for the upper class. ", "The author thinks New Towns divided the country. ", "The author thinks New Towns were a failure. ", "The author thinks New Towns were more successful than they are given credit for. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "When were New Towns built in England?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_3", "options": ["20 years ago", "The end of the 19th century", "After World War II", "The Industrial Revolution"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What makes New Towns different from other towns?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_4", "options": ["In New Towns, the upper class, middle class, and working class live side by side. ", "Everything is planned and built at the same time. ", "New Towns include historical landmarks that are preserved by law. ", "New Towns don’t have crime. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who were New Towns created for?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_5", "options": ["The upper class", "The middle class", "The working class", "Architects"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was appealing about the New Towns?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_6", "options": ["All of the houses looked the same. ", "They were self-sufficient, quaint communities. ", "They had a thriving art scene. ", "They had intricate, traditional architecture."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to the author, what went wrong with the New Towns?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_7", "options": ["People did not move to the New Towns. ", "They were built too close to major cities.", "They did not have enough green space. ", "They were executed poorly."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the overall argument the author is making?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_8", "options": ["England should invest into making more, better New Towns. ", "England should improve transportation between New Towns and major cities.", "England should not invest more money into New Towns.", "England’s New Towns are better than towns in other European countries. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "The author points out some criticism of the New Towns. Which is NOT a drawback the author writes about?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_9", "options": ["Strong urban communities were broken apart. ", "New Towns did not offer the walkability of the city; it was necessary to own a car in a New Town. ", "The construction took too long, leaving residents without necessary amenities. ", "The housing developments were too cookie-cutter, with no character. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to the author, were New Towns successful?", "question_unique_id": "99908_FEGYRXVA_10", "options": ["Yes, because people who live in them are proud of their towns. ", "Some were successful and some were not.", "No, because the infrastructure is faulty. ", "Yes, because England no longer has a housing problem. "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/cities/new-towns", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99928", "set_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-openaccess", "title": "Open Access: Scope", "year": 2019, "author": "Peter Suber", "topic": "Open access article", "article": "Open Access: Scope\nAs we saw in chapter 1, any kind of content can in principle be OA. Any kind of content can be digitized, and any kind of digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. In that sense, the potential scope of OA is universal. Hence, instead of saying that OA applies to some categories or genres and not to others, it’s better to say that some categories are easier and some harder.\nOA is not limited to the sciences, where it is known best and moving fastest, but extends to the arts and humanities. It’s not limited to research created in developed countries, where it is most voluminous, but includes research from developing countries. (Nor, conversely, is it limited to research from developing countries, where the need is most pressing.) It’s not limited to publicly funded research, where the argument is almost universally accepted, but includes privately funded and unfunded research. It’s not limited to present and future publications, where most policies focus, but includes past publications. It’s not limited to born-digital work, where the technical barriers are lowest, but includes work digitized from print, microfiche, film, and other media. It’s not limited to text, but includes data, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code.\nThere are serious, practical, successful campaigns to provide OA to the many kinds of content useful to scholars, including:\n• peer-reviewed research articles\n• unrefereed preprints destined to be peer-reviewed research articles\n• theses and dissertations\n• research data\n• government data\n• source code\n• conference presentations (texts, slides, audio, video)\n• scholarly monographs\n• textbooks\n• novels, stories, plays, and poetry\n• newspapers\n• archival records and manuscripts\n• images (artworks, photographs, diagrams, maps)\n• teaching and learning materials (“open education resources” and “open courseware”)\n• digitized print works (some in the public domain, some still under copyright)\nFor some of these categories, such as data and source code, we need OA to facilitate the testing and replication of scientific experiments. For others, such as data, images, and digitized work from other media, we need OA in order to give readers the same chance to analyze the primary materials that the authors had. For others, such as articles, monographs, dissertations, and conference presentations, we need OA simply to share results and analysis with everyone who might benefit from them.\nA larger book could devote sections to each category. Here I focus on just a few.\n5.1 Preprints, Postprints, and Peer Review\nThroughout most of its history, newcomers to OA assumed that the whole idea was to bypass peer review. That assumption was false and harmful, and we’ve made good progress in correcting it. The purpose of OA is to remove access barriers, not quality filters. Today many peer-reviewed OA journals are recognized for their excellence, many excellent peer-reviewed toll-access journal publishers are experimenting with OA, and green OA for peer-reviewed articles is growing rapidly. Unfortunately many newcomers unaware of these developments still assume that the purpose of OA is to bypass peer review. Some of them deplore the prospect, some rejoice in it, and their passion spreads the misinformation even farther.\nAll the public statements in support of OA stress the importance of peer review. Most of the enthusiasm for OA is enthusiasm for OA to peer-reviewed literature. At the same time, we can acknowledge that many of the people working hard for this goal are simultaneously exploring new forms of scholarly communication that exist outside the peer-review system, such as preprint exchanges, blogs, wikis, databases, discussion forums, and social media.\nIn OA lingo, a “preprint” is any version of an article prior to peer review, such as a draft circulating among colleagues or the version submitted to a journal. A “postprint” is any version approved by peer review. The scope of green OA deliberately extends to both preprints and postprints, just as the function of gold OA deliberately includes peer review.\nWe could say that OA preprint initiatives focus on bypassing peer review. But it would be more accurate to say that they focus on OA for works destined for peer review but not yet peer reviewed. Preprint exchanges didn’t arise because they bypass peer review but because they bypass delay. They make new work known more quickly to people in the field, creating new and earlier opportunities for citation, discussion, verification, and collaboration. How quickly? They make new work public the minute that authors are ready to make it public.\nOA preprints offer obvious reader-side benefits to those tracking new developments. But this may be a case where the author-side benefits swamp the reader-side benefits. Preprint exchanges give authors the earliest possible time stamp to mark their priority over others working on the same problem. (Historical aside: It’s likely that in the seventeenth century, journals superseded books as the primary literature of science precisely because they were faster than books in giving authors an authoritative public time stamp.)\nPreprint exchanges existed before the internet, but OA makes them faster, larger, more useful, and more widely read. Despite these advantages, however, preprint exchanges don’t represent the whole OA movement or even the whole green OA movement. On the contrary, most green OA and most OA overall focuses on peer-reviewed articles.\nAs soon as scholars had digital networks to connect peers together, they began using them to tinker with peer review. Can we use networks to find good referees, or to gather, share, and weigh their comments? Can we use networks to implement traditional models of peer review more quickly or effectively? Can we use networks to do better than the traditional models? Many scholars answer “yes” to some or all of these questions, and many of those saying “yes” also support OA. One effect is a creative and long-overdue efflorescence of experiments with new forms of peer review. Another effect, however, is the false perception that OA entails peer-review reform. For example, many people believe that OA requires a certain kind of peer review, favors some kinds of peer review and disfavors others, can’t proceed until we agree on the best form of peer review, or benefits only those who support certain kinds of peer-review reforms. All untrue.\nOA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most traditional and conservative to the most networked and innovative. Some OA journals deliberately adopt traditional models of peer review, in order to tweak just the access variable of scholarly journals. Some deliberately use very new models, in order to push the evolution of peer review. OA is a kind of access, not a kind of editorial policy. It’s not intrinsically tied to any particular model of peer review any more than it’s intrinsically tied to any particular business model or method of digital preservation.\nWith one exception, achieving OA and reforming peer review are independent projects. That is, we can achieve OA without reforming peer review, and we can reform peer review without achieving OA. The exception is that some new forms of peer review presuppose OA.\nFor example,\nopen review\nmakes submissions OA, before or after some prepublication review, and invites community comments. Some open-review journals will use those comments to decide whether to accept the article for formal publication, and others will already have accepted the article and use the community comments to complement or carry forward the quality evaluation started by the journal. Open review requires OA, but OA does not require open review.\nPeer review does not depend on the price or medium of a journal. Nor does the value, rigor, or integrity of peer review. We know that peer review at OA journals can be as rigorous and honest as peer review at the best toll-access journals because it can use the same procedures, the same standards, and even the same people (editors and referees) as the best toll-access journals. We see this whenever toll-access journals convert to OA without changing their methods or personnel.\n5.2 Theses and Dissertations\nTheses and dissertations are the most useful kinds of invisible scholarship and the most invisible kinds of useful scholarship. Because of their high quality and low visibility, the access problem is worth solving.\nFortunately OA for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) is easier than for any other kind of research literature. Authors have not yet transferred rights to a publisher, no publisher permissions are needed, no publisher fears need be answered, and no publisher negotiations slow things down or make the outcome uncertain. Virtually all theses and dissertations are now born digital, and institutions expecting electronic submission generally provide OA, the reverse of the default for journal publishers.\nThe chief obstacle seems to be author fear that making a thesis or dissertation OA will reduce the odds that a journal will publish an article-length version. While these fears are sometimes justified, the evidence suggests that in most cases they are not.\nUniversities expecting OA for ETDs teach the next generation of scholars how easy OA is to provide, how beneficial it is, and how routine it can be. They help cultivate lifelong habits of self-archiving. And they elicit better work. By giving authors a foreseeable, real audience beyond the dissertation committee, an OA policy strengthens existing incentives to do rigorous, original work.\nIf a university requires theses and dissertations to be new and significant works of scholarship, then it ought to expect them to be made public, just as it expects new and significant scholarship by faculty to be made public. Sharing theses and dissertations that meet the school’s high standard reflects well on the institution and benefits other researchers in the field. The university mission to advance research by young scholars has two steps, not one. First, help students produce good work, and then help others find, use, and build on that good work.\n5.3 Books\nThe OA movement focuses on journal articles because journals don’t pay authors for their articles. This frees article authors to consent to OA without losing money. By contrast, book authors either earn royalties or hope to earn royalties.\nBecause the line between royalty-free and royalty-producing literature is bright (and life is short), many OA activists focus exclusively on journal articles and leave books aside. I recommend a different tactic: treat journal articles as low-hanging fruit, but treat books as higher-hanging fruit rather than forbidden fruit. There are even reasons to think that OA for some kinds of books is easier to attain than OA for journal articles.\nThe scope of OA should be determined by author consent, not genre. Imagine an author of a journal article who withholds consent to OA. The economic door is open but the author is not walking through it. This helps us see that relinquishing revenue is only relevant when it leads to consent, and consent suffices whether or not it’s based on relinquishing revenue. It follows that if authors of royalty-producing genres, like books, consent to OA, then we’ll have the same basis for OA to books that we have for OA to articles.\nEven if books are higher-hanging fruit, they’re not out of reach. Two arguments are increasingly successful in persuading book authors to consent to OA.\nRoyalties on most scholarly monographs range between zero and meager. If your royalties are better than that, congratulations. (I’ve earned book royalties; I’m grateful for them, and I wish all royalty-earning authors success.) The case for OA doesn’t ask authors to make a new sacrifice or leave money on the table. It merely asks them to weigh the risk to their royalties against the benefit of OA, primarily the benefit of a larger audience and greater impact. For many book authors, the benefit will outweigh the risk. The benefit is large and the realistic prospect of royalties is low.\nThere is growing evidence that for some kinds of books, full-text OA editions boost the net sales of the priced, printed editions. OA may increase royalties rather than decrease them.\nThe first argument says that even if OA puts royalties at risk, the benefits might outweigh the risks. The second argument says that OA might not reduce royalties at all, and that conventional publication without an OA edition might be the greater risk. Both say, in effect, that authors should be empirical and realistic about this. Don’t presume that your royalties will be high when there’s evidence they will be low, and don’t presume that OA will kill sales when there’s evidence it could boost them.\nBoth arguments apply to authors, but the second applies to publishers as well. When authors have already transferred rights—and the OA decision—to a publisher, then the case rests on the second argument. A growing number of academic book publishers are either persuaded or so intrigued that they’re experimenting.\nMany book authors want a print edition, badly. But the second argument is not only compatible with print but depends on print. The model is to give away the OA edition and sell a print edition, usually via print-on-demand (POD).\nWhy would anyone buy a print book when the full text is OA? The answer is that many people don’t want to read a whole book on a screen or gadget, and don’t want to print out a whole book on their printer. They use OA editions for searching and sampling. When they discover a book that piques their curiosity or meets their personal standards of relevance and quality, they’ll buy a copy. Or, many of them will buy a copy.\nEvidence has been growing for about a decade that this phenomenon works for some books, or some kinds of books, even if it doesn’t work for others. For example, it seems to work for books like novels and monographs, which readers want to read from beginning to end, or which they want to have on their shelves. It doesn’t seem to work for books like encyclopedias, from which readers usually want just an occasional snippet.\nOne problem is running a controlled experiment, since we can’t publish the same book with and without an OA edition to compare the sales. (If we publish a book initially without an OA edition and later add an OA edition, the time lag itself could affect sales.) Another variable is that ebook readers are becoming more and more consumer friendly. If the “net boost to sales” phenomenon is real, and if it depends on the ergonomic discomforts of reading digital books, then better gadgets may make the phenomenon disappear. If the net-boost phenomenon didn’t depend on ergonomic hurdles to digital reading, or didn’t depend entirely on them, then it might survive any sort of technological advances. There’s a lot of experimenting still to do, and fortunately or unfortunately it must be done in a fast-changing environment.\nThe U.S. National Academies Press began publishing full-text OA editions of its monographs alongside priced, printed editions in March 1994, which is ancient history in internet time. Over the years Michael Jensen, its director of web communications and director of publishing technologies, has published a series of articles showing that the OA editions increased the sales of the toll-access editions.\nIn February 2007, the American Association of University Presses issued a Statement on Open Access in which it called for experiments with OA monographs and mixed OA/toll-access business models. By May 2011, the AAUP reported that 17 member presses, or 24 percent of its survey respondents, were already publishing full-text OA books.\nThe question isn’t whether some people will read the OA edition without buying the toll-access edition. Some will. The question isn’t even whether more readers of the OA edition will buy the toll-access edition than not buy it. The question is whether more readers of the OA edition will buy the toll-access edition\nthan would have bought\nthe toll-access edition without the OA edition to alert them to its existence and help them evaluate its relevance and quality. If there are enough OA-inspired buyers, then it doesn’t matter that there are also plenty of OA-satisfied nonbuyers.\nBook authors and publishers who are still nervous could consent to delayed OA and release the OA edition only after six months or a year. During the time when the monograph is toll-access only, they could still provide OA excerpts and metadata to help readers and potential buyers find the book and start to assess it.\nEven the youngest scholars today grew up in a world in which there were more print books in the average university library than gratis OA books online. But that ratio reversed around 2006, give or take. Today there are many more gratis OA books online than print books in the average academic library, and we’re steaming toward the next crossover point when there will be many more gratis OA books online than print books in the world’s largest libraries, academic or not.\nA few years ago, those of us who focus on OA to journal literature were sure that journal articles were lower-hanging fruit than any kind of print books, including public-domain books. But we were wrong. There are still good reasons to make journal literature the strategic focus of the OA movement, and we’re still making good progress on that front. But the lesson of the fast-moving book-scanning projects is that misunderstanding, inertia, and permission are more serious problems than digitization. The permission problem is solved for public-domain books. Digitizing them by the millions is a titanic technical undertaking, but it turns out to be a smaller problem than getting millions of copyrighted articles into OA journals or OA repositories, even when they’re written by authors who can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA for new journal articles faces publisher resistance, print-era incentives, and misunderstandings in every category of stakeholders, including authors and publishers. As the late Jim Gray used to say, “May all your problems be technical.”\n5.4 Access to What?\nNot all the literature that researchers want to find, retrieve, and read should be called knowledge. We want access to serious proposals for knowledge even if they turn out to be false or incomplete. We want access to serious hypotheses even if we’re still testing them and debating their merits. We want access to the data and analysis offered in support of the claims we’re evaluating. We want access to all the arguments, evidence, and discussion. We want access to everything that could help us decide what to call knowledge, not just to the results that we agree to call knowledge. If access depended on the outcome of debate and inquiry, then access could not contribute to debate and inquiry.\nWe don’t have a good name for this category larger than knowledge, but here I’ll just call it research. Among other things, research includes knowledge and knowledge claims or proposals, hypotheses and conjectures, arguments and analysis, evidence and data, algorithms and methods, evaluation and interpretation, debate and discussion, criticism and dissent, summary and review. OA to research should be OA to the whole shebang. Inquiry and research suffer when we have access to anything less.\nSome people call the journal literature the “minutes” of science, as if it were just a summary. But it’s more than that. If the minutes of a meeting summarize a discussion, the journal literature is a large part of the discussion itself. Moreover, in an age of conferences, preprint servers, blogs, wikis, databases, listservs, and email, the journal literature is not the whole discussion. Wikipedia aspires to provide OA to a summary of knowledge, and (wisely) refuses to accept original research. But the larger OA movement wants OA to knowledge and original research themselves, as well as the full discussion about what we know and what we don’t. It wants OA to the primary and secondary sources where knowledge is taking shape through a messy process that is neither consistent (as it works through the clash of conflicting hypotheses) nor stable (as it discards weak claims and considers new ones that appear stronger). The messiness and instability are properties of a discussion, not properties of the minutes of a discussion. The journal literature isn’t just a report on the process but a major channel of the process itself. And not incidentally, OA is valuable not just for making the process public but for facilitating the process and making it more effective, expeditious, transparent, and global.\nTo benefit from someone’s research, we need access to it, and for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether the research is in the sciences or humanities. We need access to medical or physical research before we can use it to tackle a cure for malaria or devise a more efficient solar panel. We need access to an earthquake prediction before we can use it to plan emergency responses.\n                                         \n                                          And we need access to literary and philosophical research in order to understand a difficult passage in Homer or the strength of a response to epistemological skepticism.\nFor this kind of utility, the relevant comparison is not between pure and applied research or between the sciences and humanities. The relevant comparison is between any kind of research when OA and the same kind of research when locked behind price and permission barriers. Whether a given line of research serves wellness or wisdom, energy or enlightenment, protein synthesis or public safety, OA helps it serve those purposes faster, better, and more universally.\n5.5 Access for Whom?\nAnswer: human beings and machines.\n5.5.1 OA for Lay Readers\nSome have opposed OA on the ground that not everyone needs it, which is a little like opposing the development of a safe and effective new medicine on the ground that not every one needs it. It’s easy to agree that not everyone needs it. But in the case of OA, there’s no easy way to identify those who do and those who don’t. In addition, there’s no easy way, and no reason, to deliver it only to those who need it and deny it to everyone else.\nOA allows us to provide access to everyone who cares to have access, without patronizing guesswork about who really wants it, who really deserves it, and who would really benefit from it. Access for everyone with an internet connection helps authors, by enlarging their audience and impact, and helps readers who want access and who might have been excluded by central planners trying to decide in advance whom to enfranchise. The idea is to stop thinking of knowledge as a commodity to meter out to deserving customers, and to start thinking of it as a public good, especially when it is given away by its authors, funded with public money, or both.\nSome lobbyists for toll-access publishers argue, in good faith or bad, that the goal of OA is to bring access to lay readers. This sets up their counter-argument that lay readers don’t care to read cutting-edge research and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. Some publishers go a step further and argue that access to research would harm lay readers.\nThis is a two-step argument, that OA is primarily for lay readers and that lay readers don’t need it. Each step is false. The first step overlooks the unmet demand for access by professional researchers, as if all professionals who wanted access already had it, and the second overlooks the unmet demand for access by lay readers, as if lay readers had no use for access.\nOne reason to think the first step is put forward in bad faith is that it overlooks the very conspicuous fact that the OA movement is driven by researchers who are emphatic about wanting the benefits of OA for themselves. It also overlooks the evidence of wide and widespread access gaps even for professional researchers. (See section 2.1 on problems.)\nThe problem with the second step is presumption. How does anyone know in advance the level of demand for peer-reviewed research among lay readers? When peer-reviewed literature is toll-access and expensive, then lack of access by lay readers and consumers doesn’t show lack of demand, any more than lack of access to Fort Knox shows lack of demand for gold. We have to remove access barriers before we can distinguish lack of access from lack of interest. The experiment has been done, more than once. When the U.S. National Library of Medicine converted to OA in 2004, for example, visitors to its web site increased more than a hundredfold.\nA common related argument is that lay readers surfing the internet are easily misled by unsupported claims, refuted theories, anecdotal evidence, and quack remedies. Even if true, however, it’s an argument for rather than against expanding online access to peer-reviewed research. If we’re really worried about online dreck, we should dilute it with high-quality research rather than leave the dreck unchallenged and uncorrected.\nMany of us medical nonprofessionals—who may be professionals in another field—want access to medical research in order to read about our own conditions or the conditions of family members. But even if few fall into that category, most of us still want access for our doctors, nurses, and hospitals. We still want access for the nonprofit advocacy organizations working on our behalf, such as the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Cystinosis Research Network, or the Spina Bifida Association of America. And in turn, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and advocacy organizations want access for laboratory researchers. As I argued earlier (section 1.2), OA benefits researchers directly and benefits everyone else indirectly by benefiting researchers.\nA May 2006 Harris poll showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted OA for publicly funded research. 83 percent wanted it for their doctors and 82 percent wanted it for everyone. 81 percent said it would help medical patients and their families cope with chronic illness and disability. 62 percent said it would speed up the discovery of new cures. For each poll question, a fairly large percentage of respondents checked “neither agree nor disagree” (between 13 and 30 percent), which meant that only tiny minorities disagreed with the OA propositions. Only 3 percent didn’t want OA for their doctors, 4 percent didn’t want it for themselves, and 5 percent didn’t think it would help patients or their families.\nThe ratio of professional to lay readers of peer-reviewed research undoubtedly varies from field to field. But for the purpose of OA policy, it doesn’t matter what the ratio is in any field. What matters is that neither group has sufficient access today, when most research journals are toll-access. Professional researchers don’t have sufficient access through their institutional libraries because subscription prices are rising faster than library budgets, even at the wealthiest libraries in the world. Motivated lay readers don’t have sufficient access because few public libraries subscribe to any peer-reviewed research journals, and none to the full range.\nThe argument against access for lay readers suffers from more than false assumptions about unmet demand. Either it concedes or doesn’t concede that OA is desirable for professional researchers. If it doesn’t, then it should argue first against the strongest opponent and try to make the case against OA for professionals. But if it does concede that OA for professionals is a good idea, then it wants to build a selection system for deciding who deserves access, and an authentication system for sorting the sheep from the goats. Part of the beauty of OA is that providing access to everyone is cheaper and easier than providing access to some and blocking access to others. We should only raise costs and pay for the apparatus of exclusion when there’s a very good reason to do so.\n5.5.2 OA for Machines\nWe also want access for machines. I don’t mean the futuristic altruism in which kindly humans want to help curious machines answer their own questions. I mean something more selfish. We’re well into the era in which serious research is mediated by sophisticated software. If our machines don’t have access, then we don’t have access. Moreover, if we can’t get access for our machines, then we lose a momentous opportunity to enhance access with processing.\nThink about the size of the body of literature to which you have access, online and off. Now think realistically about the subset to which you’d have practical access if you couldn’t use search engines, or if search engines couldn’t index the literature you needed.\nInformation overload didn’t start with the internet. The internet does vastly increase the volume of work to which we have access, but at the same time it vastly increases our ability to find what we need. We zero in on the pieces that deserve our limited time with the aid of powerful software, or more precisely, powerful software with access. Software helps us learn what exists, what’s new, what’s relevant, what others find relevant, and what others are saying about it. Without these tools, we couldn’t cope with information overload. Or we’d have to redefine “coping” as artificially reducing the range of work we are allowed to consider, investigate, read, or retrieve.\nSome publishers have seriously argued that high toll-access journal prices and limited library budgets help us cope with information overload, as if the literature we can’t afford always coincides with the literature we don’t need. But of course much that is relevant to our projects is unaffordable to our libraries. If any problems are intrinsic to a very large and fast-growing, accessible corpus of literature, they don’t arise from size itself, or size alone, but from limitations on our discovery tools. With OA and sufficiently powerful tools, we could always find and retrieve what we needed. Without sufficiently powerful tools, we could not. Replacing OA with high-priced toll access would only add new obstacles to research, even if it simultaneously made the accessible corpus small enough for weaker discovery tools to master. In Clay Shirky’s concise formulation, the real problem is not information overload but filter failure.\nOA is itself a spectacular inducement for software developers to create useful tools to filter what we can find. As soon as the tools are finished, they apply to a free, useful, and fast-growing body of online literature. Conversely, useful tools optimized for OA literature create powerful incentives for authors and publishers to open up their work. As soon as their work is OA, a vast array of powerful tools make it more visible and useful. In the early days of OA, shortages on each side created a vicious circle: the small quantity of OA literature provided little incentive to develop new tools optimized for making it more visible and useful, and the dearth of powerful tools provided little extra incentive to make new work OA. But today a critical mass of OA literature invites the development of useful tools, and a critical mass of useful tools gives authors and publishers another set of reasons to make their work OA.\nAll digital literature, OA or toll access, is machine-readable and supports new and useful kinds of processing. But toll-access literature minimizes that opportunity by shrinking the set of inputs with access fees, password barriers, copyright restrictions, and software locks. By removing price and permission barriers, OA maximizes this opportunity and spawns an ecosystem of tools for searching, indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting, mashing-up, and other kinds of processing, not to mention myriad forms of crunching and connecting that we can’t even imagine today. One bedrock purpose of OA is to give these research-enhancing, utility-amplifying tools the widest possible scope of operation.\nIn this sense, the ultimate promise of OA is not to provide free online texts for human reading, even if that is the highest-value end use. The ultimate promise of OA is to provide free online data for software acting as the antennae, prosthetic eyeballs, research assistants, and personal librarians of all serious researchers.\nOpening research literature for human users also opens it for software to crunch the literature for the benefit of human users. We can even hope that OA itself will soon be old hat, taken for granted by a new generation of tools and services that depend on it. As those tools and services come along, they will be the hot story and they will deserve to be. Technologists will note that they all depend on OA, and historians will note that OA itself was not easily won.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the purpose of OA?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_1", "options": ["Open access would remove access barriers to content, such as fees or membership requirements, so that the content is available to everyone. ", "Open access would give anyone who works at a university unlimited access to content.", "Open access would allow anyone to publish what they want online, even if the information is untrue.", "Open access would give educators unlimited access to databases. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the author’s message about OA?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_2", "options": ["The author believes that there should be open access to all content that could be useful to scholars.", "The author believes that lay people should not have open access to academic articles. ", "The author believes that printed books are superior to digital content.", "The author believes that open access will diminish the peer-review process. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to the author, does open access mean articles won’t be peer reviewed?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_3", "options": ["No, because many journals will still require peer review before publishing content.", "No, because lay people will not want to read articles that are not peer reviewed. ", "Yes, because there will not be an incentive to do the peer review process. ", "Yes, because journals won’t pay authors for their articles. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the “low hanging fruit”?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_4", "options": ["Print books", "Conference presentations ", "Academic journal articles", "Textbooks"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the “high hanging fruit”?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_5", "options": ["Print books", "Theses and dissertations", "Postprint articles", "Academic journal articles"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is one reason that the OA movement focuses mainly on academic articles?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_6", "options": ["Other types of content is already free to the public. ", "Lay people are not interested in reading academic journals. ", "People are not reading books anymore.", "Journals don’t pay authors for their work, so open access won’t impact an author’s compensation. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "According to the author, who will benefit the most from OA?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_7", "options": ["Researchers ", "Journalists ", "Lay people", "Graduate students "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to the author, why should preprint be made OA?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_8", "options": ["Lay people should have the same access as professional researchers. ", "The peer review process is outdated. ", "Lay people do not care if an article is peer reviewed. ", "Researchers will have quicker access to new work instead of having to wait for the long process of peer review. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why would a book author want to have their work be OA?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_9", "options": ["Book authors care more about people reading their work than getting financially compensated.", "Book authors would get paid more from online advertising than selling their books in a store. ", "People are not buying print books anymore.", "Open access will encourage some people to buy the print version. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which is NOT an argument for OA?", "question_unique_id": "99928_0JALRSQJ_10", "options": ["People should create content for free because financial compensation can create bias.   ", "Software can organize the information to make research faster and easier.", "Lay people will receive better medical care if their medical team has open access to current research.", "Knowledge needs to be seen as a public good rather than a commodity."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/u3zxluq1/release/2", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu"}
{"article_id": "99925", "set_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-openaccess", "title": "Open Access: Motivation", "year": 2019, "author": "Peter Suber", "topic": "Open access article", "article": "Open Access: Motivation\n2.1 OA as Solving Problems\nThere are lamentably many problems for which OA is part of the solution. Here are fifteen ways in which the current system of disseminating peer-reviewed research is deeply dysfunctional for researchers and their institutions, even if highly profitable for the largest conventional publishers. I’ve limited the list to those for which OA offers some hope of relief.\nWe are in the midst of a pricing crisis for scholarly journals. For four decades, subscription prices have risen significantly faster than inflation and significantly faster than library budgets. Subscription prices have risen about twice as fast as the price of healthcare, for most people the very index of skyrocketing, unsustainable prices. We’re long past the era of damage control and into the era of damage.\nWhen most peer-reviewed research journals are toll access, a pricing crisis entails an access crisis. Before the rise of OA, all peer-reviewed journals were toll access, and even today about three-quarters of peer-reviewed journals are toll access.\n                                                 \n                                                  When subscribers respond to skyrocketing prices by canceling subscriptions, access decreases. Cancellations mitigate one problem and aggravate another. A study by the Research Information Network in late 2009 found that 40 percent of surveyed researchers had trouble accessing journal literature at least once a week, and two-thirds at least once a month. About 60 percent said that access limitations hindered their research, and 18 percent said the hindrance was significant.\nEven the wealthiest academic libraries in the world suffer serious access gaps. When the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously for a strong OA policy in February 2008, Professor Stuart Shieber explained that cumulative price increases had forced the Harvard library to undertake “serious cancellation efforts” for budgetary reasons.\nAccess gaps are worse at other affluent institutions, and worse still in the developing world. In 2008, Harvard subscribed to 98,900 serials and Yale to 73,900. The best-funded research library in India, at the Indian Institute of Science, subscribed to 10,600. Several sub-Saharan African university libraries subscribed to zero, offering their patrons access to no conventional journals except those donated by publishers.\nThe largest publishers minimize cancellations by bundling hundreds or thousands of high-demand and low-demand journals into “big deals,” which reduce the bargaining power of libraries and the cost-cutting options available to them. On the plus side, big deals give universities access to more titles than they had before and reduce the average cost per title. But when libraries try to cancel individual titles that are low in quality or low in local usage, publishers raise the price on the remaining titles. Bundling gives libraries little room to save money with carefully targeted cancellations, and after a point forces them to cancel all or none.\nBy design, big deals are too big to cancel without pain, giving publishers leverage to raise prices out of proportion to journal costs, size, usage, impact, and quality. Without bundling, libraries would have responded to the pricing crisis with a devastating number of cancellations. With bundling, publishers protect even second-rate journals from cancellation, protect their own profits, and shift the devastation to library budgets.\nWhile the damage grows, the largest journal publishers earn higher profit margins than the largest oil companies. In 2010, Elsevier’s journal division had a profit margin of 35.7 percent while ExxonMobil had only 28.1 percent.\nBy soaking up library budgets, big deals harm journals from small nonprofit publishers excluded from the bundles. This exacerbates the problem for researchers because journals from these smaller publishers tend to be higher in quality and impact than the journals protected by the big deals (more in #11 below).\nTo top it off, most big deals include confidentiality clauses preventing universities from disclosing the prices they pay. The effect is to reduce bargaining and price competition even further. In 2009, three academics launched the Big Deal Contract Project to use state open-record laws to force disclosure of big-deal contracts with public universities. Elsevier went to court to block the release of its contract with Washington State University and lost.\nDuring the decades in which journal prices have been rising faster than inflation and faster than library budgets, libraries have cut into their book budgets to pay for journals. According to James McPherson, “In 1986 [academic] libraries spent 44 percent of their budgets on books and 56 percent on journals; by 1997 the imbalance had grown to 28 percent for books and 72 percent for journals.” Because academic libraries now buy fewer books, academic book publishers now accept fewer manuscripts. One result is that the journal crisis, concentrated in the sciences, has precipitated a monograph crisis, concentrated in the humanities.\nNew restrictions on electronic journals add a permissions crisis on top of the pricing crisis. For publishers of online toll-access journals, there are business reasons to limit the freedom of users to copy and redistribute texts, even if that leaves users with fewer rights than they had with print journals. But these business reasons create pernicious consequences for libraries and their patrons.\nAmong the results: When libraries pay for subscriptions to digital journals, they don’t buy or own their own digital copies but merely rent or license them for a period of time. If they cancel a subscription, they could lose access to past issues. They could violate the publishers’ copyrights if they make or hold copies for long-term preservation without special permission or payment, shifting the task of preservation more and more to publishers who are not preservation experts and who tend to make preservation decisions with only future market potential in mind. Libraries can’t migrate older content, such as journal backfiles, to new media and formats to keep them readable as technology changes, at least not without special permission or risk of liability. Some publishers don’t allow libraries to share digital texts by interlibrary loan and instead require them to make printouts, scan the printouts, and lend the scans. Libraries must negotiate for prices and licensing terms, often under nondisclosure agreements, and retain and consult complex licensing agreements that differ from publisher to publisher and year to year. They must police or negotiate access for walk-in patrons, online users off campus, and visiting faculty. They must limit access and usage by password, internet-protocol (IP) address, usage hours, institutional affiliation, physical location, and caps on simultaneous users. They must implement authentication systems and administer proxy servers. They must make fair-use judgment calls, erring on the side of seeking permission or forgoing use. They must explain to patrons that cookies and registration make anonymous inquiry impossible and that some uses allowed by law are not allowed by the technology.\nI make this list library-centric rather than user-centric because the pricing crisis has nearly killed off individual subscriptions. Most subscribers to toll-access journals are libraries, and most authorized readers of toll-access journals are library patrons.\nIn short, conventional publishers regard easy online sharing as a problem while researchers and libraries regard it as a solution. The internet is widening the gap between the interests of conventional publishers and the interests of researchers and research institutions.\nConventional publishers are adapting to the digital age in some respects. They’re migrating most print journals to digital formats\n                                                 \n                                                  and even dropping their print editions. They’re incorporating hyperlinks, search engines, and alert services. A growing number are digitizing their backfiles and integrating texts with data. But the revolutionary power to share content without price or permission barriers, to solve the pricing and permission crises at a stroke and liberate research for the benefit of all, is the one innovation they fear most.\nConventional publishers acquire their key assets from academics without charge. Authors donate the texts of new articles and the rights to publish them. Editors and referees donate the peer-review judgments to improve and validate their quality.\n                                         \n                                          But then conventional publishers charge for access to the resulting articles, with no exception for authors, editors, referees, or their institutions. Publishers argue that they add value to the submitted manuscripts, which is true. But other players in the game, such as authors, editors, and referees, add far more value than publishers. For funded research, the funding agency is another critical player. It too must pay for access to the resulting articles even when the cost of a research project is hundreds of thousands of times greater than the cost of publication. Among these five value-adders—authors, editors, referees, funders, and publishers—publishers add the least value and generally demand the ownership rights.\nConventional publishers use a business model that depends on access barriers and creates artificial scarcity. All publishers (conventional and OA) need revenue to cover their costs, but OA publishers use business models that dispense with access barriers and avoid artificial scarcity. Toll-access publishers contend that the OA business models are inadequate. We can debate that, for example, in light of the evidence that more than 7,500 peer-reviewed OA journals are finding ways to pay their bills, the fact that a growing number of for-profit OA publishers are already showing profits, and the fact that most of the money needed to support OA journals is currently tied up supporting toll-access journals. (See chapter 7 on economics.)\nBut in the end it doesn’t matter whether toll-access publishers are right or wrong to believe that their revenue requires access barriers. The deeper problem is that we donate time, labor, and public money to create new knowledge and then hand control over the results to businesses that believe, correctly or incorrectly, that their revenue and survival depend on limiting access to that knowledge. If toll-access publishers are right that they must erect access barriers to reimburse themselves, then the problem is that we allow them to be the only outlets for most peer-reviewed research. If they’re wrong about the need for access barriers, then the problem is that we tolerate their access barriers, even for publicly funded research and gifts from authors who write for impact and not for money.\nConventional publishers often criticize OA initiatives for “interfering with the market,” but scholarly publishing is permeated by state action, public subsidies, gift culture, and anticompetitive practices.\n                                                 \n                                                  All scholarly journals (toll access and OA) benefit from public subsidies. Most scientific research is funded by public agencies using public money, conducted and written up by researchers working at public institutions and paid with public money, and then peer-reviewed by faculty at public institutions and paid with public money. Even when researchers and peer reviewers work at private universities, their institutions are subsidized by publicly funded tax exemptions and tax-deductible donations. Most toll-access journal subscriptions are purchased by public institutions and paid with taxpayer money.\nLast and not least, publishers exercise their control over research articles through copyright, a temporary government-created monopoly.\nEvery scholarly journal is a natural mini-monopoly in the sense that no other journal publishes the same articles. There’s nothing improper about this natural mini-monopoly. It’s a side-effect of the desirable fact that journals don’t duplicate one another. But it means that toll-access journals compete for authors much more than they compete for subscribers. If you need an article published in a certain journal, then you need access to that journal. This is one reason why free and expensive journals can coexist in the same field, even at the same level of quality. The free journals don’t drive the expensive journals out of business or even drive down their prices. By weakening the competition for buyers, however, this natural monopoly weakens the market feedback that would otherwise punish declining quality, declining usage, and rising prices.\nLaid on top of this natural monopoly are several layers of artificial monopoly. One kind of evidence is that large commercial publishers charge higher prices and raise their prices faster than small, nonprofit publishers. Yet, the scholarly consensus is that quality, impact, and prestige are generally higher at the nonprofit society journals.\nLarge conventional publishers spend some of the money they extract from libraries on marketing and “content protection” measures that benefit publishers far more than users. Indeed, the content protection measures don’t benefit users at all and make the texts less useful.\nConventional for-profit journals can increase their profit margins by decreasing their rejection rates. Reducing the rejection rate reduces the number of articles a journal must peer review for each article it publishes.\nMost faculty and researchers are aware of access gaps in their libraries but generally unaware of their causes and unaware that the problems are systemic and worsening. (A common response: My research is very specialized, so naturally my library won’t have everything I need.) On the other hand, librarians are acutely aware of library budget crises, high journal prices, hyperinflationary price increases, bundling constraints, publisher profit margins, and the disconnect between prices paid and journal costs, size, usage, impact, and quality. Researcher oblivion to the problems facing libraries adds several new problems to the mix. It means that the players who are most aware of quality are generally unaware of prices, which Jan Velterop once called the “cat food” model of purchasing. It creates a classic moral hazard in which researchers are shielded from the costs of their preferences and have little incentive to adjust their preferences accordingly. It subtracts one more market signal that might otherwise check high prices and declining quality. And while researchers support OA roughly to the extent that they know about it, and have their own reasons to work for it, their general unawareness of the crisis for libraries adds one more difficulty to the job of recruiting busy and preoccupied researchers to the cause of fixing this broken system.\nThe fact that there are enough problems to motivate different stakeholders is a kind of good news. If the system were broken for buyers (librarians) but not for users (researchers), or vice versa, that would delay any fix even longer. Or it would create a pernicious trade-off in which any fix would help one group at the expense of the other. But the system is broken for both buyers and users, which makes them natural allies.\nFinally, even in the absence of perverse journal pricing practices, the subscription or toll-access business model would not scale with the growth of research or the growth of published knowledge. If prices were low today and guaranteed to remain low forever, the total price for the total literature would still be heading toward exponential explosion. This is easiest to see at the mythical University of Croesus, which can afford 100 percent of the literature today. In that respect, Croesus is far better off than any university in the real world. Let’s suppose that journal prices and the Croesus library budget increase at the same rate forever. For simplicity, let’s assume that rate is zero. They never grow at all, not even at the rate of inflation. Let’s assume that the growth of knowledge means that the journal literature grows by 5 percent a year, a common industry estimate. Croesus can afford full coverage today, but in twenty years it would have to spend 2.7 times more than it spends today for full coverage, in sixty years 18.7 times more, and in a hundred years 131.5 times more. But since Croesus can’t spend more than it has, in twenty years the coverage it could afford would drop from 100 percent to 37.7 percent, in sixty years to 5.4 percent, and in a hundred years to less than 1 percent.\nWe need a system of research dissemination that scales with the growth of research volume. The subscription or toll-access system scales negatively by shrinking the accessible percentage of research as research itself continues to grow.\nMoney would solve the access crisis if we had enough of it, and if the amount at our disposal grew in proportion to the growing volume and growing prices of the literature. But we don’t have nearly enough money, and the money we do have doesn’t grow nearly fast enough to keep pace with the volume or prices of the literature.\nToll-access publishers don’t benefit from access gaps and have their own reasons to want to close them. But they prefer the unscalable money solution, even if university budgets and national treasuries must be squeezed by law to find the funds. Crispin Davis, then-CEO of Elsevier, once argued that “the government needs to lay down guidelines on the proportion of university funds that should be set aside for the acquisition of books and journals, or even increase funding to ensure that universities can buy all the material they need.”\nAt some point we should trust the math more than special-interest lobbies. Among the many who have done the math, the University of California concluded that the subscription model for research journals is “incontrovertibly unsustainable.”\n2.2 OA as Seizing Opportunities\nEven if we had no pressing problems to solve, we’d want to take full advantage of the unprecedented power of digital technology to share knowledge and accelerate research. But we have both problems and opportunities, and we should acknowledge that. Too much of the OA discussion is grim, utilitarian, and problem-oriented. We should complement it with discussion that is joyful, curious, and opportunity-oriented. Serious problems don’t rule out beautiful opportunities, and one of the most beautiful opportunities facing OA is that certain strategic actions will solve serious problems and seize beautiful opportunities at the same time.\nHere’s a brace of those beautiful opportunities. The internet emerged just as journal subscription prices were reaching unbearable levels. The internet widens distribution and reduces costs at the same time. Digital computers connected to a global network let us make perfect copies of arbitrary files and distribute them to a worldwide audience at zero marginal cost. For 350 years, scholars have willingly, even eagerly, published journal articles without payment, freeing them to consent to OA without losing revenue. Unrestricted access to digital files supports forms of discovery and processing impossible for paper texts and for inaccessible or use-restricted digital texts. OA is already lawful and doesn’t require copyright reform. Now that the internet is at our fingertips, OA is within the reach of researchers and research institutions acting alone and needn’t wait for publishers, legislation, or markets. Authors, editors, and referees—the whole team that produces peer-reviewed research articles—can provide OA to peer-reviewed research literature and, if necessary, cut recalcitrant publishers out of the loop. For researchers acting on their own, the goal of complete OA is even easier to attain than the goal of affordable journals.\nA less obvious but more fundamental opportunity is that knowledge is\nnonrivalrous\n(to use a term from the economics of property). We can share it without dividing it and consume it without diminishing it. My possession and use of some knowledge doesn’t exclude your possession and use of the same knowledge. Familiar physical goods like land, food, and machines are all\nrivalrous\n. To share them, we must take turns or settle for portions. Thomas Jefferson described this situation beautifully in an 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson:\nIf nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea. . . . Its peculiar character . . . is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine.\nWe seldom think about how metaphysically lucky we are that knowledge is nonrivalrous. We can all know the same ideas, stories, tunes, plans, directions, and words without my knowledge blocking yours or yours blocking mine. We’re equally fortunate that speech is nonrivalrous, since it allows us to articulate and share our knowledge without reducing it to a rivalrous commodity.\nBut for all of human history before the digital age, writing has been rivalrous. Written or recorded knowledge became a material object like stone, clay, skin, or paper, which was necessarily rivalrous. Even when we had the printing press and photocopying machine, allowing us to make many copies at comparatively low cost, each copy was a rivalrous material object. Despite its revolutionary impact, writing was hobbled from birth by this tragic limitation. We could only record nonrivalrous knowledge in a rivalrous form.\nDigital writing is the first kind of writing that does not reduce recorded knowledge to a rivalrous object. If we all have the right equipment, then we can all have copies of the same digital text without excluding one another, without multiplying our costs, and without depleting our resources.\nI’ve heard physicists refer to the prospect of room-temperature superconductivity as a “gift of nature.” Unfortunately, that is not quite within reach. But the nonrivalrous property of digital information is a gift of nature that we’ve already grasped and put to work. We only have to stand back a moment to appreciate it. To our ancestors, the prospect of recording knowledge in precise language, symbols, sounds, or images without reducing the record to a rivalrous object would have been magical. But we do it every day now, and it’s losing its magic.\nThe danger is not that we already take this property for granted but that we might stop short and fail to take full advantage of it. It can transform knowledge-sharing if we let it.\nWe take advantage of this gift when we post valuable work online and permit free access and unrestricted use for every user with an internet connection. But if we charge for access, enforce exclusion, create artificial scarcity, or prohibit essential uses, then we treat the nonrivalrous digital file like a rivalrous physical object, dismiss the opportunity, and spurn the gift.\nWhen publishers argue that there is no access problem and that we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken, there are two answers. First, they’re wrong. There are deep and serious access problems. Publishers who really don’t know this should talk to the libraries who subscribe to their journals, and even more to the libraries who don’t. But second, leaving that quarrel entirely to one side, there are good reasons to pursue OA anyway.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Who is the biggest adversary of OA?", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_1", "options": ["Universities", "Publishers", "Editors", "Researchers "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why are there increasing cancelations of journal subscriptions?", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_2", "options": ["The quality of work in the journals has decreased.", "The journals are no longer requiring peer review. ", "Researchers have realized that they can find the same information online for free.", "The price of subscriptions has become unaffordable."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who is making the most profit off of toll access journals?", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_3", "options": ["publishers", "universities", "libraries", "editors"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Who is burdened the most with the cost of big deal subscriptions?", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_4", "options": ["editors ", "researchers", "libraries ", "publishers"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How do toll access journals hinder research?", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_5", "options": ["It creates access gaps. ", "Researchers need to get a study approved by a publisher before they can begin. ", "Publishers will only publish content they think will sell. ", "The peer review process is time consuming. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why aren’t researchers advocating for OA?", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_6", "options": ["Researchers are afraid of backlash from publishers.", "Most researchers don’t know that they have access gaps.  ", "Researchers get paid by toll access journals for their articles.", "Most researchers are unaware of the high cost of journal subscriptions. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Which is NOT an argument the author makes?", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_7", "options": ["Public money is often used to fund research, so the public should have access to the results of that research.", "The subscription model is financially unsustainable for universities.", "Toll access makes access gaps inevitable.", "Publishers use their profits to lobby for policies that favor their interests. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How can OA make knowledge nonrivalrous?", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_8", "options": ["Free digital content gives everyone equal access to it. ", "OA would ensure that only a few users would be able to access an article at a time. ", "OA would ensure that lay people would have time limits for access to academic articles. ", "Publishers will no longer compete with each other for new material. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Technology makes digital content more _______________ than print.", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_9", "options": ["high-maintenance  ", "cost-effective", "time consuming", "readable"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the author’s main message? ", "question_unique_id": "99925_32KRIJXM_10", "options": ["Lay people need access to academic journals just as much as researchers do. ", "Librarians and researchers should work together to advocate for OA. ", "Researchers and librarians are not being paid enough. ", "Commercial publishers charge more, but the quality tends to be better at non-profit publishers. "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ktf344br/release/2", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu"}
{"article_id": "99926", "set_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-openaccess", "title": "Open Access: Varieties", "year": 2019, "author": "Peter Suber", "topic": "Open access article", "article": "Open Access: Varieties\nThere are many ways to deliver OA: personal web sites, blogs, wikis, databases, ebooks, videos, audios, webcasts, discussion forums, RSS feeds, and P2P networks.\n \n                                          Unless creative thinking stops now, there will be many more to come.\nHowever, two delivery vehicles dominate the current discussion: journals and repositories.\nOA journals are like non-OA journals except that they’re OA. Making good on that exception requires a new funding model, but nearly everything else about the journal could be held constant, if we wanted to hold it constant. Some OA journals are very traditional except that they’re OA, while others deliberately push the evolution of journals as a category. (Some toll-access journals also push that evolution, if we don’t count stopping short of OA.)\nLike conventional, toll-access journals, some OA journals are first-rate and some are bottom feeders. Like conventional journals, some OA journals are high in prestige and some are unknown, and some of the unknowns are high in quality and some are low. Some are on solid financial footing and some are struggling. Also like conventional journals, most are honest and some are scams.\nAs early as 2004, Thomson Scientific found that “in each of the broad subject areas studied there was at least one OA title that ranked at or near the top of its field” in citation impact. The number of high-quality, high-impact OA journals has only grown since.\nUnlike toll-access journals, however, most OA journals are new. It’s hard to generalize about OA journals beyond saying that they have all the advantages of being OA and all the disadvantages of being new.\n \n                                          To be more precise: A disappointing number of OA journals don’t have all the advantages of being OA because they retain needless permission barriers. (See section 3.3 on gratis and libre OA.) At the same time, a heartening number of OA journals no longer suffer from the disadvantages of being new.\nLike conventional journal publishers, some OA journal publishers are for-profit and some are nonprofit. Like conventional publishers, there are a few large OA publishers and a long tail of small ones, although the largest OA publishers are small compared to the largest conventional publishers. Unlike conventional publishers, the profitable for-profit OA publishers have moderate rather than obscene profit margins.\nOA repositories are online collections or databases of articles. Unlike OA journals, OA repositories have no counterpart in the traditional landscape of scholarly communication. That makes them woefully easy to overlook or misunderstand.\nBy default, new deposits in OA repositories are OA. But most repositories today support\ndark deposits\n, which can be switched to OA at a later date. Most OA repositories were launched to host peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. But often they include other sorts of content as well, such as theses and dissertations, datasets, courseware, and digitized copies of works from the special collections of the hosting institution’s library. For scholars, repositories are better at making work OA than personal web sites because repositories provide persistent URLs, take steps for long-term preservation, and don’t disappear when the author changes jobs or dies.\n3.1 Green and Gold OA\nGold and green OA differ in at least two fundamental respects.\nFirst, OA journals and repositories differ in their relationship to peer review. OA journals perform their own peer review, just like conventional journals. Repositories generally don’t perform peer review, although they host and disseminate articles peer-reviewed elsewhere. As a result, gold and green OA differ in their support costs and in the roles they can play in the scholarly communications universe.\nTerminology\nThe OA movement uses the term\ngold OA\nfor OA delivered by journals, regardless of the journal’s business model, and\ngreen OA\nfor OA delivered by repositories.\nSelf-archiving\nis the practice of depositing one’s own work in an OA repository. All three of these terms were coined by Stevan Harnad.\nSecond, OA journals obtain the rights or permissions they need directly from the rightsholders, while repositories ask depositors to obtain the needed rights or permissions on their own. Even when the depositors are the authors themselves, they may already have transferred key rights to publishers. As a result, OA journals can generate permission for reuse at will, and OA repositories generally cannot. Hence, most libre OA is gold OA, even if it’s not yet the case that most gold OA is libre OA. (See more in section 3.3 on gratis and libre OA.)\nGold and green OA require different steps from authors. To make new articles gold OA, authors simply submit their manuscripts to OA journals, as they would to conventional journals. To make articles green OA, authors simply deposit their manuscripts in an OA repository.\nMost importantly, the green/gold distinction matters because if authors can’t make their work OA one way, they can make it OA the other way. One of the most persistent and damaging misunderstandings is that all OA is gold OA. Authors who can’t find a high-quality, high-prestige OA journal in their field, or whose submissions are rejected from first-rate OA journals, often conclude that they must give up on OA or publish in a second-rate journal. But that’s hasty. If they publish in the best toll-access journal that will accept their work, then—more often than not—they may turn around and deposit the peer-reviewed manuscript in an OA repository. Most toll-access publishers and toll-access journals give blanket permission for green OA, many others will give permission on request, and the numbers approach 100 percent when authors are subject to green OA mandates from their funding agencies or universities. (More in chapters 4 on OA policies and 10 on making your own work OA.)\nOne of the early victories of the OA movement was to get a majority of toll-access publishers and journals to give blanket permission for author-initiated green OA. But this victory remains one of the best-kept secrets of scholarly publishing, and widespread ignorance of it is the single most harmful consequence of green OA’s invisibility. Overlooking this victory reduces the volume of OA and creates the false impression that a trade-off between prestige and OA is common when in fact it is rare. Forgetting that green OA is compatible with conventional publishing also feeds the false impression that policies requiring green OA actually require gold OA and thereby limit the freedom of authors to submit work to the journals of their choice. (More in chapter 4 on policies.)\nMost publishing scholars will choose prestige over OA if they have to choose. The good news is that they rarely have to choose. The bad news is that few of them know that they rarely have to choose. Few realize that most toll-access journals permit author-initiated green OA, despite determined efforts to explain and publicize this early victory for green OA.\nThere are two reasons why OA is compatible with prestigious publication, a gold reason and a green one. The gold reason is that a growing number of OA journals have already earned high levels of prestige, and others are steadily earning it. If there are no prestigious OA journals in your field today, you could wait (things are changing fast), you could help out (by submitting your best work), or you could move on to green. The green reason why OA is compatible with prestige is that most toll-access journals, including the prestigious, already allow OA archiving. As noted, this “most” can become “all” with the aid of an effective OA policy. (See chapter 4 on policies.)\nThe most useful OA repositories comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), which makes separate repositories play well together. In the jargon, OAI compliance makes repositories\ninteroperable\n, allowing the worldwide network of individual repositories to behave like a single grand virtual repository that can be searched all at once. It means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant repository without knowing which repositories exist, where they are located, or what they contain. (OA and OAI are separate but overlapping initiatives.)\nMost of the major academic and nonacademic search engines crawl OA journals and OA repositories. For example, Google, Bing, and Yahoo all do this and do it from self-interest. These search engines now provide another method (beyond OAI-based interoperability) for searching across the whole network of repositories without knowing what exists where. A common misunderstanding sees OA repositories as walled gardens that make work hard to find by requiring readers to make separate visits to separate repositories to run separate searches. The reverse is true in two senses: OA repositories make work easier to find, and toll-access collections are the ones more likely to be walled gardens, either invisible to search engines or requiring separate visits and separate searches.\nDisciplinary\nrepositories (also called\nsubject\nrepositories) try to capture all the research in a given field, while\ninstitutional\nrepositories try to capture all the research from a given institution. Because both kinds tend to be OAI-compliant and interoperable, the differences matter very little for readers. Readers who want to browse a repository for serendipity are more likely to find useful content in a disciplinary repository in the right field than in an institutional repository. But most scholars find repository content by keyword searches, not by browsing, and through cross-archive searches, not through local single-repository searches.\nHowever, the differences between disciplinary and institutional repositories matter more for authors. On the one hand, institutions are in a better position than disciplines to offer incentives and assistance for deposit, and to adopt policies to ensure deposit. A growing number of universities do just that. On the other hand, scholars who regularly read research in a large disciplinary repository, such as arXiv for physics or PubMed Central for medicine, readily grasp the rationale for depositing their work in OA repositories and need less nudging to do so themselves. (More in chapter 4 on policies.)\nBecause most publishers and journals already give blanket permission for green OA, the burden is on authors to take advantage of it. In the absence of an institutional policy to encourage or require deposits, the spontaneous rate of deposit is about 15 percent. Institutions requiring deposit can push the rate toward 100 percent over a few years.\nThe reason the spontaneous rate is lower than the nudged, assisted, and mandated rate is rarely opposition to OA itself. Almost always it’s unfamiliarity with green OA (belief that all OA is gold OA), misunderstanding of green OA (belief that it violates copyright, bypasses peer review, or forecloses the possibility of publishing in a venerable journal), and fear that it is time-consuming. In this sense, author unfamiliarity and misunderstanding are greater obstacles to OA than actual opposition, whether from authors or publishers.\nThe remedies are already spreading worldwide: launching more OA journals and repositories, educating researchers about their gold and green OA options, and adopting intelligent policies to encourage gold OA and require green OA. (More in chapter 4 on OA policies.)\n3.2 Green and Gold as Complementary\nSome friends of OA focus their energy on green OA and some focus on gold OA. Some support both kinds about equally and have merely specialized. But some give one a higher strategic priority than the other. I’ll argue that green and gold OA are complementary and synergistic. We should pursue them simultaneously, much as an organism must develop its nervous system and digestive system simultaneously.\nFortunately, this synergy is served even by differences of opinion about its existence. The fact that some activists give green OA a higher priority than gold, and some the reverse, creates a natural division of labor ensuring that good people are working hard on each front.\nGreen OA has some advantages over gold OA. It makes faster progress, since it doesn’t require the launch of new peer-reviewed journals or the conversion of old ones. For the same reason, it’s less expensive than gold OA and can scale up quickly and inexpensively to meet demand, while the bulk of the money needed to scale up OA journals is still tied up in subscriptions to toll-access journals.\nGreen OA can be mandated without infringing academic freedom, but gold OA cannot. (More precisely, gold OA can’t be mandated without infringing academic freedom until virtually all peer-reviewed journals are OA, which isn’t on the horizon.) A green OA policy at a university can cover the institution’s entire research output, regardless of where authors choose to publish, while a gold OA policy can only cover the new articles that faculty are willing to submit to OA journals.\nGreen OA is compatible with toll-access publication. Sometimes this is because toll-access publishers hold the needed rights and decide to allow it, and sometimes because authors retain the needed rights. Well-drafted OA policies can ensure that authors always retain the needed rights and spare them the need to negotiate with publishers. (See chapters 4 on policies and 6 on copyright.)\nWhen the best journals in a field are toll-access—often the case today even if changing—green OA allows authors to have their cake and eat it too. Authors good enough to publish in the best journals may do so and still make their work OA, without waiting for high-prestige OA journals to emerge in their fields. When promotion and tenure committees create strong incentives to publish in venerable toll-access journals—often the case today even if changing—green OA allows authors to make their work OA without bucking institutional incentives or relinquishing institutional rewards.\nGreen OA works for preprints as well as postprints, while gold OA only works for postprints. For the same reason, green OA works for other kinds of work that peer-reviewed journals generally don’t publish, such as datasets, source code, theses and dissertations, and digitized copies of work previously available only in another medium such as print, microfiche, or film.\nOn the other side, gold OA has some advantages over green OA. Gold OA articles needn’t labor under restrictions imposed by toll-access publishers fearful of OA. Hence, gold OA is always immediate, while green OA is sometimes embargoed or delayed. Similarly, gold OA can always be libre, even if it doesn’t take sufficient advantage of this opportunity, while green OA seldom even has the opportunity. (See chapter 4 on policies.)\nGold OA provides OA to the published version, while green OA is often limited to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, without copy editing or final pagination. Making the OA edition the same as the published edition reduces the confusion caused by the circulation of multiple versions.\nGold OA performs its own peer review, without depending on toll-access journals to perform it. Hence support for gold OA supports the survival of peer review itself in case toll-access journals can no longer provide it.\nFinally, green OA may be a manageable expense, but gold OA can be self-sustaining, even profitable.\nLibrarians traditionally distinguish four functions performed by scholarly journals: Registration (time stamp), certification (peer review), awareness (distribution), and archiving (preservation). We know that green and gold OA are complementary as soon as we recognize that green is better than gold for registration (its time stamps are faster) and preservation, and that gold OA is better than green OA for certification (peer review).\nSome see green OA mainly as a tool to force a transition to gold OA. The idea is that rising levels of green OA will trigger the cancellation of conventional journals and pressure them to convert to gold OA. The growing volume of green OA might have this effect. Some publishers fear that it will, and some OA activists hope that it will. But it might not have this effect at all. One piece of evidence is that green OA hasn’t triggered journal cancellations in physics, where levels of green OA approach 100 percent and have been high and growing for nearly two decades. (More in chapter 8 on casualties.) Even if it did have this effect, however, it wouldn’t follow that it is the best strategy for advancing gold OA. There are good prospects for a peaceful revolution based on publisher consent and self-interest. (More in chapter 7 on economics.)\nMost importantly, however, we’ll still want green OA in a world where all peer-reviewed journals are OA. For example, we’ll want green OA for preprints and for the earliest possible time-stamp to establish the author’s priority. We’ll want green OA for datasets, theses and dissertations, and other research genres not published in journals. We’ll want green OA for the security of having multiple OA copies in multiple independent locations. (Even today, the best OA journals not only distribute their articles from their own web sites but also deposit copies in independent OA repositories.) At least until the very last conventional journal converts to OA, we’ll need green OA so that research institutions can mandate OA without limiting the freedom of authors to submit to the journals of their choice. We’ll even want OA repositories as the distribution mechanism for many OA journals themselves.\nA worldwide network of OA repositories would support one desirable evolution of what we now call journals. It would allow us to decouple peer review from distribution. Peer review could be performed by freestanding editorial boards and distribution by the network of repositories. Decoupling would remove the perverse incentive for peer-review providers to raise access barriers or impede distribution. It would also remove their perverse incentive to demand exclusive rights over research they didn’t fund, perform, write up, or buy from the authors.\nOn the other side, we’ll still want gold OA in a world where all new articles are green OA. High-volume green OA may not have caused toll-access journal cancellations yet, even in fields where green OA approaches 100 percent. But we can’t say that it will never do so, and we can’t say that every field will behave like physics in this respect. If peer-reviewed toll-access journals are not sustainable (see section 2.1), then the survival of peer review will depend on a shift to peer-reviewed OA journals.\nIt won’t matter whether toll-access journals are endangered by rising levels of green OA, by their own hyperinflationary price increases, or by their failure to scale with the rapid growth of new research. If any combination of these causes puts peer-reviewed toll-access journals in jeopardy, then peer review will depend on OA journals, which are not endangered by any of those causes. (In chapter 8 on casualties, we’ll see evidence that toll-access journal price increases cause many more cancellations than green OA does.)\nFinally, if all new articles are green OA, we’ll still want the advantages that are easier for gold OA than for green OA to provide: freedom from permission barriers, freedom from delays or embargoes, and freedom from ever-rising drains on library budgets.\nNeither green nor gold OA will suffice, long-term or short-term. That’s a reason to pursue both.\n3.3 Gratis and Libre OA\nSometimes we must speak unambiguously about two subspecies of OA. One removes price barriers alone and the other removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers. The former is\ngratis OA\nand the latter\nlibre OA\n.\nTo sharpen their definitions, we need a quick detour into fair use. In the United States, fair use is an exception to copyright law allowing users to reproduce copyrighted work “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . , scholarship, or research” (to quote the U.S. copyright statute).\nFair use has four characteristics that matter to us here. First, the permission for fair use is granted by law and needn’t be sought from the copyright holder. Or equivalently, the statute assures us that no permission is needed because fair use “is not an infringement of copyright.” Second, the permission is limited and doesn’t cover all the uses that scholars might want to make. To exceed fair use, users must obtain permission from the copyright holder. Third, most countries have some equivalent of fair use, though they differ significantly in what they allow and disallow. Finally, fair use is vague. There are clear cases of fair use (quoting a short snippet in a review) and clear cases of exceeding fair use (reprinting a full-text book), but the boundary between the two is fuzzy and contestable.\nGratis OA is free of charge but not more free than that. Users must still seek permission to exceed fair use. Gratis OA removes price barriers but not permission barriers.\nLibre OA is free of charge and also free of some copyright and licensing restrictions. Users have permission to exceed fair use, at least in certain ways. Because there are many ways to exceed fair use, there are many degrees or kinds of libre OA. Libre OA removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers.\nFortunately, we don’t always need these terms. Indeed, in most of this book I use “OA” without qualification. The generic term causes no trouble until we need to talk about differences between gratis and libre OA, just as “carbohydrate” causes no trouble until we need to talk about differences between simple and complex carbohydrates.\nI’m borrowing the gratis/libre language from the world of software, where it expresses the same distinction. If the terms sound odd in English, it’s because English doesn’t have more domesticated terms for this distinction. Their oddity in English may even be an advantage, since the terms don’t carry extra baggage, as “open” and “free” do, which therefore helps us avoid ambiguity.\nFirst note that the gratis/libre distinction is not the same as the green/gold distinction. The gratis/libre distinction is about user rights or freedoms, while the green/gold distinction is about venues or vehicles. Gratis/libre answers the question,\nhow open is it?\nGreen/gold answers the question,\nhow is it delivered?\nGreen OA can be gratis or libre but is usually gratis. Gold OA can be gratis or libre, but is also usually gratis. However, it’s easier for gold OA to be libre than for green OA to be libre, which is why the campaign to go beyond gratis OA to libre OA focuses more on journals than repositories.\nIf users encounter a full-text work online without charge, then they know it’s gratis OA. They don’t have to be told, even if they’d like to be told—for example, so that they don’t have to wonder whether they’re reading an illicit copy. But users can’t figure out whether a work is libre OA unless the provider (author or publisher) tells them. This is the purpose of a\nlicense\n, which is simply a statement from the copyright holder explaining what users may and may not do with a given work.\nWorks under “all-rights-reserved” copyrights don’t need licenses, because “all rights reserved” means that without special permission users may do nothing that exceeds fair use.\nThe default around the world today is that new works are copyrighted from birth (no registration required), that the copyright initially belongs to the author (but is transferrable by contract), and that the rights holder reserves all rights. Authors who want to provide libre OA must affirmatively waive some of their rights and use a license to tell users they’ve done so. For convenience, let’s say that an\nopen license\nis one allowing some degree of libre OA.\nAlthough the word “copyright” is singular, it covers a plurality of rights, and authors may waive some and retain others. They may do so in any combination that suits their needs. That’s why there are many nonequivalent open licenses and nonequivalent types of libre OA. What’s important here is that waiving some rights in order to provide libre OA does not require waiving all rights or waiving copyright altogether. On the contrary, open licenses presuppose copyright, since they express permissions from the copyright holder. Moreover, the rights not waived are fully enforceable. In the clear and sensible language of Creative Commons, open licenses create “some-rights-reserved” copyrights rather than “all-rights-reserved” copyrights.\nThe open licenses from Creative Commons (CC) are the best-known and most widely used. But there are other open licenses, and authors and publishers can always write their own. To illustrate the range of libre OA, however, it’s convenient to look at the CC licenses.\nThe maximal degree of libre OA belongs to works in the public domain. Either these works were never under copyright or their copyrights have expired. Works in the public domain may be used in any way whatsoever without violating copyright law. That’s why it’s lawful to translate or reprint Shakespeare without hunting down his heirs for permission. Creative Commons offers CC0 (CC-Zero) for copyright holders who want to assign their work to the public domain.\nThe CC Attribution license (CC-BY) describes the least restrictive sort of libre OA after the public domain. It allows any use, provided the user attributes the work to the original author. This is the license recommended by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval program for OA journals.\n \n                                          I support this recommendation, use CC-BY for my blog and newsletter, and request CC-BY whenever I publish in a journal.\nCC supports several other open licenses as well, including CC-BY-NC, which requires attribution and blocks commercial use, and CC-BY-ND, which requires attribution and allows commercial use but blocks derivative works. These licenses are not equivalent to one another, but they all permit uses beyond fair use and therefore they all represent different flavors of libre OA.\nWhile you can write your own open licenses or use those created by others, the advantage of CC licenses is that they are ready-made, lawyer-drafted, enforceable, understood by a large and growing number of users, and available in a large and growing number of legal jurisdictions. Moreover, each comes in three versions: human-readable for nonlawyers, lawyer-readable for lawyers and judges, and machine-readable for search engines and other visiting software. They’re extremely convenient and their convenience has revolutionized libre OA.\nThe best way to refer to a specific flavor of libre OA is by referring to a specific open license. We’ll never have unambiguous, widely understood technical terms for every useful variation on the theme. But we already have clearly named licenses for all the major variations on the theme, and we can add new ones for more subtle variations any time we want.\nA work without an open license stands or appears to stand under an all-rights-reserved copyright. If the rights holder privately welcomes uses beyond fair use, or has decided not to sue for certain kinds of infringement, ordinary users have no way to know that and are forced to choose the least of three evils: the delay of asking permission, the risk of proceeding without it, and the harm of erring on the side of nonuse. These are not only obstacles to research; they are obstacles that libre OA was designed to remove.\nThe BBB definition calls for both gratis and libre OA. However, most of the notable OA success stories are gratis and not libre. I mean this in two senses: gratis success stories are more numerous than libre success stories, so far, and most gratis success stories are notable. Even if they stop short of libre OA, they are hard-won victories and major advances.\nSome observers look at the prominent gratis OA success stories and conclude that the OA movement focuses on gratis OA and neglects libre. Others look at the public definitions and conclude that OA focuses on libre OA and disparages gratis. Both assessments are one-sided and unfair.\nOne hard fact is that gratis OA is often attainable in circumstances when libre OA is not attainable. For example, a major victory of the OA movement has been to persuade the majority of toll-access publishers and toll-access journals to allow green gratis OA. We’re very far from the same position for green libre OA. Similarly, most of the strong OA policies at funding agencies and universities require green gratis OA. A few require green libre OA, and green libre OA is growing for other reasons. But if these funders and universities had waited until they could muster the votes for a green libre policy, most of them would still be waiting. (See section 4.3 on the historical timing of OA policies.)\nA second hard fact is that even gratis OA policies can face serious political obstacles. They may be easier to adopt than libre policies, but in most cases they’re far from easy. The OA policy at the U.S. National Institutes of Health was first proposed by Congress in 2004, adopted as a mere request or encouragement in 2005, and strengthened into a requirement in 2008. Every step along the way was strenuously opposed by an aggressive and well-funded publishing lobby. Yet even now the policy provides only gratis OA, not libre OA. Similarly, the gratis OA policies at funders and universities were only adopted after years of patiently educating decision-makers and answering their objections and misunderstandings. Reaching the point of adoption, and especially unanimous votes for adoption, is a cause for celebration, even if the policies only provide gratis, not libre OA.\nThe Directory of Open Access Journals is the most authoritative catalog of OA journals and the only one limiting itself to peer-reviewed journals. But only 20 percent of titles in the DOAJ use CC licenses, and fewer than 11 percent use the recommended CC-BY license. Viewed the other way around, about 80 percent of peer-reviewed OA journals don’t use any kind of CC license. Some of these might use non-CC licenses with a similar legal effect, but these exceptions are rare. Simply put, most OA journals are not using open licenses. Most operate under all-rights-reserved copyrights and leave their users with no more freedom than they already had under fair use. Most are not offering libre OA. Even those wanting to block commercial use, for example, tend to use an all-rights-reserved copyright rather than an open license that blocks commercial use, such as CC-BY-NC, but allows libre OA in other respects.\nI’ve argued that it’s unfair to criticize the OA movement for disparaging gratis OA (merely on the ground that its public statements call for libre) or neglecting libre OA (merely on the ground that most of its success stories are gratis). But two related criticisms would be more just. First, demanding libre or nothing where libre is currently unattainable makes the perfect the enemy of the good. Fortunately, this tactical mistake is rare. Second, settling for gratis where libre is attainable makes the good a substitute for the better. Unfortunately, this tactical mistake is common, as we see from the majority of OA journals that stop at gratis when they could easily offer libre.\nLet’s be more specific about the desirability of libre OA. Why should we bother, especially when we may already have attained gratis OA? The answer is that we need libre OA to spare users the delay and expense of seeking permission whenever they want to exceed fair use. And there are good scholarly reasons to exceed fair use. For example:\nto quote long excerpts\n• to distribute full-text copies to students or colleagues\n• to burn copies on CDs for bandwidth-poor parts of the world\n• to distribute semantically-tagged or otherwise enhanced (i.e., modified) versions\n• to migrate texts to new formats or media to keep them readable as technologies change\n• to create and archive copies for long-term preservation\n• to include works in a database or mashup\n• to make an audio recording of a text\n• to translate a text into another language\n• to copy a text for indexing, text-mining, or other kinds of processing\nIn some jurisdictions, some of these uses may actually fall under fair use, even if most do not. Courts have settled some of the boundaries of fair use but by no means all of them, and in any case users can’t be expected to know all the relevant court rulings. Uncertainty about these boundaries, and increasingly severe penalties for copyright infringement, make users fear liability and act cautiously. It makes them decide that they can’t use something they’d like to use, or that they must delay their research in order to seek permission.\nLibre OA under open licenses solves all these problems. Even when a desirable use is already allowed by fair use, a clear open license removes all doubt. When a desirable use does exceed fair use, a clear open license removes the restriction and offers libre OA.\nWhen you can offer libre OA, don’t leave users with no more freedom than fair use. Don’t leave them uncertain about what they may and may not do. Don’t make conscientious users choose between the delay of seeking permission and the risk of proceeding without it. Don’t increase the pressure to make users less conscientious. Don’t make them pay for permission. Don’t make them err on the side of nonuse. Make your work as usable and useful as it can possibly be.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What are the two most popular formats for delivering OA?", "question_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D_1", "options": ["Ebooks and databases", "Repositories and databases", "Journals and blogs", "Journals and repositories"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How are OA journals different from toll access journals?", "question_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D_2", "options": ["OA journals only publish postprints while toll access journals publish both preprints and postprints.", "OA journals are newer, free to read, and have moderate profit margins.", "Toll access journals do not make a profit while OA journals do.", "Toll access journals are newer, free to read, and have large profit margins. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is green OA?", "question_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D_3", "options": ["Open access content delivered through repositories. ", "Open access content delivered through personal web sites.", "Open access content delivered through journals.", "Open access content that has permission barriers removed. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is gold OA?", "question_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D_4", "options": ["Open access content delivered through databases. ", "Open access content that does not allow users to exceed fair use. ", "Open access content delivered through journals. ", "Open access content delivered through repositories."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Does the author give more preference to gold OA or green OA?", "question_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D_5", "options": ["Neither. The author argues that both are important.", "Gold OA", "Green OA ", "Neither. The author argues that the gold/green is irrelevant to the OA movement."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How many authors are taking advantage of toll access journals' blanket permission for green OA?", "question_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D_6", "options": ["none", "half", "100%", "15%"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is an example of libre OA?", "question_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D_7", "options": ["Educators are given special permissions under the fair use law. ", "Movie producers need to get permission from the author before making a book into a movie. ", "The complete works of Shakespeare are in the public domain and can be used in any way. ", "A database collection of physics. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is libre OA?", "question_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D_8", "options": ["Access to the material is free, but there are still permission barriers. ", "Access to the material is free, but the publisher owns the copyright to the material, not the author.", "Access to the material is free, and the author gives up all rights to the material.", "Access to the material is free, and some permission barriers are removed."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is gratis OA?", "question_unique_id": "99926_ZAGS980D_9", "options": ["Access to the material is free, and the author gives up all rights to the material. ", "Access to the material is free, and some permission barriers are removed.", "Access to the material is free, but there are still permission barriers. ", "Access to the material is free, but the publisher owns the copyright to the material, not the author. "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/9i5oj5l9/release/2", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://openaccesseks.mitpress.mit.edu"}
{"article_id": "99913", "set_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Strength in numbers", "year": 2017, "author": "Lucy Jones", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Strength in numbers\nThe year is 2027. Dorothy visits her GP about panic attacks she's been getting at work. Before prescribing any treatment, the doctor looks at her genetic history for markers that could affect her response to certain drugs. The GP is looking in particular for CYP2C19 polymorphism, which would mean Dorothy can't metabolise a group of medicines (SSRIs); and at the same time, she examines her patient's sequenced DNA to see if she carries the genetic mutation responsible for panic disorder. Dorothy is a heavy drinker and her doctor sees that she carries a risk gene for alcohol dependence. She considers a drug that could modulate the gene. Dorothy leaves with a smartwatch to log her daily life for the next week: her quality of sleep, diet, exercise, stress, mood and activity. \n\n In the room next door, Fred is talking to a specialist about his Parkinson's symptoms. He was prescribed a drug recently for the subtype of Parkinson's he has and, for the first time, there were no side effects. In the past, Fred and the specialist used trial and error to find the right medication. But ever since computers have been able to process exabytes of data, scientists have found patterns and trends that allow them to treat Parkinson's with greater efficiency. Better still, through using an app on his phone, Fred has realised that taking his medicine at night affected his sleep; so he's started taking it at lunchtime instead.  \n\n Valerie has a migraine again. Like many young people these days, she had her DNA sequenced for her 18th birthday and discovered that she's one of the 7 per cent of Europeans who can't convert codeine into morphine. She inherited her response to the drug from her mother. Valerie knows to mention this to her doctor who prescribes her a non codeine-based painkiller. The doctor also considers what impact Valerie's gut flora and microbiome might have on medication. \n\n At its simplest, precision medicine is ultra-tailored healthcare. When President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015, he put it this way: \"delivering the right treatments, at the right time, every time, to the right person.\"  \n\n Precision medicine, also known as personalised medicine, is being heralded as the next major breakthrough in healthcare. In Britain, the NHS is \"on a journey towards embedding a personalised medicine approach into mainstream healthcare.\" \n\n While medical care has always been tailored to the individual to an extent, the degree to which it can be personalised today is unprecedented because of new technology. Equipment that would have been the stuff of science fiction 20 years ago is now available in many universities. Three key advancements combine to make medicine more precise: patient-generated data through smartphones and wearable tech, genomic medicine and computer science. \n\n First, patients can quickly and easily log their daily symptoms with apps on their phones or wearable technology to understand their illnesses better. Detailed records also aid doctors in the way they treat patients and provide data for research. \n\n Second, technology is allowing us to sequence DNA at a faster rate and a cheaper cost than ever before; and scientists are understanding the genetic markers of disease at a significant rate. Estimates suggest the cost of sequencing the very first genome could have been as high as $1bn. By 2016, the cost had dropped below $1,500. The process now takes hours rather than weeks. \n\n Third, in the age of big data, computers are allowing scientists to analyse vast amounts of data with greater precision than ever before. Machine-learning algorithms accelerate analysis of data sets which result in rapid discoveries.\nPrecision medicine is charged by a need to address the sheer variety of people's reactions to things going wrong in their bodies. From neurological disorders to strokes, cancer to depression, infections to alcoholism, each patient is unique; so ultimately the treatment should be unique, too.  \n\n Parkinson's is one of the first diseases precision medicine is being applied to. It's a heterogeneous disease, which means there is a lot of variability in how patients progress. In its early stages, the disease can manifest itself with symptoms very different from the tremors most associated with it. Patients may have motion-related issues with walking, posture or movement of the fingers; but they may also experience cognitive and memory problems, depression or lose their sense of smell. Because the early signs are so varied, it is difficult to predict the progression in individual patients. \n\n Dr Duygu Tosun-Turgut of the University of California won the 2016 data challenge set by the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. Her aim was to discover whether the progression rate of Parkinson's disease could be predicted. If doctors could predict the speed of a patient's decline, it could affect both treatment and prognosis. It would also assist with clinical trials, as it is better to recruit patients in swift rather than slow decline. In these patients, changes and improvements – and therefore efficacy of treatment – are demonstrated more dramatically. \n\n To define the progression rate, Dr Tosun and her team looked at all the clinical data available, captured from multiple patient visits to clinics. This included, for example, the results of memory tests, the total number of times patients could sit down and stand up over a 30-second period or changes in sleeping habits and sense of smell. Dr Tosun then looked for a pattern using data-driven machine-learning algorithms. \n\n Two groups were identified. One was slow progressing and the other was fast progressing. The next step was to find out if there were any baseline assessments that could be used to predict the rate of progression. At this point they looked at genetic makeup, fluid biomarkers, imaging MRI data and other factors.  \n\n \"The body is a whole, everything is so connected. There might be something dominant but it affects other systems in the body. It's the same in the brain,\" says Dr Tosun.\nShe discovered that if patients arrived with more motor-related symptoms on their first visit, they would decline faster. She also identified a brain region with degenerated white matter fibres. She found that the more degenerated the structures were in these regions, the faster the patient declined. \n\n Data was collected from people with a family history of Parkinson's or those who exhibited early signs to see if the same measure could be used to detect the disease before the symptoms started appearing. The goal would be to intervene before the disease started to progress. \n\n \"It's very difficult to reverse neurodegeneration,\" says Dr Tosun. \"If [a patient is] progressing fast, or if they have the markers telling us they're going to progress fast, you need to progress faster.\" \n\n Now Dr Tosun has turned her focus on the earliest mechanisms that trigger neurodegeneration. If it is known what triggers the disease, there may be precautions people can take to avoid developing Parkinson's. \"It can be diet, supplements, physical activity or cognitive activity,\" she says. \n\n \"It's very important to understand everything about that patient,\" says Dr Tosun. \"Not just their symptoms: their environment, their background, the state of their brain and body. The more we learn about the patient, the more the we can model the disease and treatment better.\" \n\n With advancements in computer science, algorithms and hardware, scientists like Dr Tosun are at the point where they can look at all the data at one time to better understand disease, health, prognosis and treatment. Finding patterns will help answer different questions. \n\n The vast capacity of big data is crucial. Dr Beckie Port, senior research communications officer at Parkinson's UK, says, \"The more people you put in your experiments, the more you can iron out some of the complexities and start to see trends, It's going to be a mammoth mission to start teasing out individual factors that could be used for personalised medicine, but it's not impossible.\"\nPersonal technology – wearable tech such as fitbits and smartphone apps – is another important element in precision medicine. It is already being used in the field of Parkinson's. uMotif is a 'patient data capture platform' that allows patients with long-term conditions to track their symptoms using an app. A patient inputs information about symptoms every day, including non-motor symptoms. How did you sleep? What's your mood like today? How about stress levels? What did you eat? How's your pain? Do you have nausea? \n\n With this information, researchers and clinical teams can understand the disease better; and  patients can have more useful conversations with their clinicians. The patient becomes an active participant rather than a spectator. \"How you feel your Parkinson's is a very important thing in quality of life and good treatments,\" says uMotif's co-founder and chief executive Bruce Hellman.  \n\n The data capture for a major study into Parkinson's is just finishing. Over 4,221 people tracked their health for 100 days and donated the data to academic research. \n\n Already, the feedback suggests the technology is having a positive effect on individual lives. Since using the app, Mick, a Parkinson's patient, reports feeling more assured in talking about his condition with a neurologist because he has a record of what's been happening and how he's felt. \"It teaches you, 'Don't beat yourself up because you can't do what you used to do, look at what you\nare\ndoing',\" he says. \n\n Through plotting her feelings each day, Sam now realises that she was managing her life with Parkinson's better that she thought. She'd been getting anxiety attacks in the morning and it suddenly dawned on her that changing taking her medication from the evening to the morning might help ease the attacks. It worked. \"I'm in control of my health,\" she says. \n\n \"One of the problems people have,\" says Dr Port, \"is that when they go to the doctor's they may be having a very good or bad day but it might not reflect what they're like on an everyday basis, That snapshot the specialist sees could influence [the patient's] drugs for the next six months.\" \n\n \"People with Parkinson's often only visit a doctor twice a year,\" says Hellman, \"so knowing more about their health will help them to bridge the gap between health visits and better understand their symptoms. Health is done to you at the moment but in the future it should be done with you.\"\nThe 100,000 Genomes Project is planning to sequence 100,000 genomes from around 70,000 people. The largest national sequencing project of its kind in the world, it aims to create a new genomic medicine service here in the UK. At the time of writing, the 20,429 genomes that have so far been sequenced are split 50/50 between cancer and rare diseases. It covers a large geographical area: England already has 13 genomic medicine centres covering 85 NHS trusts.  \n\n \"Genomic medicine is right at the vanguard of personalised medicine,\" says Tom Fowler, deputy chief scientist and director of public health at Genomics England. He points out the role it can play in treating rare diseases, where unmet diagnostic needs are of paramount importance. \"For people with a lifetime of wondering why they or their child is affected, the benefit [of genomic medicine] is being able to answer that question. It also can improve existing or potential treatment and help with making reproduction choices.\" \n\n Thanks to genomoic medicine, numerous diagnoses have been possible. The gene mutation causing four-year-old Jessica's rare disease was identified by researchers after her parents spent years not knowing what was wrong. Jessica's treatment is simply a special diet that enhances glucose production in the brain. After a month on the regime, Jessica's parents \"noticed a big improvement in her speech, energy levels and general steadiness,\" according to consultant Maria Bitner-Glindzicz of Great Ormond Street hospital. \"Overall, she is better and brighter in herself and her parents don't worry about her having fits on a daily basis as they used to.\" \n\n The project anticipates a 25 per cent diagnostic rate in rare diseases but Fowler says the remaining 75 per cent don't just get put aside, the data goes into research environments where it will be worked on: \"It's the start, not the end, of the journey.\" \n\n A small group of Parkinson's patients is included in the 100,000 Genomes project because early onset Parkinson's is considered rare and it's more likely to contain a genetic factor. It is estimated that around 5 per cent of Parkinson's cases have a genetic link; but Dr Port thinks the role of genetics in the disease is probably a lot larger.\nThe challenge now is how to move this kind of healthcare into the mainstream as part of routine healthcare. Fowler hopes that will happen in the next five years. In 2015, in partnership with Health Education England, nine universities introduced master's degrees in Genomic Medicine. \"A legacy of upskilling staff so they understand information will make the long-lasting difference,\" says Fowler. \"If we build an infrastructure and workforce that can cope with genomic medicine, as new discoveries happen we've got the ability to adapt and take them on board.\" \n\n Genetic testing can already reveal the potential for future illness and allow for proactive and preventative decisions. When Angelina Jolie, for example, discovered she carried BRCA1, the genetic marker for breast cancer that her late mother carried, she had a double mastectomy. People with a BRCA1 mutation have a 65 per cent chance of developing breast cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute. \n\n At the moment the number of people who've had their genes sequenced is fractional but it could become more commonplace. Will everyone have genetic testing eventually? \"At the current time it's difficult to see how that would step out into the mainstream,\" says Fowler. \"There may well be a time where that is the case and we move towards it.\" The NHS wouldn't be expected to pay for that, he adds. \n\n People are already paying to have their genes tested. Companies like 23andMe of gene testing home-kit services, which offer the possibility of finding out if you have a genetic variant that could put you at risk for certain traits or conditions. They range from serious conditions (cancer, Alzheimer's) to traits (caffeine metabolism, alcohol flush reaction, coriander aversion and sensitivity to the sound of chewing). \n\n Critics of precision medicine say that the word 'precision' is an unrealistic, inflated, hyperbolic term. They caution that there are many things happening in the human body, as well as genetics. In the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Canadian doctor Dan Roden wrote, \"Patients are more than collections of genomes and gene-environment interactions; they are individuals influenced by experience, culture, education, upbringing, and innumerable other factors.\" \n\n Still, there have already been some major success stories in genomic medicine. Most recently, DNA sequencing has led to a 'miracle' drug that treats spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the most common genetic cause of death in childhood. The drug has recently been approved by the FDA. \n\n Combined with patient-generated data and computer-powered analysis of big data, precision medicine seems like an obvious next step. It will take time and cost money but once the task of digitising healthcare is finished, it promises a slicker, more efficient system with better diagnosis and treatment.  \n\n \"You can't assume everyone has average Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or depression. They have their own properties,\" says Dr Tosun. \"Precision Medicine is the solution, it's something we need to do.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is precision medicine?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_1", "options": ["Highly personalized medicine that is tailored to treat an individual’s needs. ", "The use of pharmaceuticals to treat an individual’s symptoms.", "Making genetic testing widespread to predict illness. ", "Combining traditional medicine with psychology so that treatment plans address an individual's physical health and mental health. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the main argument of the article?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_2", "options": ["The upfront costs of precision medicine outweigh the potential benefits. ", "Precision medicine should be the healthcare of the future. ", "Precision medicine is a worthy goal, but we are far from achieving it. ", "Precision medicine will lead to unnecessary preemptive treatment, as exemplified by Angelina Jolie. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What advancements can be used for precision medicine?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_3", "options": ["Personal technology, genetic testing, and nutrition programs", "Nutrition programs, clinical trials, and personal technology", "Genetic testing, clinical trials, and computer science ", "Personal technology, genetic testing, and computer science "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is genomic medicine?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_4", "options": ["Using stem cells to treat illness. ", "Looking at a patient’s family history to determine a diagnosis or treatment plan. ", "Looking at a patient’s genes to determine a diagnosis or treatment plan. ", "Using apps to help patients track their symptoms. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is a critique of precision medicine?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_5", "options": ["There is controversy around the morality of this kind of medicine. ", "It will only impact people with rare diseases. ", "It is unrealistic because it ignores other factors that affect an individual’s health. ", "Investments into precision medicine are costly. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Parkinson’s being used to experiment with precision medicine?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_6", "options": ["There is no current treatment for Parkinson’s.", "People know about Parkinson’s because of Michael J Fox. ", "Parkinson’s patients experience a range of symptoms that differ between individuals. ", "Parkinson’s is a genetic disorder."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What was Dr. Tosun hoping to find with her study?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_7", "options": ["The reason why some people with Parkinson’s decline quickly while others have a slow progression of symptoms. ", "An app that would allow Parkinson’s patients to track their symptoms.", "A pharmaceutical treatment with no side effects. ", "The genetic mutation that causes Parkinson’s. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What leads to a faster decline in Parkinson’s patients?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_8", "options": ["Loss of the ability to smell predicted a faster decline. ", "Intense psychological symptoms predicted a faster decline. ", "Cognitive and memory problems predicted a faster decline. ", "Motor-related symptoms predicted a faster decline. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How is the Genomes Project helpful for medicine?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_9", "options": ["The goal of the project is to create vaccinations to prevent diseases. ", "The database will help doctors diagnose diseases caused by genetic mutations. ", "The project creates apps for people to track their symptoms.  ", "Anyone will be able to get healthcare coverage for genetic testing. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is precision medicine more attainable today than it was before?", "question_unique_id": "99913_U8AW81UV_10", "options": ["Interdisciplinary studies are more common today. ", "Advancements in technology make gathering data easier. ", "The cost of healthcare has gone down.", "There are more doctors today than ever before. "], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/life-death/precision-medicine", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99906", "set_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Hold your nerves", "year": 2016, "author": "Ben Martynoga", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Hold your nerves\nStress wrecks too many days before they've even begun. It creeps up as soon as the alarm jerks you awake. Fingers reflexively unlock your phone. Emails bound in with a jolly ping: things you should have done last week; pointless meeting requests; bills to pay.  \n\n Over a gobbled breakfast you scan the headlines: wall-to-wall misery and pointlessness. On the train you turn to social media for relief. Gillian is funnier than you. Alex got promoted again. Laura's sunning herself in Thailand. You're here, packed in, surrounded but alone, rattling your way towards another overstretched day in an unfulfilling role. There's talk of redundancies and an appointment with the boss looms. Thoughts turn to your dream job. Your heart rate steps up again. Even if you had the energy to fill in the form, you wouldn't get the job. Besides, your sneezing neighbour's probably just infected you with the Zika virus. \n\n Stress. We know what it feels like, we can smell it on others, we complain about it most days. But what is it? Now that's a slippery question. \n\n Apparently, we're living through an epidemic of it. Latest figures from the UK government's Health and Safety Executive state that stress cost the economy nearly 10m working days last year. Forty-three per cent of all sick days were chalked up to stress. Across the Atlantic, a major 2014 survey conducted by radio network NPR showed that 49 per cent of Americans reported a major stress event in the last year. In 2013 US doctors wrote 76m unique prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs Xanax and Ativan. With the media pushing images of stress-induced heart disease, strokes, obesity, depression, ulcers and cancer, it's hard not to conclude that stress kills. \n\n But consider this: just a century ago nobody got stressed. They suffered with their nerves; got a touch of the vapours; they worried; but they were never stressed. Stress happened to metals subjected to powerful forces and to syllables in elocution classes. In fact, our current view of stress – what it is, what it feels like, and when it is harmful – evolved surprisingly recently. This matters. Recent research shows that the way we think about stress has a profound influence on how it affects us.\nThere is no doubt that prolonged, uncontrollable stress – particularly if suffered in childhood – can be profoundly corrosive and debilitating. But what of the familiar stresses of day-to-day life? Are they actually damaging you? Might the belief that stress is harmful be self-fulfilling? And what would a stress-free life really look like? Instead of turning in on ourselves and doing battle with our personal stress demons, might we be able to put their diabolic energy to good use?\nPull back for a moment from your daily hustle and you'll see that many of us are incurably hooked on stress. We thrive on it. We get a kick out of surviving the high-stakes presentation, meeting the deadline and overcoming our fears and prejudices. Watching a thriller, we're on the edge of our seats, pulses racing. Sports, on the field or on television, can propel us into \"fight or flight\" mode. Humanity's fascination with gambling hinges on stress. \n\n If the most skilled physiologists in the world could peer beneath the skin of a thrill-seeker on a rollercoaster and an out-of-their-depth job interview candidate, they'd struggle to tell them apart. Deep in the brain, they'd see a structure called the hypothalamus fired up. With each lurch of the ride or disarming question asked, the hypothalamus signals to the adrenal glands, which sit atop each kidney. The adrenals then squirt a shot of adrenaline into the bloodstream. In the background, the hypothalamus prods the pituitary gland, which passes a different message on to the adrenal gland. This ups the production of cortisol, the textbook 'stress hormone'. Flipping these key biological switches triggers the familiar bodily symptoms of stress: a pounding heart, raised blood pressure, dilated pupils, arrested digestion and a damped-down immune system. In both cases, the biological stress response would look very similar. \n\n Even if we could eliminate stress entirely, or smother it with pharmaceuticals, we wouldn't want to. To muzzle the stress response is to silence the good as well as the bad. At best, stress can motivate us to achieve more and fix the sources of our stress. Boredom is stressful in its own way: ask a caged lion, or an understimulated teenager. In fact, as animal psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder told New Scientist recently, boredom may exist to spur us back into activity. This half-forgotten idea, that some degree of stress can inspire and elevate, is common sense. It also has deep roots in the earliest scientific study of stress and stress responses. \n\n Back at the beginning of the 20th century, two American psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, wanted to know how stressing out lab mice affected their learning. They set the rodents navigational challenges and punished wrong turns with small electric shocks to the feet. In their terminology, larger electric currents caused greater 'arousal'. \n\n They spotted some consistent trends. When they gave mice an easy task (choosing between a black or a white tunnel, achieved by different lighting) the relationship between the strength of the shock and the speed of learning was simple. The greater the stressor, the quicker the mice learned to pick the right tunnel. \n\n When the challenge was subtler (differentiating between grey tunnels), the response was less straightforward. Weak shocks provided little impetus to learn, but as the zaps got stronger, the mice gradually upped their game. They focused on the task and remembered the consequences of wrong choices. Yet, at a certain point, the high stress levels that helped with the easy task became counterproductive. Overwhelmed, the mice skittered around at random, vainly trying to escape. \n\n On a graph, the relationship between stress and performance on onerous tasks traces an inverted U-shape. Some degree of stress helps, but there is a clear tipping point, beyond which stress becomes paralysing. These findings became the Yerkes-Dodson law.  \n\n This was all very well for mice, but could it be applied to the vagaries of human existence? According to Canadian-Austrian endocrinogist Hans Selye, the 'father of stress', it could. It was 10-times Nobel prize nominee Selye who first described the key glands, hormones and nerves of the biological stress response during the 1930s and 40s. Selye was also one of the first to apply the word 'stress' to human biology (he once quipped that he might have chosen a different word had his grasp of English been better).  \n\n For Selye, 'stress' described an all-purpose response the body had to any demand placed upon it. When stress is on the upswing of Yerkes and Dodsons' inverted-U performance curve, Selye calls it 'eustress'. This is where good teachers and managers should push their charges: to the sweet spot that separates predictable tedium from chaotic overload. When stress gets more persistent, unmanageable and damaging, Selye called it 'distress'. Eustress and distress have identical biological bases, they are simply found at different points on the same curve. \n\n We know this, but today stress has a terrible public image, often synonymous with distress. While some wear their stress as a badge of honour (\"I'm important enough to be stressed,\" they think), deep down even the most gung-ho City workers probably stress about their stress. And in painting stress as a beast, we grant it more destructive power.\nWhen did we come to view stress as the universal enemy? Mark Petticrew, Professor of Public Health Evaluation at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has sifted through a huge archive of historical tobacco industry documents. He revealed that a large proportion of stress research during the second half of the 20th century was funded, steered and manipulated by this most unexpected of benefactors. From the late 1950s, Hans Selye himself received hundreds of thousands of tobacco-stained dollars. He also allowed industry lawyers to vet his research and appeared in several pro-tobacco propaganda films.\n\"They put a massive, massive amount of money into it,\" Petticrew told me. \"This isn't a side story in the history of stress.\" \n\n Why were tobacco manufacturers so interested in stress? First of all cigarettes were marketed as a stress reliever. \"To anxiety… I bring relief,\" reads a 1930s advertisement for Lucky Strike. So if research could help them pin poor mental and physical health to stress, this sort of message would carry more weight. (Incidentally, the still widespread belief that smoking reduces anxiety appears to be wrong).  \n\n Later, as evidence that smoking caused cancer and heart disease piled up, the tobacco industry became hell-bent on proving that stress was an equally significant risk factor. They used the authority of Selye and several other leading stress researchers as a smokescreen (pardon the pun). \"Doubt is our product,\" read a leading tobacco industry executive's 1969 memo. And so doubt they sowed. Time and again they argued that stress was a major cause of disease. Those seeking to control tobacco were barking up the wrong tree, they claimed. \n\n It worked: they convinced the general public of the evils of stress and diverted public health research for at least a decade. With tobacco regulation and compensation payouts postponed, the profits kept rolling in.\nSo should we doubt the veracity and neutrality of all the foundational research into stress as disease? \"I wouldn't want to argue that stress doesn't exist, or that it isn't bad for your health and certainly your mental health,\" says Petticrew. \"But you can't ignore this story.\"\nHe goes on to describe concrete 'findings' that industry-funded researchers got wrong. Prominent among these was a link between coronary disease and people displaying so-called 'Type A' personality traits: competitiveness, ambition and anxiety. Such temperamentally 'stressed' people were especially likely to suffer heart attacks and, not coincidentally, to smoke. Then the association simply faded away.  \n\n \"Aside from the scientific weaknesses, which are many, Type A is a cultural artefact to some extent constructed by the tobacco lobby,\" says Petticrew. Despite its fragile foundations, the Type A myth persists today. Pettigrew calls such research, which continues to be published despite repeatedly negative findings, 'zombie science'.\nThe long shadow cast by decades of one-sided, propaganda-laced stress research has led many of us to believe that stress is a direct cause of heart attacks. But the British Heart Foundation's website clearly states, \"There is no evidence to suggest that stress causes coronary heart disease or heart attacks.\" Nor does it cause stomach ulcers: a bacterium called H. pylori does that. \n\n Yet the tobacco-funded researchers didn't get it all wrong. Stress does have clear causal links to some diseases, particularly mental illnesses including depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and addictive behaviour. High stress levels do appear to be a general risk factor for early death, particularly for middle-aged men. Moreover, we all know how unpleasant stress can be. From insomnia to binge eating and boozing, we respond to stress with all sorts of counterproductive and antisocial behaviours. And that's partly why the tone of messages we hear about stress matters so much. Humans are inherently suggestible and particularly vulnerable to warning messages about our health, especially when those messages seem to be backed by science. \n\n With mice in a cage, you can measure the tipping point – the precise current of the electric shock – where good stress becomes bad. You can see how many weeks of stress cause adrenal glands to enlarge and immune systems to wither. But when it comes to humankind, we don't need the lurking menace of a lion in the long grass to activate our stress response. We can do it perfectly well for ourselves. All it takes is a negative thought, the memory of an insult, or a vague feeling of unease. \n\n So, we can think our way into stress. And, as recent evidence shows, if we believe stress is going to hurt us, it is more likely to hurt us. This is one message emerging from the Whitehall II project, a long-term study of 10,000 UK government civil servants, set up in 1985 to study the social, economic and personal determinants of health and disease. A 2013 analysis of Whitehall II data concluded that people who believe stress adversely affects their health are more than twice as likely to suffer a heart attack, regardless of the amount of stress they appear to be under. \n\n There is a flipside to this gloomy news, though. If our thoughts and beliefs can switch on a damaging stress response, mightn't they also switch it off? Could the power of suggestion be a partial vaccination in the battle against the stress epidemic? This is the contention of Alia Crum, an ambitious young psychology professor at Stanford University. \n\n Crum is a flagbearer for the on-trend science of mindset manipulations. In 2007 she showed that if hotel chambermaids come to think of their work as exercise, they lose weight and their blood pressure falls, apparently without working any harder. And in 2011 Crum showed that if we consume a healthy snack dressed as a calorie-laden indulgence, the power of belief dupes our hormonal appetite system into feeling sated. \n\n More recently she turned her attention to our core beliefs about stress. Crum's unlikely collaborators were 388 employees of UBS bank, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. This was a time of turmoil, layoffs and uncertainty at the firm. Stress was rife. Crum wanted to know how these overworked bankers thought about stress and whether she could change their convictions. \n\n She split the bank workers into three groups. A small control group got no training. Over the course of a week, the other two groups were shown three different short training videos. Superficially the videos were similar: they talked about stress and its effects on mind and body. One group's films dealt with disease risk, anxiety, depression and distraction. They showed basketball ace LeBron James missing a decisive shot under pressure, implying stress is debilitating. In the other videos LeBron sinks his basket, the message being that stress sharpens attention, boosts cognition, enhances relationships and forces fresh perspectives: it is life-enhancing. \n\n The UBS staff subtly changed their views. The ‘stress is enhancing’ group took on a more positive stance and reported being more productive, focused and collaborative. They also reported less depression and anxiety, and even a reduction in symptoms like back pain and insomnia. Curiously, The ‘stress is debilitating’ group didn't get any worse, perhaps because they already shared the widespread pessimistic view of stress. \n\n Although the results aren't exactly transformative, it seems that by changing how we think about stress, we can temper the stress response. Over a lifetime of minor and major stresses, even relatively subtle drops in anxiety levels and a little less strain on the cardiovascular system could translate into significant boons for physical and psychological health. The inescapable conclusion is this: the human mind is a powerful gatekeeper to the stress response.\nBut we have to tread carefully here. UBS employees may have the freedom to choose a less stressful life, and find opportunity to reshape their stress mindsets. But what about those whose stress is delivered early and compounded by a lifetime of disadvantage and adversity? In his book The Health Gap, UCL Professor Sir Michael Marmot describes a prototypical young man growing up in a rundown part of Glasgow:\n\"Life expectancy 54 years, subject to physical and sexual abuse from a succession of male partners of his mother; moving house about once every 18 months; entering school with behavioural problems, which then led on to delinquency, gang violence, and spells in prison. At various times, psychiatrists labelled him as having personality disorder, anxiety, depression, and antisocial tendencies.\" \n\n To blame him for succumbing to his stressful circumstances and having the wrong mindset would be absurd. Marmot continues: \"It is true that tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and an appalling diet, along with liberal indulgence in violence, are major contributors to his ill health, but the causes of the causes are his tragic life history.\" \n\n Marmot describes why the conventional fixes to socioeconomic disadvantage – healthcare provision, lifestyle education, housing schemes, youth centres and the like – may be off beam. He argues instead that we need to look at the mind: \"The mind is the major gateway through which social circumstances lead to health inequalities. It is not what you have that is important for health, but what you can do with what you have.\"  \n\n Perhaps this is where the story of familiar workaday stress and the grinding strain of social injustice come together. Stress only gets under our skin when we can't see the end or spot the fix. It is only truly distressing when it feels out of control. So what, other than using Crum's mindset interventions, can we do to restore the critical feeling of empowerment? \n\n Most reports of the 'stress epidemic' paint stress as a private enemy: something to battle with, resist or evade. The industries that have emerged to combat stress – self-help, stress management, therapy and the like – doubtless help many to cope. But even their emphasis on 'coping' and 'resilience' inadvertently bolsters the 'stress is debilitating' mindset. These approaches also tend to promote personal introspection. Certainly, faced with personal challenges, family turmoil and professional adversity, many of us turn in on ourselves, insulating ourselves from the social world, which seems to be the source of so much stress.\nYet according to Yale psychologist Emily Ansell, looking up from your navel and reaching out a kindly hand to your fellow human beings can be surprisingly helpful. In a study published last year, Ansell and colleagues gave a group of 77 people a diary-like smartphone app. They asked them to record all the stressful incidents they encountered, and any minor acts of kindness they performed, during a 14-day period. These data show that gestures like holding doors for strangers and helping the elderly across the road buffer the effects of stress and make you feel measurably more positive.\n\"It's not just whether you're more altruistic than the next person,\" Ansell told NPR. \"It's that being more altruistic than usual can change your experience from day to day. It's all about doing more than your average.\" \n\n Mobile technology now helps us reach out directly to those buckling under stress. Koko is a slick app developed by a team at the MIT media lab, which puts the hive mind to work on counselling and therapy. Wired described it as, \"What you'd get if you were to combine the swiping gesture of Tinder, the anonymity of Whisper, the upvoting of Reddit, and the earnestness of old-fashioned forums.\" Koko users write on the app's digital noticeboard, giving short summaries of their stress and anxiety, ranging from workplace insecurities to more entrenched depression, anxiety and inner turmoil. Other, anonymous users then offer constructive ideas to rethink and reframe the problem. \n\n Launched last June, Koko is now used in 155 countries. The early signs are that it works. Amid the ocean of unproven and gimmicky 'stress-busting' apps out there, here is one that has some hard evidence behind it. In a 2015 clinical trial, Koko's web-based predecessor showed promise as a tool for managing depression. Koko has recently been repackaged, to help people tackle everyday stress, as well as depression. \n\n Koko co-creator Rob Morris thinks that giving advice may be even more beneficial than getting it. \"Helping others can help build feelings of self-efficacy. Many of our users describe feeling more empowered to help themselves after observing their successes when helping others,\" he tells me. \n\n While the acts of kindness recommended by psychologist Ansell and Koko's forum for constructive stress 'reframing' may only be behavioural tweaks, they could hint at where more fundamental solutions might lie. By emphasising the power of reaching out to others, they also remind us that loneliness is a uniquely toxic source of stress. It appears to be on the rise, especially in the developed world, where its cuts across age and social class. As UCLA Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry Steven Cole told Pacific Standard magazine, \"Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete.\"  \n\n Thrill-seekers, work-junkies and young lovers remind us that stress can be a source of great energy. But left unchecked it's often a frustrating and self-defeating power. What if we could learn to divert some of that potency away from our private battles and into forging connections with those around us? Positive interactions deliver a reward at the neurological level. They restore a sense of control and show that meaningful relationships are possible.  \n\n Give it a try as you struggle to work next Monday. See how it feels to lift some pushchairs, offer directions and return a few smiles. If you can make the time it also pays to aim higher: try volunteering or helping more vulnerable members of your community or family. Ansell's and other studies have shown that helping others cushions stress. Moreover, helpers often get more psychological and health benefits than those on the receiving end of that help. \n\n Michael Poulin, a professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo, is so convinced of this counterintuitive finding that he ended a recent academic paper with this proposition: \"At-risk populations are frequently advised to seek support from their social networks. A less common message, but one that perhaps deserves more prominence, is for them to support others as well.\" \n\n Poulin's hunch is that helping others works as the ultimate distractor: \"In disengaging from one's self-focused concerns to help others, the sources of stress on one's own life decrease in perceived importance and thus impact on one's own well-being.\" And it's no good just going through the motions; you've got to believe in what you are doing. \"Only if you genuinely commit to the goal of caring for another's welfare do you have cause to disengage [from your own stress].\" \n\n So how do we encourage prosocial behaviour throughout society, particularly at the underprivileged margins? According to Paul Piff, a social psychologist at UC Irvine, lower-class individuals in America tend to \"have less and give more\". They are more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful than their upper-class counterparts. It's possible that this tendency to reach out and muck in is a direct response to a life of chronic stress. In response to Piff's theory, Poulin suggests, \"We should perhaps really focus on encouraging prosocial behaviour among the well-off, potentially leading both to benefits for them – in terms of stress – and for the disadvantaged, who would presumably benefit from their generosity.\" \n\n From this outward-facing perspective, it's easy to see the value of social prescriptions. Although they are sometimes perceived as box-ticking exercises to complement the real work of providing homes, healthcare and jobs, the more delicate job of building a sense of community may actually be at the centre of the game. Development that is imposed from on high can increase a feeling of disempowerment. At times of pressure it is this more fragile sense of control that has the potential to convert stress into a constructive force rather than a destructive one.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "What is the premise of the Yerkes-Dodson law?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_1", "options": ["While people may benefit from a certain amount of stress in their lives, too much stress is counterproductive.", "Like mice, when people are given less straightforward choices in life, they become confused and have a difficult time making a decision.", "Little stress in life often yields the greatest results in terms of general happiness and productivity. ", "Stress is intrinsically linked to human biology and can be tracked and measured through electrical shocks."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is it important to differentiate between eustress and distress?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_2", "options": ["Understanding these two terms can help dispel the myth that all eustress is good and all distress is bad and that there is a proper union between the two that can result in real peace.", "It is important to correctly define these two terms so that Selye can finally win a Nobel prize and he doesn't have to continue doing research for tobacco companies.", "It would benefit people to help them realize that a certain amount of stress is good as this can drive ambition and accomplishment; at the same time, it is important to temper stress so it doesn't become too overwhelming.", "Not understanding the difference between these two kinds of stress can lead to more persistent, unmanageable, and damaging kinds of stress in a person's life."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Petticrew believe the tobacco industry's stress research is relevant?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_3", "options": ["The research demonstrates that tobacco is an appropriate way to cope with stress and that the negative physical health effects of smoking are largely exaggerated.", "It reveals that Selye's research into the biological function of stress was tainted by his involvement with the tobacco industry's interest in propagandizing its product as a cure for stress.", "It introduced the revolutionary concept of the \"Type A\" personality, which has been used as a diagnosis for competitiveness, ambition, and anxiety in the ensuing years.", "It demonstrates the ways in which lies about the causes and results of stress have been perpetuated by industry in the name of sales and how many of those lies have persisted in spite of being disproven."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is the connection between human suggestibility and stress according to the article?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_4", "options": ["If you have convinced yourself that stress will harm you, then it most likely will.", "People who read self-help books, practice meditation, and go to therapy will automatically experience less stress in their lives.", "People experiencing enormous amounts of distress in their lives can reexamine the causes of that distress and learn to view it as eustress instead.", "People who were born into poverty and similar difficult circumstances can remove stress from their lives by simply embracing eustress."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were the videos of LeBron James missing and sinking basketball shots significant?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_5", "options": ["They revealed that our pre-conceived notions of stress will remain unchanged no matter what evidence is presented to us.", "Viewing both videos encouraged viewers with the message that being stressed sharpened attention, boosted cognition, enhanced relationships, and forced fresh perspectives.", "For groups that watched James missing shots, their views of stress remained unchanged, while those that watched him making the shots developed a more favorable view of stress as productive.", "It was unusual to find video footage where LeBron James was missing shots instead of simply sinking them with nothing but net. Therefore, the study was groundbreaking."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Marmot believe healthcare, education, and housing may not be adequate for correcting health inequalities?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_6", "options": ["He believes that tobacco, alcohol, drugs, bad diet, and violence are too powerful of negative forces that interfere in a person's life to be easily corrected by offering these services.", "Marmot believes that people should reframe their relationship with stress in order to understand that there are good types of stress and bad types of stress referred to as eustress and distress.", "Marmot believes there must also be attention paid to a person's life story and the effect that can have on that person's ability to use their mind to relate to stress.", "He believes the problem of stress is too vast and varied in our world, citing alarming statistics about shortened life expectancies in recent years."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the irony of coping mechanisms such as self-help, stress management, and therapy?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_7", "options": ["None of these strategies for coping with stress have any basis in scientific or medical fact and are simply scams designed by people who wish to profit from other people's pain.", "They reinforce the idea that all stress is bad and encourage inwardness, whereas studies show that reappropriating stress by reaching out in kindness to others reduces the negative effects of stress significantly more.", "These strategies for dealing with stress pretend to encourage self-reflection when in fact they are endorsing self-centeredness which in turn causes more stress.", "The work to isolate people suffering from stress, which ultimately drives them into deeper and deeper depression until they finally have a stress-induced medical episode."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the author suggest the underprivileged benefit from prosocial behaviors such as helping others?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_8", "options": ["When the wealthy are encouraged to engage in prosocial behaviors such as volunteering or donating to charity, they are reducing the stress in the lives of others.", "The author does not believe that the underprivileged should receive social welfare, and so he proposes that they simply help each other instead.", "Studies have shown that when at-risk or underprivileged populations participate in activities where they sincerely help others, they effectively distract from their own stress.", "When the underprivileged give of themselves, they become an example to the well-off, who will, in turn, give of their time and services to help reduce stress in the lives of those who need it most."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Koko's creator believe the app has been successful?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_9", "options": ["The app is currently used in 155 countries around the world, and it is due to this accessibility and universality that it has yielded strong results.", "The anonymity feature of the app allows users to feel comfortable sharing not only moments of stress in their daily routine but also experiences of deep stress in their lives in general.", "Seeing one's advice have a positive impact on another's person's life can encourage someone to feel more positive about the possibility of helping themselves.", "He believes the app's success can be attributed to its successful merging of ideas from other social relationship apps such as Tinder, Whisper, and Reddit."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why does the author suggest stress is a relatively recent phenomenon?", "question_unique_id": "99906_1A0Y5FJN_10", "options": ["Prior to the 20th century, nobody ever experienced feelings of anxiety or worry because it was a simpler time to be alive.", "\"Stress\" simply referred to powerful natural forces that could bend metal prior to the 20th century, and nobody was concerned about more contemporary associations with anxiety.", "Experiments and research into the concept of stress began in the early 20th century, and the contemporary view of stress as exclusively harmful is even newer.", "The term \"stress\" exclusively referred to the syllables in language pronunciation prior to 20th-century research into the psychological concept of \"stress.\""], "difficult": 1}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/life-death/a-little-stress-may-be-good-for-you", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99907", "set_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "How Scotland is tackling the democratic deficit, from the ground up", "year": 2017, "author": "Karin Goodwin", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "How Scotland is tackling the democratic deficit, from the ground up\nOn a chilly February morning in Glasgow, Stephanie Anthony and her three-year-old son Ilan are perching on a log in front of a small bonfire. They are making popcorn with kernels, using two sieves tied together with string, and are surrounded by a warm circle of toddlers, mums, dads, aunties, grannies and childminders from the local area. \n\n A few yards away, Monroe, two, is also 'cooking', sloshing earth and grass carefully in a saucepan in the mud kitchen. Preschoolers Reuben and Benjamin are making a woodchip path, wheeling little barrows back and forth from a large pile. On the adjoining meadow, dogs and their owners enjoy a stroll and a chat. A colourful signpost arrow points straight ahead for 'Wonderland'. \n\n It is an urban idyll of sorts. This piece of vacant land on the edge of Glasgow's residential west end – known as the Children's Wood and North Kelvin Meadow – would probably be a building site now if left up to Glasgow City Council. But in December, after a five-year campaign to keep it in use for the community as wild space, the Scottish Government overruled the local authority, which had granted permission for luxury flats to be built on the site. The sale of land to developer New City Vision was stopped in its tracks.  \n\n Campaigners are now looking at the possibility of community buy-out to ensure it continues to be used by local nurseries, primary and secondary schools – as well as the group's own forest schools, outdoor play, gardening groups and others.  \n\n \"I don't think the council realised how much it meant to us,\" says Anthony. \"We've fought so hard. But if local democracy had been working we wouldn't have had to fight against the lobbying of private companies.\"\nThere is a growing sense – from activities, academics and political commentators alike – that we are experiencing a clear democracy deficit. Questions are being raised about that the legitimacy of the politicians supposed to serve us. Does voting alone constitute democracy?\nAt the last general election, around two-thirds of those able to vote did so, while in local elections only about 26 per cent turn up to polling stations. And it is particularly the poor – and the young – who don't participate and for whom policies are not created.  \n\n The issue is brought into sharpest focus at a local level. Two years ago research by Scotland's first Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy claimed radical democracy reform was needed in response to \"unacceptable levels of inequality\". \n\n And it is in Scotland, where many became politically emboldened and active – sometimes for the first time – during the 2014 independence referendum, there is a growing movement to realise that reform. \n\n November saw the launch of Our Democracy: Act as if we own the place, a year-long coalition campaign that will see events held across Scotland to encourage citizens to imagine what their community would look like if they made the decisions, even for a day. Groups will then be encouraged to take steps to make those changes happen.  \n\n Willie Sullivan, director of the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, and author of The Missing Scotland, about the million-plus Scots who don't vote, claims the grassroots approach is key.\n\"Real democracy needs people to come together to debate and come up with ideas,\" he says. \"Yet simply voting doesn't allow for discussion or debate. \n\n \"The promise of democracy is that you all have an equal voice. Yet the greatest inequality is the inequality of power. That's part of the breakdown of trust. People know that there are some who can pull those levers of power while others cannot access them.\" \n\n Reports will be written up following each planned meeting – from Dundee to Inverness to Kirriemuir in Angus – and submitted to the Scottish government's consultation on the decentralisation of government. The scope for its plans is currently being finalised.  \n\n \"In Scotland we are always told to manage people's expectations,\" Sullivan says. \"But in this case we want to raise them, to give them confidence that we don't need to wait for permission. There is a bubbling feeling that maybe we can do it ourselves.\" \n\n Emily Cutts, who initiated the Children's Wood just after the birth of her second child, can relate to that. The power of positive thinking was crucial, she claims, in turning a waste ground into a nurturing place for the whole community.   \n\n \"Everything that we did was guerrilla,\" she says. \"My intention was to signal that we'd won from the beginning.\" Yet it was an uphill struggle. Councillors told them the planned development was a done deal, others said the Children's Wood was a nice idea that would never work.\nSo they set about making it official, registering the playgroup, getting nurseries and schools using the land and organising community events from storytelling to fireside songs. One of the most important things, according to Coutts, was to be optimistic. \"And even when it felt like we'd had a setback we also found solutions.\" \n\n Look around Glasgow – a city known for its fighting talk – and there is plenty to inspire. Kinning Park Complex, in the city's southside, is a former primary school turned community centre, which the council decided to close 21 years ago this May. The locals had other ideas, squatting the building for 55 days and saving it for the deprived areas surrounding it.  A few miles further south, Govanhill Baths started running its first swimming lessons 16 years ago last month. Here too it was a local community occupation, and a hard won campaign, that brought it back to life after council closure.  \n\n Robin McAlpine, director of the Common Weal, a \"think and do tank\" set up ahead of the Independence Referendum, has huge admiration for these campaigns and others like them. But the fact that they are needed at all makes him downright angry.  \n\n \"If you had a functioning local democracy you wouldn't need to fight like this,\" he says, fresh from the frustrations of trying to help a group in Aberdeen stop land being sold off to developers. They can't get legal advice and the odds are stacked against them. \n\n Examples of similar power imbalances litter the country. In Edinburgh campaigners in the Old Town are fighting on a range of fronts to stop what they see as the overdevelopment of the World Heritage site. And across Scotland – from Stirlingshire to Aberdeenshire and beyond – communities are fighting off development plans.\n\"If there's one thing that is truly exhausting it is taking on a bureaucracy when you don't have one of your own,\" says McAlpine. \"I've seen people burn out so many times. When you are campaigning for something like this you are always fighting against a better-resourced opponent.\" \n\n \"When you ask local politicians about it they say all people care about is getting their bins emptied. In fact they care deeply about other values, about their local area, families and communities. To say otherwise is just wrong.\" \n\n For him there is another way – participatory democracy that would see communities take on the issues that mattered – by establishing a Citizen's Assembly to act as a second chamber to the Scottish Parliament. In coming weeks Common Weal will launch a paper on the proposal in which they suggest selecting a random, representative sample of 73 members of the public to fulfil this role for at least one year. It is proposing a two-year trial that he says could help revolutionise democracy.  \n\n Interest in sortition, which sees citizens selected at random in response to the belief that power corrupts, is growing worldwide. But for its critics it's difficult to imagine what it would mean in practice.  \n\n At one charity in Govan, Glasgow's former shipbuilding area, a version of sorts already exists. Galgael, which aims to rebuild both individuals and the community through purposeful activity, from boat-building to carving and selling surplus timber, holds a monthly assembly for volunteers and staff, as part of its commitment to a democratic model. Though there is also a board, the important decisions are taken here. \n\n Galgael was founded in 1997 by Gehan Macleod and her visionary husband Colin, who died in 2005 aged just 39. It was born out of Pollok Free State, an early 90s treetop occupation Colin instigated to protest against the building of the M77 through the public woodlands in the city's Pollok Park. They failed to stop the road but succeeded in creating a community with new skills and purpose; and brought that back to Govan. \n\n Today Macleod is facilitating the assembly with warmth and honesty, helping identify issues and open up discussion with compassion and a lack of blame. Respectful disagreement is encouraged and solutions are jointly found. \n\n \"Our health is affected by decisions made on personal, professional and state levels,\" says Macleod, who also believes that the process of how decisions are made, not just their outcome, really matters.\nFor many in this room the experience of being heard has been life-changing. Michael O'Neill, who now lives in Clydebank but is originally from Govan, started volunteering here after being made redundant and suffering a breakdown of sorts.  \n\n \"I ended up just sitting in my house looking at the four walls and leaving my wife and two kids to get on with it,\" he says. Three years later he's working in the workshop, welding, cutting wood, delivery driving and whatever else needs doing. \"When you come here nobody judges you and you can speak your mind. If you make a mistake it's no big deal; it's how you learn. For me it's been like therapy. I think if places like this were widespread people would see life differently.\"  \n\n Up on the tiny Isle of Eigg, just south of Skye, Maggie Fyffe, secretary of the Eigg Heritage Trust, knows only too well the difference that community ownership makes. In June 2017, islanders will also celebrate the 20th anniversary of the community buy-out, which saw them go on to run their own affairs and develop the world's first completely renewable energy grid.  \n\n \"When the island was in private ownership we couldn't do anything,\" she says. \"In the nineties the island was pretty depressed. All that changed after the community buy-out. \n\n \"There's now a culture of self-sufficiency which has grown; there are endless small businesses up and running as well as large infrastructure projects.\" Young people are returning, building homes and having families. The future feels bright.  \n\n \"We are not perfect,\" she admits. \"Often it's a case of muddling through. But we are an example of how a bunch of ordinary people can run their own community. You don't know what you can do until you try, do you?\"  \n\n Back at the Children’s Wood, the playgroup is coming to a close. Toddlers clamber off rope swings, reluctantly part with wheelbarrows and wave goodbye to friends before winding their way through the trees on their way home for lunch. Some stop to splash in muddy puddles on the meadow; parents chat as they wait.  \n\n The community is now in talks with the council about a 25-year lease and is hopeful that it can start on plans to develop a meeting space, complete with solar panels and compost toilet, a treehouse village and wildflower planting to encourage biodiversity in the meadow.  \n\n Their eyes are also on the future; on a time when these pre-schools will watch their own children jump in puddles, hang out with their neighbours and be able to make sure it's the needs of the community that matter, first and foremost. That, campaigners claim, is what local democracy reform is really all about.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why was Our Democracy created?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_1", "options": ["It was established to give the voices of the poor and young more of a say in local and federal government policy decisions.", "It was formed as a response to the growing concern about democracy in Scotland and empowering citizens to think about how they would do things differently than those who currently make decisions for the country.", "It was an effort to organize a citizen review board that would oversee the functions of government to ensure proper representation.", "It was a direct response to the Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy which claimed radical democracy reform was needed."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does Willie Sullivan believe contributes the most to a lack of faith in democracy?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_2", "options": ["The belief that a person's vote doesn't actually matter in the long run.", "The feeling that social problems are running wildly out of control and therefore there are too many issues to address.", "The growing inequality between the voice of the people and those who have the power to make decisions that affect their lives.", "Simply voting does not allow for discussion or debate so people feel that their point of view does not matter."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How did Children's Wood come to fruition?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_3", "options": ["Emily Cutts and a group of fellow community members squatted in the woods until the councillors yielded to their demands.", "They initiated a playgroup for children, which eventually grew so large that the councillors were convinced it was a viable project.", "Emily Cutts and her fellow community members petitioned the local city council to stop invasive developments by demonstrating the harm they would cause to the community.", "According to its founder, it was largely successful due to an optimistic mindset and persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is the director of the Common Weal upset?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_4", "options": ["He is tired of constantly being rejected by legal representatives who would rather work with developers.", "His \"think and do tank\" model continues to receive push back from the Independence Referendum in spite of its success in modeling participatory democracy.", "He strongly disapproves of the overdevelopment of areas such as the World Heritage site in Edinburgh as well as similar areas in Stirlingshire and Aberdeenshire.", "He sees the way in which people continue to experience burnout in their battles against wealthy developers. "], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is a solution offered by McAlpine to the problem of disenfranchisement?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_5", "options": ["Developing charities where people can volunteer and participate in decision-making and governance would encourage people to actively participate on a larger scale as well.", "Revolutionizing democracy by giving 73 specifically chosen citizens a voice in the Scottish Parliament to represent the interests of the people.", "The creation of a Citizen's Assembly would boost the work of the Common Weal and thereby help procure more funding for its community projects.", "Developing a Citizen's Assembly modelled after the concept of sortition would put the voice of the people in direct conversation with the Scottish Parliament."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does Galgael model participatory democracy?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_6", "options": ["They have open discussions between volunteers and staff who make recommendations to the organization's facilitator, Gehan Macleod, who make the ultimate decisions for Galgael.", "They participate in occupation protests to prevent the building of new roads through public woodlands.", "They hold a gathering twelve times a year involving staff members and volunteers who work together to make key decisions for the organization.", "The volunteers and staff advise the board of directors on the activities of Galgael, and the board takes their information into consideration when making decisions."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the story of the Isle of Eigg illustrate?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_7", "options": ["It paints a picture of the future of Scotland that is overall optimistic and brimming with hope thanks to the efforts of young people to reimagine infrastructure projects.", "It demonstrates how lives can be changed for the better when an entire community comes together to restructure how its society operates after buying out ownership from a private entity.", "It shows how overdevelopment by private parties always leads to deep depression and ultimately divestment from the community.", "It demonstrates how communities are not perfect, and even though the Isle of Eigg was able to achieve its independence from private ownership, it learned that people cannot govern themselves."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What is Monroe doing in the Children's Wood?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_8", "options": ["He is cooking dinner there using a saucepan. ", "He is pretending to cook with the surrounding mud and grass.", "He is making a woodchip bath with his friends Reuben and Benjamin and helping them move the wheelbarrows.", "He is sitting in front of a bonfire and making popcorn with his grandparents."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does the director of the Electoral Reform Society want to change the way things are done in Scotland?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_9", "options": ["He wants to conduct vast voter registration drives in order to increase the number of people participating in the democratic process.", "He wants to empower the people to make change happen for themselves in the absence of a truly representative Parliament.", "He is encouraging voters to replace the current representatives in Parliament who seem to only represent developers with those who come directly from the people themselves.", "While he agrees that major changes need to happen, he wants to encourage people to manage their expectations in order to not feel let down by the process."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does Macleod believe so strongly in the process of sortition?", "question_unique_id": "99907_J9SAMLVD_10", "options": ["She believes that governing bodies should operate independently of the people they serve in order to maintain a sense of neutrality.", "Her husband had modeled the practice to great effect during his lifetime, and she wants to honor his legacy by mirroring that in the governance of Galgael.", "She believes that the decision-making process is as important as the decisions themselves and that everyone should have a stronger voice in both.", "She was inspired by the example set forth by the Isle of Eigg and believed that this would be a workable model for her own organization."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/society/scottish-local-democracy", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99909", "set_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Moonshots for the Earth", "year": 2015, "author": "Lucy Jones", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Moonshots for the Earth\nAt the end of August, as the northern hemisphere's hottest summer on record drew to a close, a group of inventors, designers and engineers assembled in a grand stone castle an hour's drive west of Paris. Château de Millemont was hosting a five-week 'innovation camp' for the pioneers behind 12 new projects, chosen for their contribution to achieving a world without fossil fuels. POC21 (Proof of Concept) was set up as an active, grassroots foil to cop 21, the 21st UN Climate Change conference in Paris, which begins at the end of November.  \n\n \"Global emissions have doubled since the first UN climate summit in 1995,\" says the POC21 video, amid images of environmental catastrophe, so \"Let's move from talking to building a better tomorrow.\" The objective was to create workable open-source technology in the fields of energy, food and waste – life, basically.  \n\n Products that made it to the final 12 included a pedal tractor, a smartphone-controlled greenhouse and an antibacterial water filter. Daniel Connell, one of the chosen inventors, travelled to Paris from the UK for the event. He was picked because he'd created an impressive cost- and resource-efficient wind turbine design. You can make it for about £20 out of aluminium sheets, a bike wheel, rivets, washers and nuts and bolts.  \n\n \"It's entirely built from recycled or upcycled materials, and can be assembled by anybody with basic hand or power tools,\" says Dominik Wind, core organiser of POC21. \"While this makes his design a perfect fit for the people that need it most (the poor, the marginalised around the globe), it's also the perfect design to build upon: it's the basis to start from with more customised, possibly also more complex and more expensive iterations.\"  \n\n Connell has been creating prototype technologies and tutorials for solar and wind designs while moving around the world over the last 10 years, traversing Canada, France, India and Spain. A 3D animator by trade, he is self-taught – he describes the Solar Flower, a DIY solar energy collector he created, as \"my degree\" – and set out to make an existing design for a wind turbine cheap and easy for people to use. \"Technically, it could be $5 if you just pay for the rivets and get plates and a bike wheel for free,\" he said.  \n\n A seasoned squatter, Connell made his project possible by sifting through scrap heaps, fixing up bikes and living on a few pounds a day so he wouldn't have to work and could devote his time to the wind turbine. Connell's ethos is inspired by the self-sufficient communities he grew up in as a child in New Zealand, and that country's culture of ingenuity and making stuff. Since POC21, his product has improved and he's showing it to students, retirees and other people who want to get off grid via workshops.  \n\n Connell is one of a number of green inventors working to ease the world's transition to climate change. As wildfires spread, countries sink, species go extinct, floods and drought increase, seas rise, storms devastate, glaciers melt, crops fail, pollution decreases life expectancy and the potential for conflict grows, eyes look to the inventors, geniuses and entrepreneurs who surely can figure out a way of saving the planet.  \n\n When Pope Francis, in an unprecedented speech earlier this year, rejected market solutions for climate change, attacked \"unfettered capitalism\" and made a forceful moral plea, it raised the question: if individual behavioural changes aren't realistic or enough, can't technology provide a route out of the problem? Where is that technology? And is 'techno-utopianism' realistic in the context of the climate crisis?\nMajor companies are already divesting from fossil fuels – most recently the Rockefeller Foundation, the Church of England and Norway's £900bn sovereign wealth fund – as burnable reserves run out and the climate change threat becomes more apparent; but local attention is also turning to how to transition to a greener world.  \n\nIn the bowels of an east London theatre on a foggy Sunday afternoon a month or so after POC21, a panel discusses whether Hackney Council should divest its pensions away from fossil fuels. \"There is an energy transition happening,\" says Carbon Tracker's Luke Sussams. Dr David McCoy, an expert in global public health, says, \"We face an existential threat in terms of eco collapse… My 14-year-old daughter's future does not look good.\" He explains how global warming will affect disease patterns and prompt conflict over scarce resources. Yet there is some optimism about green developments in electric cars, renewable energies and Tesla's new battery technology.  \n\n Bill McKibben, the campaigner and author who brought global warming to public consciousness with his 1989 book The End of Nature, and more recently the founder of international pressure group 350.org, is positive and excited about innovation in the green world. \"The price of a solar panel dropped 75 per cent in the last six years,\" he said, speaking from his home in Vermont. \"The world's engineers are doing their job; and doing it extraordinarily well.\"  \n\n The move to renewable energy is under way. An Apollo-style research programme to make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels recently won the backing of Sir David Attenborough and high-profile businesspeople, politicians and economists. Even Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, has warned that the \"vast majority of reserves are unburnable\" if global temperature rises are to be limited to below 2C. But others think that it's not enough, and consider geoengineering to be the grand techno-fix.  \n\n First presented as a big-idea solution to climate change in the 1960s, geoengineering proposals range from the seemingly fantastical – brightening the clouds; stirring the seas to change their temperature and cool the Earth; turning the ocean into a gigantic bubble bath to reflect the sun; covering the deserts in mirrors and sending parasols into space; mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo – to the more mundane: removing carbon from atmosphere and storing it somewhere else.  \n\n Although a number of scientists and researchers – including the Royal Society, which held a geoengineering 'retreat' in Buckinghamshire in 2011 – think geoengineering is an option worth considering, no one is actually doing it yet. Well, apart from Russ George, the businessman, entrepreneur and \"DIY rogue geo-vigilante\" who dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific ocean, triggering a 10,000-sq-km plankton bloom (plankton blooms suck carbon out of the atmosphere). Though the efficacy of his actions is still unclear, George was criticised for eco-terrorism, and was said to have contravened UN conventions.  \n\nThe big problem with DIY geoengineering, and any geoengineering for that matter, is its potential for danger: we don't know what would happen. David Keith, a professor of engineering at Harvard who developed a giant air-sucking wall to capture carbon, told the New Yorker's Michael Specter, \"It is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on Earth.\"  \n\n On the other hand, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) doesn't seem, on the face of it, like playing god with our weather systems or trying, fruitlessly, to find a dimmer switch for the sun. A company called Skyonics claims its Skymine process can capture harmful pollutants and turn them into marketable products such as baking soda and bleach.  \n\n But to what extent can sucking carbon out of the air work? Sabine Mathesius, a climate modeller at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wanted to see what CDR could achieve if five gigatons (an enormous, hypothetical amount) of carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere each year. Simulations found that the impact of this level of removal would not be significant at all, especially in terms of protecting the ocean, which is acidified by human-produced CO2.  \n\n \"In the beginning I was surprised,\" she said. \"Like many people I also hoped that geoengineering could be a way to undo the harm we did with our CO2 emissions. But if you see how much CO2 we can get out of the atmosphere with the current technologies and what we are expected to emit in a business-as-usual scenario, you can already see that the impact of CO2 removal cannot be that big.\"  \n\n CDR could be used as a supporting measure to avoid the worst scenario if emissions are reduced at the same time, Mathesius concluded. \"What is not possible is just emitting the CO2 as usual and further expanding our industries and then using CDR to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Reducing emissions is the cheapest way to keep the CO2 levels low; and also the easiest way.\" More promising technologies, such as bioenergy with carbon capture or artificial trees, would also require fertile land or would cost astronomic amounts, Mathesius says. So where then would she place her hope in terms of a techno-fix to solve climate change? \"Clean energy to make it easier for people to emit less CO2.\"  \n\n Carbon capture and storage gets short shrift from McKibben. \"If you step back and think about it for a minute, it's silly,\" he says. \"You can do it, obviously, but can you do it at a cost that makes any kind of sense? You can't. No one's been able to yet. You're way better off just building the windmills in the first place. All it is is a solution designed to try and appease the power of the coal industry and offer them some kind of future.\"  \n\n Those looking into this techno-fix are quite clear that solar radiation management or carbon capture is no substitute for reducing carbon emissions anyway. Bodies such as the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI) and the Royal Society contain wary caveats, that geoengineering is not an alternative to reducing carbon consumption. McKibben calls them an \"absurd set of ideas where people throw up their hands and say, 'There's no way we can solve this problem, so instead let's fill the atmosphere with sulphur'.\"\nOn the last day of April, Elon Musk entered the stage at his Tesla Design Centre in Hawthorne, California to thumping dubstep, whoops and ripples of applause. The billionaire business magnate nodded to the crowd of adoring fans and set out his vision for a complete transformation of how the world works. His 20-minute speech explained how a new invention – the Powerwall battery – would advance a complete overhaul of the world's energy infrastructure. \"This is how it is today… it sucks,\" Musk began, gesturing to slides depicting factories belching out smoke.  \n\n The solution to getting from fossil fuel hell to a renewable-powered future, he explained, was his new product. Because \"existing batteries suck,\" he had developed the Tesla Powerwall: a wall-mounted, household battery on sale for $3,500 (£2,300). His statements were punctuated by cheers and screams from the crowd, especially when he revealed that the whole event had been powered by solar and Powerwall.  \n\n Musk believes that transitioning to electric cars and solar energy will contain the worst effects of climate change. His electric cars are improving all the time; the mass-market model is expected to be ready before 2020. Tesla open-sourced all its patents and technology in 2014 to encourage other people to advance the electric vehicle industry; and lots of major names in the automobile world have followed with designs for electric cars. \"We need the entire automotive industry to remake, and quickly,\" said McKibben. Musk has also proposed the Hyperloop, a new transport system he describes as \"a cross between Concorde, a railgun and a hockey table\".  \n\n Advances in batteries radically change the picture of renewable energy, electric cars and transport systems; and important improvements are happening. At the end of October 2015, a group of Cambridge scientists made a major breakthrough with a rechargeable super-battery that can hold five times more energy as those we're used to and can power a car from London to Edinburgh on a single charge.  \n\n Improved battery storage will change everything for green energy enthusiasts like Daniel Connell in the next few years. \"This is why, apart from [a lack of] political will, we don't have renewable energy: because storage levels don't reach grid level. But before the end of the decade they will,\" he explains.\nOne of the projects chosen for POC21, the French eco-castle retreat, was a design by a team from Berlin. Sunzilla, a diesel generator without diesel, fuelled by the sun, can be assembled by anyone. Germany is leading the way in the energy revolution with its\nenergiewende\n, driven by Green politicians and the support of local citizens. In 2014, just over a quarter of German energy came from renewable sources; in 2050, the goal is 80 per cent. The German Green Party politician Ralf Fücks, author of a new book called Green Growth, Smart Growth, is a techno-optimist with faith in society's ability to find a way out of the ecological crisis, although he cautions against the hubris of large-scale techno-fixes. Investment in green technologies and renewable energies are more realistic, he writes, than carbon capture and storage.  \n\n Fücks speak slowly, carefully and with an obvious delight in the natural world. \"Spider silk is a wonderful substance,\" he says at one point. \"It's more flexible than rubber and more solid than steel and we now have the skills to discover [its] molecular composition.\" He cites the smooth skin of the shark and the self-cleaning surface of the lotus blossom as examples of biological productivity we can learn from and use for our own purposes, while decreasing CO2 emissions.  \n\n But biomimicry is in its early stages, and renewables have already crossed to the point of no return, as Fücks puts it. On the plus side, though, costs for solar and wind power have decreased considerably over the last five years.  \n\n Fücks sees opportunities for young entrepreneurs and startups in a world without global celebrities such as Bill Gates or Richard Branson. The environmental reform of industrial society, in his view, demands a combination of big and small. There is room for more Elon Musks.  \n\n The world of food is fertile ground for big ideas and green tech innovation. Last summer saw the publication of new technology proposals to turn the waste shells of prawn, crab and lobster into nitrogen-rich chemicals for use, say, in pharmaceuticals, carbon sequestration and animal feed, which would avoid industrial production using fossil fuels.  \n\nFarmers, too, are innovating worldwide. In Devon, Rebecca Hosking is using new land management techniques to make a contribution to fighting climate change. She uses a grazing method that purposely locks atmospheric carbon back into the soil. Instead of ploughing, her long-grass grazing technique keeps carbon in the roots, ploughing release-carbon from soil into the atmosphere. The more organic matter there is in the ground, the more it can trap in the carbon.  \n\n \"Once you lock it in, and as long as you don't plough or let your grassland dry out, then the carbon stays in the soil,\" she says. \"You know that climate change is happening, we do our bit and suck out as much carbon as we can.\"  \n\n This method, which French farmers are also keen to implement, is similar in the way it works to a new, low-methane, genetically modified rice. SUSIBA2, the new rice, uses smaller roots, and produces less methane, one of the chief greenhouse gases. Scientists have also developed a feed supplement for dairy cows that could reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent.  \n\n Global warming is posing serious challenges to water supply; and we all know that the melting of glaciers is one detrimental effect of climate change. Cue another climate hero: Chewang Norphel, an 80-year-old retired civil engineer, has made 12 artificial glaciers in the last 30 years to provide water for the people of Ladakh, India. The Ice Man, as he is called, realised he could divert water through canals into frozen ice sheets, which would melt in spring and provide water for irrigation, agriculture and general local use. \"Getting water during the sowing period is the most crucial concern of the farmers because the natural glaciers start melting in the month of June and sowing starts in April and May,\" he told online news portal the Better India.  \n\n Ocean farmers are also growing kelp again to encourage a move away from environmentally costly meat-based diets. Indeed, 3D ocean farming proponents GreenWave quote a study that found a network of seaweed farms the size of Washington state could provide all the dietary protein for the entire world population.  \n\n Pope Francis's recent address sounded a note of caution around technology as a solution to climate change. \"Our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience,\" he said.  \n\n Bill McKibben believes the key is solving the \"structural systemic problem rooted in the balance of political power on our planet.\" To make a difference, he says, an individual must \"join with other people to build the kind of movement that can change those balances of power.\" In Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything, she writes about the Hollywood action movie narrative that tells us that, at the very last minute, some of us are going to be saved: \"Since our secular religion is technology, it won't be god that saves us but Bill Gates and his gang of super-geniuses at Intellectual Ventures.\"  \n\n But, while some techno-fixes recall the Greek hubris myth of Icarus, there is work to be done and hope to be found. Around the world, people are working to improve 3D printing technology and the usability of tutorials to explain how to make Connell's DIY wind turbine or the German Sunzilla. Demand Logic, a company based in London, is using data to sweep big, commercial buildings in the city and work out where energy savings can be made.  \n\n Of the UN Climate Conference in Paris, McKibben says it will be most interesting to see whether countries will come up with the money to help poor countries leapfrog technologically. But he maintains that engineers and innovators are focusing their efforts in the right place, speeding up the transition from fossil fuels. Despite the Pope's cautionary note, the industry of technology is crucial in the shift to a newly balanced planet. McKibben praised the good, cheap solar panels we already have, but said they could be much more efficient and easier to adopt. \"There's no shortage of crucial and interesting work for architects, engineers and financiers, and none of it requires telling yourself science fiction stories, the way that you have to if all you can think of is, 'Let's put a giant piece of film in space to block the sun'.\"\nPhotographs courtesy of POC21: first photograph published via Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0, second and third images via CC BY-SA 2.0\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why is Daniel Connell's wind turbine design so unique?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_1", "options": ["It is the first wind turbine designed by a nomadic inventor whose travels around the world inform his inventions.", "It is the only wind turbine of its kind to utilize aluminum, rivets, washers, nuts, and bolts.", "In addition to being customizable and simple, it is cost-effective and therefore accessible to everyone.", "Also nicknamed the Solar Flower, it is the first do-it-yourself wind turbine available on the market that is cheap and easy to use."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why do some consider geoengineering to be the solution to the threat of climate change?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_2", "options": ["Because of the obsession with technology and grandiose gestures, people are more interested in investing in projects with unique and creative approaches to tackling climate change.", "Due to the immediacy of the threat of climate change, certain risks must be taken, and geoengineering offers the biggest risks for the largest pay-off.", "They believe the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is not sufficient to stem the climate crisis and supplemental measures are needed.", "Many scientists and inventors have discovered that large-scale engineering projects, such as covering the deserts in mirrors and dumping 100 tons of iron sulfate into the ocean, offer the only large-scale solutions to such an imposing problem."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is Mathesius skeptical about the use of a Carbon Dioxide Removal strategy?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_3", "options": ["CDR efforts would not lead to significant decreases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; instead, it should supplement the shift to clean energy and overall reduction of emissions. ", "CO2 removal maxes out at five gigatons, which would not be a sufficient amount of removal required to protect the oceans of the world.", "Because of its link to bioengineering, it has not been properly vetted, so therefore its efficacy is widely unknown.", "CDR is generally considered to be one of the most expensive technological answers to the question of reducing the harm of emissions upon the atmosphere."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is the problem with geoengineering?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_4", "options": ["It doesn't do enough to reduce emissions and instead focuses on innovative engineering projects and working around fossil fuel companies.", "It is largely untested and therefore might be dangerous. In addition, its overall effectiveness is still unclear.", "They involve projects often designed by ambitious inventors who circumvent what is legal in the name of creation and climate progress.", "It is an enterprise characterized largely by hubris, and without any clear direction and time running out, it is better to focus on more practical projects"], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is Elon Musk's work at Tesla encouraging?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_5", "options": ["He has designed the Hyperloop, a new transport system he describes as \"a cross between Concorde, a railgun and a hockey table.\"", "Thanks to Tesla's invention of the electric car, the world will see fossil fuel emissions drop significantly by 2050.", "He embraces a clean energy business model and encourages other businesses to do the same by making his patents publicly available.", "Under his direction, Tesla has developed energy-efficient batteries that has increased the amount of storage batteries can have and led to the invention of similar products around the world."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What is important about Pope Francis' pronouncement about climate change?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_6", "options": ["It is a stark reminder that climate change is a major problem affecting all of the people of the world.", "It reminds people that technological progress must be tempered by responsibility and a commitment to human values.", "It demonstrates that humanity's religion is technology despite the fact that he represents the Catholic church.", "It was a withering condemnation of capitalism and a call to action to reject capitalist societies around the world."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How does McKibben believe humanity can respond to Pope Francis' call for climate action?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_7", "options": ["People must find a way to fix the systemic issues associated with addressing climate change including decentralizing power by utilizing technology but not trusting solely in technology to save them.", "He suggests that wealthier countries leading the tech movements should donate money to poor and developing countires in order to help them catch up them technologically. ", "He believes that architects, engineers, and financiers should think outside the box and work together to come up with innovative, creative solutions to the problem.", "He strongly believes in the utilization of techno-fixes to lower emissions and reverse the damaging effects of climate change upon the environment. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "In what ways are farmers contributing to the efforts to turn the tide on climate change?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_8", "options": ["They have created new types of food for large-scale human consumption using the shells of prawn, crab, and lobster.", "They are contributing to CDR efforts by trapping carbon in the soil, which will ultimately lead to a rejuvenation of the world's oceans.", "They donate large portions of their land in order to allow engineers, scientists, and inventors to test their bioengineering innovations on a wider scale.", "They have developed ways to trap carbon in the soil, reduce methane emissions from rice and cows, and transform the waste of crustaceans into products that wouldn't require the use of fossil fuels to produce."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is biomimicry not utilized on a larger scale?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_9", "options": ["Animals and plants are so unique and special that it is nearly impossible to imitate their magnificence.", "It is a niche area of scientific inquiry and not many scientists, engineers, and inventors are interested in exploring that area.", "Biomimicry is relatively new, and renewable energies such as solar and wind power are very popular and inexpensive by comparison.", "As of yet, there are not many opportunities for young entrepreneurs and startups in the world of biomimicry, and renewable energies have made further inquiry into the science moot."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "How might scientists and inventors address the decreasing global water supply?", "question_unique_id": "99909_OLMIIALK_10", "options": ["They can devote their time and energy towards projects like Better India, which seeks to supplement its drinkable water resources with artificial icebergs.", "They can invest time and research into ideas like the artificial production of glaciers and pursuing kelp as a central source of protein.", "They can turn to farmers working in the field of irrigation innovation for better stewardship of water used to plant crops.", "They can adopt bioengineering innovations such as Russ George's dumping of iron sulphate that resulted in a 10,000-sq-km plankton boom."], "difficult": 0}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/margins/a-technological-fix-for-climate-change", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99904", "set_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Futures not of our making", "year": 2016, "author": "Jared Robert Keller", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Futures not of our making\nAfter listening to Travis Kalanick, CEO and co-founder of Uber, explain why his world-conquering ride-hailing service is ultimately better for drivers than the taxi industry, Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show, queried his grand plans: \"I know you talk about how good this is for drivers, but you said you want, like,\nself-driving\nUber cars… that's not for the driver, [you're] employing robots at that point. How is that helping livery drivers?\" Kalanick responded by shifting the conversation:\nGoogle is doing the driverless thing. Tesla is doing the driverless thing. Apple is doing the driverless thing. This is going to be the world. So a question for a tech company is, do you want to be part of the future or do you want to resist the future?\nDriverless cars are the future. If that doesn't appeal to you, blame automation; blame Silicon Valley. Don't blame Uber.  \n\n Now, Travis Kalanick's vision of the future may indeed come to fruition, and taxi drivers, long-haul truckers and (eventually) train conductors may in fact need to begin looking for new jobs. But what struck me about his oft-repeated response was the way that it so subtly but effectively controlled the narrative around automation and the future. By maintaining that the future is predetermined, Kalanick manoeuvred us, the public, into a position where we, too, are seemingly left with just two choices: resist that future, or embrace it.\nOf course, this is not the case: every technological advance involves human agency, and so there are choices available to us, but Kalanick's response circumvents this. We shouldn't get in the way of technological determinism. \n\n In the context of politics, Patricia Dunmire has written that such language works to \"supplant the notion of the future as the site of the possible with a conception of the future as inevitable\". This then limits the ability of people to \"imagine, articulate and realise futures\" different to ones handed down by those in power. \n\n My concern is that if we allow tech companies to similarly cast the future as determined, they can avoid engaging in a meaningful discussion about the consequences and implications of new technologies like self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI), or machine learning.\nUnsurprisingly, Kalanick is far from the first industry boss to frame the future of automation in this way. Industrialists, engineers and scientists in mid-20th-century America deployed many of these same narratives in similar attempts to control the discourse around technology and 'the future'. Examining how these narratives were deployed in the past can offer insight into how they are currently being used today – and what to do about it. \n\n The planners of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, for instance, took quite a deterministic view of the relationship between society and technological advance, which the guidebook for the fair encapsulated, in one of the great chapter headings of the 20th century: 'Science Finds – Industry Applies – Man Conforms'. \n\n The guidebook went on to explain: \"Science discovers, genius invents, industry applies, and man adapts himself to, or is moulded by, new things… Individuals, groups, entire races of men fall into step with the slow or swift movement of the march of science and industry.\" \n\n As well as conjuring images of a certain goose-stepping hyena scene from The Lion King, this description casts technological progress as the prime mover within society. Technological advancement is imagined as a train travelling briskly down the tracks toward a singular destination – a destination that will not only be revolutionary but unquestionably beneficial for all. The public just needs to climb aboard. \n\n The National Association of Manufacturers put its own unique spin on this well-worn metaphor in 1954 when it said: \"[G]eared to the smooth, effortless workings of automation, the magic carpet of our free economy heads for distant and undreamed of horizons. Just going along for the ride will be the biggest thrill on earth.\"\nYet, for as much as technological advances are often framed as revolutionary, they are also often framed as simply\nevolutionary\n. While new automative technologies like electric limit switches, photoelectric controls, or microprocessors were described as revolutionary advances that would greatly benefit industrialists and consumers alike, these same advances were also described as merely the next step in the slow and gradual evolution of industrial technique. \n\n Adopting this approach, a 1955 General Electric film/advertisement entitled This is Automation described recent advances in automation as the latest in long line of  \"natural evolution in industry\" that had \"worked to the advantage of everyone\".\nThis not only served to naturalise automatic processes at a time when the US Congress was meeting to discuss concerns about automation, it also served to rewrite the history of automation extending backward to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. \"Before the word automation was coined\", the film explained, advances in manufacturing \"seemed funny or fearful, depending on the viewpoint… The trouble was, some people thought of automation as a sudden thing – a revolutionary idea. But it isn't! It began nearly two hundred years ago\".\nThe message, then, was that automation was not new, and therefore need not be foreboding; what had benefited society in the past would benefit society in the future. After all, did not labourers in the 1950s enjoy better working conditions, shorter hours, and greater purchasing power compared to their equals a century before? The 'natural evolution' of automation would ensure that labourers in 2050 would be similarly better off. \n\n Such an account, however, makes no mention of the decades of work done by unions to secure those benefits or the legislation passed to ingrain certain rights as law. Two hundred years of automation are made to seem almost automatically beneficial. As a result, we're led to believe that the future of automation will require equally little in the way of regulation or action by labour unions. In a very real, very Orwellian sense, industry bosses who took such an approach were able to control the story of how automation unfolded in the past, and how it would unfold in the future. In the words of the Party: \"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past\".\nAccording to many mid-20th-century industry bosses, the only thing that could derail this better future were the pessimists and critics – the people who wanted to saddle America's economy with unnecessary and burdensome regulation. It was Henry Ford himself who, in a 1939 New York Times article celebrating the opening of the New York World's Fair, lambasted those who would resist the onward march of science. \"Despite every restriction that can be placed on it by so-called 'reformers',\" Ford wrote, \"the quest will continue – invention will go forward.\" \n\n In one of the most unintentionally delightful films from the 20th century the industrial manufacturing firm, Westinghouse, set out to confront these 'so-called reformers' with a feature-length film, The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair, released in 1939. Part drama and part corporate advertisement, the film sets up a struggle for the soul of the Middleton's cherubic young son, Bud. On one side is Nikolas Makaroff, an intellectual, European, artist type who is partial to quoting Karl Marx and refers to automation as \"Frankenstein's monster\". On the other is Jim Treadway, a good ol' American boy who passed up a chance to play pro (American) football in order to work for Westinghouse and who believes in the power of science, industry, progress and the American way. For good measure, the screenwriters also include a love triangle between Makaroff, the Middletons' daughter, Babs, and Treadway (her former flame).\nThe film opens with a gloomy radio announcement about the lack of jobs in Depression-era America, after which Bud laments his luck at being born into joblessness. \"Maybe it is difficult\", Mr Middleton interjects, \"but it's worse to be a quitter… You've heard all the\ntalkers\n, now I'm going to show you the\ndoers\n!\" And with that, the Middletons are off to the fair.\nThe two Middleton men soon meet up with Jim Treadway, whom Mr Middleton drafts to convince Bud of the great prospects for the future thanks to automation and technological advancement. The scenes that follow are notable for the way in which Treadway not only casts aside concerns about the future, but paints those with concerns as domineering, fact-averse, pessimists:\nMr. Middleton: \"Tell me Jim, do you honestly believe industry can make enough jobs in the future to take care of the young people that are coming along?\"\nJim Treadway: \"I think the problem's going to be the other way around. Industry will make so many jobs there won't be enough people to fill them.\"\nBud: *Scoff*\nJim Treadway: \"So you don't believe me do you?\"\nBud: \"From all I've heard…\"\nJim Treadway: [Crossing arms] \"You're liable to hear anything these days. Are you willing to sit back and let a lot of self-appointed leaders do your thinking for you?\"\nBud: \"Well they believe we're on the skids…\"\nJim Treadway: \"Yes, and the men who built this fair believe the opposite. And what's more they back up\ntheir\nbelief… with two hundred million dollars' worth of facts.\"\nBud: \"Well maybe the other side would, too, if they weren't busted.\"\nJim Treadway: \"And they'll stay that way. Until they learn that prosperity and pessimism don't travel together. But they're like you, Bud: they don't like facts.\"\nBud: \"Oh, I don't mind them, Jim.\"\nJim Treadway: \"Good, then I'll introduce you to a few. Come along.\"\n[Taking him warmly by the shoulder, Jim leads Bud off stage left].\nAfter an entire day of learning about the economic benefits of photoelectric cells, triodes, and oscilloscopes, Bud has had enough of pessimism. And after Nikolas Makaroff is exposed as a hypocrite, liar and coward, Babs returns to Treadway. The film and the fair for which it was produced are noteworthy for the way that the industrial, scientific, engineering, and business communities came together to directly combat the negative press surrounding technological advancement. \n\n In her analysis of the fair, the historian Sue Bix writes: \"In defining the future as a period characterised by wonderful revolutions in production, exhibitors effectively excluded discussion of any accompanying cost to workers.\" By doing so, they were able to avoid taking any substantive steps to address the concerns of labour unions and government bodies.\nThe fact that industry bosses from Henry Ford to Travis Kalanick have been deploying similar rhetoric for more than a century speaks to the success of these narratives, and to the extent to which these same industry bosses have largely been able to avoid engaging in meaningful discussions about the impact of automative technologies. Indeed, their success  makes it difficult to even imagine any alternatives. Such framing, according to the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, \"annihilates any future uncontained in the past and present\". \n\n Thankfully, however, a small number of writers and activists from this period offered up a few alternatives.  \n\n Take the example of the United Auto Workers' (UAW) union. A few years after Congress met to discuss concerns about automation and General Electric released its supporting film This is Automation\n,\nthe UAW put out its own film on the topic of automation, Push Buttons and People. The film challenges determinist framings of technological advancement by asking, \"Will whatever happens, happen automatically? Can we do anything?\"\nAfter showing footage of Walter Reuther, head of the UAW, testifying before Congress about the effects of automation, the film draws to a close and the narrator moves to sum up:\nWell, here we are back again with our original word: automation… You and I and a Senate Committee, and Walter Reuther, have had a discussion. Why? Because it's our common problem. The question is: what shall we do to succeed, to tame automation? We, you… the companies, the United States Senate…\nGiven that their jobs were on the line, it is understandable that the UAW described automation not as a train headed toward better shores, but as \"a word to strike terror in any human heart\" and as something to be confronted and 'tamed'. More importantly, however, the UAW also framed technological advancement as something that was contestable and open to discussion rather than predetermined. The film made a point of attempting to draw viewers into a conversation about how to proceed.\nOr take the ecologically-minded writer Peter van Dresser who, in a 1939 article in Harper's, rejected Aladdin-esque framings of technological advancement. The American people, according to Dresser, were all too ready to \"talk and think as if Scientific Technology [sic] were a kind of wilful genie whose gifts we must gratefully accept while we accommodate ourselves as best we can to his bad habits.\" Seeing to the social health of the nation would be impossible, Van Dresser argued, so long as people continued to accept \"utterly without criticism the blueprints for America's technological future formulated by the industrial empire-builders.\"\nYet despite these calls to action, America exited the 20th century having never settled these debates about the impact of automation. According to Sue Bix, what was missing was both the willpower to challenge dominant discourses about progress and a clearly articulated vision of how the public might be given a say in the development and adoption of automative technologies. \n\n As we continue to grapple with more questions about technological advancement today, now is the time to challenge dominant discourses and articulate our alternative visions of the future.  \n\n This will require taking steps to encourage an informed dialogue between tech companies, governments, non-profits, and the public. Along these lines, the Government Data Science Partnership recently developed a Data Science Ethical Framework which aims to help policymakers and data scientists \"think through some of the ethical issues which sit outside the law.\" Through public workshops and online surveys members of the public were encouraged to participate in the development of this framework. The partnership even commissioned the Data Dilemmas app in an attempt to provide members of the public with \"a way of learning about data science and the ethical trade-offs that government has to make in designing data science projects.\" It is far from perfect, but it is a start. \n\n On the industrial side, Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook joined forces this September to create the (absurdly-named) Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. The partnership was formed with the expressed purpose of serving as \"an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society\". The coming years will tell whether this is a genuine attempt to engage in meaningful dialogue or simply an effort to mollify public fears.\nChallenging these dominating narratives could also involve setting up dedicated commissions to examine the impact and implications of technological innovations. In a promising move, the House of Commons recently recommended that a commission on Artificial Intelligence be established at the Alan Turing Institute. With a remit to examine the \"social, ethical and legal implications of recent potential developments in AI\" and ensure that new AI systems are developed responsibly and transparently, the new commission would seem to be a step in the right direction. \n\n We need more efforts such as these, and we need them to become the rule rather than the exception. Otherwise, as Grosz warns, we may find ourselves implicated in futures not of our making. \n\n And finally, in closing, here's one last clip from the Middletons:\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why does Travis Kalanick ask, \". . . do you want to be part of the future or do you want to resist the future?\"", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_1", "options": ["In order to suggest that a driverless future is unavoidable because it is an inevitable feature of the progress of automation within the automotive industry and to shift responsibility for potential job losses away from Uber. ", "He is directly confronting Stephen Colbert who had just asked him an accusatory question regarding the role of Uber in the potential unemployment of many drivers in the future due to driverless cars.", "He is trying to hold a discussion on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert about the role of technological determinism in our society in general and how people ought to see more possibilities in the future.", "He wants Uber to be a top competitor in Silicon Valley, replicating and possibly supplanting the successes of companies like Google, Tesla, and Apple."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why did the guidebook for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair include the chapter heading, \"Science Finds - Industry Applies - Man Conforms\"?", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_2", "options": ["The guidebook was intended to highlight the individual accomplishments of the scientists and inventors who contributed to the Chicago World's Fair.", "The scientific and technological innovations presented at the World's Fair represented the ways that the lives of humans would be made simpler and easier in the future.", "The planners of the World's Fair wanted their audience to engage in productive discussions about the role of science and technology in society in general.", "The developers of the World's Fair wanted to position scientific and technological advancement as the central force of progress in the world with an inevitable target irrespective of the effect on human life."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was the messaging about the benefits of the Industrial Revolution misleading as it related to automation?", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_3", "options": ["It left out a discussion of the role of unions and laws in protecting laborers as automation progressed and threatened people's livelihoods. ", "It purported to presage an influx of good-paying jobs with strong benefits when in reality the Industrial Revolution led to widespread unemployment and poverty.", "It suggested that while the rich and powerful control the past, the laborers would control the future.", "It suggested that progress was immediate and automatic as opposed to the gradually evolving and revolutionary process automation entailed."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to industry leaders, what was the greatest existential threat to technological progress?", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_4", "options": ["Intellectuals and artistic types who followed the teachings of Karl Marx and referred to automation as \"Frankenstein's Monster.\"", "Pessimists and critics who viewed technological advancement as not only harmful to society in general but also as unnecessary, as most people were comfortable with good pay and benefits in the mid-20th century.", "Reformers whose ideas could compete with their own technological advancements with innovations that utilized even greater and more advanced scientific discoveries.", "Interference from regulators and people who imagined a different future other than the one presented as inevitable by those who benefitted from that vision."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "According to the Westinghouse employee in the movie about a family visiting the New York World's Fair, what is the main issue with automation?", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_5", "options": ["He believes it will lead to the crippling of the middle class.", "He thinks it will cause the engineers of the World's Fair to spend two hundred million dollars to prove that automation can actually work for society.", "There wouldn't be enough jobs for everyone because the machines would replace the need for most human laborers.", "It would lead to a surplus of work and there might not be enough laborers to take those jobs."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What has been the result of the perpetuated idea that automation is the way of the future?", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_6", "options": ["Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, this concept has led to the gradual dismantling of the human labor force in the United States and created a crisis of labor in the 21st century.", "It has created renewed interest in investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning opportunities.", "It has given companies the ability to neglect substantive conversations and considerations about what might happen as a result of introducing new technologies into society.", "It has convinced workers to de-value their own labor and allowed company bosses to take advantage of their labor by paying insubstantial wages."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "What was the significance of the film \"Push Buttons and People\"?", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_7", "options": ["It described recent advances in automation as the latest in a long line of \"natural evolution in industry\" that had \"worked to the advantage of everyone.\"", "It proposed the concept that regulation-free automation was not necessarily the only way to move forward and workers' rights must be protected.", "It served to naturalize automatic processes at a time when the US Congress was meeting to discuss concerns about automation and rewrote the history of automation.", "It depicted automation as a kind of genie-like phenomenon that bestowed gifts like increased purchasing power, shorter hours, and better working conditions upon laborers."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why was Peter van Dresser critical of idealized discussions of technological advancement?", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_8", "options": ["It would be difficult to address other critical issues if society was meant to adapt to the results of unquestioned appropriation of automation rather than the other way around.", "He believed that people should view scientific technology as a genie whose gifts they must gratefully accept and accommodate themselves to as best as they can.", "He felt the discussions were being had exclusively between the empire-builders and members of the US Congress who stood to benefit from their investments.", "He did not believe that technological advancement was something that should be contestable, and he was a stronger believer that technological determination."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "How might societies ensure accountability for large technology companies in the future?", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_9", "options": ["They can develop harsher penalties for leaders of tech companies who take advantage of their workers by replacing their jobs with machines and slashing pay.", "They can form regulatory bodies to explore the potential consequences of scientific and technological advancements on humans and society before blindly accepting them as a natural part of evolution. ", "They can enhance communications between companies like Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook so that they are working in partnership to ensure technology benefits people and society.", "They can organize committees that may engage in meaningful dialogues that will function to mollify public fears about the potentially harmful results of the marriage between technology and industry."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why were conversations about the results of automation largely ineffectual in the 20th century?", "question_unique_id": "99904_LMD3B0RW_10", "options": ["They failed to consider the rise of superpower tech companies such as Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook and the influence they would hold over society.", "These conversations were dominated by the bosses of emerging tech companies who wanted to prioritize the use of automation over the concerns of laborers.", "They failed to sort through major ethical issues which sat outside the law and essentially paid lip service to matters of real concern to people.", "These conversations lacked a real challenge to the persistent narrative that automation was central to our social evolution as well as a consideration for the voice of the people such development affected."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/forecasts/the-future-is-not-inevitable", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}
{"article_id": "99918", "set_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34", "batch_num": "23", "writer_id": "1021", "source": "misc-longshort", "title": "Who can you trust in a post-truth world?", "year": 2017, "author": "Brennan Jacoby", "topic": "Magazine article", "article": "Who can you trust in a post-truth world?\nTrust has always been a dangerous business. Every instance of it brings the risk of let-down, disloyalty and betrayal. Still, in recent times, the vulnerability inherent in trust seems more pronounced. Technological advancements enabling increased access to information mean that awareness of corporate scandals, fake news and political lies has increased exponentially: Volkswagen; the Panama Papers; giving £350m a week to the NHS; Hillary's emails; the Pope's supposed support of Trump. The list goes on. Of course, our access to information also makes it easier to learn about the good being done in the world. But somehow scandal always lodges in the memory better than integrity. As a result, it is hard to resist being conditioned to expect that just about everything we read in the news or hear an 'expert' say will turn out to be a lie, politically motivated, or simply wrong.  \n\n This scepticism lies at the heart of our 'post-truth' and 'post-trust' times. And yet, just when truth is said to be irrelevant, and trust all but gone, those concepts feature heavily in contemporary social discourse. This is no coincidence. As the late philosopher Annette Baier said: \"We inhabit a climate of trust as we inhabit an atmosphere and notice it as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted.\" \n\n In this era of post-truth, scandals, falsity and deception have created a vacuum, leaving many of us all the more aware of just how scarce truth and trust seem to be.\nThat trust is more scarce is not just a perceived reality, but a measurable one. The PR firm Edelman has been assessing global levels of trust for the past 17 years. Their most recent Trust Barometer\nreports that:\nTwo-thirds of the countries surveyed are now 'distrusters'\nLess than 50 per cent trust in the mainstream institutions of business, government, media and NGOs to do what is right\nOver two-thirds of the general population do not have confidence that current leaders can address their country's challenges\nThe media is distrusted in more than 80 per cent of countries surveyed\nFor Edelman, these findings amount to a \"crisis of trust\" because they find a correlation between trust and societal functioning:\nWe have moved beyond the point of trust being simply a key factor in product purchase or selection of employment opportunity; it is now the deciding factor in whether a society can function. As trust in institutions erodes, the basic assumptions of fairness, shared values and equal opportunity traditionally upheld by 'the system' are no longer taken for granted.\nBecause of its relationship to social functioning, low levels of trust are, indeed, concerning. But if a reduction in trust means that fairness, shared values and justice are no longer taken for granted, the distrust that characterises so much of the world today could in fact be positive. For, while fairness, shared values and justice are necessary for societal well-being, they ought not to be taken for granted. Each historical stand against tyranny shows that the sustainability of values like justice and fairness requires them to be actively defended.\nThe world may be experiencing a crisis of trust. But the crisis cannot be that trust is merely low. For trust is not always best, and more trust is not always better. If the projects that trust enables collaborators to complete are corrupt, busting trust can be appropriate. Whistleblowers are good examples of this: in leaking secrets, they violate a trust, but for a good reason. Too much trust is also undesirable insofar as it enables the abuse of power. The checks and balances built into the American political system exist for this very reason: the relationship between citizens and such powerful leaders is not one that should be characterised solely by trust.   \n\n Just as trust is not always best, distrust, often thought to be a sign of interpersonal or societal dysfunction, can be appropriate. The key is to cultivate trust that tracks trustworthiness. If a boss, partner or government lacks the competence, motivation or good character needed to uphold the trust placed in them, distrust, rather than trust, is reasonable and appropriate. It is for this reason that the current low levels of trust are understandable. A rebuilding of trust may help society function more smoothly, but the current threat of ambiguous news and politicians who 'construct' their own truth make distrust, rather than trust, appropriate. \n\n While trust ought to track trustworthiness, there is at least one instance where trust may be well-placed despite the absence of trustworthiness: when one chooses to trust another for the sake of helping them cultivate trustworthiness, or because one loves them.  \n\n For example, just as a parent gives a pet to a child, not because they believe the child to be responsible, but to help teach them responsibility, trust can be given to others to help them develop trustworthiness. Also, in relationships characterised by a high degree of intimacy (such as marriages, partnerships and close friendships) to withhold trust because of another's faults goes against the very nature of the relationship. Part of what sets intimate relationships apart is the expectation that the trust in a friendship, partnership or marriage is strong enough, and generous enough, to withstand the imperfections and moments of untrustworthiness that occur in the relationship from time to time. It should be noted, however, that these opportunities to place trust well despite a lack of trustworthiness are more suited to interpersonal relationships than to the much less intimate engagement between the public and social institutions. It may be right to trust a partner because you love her, but it is less clear that one should trust a president or journalist with such generosity.\nIf the institutions that no longer enjoy healthy amounts of public trust are undeserving of it – that is, if they actually are untrustworthy – then the distrust reported by Edelman is well-placed. And if that is the case, then the responsibility for taking trust forward lies, at least in part, with the businesses, media groups, NGOs and governments that need to cultivate better trustworthiness and do the slow, challenging work of communicating that trustworthiness to the public. But, importantly, responsibility for cultivating well-placed trust in the post-truth era does not lie solely with those would-be trusted parties. Even if they cultivate integrity, and root out all deception in their ranks, levels of public trust may continue to ebb away. This is because distrust is quasi-perceptual; like spectacles, it frames what we see. And if left unchecked, a lingering distrust can cause one to withhold trust, even from those who really are deserving of it.  \n\n Not often discussed, this risk of misplaced distrust is the quiet threat of our post-truth era. For example, it is understandable to distrust the media production company WTO5 after they published the fabricated story that the Pope had endorsed Trump. Likewise, in the wake of its emissions scandal, it is reasonable to become sceptical of Volkswagen. But if that distrust is allowed to run amok, disposing one to be closed to new information suggesting WTO5 or Volkswagen have changed their ways and can now be trusted, it ceases to be reasonable. Distrust also becomes degraded when, as often happens, it mutates from local scepticism of a scandalised entity to a blanket concern about all related individuals or organisations. For example, one might move from distrusting Volkswagen to believing that all automobile manufacturers are bent on side-stepping emissions testing.  \n\n For trust to be well-placed, distrust must be valued as highly as trust. But in personal, professional and social life we must also take care to ensure that it is possible for untrusted parties to become appropriately trusted. Due to distrust's quasi-perceptual nature, this can be incredibly difficult. Instead, from the perspective of scepticism, all evidence about another individual or organisation can seem to support distrust.\nRemaining open to those we distrust is further complicated by the reality of hard feelings. When one is the direct victim of a betrayal, strong anger and resentment is normal. And when we hear about an act of betrayal committed against someone else, or when we read about an alleged scandal, indignation can also rush in. Such feelings can stop us from being willing to even consider evidence suggestive of reform on the part of the guilty party. Caught in bitterness, it is tempting to sacrifice the truth because it feels, at least in the moment, more satisfying to have our distrust confirmed. \n\n In the wake of violated trust, anger, resentment and indignation are appropriate. And bitterness is understandable. But they can fuel the spread of distrust, inhibiting the pursuit of truth and blocking what could be well-placed trust.  \n\n To take trust forward in this era of post-truth, then, social institutions must work to be worthy of public trust, but they should not be held solely responsible for the quality of public distrust. Each individual member of the public also has a role to play in ensuring their distrust does not run amok, which is difficult. But it can be done. \n\n An important first step to cultivating well-placed distrust is developing greater self-awareness. By understanding what is going on at the emotional level inside ourselves, we are better able to identify when distrust is fuelled by anger. Simply being aware that distrust can be misplaced can help with this. But we can also cultivate self-awareness in this area by pausing to consider the source of our distrust. Is it based on a well-established belief that the object of our distrust is in fact untrustworthy? Do we have good reason to think they actually lack competence or are unlikely to come through for us? Or is the distrust we are experiencing more strongly characterised by anger, a sense of injustice, or the desire to withhold something from the distrusted party?  \n\n It can be uncomfortable engaging with such questions because they make us look deep into what may be upsetting. Also, answering such questions truthfully requires humility, which can be difficult in the heat of anger. And so we may need to give ourselves ample time to critically assess our distrust. But taking the time to do so is vital for cultivating well-placed trust.\nIf, after reflecting, we find that our distrust is based on hard feelings, that doesn't necessarily mean it is misplaced and should be abandoned. But because hard feelings can cloud our perception of others, and so potentially be misplaced, something like forgiveness may be needed to allow a more objective distrust or trust to take its place. It is something like forgiveness that is needed here. Not all attempts to manage distrust will involve giving up hard feelings towards those who directly offended us and have sought restoration (both conditions usually thought to be necessary for forgiveness). But the step that is needed is like forgiveness because it involves letting go of hard feelings.  \n\n It is important to note that just because hard feelings are relinquished, it doesn't mean one will necessarily come to a place of trust; nor is that necessarily the goal. Rather, in identifying and giving up hard feelings, the aim is to position oneself so that any trust or distrust is held for good reason rather than being a knee-jerk emotional response. \n\n The reality of the post-truth era is that it is hard to know what to believe. And so even if institutions take steps to ensure their own trustworthiness, and members of the public also take responsibility for their own distrust, it may still be hard for trust to get started. For example, one may have rid themselves of all hard feelings toward social institutions, but still be unsure which facts about those institutions to believe, and so remain unsure if it is reasonable to trust them. However, a principle from the philosophy of trust can be helpful to take trust forward when facts are dubious: trust is a type of reliance, but it is not merely reliance. Understanding this distinction sheds light on how mere reliance can be used to scaffold trust in uncertain times. \n\n In all instances of trust, we rely on something or someone. But it is possible to rely without trusting. For example, in a rural part of the country, one might have to rely on a sole, local doctor for medical care despite suspecting him of lacking competence. Likewise, it is possible to rely on an individual or organisation while checking up on them, perhaps by fact-checking or making use of transparency initiatives. But trust cannot survive such checking. Once we begin such micromanaging, it becomes clear we do not really trust others to do what we are counting on them for.  \n\n Because it is possible to rely on others despite distrusting them, it is logically possible for the public to rely on social institutions despite being uncertain of how trustworthy those institutions really are. Such reliance in turn creates an opportunity for institutions to reveal their trustworthiness, or lack thereof, thus giving the public greater reason to trust or distrust.  \n\n Patient engagement with the National Health Service in the UK provides an example of how mere reliance can lead to trust. A 2006 Ipsos MORI study assessing patient and public satisfaction with the NHS found that while the public satisfaction with GP, inpatient, outpatient and accident and emergency services was below 60 per cent, patient satisfaction rose to 80 per cent and above. These findings suggest that something positive occurs as people actually engage with the NHS. It is not clear whether all those patients who reported satisfaction with the health service would have also said they found the NHS to be trustworthy; but by using the service, all of them did rely on it. And as they did so, they were given the opportunity to come to know more about the NHS and make a more educated decision about whether or not trust of that institution is warranted.  \n\n To rely is not the same as to trust. But because it is possible to rely while harbouring a good deal of distrust, engaging mere reliance in this time of post-truth provides one practical road to well-placed trust and distrust. \n\n Because trust is dangerous – because it always brings with it the risk of let-down and betrayal – it can be tempting to withhold trust until certainty about how governments and brands will behave is known, or until the complete veracity of a published fact has been checked. But it has never been possible to have complete certainty about what others will do. And the nature of scientific discovery means that facts are always changing. This does not mean that the fake news, corporate mismanagement and political deception that makes trust and truth so timely should be allowed to flourish. But the pursuit of well-placed trust should be tempered with the understanding that the human ability to gain certainty and control over life is limited. It is because of this very truth that trust matters at all.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.\n", "questions": [{"question": "Why are the findings of the Edelman report concerning?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_1", "options": ["They show that a significant portion of the world's population has embraced the idea that truth is relative and so every entity is equally worthy of distrust.", "They reveal a large amount of distrust in the systems of government, media, and business that people rely on for a healthy society to function.", "Low levels of trust can cause a society to lose focus of its shared values such as fairness, equal opportunity, and justice.", "They demonstrate that world leaders are taking advantage of low levels of trust to spread lies and pit people against each other for their own political benefit."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "What does the author posit is the root of contemporary widespread distrust?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_2", "options": ["The fabrications of stories like Hillary's emails and the Pope's supposed support of Trump's presidency have led to a near-universal distrust of the media.", "The Volkswagen emissions scandal has led to a generally unfavorable view of corporations, and the Panama Papers have led people to largely distrust the powerful and wealthy.", "The rapidly spreading problem of \"experts\" relaying information to the public that later turns out to be a lie, politically motivated, or misinformed. ", "The proliferation of technology has made it easier to learn about good and bad things happening in our world, and people tend to remember the events and situations that are more scandalous."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the author suggest distrust has a potentially positive function in society?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_3", "options": ["The function of distrust is to highlight the value of the trust people have in their interpersonal relationships and to show that love is more important than embracing hard feelings.", "It reminds society of its most important values and provides a barometer for holding institutions accountable when they abuse their power or demonstrate incompetence.", "Distrust reminds us to be introspective and self-aware, and therefore it is an important tool for personal growth and development.", "It teaches us to trust our instincts when it comes to placing trust in people or institutions who may or may not be worthy of that trust."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why might trust sometimes be considered well-placed even when the subject of that trust has demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_4", "options": ["When a person is attempting to help someone or something build trustworthiness or if the subject of that trust is someone about whom a person cares deeply, then that trust may be well-placed.", "Showing grace and forgiveness is an excellent strategy for holding public and social institutions accountable for past behavior and ensuring they will change that behavior going forward.", "It operates as a kind of reverse psychology on the individual or institution with whom trust has been misplaced and causes them to pursue better behavior in the future.", "Sometimes it is important to demonstrate to a person or entity that has exhibited a lack of trustworthiness that you will always trust them no matter what they do."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why does the public share responsibility with institutions it may not trust in fostering \"well-placed\" trust?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_5", "options": ["Since the public utilizes the services of such institutions, it is incumbent upon them to ensure that they are operating appropriately.", "Because if an institution makes an honest effort to cultivate trust, it becomes the public's responsibility to acknowledge that development. Otherwise, their continued distrust is not well-placed.", "Since the public and institutions share the same society, it is important that they have open communication and operate in total transparency in order to ensure complete trust.", "The public has a duty to trust institutions it relies on for essential services; if it does not, the result would be the unraveling of key functions of society. "], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why must one be careful with misplaced distrust in a time of post-truth?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_6", "options": ["Doing so can lead to presuming distrust of entire industries, government bodies, and groups of people rather than the specific entities that had demonstrated reason to place distrust with them.", "Distrust can lead to paranoia and paranoia can ultimately lead to widespread acts of violence based on misinformation.", "Misplacing trust can lead to hard feelings and cause problems in interpersonal relationships as well as the functions of social institutions. ", "In an era where truth is so difficult to ascertain, it is important to find a wide selection of facts to better inform one's decision about placing trust or distrust with a person or entity."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is self-reflection and understanding key to developing well-placed trust?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_7", "options": ["Self-reflection and understanding often lead to empathy and love for others, and these are important factors in the ability to trust someone or something despite past indiscretions.", "One must be able to trust oneself completely as a prerequisite to placing trust or distrust on another person or entity.", "Distrust cannot be considered well-placed if it is the result of years and years of continued abuse of power by an institution or repeated betrayals by a friend or family member.", "Being self-aware means we can identify the source of and evidence for distrust and discover whether or not it has been fed by negative emotions."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is forgiveness an important factor in the development of well-placed trust?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_8", "options": ["Because it will help the person embracing forgiveness find a way to come to a place of trust, which is the ultimate goal.", "Because it allows a person to let go of hard feelings, which can ultimately help to repair a damaged relationship.", "If one does not learn to forgive, then one is in danger of letting negative emotions about one person or entity inform their ideas about people or institutions in general.", "Because harboring negative emotions towards someone can cloud one's judgment, it is important to release those emotions in order to become more objective."], "difficult": 0}, {"question": "Why is reliance key to scaffolding trust in an age when the truth is often difficult to ascertain?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_9", "options": ["Any time a person develops a reliance upon a good or service in society, they learn more truths about it and therefore will learn to trust it even more than they did before.", "Out of necessity, one might rely on a person or service they distrust, and through that reliance, they can confirm their distrust was well-placed based on something like incompetence, or they realize it was misplaced trust due to a lack of true information.", "Oftentimes people must rely on specific essential services such as medical care in order to survive. When there are no other options available, one must be careful not to let distrust trump reliance.", "When the truth is difficult to determine, it is important to rely on one's own intuition in order to develop a sense of well-placed trust in people or institutions."], "difficult": 1}, {"question": "Why is trust so precarious according to the author?", "question_unique_id": "99918_00FJYK34_10", "options": ["Trust hinges largely upon reliance, and when so many people and services are unreliable, so is the development of well-placed trust.", "Because intense emotions are often involved in situations involving the development or placement of trust or distrust, there is going to be a wide range of unpredictable behaviors that will affect whether or not an individual trusts or distrusts another individual.", "There is always the danger of being disappointed or hurt when one places trust in an individual, institution, or another kind of entity. And it is impossible to know all objective truth because truth can fluid as well.", "Because we can never truly know how governments and brands are going to behave until every known fact has been checked."], "difficult": 1}], "url": "https://thelongandshort.org/society/the-future-of-trust-in-a-post-truth-world", "license": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); https://thelongandshort.org/using-our-content"}