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AMBITION By WILLIAM L. BADE Illustrated by L. WOROMAY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] To the men of the future, the scientific goals of today were as incomprehensible as the ancient quest for the Holy Grail! There was a thump. Maitland stirred, came half awake, and opened his eyes. The room was dark except where a broad shaft of moonlight from the open window fell on the foot of his bed. Outside, the residential section of the Reservation slept silently under the pale illumination of the full Moon. He guessed sleepily that it was about three o'clock. What had he heard? He had a definite impression that the sound had come from within the room. It had sounded like someone stumbling into a chair, or— Something moved in the darkness on the other side of the room. Maitland started to sit up and it was as though a thousand volts had shorted his brain.... This time, he awoke more normally. He opened his eyes, looked through the window at a section of azure sky, listened to the singing of birds somewhere outside. A beautiful day. In the middle of the process of stretching his rested muscles, arms extended back, legs tensed, he froze, looking up—for the first time really seeing the ceiling. He turned his head, then rolled off the bed, wide awake. This wasn't his room! The lawn outside wasn't part of the Reservation! Where the labs and the shops should have been, there was deep prairie grass, then a green ocean pushed into waves by the breeze stretching to the horizon. This wasn't the California desert! Down the hill, where the liquid oxygen plant ought to have been, a river wound across the scene, almost hidden beneath its leafy roof of huge ancient trees. Shock contracted Maitland's diaphragm and spread through his body. His breathing quickened. Now he remembered what had happened during the night, the sound in the darkness, the dimly seen figure, and then—what? Blackout.... Where was he? Who had brought him here? For what purpose? He thought he knew the answer to the last of those questions. As a member of the original atomic reaction-motor team, he possessed information that other military powers would very much like to obtain. It was absolutely incredible that anyone had managed to abduct him from the heavily guarded confines of the Reservation, yet someone had done it. How? He pivoted to inspect the room. Even before his eyes could take in the details, he had the impression that there was something wrong about it. To begin with, the style was unfamiliar. There were no straight lines or sharp corners anywhere. The walls were paneled in featureless blue plastic and the doors were smooth surfaces of metal, half ellipses, without knobs. The flowing lines of the chair and table, built apparently from an aluminum alloy, somehow gave the impression of arrested motion. Even after allowances were made for the outlandish design, something about the room still was not right. His eyes returned to the doors, and he moved over to study the nearer one. As he had noticed, there was no knob, but at the right of this one, at about waist level, a push-button projected out of the wall. He pressed it; the door slid aside and disappeared. Maitland glanced in at the disclosed bathroom, then went over to look at the other door. There was no button beside this one, nor any other visible means of causing it to open. Baffled, he turned again and looked at the large open window—and realized what it was that had made the room seem so queer. It did not look like a jail cell. There were no bars.... Striding across the room, he lunged forward to peer out and violently banged his forehead. He staggered back, grimacing with pain, then reached forward cautious fingers and discovered a hard sheet of stuff so transparent that he had not even suspected its presence. Not glass! Glass was never this clear or strong. A plastic, no doubt, but one he hadn't heard of. Security sometimes had disadvantages. He looked out at the peaceful vista of river and prairie. The character of the sunlight seemed to indicate that it was afternoon. He became aware that he was hungry. Where the devil could this place be? And—muscles tightened about his empty stomach—what was in store for him here? He stood trembling, acutely conscious that he was afraid and helpless, until a flicker of motion at the bottom of the hill near the river drew his attention. Pressing his nose against the window, he strained his eyes to see what it was. A man and a woman were coming toward him up the hill. Evidently they had been swimming, for each had a towel; the man's was hung around his neck, and the woman was still drying her bobbed black hair. Maitland speculated on the possibility that this might be Sweden; he didn't know of any other country where public bathing at this time of year was customary. However, that prairie certainly didn't look Scandinavian.... As they came closer, he saw that both of them had dark uniform suntans and showed striking muscular development, like persons who had trained for years with weights. They vanished below his field of view, presumably into the building. He sat down on the edge of the cot and glared helplessly at the floor. About half an hour later, the door he couldn't open slid aside into the wall. The man Maitland had seen outside, now clad in gray trunks and sandals, stood across the threshold looking in at him. Maitland stood up and stared back, conscious suddenly that in his rumpled pajamas he made an unimpressive figure. The fellow looked about forty-five. The first details Maitland noticed were the forehead, which was quite broad, and the calm, clear eyes. The dark hair, white at the temples, was combed back, still damp from swimming. Below, there was a wide mouth and a firm, rounded chin. This man was intelligent, Maitland decided, and extremely sure of himself. Somehow, the face didn't go with the rest of him. The man had the head of a thinker, the body of a trained athlete—an unusual combination. Impassively, the man said, "My name is Swarts. You want to know where you are. I am not going to tell you." He had an accent, European, but otherwise unidentifiable. Possibly German. Maitland opened his mouth to protest, but Swarts went on, "However, you're free to do all the guessing you want." Still there was no suggestion of a smile. "Now, these are the rules. You'll be here for about a week. You'll have three meals a day, served in this room. You will not be allowed to leave it except when accompanied by myself. You will not be harmed in any way, provided you cooperate. And you can forget the silly idea that we want your childish secrets about rocket motors." Maitland's heart jumped. "My reason for bringing you here is altogether different. I want to give you some psychological tests...." "Are you crazy?" Maitland asked quietly. "Do you realize that at this moment one of the greatest hunts in history must be going on? I'll admit I'm baffled as to where we are and how you got me here—but it seems to me that you could have found someone less conspicuous to give your tests to." Briefly, then, Swarts did smile. "They won't find you," he said. "Now, come with me." After that outlandish cell, Swarts' laboratory looked rather commonplace. There was something like a surgical cot in the center, and a bench along one wall supported several electronics cabinets. A couple of them had cathode ray tube screens, and they all presented a normal complement of meters, pilot lights, and switches. Cables from them ran across the ceiling and came to a focus above the high flat cot in the center of the room. "Lie down," Swarts said. When Maitland hesitated, Swarts added, "Understand one thing—the more you cooperate, the easier things will be for you. If necessary, I will use coercion. I can get all my results against your will, if I must. I would prefer not to. Please don't make me." "What's the idea?" Maitland asked. "What is all this?" Swarts hesitated, though not, Maitland astonishedly felt, to evade an answer, but to find the proper words. "You can think of it as a lie detector. These instruments will record your reactions to the tests I give you. That is as much as you need to know. Now lie down." Maitland stood there for a moment, deliberately relaxing his tensed muscles. "Make me." If Swarts was irritated, he didn't show it. "That was the first test," he said. "Let me put it another way. I would appreciate it a lot if you'd lie down on this cot. I would like to test my apparatus." Maitland shook his head stubbornly. "I see," Swarts said. "You want to find out what you're up against." He moved so fast that Maitland couldn't block the blow. It was to the solar plexus, just hard enough to double him up, fighting for breath. He felt an arm under his back, another behind his knees. Then he was on the cot. When he was able to breathe again, there were straps across his chest, hips, knees, ankles, and arms, and Swarts was tightening a clamp that held his head immovable. Presently, a number of tiny electrodes were adhering to his temples and to other portions of his body, and a minute microphone was clinging to the skin over his heart. These devices terminated in cables that hung from the ceiling. A sphygmomanometer sleeve was wrapped tightly around his left upper arm, its rubber tube trailing to a small black box clamped to the frame of the cot. Another cable left the box and joined the others. So—Maitland thought—Swarts could record changes in his skin potential, heartbeat, and blood pressure: the involuntary responses of the body to stimuli. The question was, what were the stimuli to be? "Your name," said Swarts, "is Robert Lee Maitland. You are thirty-four years old. You are an engineer, specialty heat transfer, particularly as applied to rocket motors.... No, Mr. Maitland, I'm not going to question you about your work; just forget about it. Your home town is Madison, Wisconsin...." "You seem to know everything about me," Maitland said defiantly, looking up into the hanging forest of cabling. "Why this recital?" "I do not know everything about you—yet. And I'm testing the equipment, calibrating it to your reactions." He went on, "Your favorite recreations are chess and reading what you term science fiction. Maitland, how would you like to go to the Moon ?" Something eager leaped in Maitland's breast at the abrupt question, and he tried to turn his head. Then he forced himself to relax. "What do you mean?" Swarts was chuckling. "I really hit a semantic push-button there, didn't I? Maitland, I brought you here because you're a man who wants to go to the Moon. I'm interested in finding out why ." In the evening a girl brought Maitland his meal. As the door slid aside, he automatically stood up, and they stared at each other for several seconds. She had the high cheekbones and almond eyes of an Oriental, skin that glowed like gold in the evening light, yet thick coiled braids of blonde hair that glittered like polished brass. Shorts and a sleeveless blouse of some thick, reddish, metallic-looking fabric clung to her body, and over that she was wearing a light, ankle-length cloak of what seemed to be white wool. She was looking at him with palpable curiosity and something like expectancy. Maitland sighed and said, "Hello," then glanced down self-consciously at his wrinkled green pajamas. She smiled, put the tray of food on the table, and swept out, her cloak billowing behind her. Maitland remained standing, staring at the closed door for a minute after she was gone. Later, when he had finished the steak and corn on the cob and shredded carrots, and a feeling of warm well-being was diffusing from his stomach to his extremities, he sat down on the bed to watch the sunset and to think. There were three questions for which he required answers before he could formulate any plan or policy. Where was he? Who was Swarts? What was the purpose of the "tests" he was being given? It was possible, of course, that this was all an elaborate scheme for getting military secrets, despite Swarts' protestations to the contrary. Maitland frowned. This place certainly didn't have the appearance of a military establishment, and so far there had been nothing to suggest the kind of interrogation to be expected from foreign intelligence officers. It might be better to tackle the first question first. He looked at the Sun, a red spheroid already half below the horizon, and tried to think of a region that had this kind of terrain. That prairie out there was unique. Almost anywhere in the world, land like that would be cultivated, not allowed to go to grass. This might be somewhere in Africa.... He shook his head, puzzled. The Sun disappeared and its blood-hued glow began to fade from the sky. Maitland sat there, trying to get hold of the problem from an angle where it wouldn't just slip away. After a while the western sky became a screen of clear luminous blue, a backdrop for a pure white brilliant star. As always at that sight, Maitland felt his worry drain away, leaving an almost mystical sense of peace and an undefinable longing. Venus, the most beautiful of the planets. Maitland kept track of them all in their majestic paths through the constellations, but Venus was his favorite. Time and time again he had watched its steady climb higher and higher in the western sky, its transient rule there as evening star, its progression toward the horizon, and loved it equally in its alter ego of morning star. Venus was an old friend. An old friend.... Something icy settled on the back of his neck, ran down his spine, and diffused into his body. He stared at the planet unbelievingly, fists clenched, forgetting to breathe. Last night Venus hadn't been there. Venus was a morning star just now.... Just now! He realized the truth in that moment. Later, when that jewel of a planet had set and the stars were out, he lay on the bed, still warm with excitement and relief. He didn't have to worry any more about military secrets, or who Swarts was. Those questions were irrelevant now. And now he could accept the psychological tests at their face value; most likely, they were what they purported to be. Only one question of importance remained: What year was this? He grimaced in the darkness, an involuntary muscular expression of jubilation and excitement. The future ! Here was the opportunity for the greatest adventure imaginable to 20th Century man. Somewhere, out there under the stars, there must be grand glittering cities and busy spaceports, roaring gateways to the planets. Somewhere, out there in the night, there must be men who had walked beside the Martian canals and pierced the shining cloud mantle of Venus—somewhere, perhaps, men who had visited the distant luring stars and returned. Surely, a civilization that had developed time travel could reach the stars! And he had a chance to become a part of all that! He could spend his life among the planets, a citizen of deep space, a voyager of the challenging spaceways between the solar worlds. "I'm adaptable," he told himself gleefully. "I can learn fast. There'll be a job for me out there...." If— Suddenly sobered, he rolled over and put his feet on the floor, sat in the darkness thinking. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would have to find a way of breaking down Swarts' reticence. He would have to make the man realize that secrecy wasn't necessary in this case. And if Swarts still wouldn't talk, he would have to find a way of forcing the issue. The fellow had said that he didn't need cooperation to get his results, but— After a while Maitland smiled to himself and went back to bed. He woke in the morning with someone gently shaking his shoulder. He rolled over and looked up at the girl who had brought him his meal the evening before. There was a tray on the table and he sniffed the smell of bacon. The girl smiled at him. She was dressed as before, except that she had discarded the white cloak. As he swung his legs to the floor, she started toward the door, carrying the tray with the dirty dishes from yesterday. He stopped her with the word, "Miss!" She turned, and he thought there was something eager in her face. "Miss, do you speak my language?" "Yes," hesitantly. She lingered too long on the hiss of the last consonant. "Miss," he asked, watching her face intently, "what year is this?" Startlingly, she laughed, a mellow peal of mirth that had nothing forced about it. She turned toward the door again and said over her shoulder, "You will have to ask Swarts about that. I cannot tell you." "Wait! You mean you don't know?" She shook her head. "I cannot tell you." "All right; we'll let it go at that." She grinned at him again as the door slid shut. Swarts came half an hour later, and Maitland began his planned offensive. "What year is this?" Swarts' steely eyes locked with his. "You know what the date is," he stated. "No, I don't. Not since yesterday." "Come on," Swarts said patiently, "let's get going. We have a lot to get through this morning." "I know this isn't 1950. It's probably not even the 20th Century. Venus was a morning star before you brought me here. Now it's an evening star." "Never mind that. Come." Wordlessly, Maitland climbed to his feet, preceded Swarts to the laboratory, lay down and allowed him to fasten the straps and attach the instruments, making no resistance at all. When Swarts started saying a list of words—doubtlessly some sort of semantic reaction test—Maitland began the job of integrating "csc 3 x dx" in his head. It was a calculation which required great concentration and frequent tracing back of steps. After several minutes, he noticed that Swarts had stopped calling words. He opened his eyes to find the other man standing over him, looking somewhat exasperated and a little baffled. "What year is this?" Maitland asked in a conversational tone. "We'll try another series of tests." It took Swarts nearly twenty minutes to set up the new apparatus. He lowered a bulky affair with two cylindrical tubes like the twin stacks of a binocular microscope over Maitland's head, so that the lenses at the ends of the tubes were about half an inch from the engineer's eyes. He attached tiny clamps to Maitland's eyelashes. "These will keep you from holding your eyes shut," he said. "You can blink, but the springs are too strong for you to hold your eyelids down against the tension." He inserted button earphones into Maitland's ears— And then the show began. He was looking at a door in a partly darkened room, and there were footsteps outside, a peremptory knocking. The door flew open, and outlined against the light of the hall, he saw a man with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The man shouted, "Now I've got you, you wife-stealer!" He swung the shotgun around and pulled the trigger. There was a terrible blast of sound and the flash of smokeless powder—then blackness. With a deliberate effort, Maitland unclenched his fists and tried to slow his breathing. Some kind of emotional reaction test—what was the countermove? He closed his eyes, but shortly the muscles around them declared excruciatingly that they couldn't keep that up. Now he was looking at a girl. She.... Maitland gritted his teeth and fought to use his brain; then he had it. He thought of a fat slob of a bully who had beaten him up one day after school. He remembered a talk he had heard by a politician who had all the intelligent social responsibility of a rogue gorilla, but no more. He brooded over the damnable stupidity and short-sightedness of Swarts in standing by his silly rules and not telling him about this new world. Within a minute, he was in an ungovernable rage. His muscles tightened against the restraining straps. He panted, sweat came out on his forehead, and he began to curse. Swarts! How he hated.... The scene was suddenly a flock of sheep spread over a green hillside. There was blood hammering in Maitland's temples. His face felt hot and swollen and he writhed against the restraint of the straps. The scene disappeared, the lenses of the projector retreated from his eyes and Swarts was standing over him, white-lipped. Maitland swore at him for a few seconds, then relaxed and smiled weakly. His head was starting to ache from the effort of blinking. "What year is this?" he asked. "All right," Swarts said. "A.D. 2634." Maitland's smile became a grin. "I really haven't the time to waste talking irrelevancies," Swarts said a while later. "Honestly. Maitland, I'm working against a time limit. If you'll cooperate, I'll tell Ching to answer your questions."' "Ching?" "Ingrid Ching is the girl who has been bringing you your meals." Maitland considered a moment, then nodded. Swarts lowered the projector to his eyes again, and this time the engineer did not resist. That evening, he could hardly wait for her to come. Too excited to sit and watch the sunset, he paced interminably about the room, sometimes whistling nervously, snapping his fingers, sitting down and jittering one leg. After a while he noticed that he was whistling the same theme over and over: a minute's thought identified it as that exuberant mounting phrase which recurs in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He forgot about it and went on whistling. He was picturing himself aboard a ship dropping in toward Mars, making planetfall at Syrtis Major; he was seeing visions of Venus and the awesome beauty of Saturn. In his mind, he circled the Moon, and viewed the Earth as a huge bright globe against the constellations.... Finally the door slid aside and she appeared, carrying the usual tray of food. She smiled at him, making dimples in her golden skin and revealing a perfect set of teeth, and put the tray on the table. "I think you are wonderful," she laughed. "You get everything you want, even from Swarts, and I have not been able to get even a little of what I want from him. I want to travel in time, go back to your 20th Century. And I wanted to talk with you, and he would not let me." She laughed again, hands on her rounded hips. "I have never seen him so irritated as he was this noon." Maitland urged her into the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed. Eagerly he asked, "Why the devil do you want to go to the 20th Century? Believe me, I've been there, and what I've seen of this world looks a lot better." She shrugged. "Swarts says that I want to go back to the Dark Age of Technology because I have not adapted well to modern culture. Myself, I think I have just a romantic nature. Far times and places look more exciting...." "How do you mean—" Maitland wrinkled his brow—"adapt to modern culture? Don't tell me you're from another time!" "Oh, no! But my home is Aresund, a little fishing village at the head of a fiord in what you would call Norway. So far north, we are much behind the times. We live in the old way, from the sea, speak the old tongue." He looked at her golden features, such a felicitous blend of Oriental and European characteristics, and hesitantly asked, "Maybe I shouldn't.... This is a little personal, but ... you don't look altogether like the Norwegians of my time." His fear that she would be offended proved to be completely unjustified. She merely laughed and said, "There has been much history since 1950. Five hundred years ago, Europe was overrun by Pan-Orientals. Today you could not find anywhere a 'pure' European or Asiatic." She giggled. "Swarts' ancestors from your time must be cursing in their graves. His family is Afrikander all the way back, but one of his great-grandfathers was pure-blooded Bantu. His full name is Lassisi Swarts." Maitland wrinkled his brow. "Afrikander?" "The South Africans." Something strange came into her eyes. It might have been awe, or even hatred; he could not tell. "The Pan-Orientals eventually conquered all the world, except for North America—the last remnant of the American World Empire—and southern Africa. The Afrikanders had been partly isolated for several centuries then, and they had developed technology while the rest of the world lost it. They had a tradition of white supremacy, and in addition they were terrified of being encircled." She sighed. "They ruled the next world empire and it was founded on the slaughter of one and a half billion human beings. That went into the history books as the War of Annihilation." "So many? How?" "They were clever with machines, the Afrikanders. They made armies of them. Armies of invincible killing-machines, produced in robot factories from robot-mined ores.... Very clever." She gave a little shudder. "And yet they founded modern civilization," she added. "The grandsons of the technicians who built the Machine Army set up our robot production system, and today no human being has to dirty his hands raising food or manufacturing things. It could never have been done, either, before the population was—reduced to three hundred million." "Then the Afrikanders are still on top? Still the masters?" She shook her head. "There are no more Afrikanders." "Rebellion?" "No. Intermarriage. Racial blending. There was a psychology of guilt behind it. So huge a crime eventually required a proportionate expiation. Afrikaans is still the world language, but there is only one race now. No more masters or slaves." They were both silent for a moment, and then she sighed. "Let us not talk about them any more." "Robot factories and farms," Maitland mused. "What else? What means of transportation? Do you have interstellar flight yet?" "Inter-what?" "Have men visited the stars?" She shook her head, bewildered. "I always thought that would be a tough problem to crack," he agreed. "But tell me about what men are doing in the Solar System. How is life on Mars and Venus, and how long does it take to get to those places?" He waited, expectantly silent, but she only looked puzzled. "I don't understand. Mars? What are Mars?" After several seconds, Maitland swallowed. Something seemed to be the matter with his throat, making it difficult for him to speak. "Surely you have space travel?" She frowned and shook her head. "What does that mean—space travel?" He was gripping the edge of the bed now, glaring at her. "A civilization that could discover time travel and build robot factories wouldn't find it hard to send a ship to Mars!" "A ship ? Oh, you mean something like a vliegvlotter . Why, no, I don't suppose it would be hard. But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?" He was on his feet towering over her, fists clenched. She raised her arms as if to shield her face if he should hit her. "Let's get this perfectly clear," he said, more harshly than he realized. "So far as you know, no one has ever visited the planets, and no one wants to. Is that right?" She nodded apprehensively. "I have never heard of it being done." He sank down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After a while he looked up and said bitterly, "You're looking at a man who would give his life to get to Mars. I thought I would in my time. I was positive I would when I knew I was in your time. And now I know I never will." The cot creaked beside him and he felt a soft arm about his shoulders and fingers delicately stroking his brow. Presently he opened his eyes and looked at her. "I just don't understand," he said. "It seemed obvious to me that whenever men were able to reach the planets, they'd do it." Her pitying eyes were on his face. He hitched himself around so that he was facing her. "I've got to understand. I've got to know why . What happened? Why don't men want the planets any more?" "Honestly," she said, "I did not know they ever had." She hesitated. "Maybe you are asking the wrong question." He furrowed his brow, bewildered now by her. "I mean," she explained, "maybe you should ask why people in the 20th Century did want to go to worlds men are not suited to inhabit." Maitland felt his face become hot. "Men can go anywhere, if they want to bad enough." "But why ?" Despite his sudden irrational anger toward her, Maitland tried to stick to logic. "Living space, for one thing. The only permanent solution to the population problem...." "We have no population problem. A hundred years ago, we realized that the key to social stability is a limited population. Our economic system was built to take care of three hundred million people, and we have held the number at that." "Birth control," Maitland scoffed. "How do you make it work—secret police?" "No. Education. Each of us has the right to two children, and we cherish that right so much that we make every effort to see that those two are the best children we could possibly produce...." She broke off, looking a little self-conscious. "You understand, what I have been saying applies to most of the world. In some places like Aresund, things are different. Backward. I still do not feel that I belong here, although the people of the town have accepted me as one of them." "Even," he said, "granting that you have solved the population problem, there's still the adventure of the thing. Surely, somewhere, there must be men who still feel that.... Ingrid, doesn't it fire something in your blood, the idea of going to Mars—just to go there and see what's there and walk under a new sky and a smaller Sun? Aren't you interested in finding out what the canals are? Or what's under the clouds of Venus? Wouldn't you like to see the rings of Saturn from, a distance of only two hundred thousand miles?" His hands were trembling as he stopped. She shrugged her shapely shoulders. "Go into the past—yes! But go out there? I still cannot see why." "Has the spirit of adventure evaporated from the human race, or what ?" She smiled. "In a room downstairs there is the head of a lion. Swarts killed the beast when he was a young man. He used a spear. And time traveling is the greatest adventure there is. At least, that is the way I feel. Listen, Bob." She laid a hand on his arm. "You grew up in the Age of Technology. Everybody was terribly excited about what could be done with machines—machines to blow up a city all at once, or fly around the world, or take a man to Mars. We have had our fill of—what is the word?—gadgets. Our machines serve us, and so long as they function right, we are satisfied to forget about them. "Because this is the Age of Man . We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists, like Swarts, are studying human rather than nuclear reactions. We are much more fascinated by the life and death of cultures than by the expansion or contraction of the Universe. With us, it is the people that are important, not gadgets." Maitland stared at her, his face blank. His mind had just manufactured a discouraging analogy. His present position was like that of an earnest 12th Century crusader, deposited by some freak of nature into the year 1950, trying to find a way of reanimating the anti-Mohammedan movement. What chance would he have? The unfortunate knight would argue in vain that the atomic bomb offered a means of finally destroying the infidel.... Maitland looked up at the girl, who was regarding him silently with troubled eyes. "I think I'd like to be alone for a while," he said.

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The Ignoble Savages By EVELYN E. SMITH Illustrated by DILLON [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction March 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Snaddra had but one choice in its fight to afford to live belowground—underhandedly pretend theirs was an aboveboard society! "Go Away from me, Skkiru," Larhgan said, pushing his hand off her arm. "A beggar does not associate with the high priestess of Snaddra." "But the Earthmen aren't due for another fifteen minutes," Skkiru protested. "Of what importance are fifteen minutes compared to eternity!" she exclaimed. Her lovely eyes fuzzed softly with emotion. "You don't seem to realize, Skkiru, that this isn't just a matter of minutes or hours. It's forever." "Forever!" He looked at her incredulously. "You mean we're going to keep this up as a permanent thing? You're joking!" Bbulas groaned, but Skkiru didn't care about that. The sad, sweet way Larhgan shook her beautiful head disturbed him much more, and when she said, "No, Skkiru, I am not joking," a tiny pang of doubt and apprehension began to quiver in his second smallest left toe. "This is, in effect, good-by," she continued. "We shall see each other again, of course, but only from a distance. On feast days, perhaps you may be permitted to kiss the hem of my robe ... but that will be all." Skkiru turned to the third person present in the council chamber. "Bbulas, this is your fault! It was all your idea!" There was regret on the Dilettante's thin face—an obviously insincere regret, the younger man knew, since he was well aware how Bbulas had always felt about the girl. "I am sorry, Skkiru," Bbulas intoned. "I had fancied you understood. This is not a game we are playing, but a new way of life we are adopting. A necessary way of life, if we of Snaddra are to keep on living at all." "It's not that I don't love you, Skkiru," Larhgan put in gently, "but the welfare of our planet comes first." She had been seeing too many of the Terrestrial fictapes from the library, Skkiru thought resentfully. There was too damn much Terran influence on this planet. And this new project was the last straw. No longer able to control his rage and grief, he turned a triple somersault in the air with rage. "Then why was I made a beggar and she the high priestess? You arranged that purposely, Bbulas. You—" "Now, Skkiru," Bbulas said wearily, for they had been through all this before, "you know that all the ranks and positions were distributed by impartial lot, except for mine, and, of course, such jobs as could carry over from the civilized into the primitive." Bbulas breathed on the spectacles he was wearing, as contact lenses were not considered backward enough for the kind of planet Snaddra was now supposed to be, and attempted to wipe them dry on his robe. However, the thick, jewel-studded embroidery got in his way and so he was forced to lift the robe and wipe all three of the lenses on the smooth, soft, spun metal of his top underskirt. "After all," he went on speaking as he wiped, "I have to be high priest, since I organized this culture and am the only one here qualified to administer it. And, as the president himself concurred in these arrangements, I hardly think you—a mere private citizen—have the right to question them." "Just because you went to school in another solar system," Skkiru said, whirling with anger, "you think you're so smart!" "I won't deny that I do have educational and cultural advantages which were, unfortunately, not available to the general populace of this planet. However, even under the old system, I was always glad to utilize my superior attainments as Official Dilettante for the good of all and now—" "Sure, glad to have a chance to rig this whole setup so you could break up things between Larhgan and me. You've had your eye on her for some time." Skkiru coiled his antennae at Bbulas, hoping the insult would provoke him into an unbecoming whirl, but the Dilettante remained calm. One of the chief outward signs of Terran-type training was self-control and Bbulas had been thoroughly terranized. I hate Terrestrials , Skkiru said to himself. I hate Terra. The quiver of anxiety had risen up his leg and was coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. He hoped it wouldn't reach his antennae—if he were to break down and psonk in front of Larhgan, it would be the final humiliation. "Skkiru!" the girl exclaimed, rotating gently, for she, like her fiance—her erstwhile fiance, that was, for the new regime had caused all such ties to be severed—and every other literate person on the planet, had received her education at the local university. Although sound, the school was admittedly provincial in outlook and very poor in the emotional department. "One would almost think that the lots had some sort of divine intelligence behind them, because you certainly are behaving in a beggarly manner!" "And I have already explained to you, Skkiru," Bbulas said, with a patience much more infuriating than the girl's anger, "that I had no idea of who was to become my high priestess. The lots chose Larhgan. It is, as the Earthmen say, kismet." He adjusted the fall of his glittering robe before the great polished four-dimensional reflector that formed one wall of the chamber. Kismet , Skkiru muttered to himself, and a little sleight of hand. But he didn't dare offer this conclusion aloud; the libel laws of Snaddra were very severe. So he had to fall back on a weak, "And I suppose it is kismet that makes us all have to go live out on the ground during the day, like—like savages." "It is necessary," Bbulas replied without turning. "Pooh," Skkiru said. "Pooh, pooh , POOH!" Larhgan's dainty earflaps closed. "Skkiru! Such language!" "As you said," Bbulas murmured, contemptuously coiling one antenna at Skkiru, "the lots chose well and if you touch me, Skkiru, we shall have another drawing for beggar and you will be made a metal-worker." "But I can't work metal!" "Then that will make it much worse for you than for the other outcasts," Bbulas said smugly, "because you will be a pariah without a trade." "Speaking of pariahs, that reminds me, Skkiru, before I forget, I'd better give you back your grimpatch—" Larhgan handed the glittering bauble to him—"and you give me mine. Since we can't be betrothed any longer, you might want to give yours to some nice beggar girl." "I don't want to give my grimpatch to some nice beggar girl!" Skkiru yelled, twirling madly in the air. "As for me," she sighed, standing soulfully on her head, "I do not think I shall ever marry. I shall make the religious life my career. Are there going to be any saints in your mythos, Bbulas?" "Even if there will be," Bbulas said, "you certainly won't qualify if you keep putting yourself into a position which not only represents a trait wholly out of keeping with the new culture, but is most unseemly with the high priestess's robes." Larhgan ignored his unfeeling observations. "I shall set myself apart from mundane affairs," she vowed, "and I shall pretend to be happy, even though my heart will be breaking." It was only at that moment that Skkiru realized just how outrageous the whole thing really was. There must be another solution to the planet's problem. "Listen—" he began, but just then excited noises filtered down from overhead. It was too late. "Earth ship in view!" a squeaky voice called through the intercom. "Everybody topside and don't forget your shoes." Except the beggar. Beggars went barefoot. Beggars suffered. Bbulas had made him beggar purposely, and the lots were a lot of slibwash. "Hurry up, Skkiru." Bbulas slid the ornate headdress over his antennae, which, already gilded and jeweled, at once seemed to become a part of it. He looked pretty damn silly, Skkiru thought, at the same time conscious of his own appearance—which was, although picturesque enough to delight romantic Terrestrial hearts, sufficiently wretched to charm the most hardened sadist. "Hurry up, Skkiru," Bbulas said. "They mustn't suspect the existence of the city underground or we're finished before we've started." "For my part, I wish we'd never started," Skkiru grumbled. "What was wrong with our old culture, anyway?" That was intended as a rhetorical question, but Bbulas answered it anyway. He always answered questions; it had never seemed to penetrate his mind that school-days were long since over. "I've told you a thousand times that our old culture was too much like the Terrans' own to be of interest to them," he said, with affected weariness. "After all, most civilized societies are basically similar; it is only primitive societies that differ sharply, one from the other—and we have to be different to attract Earthmen. They're pretty choosy. You've got to give them what they want, and that's what they want. Now take up your post on the edge of the field, try to look hungry, and remember this isn't for you or for me, but for Snaddra." "For Snaddra," Larhgan said, placing her hand over her anterior heart in a gesture which, though devout on Earth—or so the fictapes seemed to indicate—was obscene on Snaddra, owing to the fact that certain essential organs were located in different areas in the Snaddrath than in the corresponding Terrestrial life-form. Already the Terrestrial influence was corrupting her, Skkiru thought mournfully. She had been such a nice girl, too. "We may never meet on equal terms again, Skkiru," she told him, with a long, soulful glance that made his hearts sink down to his quivering toes, "but I promise you there will never be anyone else for me—and I hope that knowledge will inspire you to complete cooperation with Bbulas." "If that doesn't," Bbulas said, "I have other methods of inspiration." "All right," Skkiru answered sulkily. "I'll go to the edge of the field, and I'll speak broken Inter-galactic, and I'll forsake my normal habits and customs, and I'll even beg . But I don't have to like doing it, and I don't intend to like doing it." All three of Larhgan's eyes fuzzed with emotion. "I'm proud of you, Skkiru," she said brokenly. Bbulas sniffed. The three of them floated up to ground level in a triple silence. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd," Skkiru chanted, as the two Terrans descended from the ship and plowed their way through the mud to meet a procession of young Snaddrath dressed in elaborate ceremonial costumes, and singing a popular ballad—to which less ribald, as well as less inspiring, words than the originals had been fitted by Bbulas, just in case, by some extremely remote chance, the Terrans had acquired a smattering of Snadd somewhere. Since neither party was accustomed to navigating mud, their progress was almost imperceptible. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd," chanted Skkiru the beggar. His teeth chattered as he spoke, for the rags he wore had been custom-weatherbeaten for him by the planet's best tailor—now a pariah, of course, because Snadd tailors were, naturally, metal-workers—and the wind and the rain were joyously making their way through the demolished wires. Never before had Skkiru been on the surface of the planet, except to pass over, and he had actually touched it only when taking off and landing. The Snaddrath had no means of land transport, having previously found it unnecessary—but now both air-cars and self-levitation were on the prohibited list as being insufficiently primitive. The outside was no place for a civilized human being, particularly in the wet season or—more properly speaking on Snaddra—the wetter season. Skkiru's feet were soaked with mud; not that the light sandals worn by the members of the procession appeared to be doing them much good, either. It gave him a kind of melancholy pleasure to see that the privileged ones were likewise trying to repress shivers. Though their costumes were rich, they were also scanty, particularly in the case of the females, for Earthmen had been reported by tape and tale to be humanoid. As the mud clutched his toes, Skkiru remembered an idea he had once gotten from an old sporting fictape of Terrestrial origin and had always planned to experiment with, but had never gotten around to—the weather had always been so weathery, there were so many other more comfortable sports, Larhgan had wanted him to spend more of his leisure hours with her, and so on. However, he still had the equipment, which he'd salvaged from a wrecked air-car, in his apartment—and it was the matter of a moment to run down, while Bbulas was looking the other way, and get it. Bbulas couldn't really object, Skkiru stilled the nagging quiver in his toe, because what could be more primitive than any form of land transport? And even though it took time to get the things, they worked so well that, in spite of the procession's head start, he was at the Earth ship long before the official greeters had reached it. The newcomers were indeed humanoid, he saw. Only the peculiarly pasty color of their skins and their embarrassing lack of antennae distinguished them visibly from the Snaddrath. They were dressed much as the Snaddrath had been before they had adopted primitive garb. In fact, the Terrestrials were quite decent-looking life-forms, entirely different from the foppish monsters Skkiru had somehow expected to represent the cultural ruling race. Of course, he had frequently seen pictures of them, but everyone knew how easily those could be retouched. Why, it was the Terrestrials themselves, he had always understood, who had invented the art of retouching—thus proving beyond a doubt that they had something to hide. "Look, Raoul," the older of the two Earthmen said in Terran—which the Snaddrath were not, according to the master plan, supposed to understand, but which most of them did, for it was the fashionable third language on most of the outer planets. "A beggar. Haven't seen one since some other chaps and I were doing a spot of field work on that little planet in the Arcturus system—what was its name? Glotch, that's it. Very short study, it turned out to be. Couldn't get more than a pamphlet out of it, as we were unable to stay long enough to amass enough material for a really definitive work. The natives tried to eat us, so we had to leave in somewhat of a hurry." "Oh, they were cannibals?" the other Earthman asked, so respectfully that it was easy to deduce he was the subordinate of the two. "How horrible!" "No, not at all," the other assured him. "They weren't human—another species entirely—so you could hardly call it cannibalism. In fact, it was quite all right from the ethical standpoint, but abstract moral considerations seemed less important to us than self-preservation just then. Decided that, in this case, it would be best to let the missionaries get first crack at them. Soften them up, you know." "And the missionaries—did they soften them up, Cyril?" "They softened up the missionaries, I believe." Cyril laughed. "Ah, well, it's all in the day's work." "I hope these creatures are not man-eaters," Raoul commented, with a polite smile at Cyril and an apprehensive glance at the oncoming procession— creatures indeed ! Skkiru thought, with a mental sniff. "We have come such a long and expensive way to study them that it would be indeed a pity if we also were forced to depart in haste. Especially since this is my first field trip and I would like to make good at it." "Oh, you will, my boy, you will." Cyril clapped the younger man on the shoulder. "I have every confidence in your ability." Either he was stupid, Skkiru thought, or he was lying, in spite of Bbulas' asseverations that untruth was unknown to Terrestrials—which had always seemed highly improbable, anyway. How could any intelligent life-form possibly stick to the truth all the time? It wasn't human; it wasn't even humanoid; it wasn't even polite. "The natives certainly appear to be human enough," Raoul added, with an appreciative glance at the females, who had been selected for the processional honor with a view to reported Terrestrial tastes. "Some slight differences, of course—but, if two eyes are beautiful, three eyes can be fifty per cent lovelier, and chartreuse has always been my favorite color." If they stand out here in the cold much longer, they are going to turn bright yellow. His own skin, Skkiru knew, had faded from its normal healthy emerald to a sickly celadon. Cyril frowned and his companion's smile vanished, as if the contortion of his superior's face had activated a circuit somewhere. Maybe the little one's a robot! However, it couldn't be—a robot would be better constructed and less interested in females than Raoul. "Remember," Cyril said sternly, "we must not establish undue rapport with the native females. It tends to detract from true objectivity." "Yes, Cyril," Raoul said meekly. Cyril assumed a more cheerful aspect "I should like to give this chap something for old times' sake. What do you suppose is the medium of exchange here?" Money , Skkiru said to himself, but he didn't dare contribute this piece of information, helpful though it would be. "How should I know?" Raoul shrugged. "Empathize. Get in there, old chap, and start batting." "Why not give him a bar of chocolate, then?" Raoul suggested grumpily. "The language of the stomach, like the language of love, is said to be a universal one." "Splendid idea! I always knew you had it in you, Raoul!" Skkiru accepted the candy with suitable—and entirely genuine—murmurs of gratitude. Chocolate was found only in the most expensive of the planet's delicacy shops—and now neither delicacy shops nor chocolate were to be found, so, if Bbulas thought he was going to save the gift to contribute it later to the Treasury, the "high priest" was off his rocker. To make sure there would be no subsequent dispute about possession, Skkiru ate the candy then and there. Chocolate increased the body's resistance to weather, and never before had he had to endure so much weather all at once. On Earth, he had heard, where people lived exposed to weather, they often sickened of it and passed on—which helped to solve the problem of birth control on so vulgarly fecund a planet. Snaddra, alas, needed no such measures, for its population—like its natural resources—was dwindling rapidly. Still, Skkiru thought, as he moodily munched on the chocolate, it would have been better to flicker out on their own than to descend to a subterfuge like this for nothing more than survival. Being a beggar, Skkiru discovered, did give him certain small, momentary advantages over those who had been alloted higher ranks. For one thing, it was quite in character for him to tread curiously upon the strangers' heels all the way to the temple—a ramshackle affair, but then it had been run up in only three days—where the official reception was to be held. The principal difficulty was that, because of his equipment, he had a little trouble keeping himself from overshooting the strangers. And though Bbulas might frown menacingly at him—and not only for his forwardness—that was in character on both sides, too. Nonetheless, Skkiru could not reconcile himself to his beggarhood, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by thinking at least he wasn't a pariah like the unfortunate metal-workers who had to stand segregated from the rest by a chain of their own devising—a poetic thought, that was, but well in keeping with his beggarhood. Beggars were often poets, he believed, and poets almost always beggars. Since metal-working was the chief industry of Snaddra, this had provided the planet automatically with a large lowest caste. Bbulas had taken the easy way out. Skkiru swallowed the last of the chocolate and regarded the "high priest" with a simple-minded mendicant's grin. However, there were volcanic passions within him that surged up from his toes when, as the wind and rain whipped through his scanty coverings, he remembered the snug underskirts Bbulas was wearing beneath his warm gown. They were metal, but they were solid. All the garments visible or potentially visible were of woven metal, because, although there was cloth on the planet, it was not politic for the Earthmen to discover how heavily the Snaddrath depended upon imports. As the Earthmen reached the temple, Larhgan now appeared to join Bbulas at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to it. Although Skkiru had seen her in her priestly apparel before, it had not made the emotional impression upon him then that it did now, when, standing there, clad in beauty, dignity and warm clothes, she bade the newcomers welcome in several thousand words not too well chosen for her by Bbulas—who fancied himself a speech-writer as well as a speech-maker, for there was no end to the man's conceit. The difference between her magnificent garments and his own miserable rags had their full impact upon Skkiru at this moment. He saw the gulf that had been dug between them and, for the first time in his short life, he felt the tormenting pangs of caste distinction. She looked so lovely and so remote. "... and so you are most welcome to Snaddra, men of Earth," she was saying in her melodious voice. "Our resources may be small but our hearts are large, and what little we have, we offer with humility and with love. We hope that you will enjoy as long and as happy a stay here as you did on Nemeth...." Cyril looked at Raoul, who, however, seemed too absorbed in contemplating Larhgan's apparently universal charms to pay much attention to the expression on his companion's face. "... and that you will carry our affection back to all the peoples of the Galaxy." She had finished. And now Cyril cleared his throat. "Dear friends, we were honored by your gracious invitation to visit this fair planet, and we are honored now by the cordial reception you have given to us." The crowd yoomped politely. After a slight start, Cyril went on, apparently deciding that applause was all that had been intended. "We feel quite sure that we are going to derive both pleasure and profit from our stay here, and we promise to make our intensive analysis of your culture as painless as possible. We wish only to study your society, not to tamper with it in any way." Ha, ha , Skkiru said to himself. Ha, ha, ha! "But why is it," Raoul whispered in Terran as he glanced around out of the corners of his eyes, "that only the beggar wears mudshoes?" "Shhh," Cyril hissed back. "We'll find out later, when we've established rapport. Don't be so impatient!" Bbulas gave a sickly smile. Skkiru could almost find it in his hearts to feel sorry for the man. "We have prepared our best hut for you, noble sirs," Bbulas said with great self-control, "and, by happy chance, this very evening a small but unusually interesting ceremony will be held outside the temple. We hope you will be able to attend. It is to be a rain dance." "Rain dance!" Raoul pulled his macintosh together more tightly at the throat. "But why do you want rain? My faith, not only does it rain now, but the planet seems to be a veritable sea of mud. Not, of course," he added hurriedly as Cyril's reproachful eye caught his, "that it is not attractive mud. Finest mud I have ever seen. Such texture, such color, such aroma!" Cyril nodded three times and gave an appreciative sniff. "But," Raoul went on, "one can have too much of even such a good thing as mud...." The smile did not leave Bbulas' smooth face. "Yes, of course, honorable Terrestrials. That is why we are holding this ceremony. It is not a dance to bring on rain. It is a dance to stop rain." He was pretty quick on the uptake, Skkiru had to concede. However, that was not enough. The man had no genuine organizational ability. In the time he'd had in which to plan and carry out a scheme for the improvement of Snaddra, surely he could have done better than this high-school theocracy. For one thing, he could have apportioned the various roles so that each person would be making a definite contribution to the society, instead of creating some positions plums, like the priesthood, and others prunes, like the beggarship. What kind of life was that for an active, ambitious young man, standing around begging? And, moreover, from whom was Skkiru going to beg? Only the Earthmen, for the Snaddrath, no matter how much they threw themselves into the spirit of their roles, could not be so carried away that they would give handouts to a young man whom they had been accustomed to see basking in the bosom of luxury. Unfortunately, the fees that he'd received in the past had not enabled him both to live well and to save, and now that his fortunes had been so drastically reduced, he seemed in a fair way of starving to death. It gave him a gentle, moody pleasure to envisage his own funeral, although, at the same time, he realized that Bbulas would probably have to arrange some sort of pension for him; he could not expect Skkiru's patriotism to extend to abnormal limits. A man might be willing to die for his planet in many ways—but wantonly starving to death as the result of a primitive affectation was hardly one of them. All the same, Skkiru reflected as he watched the visitors being led off to the native hut prepared for them, how ignominious it would be for one of the brightest young architects on the planet to have to subsist miserably on the dole just because the world had gone aboveground. The capital had risen to the surface and the other cities would soon follow suit. Meanwhile, a careful system of tabus had been designed to keep the Earthmen from discovering the existence of those other cities. He could, of course, emigrate to another part of the planet, to one of them, and stave off his doom for a while—but that would not be playing the game. Besides, in such a case, he wouldn't be able to see Larhgan. As if all this weren't bad enough, he had been done an injury which struck directly at his professional pride. He hadn't even been allowed to help in planning the huts. Bbulas and some workmen had done all that themselves with the aid of some antique blueprints that had been put out centuries before by a Terrestrial magazine and had been acquired from a rare tape-and-book dealer on Gambrell, for, Skkiru thought, far too high a price. He could have designed them himself just as badly and much more cheaply. It wasn't that Skkiru didn't understand well enough that Snaddra had been forced into making such a drastic change in its way of life. What resources it once possessed had been depleted and—aside from minerals—they had never been very extensive to begin with. All life-forms on the planet were on the point of extinction, save fish and rice—the only vegetable that would grow on Snaddra, and originally a Terran import at that. So food and fiber had to be brought from the other planets, at fabulous expense, for Snaddra was not on any of the direct trade routes and was too unattractive to lure the tourist business. Something definitely had to be done, if it were not to decay altogether. And that was where the Planetary Dilettante came in. The traditional office of Planetary Dilettante was a civil-service job, awarded by competitive examination whenever it fell vacant to the person who scored highest in intelligence, character and general gloonatz. However, the tests were inadequate when it came to measuring sense of proportion, adaptiveness and charm—and there, Skkiru felt, was where the essential flaw lay. After all, no really effective test would have let a person like Bbulas come out on top. The winner was sent to Gambrell, the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to be given a thorough Terran-type education. No individual on Snaddra could afford such schooling, no matter how great his personal fortune, because the transportation costs were so immense that only a government could afford them. That was the reason why only one person in each generation could be chosen to go abroad at the planet's expense and acquire enough finish to cover the rest of the population. The Dilettante's official function had always been, in theory, to serve the planet when an emergency came—and this, old Luccar, the former President, had decided, when he and the Parliament had awakened to the fact that Snaddra was falling into ruin, was an emergency. So he had, after considerable soul-searching, called upon Bbulas to plan a method of saving Snaddra—and Bbulas, happy to be in the limelight at last, had come up with this program. It was not one Skkiru himself would have chosen. It was not one, he felt, that any reasonable person would have chosen. Nevertheless, the Bbulas Plan had been adopted by a majority vote of the Snaddrath, largely because no one had come up with a feasible alternative and, as a patriotic citizen, Skkiru would abide by it. He would accept the status of beggar; it was his duty to do so. Moreover, as in the case of the planet, there was no choice. But all was not necessarily lost, he told himself. Had he not, in his anthropological viewings—though Bbulas might have been the only one privileged to go on ethnological field trips to other planets, he was not the only one who could use a library—seen accounts of societies where beggarhood could be a rewarding and even responsible station in life? There was no reason why, within the framework of the primitive society Bbulas had created to allure Terran anthropologists, Skkiru should not make something of himself and show that a beggar was worthy of the high priestess's hand—which would be entirely in the Terran primitive tradition of romance. "Skkiru!" Bbulas was screaming, as he spun, now that the Terrans were out of ear- and eye-shot "Skkiru, you idiot, listen to me! What are those ridiculous things you are wearing on your silly feet?" Skkiru protruded all of his eyes in innocent surprise. "Just some old pontoons I took from a wrecked air-car once. I have a habit of collecting junk and I thought—" Bbulas twirled madly in the air. "You are not supposed to think. Leave all the thinking to me!" "Yes, Bbulas," Skkiru said meekly.

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20041

Vulgar Keynesians Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what "everyone knows," is no more than a crude caricature of the original. Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day. Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. So-called "classical" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the "loanable funds" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment. Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, "In the long run we are all dead." In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by "liquidity preference"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump. It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. Consider, for example, the "paradox of thrift." Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall! Or consider the "widow's cruse" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan. After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God. But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does. To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: "It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!") What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, "Practical men, who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings will actually reduce growth treated seriously in ("Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places," Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing. To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story. No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you. Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. "You need to stimulate the investment decision," says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment. Am I missing something? To read the reply of "Vulgar Keynesian" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.

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20048

I Have Seen the Future of Europe The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the "Capital of Europe," headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home. Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: "Taste you can trust.") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair. Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates. Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town, most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy. Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure. Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe. The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization. These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood. In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions. But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest "competence," or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective. The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like "deputy director" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates. The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ... Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.

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20020

MONICA! The White House may have been in crisis all year, but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical comedy. Hey, wait a minute--let's put on a show! The time: November 1995. The House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, are insisting on their version of the budget. President Bill Clinton is stubbornly rejecting it. The Republicans have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll let the government shut down. In the Oval Office, BILL CLINTON meets with advisers LEON PANETTA and HAROLD ICKES and secretary BETTY CURRIE to discuss this development. "The Shutdown" (upbeat production number) PANETTA: The Republicans have positions To which they're clinging fast. ICKES: The president is just as firm The die, it seems, is cast. PANETTA: Without a budget passed by Congress The government will close. All of the workers Will be sent home on furloughs. CLINTON [speaking] : Well, wait a second--not all of them. We'll need to keep some essential personnel. PANETTA: The Army and the Navy Will need to stay in place. ICKES: Also those at NASA Who keep the shuttle up in space. PANETTA: We'll need to keep the pilots Flying in their planes. CLINTON: And here at the White House My staff should remain. PANETTA [speaking] : But even here at the White House, some adjustments will be required. CLINTON: OK, tell the ushers To take a few days off. Tell the maids and cooks and butlers To go play themselves some golf. We have to do without the clerks Let them all go home. CURRIE: What about the secretaries? Who will get the phones? CLINTON [speaking] : We've got to make sure the Oval Office functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. PANETTA: Aha! I have it! We'll bring in an intern, We'll bring in an intern, Someone who's an expert with a phone. We'll bring in an intern, We'll bring in an intern, I assure you, Mr. President-- Your routine here won't get blown. PANETTA , ICKES , and CURRIE [solemnly agreeing] : The presence of an intern will ensure Your routine here won't get blown. [The advisers depart, leaving President Clinton alone. He turns introspective.] "President Lonely" (a ballad) CLINTON: I've got deputies and bureaucrats Who fulfill my every thought. And soldiers, sailors, and Marines To fight battles I want fought. There's no one who's got more power, I'm the leader of all that's free But if you subtract the flags and lackeys, I'm just Lonely. I'm President Lonely. But I guess I'll just have to muddle through. The cheers and applause are overwhelming, But presidents need cuddles, too. The fawning adoration's pleasant, But presidents need cuddles, too. [Enter Betty Currie.] CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, "Hel-lo-o-o!" And then I had the idea to take him pizza! TRIPP: And then what happened? "What Went On" (upbeat) LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. I showed him my thong, I let him take a long and ling'ring look. I led him on. He studied my thong, And from that point I had the president hooked. That night when I took the president some pizza, I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. We went into the hallway by his study And dispensed with formalities. TRIPP: Oh please go on! You must go on! Come on, girlfriend, Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! Now go on, Please go on. Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, I reached into the presidential trousers, And he got a phone call from a member of the House. So I went on, While he talked on the phone, I took a position before him on my knees, And I went on. And he talked on. Though what the congressman heard was "Please, please, please, please, please!" But then we didn't go on! TRIPP: You didn't go on? LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. TRIPP: So you didn't go on? LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he Could Trust. [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] TRIPP: Trust? LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on. TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? TRIPP: It's just my gum. LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] "Time to Go" CURRIE: They go back there, They're just talking, I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, It's just what she picks to drink. Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. CURRIE: She brings him Little presents. She really is a very thoughtful soul. LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much As her up real close and personal touch. I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. CURRIE: She never comes When he's really busy. Rarely is there anyone around. LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! CURRIE: He comes back From Easter services, Soon she's bopping in the door. LIEBERMAN: "Hallelujah, He Is Risen" Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] "Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat" (sprightly) GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, Chat, chat, Two old galpals swap the latest word. Talk, talk, Chat, chat, Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. GOLDBERG: I got tickets To the opera, Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, I lost a filling At lunch on Thursday. That's it for me, Now tell me what's up with you. TRIPP: My friend Monica? From the White House? I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. It seems this Monica chick Has been sucking the president's-- GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, Too. GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, Did I hear you rightly? Clinton got into an intern's pants? God, this news is manna, Linda! At last our cause will finally have it's chance! TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an Escape. He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables-- GOLDBERG: Unless you get that airhead down on tape. TRIPP: What? GOLDBERG: Unless you get that silly, vapid, trampy time bomb Down on tape. TRIPP: Oh--one more thing ... GOLDBERG: What? TRIPP: There's a dress ... GOLDBERG: Hold on, let me call Sparky. [Independent Counsel Starr uses Tripp to detain Monica. A few days later, the news breaks. On the advice of his pal Harry Thomason, Clinton flat-out lies to his wife, to his loyalists, and to the public about the relationship.] "I Never Have" (performance should build in tempo and intensity) CLINTON: You know I'd like to answer questions, An act my lawyers won't allow. I'll give you more not less, sooner not later, I just can't say a word right now. But I don't know why she'd say these things Her head's full of who knows what. But I never had sex with that woman I never had sex with that n-- Starr has spent $40 million, There's desperation on his face. An utter waste of public money, A prosecutorial disgrace. All he's got is some recordings Made by a vengeful snitch. I never had sex with that woman I never had sex with that b-- A vast right-wing conspiracy Is using her to beat on me. They wanna torpedo my agenda They hate me and Hillary. But I will never let them ruin Our dreams for a better world. I tell ya, I never had sex with that woman I never had sex with that Girl. [Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] "Crossing the Line" STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, Which Bittman put the lid on. And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling Upon our little gridiron. The Democrats and liberals Blast these tactics of mine, But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do When the president crosses the line. He's crossed the line. He's crossed the line. Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules When the president crosses the line. It may have seemed like dirty pool To drag his people 'fore the jury. We wasted lots of Vernon's time, May have busted Bettie Currie. His aides aren't the innocent bystanders As they claim when they moan and whine. They won't say what they know full well: The president crossed the line. He's crossed the line. He's crossed the line. I'd be a nitwit not to bend a bit When the president crosses the line. The talking heads are accusing me Of laying a perjury trap. But all it catches is lying men. Honest men beat the rap. There's people who say I'm against sex; I've had sex. It's fine. But lying about it gets my blood up And the president's crossed the line. I crossed the line. I crossed the line. Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will When the president crosses the line. [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.] "Testimony" (snappy) CLINTON: Depends what the definition of "is" is, Depends on the meaning of sex, "Alone together" is literal nonsense, Before you reach conclusions, read your text. [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, But inappropriate are all these personal questions, The country doesn't need to know these things. [Clinton's enemies reject his apology, and soon the House of Representatives begins the long process of impeachment. NEWT GINGRICH here discloses his approach.] "Bring 'em Down" (dark, moody) GINGRICH: Mustn't seem to be too cheerful, Mustn't overreach, Must remember to seem unhappy That we're going to impeach. Must remember to remain sober As we undertake this chore. At the same time, let's remember To pin some stuff on Gore. Bring 'em down. Bring 'em down. Sure, they were elected, Twice, in point of fact. Voters obviously were bewildered To have made a choice like that. Now, like charging linemen, We'll move in for the sack. Bring 'em down. Bring 'em down. Bring 'em down. [The House votes to hold impeachment hearings. But just a few weeks later, the midterm elections, which are expected to go the GOP's way, are held. Contrary to predictions, the Democrats pick up seats, and the GOP's obsession with scandal is repudiated. Gingrich resigns, and the practical chances of Clinton's removal evaporate. As the show ends, we hear from Starr, Lewinsky, and Clinton.] "The People Have Spoken" (dramatic, stirring) STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, I can't believe what they had to say. I had Clinton boxed into a corner Looks like he's going to get away. I spent four years and 40 million That's a lot of time and loot. I made Clinton look ridiculous, But the only scalp I got was Newt's. LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, I can't believe what they had to say. My boyfriend is still in office And he might return to me one day. You think perhaps that he will not want me For all the trouble I've caused so far, But he knows I can always make him happy With my thong and my cigar. CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, I can't believe what they had to say. The removal threat is over, Kenneth Starr should go away. I tell you, though, it is a mystery, I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. I might be guilty of obstruction, Yet my ratings are sky-high. That must mean I'm a pretty good president, Though how, I don't think I know. But obviously I'm not Starr or Gingrich, Which may be why they love me so. Which may be why they love me so. [Curtain.]

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20051

Reading the Inaugurals President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life. The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say? [T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere. The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the "peculiar domestic institution" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers. In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: "At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs." If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals. Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was "a bully pulpit," a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, "Let us ... "--meaning, "You do as I say." This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one. The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was. Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, "Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country," has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, "Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little." And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, "In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation." Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word "women" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase "men and women," never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural. One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. "Taxes," or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: "The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong." Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent. The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls "the supreme American problem." The words "black," "blacks," "Negro," or "race" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, "On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer "No one!"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America. Before the Civil War the word "slavery" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield (1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the "freedmen" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and 15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, "Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States," but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals. After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: "From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history." I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans. There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .

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20056

Folie ࠎ People with high IQs tend to be nearsighted. This is not because they read a lot or stare at computer screens too much. That common-sense hypothesis has been discredited by research. Rather, it is a matter of genetics. The same genes that tend to elevate IQ also tend to affect the shape of the eyeball in a way that leads to myopia. This relationship--known in genetics as "pleiotropy"--seems to be completely accidental, a quirk of evolution. Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives. Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove . So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being. As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20. In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A "beautiful dark-haired young man," "handsome as a god," he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and "rather limp and beautiful hands" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline. Agame is just a conflict situation with a bunch of participants, or "players." The players could be poker pals, oligopolists competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a "Nash equilibrium": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred, at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a "fixed-point theorem" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the "fixed point." Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever, but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus. Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for "research and development"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of "smoothness" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that "impossible" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled. That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this "genius with a penis." Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat. All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose). When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. "Nash's talk wasn't good or bad," said one mathematician present. "It was horrible." Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica. Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--"I am the left foot of God on earth"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner. He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him "the Phantom." They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: "Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision." Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way. Indeed, he has evolved into a "very fine person," according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in "insulbrick.") The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.

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20044

Diamonds in the Rough Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks. Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood. A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. "Once this opens," predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, "everyone will want one like it." And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, "If you build it, they will copy." While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago. For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.) Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating. In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects "remedy" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's. Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building. The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend. So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants. Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money. Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind. Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a "35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles." Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest. Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver. "If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money," says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. "But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal," Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have "legs," retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options. Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.

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20031

My Father's Estate A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: "I saw that your father had died," she wrote. "He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us. He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service. The nest egg is going to be taxed at a federal rate of about 55 percent, after an initial exemption and then a transition amount taxed at around 40 percent (and all that after paying estate expenses). When I think about it, I want to cry. My father and mother lived frugally all their lives. They never had a luxury car. They never flew first-class unless it was on the expense account. They never in their whole lives went on an expensive vacation. When he last went into the hospital, my father was still wearing an old pair of gray wool slacks with a sewed-up hole in them from where my dog ripped them--15 years ago. They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined. There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry. That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience. Some of them will go to the Nixon Library, and some will be on bookshelves in the (very small and modest) house my wife and I own in Malibu, a place he found beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could be no more racial segregation in schools. And there are his mementos of Richard Nixon, his White House cufflinks, photos of Camp David, certificates and honorary degrees, and clippings of great events of state. And there are his love letters to and from my mother when they were courting in 1935 and 1936, still tied with light blue ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose we'll have to place a value on these and have them taxed, too. But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well. My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. "Loyalty." There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed. My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority. He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of Bolívar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far. He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his longtime pal Murray Foss at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank where he hung his hat for many years, into account; and the words of Mrs. Wiggins, who ran the cafeteria at the AEI; and the thoughts of Alan Greenspan or the head of Goldman, Sachs; and valued them entirely on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him. He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely. My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.) Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero. My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence. Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as "Suvorov," after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it. He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called "Route 29") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled "Only You") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete. Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. ("He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' " my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.) Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, "Let's do it together. It'll take half as long." I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital. This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it. This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, "Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax." The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.

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20029

Edward W. Said The game of biographical "gotcha" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine? To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian. Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not "the parable of Palestinian identity" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said "grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members." A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to "spin" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .) Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure. Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls "the Palestinian Versailles." These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him "The Professor of Terror." New York magazine once called him "Arafat's man in New York." And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special "Money" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be "on the payroll of the PLO." Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's "Algiers Declaration" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right to exist. Over the years, he has often said that his own place in such a state would be as its toughest critic. Even as he has been unsparing in his indictments of Israeli and American policy, he has not let Arab governments--or the Palestinian leadership--off the hook. He has assailed the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that rule most of the Arab world, punctured the ideological phantasms of Pan-Arabist nationalism and reactionary Islam alike, and bemoaned the impoverished state of Arab cultural and intellectual life. He has also, within the Palestinian camp, been a consistent advocate of reconciliation with Israel and an opponent of terrorism. The Question of Palestine called for a "two-state solution" at a time when the official PLO ambition was total control over British Mandatory Palestine. The book, published in Israel in 1981, had, as of the mid-'90s, never been translated into Arabic or published in any Arab country. In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize the PLO as a legitimate party to peace talks in exchange for recognition of Israel. Arafat ignored the message. Fifteen years later, when Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, Said, who had been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the "peace process," Said has bemoaned Arafat's "capitulation" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over a few scraps of occupied territory and with Israel's continued expropriation of Palestinian lands. In the New York Times Magazine last spring, he wrote that the Palestinian state toward which the peace process seemed, however pokily, to be tending could not provide democracy and justice for the Palestinians. Instead, he called for a single, "bi-national" state based on a constitution (something neither Israel nor the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority currently has), with "the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence." But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition. But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for "post-colonial" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to "the other"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) "must be represented" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis. Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left, a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline. Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses "a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure." Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. "He is easily distracted" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , "answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol." O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing "criticism over solidarity," speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .

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20027

Booze You Can Use I love beer, but lately I've been wondering: Am I getting full value for my beer dollar? As I've stocked up on microbrews and fancy imports, I've told myself that their taste is deeper, richer, more complicated, more compelling--and therefore worth the 50 percent to 200 percent premium they command over cheap mass products or even mainstream Bud. And yet, I've started to wonder, is this just costly snobbery? If I didn't know what I was drinking, could I even tell whether it was something from Belgium, vs. something from Pabst? I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a "science of beer" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines: 1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers. Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have . 2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. ("Per pint" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack. The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: High End Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import. Pete's Wicked Lager. National-scale "microbrew." $1.11 per pint. (Deep-discount sale. List price $1.46 per pint.) Like the next one, this put us into the gray zone for a lager test. Few American "microbreweries" produce lagers of any sort. Pete's is called a lager but was visibly darker than, say, Bud. Samuel Adams Boston Lager. National macro-microbrew. $1.56 per pint. (That was list price. The following week it was on sale for $1.25 per pint, which would have made it do far better in the value rankings.) Calls itself America's Best Beer. Has dark orangey-amber color that was obviously different from all other lagers tested. Mid-Range Budweiser. $.84 per pint. (Sale. List price $.89 per pint.) Self-styled King of Beers. Miller Genuine Draft. $.84 per pint. (Sale. List price $.89 per pint.) Coors Light. $.84 per pint. (Sale. List price $.89 per pint. Isn't price competition a wonderful thing?) The Silver Bullet That Won't Slow You Down. Cheap Milwaukee's Best. $.55 per pint. (Sale. List price $.62 per pint.) A k a "Beast." Schmidt's. $.54 per pint. (Sale. List $.62 per pint.) Box decorated with a nice painting of a trout. Busch. $.50 per pint. (Sale. List $.69 per pint.) Painting of mountains. The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as "Red, White, and Blue," "Old German," or the one with generic printing that just says "Beer." The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint. 3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores. The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test was over. After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. Description: "Amusing presumption," "fresh on the palate," "crap," etc. Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the "flight" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this: To see all the grids for all the beers, click . 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference: 2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on "corrected average preference points"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results: Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a "lager." It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ... 3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are: In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to "best" beers than the prices would indicate. 4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), "I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy." The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the "group" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are: We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it "crap"; another, "Water. LITE." But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked "best" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.) Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--"fizzy and soapy"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should: 1) Buy Sam Adams when they want an individual glass of lager to be as good as it can be. 2) Buy Busch at all other times, since it gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. The detailed rankings and comments for all tasters on all beers may be found . Next installment: fancy beers .

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We Do Understand "This is not another book about civility," Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . "Civility," she explains, suggests a "veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast." Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious. In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because "contentious public discourse" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships. Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. Don't argue for the sake of arguing. Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. Many issues are multisided. Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. Don't fight over small issues. Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win. If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor. "When there is a need to make others wrong," Tannen argues, "the temptation is great to oversimplify" and to "seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours." In her need to make the "argument culture" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of "totalitarian countries" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in "ethnically motivated assaults" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler. Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's "kick 'em when they're up" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting. Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been "trained to overcome their resistance to kill" by trying "not to think of their opponents as human beings." She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. "Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty." She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler. Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists "" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: "E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient." Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: "Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time." Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing "disastrous consequences." Partial-birth abortion is "surely not" a "very important" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican "politics of obstruction" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the "broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed." The "view of government as the enemy" isn't worth debating; it's just "another troubling aspect of the argument culture." Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that "right-wing talk radio" deploys phrases "similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era." Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address "is followed immediately by a Republican response," which "weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders." A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton "broke the spell" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' "sense of connection" to "our judicial system." The investigation of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was excessive, the campaign against former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was "cruelly unfair," and the Whitewater investigation--led by "a prominent Republican known for his animosity toward the president"--is, in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, "the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history." Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. "The very fact that defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in itself evidence of the culture of critique," she writes. The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become "a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights." As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: "Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' " Similarly, "the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group." Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which "typically features a single guest." (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.) Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. "The purpose of most cross-examinations" is "not to establish facts but to discredit the witness," she asserts, as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, "the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination." She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in fact, the point of the trial): that the witness is a victim. Conversely, she assumes that the defendant cannot be a victim. While objecting to cross-examination of alleged rape victims because "it is easy to distort events so that a rape can appear to be consensual sex," she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, "Framing these hearings as a two-sides dispute between Hill and Thomas allowed the senators to focus their investigation on cross-examining Hill rather than seeking other sorts of evidence." Did the dispute not have two sides? Should Hill not have been cross-examined? Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened. Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the "cruelty of cross-examination." She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country. If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that "several of these propagandists now infest Slate "; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.

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INNOCENT AT LARGE By POUL AND KAREN ANDERSON Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] A hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course he would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared to the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble! The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown. She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise—or had it been the chairman of the board?—back several thousand dollars. Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely on top and tight around the hips. After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important. She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. "Hello-o, there," she said automatically. "So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just taking a bath and—Oh. It's you." Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. "Holy Success," he whispered in awe. "You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?" "Well, hurry up with whatever it is," snapped Peri. "I got a date tonight." "I'll say you do! With a Martian!" Peri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. "You must have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc., that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can just blank right out again. I saw him first!" Doran's thin sharp face grinned. "You break that date, Peri. Put it off or something. I got this Martian for you, see?" "So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap—" "Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl, even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight, see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the solar nexus of it, Peri, kid." Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. "He has got a hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates, legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be like taking candy from a baby." Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and cream left overnight on Pluto. "Badger?" she asked. "Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a million is three hundred thirty-three—" "Is five hundred thousand flat," said Peri. "Too bad I just got an awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?" The gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected. Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts. What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him. "Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business." "Well—recruiting." The official patted his comfortable stomach, iridescent in neolon, and chuckled patronizingly. "I am afraid, sir, you won't find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamsters Hour on Mars, would they?" "Oh, we don't expect immigration," said Matheny shyly. He was a fairly young man, but small, with a dark-thatched, snub-nosed, gray-eyed head that seemed too large for his slender body. "We learned long ago that no one is interested any more in giving up even second-class citizenship on Earth to live in the Republic. But we only wanted to hire——uh, I mean engage—an, an advisor. We're not businessmen. We know our export trade hasn't a chance among all your corporations unless we get some—a five-year contract...?" He heard his words trailing off idiotically, and swore at himself. "Well, good luck." The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the passport and handed it back. "There, now, you are free to travel anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the capital and get into the sticks—um, I mean the provinces. I am sure there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you can attract anyone out of Newer York." "Thanks," said Matheny, "but, you see, I—we need—that is.... Oh, well. Thanks. Good-by." He backed out of the office. A dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a hundred feet down at the river of automobiles. Phobos! he thought wildly. If the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin before I hit the pavement! The August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but—he used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the temperature wasn't too far below zero. Why did they tap me for this job? he asked himself in a surge of homesickness. What the hell is the Martian Embassy here for? He, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised his government before now—in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his idea—but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an occasional trip to Swindletown— My God , thought Matheny, here I am, one solitary outlander in the greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm supposed to find my planet a con man! He began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily, but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before Mars had such machines. If ever. The city roared at him. He fumbled after his pipe. Of course , he told himself, that's why the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law. Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld? He wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts, without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But more, he would have been among people he understood. The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency. Matheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one that was distinguished by relative austerity. THE CHURCH OF CHOICE Enter, Play, Pray That would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand. "Ah, brother, welcome," said a red-haired usherette in demure black leotards. "The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The restaurant is right up those stairs." "I—I'm not hungry," stammered Matheny. "I just wanted to sit in—" "To your left, sir." The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable. "Get your chips right here, sir," said the girl in the booth. "Hm?" said Matheny. She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games. He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead. He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off. But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him. "I say!" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the green table. "I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules." "You did all right, brother," said a middle-aged lady with an obviously surgical bodice. "But—I mean—when do we start actually playing ? What happened to the cocked dice?" The lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. "Sir! This is a church!" "Oh—I see—excuse me, I, I, I—" Matheny backed out of the crowd, shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears. "You forgot your chips, pal," said a voice. "Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is—" Matheny cursed his knotting tongue. Damn it, just because they're so much more sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler? The helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers. "You're from Mars, aren't you?" he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard. "Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I—" He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. "Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here." "Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft." Matheny sighed. "A drink is what I need the very most." "My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus." They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings. "I don't want to—I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran—" "Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested." "There aren't many of us on Earth," agreed Matheny. "Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me." "I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on." "We can't afford it," said Matheny. "What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage." As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: "You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few tourists to us?" "I always wanted to," said Doran. "I would like to see the what they call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she appreciated me for it!" He winked and nudged. "Oh," said Matheny. He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve— "Of course," Matheny said ritually, "I agree with all the archeologists it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent." "Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable," said Doran. "I mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know." "I do know," said Matheny. "But we're poor—a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies—which can only be paid for in Earth dollars—and we can't export enough to Earth to earn those dollars." By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down. "Whassa matter?" asked Doran. "Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?" "Uh, yes, but—well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications." Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices. "What'll you have?" asked Doran. "It's on me." "Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean—" "Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?" Matheny shuddered. "Good Lord, no!" "Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?" "Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don't think we'd drink it, do you? I mean—well, I imagine it doesn't absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don't see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much." "Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!" Doran's face split in a grin. "You know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!" He raised a hand. "Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices, why do you call yourselves poor?" "Because we are," said Matheny. "By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes—there's very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market." "Have you not got some other business?" "Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful— I Was a Slave Girl on Mars . "Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around—you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars—but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants." "How about postage stamps?" inquired Doran. "Philately is a big business, I have heard." "It was our mainstay," admitted Matheny, "but it's been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that." Doran whistled. "I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!" He fingered his mustache. "Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?" "Of course," said Matheny bitterly. "We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or—or anybody—who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars—why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state—what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?" "I see. Well, what are you having to drink?" "Beer," said Matheny without hesitation. "Huh? Look, pal, this is on me." "The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on," said Matheny. "Heineken's!" Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins. "This is a real interesting talk, Pete," he said. "You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank." Matheny shrugged. "I haven't told you anything that isn't known to every economist." Of course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough. The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian. "Ahhh!" said Matheny. "Bless you, my friend." "A pleasure." "But now you must let me buy you one." "That is not necessary. After all," said Doran with great tact, "with the situation as you have been describing—" "Oh, we're not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit." Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. "You're here on business, then?" "Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade." "What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets—uh, taxes—and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days." Matheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama top. "Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and—and—well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing." Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer. "But where do I start?" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. "I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see—" "It might be arranged," said Doran in a thoughtful tone. "It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?" "A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's Earth years, mind you." "I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete," said Doran, "but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently." "I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe," said Matheny. "That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well ... let me buy you a drink!" Doran's black eyes frogged at him. "You might at that," said the Earthman very softly. "Yes, you might at that." Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts.... "No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you." A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his. "What I really want," said Matheny, "what I really want—I mean what Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man." "A what?" "The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money." "Con man? Oh. A slipstring." "A con by any other name," said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit. Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. "You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on." "No." Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality. "No, sorry, Gus," he said. "I spoke too much." "Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun." "By all means." Matheny disposed of his last beer. "I could use some gaiety." "You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up-to-date clothes." " Allez ," said Matheny. "If I don't mean allons , or maybe alors ." The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more. Oh, well , he thought, if I succeed in this job, no one at home will quibble. And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers. "Whoof!" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. "What the dusty hell—Oh." He tried to grin, but his face burned. "I see." "That is a sexy type of furniture, all right," agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a cigarette. "Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around 2100 hours earliest." "What?" "You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you." "Me?" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. "Me? Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is—" His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips. "You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal." "What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate—" "Look, Pete," said Doran patiently. "She don't have to know that, does she?" "Well—well, no. I guess not No." "Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo," said Doran. "I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive." While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer. "You said one thing, Pete," Doran remarked. "About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it." "Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn." "Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts." "What?" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom. Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him. "I am not that man," he said frankly. "But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number." He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. "Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively." Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became overcautious. They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must. "I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea," he said slowly. "But it would have to be under security." "Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now." "What? But—but—" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago. In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant's hesitation. "I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time," he recited. Then, cheerfully: "And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth." "I know." Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. "I'm sorry to—to—I mean of course I trust you, but—" "Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure, I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go ahead." Doran crossed his legs and leaned back. "Oh, it's simple enough," said Matheny. "It's only that we already are operating con games." "On Mars, you mean?" "Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been manufacturing relics ever since." " Huh? Well, why, but—" "In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul," said Matheny. "Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars and they depend on our people to—Well, anyhow—" "I will be clopped! Good for you!" Doran blew up in laughter. "That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?" "Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl," said Matheny apologetically. "She was another official project." "Who?" "Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins." "Oh, that. Sure, I remember—Hey! You didn't!" "Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one." "I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?" "Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister." Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. "There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older." "Uh!" exclaimed Doran. "And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads. 'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few—' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise." He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who had heard everything already. Doran whistled. "That's about all, so far," confessed Matheny. "Perhaps a con is our only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but—well, I don't know." "I think—" Doran removed the helmet and stood up. "Yes?" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension. "I may be able to find the man you want," said Doran. "I just may. It will take a few days and might get a little expensive." "You mean.... Mr. Doran—Gus—you could actually—" "I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I know. We deserve a celebration!"

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51483

The Reluctant Heroes By FRANK M. ROBINSON Illustrated by DON SIBLEY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Pioneers have always resented their wanderlust, hated their hardships. But the future brings a new grudge—when pioneers stay put and scholars do the exploring! The very young man sat on the edge of the sofa and looked nervous. He carefully studied his fingernails and ran his hands through his hair and picked imaginary lint off the upholstery. "I have a chance to go with the first research expedition to Venus," he said. The older man studied the very young man thoughtfully and then leaned over to his humidor and offered him a cigaret. "It's nice to have the new air units now. There was a time when we had to be very careful about things like smoking." The very young man was annoyed. "I don't think I want to go," he blurted. "I don't think I would care to spend two years there." The older man blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the air exhaust vent. "You mean you would miss it here, the people you've known and grown up with, the little familiar things that have made up your life here. You're afraid the glamor would wear off and you would get to hate it on Venus." The very young man nodded miserably. "I guess that's it." "Anything else?" The very young man found his fingernails extremely fascinating again and finally said, in a low voice, "Yes, there is." "A girl?" A nod confirmed this. It was the older man's turn to look thoughtful. "You know, I'm sure, that psychologists and research men agree that research stations should be staffed by couples. That is, of course, as soon as it's practical." "But that might be a long time!" the very young man protested. "It might be—but sometimes it's sooner than you think. And the goal is worth it." "I suppose so, but—" The older man smiled. "Still the reluctant heroes," he said, somewhat to himself. Chapman stared at the radio key. Three years on the Moon and they didn't want him to come back. Three years on the Moon and they thought he'd be glad to stay for more. Just raise his salary or give him a bonus, the every-man-has-his-price idea. They probably thought he liked it there. Oh, sure, he loved it. Canned coffee, canned beans, canned pills, and canned air until your insides felt as though they were plated with tin. Life in a cramped, smelly little hut where you could take only ten steps in any one direction. Their little scientific home of tomorrow with none of the modern conveniences, a charming place where you couldn't take a shower, couldn't brush your teeth, and your kidneys didn't work right. And for double his salary they thought he'd be glad to stay for another year and a half. Or maybe three. He should probably be glad he had the opportunity. The key started to stutter again, demanding an answer. He tapped out his reply: " No! " There was a silence and then the key stammered once more in a sudden fit of bureaucratic rage. Chapman stuffed a rag under it and ignored it. He turned to the hammocks, strung against the bulkhead on the other side of the room. The chattering of the key hadn't awakened anybody; they were still asleep, making the animal noises that people usually make in slumber. Dowden, half in the bottom hammock and half on the floor, was snoring peacefully. Dahl, the poor kid who was due for stopover, was mumbling to himself. Julius Klein, with that look of ineffable happiness on his face, looked as if he had just squirmed under the tent to his personal idea of heaven. Donley and Bening were lying perfectly still, their covers not mussed, sleeping very lightly. Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces. "What'd they want?" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on his face. "They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands," Chapman whispered back. "What did you say?" He shrugged. "No." "You kept it short," somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and sitting on the side of his hammock. "If it had been me, I would have told them just what they could do about it." The others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head. Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. "Sore, aren't you?" "Kind of. Who wouldn't be?" "Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon. They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good man to stay on the job a while longer." " All they're trying to do," Chapman said sarcastically. "They've got a fat chance." "They think you've found a home here," Donley said. "Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?" Dahl was awake, looking bitter. "Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of us aren't going back today." No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back. Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips, and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day for breakfast duty. The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth. And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally going home. He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was morning—the Moon's "morning"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise. A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever. That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon, one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances. Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long you could almost taste the glue on the label. Donley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside. Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them. "Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left there yet?" Klein asked. "I talked to them on the last call," Chapman said. "The relief ship left there twelve hours ago. They should get here"—he looked at his watch—"in about six and a half hours." "Chap, you know, I've been thinking," Donley said quietly. "You've been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing you're going to do once you get back?" It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly. "I don't know," Chapman said slowly. "I guess I was trying not to think of that. I suppose none of us have. We've been like little kids who have waited so long for Christmas that they just can't believe it when it's finally Christmas Eve." Klein nodded in agreement. "I haven't been here three years like you have, but I think I know what you mean." He warmed up to it as the idea sank in. "Just what the hell are you going to do?" "Nothing very spectacular," Chapman said, smiling. "I'm going to rent a room over Times Square, get a recording of a rikky-tik piano, and drink and listen to the music and watch the people on the street below. Then I think I'll see somebody." "Who's the somebody?" Donley asked. Chapman grinned. "Oh, just somebody. What are you going to do, Dick?" "Well, I'm going to do something practical. First of all, I want to turn over all my geological samples to the government. Then I'm going to sell my life story to the movies and then—why, then, I think I'll get drunk!" Everybody laughed and Chapman turned to Klein. "How about you, Julius?" Klein looked solemn. "Like Dick, I'll first get rid of my obligations to the expedition. Then I think I'll go home and see my wife." They were quiet. "I thought all members of the groups were supposed to be single," Donley said. "They are. And I can see their reasons for it. But who could pass up the money the Commission was paying?" "If I had to do it all over again? Me," said Donley promptly. They laughed. Somebody said: "Go play your record, Chap. Today's the day for it." The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good. Way Back Home by Al Lewis. They ran through it twice. They were beginning to feel it now, Chapman thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was just starting to sink in. "You know, Chap," Donley said, "it won't seem like the same old Moon without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or something and it just won't have the same old appeal." "Like they say in the army," Bening said, "you never had it so good. You found a home here." The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it too much. The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to investigate. And the time went faster when you kept busy. Chapman stopped them at the lock. "Remember to check your suits for leaks," he warned. "And check the valves of your oxygen tanks." Donley looked sour. "I've gone out at least five hundred times," he said, "and you check me each time." "And I'd check you five hundred more," Chapman said. "It takes only one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go through one of those and that's it, brother." Donley sighed. "Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out that your little boys can watch out for themselves!" But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank before he left. Only Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens. "I never knew you were married," Chapman said. Klein didn't look up. "There wasn't much sense in talking about it. You just get to thinking and wanting—and there's nothing you can do about it. You talk about it and it just makes it worse." "She let you go without any fuss, huh?" "No, she didn't make any fuss. But I don't think she liked to see me go, either." He laughed a little. "At least I hope she didn't." They were silent for a while. "What do you miss most, Chap?" Klein asked. "Oh, I know what we said a little while ago, but I mean seriously." Chapman thought a minute. "I think I miss the sky," he said quietly. "The blue sky and the green grass and trees with leaves on them that turn color in the Fall. I think, when I go back, that I'd like to go out in a rain storm and strip and feel the rain on my skin." He stopped, feeling embarrassed. Klein's expression was encouraging. "And then I think I'd like to go downtown and just watch the shoppers on the sidewalks. Or maybe go to a burlesque house and smell the cheap perfume and the popcorn and the people sweating in the dark." He studied his hands. "I think what I miss most is people—all kinds of people. Bad people and good people and fat people and thin people, and people I can't understand. People who wouldn't know an atom from an artichoke. And people who wouldn't give a damn. We're a quarter of a million miles from nowhere, Julius, and to make it literary, I think I miss my fellow man more than anything." "Got a girl back home?" Klein asked almost casually. "Yes." "You're not like Dahl. You've never mentioned it." "Same reason you didn't mention your wife. You get to thinking about it." Klein flipped the lid on the specimen box. "Going to get married when you get back?" Chapman was at the port again, staring out at the bleak landscape. "We hope to." "Settle down in a small cottage and raise lots of little Chapmans, eh?" Chapman nodded. "That's the only future," Klein said. He put away the box and came over to the port. Chapman moved over so they both could look out. "Chap." Klein hesitated a moment. "What happened to Dixon?" "He died," Chapman said. "He was a good kid, all wrapped up in science. Being on the Moon was the opportunity of a lifetime. He thought so much about it that he forgot a lot of little things—like how to stay alive. The day before the Second group came, he went out to finish some work he was interested in. He forgot to check for leaks and whether or not the valve on his tank was all the way closed. We couldn't get to him in time." "He had his walkie-talkie with him?" "Yes. It worked fine, too. We heard everything that went through his mind at the end." Klein's face was blank. "What's your real job here, Chap? Why does somebody have to stay for stopover?" "Hell, lots of reasons, Julius. You can't get a whole relief crew and let them take over cold. They have to know where you left off. They have to know where things are, how things work, what to watch out for. And then, because you've been here a year and a half and know the ropes, you have to watch them to see that they stay alive in spite of themselves. The Moon's a new environment and you have to learn how to live in it. There's a lot of things to learn—and some people just never learn." "You're nursemaid, then." "I suppose you could call it that." Klein said, "You're not a scientist, are you?" "No, you should know that. I came as the pilot of the first ship. We made the bunker out of parts of the ship so there wasn't anything to go back on. I'm a good mechanic and I made myself useful with the machinery. When it occurred to us that somebody was going to have to stay over, I volunteered. I thought the others were so important that it was better they should take their samples and data back to Earth when the first relief ship came." "You wouldn't do it again, though, would you?" "No, I wouldn't." "Do you think Dahl will do as good a job as you've done here?" Chapman frowned. "Frankly, I hadn't thought of that. I don't believe I care. I've put in my time; it's somebody else's turn now. He volunteered for it. I think I was fair in explaining all about the job when you talked it over among yourselves." "You did, but I don't think Dahl's the man for it. He's too young, too much of a kid. He volunteered because he thought it made him look like a hero. He doesn't have the judgment that an older man would have. That you have." Chapman turned slowly around and faced Klein. "I'm not the indispensable man," he said slowly, "and even if I was, it wouldn't make any difference to me. I'm sorry if Dahl is young. So was I. I've lost three years up here. And I don't intend to lose any more." Klein held up his hands. "Look, Chap, I didn't mean you should stay. I know how much you hate it and the time you put in up here. It's just—" His voice trailed away. "It's just that I think it's such a damn important job." Klein had gone out in a last search for rock lichens and Chapman enjoyed one of his relatively few moments of privacy. He wandered over to his bunk and opened his barracks bag. He checked the underwear and his toothbrush and shaving kit for maybe the hundredth time and pushed the clothing down farther in the canvas. It was foolish because the bag was already packed and had been for a week. He remembered stalling it off for as long as he could and then the quiet satisfaction about a week before, when he had opened his small gear locker and transferred its meager belongings to the bag. He hadn't actually needed to pack, of course. In less than twenty-four hours he'd be back on Earth where he could drown himself in toothpaste and buy more tee shirts than he could wear in a lifetime. He could leave behind his shorts and socks and the outsize shirts he had inherited from—who was it? Driesbach?—of the First group. Dahl could probably use them or maybe one of the boys in the Third. But it wasn't like going home unless you packed. It was part of the ritual, like marking off the last three weeks in pencil on the gray steel of the bulkhead beside his hammock. Just a few hours ago, when he woke up, he had made the last check mark and signed his name and the date. His signature was right beneath Dixon's. He frowned when he thought of Dixon and slid back the catch on the top of the bag and locked it. They should never have sent a kid like Dixon to the Moon. He had just locked the bag when he heard the rumble of the airlock and the soft hiss of air. Somebody had come back earlier than expected. He watched the inner door swing open and the spacesuited figure clump in and unscrew its helmet. Dahl. He had gone out to help Dowden on the Schmidt telescope. Maybe Dowden hadn't needed any help, with Bening along. Or more likely, considering the circumstances, Dahl wasn't much good at helping anybody today. Dahl stripped off his suit. His face was covered with light beads of sweat and his eyes were frightened. He moistened his lips slightly. "Do—do you think they'll ever have relief ships up here more often than every eighteen months, Chap? I mean, considering the advance of—" "No," Chapman interrupted bluntly. "I don't. Not at least for ten years. The fuel's too expensive and the trip's too hazardous. On freight charges alone you're worth your weight in platinum when they send you here. Even if it becomes cheaper, Bob, it won't come about so it will shorten stopover right away." He stopped, feeling a little sorry for Dahl. "It won't be too bad. There'll be new men up here and you'll pass a lot of time getting to know them." "Well, you see," Dahl started, "that's why I came back early. I wanted to see you about stopover. It's that—well, I'll put it this way." He seemed to be groping for an easy way to say what he wanted to. "I'm engaged back home. Really nice girl, Chap, you'd like her if you knew her." He fumbled in his pocket and found a photograph and put it on the desk. "That's a picture of Alice, taken at a picnic we were on together." Chapman didn't look. "She—we—expected to be married when I got back. I never told her about stopover, Chap. She thinks I'll be home tomorrow. I kept thinking, hoping, that maybe somehow—" He was fumbling it badly, Chapman thought. "You wanted to trade places with me, didn't you, Bob? You thought I might stay for stopover again, in your place?" It hurt to look in Dahl's eyes. They were the eyes of a man who was trying desperately to stop what he was about to do, but just couldn't help himself. "Well, yes, more or less. Oh, God, Chap, I know you want to go home! But I couldn't ask any of the others; you were the only one who could, the only one who was qualified!" Dahl looked as though he was going to be sick. Chapman tried to recall all he knew about him. Dahl, Robert. Good mathematician. Graduate from one of the Ivy League schools. Father was a manufacturer of stoves or something. It still didn't add, not quite. "You know I don't like it here any more than you do," Chapman said slowly. "I may have commitments at home, too. What made you think I would change my mind?" Dahl took the plunge. "Well, you see," he started eagerly, too far gone to remember such a thing as pride, "you know my father's pretty well fixed. We would make it worth your while, Chap." He was feverish. "It would mean eighteen more months, Chap, but they'd be well-paid months!" Chapman felt tired. The good feeling he had about going home was slowly evaporating. "If you have any report to make, I think you had better get at it," he cut in, keeping all the harshness he felt out of his voice. "It'll be too late after the relief ship leaves. It'll be easier to give the captain your report than try to radio it back to Earth from here." He felt sorrier for Dahl than he could ever remember having felt for anybody. Long after going home, Dahl would remember this. It would eat at him like a cancer. Cowardice is the one thing for which no man ever forgives himself. Donley was eating a sandwich and looking out the port, so, naturally, he saw the ship first. "Well, whaddya know!" he shouted. "We got company!" He dashed for his suit. Dowden and Bening piled after him and all three started for the lock. Chapman was standing in front of it. "Check your suits," he said softly. "Just be sure to check." "Oh, what the hell, Chap!" Donley started angrily. Then he shut up and went over his suit. He got to his tank and turned white. Empty. It was only half a mile to the relief rocket, so somebody would probably have got to him in time, but.... He bit his lips and got a full tank. Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman noticed one—it was probably Donley—pat the ship affectionately before he started back. They were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First. Donley and the others were all over them. How was it back on Earth? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still teaching at the university? What was the international situation? Was the sky still blue, was the grass still green, did the leaves still turn color in the autumn, did people still love and cry and were there still people who didn't know what an atom was and didn't give a damn? Chapman had gone through it all before. But was Ginny still Ginny? Some of the men in the Third had their luggage with them. One of them—a husky, red-faced kid named Williams—was opening a box about a foot square and six inches deep. Chapman watched him curiously. "Well, I'll be damned!" Klein said. "Hey, guys, look what we've got here!" Chapman and the others crowded around and suddenly Donley leaned over and took a deep breath. In the box, covering a thick layer of ordinary dirt, was a plot of grass. They looked at it, awed. Klein put out his hand and laid it on top of the grass. "I like the feel of it," he said simply. Chapman cut off a single blade with his fingernail and put it between his lips. It had been years since he had seen grass and had the luxury of walking on it and lying on its cool thickness during those sultry summer nights when it was too hot to sleep indoors. Williams blushed. "I thought we could spare a little water for it and maybe use the ultraviolet lamp on it some of the time. Couldn't help but bring it along; it seemed sort of like a symbol...." He looked embarrassed. Chapman sympathized. If he had had any sense, he'd have tried to smuggle something like that up to the Moon instead of his phonograph. "That's valuable grass," Dahl said sharply. "Do you realize that at current freight rates up here, it's worth about ten dollars a blade?" Williams looked stricken and somebody said, "Oh, shut up, Dahl." One of the men separated from the group and came over to Chapman. He held out his hand and said, "My name's Eberlein. Captain of the relief ship. I understand you're in charge here?" Chapman nodded and shook hands. They hadn't had a captain on the First ship. Just a pilot and crew. Eberlein looked every inch a captain, too. Craggy face, gray hair, the firm chin of a man who was sure of himself. "You might say I'm in charge here," Chapman said. "Well, look, Mr. Chapman, is there any place where we can talk together privately?" They walked over to one corner of the bunker. "This is about as private as we can get, captain," Chapman said. "What's on your mind?" Eberlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked at Chapman. "I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than anybody else," he began. "I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity." Eberlein took out a pack of cigarets. "Mind if I smoke?" Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. "Ask him. He's in charge now." The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. "You know we have big plans for the station," he said. "I hadn't heard of them." "Oh, yes, big plans . They're working on unmanned, open-side rockets now that could carry cargo and sheet steel for more bunkers like this. Enable us to enlarge the unit, have a series of bunkers all linked together. Make good laboratories and living quarters for you people." His eyes swept the room. "Have a little privacy for a change." Chapman nodded. "They could use a little privacy up here." The captain noticed the pronoun. "Well, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you, Chapman. The Commission talked it over and they'd like to see you stay. They feel if they're going to enlarge it, add more bunkers and have more men up here, that a man of practical experience should be running things. They figure that you're the only man who's capable and who's had the experience." The captain vaguely felt the approach was all wrong. "Is that all?" Eberlein was ill at ease. "Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories." All this and a title too, Chapman thought. "That's it?" Chapman asked. Eberlein frowned. "Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or...." "The answer is no," Chapman said. "I'm not interested in more money for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it, captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to appreciate that. "Bob Dahl is staying for stopover. If there's something important about the project or impending changes, perhaps you'd better tell him before you go." He walked away.

valid

51461

A Pail of Air By FRITZ LEIBER Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction December 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The dark star passed, bringing with it eternal night and turning history into incredible myth in a single generation! Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I'd just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing. You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you? Even at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it is natural we should react like that sometimes. When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times, for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have the Sun's protection. I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside. Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course. But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the heat—and came into the Nest. Let me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've never seen the real walls or ceiling. Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time, and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do. The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too. It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen air all around then and you didn't really need one. He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too. Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa put it down close by the fire. Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive. It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke. Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn't something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it through a door to outside. You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe. Of course, all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the same time. First to drop out was the carbon dioxide—when you're shoveling for water, you have to make sure you don't go too high and get any of that stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make the fire go out. Next there's the nitrogen, which doesn't count one way or the other, though it's the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there's the oxygen that keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing pure oxygen, but we're used to it and don't notice. Finally, at the very top, there's a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff. All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa laughingly says, whatever that is. I was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one, as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling. "And you watched this light for some time, son?" he asked when I finished. I hadn't said anything about first thinking it was a young lady's face. Somehow that part embarrassed me. "Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor." "And it didn't look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?" He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally died. "Not like anything I ever saw," I told him. He stood for a moment frowning. Then, "I'll go out with you, and you show it to me," he said. Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and so on. Ma started moaning again, "I've always known there was something outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!" Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip and Pa won't let me make it alone. "Sis," Pa said quietly, "come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air, too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the cloth to pick up the bucket." Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail and the two of us go out. Pa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a bit scared. You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't be anything human or friendly. Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night, cold night. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away. I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther out all the time. I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa out on the balcony. I don't know what the city looked like in the old days, but now it's beautiful. The starlight lets you see it pretty well—there's quite a bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to be streets. I sometimes make my mashed potatoes look like it, before I pour on the gravy. Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows, underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth. Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself first and known it wasn't so. He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing off guard. I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready. Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, "If you see something like that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two of you, too." "You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest, tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being brave." His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the fact that Pa took it seriously. It's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination, but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old days, and how it all happened. He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from the shelf and lay it down beside him. It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two and keeps improving it in spots. He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong, when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star, this burned out sun, and upsets everything. You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt, any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up. Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their nervousness. As if all folks didn't have to hang together and pool every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold? Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He's cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound pretty wild. He may be right. The dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out, what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of unfrozen water!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit on the other side. But then they found it wasn't going to hit either side, but was going to come very close to the Earth. Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a little while—pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won and carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last minute he managed to hold on to the Moon. That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been sitting too far from the fire. You see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably in order to take it away. The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that people keeled over and fainted—though of course, at the same time, they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones broke or skulls cracked. We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly too busy to notice. You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could lay his hands on. I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten old nights long. Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building, others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for coal. In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but just like life. Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound, especially the young lady. Now, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see, I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others. What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to life—not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible? That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the dark star to get us. Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen—the beautiful young lady and the moving, starlike light. The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the Nest. I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said and clenched my teeth and didn't speak. We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently. There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks. And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My skin tightened all over me. Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the place where he philosophizes. "So I asked myself then," he said, "what's the use of going on? What's the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden I got the answer." Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe. "Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold," Pa was saying. "The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the last man as the first." And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes. "So right then and there," Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear them, "right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars." But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped the handle of the hammer beside him. In through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her shoulders—men's faces, white and staring. Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight. The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion. They were simply people, you see. We hadn't been the only ones to survive; we'd just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we found out how they'd survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy. They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had a regular little airtight city, with air-locks and all. They even generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.) But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double-flabbergasted at us. One of the men kept saying, "But it's impossible, I tell you. You can't maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It's simply impossible." That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air. Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and suddenly she broke down and cried. They'd been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and plenty of chemical fuel. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was go out and shovel the air blanket at the top level . So after they'd got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they'd decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth. Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate. Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd wasted some time in the building across the street. By now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at all and just asked bushels of questions. In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen. Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice as anything to me. I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone and get our feelings straightened out. And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady, "But I wouldn't know how to act there and I haven't any clothes." The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, "It just doesn't seem right to let this fire go out." Well, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a "survival school." Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo. Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself. You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up. "It's different, now that we know others are alive," he explains to me. "Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to speak. It scares a person." I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light. "It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest," I said, wanting to cry, kind of. "It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers." He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas. "You'll quickly get over that feeling son," he said. "The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning." I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.

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HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS By JIM HARMON Illustrated by WEST [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Every lonely man tries to make friends. Manet just didn't know when to stop! William Manet was alone. In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable lectures to a bored and captive audience of one. He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and think more like a god than any man for generations. But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it. Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and winked at it whenever he passed that way. Lately she was winking back at him. Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity. No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet could only be this lonely on Mars. Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human. All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat, flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was needed here—no human being, at least. The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization. They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet and his fellows. The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between the various Overseers. They weren't very providential. But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered wonderful opportunities. It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as bright as envy. Manet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia. Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest, making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a kind of climaxing release of terror. So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship. He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin. The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the horizontal pattern of chinked wall. "Need a fresher?" the host inquired. Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the comfortingly warm leather chair. "No, no, I'm fine ." He let the word hang there for examination. "Pardon me, but could you tell me just what place this is?" The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. "Whatever place you choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's my motto. It is a way of life with me." "Trader Tom? Service?" "Yes! That's it exactly. It's me exactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the planets." Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey, immensely powerful. "The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving the wants of spacemen," he exploded. "Ah," Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed his hands and buttocks. "Ah, but I am not a government service. I represent free enterprise." "Nonsense," Manet said. "No group of private individuals can build a spaceship. It takes a combine of nations." "But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known. Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper. They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things they can forego the papers. Comprehend, mon ami ? My businessmen have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals." "I don't believe you," Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown blunt with disuse. "What possible profit could your principals turn from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this glass of whiskey." "Do you find it good whiskey?" "Very good." "Excellent?" "Excellent, if you prefer." "I only meant—but never mind. We give you what you want. As for paying for it—why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a Trader Tom Credit Card." "And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?" Manet demanded. "That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it." "That's it precisely!" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. "You never pay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your estate ." "But I may leave no estate!" Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. "All businesses operate on a certain margin of risk. That is our worry." Manet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed to have been polished clean. "What do you have to offer?" "Whatever you want?" Irritably, "How do I know what I want until I know what you have?" "You know." "I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale." "Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only sell . I am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for example ... extraterrestrials." "Folk legend!" "On the contrary, mon cher , the only reality it lacks is political reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without representation. Come, tell me what you want." Manet gave in to it. "I want to be not alone," he said. "Of course," Trader Tom replied, "I suspected. It is not so unusual, you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so much." Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand. When he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was pushing it across the floor towards him. The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a busy city street. The red and blue letters said: LIFO The Socialization Kit "It is commercialized," Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin. "It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic, aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it approaches being art. We must accept it." "What's the cost?" Manet asked. "Before I accept it, I have to know the charges." "You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the Trader Tom plan." "Well, is it guaranteed?" "There are no guarantees," Trader Tom admitted. "But I've never had any complaints yet." "Suppose I'm the first?" Manet suggested reasonably. "You won't be," Trader Tom said. "I won't pass this way again." Manet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall. Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad. Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk, suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad. So he went to open the box. The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed. The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime. On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the Reader's Digest , covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in black on the spine and cover: The Making of Friends . Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title in larger print and slightly amplified: The Making of Friends and Others . There was no author listed. A further line of information stated: "A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit." At the bottom of the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD., SYRACUSE. The unnumbered first chapter was headed Your First Friend . Before you go further, first find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital . He quickly riffled through the pages. Other Friends, Authority, A Companion .... Then The Final Model . Manet tried to flip past this section, but the pages after the sheet labeled The Final Model were stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants. Manet flipped back to page one. First find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital to your entire experiment in socialization. The Modifier is Part #A-1 on the Master Chart. He prowled through the box looking for some kind of a chart. There was nothing that looked like a chart inside. He retrieved the lid and looked at its inside. Nothing. He tipped the box and looked at its outside. Not a thing. There was always something missing from kits. Maybe even the Modifier itself. He read on, and probed and scattered the parts in the long box. He studied the manual intently and groped out with his free hand. The toe bone was connected to the foot bone.... The Red King sat smugly in his diagonal corner. The Black King stood two places away, his top half tipsy in frustration. The Red King crabbed sideways one square. The Black King pounced forward one space. The Red King advanced backwards to face the enemy. The Black King shuffled sideways. The Red King followed.... Uselessly. "Tie game," Ronald said. "Tie game," Manet said. "Let's talk," Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful. Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him. Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible. "The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars," Ronald said pontifically. "Only in the air," Manet corrected him. Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress. Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder. "There were no dogfights in Korea," Ronald said. "I know." "The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts, that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the leisurely combats of World War One." "I know." "Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic." "I know." Manet knew it all. He had heard it all before. He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines, the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing, ad nauseum . What a narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal human being? Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy. Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. "Hoot" Gibson, Sam Merwin tennis stories, Saturday Evening Post covers—when he had first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm opinions on all these. He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that Dime Sports had been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why, Sewanee Review , there had been a magazine for you. Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk. "Ronald," Manet said, "you are a terrific jerk." Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right. Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross. Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel. The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the diesel works, closed again. Ronald leaped forward and led with his right. Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of Ronald's jaw. Ronald pinwheeled to the floor. He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth. "Had enough?" he asked Manet. Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. "Yes." Ronald hopped up lightly. "Another checkers, Billy Boy?" "No." "Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer." Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury. Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid. Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard. But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that their checker games always ended in a tie? The calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission. The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time. Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent wall. By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand. And several hundred miles of desert could see him. For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles and patchy sunburn. Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward Communication. He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on the walls of the tubeway. As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch. "Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!" Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since. In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback of the transmission. "Hello, Overseers," the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C. It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York swing. "We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall be required to stay at your present stations," said the Voice of God's paternal uncle. "As you on Mars may know, there has been much discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present schedule—" there was of course no "K" sound in the word—"for atmosphere seeding. "The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was 18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources of two hundred and seventy-four years is not an official government estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to believe our original estimate was substantially correct. The total time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years." A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder. He sat there thinking about eighteen years. He did not switch to video for some freshly taped westerns. Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out. There was a lot left inside. One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one of them, he now knew, was the Modifier. The Modifier was what he needed to change Ronald. Or to shut him off. If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room for 18 flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head. Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to nothing whatsoever. Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years. Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types. Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain compensations. Manet opened the book to the chapter headed: The Making of a Girl . Veronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth. "Daniel Boone," she sighed huskily, "only killed three Indians in his life." "I know." Manet folded his arms stoically and added: "Please don't talk." She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over his chest and up to the hollows of his throat. "I need a shave," he observed. Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather bristly, masculine countenance. Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion. She made her return. "Not now," he instructed her. "Whenever you say." He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment. There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise. "Now?" she asked. "I'll tell you." "If you were a jet pilot," Veronica said wistfully, "you would be romantic. You would grab love when you could. You would never know which moment would be last. You would make the most of each one." "I'm not a jet pilot," Manet said. "There are no jet pilots. There haven't been any for generations." "Don't be silly," Veronica said. "Who else would stop those vile North Koreans and Red China 'volunteers'?" "Veronica," he said carefully, "the Korean War is over. It was finished even before the last of the jet pilots." "Don't be silly," she snapped. "If it were over, I'd know about it, wouldn't I?" She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright, less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald. Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what constituted appropriate "feminine" characteristics. "I suppose," he said heavily, "that you would like me to take you back to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?" "Oh, yes." "Veronica, your stupidity is hideous." She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. "That is a mean thing to say to me. But I forgive you." An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head until it forced a sound out of him. "Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight in you at all?" He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw. It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago. Veronica sprang forward and led with a right. Ronald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the corridor. "Hear that?" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth. "No, darling." Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore the noise. She was still following orders. "Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald," the voice carried through sepulchrally. "Shut up!" Manet yelled. The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off. A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it. Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the station. Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch. Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months. Ronald didn't say anything to Manet. But he looked offended. "You," Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back, "inside, inside." Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl. "Do you know what I'm going to do with you?" Manet demanded. "I'm going to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year, forever! Now what do you think about that?" "If you think it's the right thing, dear," Veronica said hesitantly. "You know best, Willy," Ronald said uncertainly. Manet slammed the hatch in disgust. Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he walked too carefully for this to happen. As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: "In my opinion, William, you should let us out." "I," Veronica said, "honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill, dearest." Manet giggled. "What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?" He went down the corridor, giggling. He giggled and thought: This will never do. Pouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the box to go around. The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit. He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier. He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit. Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit. But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once. Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet. He glanced forward and found the headings: The Final Model . There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he could. He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and under his fingers.... Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back. Victor was finished. Perfect. Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose. "Move!" Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the flesh-sprayers. As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier. "It's finished!" were Victor's first words. "It's done!" Manet stared at the tiny wreck. "To say the least." Victor stepped out of the oblong box. "There is something you should understand. I am different from the others." "They all say that." "I am not your friend." "No?" "No. You have made yourself an enemy." Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure at the symmetry of the situation. "It completes the final course in socialization," Victor continued. "I am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have all your knowledge. You do not have all your knowledge. If you let yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is my function to use everything I possibly can against you." "When do you start?" "I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier." "What's so bad about that?" Manet asked with some interest. "You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man. I've seen that you will always keep your friends. " The prospect was frightful. Victor smiled. "Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?" "Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you are through? You have fulfilled your function?" "Yes. Yes." "Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see me suffer?" " Yes. " "No. Can't do it, old man. Can't. I know. You're too human, too like me. The one thing a man can't accept is a passive state, a state of uselessness. Not if he can possibly avoid it. Something has to be happening to him. He has to be happening to something. You didn't kill me because then you would have nothing left to do. You'll never kill me." "Of course not!" Victor stormed. "Fundamental safety cut-off!" "Rationalization. You don't want to kill me. And you can't stop challenging me at every turn. That's your function." "Stop talking and just think about your miserable life," Victor said meanly. "Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that for boredom, for passiveness?" "That's what I'm trying to tell you," Manet said irritably, his social manners rusty. "I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a friend!"

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THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Illustrated by WEST [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent—including my date with my girl! When the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put the roof on the city, as they say. It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken. But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it—to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this morning—right after the egg yolk—and invited myself down to her place. "Ten o'clock," she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o'clock, she meant ten o'clock. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up. Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened—I'd broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for four days. And then the elevator didn't come. Until then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one. I had a Whimsical Approach: "Honey, I see there's a nice little Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three." And I had a Romantic Approach: "Darling, I can't live without you at the moment. Temporarily, I'm madly in love with you. I want to share my life with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?" I even had a Straightforward Approach: "Linda, I'm going to be needing a wife for at least a year or two, and I can't think of anyone I would rather spend that time with than you." Actually, though I wouldn't even have admitted this to Linda, much less to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract for any kind of marriage other than Non-P—Non-Permanent, No Progeny. So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more than a blurted, "Will you marry me?" and I struggled with zippers and malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment at five minutes to ten. Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away. It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I was giving myself plenty of time. But then the elevator didn't come. I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't understand it. The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour. I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late. It didn't arrive. I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to give her advance warning that I would be late? Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION. Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to keep us from being interrupted. Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute late. No matter. It didn't arrive. I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three. I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY. It took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female receptionist "My name is Rice!" I bellowed. "Edmund Rice! I live on the hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and——" "The-elevator-is-disconnected." She said it very rapidly, as though she were growing very used to saying it. It only stopped me for a second. "Disconnected? What do you mean disconnected? Elevators don't get disconnected!" I told her. "We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible," she rattled. My bellowing was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen. I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it, giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as rationally as you could please, "Would you mind terribly telling me why the elevator is disconnected?" "I-am-sorry-sir-but-that——" "Stop," I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly at her screen and parroted her responses. But now she was actually looking at me . I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, "I would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have ruined my life." She blinked, open-mouthed. "Ruined your life?" "Precisely." I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly than before. "I was on my way," I explained, "to propose to a girl whom I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you understand me?" She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too preoccupied to notice it at the time. "In every way but one," I continued. "She has one small imperfection, a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten o'clock. I'm late! " I shook my fist at the screen. "Do you realize what you've done , disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she marry me, she won't even speak to me! Not now! Not after this!" "Sir," she said tremulously, "please don't shout." "I'm not shouting!" "Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your—" "You understand ?" I trembled with speechless fury. She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen, revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay any attention to. "We're not supposed to give this information out, sir," she said, her voice low, "but I'm going to tell you, so you'll understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—" she leaned even closer to the screen—"there's a spy in the elevator." II It was my turn to be stunned. I just gaped at her. "A—a what?" "A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think of to get him out." "Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?" "He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims the elevator at them." That sounded impossible. "He aims the elevator?" "He runs it up and down the shaft," she explained, "trying to crush anybody who goes after him." "Oh," I said. "So it might take a while." She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, "They're afraid they'll have to starve him out." "Oh, no!" She nodded solemnly. "I'm terribly sorry, sir," she said. Then she glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said, "We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible." Click. Blank screen. For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked! What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected? Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr. Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War. Dr. Kilbillie—Intermediate Project History, when I was fifteen years old—had private names for every major war of the twentieth century. There was the Ignoble Nobleman's War, the Racial Non-Racial War, and the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, known to the textbooks of course as World Wars One, Two, and Three. The rise of the Projects, according to Dr. Kilbillie, was the result of many many factors, but two of the most important were the population explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course, meant that there was continuously more and more people but never any more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to vertical. Before 1900, the vast majority of human beings lived in tiny huts of from one to five stories. By 2000, everybody lived in Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects (also called apartments and co-ops) already included restaurants, shopping centers, baby-sitting services, dry cleaners and a host of other adjuncts. By the end of the century, the Projects were completely self-sufficient, with food grown hydroponically in the sub-basements, separate floors set aside for schools and churches and factories, robot ore-sleds capable of seeking out raw materials unavailable within the Projects themselves and so on. And all because of, among other things, the population explosion. And the Treaty of Oslo. It seems there was a power-struggle between two sets of then-existing nations (they were something like Projects, only horizontal instead of vertical) and both sets were equipped with atomic weapons. The Treaty of Oslo began by stating that atomic war was unthinkable, and added that just in case anyone happened to think of it only tactical atomic weapons could be used. No strategic atomic weapons. (A tactical weapon is something you use on the soldiers, and a strategic weapons is something you use on the folks at home.) Oddly enough, when somebody did think of the war, both sides adhered to the Treaty of Oslo, which meant that no Projects were bombed. Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected radioactive particles. However, what with all of the other treaties which were broken during the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to ask. And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it go at that. But now there was a spy in the elevator. When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the other side of them. I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda. I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen. I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient reason for me to be late. He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out. I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway. I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of stairs since I was twelve years old. Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators, didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was the use of stairs? Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary information), the Project had been built when there still had been such things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them. And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps. Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could. If the door would open. It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing, took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor. On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with difficulty. I read them. They said: EMERGENCY ENTRANCE ELEVATOR SHAFT AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY KEEP LOCKED I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already. Somebody in authority might simply have goofed. As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and the spy came out, waving a gun. III He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous, in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the elevator shaft. Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us open-mouthed and wide-eyed. Unfortunately, he recovered first. He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. "Don't move!" he whispered harshly. "Don't make a sound!" I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound. Which left me quite free to study him. He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he didn't look like a spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to my parents' apartment. His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand at the descending stairs and whispered, "Where do they go?" I had to clear my throat before I could speak. "All the way down," I said. "Good," he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending boots. The Army! But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He said, "Where do you live?" "One fifty-three," I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man. I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to either escape or capture him. "All right," he whispered. "Go on." He prodded me with the gun. And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back, and grated in my ear, "I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're friends, just strolling along together. You got that?" I nodded. "All right. Let's go." We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I thumbed the door open and we went inside. Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile playing across his lips. I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He said, "Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any silly heroics, nothing will happen to you." "You'll never get away," I told him. "The whole Project is alerted." "You let me worry about that," he said. He licked his lips. "You got any chico coffee?" "Yes." "Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with boiling water." "I only have my day's allotment," I protested. "Just enough for two cups, lunch and dinner." "Two cups is fine," he said. "One for each of us." And now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't ever going to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains. As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then, "What do you do for a living?" I thought fast. "I'm an ore-sled dispatcher," I said. That was a lie, of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about it. Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karati—talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came. He was quiet for a moment. "What about radiation level on the ore-sleds?" I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much. "When they come back," he said. "How much radiation do they pick up? Don't you people ever test them?" "Of course not," I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's information to guide me. "All radiation is cleared from the sleds and their cargo before they're brought into the building." "I know that," he said impatiently. "But don't you ever check them before de-radiating them?" "No. Why should we?" "To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped." "For what? Who cares about that?" He frowned bitterly. "The same answer," he muttered, more to himself than to me. "The same answer every time. You people have crawled into your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever." I looked around at my apartment. "Rather a well-appointed cave," I told him. "But a cave nevertheless." He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical flame. "Don't you ever wish to get Outside?" Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. "Outside? Of course not!" "The same thing," he grumbled, "over and over again. Always the same stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia, before he ever made that first step from the cave?" "I have no idea," I told him. "I'll tell you this," he said belligerently. "A lot longer than it took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again." He started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion as he talked. "Is this the natural life of man? It is not. Is this even a desirable life for man? It is definitely not." He spun back to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed it as though it were a finger, not a gun. "Listen, you," he snapped. "Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all the time. He was planning to tackle space ! The moon first, and then the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there, waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching out for it." He glared as though daring me to doubt it. I decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy, he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded politely. "So what happened?" he demanded, and immediately answered himself. "I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his tail between his legs. That's what he did!" To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by saying, "Here's your coffee." "Put it on the table," he said, switching instantly from raving maniac to watchful spy. I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and suddenly said, "What did they tell you I was? A spy?" "Of course," I said. He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. "Of course. The damn fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?" He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. "I—I wouldn't know, exactly," I stammered. "Military equipment, I suppose." "Military equipment? What military equipment? Your Army is supplied with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it." "The defenses—" I started. "The defenses," he interrupted me, "are non-existent. If you mean the rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what other defenses are there? None." "If you say so," I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy spy. "Your people send out spies, too, don't they?" he demanded. "Well, of course." "And what are they supposed to spy on?" "Well—" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even answer it. "They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by one of the other projects." "And do they find any indications, ever?" "I'm sure I don't know," I told him frostily. "That would be classified information." "You bet it would," he said, with malicious glee. "All right, if that's what your spies are doing, and if I'm a spy, then it follows that I'm doing the same thing, right?" "I don't follow you," I admitted. "If I'm a spy," he said impatiently, "then I'm supposed to look for indications of an attack by you people on my Project." I shrugged. "If that's your job," I said, "then that's your job." He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. "That's not my job, you blatant idiot!" he shouted. "I'm not a spy! If I were a spy, then that would be my job!" The maniac had returned, in full force. "All right," I said hastily. "All right, whatever you say." He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, "Bah!" and dropped back into the chair. He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then looked at me again. "All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that I had found indications that you people were planning to attack my Project?" I stared at him. "That's impossible!" I cried. "We aren't planning to attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!" "How do I know that?" he demanded. "It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?" "Ah hah!" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger again. "Now, then," he said. "If you know it doesn't make any sense for this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should you think they might see some advantage in attacking you ?" I shook my head, dumbfounded. "I can't answer a question like that," I said. "How do I know what they're thinking?" "They're human beings, aren't they?" he cried. "Like you? Like me? Like all the other people in this mausoleum?" "Now, wait a minute—" "No!" he shouted. "You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm not a spy, and I'm going to tell you what I am." I waited, looking as attentive as possible. "I come," he said, "from a Project about eighty miles north of here. I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to protect me." The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the violence that was so obviously in this lunatic. "The radiation level," he went on, "is way down. It's practically as low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least." He leaned forward again, urgent and serious. "The world is safe out there now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects." And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all. "I'm a trained atomic engineer," he went on. "In my project, I worked on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job, and they knew it.

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JAYWALKER BY ROSS ROCKLYNNE Illustrated by DON DIBLEY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction December 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Women may be against progress because it means new pseudo-widowhoods. Space-widowhood, for instance.... At last she was on the gangplank, entering the mouth of the spaceship—and nothing could ever stop her now. Not unless she broke down completely in front of all these hurrying, Moon-bound passengers, in plain sight of the scattered crowd which clustered on the other side of the space-field barriers. Even that possibility was denied her when two gently insistent middle-aged ladies indicated she was blocking the way.... Somehow, dizzily, she was at her seat, led there by a smiling, brown-clad stewardess; and her azure-tipped fingers were clutching at the pearl-gray plasta-leather of the chair arm. Her eyes, the azure of her nails, the azure (so she had been told) of Earth seen from interplanetary space, grew hot. She closed them, and for a moment gave herself up to an almost physical yearning for the Toluca Lake house—the comfort, the safety, the—the sanity of it. Stubbornly she forced herself back to reality. At any moment Jack, dark-eyed and scrappy, might come swinging down the long, shining aisle. Jack—Captain Jack McHenry, if you please—must not know, yet, what she was doing to patch up their marriage. She turned her face away from the aisle, covered her cheek with her hand to hide it. Her gaze went out through the ray-proof glass port to the field, to the laboring beetle of a red tractor bearing the gangway on its busy back, to the low, blast-proof administration building. When her gaze came to the tall sign over the entrance, she hurried it past; it was too late to think about that now, the square, shouting type that read: CAUTION HAVE YOU PASSED YOUR PHYSICAL EXAMINATION? Avoiding It May Cost Your Life! "May I see your validation, please?" Marcia McHenry stiffened. Had she read the sign aloud? She turned startled eyes up to the smiling stewardess, who was holding out a well-groomed hand. Marcia responded weakly to the smile, overcame a sudden urge to blurt out that she had no validation—not her own, anyway. But her stiff fingers were already holding out the pink card with Nellie Foster's name on it. "You're feeling well, Mrs. Foster?" Feeling well? Yes, of course. Except for the—usual sickness. But that's so very normal .... Her numb lips moved. "I'm fine," she said. Miss Eagen (which, her neat lapel button attested, was her name) made a penciled frown as lovely as her machined smile. "Some day," she told Marcia, "we won't have to ask the passengers if they're well. It's so easy to come aboard on someone else's validation, and people don't seem to realize how dangerous that is." As Miss Eagen moved to the next seat, Marcia shrank into a small huddle, fumbling with the card until it was crammed shapeless into her purse. Then from the depths of her guilt came rebellion. It was going to be all right. She was doing the biggest thing she'd ever done, and Jack would rise to the occasion, and it would be all right. It had to be all right.... After this—if this didn't work—there just would be nothing else she could do. She wasn't a scheming woman. No one would ever know how difficult it had been for her to think up the whole plan, to find Nellie Foster (someone Jack had never met) and to persuade Nellie to register for the trip and take the physical for her. She'd had to lie to Nellie, to make Nellie think she was brave and adventurous, and that she was just doing it to surprise Jack. Oh, he'd be surprised, all right. The flash walls on the field were being raised to keep the blow-by from the ship's jets from searing the administration building and the area beyond. Marcia realized with crushing suddenness that the ship was about to blast off in seconds. She half-rose, then sank back, biting her lip. Silly ... Jack had said that—her fear of space was silly. He'd said it during the quarrel, and he'd roared at her, "And that's why you want me to come back—ground myself, be an Earth-lubber—so I can spare you the anguish of sitting home wondering if I'll come back alive!" And then he'd been sorry he'd shouted, and he sat by her, taking her chin in his hand. "Marcia, Marcia," he'd said gently, "you're so silly ! It's been nineteen whole years since your father died in the explosion of a Moon-rocket. Rocket motors just don't explode any more, honey! Ships travel to the Moon and back on iron-clad, mathematical orbits that are figured before the ship puffs a jet—" "The Elsinore ?" She'd said it viciously, to taunt him, and something in her had been pleased at the dull flush that rose to his face. Everyone knew about the Elsinore , the 500-foot Moon-ferry that almost missed the Moon. "That," he said bitterly, "was human damnfoolishness botching up the equations. Too many lobbyists have holdings on the Moon and don't want to risk not being able to go there in a hurry. So they haven't passed legislation to keep physically unfit people off spaceships. One of the passengers got aboard the Elsinore on somebody else's validation—which meant that nobody knew he was taking endocrine treatments to put hair on his brainless head and restore his—Oh, the Jaywalker !" Jack spat in disgust. "Anyway, he was the kind of idiot who never realizes that certain glandular conditions are fatal in free fall." Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space, when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than ever before. He went on remorselessly, "Once the Elsinore reached the free-fall flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put the ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing the Moon or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening." "It's all so dull!" she had flared, and then, "How can I be interested in what some blundering space-jockey did?" "Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground." "Was it?" she'd yawned. "Could you do it?" "I—like to think I could," he said. "I'd hate to have to try." She'd shrugged. "Then it can't be very difficult, darling." She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her, and made her fight back unfairly. After he'd gone—for good, he said—her anger had sustained her for a few weeks. Then, bleakly, she knew she'd go to the ends of Earth for Jack. Or even to the Moon.... Sitting rigid in the tense stillness of a rocket ship that was about to leap from Earth, Marcia started as an officer ducked his head into the passenger compartment from the pilot room's deep glow. But it wasn't Jack. The officer's lips moved hurriedly as he counted over the seats. He ducked back out of sight. From the bulk-heads, the overhead, everywhere, came a deep, quiet rumble. Some of the passengers looked anxious, some excited, and some just leafed casually through magazines. Now the brown-clad Miss Eagen was speaking from the head of the aisle. "Those of you who haven't been in a rocket before won't find it much different from being in an airplane. At the same time—" She paused, quiet brown eyes solemn. "What you are about to experience is something that will make you proud to belong to the human race." That again! thought Marcia furiously; and then all emotion left her but cold, ravening fear as the rumble heightened. She tried to close her eyes, her ears against it, but her mind wouldn't respond. She squirmed in her chair and found herself staring down at the field. It looked the way she felt—flat and pale and devoid of life, with a monstrous structure of terror squatting in it. The scene was abruptly splashed with a rushing sheet of flame that darkened the daytime sky. Then it was torn from her vision. It was snatched away—the buildings, the trees, the roads surrounding the field seemed to pour in upon it, shrinking as they ran together. Roads dried up like parched rivers, thinning and vanishing into the circle of her horrified vision. A great, soft, uniform weight pressed her down and back; she fought it, but it was too big and too soft. Now Earth's surface was vague and Sun-splashed. Marcia's sense of loss tore at her. She put up her hands, heavily, and pressed the glass as if she could push it out, push herself out, go back, back to Earth and solidity. Clouds shot by like bullets, fell away until they were snowflakes roiling in violet haze. Then, in the purling universe that had grown around the ship, Earth was a mystic circle, a shallow dish floating darkly and heavily below. "We are now," said Miss Eagen's calm voice, "thirty-seven miles over Los Angeles." After that, there was scarcely room for thought—even for fear, though it lurked nearby, ready to leap. There was the ascent, the quiet, sleeplike ascent into space. Marcia very nearly forgot to breathe. She had been prepared for almost anything except this quality of peace and awe. She didn't know how long she had been sitting there, awestruck, spellbound, when she realized that she had to finish the job she'd started, and do it right now, this minute. It might already be too late ... she wished, suddenly, and for the very first time, that she'd paid more attention to Jack's ramblings about orbits and turn-over points and correction blasts, and all that gobbledegook. She glanced outside again and the sky was no longer deep blue, but black. She pressed herself up out of the soft chair—it was difficult, because of the one-and-a-half gravities the ship was holding—and plodded heavily up the aisle. Miss Eagen was just rising from the chair in which she sat for the take-off. "Miss Eagen—" "Yes, Mrs. Fos—why, what's the matter?" Seeing the startled expression on the stewardess' face, Marcia realized she must be looking like a ghost. She put a hand to her cheek and found it clammy. "Come along," said Miss Eagen cheerfully. She put a firm arm around Marcia's shoulder. "Just a touch of space-sickness. This way. That's it. We'll have you fixed up in a jiffy." "It isn't s-space sickness," said Marcia in a very small and very positive voice. She let herself be led forward, through the door and to the left, where there was a small and compact ship's hospital. "Now, now," said Miss Eagen briskly, "just you lie down there, Mrs. Foster. Does it hurt any special place?" Marcia lay down gratefully. She closed her eyes tightly and said, "I'm not Mrs. Foster. It doesn't hurt." "You're not—" Miss Eagen apparently decided to take one thing at a time. "How do you feel?" "Scared," said Marcia. "Why, what—is there to be scared of?" "I'm pregnant." "Well, that's no—You're what ?" "I'm Mrs. McHenry. I'm Jack's wife." There was such a long pause that Marcia opened her eyes. Miss Eagen was looking at her levelly. She said, "I'll have to examine you." "I know. Go ahead." Miss Eagen did, swiftly and thoroughly. "You're so right," she breathed. She went to the small sink, stripping off her rubber gloves. With her back to Marcia, she said, "I'll have to tell the captain, you know." "I know. I'd rather ... tell him myself." "Thanks," said Miss Eagen flatly. Marcia felt as if she'd been slapped. Miss Eagen dried her hands and crossed to an intercom. "Eagen to Captain." "McHenry here." "Captain McHenry, could you come back to the hospital right away?" "Not right away, Sue." Sue! No wonder he had found it so easy to walk out! She looked at the trim girl with hating eyes. The intercom said, "You know I've got course-correction computations from here to yonder. Give me another forty minutes." "I think," said Sue Eagen into the mike, "that the computations can wait." "The hell you do!" The red contact light on the intercom went out. "He'll be right here," said Miss Eagen. Marcia sat up slowly, clumsily. Miss Eagen did not offer to help. Marcia's hands strayed to her hair, patted it futilely. He came in, moving fast and purposefully, as always. "Sue, what in time do you think you— Marcia! " His dark face broke into a delighted grin and he put his arms out. "You—you're here— here , on my ship!" "I'm pregnant, Jack," she said. She put out a hand to ward him off. She couldn't bear the thought of his realizing what she had done while he had his arms around her. "You are ? You—we—" He turned to Miss Eagen, who nodded once, her face wooden. "Just find it out?" This time Miss Eagen didn't react at all, and Marcia knew that she had to speak up. "No, Jack. I knew weeks ago." There was no describable change in his face, but the taut skin of his space-tanned cheek seemed, somehow, to draw inward. His eyebrow ridges seemed to be more prominent, and he looked older, and very tired. Softly and slowly he asked, "What in God's name made you get on the ship?" "I had to, Jack. I had to." "Had to kill yourself?" he demanded brutally. "This tears it. This ties it up in a box with a bloody ribbon-bow. I suppose you know what this means—what I've got to do now?" "Spin ship," she replied immediately, and looked up at him pertly, like a kindergarten child who knows she has the right answer. He groaned. "You said you could do it." "I can ... try," he said hollowly. "But—why, why ?" "Because," she said bleakly, "I learned long ago that a man grows to love what he has to fight for." "And you were going to make me fight for you and the child—even if the lives of a hundred and seventy people were involved?" "You said you could handle it. I thought you could." "I'll try," he said wearily. "Oh, I'll try." He went out, dragging his feet, his shoulders down, without looking at her. There was a stiff silence. Marcia looked up at Miss Eagen. "It's true, you know," she said. "A man grows to love the things he has to defend, no matter how he felt about them before." The stewardess looked at her, her face registering a strange mixture of detachment and wonder. "You really believe that, don't you?" Marcia's patience, snapped. "You don't have to look so superior. I know what's bothering you . Well, he's my husband, and don't you forget it." Miss Eagen's breath hissed in. Her eyes grew bright and she shook her head slightly. Then she turned on her heel and went to the intercom. Marcia thought for a frightened moment that she was going to call Jack back again. Instead she dialed and said, "Hospital to Maintenance. Petrucelli?" "Petrucelli here." "Come up with a crescent wrench, will you, Pet?" Another stiff silence. A question curled into Marcia's mind and she asked it. "Do you work on all these ships at one time or another?" Miss Eagen did not beat around the bush. "I've been with Captain McHenry for three years. I hope to work with him always. I think he's the finest in the Service." "He—th-thinks as well of you, no doubt." Petrucelli lounged in, a big man, easy-going, powerful. "What's busted, muscles?" "Bolt the bed to the bulkhead, Pet. Mrs. McHenry—I'm sorry, but you'll have to get up." Marcia bounced resentfully off the cot and stood aside. Petrucelli looked at her, cocked an eyebrow, looked at Miss Eagen, and asked, "Jaywalker?" "Please hurry, Pet." She turned to Marcia. "I've got to explain to the passengers that there won't be any free fall. Most of them are looking forward to it." She went out. Marcia watched the big man work for a moment. "Why are you putting the bed on the wall?" He looked at her and away, quickly. "Because, lady, when we start to spin, that outside bulkhead is going to be down . Centrifugal force, see?" And before she could answer him he added, "I can't talk and work at the same time." Feeling very much put-upon, Marcia waited silently until he was finished, and the bed hung ludicrously to the wall like a walking fly. She thanked him timidly, and he ignored it and went out. Miss Eagen returned. "That man was very rude," said Marcia. Miss Eagen looked at her coolly. "I'm sorry," she said, obviously not meaning sorry at all. Marcia wet her lips. "I asked you a question before," she said evenly. "About you and the captain." "You did," said Sue Eagen. "Please don't." "And why not?" "Because," said Miss Eagen, and in that moment she looked almost as drawn as Jack had, "I'm supposed to be of service to the passengers at all times no matter what. If I have feelings at all, part of my job is to keep them to myself." "Very courteous, I'm sure. However, I want to release you from your sense of duty. I'm most interested in what you have to say." Miss Eagen's arched nostrils seemed pinched and white. "You really want me to speak my piece?" In answer Marcia leaned back against the bulkhead and folded her arms. Miss Eagen gazed at her for a moment, nodded as if to herself, and said, "I suppose there always will be people who don't pay attention to the rules. Jaywalkers. But out here jaywalkers don't have as much margin for error as they do crossing against a traffic light on Earth." She looked Marcia straight in the eye. "What makes a jaywalker isn't ignorance. It's a combination of stupidity and stubbornness. The jaywalker does know better. In your case...." She sighed. "It's well known—even by you—that the free-fall condition has a weird effect on certain people. The human body is in an unprecedented situation in free fall. Biologically it has experienced the condition for very short periods—falling out of trees, or on delayed parachute jumps. But it isn't constituted to take hour after hour of fall." "What about floating in a pool for hours?" asked Marcia sullenly. "That's quite a different situation. 'Down' exists when you're swimming. Free-fall means that everything around you is 'up.' The body's reactions to free-fall go much deeper than space-nausea and a mild feeling of panic. When there's a glandular imbalance of certain kinds, the results can be drastic. Apparently some instinctual part of the mind reacts as if there were a violent emergency, when no emergency is recognized by the reasoning part of the mind. There are sudden floods of adrenalin; the 17-kesteroids begin spastic secretions; the—well, it varies in individuals. But it's pretty well established that the results can be fatal. It kills men with prostate trouble—sometimes. It kills women in menopause—often. It kills women in the early stages of pregnancy— always ." "But how?" asked Marcia, interested in spite of her resentment. "Convulsions. A battle royal between a glandular-level panic and a violent and useless effort of the will to control the situation. Muscles tear, working against one another. Lungs rupture and air is forced into the blood-stream, causing embolism and death. Not everything is known about it, but I would guess that pregnant women are especially susceptible because their protective reflexes, through and through, are much more easily stimulated." "And the only thing that can be done about it is to supply gravity?" "Or centrifugal force (or centripetal, depending on where you're standing, but why be technical?)—or, better yet, keep those people off the ships." "So now Jack will spin the ship until I'm pressed against the walls with the same force as gravity, and then everything will be all right." "You make it sound so simple." "There's no need to be sarcastic!" Marcia blurted. "Jack can do it. You think he can, don't you? Don't you?" "He can do anything any space skipper has ever done, and more," said Sue Eagen, and her face glowed. "But it isn't easy. Right this minute he's working over the computer—a small, simple, ship-board computer—working out orbital and positional and blast-intensity data that would be a hard nut for the giant calculators on Earth to crack. And he's doing it in half the time—or less—than it would take the average mathematician, because he has to; because it's a life-and-death matter if he makes a mistake or takes too long." "But—but—" "But what?" Miss Eagen's composure seemed to have been blasted to shreds by the powerful currents of her indignation. Her eyes flashed. "You mean, but why doesn't he just work the ship while it's spinning the same way he does when it isn't?" Through a growing fear, Marcia nodded mutely. "He'll spin the ship on its long axis," said the stewardess with exaggerated patience. "That means that the steering jet tubes in the nose and tail are spinning, too. You don't just turn with a blast on one tube or another. The blasts have to be let off in hundreds of short bursts, timed to the hundredth of a second, to be able to make even a slight course correction. The sighting instruments are wheeling round and round while you're checking your position. Your fuel has to be calculated to the last ounce—because enough fuel for a Moon flight, with hours of fuelless free-fall, and enough fuel for a power spin and course corrections while spinning, are two very different things. Captain McHenry won't be able to maneuver to a landing on the Moon. He'll do it exactly right the first time, or not at all." Marcia was white and still. "I—I never—" "But I haven't told you the toughest part of it yet," Miss Eagen went on inexorably. "A ship as massive as this, spinning on its long axis, is a pretty fair gyroscope. It doesn't want to turn. Any force that tries to make it turn is resisted at right angles to the force applied. When that force is applied momentarily from jets, as they swing into position and away again, the firing formulas get—well, complex. And the ship's course and landing approach are completely new. Instead of letting the ship fall to the Moon, turning over and approaching tail-first with the main jets as brakes, Captain McHenry is going to have to start the spin first and go almost the whole way nose-first. He'll come up on the Moon obliquely, pass it, stop the spin, turn over once to check the speed of the ship, and once again to put the tail down when the Moon's gravity begins to draw us in. There'll be two short periods of free-fall there, but they won't be long enough to bother you much. And if we can do all that with the fuel we've got, it will be a miracle. A miracle from the brain of Captain McHenry." Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door. Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm. "Where are you going?" "I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with these people...." "He will and he must. You surely know your husband." "I know him as well as you do." Miss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. "Do as you like," she whispered. "And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning ship for." She took her hand from Marcia's arm. Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor. She found herself at the entrance to the pilot room. In one sweeping glance she saw a curved, silver board. Before it a man sat tranquilly. Nearer to her was Jack, hunched over the keyboard of a complex, compact machine, like a harried bookkeeper on the last day of the month. Her lips formed his name, but she was silent. She watched him, his square, competent hands, his detached and distant face. Through the forward view-plate she saw a harsh, jagged line, the very edge of the Moon's disc. Next to it, and below, was the rear viewer, holding the shimmering azure shape of Earth. " All Earth watches me when I work, but with your eyes. " Jack had said that to her once, long ago, when he still loved her. "... human damnfoolishness botching up the equations...." He had said that once, too. Miss Eagen was standing by the hospital door, watching her. When Marcia turned away without speaking to Jack, Miss Eagen smiled and held out her hand. Marcia went to her and took the hand. They went into the hospital. Miss Eagen didn't speak; she seemed to be waiting. "Yes, I know who Jack's spinning the ship for," said Marcia. Miss Eagen looked an unspoken question. Marcia said, painfully, "He's like the Captain of the Elsinore . He's risking his life for a—a stranger. A jaywalker. Not for me. Not even for his baby." "Does it hurt to know that?" Marcia looked into the smooth, strong face and said with genuine astonishment, "Hurt? Oh, no! It's so—so big!" There was a sudden thunder. Over Miss Eagen's shoulder, through the port, Marcia saw the stars begin to move. Miss Eagen followed her gaze. "He's started the spin. You'll be all right now." Marcia could never recall the rest of the details of the trip. There was the outboard bulkhead that drew her like a magnet, increasingly, until suddenly it wasn't an attracting wall, but normally and naturally "down." Then a needle, and another one, and a long period of deep drowsiness and unreality. But through and through that drugged, relaxed period, Jack and the stars, the Moon and Sue Eagen danced and wove. Words slipped in and out of it like shreds of melody: "A man comes to love the things he has to fight for." And Jack fighting—for his ship, for the Moon, for the new-building traditions of the great ones who would carry humanity out to the stars. Sue Eagen was there, too, and the thing she shared with Jack. Of course there was something between them—so big a thing that there was nothing for her to fear in it. Jack and Sue Eagen had always had it, and always would have; and now Marcia had it too. And with understanding replacing fear, Marcia was free to recall that Jack had worked with Sue Eagen—but it was Marcia that he had loved and married. There was a long time of blackness, and then a time of agony, when she was falling, falling, and her lungs wanted to split, explode, disintegrate, and someone kept saying, "Hold tight, Marcia; hold tight to me," and she found Sue Eagen's cool strong hands in hers. Marcia. She called me Marcia. More blackness, more pain—but not so much this time; and then a long, deep sleep. A curved ceiling, but a new curve, and soft rose instead of the gunmetal-and-chrome of the ship. White sheets, a new feeling of "down" that was unlike either Earth or the ship, a novel and exhilarating buoyancy. And kneeling by the bed— "Jack!" "You're all right, honey." She raised herself on her elbow and looked out through the unglazed window at the ordered streets of the great Luna Dome. "The Moon.... Jack, you did it!" He snapped his fingers. He looked like a high-school kid. "Nothin' to it." She could see he was very proud. Very tired, too. He reached out to touch her. She drew back. "You don't have to be sweet to me," she said quietly. "I understand how you must feel." "Don't have to?" He rose, bent over her, and slid his arms around her. He put his face into the shadowed warmth between her hair and her neck and said, "Listen, egghead, there's no absolute scale for courage. We had a bad time, both of us. After it was over, and I had a chance to think, I used it trying to look at things through your eyes. And that way I found out that when you walked up that gangway, you did the bravest thing I've ever known anyone to do. And you did it for me. It doesn't matter what else happened. Sue told me a lot about you that I didn't know, darling. You're ... real huge for your size. As for the bad part of what happened—nothing like it can ever happen again, can it?" He hugged her. After a time he reached down and touched her swelling waist. It was like a benediction. "He'll be born on the Moon," he whispered, "and he'll have eyes the color of all Earth when it looks out to the stars." " She'll be born on the Moon," corrected Marcia, "and her name will be Sue, and ... and she'll be almost as good as her father."

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END AS A HERO By KEITH LAUMER Illustrated by SCHELLING [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Granthan's mission was the most vital of the war. It would mean instant victory—but for whom? I In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me. I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious. I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couch—the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst.... There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again.... I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left arm—well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn't anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn't amputated. I wasn't complaining. As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Gool—if I survived. I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work. I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzar's CCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters. I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was almost five minutes before the "acknowledge" came through from the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look. "Granthan!" he burst out. "Where are the others? What happened out there?" I turned him down to a mutter. "Hold on," I said. "I'll tell you. Recorders going?" I didn't wait for an answer—not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on: " Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was Gilgamesh —I think. I got out. I lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people the drinks are on me." I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his reaction to my report. I dozed off—and awoke with a start. Kayle was talking. "—your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?" "How the hell do I know?" I yelled—or croaked. But Kayle's voice was droning on: "... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack—and came to on the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there. "This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line. "I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept the risk." "What do I do now?" I stormed. "Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you think of something? I need a doctor!" Presently Kayle replied. "Yes," he said. "You'll have to enter a parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation." He didn't meet my eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and pretend—right up until the warheads struck—that I didn't know I'd been condemned to death. II I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I was acting under Gool orders. I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were mine, all mine.... But how could I be sure of that? Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their tampering—not at a conscious level. But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack. Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious—and see again what had happened. I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on the trigger word that would key an auto-hypnotic sequence.... Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of mirror-bright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper.... The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion. And found it. As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations. I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt. " It is a contact, Effulgent One! " " Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the threshold.... " " It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough! " A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the voices—yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought against the intruding stimuli—then yielded under the relentless thrust of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me—and then the hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg. My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought—and the world-ending impact as I fell. At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality lashed out again—fighting the invader. " Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one! " " Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the last filament of your life-force! " Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering—at a conscious level. Watching the Gool mind, I learned. The insinuating probe—a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had theorized—was no more than a pattern in emptiness.... But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been done to me. Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves. Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable void—and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening dark shape. There was a soundless shriek. " Effulgence! It reached out—touched me! " Using the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck, stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy of xenophobia—a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well. I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering. Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact, tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind.... I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner source, filling an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a more favorable position. I probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory told me, were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that would transport the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals—riches beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe cluster—those who remained of a once-great race—at a single feeding trough. They would spread out across a galaxy—and beyond. But not if I could help it. The Gool had evolved a plan—but they'd had a stroke of bad luck. In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough, perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage. Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see what I could steal. A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts, fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the concepts of an alien mind. I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine. I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its meaning exploded in my mind. From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of their kind. Matter across space. "You've got to listen to me, Kayle," I shouted. "I know you think I'm a Gool robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without a fight. Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The concept is too complex to try to describe in words. You'll have to take my word for it. I can build it, though, using standard components, plus an infinite-area antenna and a moebius-wound coil—and a few other things...." I harangued Kayle for a while, and then sweated out his answer. I was getting close now. If he couldn't see the beauty of my proposal, my screens would start to register the radiation of warheads any time now. Kayle came back—and his answer boiled down to "no." I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the ego-complex. I might have saved my breath. "I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan," he snapped. "It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to you well enough. I'm sorry." I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the problem at hand. I keyed the chart file, flashed pages from the standard index on the reference screen, checking radar coverages, beacon ranges, monitor stations, controller fields. It looked as though a radar-negative boat the size of mine might possibly get through the defensive net with a daring pilot, and as a condemned spy, I could afford to be daring. And I had a few ideas. III The shrilling of the proximity alarm blasted through the silence. For a wild moment I thought Kayle had beaten me to the punch; then I realized it was the routine DEW line patrol contact. "Z four-oh-two, I am reading your IFF. Decelerate at 1.8 gee preparatory to picking up approach orbit...." The screen went on droning out instructions. I fed them into the autopilot, at the same time running over my approach plan. The scout was moving in closer. I licked dry lips. It was time to try. I closed my eyes, reached out—as the Gool mind had reached out to me—and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched keys, spoke into his microphone: "As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and let-down." I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear of the DEW line now, rapidly approaching atmosphere. "Z four-oh-two," the speaker crackled. "This is planetary control. I am picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down." There was a long pause. Then: "Z four-oh-two, countermand DEW Line clearance! Repeat, clearance countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!" It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it dumb, and hope for a little luck. "Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that, fellows. I'm a little banged up—I guess I switched frequencies on you. What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?" "Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!" "Hey, you birds are mixed up," I protested. "I'm cleared all the way. I checked in with DEW—" It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out— A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar screens blanked off.... For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up, over, buffeting me against the restraining harness. I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on the water. I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key. "This is Z four-oh-two," I said. "I have an urgent report for Colonel Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence." Kayle's face appeared. "Don't fight it, Granthan," he croaked. "You penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—" "Later," I snapped. "How about calling off your dogs now? And send somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other complaints." "We have you pinpointed," Kayle cut in. "It's no use fighting it, Granthan." I felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. "You've got to listen, Kayle," I shouted. "I suppose you've got missiles on the way already. Call them back! I have information that can win the war—" "I'm sorry, Granthan," Kayle said. "It's too late—even if I could take the chance you were right." A different face appeared on the screen. "Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and in the name of the President—who has been apprised of this tragic situation—it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously—for your heroic effort. Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will, to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you." The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture. "Stow that, you pompous idiot!" I barked. "I'm no spy!" Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general. "Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand...." I flipped the switch, sat gripping the couch, my stomach rising with each heave of the floating escape capsule. I had perhaps five minutes. The missiles would be from Canaveral. I closed my eyes, forced myself to relax, reached out.... I sensed the distant shore, the hot buzz of human minds at work in the cities. I followed the coastline, found the Missile Base, flicked through the cluster of minds. "— missile on course; do right, baby. That's it, right in the slot. " I fingered my way through the man's mind and found the control centers. He turned stiffly from the plotting board, tottered to a panel to slam his hand against the destruct button. Men fell on him, dragged him back. "— fool, why did you blow it? " I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel, detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew. I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now. I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next attacker. IV It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself. A few more minutes and you can lie down ... rest.... The shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside for a grip with my good hand. Gravel scrunched nearby. The beam of a flashlight lanced out, slipped along the weathered car, caught me. There was a startled exclamation. I ducked back, closed my eyes, felt out for his mind. There was a confused murmur of thought, a random intrusion of impressions from the city all around. It was hard, too hard. I had to sleep— I heard the snick of a revolver being cocked, and dropped flat as a gout of flame stabbed toward me, the imperative Bam! echoing between the cars. I caught the clear thought: "God-awful looking, shaved head, arm stuck out; him all right—" I reached out to his mind and struck at random. The light fell, went out, and I heard the unconscious body slam to the ground like a poled steer. It was easy—if I could only stay awake. I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide down into darkness. The car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation at the treatment it had received—walking brace and all—and the burned arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a badly embalmed mummy—except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast. I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would have finished me—and the hapless fisherman—right then. We rode out a couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the air. At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car—with driver. He dropped me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me. Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of the farce. I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages. I needed new clothes—or at least different ones—and something to cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had recognized me at a glance. I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly worried—at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself. The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes and let my awareness stretch out. "— lousy job. What's the use? Little witch in the lunch room ... up in the hills, squirrel hunting, bottle of whiskey.... " I settled into control gently, trying not to alarm the man. I saw through his eyes the dusty box car, the rust on the tracks, the listless weeds growing among cinders, and the weathered boards of the platform. I turned him, and saw the dingy glass of the telegraph window, a sagging screen door with a chipped enameled cola sign. I walked the man to the door, and through it. Behind a linoleum-topped counter, a coarse-skinned teen-age girl with heavy breasts and wet patches under her arms looked up without interest as the door banged. My host went on to the counter, gestured toward the waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches under a glass cover. "I'll take 'em all. And candy bars, and cigarettes. And give me a big glass of water." "Better git out there and look after yer train," the girl said carelessly. "When'd you git so all-fired hungry all of a sudden?" "Put it in a bag. Quick." "Look who's getting bossy—" My host rounded the counter, picked up a used paper bag, began stuffing food in it. The girl stared at him, then pushed him back. "You git back around that counter!" She filled the bag, took a pencil from behind her ear. "That'll be one eighty-five. Cash." My host took two dog-eared bills from his shirt pocket, dropped them on the counter and waited while the girl filled a glass. He picked it up and started out. "Hey! Where you goin' with my glass?" The trainman crossed the platform, headed for the boxcar. He slid the loose door back a few inches against the slack latch, pushed the bag inside, placed the glass of water beside it, then pulled off his grimy railroader's cap and pushed it through the opening. He turned. The girl watched from the platform. A rattle passed down the line and the train started up with a lurch. The man walked back toward the girl. I heard him say: "Friend o' mine in there—just passin' through." I was discovering that it wasn't necessary to hold tight control over every move of a subject. Once given the impulse to act, he would rationalize his behavior, fill in the details—and never know that the original idea hadn't been his own. I drank the water first, ate a sandwich, then lit a cigarette and lay back. So far so good. The crates in the car were marked "U. S. Naval Aerospace Station, Bayou Le Cochon". With any luck I'd reach New Orleans in another twelve hours. The first step of my plan included a raid on the Delta National Labs; but that was tomorrow. That could wait. It was a little before dawn when I crawled out of the car at a siding in the swampy country a few miles out of New Orleans. I wasn't feeling good, but I had a stake in staying on my feet. I still had a few miles in me. I had my supplies—a few candy bars and some cigarettes—stuffed in the pockets of the tattered issue coverall. Otherwise, I was unencumbered. Unless you wanted to count the walking brace on my right leg and the sling binding my arm. I picked my way across mushy ground to a pot-holed black-top road, started limping toward a few car lights visible half a mile away. It was already hot. The swamp air was like warmed-over subway fumes. Through the drugs, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my various wounds. I reached out and touched the driver's mind; he was thinking about shrimps, a fish-hook wound on his left thumb and a girl with black hair. "Want a lift?" he called. I thanked him and got in. He gave me a glance and I pinched off his budding twinge of curiosity. It was almost an effort now not to follow his thoughts. It was as though my mind, having learned the trick of communications with others, instinctively reached out toward them. An hour later he dropped me on a street corner in a shabby marketing district of the city and drove off. I hoped he made out all right with the dark-haired girl. I spotted a used-clothing store and headed for it. Twenty minutes later I was back on the sidewalk, dressed in a pinkish-gray suit that had been cut a long time ago by a Latin tailor—maybe to settle a grudge. The shirt that went with it was an unsuccessful violet. The black string tie lent a dubious air of distinction. I'd swapped the railroader's cap for a tarnished beret. The man who had supplied the outfit was still asleep. I figured I'd done him a favor by taking it. I couldn't hope to pass for a fisherman—I wasn't the type. Maybe I'd get by as a coffee-house derelict. I walked past fly-covered fish stalls, racks of faded garments, grimy vegetables in bins, enough paint-flaked wrought iron to cage a herd of brontosauri, and fetched up at a cab stand. I picked a fat driver with a wart. "How much to the Delta National Laboratories?" He rolled an eye toward me, shifted his toothpick. "What ya wanna go out there for? Nothing out there." "I'm a tourist," I said. "They told me before I left home not to miss it." He grunted, reached back and opened the door. I got in. He flipped his flag down, started up with a clash of gears and pulled out without looking. "How far is it?" I asked him. "It ain't far. Mile, mile and a quarter." "Pretty big place, I guess." He didn't answer. We went through a warehousing district, swung left along the waterfront, bumped over railroad tracks, and pulled up at a nine-foot cyclone fence with a locked gate. "A buck ten," my driver said. I looked out at the fence, a barren field, a distant group of low buildings. "What's this?" "This is the place you ast for. That'll be a buck ten, mister." I touched his mind, planted a couple of false impressions and withdrew. He blinked, then started up, drove around the field, pulled up at an open gate with a blue-uniformed guard. He looked back at me. "You want I should drive in, sir?" "I'll get out here." He jumped out, opened my door, helped me out with a hand under my good elbow. "I'll get your change, sir," he said, reaching for his hip. "Keep it." "Thank YOU." He hesitated. "Maybe I oughta stick around. You know." "I'll be all right." "I hope so," he said. "A man like you—you and me—" he winked. "After all, we ain't both wearing berets fer nothing." "True," I said. "Consider your tip doubled. Now drive away into the sunrise and forget you ever saw me."

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51351

THE SPICY SOUND OF SUCCESS By JIM HARMON Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Now was the captain's chance to prove he knew less than the crew—all their lives hung upon it! There was nothing showing on the video screen. That was why we were looking at it so analytically. "Transphasia, that's what it is," Ordinary Spaceman Quade stated with a definite thrust of his angular jaw in my direction. "You can take my word on that, Captain Gavin." "Can't," I told him. "I can't trust your opinion. I can't trust anything . That's why I'm Captain." "You'll get over feeling like that." "I know. Then I'll become First Officer." "But look at that screen, sir," Quade said with an emphatic swing of his scarred arm. "I've seen blank scanning like that before and you haven't—it's your first trip. This always means transphasia—cortex dissolution, motor area feedback, the Aitchell Effect—call it anything you like, it's still transphasia." "I know what transphasia is," I said moderately. "It means an electrogravitational disturbance of incoming sense data, rechanneling it to the wrong receptive areas. Besides the human brain, it also effects electronic equipment, like radar and television." "Obviously." Quade glanced disgustedly at the screen. "Too obvious. This time it might not be a familiar condition of many planetary gravitational fields. On this planet, that blank kinescope may mean our Big Brother kites were knocked down by hostile natives." "You are plain wrong, Captain. Traditionally, alien races never interfere with our explorations. Generally, they are so alien to us they can't even recognize our existence." I drew myself up to my full height—and noticed in irritation it was still an inch less than Quade's. "I don't understand you men. Look at yourself, Quade. You've been busted to Ordinary Spaceman for just that kind of thinking, for relying on tradition, on things that have worked before. Not only your thinking is slipshod, you've grown careless about everything else, even your own life." "Just a minute, Captain. I've never been 'busted.' In the Exploration Service, we regard Ordinary Spaceman as our highest rank. With my hazard pay, I get more hard cash than you do, and I'm closer to retirement." "That's a shallow excuse for complacency." "Complacency! I've seen ten thousand wonders in twenty years of space, with a million variations. But the patterns repeat themselves. We learn to know what to expect, so maybe we can't maintain the reactionary caution the service likes in officers." "I resent the word 'reactionary,' Spaceman! In civilian life, I was a lapidary and I learned the value of deliberation. But I never got too cataleptic to tap a million-dollar gem, which is more than my contemporaries can say, many of 'em." "Captain Gavin," Quade said patiently, "you must realize that an outsider like you, among a crew of skilled spacemen, can never be more than a figurehead." Was this the way I was to be treated? Why, this man had deliberately insulted me, his captain. I controlled myself, remembering the familiarity that had always existed between members of a crew working under close conditions, from the time of the ancient submarines and the first orbital ships. "Quade," I said, "there's only one way for us to find out which of us is right about the cause of our scanning blackout." "We go out and find the reason." "Exactly. We go. You and me. I hope you can stand my company." "I'm not sure I can," he answered reluctantly. "My hazard pay doesn't cover exploring with rookies. With all due respect, Captain." I clapped him on the shoulder. "But, man, you have just been telling me all we had to worry about was common transphasia. A man with your experience could protect himself and cover even a rookie, under such familiar conditions—right?" "Yes, sir, I suppose I could," Quade said, bitterly aware he had lost out somewhere and hoping that it wasn't the start of a trend. "Looks okay to me," I said. Quade passed a gauntlet over his faceplate. "It's real. I can blur it with a smudged visor. When it blurs, it's solid." The landscape beyond the black corona left by our landing rockets was unimpressive. The rocky desert was made up of silicon and iron oxide, so it looked much the same as a terrestrial location. Yellowish-white sand ran up to and around reddish brown rock clawing into the pink sunlight. "I don't understand it," Quade admitted. "Transphasia hits you a foul as soon as you let it into the airlock." "Apparently, Quade, this thing is going to creep up on us." "Don't sound smug, Captain. It's pitty-pattying behind you too." The keening call across the surface of consciousness postponed my reply. The wail was ominously forlorn, defiant of description. I turned my head around slowly inside my helmet, not even sure that I had heard it. But what else can you do with a wail but hear it? Quade nodded. "I've felt this before. It usually hits sooner. Let's trace it." "I don't like this," I admitted. "It's not at all what I expected from what you said about transphasia. It must be something else." "It couldn't be anything else. I know what to expect. You don't. You may begin smelling sensations, tasting sounds, hearing sights, seeing tastes, touching odors—or any other combination. Don't let it bother you." "Of course not. I'll soothe my nerves by counting little shocks of lanolin jumping over a loud fence." Quade grinned behind his faceplate. "Good idea." "Then you can have it. I'm going to try keeping my eyes open and staying alive." There was no reply. His expression was tart and greasy despite all his light talk, and I knew mine was the same. I tested the security rope between our pressure suits. It was a taut and virile bass. We scaled a staccato of rocks, our suits grinding pepper against our hides. The musk summit rose before us, a minor-key horizon with a shifting treble for as far as I could smell. It was primitive beauty that made you feel shocking pink inside. The most beautiful vista I had ever tasted, it couldn't be dulled even by the sensation of beef broth under my skin. "Is this transphasia?" I asked in awe. "It always has been before," Quade remarked. "Ready to swallow your words about this being something an old hand wouldn't recognize, Captain?" "I'm swallowing no words until I find out precisely how they taste here." "Not a bad taste. They're pretty. Or haven't you noticed?" "Quade, you're right! About the colors anyway. This reminds me of an illiscope recording from a cybernetic translator." "It should. I don't suppose we could understand each other if it wasn't for our morphistudy courses in reading cross-sense translations of Centauri blushtalk and the like." It became difficult to understand him, difficult to try talking in the face of such splendor. You never really appreciate colors until you smell them for the first time. Quade was as conversational as ever, though. "I can't see irregularities occurring in a gravitational field. We must have compensated for the transphasia while we still had a point of reference, the solid reality of the spaceship. But out here, where all we have to hang onto is each other, our concept of reality goes bang and deflates to a tired joke." Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second. The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I couldn't quite make out. Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain. "Wait a minute, Spaceman!" I bellowed. "Where the devil do you think you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order." He stopped. "Don't you want to find out what that was? This is an exploration party, you know, sir." "I'm not sure I do want to find out what that was just now. I didn't like the feel of it. But the important thing is for us not to get any further from the ship." "That's important, Captain?" "To the best of my judgment, yes. This—condition—didn't begin until we got so far away from the spacer—in time or distance. I don't want it to get any worse. It's troublesome not to know black from white, but it would be a downright inconvenience not to know which way is up." "Not for an experienced spaceman," Quade griped. "I'm used to free-fall." But he turned back. "Just a minute," I said. "There was something strange up ahead. I want to see if short-range radar can get through our electrogravitational jamming here." I took a sighting. My helmet set projected the pattern on the cornea. Sweetness building up to a stab of pure salt—those were the blips. Beside me, there was a thin thread of violet. Quade had whistled. He was reading the map too. The slope fell away sharply in front of us, becoming a deep gorge. There was something broken and twisted at the bottom, something we had known for an instant as a streak of spice. "There's one free-fall," I said, "where you wouldn't live long enough to get used to it." He said nothing on the route back to the spacer. "I know all about this sort of thing, Gav," First Officer Nagurski said expansively. He was rubbing the well-worn ears of our beagle mascot, Bruce. A heavy tail thudded on the steel deck from time to time. My finger could barely get in the chafing band of my regulation collar. I was hot and tired, fresh—in only the chronological sense—from a pressure suit. "What do you know all about, Nagurski? Dogs? Spacemen? Women? Transphasia?" "Yes," he answered casually. "But I had immediate reference to our current psychophysiological phenomenon." I collapsed into the swivel in front of the chart table. "First off, let's hear what you know about—never mind, make it dogs." "Take Bruce, for example, then—" "No, thanks. I was wondering why you did." "I didn't." His dark, round face was bland. "Bruce picked me. Followed me home one night in Chicago Port. The dog or the man who picks his own master is the most content." "Bruce is content," I admitted. "He couldn't be any more content and still be alive. But I'm not sure that theory works out with men. We'd have anarchy if I tried to let these starbucks pick their own master." " I had no trouble when I was a captain," Nagurski said. "Ease the reins on the men. Just offer them your advice, your guidance. They will soon see why the service selected you as captain; they will pick you themselves." "Did your crew voluntarily elect you as their leader?" "Of course they did, Gav. I'm an old hand at controlling crews." "Then why are you First Officer under me now?" He blinked, then decided to laugh. "I've been in space a good many years. I really wanted to relax a little bit more. Besides, the increase in hazard pay was actually more than my salary as a captain. I'm a notch nearer retirement too." "Tell me, did you always feel this way about letting the men select their own leader?" Nagurski brought out a pipe. He would have a pipe, I decided. "No, not always. I was like you at first. Fresh from the cosmic energy test lab, suspicious of everything, trying to tell the old hands what to do. But I learned that they are pretty smart boys; they know what they are doing. You can rely on them absolutely." I leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Let me tell you a thing, Nagurski. Your trust of these damn-fool spacemen is why you are no longer a captain. You can't trust anything out here in space, much less human nature. Even I know that much!" He was pained. "If you don't trust the men, they won't trust you, Gav." "They don't have to trust me. All they have to do is obey me or, by Jupiter, get frozen stiff and thawed out just in time for court-marshal back home. Listen," I continued earnestly, "these men aren't going to think of me—of us , the officers, as their leaders. As far as the crew is concerned, Ordinary Spaceman Quade is the best man on this ship." "He is a good man," Nagurski said. "You mustn't be jealous of his status." The dog growled. He must have sensed what I almost did to Nagurski. "Never mind that for now," I said wearily. "What was your idea for getting our exploration parties through this transphasia?" "There's only one idea for that," said Quade, ducking his long head and stepping through the connecting hatch. "With the Captain's permission...." "Go ahead, Quade, tell him," Nagurski invited. "There's only one way to wade through transphasia with any reliability," Quade told me. "You keep some kind of physical contact with the spaceship. Parties are strung out on guide line, like we were, but the cable has to be run back and made fast to the hull." "How far can we run it back?" Quade shrugged. "Miles." "How many?" "We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see, smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost." "Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you know." "What else can we do, Captain?" Nagurski asked puzzledly. "You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from transphasia. Is that it?" Quade gave a curt nod. "Then," I told them, "we will have to start tearing apart this ship." Sergeant-Major Hoffman and his team were doing a good job of ripping out the side of the afterhold. Through the portal I could see the suited men expertly guiding the huge curved sections on their ray projectors. "Cannibalizing is dangerous." Nagurski put his pipe in his teeth and shook his head disapprovingly. "Spaceships have parts as interchangeable as Erector sets. We can take apart the tractors and put our ship back together again after we complete the survey." "You can't assemble a jigsaw puzzle if some of the pieces are missing." "You can't get a complete picture, but you can get a good idea of what it looks like. We can take off in a reasonable facsimile of a spaceship." "Not," he persisted, "if too many parts are missing." "Nagurski, if you are looking for a job safer than space exploration, why don't you go back to testing cosmic bomb shelters?" Nagurski flushed. "Look here, Captain, you are being too damned cautious. There is a way one handles the survey of a planet like this, and this isn't the way." "It's my way. You heard what Quade said. You know it yourself. The men have to have something tangible to hang onto out there. One slender cable isn't enough of an edge on sensory anarchy. If the product of their own technological civilization can keep them sane, I say let 'em take a part of that environment with them." "In departing from standard procedure that we have learned to trust, you are risking more than a few men—you risk the whole mission in gambling so much of the ship. A captain doesn't take chances like that!" "I never said I wouldn't take chances. But I'm not going to take stupid chances. I might be doing the wrong thing, but I can see you would be doing it wrong." "You know nothing about space, Captain! You have to trust us ." "That's it exactly, First Officer Nagurski," I said sociably. "If you lazy, lax, complacent slobs want to do something in a particular way, I know it has to be wrong." I turned and found Wallace, the personnel man, standing in the hatchway. "Pardon, Captain, but would you say we also lacked initiative?" "I would," I answered levelly. "Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone." "The idiot!" I yelped. "Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it." "He didn't hook on a cable, Captain," Wallace said. "I suppose he intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded." "Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what I said as long as I command this spacer." "Cool off, Gav," Nagurski advised me. "It's been done before. Anybody else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him." "I trusted him too far by letting him run around loose. He needs a leash in more ways than one, and I'm going to put one on him." For me, it was a nightmare. I lay down in my cabin and thought. I had to think things through very carefully. One mistake was too many for me. My worst fear had been that someday I would overlook one tiny flaw and ruin a gem. Now I might have ruined an exploration and destroyed a man, not a stone, because I had missed the flaw. No one but a reckless fool would have gone out alone on a strange planet with a terrifying phenomenon, but I'd had enough evidence to see that space exploration made a man a reckless fool by doing things on one planet he had once found safe and wise on some other world. The thought intruded itself: why hadn't I recognized this before I let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment? I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very well be true, but how did that help now? I had to think . I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane reasons—he was the most important member of the crew. With him around, there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have endless opinions to contend with. But it wouldn't do any good to go out no better equipped than he. There was no time to wait for tractors to be built if we wanted to reach him alive, and we certainly couldn't reach him five or ten miles out with our three miles of safety line. We would have to go in spacesuits. But how would that leave us any better off than Quade? Why was Quade vulnerable in his spacesuit, as I knew from experience he would be? How could we be less vulnerable, or preferably invulnerable? "Captain, you got nothing to worry about," Quartermaster Farley said. He patted a space helmet paternally. "You got yourself a self-contained environment. The suit's eye looks into yours at the arteries in the back of your eyeball so it can read your amber corpuscles and feed you your oxygen in the right amounts; you're a bottle-fed baby. If transphasia gets you seeing limburger, turn on the radar and you're air-conditioned as an igloo. Nothing short of a cosmic blast can dent that hide. You got it made." "You are right," I said, "only transphasia comes right through these air-fast joints." "Something strange about the trance, Captain," Farley said darkly. "Any spaceman can tell you that. Things we don't understand." "I'm talking about something we do understand— sound . These suits perfectly soundproof?" "Well, you can pick up sound by conduction. Like putting two helmets together and talking without using radio. You can't insulate enough to block out all sound and still have a man-shaped suit. You have—" "I know. Then you have something like a tractor or a miniature spaceship. There isn't time for that. We will have to live with the sound." "What do you think he's going to hear out there, Captain? We'd like to find one of those beautiful sirens on some planet, believe me, but—" "I believe you," I said quickly. "Let's leave it at that. I don't know what he will hear; what's worrying me is how he'll hear it, in what sensory medium. I hope the sound doesn't blind him. His radar is his only chance." "How do you figure on getting a better edge yourself, sir?" "I have the idea, but not the word for it. Tonal compensation, I suppose. If you can't shut out the noise, we'll have to drown it out." Farley nodded. "Beat like a telephone time signal?" "That would do it." "It would do something else. It would drive you nuts." I shrugged. "It might be distracting." "Captain, take my word for it," argued Farley. "Constant sonic feedback inside a spacesuit will set you rocking against the grain." "Devise some regular system of interruptions," I suggested. "Then the pattern will drive you crazy. Maybe in a few months, with luck, I could plan some harmonic scale you could tolerate—" "We don't have a few months," I said. "How about music? There's a harmonic scale for you, and we can endure it, some of it. Figaro and Asleep in the Cradle of the Deep can compensate for high-pitched outside temperatures, and Flight of the Bumble Bee to block bass notes." Farley nodded. "Might work. I can program the tapes from the library." "Good. There's one more thing—how are our stores of medicinal liquor?" Farley paled. "Captain, are you implying that I should be running short on alcohol? Where do you get off suggesting a thing like that?" "I'm getting off at the right stop, apparently," I sighed. "Okay, Farley, no evasions. In plain figures, how much drinking alcohol do we have left?" The quartermaster slumped a bit. "Twenty-one liters unbroken. One more about half full." "Half full? How did that ever happen? I mean you had some left ? We'll take this up later. I want you to run it through the synthesizer to get some light wine...." "Light wine?" Farley looked in pain. "Not whiskey, brandy, beer?" "Light wine. Then ration it out to some of the men." "Ration it to the men!" "That's an accurate interpretation of my orders." "But, sir," Farley protested, "you don't give alcohol to the crew in the middle of a mission. It's not done. What reason can you have?" "To sharpen their taste and olfactory senses. We can turn up or block out sound. We can use radar to extend our sight, but the Space Service hasn't yet developed anything to make spacemen taste or smell better." "They are going to smell like a herd of winos," Farley said. "I don't like to think how they would taste." "It's an entirely practical idea. Tea-tasters used to drink almond-and-barley water to sharpen their senses. I've observed that wine helps you appreciate culinary art more. Considering the mixed-up sensory data under transphasia, wine may help us to see where we are going." "Yes, sir," Farley said obediently. "I'll give spacemen a few quarts of wine, telling them to use it carefully for scientific purposes only, and then they will be able to see where they are going. Yes, sir." I turned to leave, then paused briefly. "You can come along, Farley. I'm sure you want to see that we don't waste any of the stuff." "There they are!" Nagurski called. "Quade's footsteps again, just beyond that rocky ridge." The landscape was rich chocolate ice cream smothered with chocolate syrup, caramel, peanuts and maple syrup, eaten while you smoked an old, mellow Havana. The footsteps were faint traces of whipped cream across the dark, rich taste of the planet. I splashed some wine from my drinking tube against the roof of my mouth to sharpen my taste. It brought out the footsteps sharper. It also made the landscape more of a teen-ager's caloric nightmare. The four of us pulled ourselves closer together by reeling in more of our safety line. Farley and Hoffman, Nagurski and myself, we were cabled together. It gave us a larger hunk of reality to hold onto. Even so, things wavered for me during a wisp of time. We stumbled over the ridge, feeling out the territory. It was a sticky job crawling over a melting, chunk-style Hershey bar. I was thankful for the invigorating Sousa march blasting inside my helmet. Before the tape had cut in, kicked on by the decibel gauge, I had heard or felt something dark and ominous in the outside air. "Yes, this is definitely the trail of Quail," Nagurski said soberly. "This is serious business. I must ask whoever has been giggling on this channel to shut up. Pardon me, Captain. You weren't giggling, sir?" "I have never giggled in my life, Nagurski." "Yes, sir. That's what we all thought." A moment later, Nagurski added, "Anyway, I just noticed it was my shelf—my, that is, self." The basso profundo performing Figaro on my headset climbed to a girlish shriek. A sliver of ice. This was the call Quade and I had first heard as we were about to troop over a cliff. I dug in my heels. "Take a good look around, boys," I said. "What do you see?" "Quail," Nagurski replied. "That's what I see." "You," I said carefully, "have been in space a long time. Look again." "I see our old buddy, Quail." I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It was Quade. A man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead. Grudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge. A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of Pomp and Circumstance . Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges. The Quartermaster rose with grim deliberation, and hiccuped. "Better get him back to the spaceship fast. I've seen this kind of thing before with transphasia. His body cooled down because of the screaming wind—psychosomatic reaction—and his heating circuits compensated for the cool flesh. The poor devil's got frostbite and heat prostration." The four of us managed to haul Quade back by using the powered joints in our suits. Hoffman suggested that he had once seen an injured man walked back inside his suit like a robot, but it was a delicate adjustment, controlling power circuits from outside a suit. It was too much for us—we were too tired, too numb, too drunk. At first sight of the spacer in the distance, transphasia left me with only a chocolate-tasting pink after-image on my retina. It was now showing bare skeleton from cannibalization for tractor parts, but it looked good to me, like home. The wailing call sounded through the amber twilight. I realized that I was actually hearing it for the first time. The alien stood between us and the ship. It was a great pot-bellied lizard as tall as a man. Its sound came from a flat, vibrating beaver tail. Others of its kind were coming into view behind it. "Stand your ground," I warned the others thickly. "They may be dangerous." Quade sat up on our crisscross litter of arms. "Aliens can't be hostile. Ethnic impossibility. I'll show you." Quade was delirious and we were drunk. He got away from us and jogged toward the herd. "Let's give him a hand!" Farley shouted. "We'll take us a specimen!" I couldn't stop them. Being in Alpine rope with them, I went along. At the time, it even seemed vaguely like a good idea. As we lumbered toward them, the aliens fell back in a solid line except for the first curious-looking one. Quade got there ahead of us and made a grab. The creature rose into the air with a screaming vibration of his tail and landed on top of him, flattening him instantly. "Sssh, men," Nagurski said. "Leave it to me. I'll surround him." The men followed the First Officer's example, and the rope tying them to him. I went along cheerfully myself, until an enormous rump struck me violently in the face. My leaded boots were driven down into fertile soil, and my helmet was ringing like a bell. I got a jerky picture of the beast jumping up and down on top of the others joyously. Only the stiff space armor was holding up our slack frames. "Let's let him escape," Hoffman suggested on the audio circuit. "I'd like to," Nagurski admitted, "but the other beasts won't let us get past their circle." It was true. The aliens formed a ring around us, and each time a bouncing boy hit the line, he only bounced back on top of us. "Flat!" I yelled. "Our seams can't take much more of this beating." I followed my own advice and landed in the dirt beside Quade. The bouncer came to rest and regarded us silently, head on an eighty-degree angle. I was stone sober. The others were lying around me quietly, passed out, knocked out, or taking cover. The ring of aliens drew in about us, closer, tighter, as the bouncer sat on his haunches and waited for us to move. "Feeling better?" I asked Quade in the infirmary. He punched up his pillow and settled back. "I guess so. But when I think of all the ways I nearly got myself killed out there.... How far have you got in the tractors?" "I'm having the tractors torn down and the parts put back into the spaceship where they belong. We shouldn't risk losing them and getting stuck here." "Are you settling for a primary exploration?" "No. I think I had the right idea on your rescue party. You have to meet and fight a planet on its own terms. Fighting confused sounds and tastes with music and wine was crude, but it was on the right track. Out there, we understood language because we were familiar with alien languages changed to other sense mediums by cybernetic translators. Using the translator, we can learn to recognize all confused data as easily. I'm starting indoctrination courses." "I doubt that that is necessary, sir," Quade said. "Experienced spacemen are experienced with transphasia. You don't have to worry. In the future, I'll be able to resist sensations that tell me I'm freezing to death—if my gauges tell me it's a lie." I examined his bandisprayed hide. "I think my way of gaining experience is less painful and more efficient." Quade squirmed. "Yes, sir. One thing, sir—I don't understand how you got me away from those aliens." "The aliens were trying to help. They knew something was wrong and they were prodding and probing. When the first tractor pulled up and the men got out, they seemed to realize our own people could help us easier than they could." "I am not quite convinced that those babies just meant to help us all the time." "But they did! First, that call of theirs—it wasn't to lead us into danger, but to warn us of the cliff, the freezing wind. They saw we were trying to find out things about their world, so they even offered us one of their own kind to study. Unfortunately, he was too much for us. They didn't give us their top man, of course, only the village idiot. It's just as well. We aren't allowed to dissect creatures that far up the intelligence scale." "But why should they want to help us?" Quade demanded suspiciously. "I think it's like Nagurski's dog. The dog came to him when it wanted somebody to own it, protect it, feed it, love it. These aliens want Earthmen to colonize the planet. We came here, you see, same as the dog came to Nagurski." "Well, I've learned one thing from all of this," Quade said. "I've been a blind, arrogant, cocksure fool, following courses that were good on some worlds, most worlds, but not good on all worlds. I'm never going to be that foolhardy again." "But you're losing confidence , Quade! You aren't sure of yourself any more. Isn't confidence a spaceman's most valuable asset?" "The hell it is," Quade said grimly. "It's his deadliest liability." "In that case, I must inform you that I am demoting you to Acting Executive Officer." "Huh?" Quade gawked. "But dammit, Captain, you can't do that to me! I'll lose hazard pay and be that much further from retirement!" "That's tough," I sympathized, "but in every service a chap gets broken in rank now and then." "Maybe it's worth it," Quade said heavily. "Now maybe I've learned how to stay alive out here. I just hope I don't forget." I thought about that. I was nearly through with my first mission and I could speak with experience, even if it was the least amount of experience aboard. "Quade," I said, "space isn't as dangerous as all that." I clapped him on the shoulder fraternally. "You worry too much!"

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JAMIESON By BILL DOEDE Illustrated by GRAY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine December 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] A Konv cylinder was the key to space—but there was one power it could not match! They lived in a small house beside the little Wolf river in Wisconsin. Once it had been a summer cottage owned by a rich man from Chicago. The rich man died. His heirs sold it. Now it was well insulated and Mrs. Jamieson and her son were very comfortable, even in the coldest winter. During the summer they rented a few row boats to vacationing fishermen, and she had built a few overnight cabins beside the road. They were able to make ends meet. Her neighbors knew nothing of the money she had brought with her to Wisconsin. They didn't even know that she was not a native. She never spoke of it, except at first, when Earl was a boy of seven and they had just come there to live. Then she only said that she came from the East. She knew the names of eastern Wisconsin towns, and small facts about them; it lent an air of authenticity to her claim of being a native. Actually her previous residence was Bangkok, Siam, where the Agents had killed her husband. That was back in '07, on the eve of his departure for Alpha Centaurus; but she never spoke of this; and she was very careful not to move from place to place except by the conventional methods of travel. Also, she wore her hair long, almost to the shoulders. People said, "There goes one of the old-fashioned ones. That hair-do was popular back in the sixties." They did not suspect that she did this only to cover the thin, pencil-line scar, evidence that a small cylinder lay under her skin behind the ear. For Mrs. Jamieson was one of the Konvs. Her husband had been one of the small group who developed this tiny instrument. Not the inventor— his name was Stinson, and the effects produced by it were known as the Stinson Effect. In appearance it resembled a small semi-conductor device. Analysis by the best scientific minds proved it to be a semi-conductor. Yet it held the power to move a body instantly from one point in space to any other point. Each unit was custom built, keyed to operate only by the thought pattern of the particular individual. Several times in the past seven years Mrs. Jamieson had seen other Konvs, and had been tempted to identify herself and say, "Here I am. You are one of them; so am I. Come, and we'll talk. We'll talk about Stinson and Benjamin, who helped them all get away. And Doctor Straus. And my husband, E. Mason Jamieson, who never got away because those filthy, unspeakable Agents shot him in the back, there in that coffee shop in Bangkok, Siam." Once, in the second year after her husband's death, an Agent came and stayed in one of her cabins. She learned that he was an Agent completely by accident. While cleaning the cabin one morning his badge fell out of a shirt pocket. She stood still, staring at the horror of it there on the floor, the shirt in her hands, all the loneliness returning in a black wave of hate and frustration. That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his bed and shot him with a .22 rifle. She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth; while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong. She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown. Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own. Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge. Later they would go to Alpha Centaurus, where a life free from Agents could be lived. It happened to Earl one hot summer day when he was fourteen. Mrs. Jamieson was working in her kitchen; Earl supposedly was swimming with his friends in the river. Suddenly he appeared before her, completely nude. At sight of his mother his face paled and he began to shake violently, so that she was forced to slap him to prevent hysteria. She looked behind his ear. It was there. "Mom!" he cried. "Mom!" He went to the window and looked out toward the river, where his friends were still swimming in the river, with great noise and delight. Apparently they did not miss him. Mrs. Jamieson handed him a pair of trousers. "Here, get yourself dressed. Then we'll talk." He started for his room, but she stopped him. "No, do it right here. You may as well get used to it now." "Get used to what?" "To people seeing you nude." "What?" "Never mind. What happened just now?" "I was swimming in the river, and a man came down to the river. His hair was all white, and his eyes looked like ... well, I never saw eyes like his before. He asked who was Earl Jamieson, and I said I was. Then he said, 'Come with me.' I went with him. I don't know why. It seemed the right thing. He took me to a car and there was another man in it, that looked like the first one only he was bigger. We went to a house, not far away and went inside. And that's all I can remember until I woke up. I was on a table, sort of. A high table. There was a light over it. It was all strange, and the two men stood there talking in some language I don't know." Earl ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head. "I don't remember clearly, I guess. I was looking around the room and I remember thinking how scared I was, and how nice it would be to be here with you. And then I was here." Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. "What is it?" he asked, desperately. "What happened to me?" "Better put your trousers on," Mrs. Jamieson said. "It's something very unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful." "But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?" Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his trousers. "Guess I know now. They made me a Konv." "Well, don't take on so. You'll get used to it." "But they shouldn't have! They didn't even ask me!" He started for the door, but she called him back. "No, don't run away from it now. This is the time to face it. There are two sides to every story, you know. You hear only one side in school—their side. There is also our side." He turned back, a dawning comprehension showing in his eyes. "That's right, you're one, too. That is why you killed that Agent in the third cabin." It was her turn to be surprised. "You knew about that?" "I saw you. I wasn't sleeping. I was afraid to stay inside alone, so I followed you. I never told anyone." "But you were only nine!" "They would have taken you away if I'd said anything." Mrs. Jamieson held out her hand. "Come here, son. It's time I told you about us." So he sat across the kitchen table from her, and she told the whole history, beginning with Stinson sitting in the laboratory in New Jersey, holding in his hand a small cylinder moulded from silicon with controlled impurities. He had made it, looking for a better micro-circuit structure. He was holding this cylinder ... and it was a cold day outside ... and he was dreaming of a sunny Florida beach— And suddenly he was there, on the beach. He could not believe it at first. He felt the sand and water, and felt of himself; there was no mistake. On the plane back to New Jersey he came to certain conclusions regarding the strange power of his device. He tried it again, secretly. Then he made more cylinders. He was the only man in the world who knew how to construct it, and he kept the secret, giving cylinders to selected people. He worked out the basic principle, calling it a kinetic ordinate of negative vortices, which was very undefinitive. It was a subject of wonder and much speculation, but no one took serious notice of them until one night a federal Agent arrested one man for indecency. It was a valid charge. One disadvantage of this method of travel was that, while a body could travel instantaneously to any chosen spot, it arrived without clothes. The arrested man disappeared from his jail cell, and the next morning the Agent was found strangled to death in his bed. This set off a campaign against Konvs. One base act led to another, until the original reason for noticing them at all was lost. Normal men no longer thought of them as human. Mrs. Jamieson told how Stinson, knowing he had made too many cylinders and given them unwisely, left Earth for Alpha Centaurus. He went alone, not knowing if he could go so far, or what he would find when he arrived. But he did arrive, and it was what he had sought. He returned for the others. They gathered one night in a dirty, broken-down farmhouse in Missouri—and disappeared in a body, leaving the Agents standing helplessly on Earth, shaking their fists at the sky. "You have asked many times," Mrs. Jamieson said, "how your father died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin? I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him." "I don't blame you, mother," Earl said simply. "But we are freaks. Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on the walls in rest rooms." "Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if you couldn't do them?" Just like that, it was over. That is, the first shock was over. Mrs. Jamieson watched Earl leave the house, walking slowly along the river, a boy with a man's problems. His friends called to him from the river, but he chose not to hear. He wanted to be alone. He needed to think, to feel the newness of the thing. Perhaps he would cross the river and enter the deep forest there. When the initial shock wore off he might experiment with his new power. He would not travel far, in these first attempts. Probably he would stay within walking distance of his clothes, because he still lacked the tricks others had learned. It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the river to cool herself. For the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl's confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them. They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching for some clue to their identity. It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as one of the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson took his group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns peculiar to themselves. These could be identified, if caught on their detectors, and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with the others. Had she returned to Earth? The question did not trouble them long. They had more serious problems. Stinson had selected only the best of the Konvs when he left Earth, leaving all those with criminal tendencies behind. They could have followed if they chose—what could stop them? But it was more lucrative to stay. On Earth they could rob, loot, even murder—without fear of the law. Earl changed. Even before the summer was over, he matured. The childish antics of his friends began to bore him. "Be careful, Earl," his mother would say. "Remember who you are. Play with them sometimes, even if you don't like it. You have a long way to go before you will be ready." During the long winter evenings, after they had watched their favorite video programs, they would sit by the fireplace. "Tell me about the great ones," he would say, and she would repeat all the things she remembered about Stinson and Benjamin and Straus. She never tired of discussing them. She would tell about Benjamin's wife, Lisa, and try to describe the horror in Lisa's young mind when the news went out that E. Mason Jamieson had been killed. She wanted him to learn as much as possible about his father's death, knowing that soon the Agents would be after Earl. They were so clever, so persistent. She wanted him to be ready, not only in ways of avoiding their traps ... but ready with a heart full of hate. Sometimes when she talked about her husband, Mrs. Jamieson wanted to stand up and scream at her son, "Hate, hate! Hate! You must learn to hate!" But she clenched her hands over her knitting, knowing that he would learn it faster if she avoided the word. The winter passed, and the next summer, and two more summers. Earl was ready for college. They had successfully kept their secret. They had been vigilant in every detail. Earl referred to the "damn Agents" now with a curl of his lip. They had been successful in contacting other Konvs, and sometimes visited them at a remote rendezvous. "When you have finished college," Mrs. Jamieson told her son, "we will go to Centaurus." "Why not now?" "Because when you get there they will need men who can contribute to the development of the planet. Stinson is a physicist, Benjamin a metallurgist, Straus a doctor. But Straus is an old man by this time. A young doctor will be needed. Study hard, Earl. Learn all you can. Even the great ones get sick." She did not mention her secret hope, that before they left Earth he would have fully avenged his father's death. He was clever and intelligent. He could kill many Agents. So she exhumed the money she had hidden more than ten years before. The house beside the Little Wolf river was sold. They found a modest bungalow within walking distance of the University's medical school. Mrs. Jamieson furnished it carefully but, oddly, rather lavishly. This was her husband's money she was spending now. It needed to last only a few years. Then they would leave Earth forever. A room was built on the east side of the bungalow, with its own private entrance. This was Earl's room. Ostensibly the private entrance was for convenience due to the irregular hours of college students. It was also convenient for coming home late at night after Agent hunting. Mrs. Jamieson was becoming obvious. Excitement brought color to her cheeks when she thought of Earl facing one of them—a lean, cunning jaguar facing a fat, lazy bear. It was her notion that federal Agents were evil creatures, tools of a decadent, bloodthirsty society, living off the fat of the land. She painted the room herself, in soft, pastel colors. When it was finished she showed Earl regally into the room, making a big joke of it. "Here you can study and relax, and have those bull sessions students are always having," she said. "There will be no friends," he answered, "not here. No Konvs will be at the university." "Why not? Stinson selected only educated, intelligent people. When one dies the cylinder is taken and adjusted to a new thought pattern—usually a person from the same family. I would say it is very likely that Konvs will be found here." He shook his head. "No. They knew we were coming, and no one said a word about others being here. I'm afraid we are alone." "Well, I think not," she said firmly. "Anyway, the room will be comfortable." He shook his head again. "Why can't I be in the house with you? There are two bedrooms." She said quickly, "You can if you wish. I just thought you'd like being alone, at your age. Most boys do." "I'm not like most boys, mother. The Konvs saw to that. Sometimes I'm sorry. Back in high school I used to wish I was like the others. Do you remember Lorane Peters?" His mother nodded. "Well, when we were seniors last year she liked me quite a lot. She didn't say so, but I knew it. She would sit across the aisle from me, and sometimes when I saw how her hair fell over her face when she read, I wanted to lean over and whisper to her, 'Hey, Lorrie—' just as if I was human—'can I take you to the basketball game?'" Mrs. Jamieson turned to leave the room, but he stopped her. "You understand what I'm saying, don't you?" "No, I don't!" she said sharply. "You're old enough to face realities. You are a Konv. You always will be a Konv. Have you forgotten your own father? " She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was crying just beyond the wall. Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway. In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but she soon grew aware of her mistake. One day he disappeared. Mrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed. The second day after his disappearance she found a small item. A Konv had raided the Agent's office in Stockholm, killing three, and getting killed himself. Mrs. Jamieson dropped the paper immediately and went to Stockholm. She did not consider the risk. In Stockholm she found clothes and made discreet inquiries. The slain man had been a Finnish Konv, one of those left behind by Stinson as an undesirable. His wife had been killed by the Agents the week before. He had gone completely insane and made the raid singlehanded. Mrs. Jamieson read the account of crimes committed by the man and his wife, and determined to prevent Earl from making the mistake of taking on more than he could handle. When she arrived at her own home, Earl was in his room. "Where have you been?" she asked petulantly. "Oh, here and there." "I thought you were involved in that fight in Stockholm." He shook his head. She stood in the doorway and watched him leaning over his desk, attempting to write something on a sheet of paper. She was proud of his profile, tow-headed as a boy, handsome in a masculine way. He cracked his knuckles nervously. "What did you do?" she asked. Suddenly he flung the pencil down, jumped from his chair and paced the floor. "I talked to an Agent last night," he said. "Where?" "Bangkok." Mrs. Jamieson had to sit down. Finally she was able to ask, "How did it happen?" "I broke into the office there to get at the records. He caught me." "What were you looking for?" "I wanted to learn the names of the men who killed Father." He said the word strangely. He was unaccustomed to it. "Did you find them?" He pointed to the paper on his desk. Mrs. Jamieson, trembling, picked it up and read the names. Seeing them there, written like any other names would be written, made her furious. How could they? How could the names of murderers look like ordinary names? When she thought them in her mind, they even sounded like ordinary names—and they shouldn't! She had always thought that those names, if she ever saw them, would be filthy, unholy scratches on paper, evil sounds, like the rustle of bedclothes to a jealous lover listening at a keyhole. "Tom Palieu" didn't sound evil; neither did "Al Jonson." She was shaken by this more than she would permit Earl to see. "Why did you want the names?" "I don't know," he said. "Curiosity, maybe, or a subconscious desire for revenge. I just wanted to see them." "Tell me what happened! If an Agent saw you ... well, either he killed you or you killed him. But you're here alive." "I didn't kill him. That's what seems so strange. And he didn't try to kill me. We didn't even fight. He didn't ask why I broke in without breaking the lock or even a window. He seemed to know. He did ask what I was doing there, and who I was. I told him, and ... he helped me get the names. He asked where I lived. 'None of your damn business,' I told him. Then he said he didn't blame me for not telling, that Konvs must fear Agents, and hate them. Then he said, 'Do you know why we kill Konvs? We kill them because there is no prison cell in the world that will hold a Konv. When they break the law, we have no choice. It is a terrible thing, but must be done. We don't want your secret; we only want law and order. There is room enough in the world for both of us.'" Mrs. Jamieson was furious. "And you believed him?" "I don't know. I just know what he said—and that he let me go without trying to shoot me." Mrs. Jamieson stopped on her way out of the room and laid a hand on his arm. "Your father would have been proud of you," she said. "Soon you will learn the truth about the Agents." Beyond the closed door, out of sight of her son, Mrs. Jamieson gave rein to the excitement that ran through her. He had wanted the names! He didn't know why—not yet—but he would. "He'll do it yet!" she whispered to the flowered wallpaper. She didn't care that no one heard her. She didn't know where the men were now, those who had killed her husband. They could be anywhere. Agents moved from post to post; in ten years they might be scattered all over Earth. In the killing of Konvs, some cylinders might even be taken by Agents—and used by them, for the power and freedom the cylinders gave must be coveted even by them. And they were in the best position to gain them. She was consumed by fear that one or more of the men on Earl's list might have acquired a cylinder and were now Konvs themselves. Two weeks later she read a news item saying that Tom Palieu had been killed by a Konv. The assassin's identity was unknown, but agents were working on the case. She knew. She had found a gun in Earl's desk. She took the paper into Earl's room. "Did you do this?" He turned away from her. "It doesn't matter whether I did or not. They will suspect me. His name was on the list." "They will," she agreed. "It doesn't matter who the Konv is, now that an Agent has been killed. The one in Bangkok will tell them about you and the list of names, and it's all they need." "Well, what else can he do?" Earl asked. "After all, he is an Agent. If one of them is killed, he will have to tell what he knows." "You're defending him? Why?" she cried. "Tell me why!" He removed her hand from his arm. Her nails were digging into his flesh. "I don't know why. Mother, I'm sorry, but Agents are just people to me. I can't hate them the way you do." Mrs. Jamieson's face colored, then drained white. Suddenly, with a wide, furious sweep of her hand, she slapped his face. So much strength and rage was in her arm that the blow almost sent him spinning. They faced each other, she breathing hard from the exertion, Earl stunned immobile—not by the blow, but from the knowledge that she could hate so suddenly, viciously. She controlled herself. "We must find a way to leave here," she said, calmly. "They won't find us." "Oh, yes they will," she said. "Don't underestimate them. Agents are picked from the most intelligent people on Earth. It will be a small job for them. Don't forget they know who you are. Even if you hadn't been so stupid as to tell them, they'd know. They knew my pattern from the time your father was alive. They got yours when we were together years ago, teasing them. They linked your pattern with mine. They know that your father and I had a son. Your birth was recorded. The only difficult aspect of their job now is to find where you live, and it won't be impossible. They will drive their cars through every city on Earth with those new detectors, until they pick up your pattern or mine. I'm afraid it's time to leave Earth." Earl sat down suddenly, "It's just as well. I thought maybe some day I might hate them too, or learn to like them. But I can do neither, so I am halfway between, and no man can live this way." She did not answer him. Finally he said, "It doesn't make sense to you, does it?" "No, it doesn't. This is not the time for such discussions, anyway. The Agents have their machines working at top speed, while we sit here and talk." Suddenly they were not alone. No sound was generated by the man's coming. One instant they were talking alone, the next he was here. Earl saw him first. He was a middle-aged man whose hair was completely white. He stood near the desk, easily, as if standing there were the most natural way to relax. He was entirely nude ... but it seemed natural and right. Then Mrs. Jamieson saw him. "Benjamin!" she cried. "I knew someone would come." He smiled. "This is your son?" "Yes," she said. "We are ready." "I remember when you were born," he said, and smiled in reminiscence. "Your father was afraid you would be twins." Earl said, "Why was my father killed?" "By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders. Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables with cylinders have never reached Centaurus." Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside. "We'd better hurry," Mrs. Jamieson said. Benjamin held out his hands. They took them, to increase the power of the cylinders. As the Agents pounded on the door, Mrs. Jamieson flicked one thought of hatred at them, but of course they did not hear her. Benjamin's hands gripped tightly. Mrs. Jamieson slowly opened her eyes.... She no longer felt the hands. She was still in the room! Benjamin and her son were gone. Her outstretched hands touched nothing. Her power was gone! The Agents stepped into the room over the broken door. She stared at them, then ran to Earl's desk, fumbling for the gun. The Agents' guns rattled. Love, Benjamin said, the greatest of these is love. Or did someone else say that? Someone, somewhere, perhaps in another time, in some misty, forgotten chip of time long gone, in another frame of reference perhaps.... Mrs. Jamieson could not remember, before she died.

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The Gravity Business By JAMES E. GUNN Illustrated by ASHMAN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he—and how could anyone find out what those terms might be? The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun. It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either. As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that. A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright. Then all was quiet—outside. Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. "Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!" Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed. "Now, Grampa," Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. "That landing was pretty rough, Junior." Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. "I know it, Fred," he said, frowning. "This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth." Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, "Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said, 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'" "That's enough, Four," Junior interrupted. "Never mind what I said." Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened. "And, Four," Reba said automatically, "don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful." Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy. "But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'" Four complained. "Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'" "That's different," Reba said. Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. "See!" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. "That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again." "Stop picking on Junior," Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. "I'm sure he did the best he could." "Anybody talks about gravitational pull," Grampa said, snorting, "deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago." "Go back to your games, Grampa," Fred said impatiently. "We've got work to do." Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. "You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?" "It belongs to all of us," Four said shrilly. "You gave us all a sixth share." "That's right, Four," Grampa muttered, "so I did. But whose money bought it?" "You bought it, Grampa," Fred said. "That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?" "You, Grampa," Fred said. "You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?" "And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills," Joyce said bitterly, "and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!" "Well, now," Grampa protested, "I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone." "You're never going to die, Grampa," Joyce said harshly. "Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company." "Well, now," said Grampa, blinking, "how'd you find out about that? Well, now!" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. "I'll get you this time!" Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. "You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?" Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. "I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner." "That's simple," Four said without hesitation. "The winning strategy is to—" "Don't be a kibitzer!" Grampa snapped. "When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!" He snorted indignantly. Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern. "Look!" he said suddenly. "This planet not only has flora—it has fauna." He rushed to the air lock. "Four!" Reba called out warningly. "It's all right, Reba," Four assured her. "The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum." "What about macro-organisms—" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. "That boy!" she said to Junior. "Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy." But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. "Well, what's all the mystery?" "No use bothering the others yet," Junior said, his face puzzled. "You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit." "Quit!" "That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver—it won't budge!" The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, "Fweep? Fweep?" Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. "Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!" "You mean Fweep?" Four asked in astonishment. "I mean that thing, whatever you call it." Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. "Get it out!" Four's eyes widened farther. "But Fweep's my friend." "Nonsense!" Joyce said sharply. "Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a—a blob!" "Fweep?" queried the raspberry lips. "Fweep?" "If it's Four's friend," Reba said firmly, "it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room." Joyce stood up indignantly. "Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!" She glared malignantly at Grampa. "If you'd rather have that blob than me—well!" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it. "Fweep?" asked the blob. "Sure," Four said. "Go ahead, fweep—I mean sweep." Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile. Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. "Good for you, Reba!" he said admiringly. "For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve." "Why, thanks, Grampa," Reba said, surprised. "I like you, gal. Never forget it." "I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!" "You bet he would!" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, "Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow." Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. "Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too." Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. "And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather." Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. "What you doing, Four?" "Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings," Four said absently. "The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle." "That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?" "You get the other one figured out?" "It was easy," Grampa said breezily, "once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each—" "That's right," Four agreed. "I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts." Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it. Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. "Thought you'd say that," he said, picking out the box. "Help yourself." With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. "Ahhh!" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away. "What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?" Four asked. "Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit—" "Did you ever work on Niccolò Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?" "Yep," Grampa said. "Too easy." Four thought a moment. "There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries—" "Sounds good, boy," Grampa said eagerly. "Whip it up for me." "Okay, Grampa." Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet. Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked. Its gelatinous form jiggled. "Hic!" it said. As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. "Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on." The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts. "Any luck?" Reba asked brightly. "Do we look it?" Junior grumbled. "Where's Joyce?" asked Fred. "Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!" The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question: "Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?" "No," Fred said slowly, "and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it." "Then what makes this planet so heavy?" Reba asked. Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. "Your guess is as good as anybody's." "Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock," Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. "This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!" She glared venomously at Grampa. "We've still got Fweepland," Four said solemnly. "Fweepland?" Reba repeated. "This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium." "A good thing, too," Junior said glumly, "because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here—involuntary colonists." Joyce spun on him. "You're joking!" she screeched. "I wish I were," Junior said. "But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize." "It's these '23 models," Grampa put in disgustedly. "They never were any good." The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either. Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, "If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth," he amended. "You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it." "That's just supposition," Junior said stubbornly. "The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D." "Maybe the polarizer is broken," Fred suggested. Grampa snorted. "Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to." "Then it goes deeper," Junior insisted. "It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?" Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. "Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth—" "Let's not get up on any pulpits," Fred growled. "Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?" Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. "Well," he said, "at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?" The smile faded. "No, I guess you don't." He cleared his throat professorially. "Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses." The faces were still blank and unillumined. "Gravity is similar to light," he pressed on. "In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted." The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. "That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do." "Now wait a minute!" Grampa protested. "That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me—I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'" "The only thing you ever did was the polarizer," Joyce snapped. "And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible." Grampa squinted at her sagely. "That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it." "But you don't really know why it works," Junior persisted. "Well, no," Grampa admitted. "Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it." "Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?" Joyce demanded ironically. "Well, now," Grampa said in bafflement, "it rightly should, you know." "We're stuck," Reba said softly. "We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—" "Which," Joyce interrupted, "might get picked up in a few centuries." "And make the best of what we've got," Reba went on, unheeding. "If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver—even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want." "You know the law: one child per couple," Joyce reminded her frigidly. "You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me." Junior frowned at his wife. "I believe you're actually glad it happened." "I could think of worse things," Reba said. "I like your spunk, Reb," Grampa muttered. "Speaking of children," Junior said, "where's Four?" "Here." Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep. "Fweep?" it queried hopefully. "Not now," said Four. "Where've you been?" Reba asked anxiously. "What've you been doing?" "I've been all over Fweepland," Four said wearily, "trying to locate its center of gravity." "Well?" Fred prompted. "It shifts." "That's impossible," said Junior. "Not for Fweep," Four replied. "What do you mean by that?" Joyce suspiciously asked. "It shifted," Four explained patiently, "because Fweep kept following me." "Fweep?" Junior repeated stupidly. "Fweep?" Fweep said eagerly. "He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave." The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. "I got it figured out, Four," he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. "A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—" "Not now, Grampa," Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin. The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too. "Rat poison?" Four asked. Joyce started guiltily. "How did you know?" "There's no use trying to poison Fweep," Four said calmly. "He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all." "What level does he use?" Junior wanted to know. "Point the scintillation counter at him." Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped. Junior looked at the counter's dial. "He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?" "He uses ordinary matter," Four said. "He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago." "He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?" Junior said unbelievingly. Four nodded. "And that 'skin' of his—whatever it is he uses for skin—is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead." Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. "Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass." "And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us." Four giggled at the thought. Joyce glared at him furiously. "Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!" "I don't figure it's a whim," Grampa said. "Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move." "I don't care why that thing does it," Joyce said icily. "I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it." "How?" asked Four. "Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy." "Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?" "We'd have a long wait," Four observed. "Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet." "Well?" "Probably he's immortal." "And he doesn't reproduce?" Reba asked sympathetically. "Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures." "But he must have some way of reproduction," Reba argued. "An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now." "Maybe he developed," Four offered. "It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed." "He must have been here a long, long time," Fred said. "Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now." Reba looked at Fweep kindly. "We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway." "I thank him for nothing," Joyce snapped. "He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !" Fred turned impatiently on his wife. "Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!" Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. "Fred!" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room. Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. "Well, boy," he said to Fred, "I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you." Fred stood up apologetically. "I'd better go calm her down," he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce. "Give her one for me!" Grampa called. Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music. "Makes you think, doesn't it?" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly. "Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result." "What I can't understand," Junior said thoughtfully, "is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed—long enough to keep us from being squashed—and then quit." "Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from," Four explained. "All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped." "Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?" Grampa said. "Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop." "He's no more improbable than people," said Four. "Less than some I've known," Grampa conceded. "If he can eat anything," Reba said, "why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?" "He wants to be helpful," Four replied without hesitation, "and he's lonely. After all," he added wistfully, "he's never had any friends." "How do you know all these things?" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. "Can you talk to it?" Behind her, Fred said, "Now, Joyce, you promised—" "But this is important," Joyce cut him off eagerly. "Can you? Talk to it, I mean?" "Some," Four admitted. "Have you asked it to let us go?" "Yes." "Well? What did it say?" "He said he didn't want his friend to leave him." At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips. "Fwiend," it said. "Well, now," Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, "that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep." In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, "That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but—" "Joyce!" Reba cried, horrified. "Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—" "Never mind, Reba," Four said evenly. "It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution." "Fwiend," said Fweep gently. The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone. "Junior!" said Joyce, shocked. Junior swung around impatiently. "Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work." "I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—" "Mother!" Junior warned. "We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!" "Well!" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair. Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. "Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet." Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. "It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on." "I take it all back," said Grampa. "That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him. "Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave—if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do. "That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points." "That may be," Junior said stubbornly, "but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing." "He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep," Reba said, her voice soft. "No, here they come now."

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The Princess and the Physicist By EVELYN E. SMITH Illustrated by KOSSIN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Elected a god, Zen the Omnipotent longed for supernatural powers—for he was also Zen the All-Put-Upon, a galactic sucker! Zen the Terrible lay quiescent in the secret retreat which housed his corporeal being, all the aspects of his personality wallowing in the luxury of a day off. How glad he was that he'd had the forethought to stipulate a weekly holiday for himself when first this godhood had been thrust upon him, hundreds of centuries before. He'd accepted the perquisites of divinity with pleasure then. It was some little time before he discovered its drawbacks, and by then it was too late; he had become the established church. All the aspects of his personality rested ... save one, that is. And that one, stretching out an impalpable tendril of curiosity, brought back to his total consciousness the news that a spaceship from Earth had arrived when no ship from Earth was due. So what? the total consciousness asked lazily of itself. Probably they have a large out-of-season order for hajench. My hajench going to provide salad bowls for barbarians! When, twenty years previously, the Earthmen had come back to their colony on Uxen after a lapse of thousands of years, Zen had been hopeful that they would take some of the Divine Work off his hands. After all, since it was they who had originally established the colony, it should be their responsibility. But it seemed that all humans, not merely the Uxenach, were irresponsible. The Earthmen were interested only in trade and tribute. They even refused to believe in the existence of Zen, an attitude which he found extremely irritating to his ego. True, Uxen prospered commercially to a mild extent after their return, for the local ceramics that had been developed in the long interval found wide acceptance throughout the Galaxy, particularly the low bowls which had hitherto been used only for burning incense before Zen the Formidable. Now every two-bit planet offered hajench in its gift shops. Culturally, though, Uxen had degenerated under the new Earth administration. No more criminals were thrown to the skwitch. Xwoosh lost its interest when new laws prohibited the ancient custom of executing the losing side after each game. There was no tourist trade, for the planet was too far from the rest of the Galaxy. The commercial spaceships came only once every three months and left the same day. The two destroyers that "guarded" the planet arrived at rare intervals for fueling or repairs, but the crew never had anything to do with the Uxenach. Local ordinance forbade the maidens of Uxen to speak to the outlanders, and the outlanders were not interested in any of the other native products. But the last commercial spaceship had departed less than three weeks before on its regular run, and this was not one of the guard ships. Zen reluctantly conceded to himself that he would have to investigate this situation further, if he wanted to retain his reputation for omniscience. Sometimes, in an occasional moment of self-doubt, he wondered if he weren't too much of a perfectionist, but then he rejected the thought as self-sacrilege. Zen dutifully intensified the beam of awareness and returned it to the audience chamber where the two strange Earthmen who had come on the ship were being ushered into the presence of the king by none other than Guj, the venerable prime minister himself. "Gentlemen," Guj beamed, his long white beard vibrating in an excess of hospitality, "His Gracious Majesty will be delighted to receive you at once." And crossing his wrists in the secular xa, he led the way to where Uxlu the Fifteenth was seated in full regalia upon his imposing golden, gem-encrusted throne. Uxlu himself, Zen admitted grudgingly, was an imposing sight to anyone who didn't know the old yio. The years—for he was a scant decade younger than Guj—had merely lent dignity to his handsome features, and he was still tall and upright. "Welcome, Earthlings, to Uxen," King Uxlu said in the sonorous tones of the practiced public speaker. "If there is aught we can do to advance your comfort whilst you sojourn on our little planet, you have but to speak." He did not, Zen noted with approval, rashly promise that requests would necessarily be granted. Which was fine, because the god well knew who the carrier out of requests would be—Zen the Almighty, the All-Powerful, the All-Put-Upon.... "Thank you, Your Majesty," the older of the two scientists said. "We merely seek a retired spot in which to conduct our researches." "Researches, eh?" the king repeated with warm interest. "Are you perhaps scientists?" "Yes, Your Majesty." Every one of Zen's perceptors quivered expectantly. Earth science was banned on Uxen, with the result that its acquisition had become the golden dream of every Uxena, including, of course, their god. The older scientist gave a stiff bow. "I am an anthropologist. My name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter Hammond—" he indicated the tall young man with him—"is a physicist." The king and the prime minister conferred together in whispers. Zen wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of proven fact. "Curious researches," the king said, emerging from the conference, "that require both physics and anthropology." "Yes," said Kendrick. "They are rather involved at that." Peter Hammond shuffled his feet. "Perhaps some of our technicians might be of assistance to you," the king suggested. "They may not have your science, but they are very adept with their hands...." "Our researches are rather limited in scope," Kendrick assured him. "We can do everything needful quite adequately ourselves. All we need is a place in which to do it." "You shall have our own second-best palace," the king said graciously. "It has both hot and cold water laid on, as well as central heating." "We've brought along our own collapsible laboratory-dwelling," Kendrick explained. "We just want a spot to set it up." Uxlu sighed. "The royal parks are at your disposal. You will undoubtedly require servants?" "We have a robot, thanks." "A robot is a mechanical man who does all our housework," Hammond, more courteous than his superior, explained. Zen wondered how he could ever have felt a moment's uneasiness concerning these wonderful strangers. "Zen will be interested to hear of this," the prime minister said cannily. He and the king nodded at one another. " Who did you say?" Kendrick asked eagerly. "Zen the Terrible," the king repeated, "Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the Encyclopedic. Surely you have heard of him?" he asked in some surprise. "He's Uxen's own particular, personal and private god, exclusive to our planet." "Yes, yes, of course I've heard about him," Kendrick said, trembling with hardly repressed excitement. What a correct attitude! Zen thought. One rarely finds such religious respect among foreigners. "In fact, I've heard a great deal about him and I should like to know even more!" Kendrick spoke almost reverently. "He is an extremely interesting divinity," the king replied complacently. "And if your robot cannot teleport or requires a hand with the heavy work, do not hesitate to call on Zen the Accommodating. We'll detail a priest to summon—" "The robot manages very well all by itself, thank you," Kendrick said quickly. In his hideaway, the material body of Zen breathed a vast multiple sigh of relief. He was getting to like these Earthmen more and more by the minute. "Might I inquire," the king asked, "into the nature of your researches?" "An investigation of the prevalent nuclear ritual beliefs on Uxen in relation to the over-all matrix of social culture, and we really must get along and see to the unloading of the ship. Good-by, Your Majesty ... Your Excellency." And Kendrick dragged his protesting aide off. "If only," said the king, "I were still an absolute monarch, I would teach these Earthlings some manners." His face grew wistful. "Well I remember how my father would have those who crossed him torn apart by wild skwitch." "If you did have the Earthlings torn apart by wild skwitch, Sire," Guj pointed out, "then you would certainly never be able to obtain any information from them." Uxlu sighed. "I would merely have them torn apart a little—just enough so that they would answer a few civil questions." He sighed again. "And, supposing they did happen to—er—pass on, in the process, think of the tremendous lift to my ego. But nobody thinks of the king's ego any more these days." No, things were not what they had been since the time the planet had been retrieved by the Earthlings. They had not communicated with Uxen for so many hundreds of years, they had explained, because, after a more than ordinarily disastrous war, they had lost the secret of space travel for centuries. Now, wanting to make amends for those long years of neglect, they immediately provided that the Earth language and the Earth income tax become mandatory upon Uxen. The language was taught by recordings. Since the Uxenach were a highly intelligent people, they had all learned it quickly and forgotten most of their native tongue except for a few untranslatable concepts. "Must be a new secret atomic weapon they're working on," Uxlu decided. "Why else should they come to such a remote corner of the Galaxy? And you will recall that the older one—Kendrick—said something about nuclear beliefs. If only we could discover what it is, secure it for ourselves, perhaps we could defeat the Earthmen, drive them away—" he sighed for the third time that morning—"and rule the planet ourselves." Just then the crown princess Iximi entered the throne room. Iximi really lived up to her title of Most Fair and Exalted, for centuries of selective breeding under which the kings of Uxen had seized the loveliest women of the planet for their wives had resulted in an outstanding pulchritude. Her hair was as golden as the ripe fruit that bent the boughs of the iolo tree, and her eyes were bluer than the uriz stones on the belt girdling her slender waist. Reproductions of the famous portrait of her which hung in the great hall of the palace were very popular on calendars. "My father grieves," she observed, making the secular xa. "Pray tell your unworthy daughter what sorrow racks your noble bosom." "Uxen is a backwash," her father mourned. "A planet forgotten, while the rest of the Galaxy goes by. Our ego has reached its nadir." "Why did you let yourself be conquered?" the princess retorted scornfully. "Ah, had I been old enough to speak then, matters would be very different today!" Although she seemed too beautiful to be endowed with brains, Iximi had been graduated from the Royal University with high honors. Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first. " Let ourselves be conquered!" Her father's voice rose to a squeak. " Let ourselves! Nobody asked us—we were conquered." "True, but we could at least have essayed our strength against the conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to the last man!" "A woman is always ready to fight to the last man," Guj commented. "Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a princess of the blood, a—a woman!" "We are all equal before Zen," Guj said sententiously, making the high xa. "Praise Zen," Uxlu and Iximi chanted perfunctorily, bowing low. Iximi, still angry, ordered Guj—who was also high priest—to start services. Kindling the incense in the hajen, he began the chant. Of course it was his holiday, but Zen couldn't resist the appeal of the incense. Besides he was there anyway, so it was really no trouble, no trouble , he thought, greedily sniffing the delicious aroma, at all . He materialized a head with seven nostrils so that he was able to inhale the incense in one delectable gulp. Then, "No prayers answered on Thursday," he said, and disappeared. That would show them! "Drat Zen and his days off!" The princess was in a fury. "Very well, we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?" "Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them when you came in?" "No, Respected Father," she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. "I must have just missed them. What are they like?" He told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use before his daughter. "And these squuch," he concluded, "are undoubtedly working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen." "Moolai Uxen!" the princess shouted, standing up. "My friends, must we continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the...." "Anyone," said Guj, "can make a speech." The princess sat on the steps of the throne and pondered. "Obviously we must introduce a spy into their household to learn their science and turn it to our advantage." "They are very careful, those Earthlings," Guj informed her superciliously. "It is obvious that they do not intend to let any of us come near them." The princess gave a knowing smile. "But they undoubtedly will need at least one menial to care for their dwelling. I shall be that menial. I, Iximi, will so demean myself for the sake of my planet! Moolai Uxen!" "You cannot do it, Iximi," her father said, distressed. "You must not defile yourself so. I will not hear of it!" "And besides," Guj interposed, "they will need no servants. All their housework is to be done by their robot—a mechanical man that performs all menial duties. And you, Your Royal Highness, could not plausibly disguise yourself as a machine." "No-o-o-o, I expect not." The princess hugged the rosy knees revealed by her brief tunic and thought aloud, "But ... just ... supposing ... something ... went wrong with the robot.... They do not possess another?" "They referred only to one, Highness," Guj replied reluctantly. "But they may have the parts with which to construct another." "Nonetheless, it is well worth the attempt," the princess declared. "You will cast a spell on the robot, Guj, so that it stops." He sighed. "Very well, Your Highness; I suppose I could manage that!" Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could be heard bellowing in the anteroom, "Has any one of you squuch seen my pliers?" "There is no need for worry, Venerated Ancestor," the princess assured the monarch. "All-Helpful Zen will aid me with my tasks." Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself. Another aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised. Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays. "You certainly fixed us up fine!" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to the professor. "You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever.... And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be just what you needed." "Yes, and the first to catch on to why we're here. We mustn't antagonize the natives; these closed groups are so apt to resent any investigation into their mythos." "If it's all mythical, why do you need a scientist then?" "A physical scientist, you mean," Kendrick said austerely. "For anthropology is a science, too, you know." Peter snorted. "Some Earthmen claim actually to have seen these alleged manifestations," Kendrick went on to explain, "in which case there must be some kind of mechanical trickery involved—which is where you come in. Of course I would have preferred an engineer to help me, but you were all I could get from the government." "And you wouldn't have got me either, if the Minister of Science didn't have it in for me!" Peter said irately. "I'm far too good for this piddling little job, and you know it. If it weren't for envy in high places—" "Better watch out," the professor warned, "or the Minister might decide you're too good for science altogether, and you'll be switched to a position more in keeping with your talents—say, as a Refuse Removal Agent." And what is wrong with the honored art of Refuse Removal? Zen wondered. There were a lot of mystifying things about these Earthmen. The scientists' quaint little edifice was finally set up, and the spaceship took its departure. It was only then that the Earthmen discovered that something they called cigarettes couldn't be found in the welter of packages, and that the robot wouldn't cook dinner or, in fact, do anything. Good old Guj , Zen thought. "I can't figure out what's gone wrong," Peter complained, as he finished putting the mechanical man together again. "Everything seems to be all right, and yet the damned thing won't function." "Looks as if we'll have to do the housework ourselves, confound it!" "Uh-uh," Peter said. "You can, but not me. The Earth government put me under your orders so far as this project is concerned, sir, but I'm not supposed to do anything degrading, sir, and menial work is classified as just that, sir, so—" "All right, all right !" Kendrick said. "Though it seems to me if I'm willing to do it, you should have no objection." "It's your project, sir. I gathered from the king, though," Peter added more helpfully, "that some of the natives still do menial labor themselves." "How disgusting that there should still be a planet so backward that human beings should be forced to do humiliating tasks," Kendrick said. You don't know the half of it, either , Zen thought, shocked all the way back to his physical being. It had never occurred to him that the functions of gods on other planets might be different than on Uxen ... unless the Earthlings failed to pay reverence to their own gods, which seemed unlikely in view of the respectful way with which Professor Kendrick had greeted the mention of Zen's Awe-Inspiring Name. Then Refuse Removal was not necessarily a divine prerogative. Those first colonists were very clever , Zen thought bitterly, sweet-talking me into becoming a god and doing all their dirty work. I was happy here as the Only Inhabitant; why did I ever let those interlopers involve me in Theolatry? But I can't quit now. The Uxenach need Me ... and I need incense; I'm fettered by my own weakness. Still, I have the glimmerings of an idea.... "Oh, how much could a half-witted menial find out?" Peter demanded. "Remember, it's either a native servant, sir, or you do the housework yourself." "All right," Kendrick agreed gloomily. "We'll try one of the natives." So the next day, still attended by the Unseen Presence of Zen, they sought audience with the prime minister. "Welcome, Earthmen, to the humble apartments of His Majesty's most unimportant subject," Guj greeted them, making a very small xa as he led them into the largest reception room. Kendrick absently ran his finger over the undercarving of a small gold table. "Look, no dust," he whispered. "Must have excellent help here." Zen couldn't help preening just a bit. At least he did his work well; no one could gainsay that. "Your desire," Guj went on, apparently anxious to get to the point, "is my command. Would you like a rojh of dancing girls to perform before you or—?" "The king said something yesterday about servants being available," Kendrick interrupted. "And our robot seems to have broken down. Could you tell us where we could get someone to do our housework?" An expression of vivid pleasure illuminated the prime minister's venerable countenance. "By fortunate chance, gentlemen, a small lot of maids is to be auctioned off at a village very near the Imperial City tomorrow. I should be delighted to escort you there personally." "Auctioned?" Kendrick repeated. "You mean they sell servants here?" Guj raised his snowy eyebrows. "Sold? Certainly not; they are leased for two years apiece. After all, if you have no lease, what guarantee do you have that your servants will stay after you have trained them? None whatsoever." When the two scientists had gone, Iximi emerged from behind a bright-colored tapestry depicting Zen in seven hundred and fifty-three of his Attributes. "The younger one is not at all bad-looking," she commented, patting her hair into place. "I do like big blond men. Perhaps my task will not be as unpleasant as I fancied." Guj stroked his beard. "How do you know the Earthlings will select you , Your Highness? Many other maids will be auctioned off at the same time." The princess stiffened angrily. "They'll pick me or they'll never leave Uxen alive and you, Your Excellency, would not outlive them." Although it meant he had to overwork the other aspects of his multiple personality, Zen kept one free so that the next day he could join the Earthmen—in spirit, that was—on their excursion in search of a menial. "If, as an anthropologist, you are interested in local folkways, Professor," Guj remarked graciously, as he and the scientists piled into a scarlet, boat-shaped vehicle, "you will find much to attract your attention in this quaint little planet of ours." "Are the eyes painted on front of the car to ward off demons?" Kendrick asked. "Car? Oh, you mean the yio!" Guj patted the forepart of the vehicle. It purred and fluttered long eyelashes. "We breed an especially bouncy strain with seats; they're so much more comfortable, you know." "You mean this is a live animal?" Guj nodded apologetically. "Of course it does not go very fast. Now if we had the atomic power drive, such as your spaceships have—" "You'd shoot right off into space," Hammond assured him. "Speed," said Kendrick, "is the curse of modern civilization. Be glad you still retain some of the old-fashioned graces here on Uxen. You see," he whispered to his assistant, "a clear case of magico-religious culture-freezing, resulting in a static society unable to advance itself, comes of its implicit reliance upon the powers of an omnipotent deity." Zen took some time to figure this out. But that's right! he concluded, in surprise. "I thought your god teleported things?" Peter asked Guj. "How come he doesn't teleport you around, if you're in such a hurry to go places?" Kendrick glared at him. "Please remember that I'm the anthropologist," he hissed. "You have got to know how to describe the Transcendental Personality with the proper respect." "We don't have Zen teleport animate objects," the prime minister explained affably. "Or even inanimate ones if they are fragile. For He tends to lose His Temper sometimes when He feels that He is overworked—" Feels, indeed! Zen said to himself—"and throws things about. We cannot reprove Him for His misbehavior. After all, a god is a god." "The apparent irreverence," Kendrick explained in an undertone, "undoubtedly signifies that he is dealing with ancillary or, perhaps, peripheral religious beliefs. I must make a note of them." He did so. By the time the royal yio had arrived at the village where the planetary auctions for domestics were held, the maids were already arranged in a row on the platform. Most were depressingly plain creatures and dressed in thick sacklike tunics. Among them, the graceful form of Iximi was conspicuous, clad in a garment similar in cut but fashioned of translucent gauze almost as blue as her eyes. Peter straightened his tie and assumed a much more cheerful expression. "Let's rent that one !" he exclaimed, pointing to the princess. "Nonsense!" Kendrick told him. "In the first place, she is obviously the most expensive model. Secondly, she would be too distracting for you. And, finally, a pretty girl is never as good a worker as a plain.... We'll take that one." The professor pointed to the dumpiest and oldest of the women. "How much should I offer to start, Your Excellency? No sense beginning the bidding too high. We Earthmen aren't made of money, in spite of what the rest of the Galaxy seems to think." "A hundred credits is standard," Guj murmured. "However, sir, there is one problem—have you considered how you are going to communicate with your maid?" "Communicate? Are they mutes?" "No, but very few of these women speak Earth." A look of surprise flitted over the faces of the servants, vanishing as her royal highness glared at them. Kendrick pursed thin lips. "I was under the impression that the Earth language was mandatory on Uxen." "Oh, it is; it is, indeed!" Guj said hastily. "However, it is so hard to teach these backward peasants new ways." One of the backward peasants gave a loud sniff, which changed to a squeal as she was honored with a pinch from the hand of royalty. "But you will not betray us? We are making rapid advances and before long we hope to make Earth universal." "Of course we won't," Peter put in, before Kendrick had a chance to reply. "What's more, I don't see why the Uxenians shouldn't be allowed to speak their own language." The princess gave him a dazzling smile. "Moolai Uxen! We must not allow the beautiful Uxulk tongue to fall into desuetude. Bring back our lovely language!" Guj gestured desperately. She tossed her head, but stopped. "Please, Kendrick," Peter begged, "we've got to buy that one!" "Certainly not. You can see she's a troublemaker. Do you speak Earth?" the professor demanded of the maid he had chosen. "No speak," she replied. Peter tugged at his superior's sleeve. "That one speaks Earth." Kendrick shook him off. "Do you speak Earth?" he demanded of the second oldest and ugliest. She shook her head. The others went through the same procedure. "It looks," Peter said, grinning, "as if we'll have to take mine." "I suppose so," Kendrick agreed gloomily, "but somehow I feel no good will come of this." Zen wondered whether Earthmen had powers of precognition. No one bid against them, so they took a two-year lease on the crown princess for the very reasonable price of a hundred credits, and drove her home with them. Iximi gazed at the little prefab with disfavor. "But why are we halting outside this gluu hutch, masters?" Guj cleared his throat. "Sirs, I wish you joy." He made the secular xa. "Should you ever be in need again, do not hesitate to get in touch with me at the palace." And, climbing into the yio, he was off. The others entered the small dwelling. "That little trip certainly gave me an appetite," Kendrick said, rubbing his hands together. "Iximi, you had better start lunch right away. This is the kitchen." Iximi gazed around the cubicle with disfavor. "Truly it is not much," she observed. "However, masters, if you will leave me, I shall endeavor to do my poor best." "Let me show you—" Peter began, but Kendrick interrupted. "Leave the girl alone, Hammond. She must be able to cook, if she's a professional servant. We've wasted the whole morning as it is; maybe we can get something done before lunch." Iximi closed the door, got out her portable altar—all members of the royal family were qualified members of the priesthood, though they seldom practiced—and in a low voice, for the door and walls were thin, summoned Zen the All-Capable. The god sighed as he materialized his head. "I might have known you would require Me. What is your will, oh Most Fair?" "I have been ordered to prepare the strangers' midday repast, oh Puissant One, and I know not what to do with all this ukh, which they assure me is their food." And she pointed scornfully to the cans and jars and packages. "How should I know then?" Zen asked unguardedly. The princess looked at him. "Surely Zen the All-Knowing jests?" "Er—yes. Merely having My Bit of Fun, you know." He hastily inspected the exterior of the alleged foods. "There appear to be legends inscribed upon the containers. Perchance, were we to read them, they might give a clue as to their contents." "Oh, Omniscent One," the princess exclaimed, "truly You are Wise and Sapient indeed, and it is I who was the fool to have doubted for so much as an instant." "Oh you doubted, did you?" Terrible Zen frowned terribly. "Well, see that it doesn't happen again." He had no intention of losing his divine authority at this stage of the game. "Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize a few pair of arms as well as Your August and Awe-inspiring Countenance, for there is much work to be done." Since the partitions were thin, Zen and the princess could hear most of the conversation in the main room. "... First thing to do," Kendrick's voice remarked, "is find out whether we're permitted to attend one of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically...." "The stove is here, Almighty," the princess suggested, "not against the door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear." "Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet. Moolai Uxen." "Moolai Uxen," the princess replied automatically.

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NO SUBSTITUTIONS By JIM HARMON Illustrated by JOHNSON [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine November 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] If it was happening to him, all right, he could take that ... but what if he was happening to it? Putting people painlessly to sleep is really a depressing job. It keeps me awake at night thinking of all those bodies I have sent to the vaults, and it interferes to a marked extent with my digestion. I thought before Councilman Coleman came to see me that there wasn't much that could bother me worse. Coleman came in the morning before I was really ready to face the day. My nerves were fairly well shot from the kind of work I did as superintendent of Dreamland. I chewed up my pill to calm me down, the one to pep me up, the capsule to strengthen my qualities as a relentless perfectionist. I washed them down with gin and orange juice and sat back, building up my fortitude to do business over the polished deck of my desk. But instead of the usual morning run of hysterical relatives and masochistic mystics, I had to face one of my superiors from the Committee itself. Councilman Coleman was an impressive figure in a tailored black tunic. His olive features were set off by bristling black eyes and a mobile mustache. He probably scared most people, but not me. Authority doesn't frighten me any more. I've put to sleep too many megalomaniacs, dictators, and civil servants. "Warden Walker, I've been following your career with considerable interest," Coleman said. "My career hasn't been very long, sir," I said modestly. I didn't mention that nobody could last that long in my job. At least, none had yet. "I've followed it from the first. I know every step you've made." I didn't know whether to be flattered or apprehensive. "That's fine," I said. It didn't sound right. "Tell me," Coleman said, crossing his legs, "what do you think of Dreamland in principle?" "Why, it's the logical step forward in penal servitude. Man has been heading toward this since he first started civilizing himself. After all, some criminals can't be helped psychiatrically. We can't execute them or turn them free; we have to imprison them." I waited for Coleman's reaction. He merely nodded. "Of course, it's barbaric to think of a prison as a place of punishment," I continued. "A prison is a place to keep a criminal away from society for a specific time so he can't harm that society for that time. Punishment, rehabilitation, all of it is secondary to that. The purpose of confinement is confinement." The councilman edged forward an inch. "And you really think Dreamland is the most humane confinement possible?" "Well," I hedged, "it's the most humane we've found yet. I suppose living through a—uh—movie with full sensory participation for year after year can get boring." "I should think so," Coleman said emphatically. "Warden, don't you sometimes feel the old system where the prisoners had the diversions of riots, solitary confinement, television, and jailbreaks may have made time easier to serve? Do these men ever think they are actually living these vicarious adventures?" That was a question that made all of us in the Dreamland service uneasy. "No, Councilman, they don't. They know they aren't really Alexander of Macedonia, Tarzan, Casanova, or Buffalo Bill. They are conscious of all the time that is being spent out of their real lives; they know they have relatives and friends outside the dream. They know, unless—" Coleman lifted a dark eyebrow above a black iris. "Unless?" I cleared my throat. "Unless they go mad and really believe the dream they are living. But as you know, sir, the rate of madness among Dreamland inmates is only slightly above the norm for the population as a whole." "How do prisoners like that adjust to reality?" Was he deliberately trying to ask tough questions? "They don't. They think they are having some kind of delusion. Many of them become schizoid and pretend to go along with reality while secretly 'knowing' it to be a lie." Coleman removed a pocket secretary and broke it open. "About these new free-choice models—do you think they genuinely are an improvement over the old fixed-image machines?" "Yes, sir," I replied. "By letting the prisoner project his own imagination onto the sense tapes and giving him a limited amount of alternatives to a situation, we can observe whether he is conforming to society to a larger extent." "I'm glad you said that, Walker," Councilman Coleman told me warmly. "As I said, I've been following your career closely, and if you get through the next twenty-four-hour period as you have through the foregoing part of your Dream, you will be awakened at this time tomorrow. Congratulations!" I sat there and took it. He was telling me , the superintendent of Dreamland, that my own life here was only a Dream such as I fed to my own prisoners. It was unbelievably absurd, a queasy little joke of some kind. But I didn't deny it. If it were true, if I had forgotten that everything that happened was only a Dream, and if I admitted it, the councilman would know I was mad. It couldn't be true. Yet— Hadn't I thought about it ever since I had been appointed warden and transferred from my personnel job at the plant? Whenever I had come upon two people talking, and it seemed as if I had come upon those same two people talking the same talk before, hadn't I wondered for an instant if it couldn't be a Dream, not reality at all? Once I had experienced a Dream for five or ten minutes. I was driving a ground car down a spidery road made into a dismal tunnel by weeping trees, a dank, lavender maze. I had known at the time it was a Dream, but still, as the moments passed, I became more intent on the difficult road before me, my blocky hands on the steering wheel, thick fingers typing out the pattern of motion on the drive buttons. I could remember that. Maybe I couldn't remember being shoved into the prison vault for so many years for such and such a crime. I didn't really believe this, not then, but I couldn't afford to make a mistake, even if it were only some sort of intemperate test—as I was confident it was, with a sweet, throbbing fury against the man who would employ such a jagged broadsword for prying in his bureaucratic majesty. "I've always thought," I said, "that it would be a good idea to show a prisoner what the modern penal system was all about by giving him a Dream in which he dreamed about Dreamland itself." "Yes, indeed," Coleman concurred. Just that and no more. I leaned intimately across my beautiful oak desk. "I've thought that projecting officials into the Dream and letting them talk with the prisoners might be a more effective form of investigation than mere observation." "I should say so," Coleman remarked, and got up. I had to get more out of him, some proof, some clue beyond the preposterous announcement he had made. "I'll see you tomorrow at this time then, Walker." The councilman nodded curtly and turned to leave my office. I held onto the sides of my desk to keep from diving over and teaching him to change his concept of humor. The day was starting. If I got through it, giving a good show, I would be released from my Dream, he had said smugly. But if this was a dream, did I want probation to reality? Horbit was a twitchy little man whose business tunic was the same rodent color as his hair. He had a pronounced tic in his left cheek. "I have to get back," he told me with compelling earnestness. "Mr. Horbit—Eddie—" I said, glancing at his file projected on my desk pad, "I can't put you back into a Dream. You served your full time for your crime. The maximum." "But I haven't adjusted to society!" "Eddie, I can shorten sentences, but I can't expand them beyond the limit set by the courts." A tear of frustration spilled out of his left eye with the next twitch. "But Warden, sir, my psychiatrist said that I was unable to cope with reality. Come on now, Warden, you don't want a guy who can't cope with reality running around loose." He paused, puzzled. "Hell, I don't know why I can't express myself like I used to." He could express himself much better in his Dream. He had been Abraham Lincoln in his Dream, I saw. He had lived the life right up to the night when he was taking in An American Cousin at the Ford Theater. Horbit couldn't accept history that he had no more life to live. He only knew that if in his delirium he could gain Dreamland once more, he could get back to the hard realities of dealing with the problems of Reconstruction. " Please ," he begged. I looked up from the file. "I'm sorry, Eddie." His eyes narrowed, both of them, on the next twitch. "Warden, I can always go out and commit another anti-social act." "I'm afraid not, Eddie. The file shows you are capable of only one crime. And you don't have a wife any more, and she doesn't have a lover." Horbit laughed. "Your files aren't infallible, Warden." With one gesture, he ripped open his tunic and tore into his own flesh. No, not his own flesh. Pseudo-flesh. He took out the gun that was underneath. "The beamer is made of X-ray-transparent plastic, Warden, but it works as well as one made of steel and lead." "Now that you've got it in here," I said in time with the pulse in my throat, "what are you going to do with it?" "I'm going to make you go down to the vaults and put me back to sleep, Warden." I nodded. "I suppose you can do that. But what's to prevent me from waking you up as soon as I've taken away your gun?" "This!" He tossed a sheet of paper onto my desk. "What's this?" I asked unnecessarily. I could read it. "A confession that you accepted a bribe to put me back to sleep," Horbit said, his tic beating out a feverish tempo. "As soon as you've signed it, I'll use your phone to have it telefaxed to the Registrar of Private Documents." I had to admire the thought behind the idea. Horbit was convinced that I was only a figment of his unfocused imagination, but he was playing the game with uncompromising logic, trusting that even madness had hard and tight rules behind it. There was also something else I admired about the plan. It could work. Once he fed that document to the archives, I would be obligated to help him even without the gun. My word would probably be taken that I had been forced to do it at gunpoint, but there would always be doubts, enough to wreck my career when it came time for promotion. Nothing like this had ever happened in my years as warden. Suddenly, Coleman's words hit me in the back of the neck. If I got through the next twenty-four hours. This had to be some kind of test. But a test for what? Had I been deliberately told that I was living only a Dream to see if my ethics would hold up even when I thought I wasn't dealing with reality? Or if this was only a Dream, was it a test to see if I was morally ready to return to the real, the earnest world? But if it was a test to see if I was ready for reality, did I want to pass it? My life was nerve-racking and mind-wrecking, but I liked the challenge—it was the only life I knew or could believe in. What was I going to do? The only thing I knew was that I couldn't tune in tomorrow and find out. The time was now . Horbit motioned the gun to my desk set. "Sign that paper." I reached out and took hold of his wrist. I squeezed. Horbit's screams brought in the guards. I picked up the gun from where he had dropped it and handed it to Captain Keller, my head guard, a tough old bird who wore his uniform like armor. "Trying to force his way back to the sleep tanks," I told Keller. He nodded. "Happened before. Back when old man Preston lost his grip." Preston had been my predecessor. He had lost his hold on reality like all the others before him who had served long as warden of Dreamland. A few had quit while they were still ahead and spent the rest of their lives recuperating. Our society didn't produce individuals tough enough to stand the strain of putting their fellow human beings to sleep for long. One of Keller's men had stabbed Horbit's arm with a hypospray to blanket the pain from his broken wrist, and the man was quieter. "I couldn't have done it, Warden," Horbit mumbled drowsily. "I couldn't kill anybody. Unless it was like that other time." "Of course, Eddie," I said. I had banked on that, hadn't I, when I made my move? Or did I? Wasn't it perhaps a matter of knowing that all of it wasn't real and that the safety cutoffs in even a free-choice model of a Dream Machine couldn't let me come to any real harm? I had been suspiciously brave, disarming a dedicated maniac. With only an hour to spare for gym a day, I could barely press 350 pounds. I was hardly in shape for personal combat. On the other hand, maybe I actually wanted something to go wrong so my sleep sentence would be extended. Or was it that, in some sane part of my mind, I wanted release from unreality badly enough to take any risk to prove that I was morally capable of returning to the real world? It was a carrousel and I couldn't catch the brass ring no matter how many turns I went spinning through. I hardly heard Horbit when he half-shouted at me as my men led him from the room. Glancing up sharply, I saw him straining purposefully against the bonds of muscle and narcotic that held him. "You have to send me back now, Warden," he was shrilling. "You have to! I tried to coerce you with a gun. That's a crime, Warden—you know that's a crime! I have to be put to sleep!" Keller flicked his mustache with a thick thumbnail. "How about that? You won't let a guy back into the sleepy-bye pads, so he pulls a gun on you to make you, and that makes him eligible. He couldn't lose, Warden. No, sir, he had it made." My answer to Keller was forming, building up in my jaw muscles, but I took a pill and it went away. "Hold him in the detention quarters," I said finally. "I'm going to make a study of this." Keller winked knowingly and sauntered out of the office, his left hand swinging the blackjack the Committee had taken away from him a decade before. The problem of what to do with Keller wasn't particularly atypical of the ones I had to solve daily and I wasn't going to let that worry me. Much. I pressed my button to let Mrs. Engle know I was ready for the next interview. They came. There were the hysterical relatives, the wives and mothers and brothers who demanded that their kin be Awakened because they were special cases, not really guilty, or needed at home, or possessed of such awesome talents and qualities as to be exempt from the laws of lesser men. Once in a while I granted a parole for a prisoner to see a dying mother or if some important project was falling apart without his help, but most of the time I just sat with my eyes propped open, letting a sea of vindictive screeching and beseeching wailings wash around me. The relatives and legal talent were spaced with hungry-eyed mystics who were convinced they could contemplate God and their navels both conscientiously as an incarnation of Gautama. To risk sounding religiously intolerant, I usually kicked these out pretty swiftly. The onetime inmate who wanted back in after a reprieve was fairly rare. Few of them ever got that crazy. But it was my luck to get another the same day, the day for me, as Horbit. Paulson was a tall, lean man with sad eyes. The clock above his sharp shoulder bone said five till noon. I didn't expect him to take much out of my lunch hour. "Warden," Paulson said, "I've decided to give myself up. I murdered a blind beggar the other night." "For his pencils?" I asked. Paulson shifted uneasily. "No, sir. For his money. I needed some extra cash and I was stronger than he was, so why shouldn't I take it?" I examined the projection of his file. He was an embezzler, not a violent man. He had served his time and been released. Conceivably he might embezzle again, but the Committee saw to it that temptation was never again placed in his path. He would not commit a crime of violence. "Look, Paulson," I said, a trifle testily, "if you have so little conscience as to kill a blind old man for a few dollars, where do you suddenly get enough guilt feelings to cause you to give yourself up?" Paulson tried his insufficient best to smile evilly. "It wasn't conscience, Warden. I never lie awake a minute whenever I kill anybody. It's just—well, Dreaming isn't so bad. Last time I was Allen Pinkerton, the detective. It was exciting. A lot more exciting than the kind of life I lead." I nodded solemnly. "Yes, no doubt strangling old men in the streets can be pretty dull for a red-blooded man of action." "Yes," Paulson said earnestly, "it does get to be a humdrum routine. I've been experimenting with all sorts of murders, but I just don't seem to get much of a kick out of them now. I'd like to try it from the other end as Pinkerton again. Of course, if you can't arrange it, I guess I'll have to go out and see what I can do with, say, an ax." His eye glittered almost convincingly. "Paulson, you know I could have you watched night and day if I thought you really were a murderer. But I can't send you back to the sleep vaults without proof and conviction for a crime." "That doesn't sound very reasonable," Paulson objected. "Turning loose a homicidal maniac who is offering to go back to the vaults of his own free will just because you lack a little trifling proof of his guilt." "Sure," I told him, "but I don't want to share the same noose with you. My job is to keep the innocent out and the convicted in. And I do my job, Paulson." "But you have to! If you don't, I'll have to go out and establish my guilt with another crime. Do you want a crime on your hands, Warden?" I studied his record. There was a chance, just a chance.... "Do you want to wait voluntarily in the detention quarters?" I asked him. He agreed readily enough. I watched him out of the office and rang for lunch. The news on the wall video was dull as usual. A man got tired of hearing peace, safety, prosperity and brotherly love all the time. I dug into my strained spinach, raw hamburger, and chewed up my white pill, my red pill, my ebony pill, and my second white pill. The gin and tomato juice took the taste away. I was ready for the afternoon session. Matrons were finishing the messy job of dragging a hysterical woman out of the office when Keller came back. He had a stubborn look on his flattened, red face. "New prisoner asking to see you personal," Keller reported. "Told him no. Okay?" "No," I said. "He can see me. That's the law and you know it. He isn't violent, is he?" I asked in some concern. The room was still in disarray. "Naw, he ain't violent, Warden. He just thinks he's somebody important." "Sounds like a case for therapy, not Dreamland. Who does he think he is?" "One of the Committee—Councilman Coleman." "Mm-hmm. And who is he really, Captain?" "Councilman Coleman." I whistled. "What did they nail him on?" "Misuse of authority." "And he didn't get a suspended for that?" "Wasn't his first offense. Still want to see him?" I gave a lateral wave of my hand. "Of course." My pattern of living—call it my office routine—had been re-established through the day. I hadn't had a chance to brood much over the bombshell Coleman had tossed in my lap in the morning, but now I could think. Coleman entered wearing the same black tunic, the same superior attitude. His black eyes fastened on me. "Sit down, Councilman," I directed. He deigned to comply. I studied the files flashed before me. Several times before, Coleman had been guilty of slight misuses of his authority: helping his friends, harming his enemies. Not enough to make him be impeached from the Committee. His job was so hypersensitive that if every transgression earned dismissal, no one could hold the position more than a day. Even with the best intentions, mistakes can be taken for deliberate errors. Not to mention the converse. For his earlier errors, Coleman had first received a suspended sentence, then two terminal sentences to be fixed by the warden. My predecessors had given him first a few weeks, then a few months of sleep in Dreamland. Coleman's eyes didn't frighten me; I focused right on the pupils. "That was a pretty foul trick, Councilman. Did you hope to somehow frighten me out of executing this sentence by what you told me this morning?" I couldn't follow his reasoning. Just how making me think my life was only a Dream such as I imposed on my own prisoners could help him, I couldn't see. "Warden Walker," Coleman intoned in his magnificent voice, "I'm shocked. I am not personally monitoring your Dream. The Committee as a whole will decide whether you are capable of returning to the real world. Moreover, please don't get carried away. I'm not concerned with what you do to this sensory projection of myself, beyond how it helps to establish your moral capabilities." "I suppose," I said heavily, "that I could best establish my high moral character by excusing you from this penal sentence?" "Not at all," Councilman Coleman asserted. "According to the facts as you know them, I am 'guilty' and must be confined." I was stymied for an instant. I had expected him to say that I must know that he was incapable of committing such an error and I must pardon him despite the misguided rulings of the courts. Then I thought of something else. "You show symptoms of being a habitual criminal, Coleman. I think you deserve life ." Coleman cocked his head thoughtfully, concerned. "That seems rather extreme, Warden." "You would suggest a shorter sentence?" "If it were my place to choose, yes. A few years, perhaps. But life—no, I think not." I threw up my hands. You don't often see somebody do that, but I did. I couldn't figure him. Coleman had wealth and power as a councilman in the real world, but I had thought somehow he wanted to escape to a Dream world. Yet he didn't want to be in for life, the way Paulson and Horbit did. There seemed to be no point or profit in what he had told me that morning, nothing in it for him. Unless— Unless what he said was literally true. I stood up. My knees wanted to quit halfway up, but I made it. "This," I said, "is a difficult decision for me, sir. Would you make yourself comfortable here for a time, Councilman?" Coleman smiled benignly. "Certainly, Warden." I walked out of my office, slowly and carefully. Horbit was sitting in his detention quarters idly flicking through a book tape on the Civil War when I found him. The tic in his cheek marked time with every new page. "President Lincoln," I said reverently. Horbit looked up, his eyes set in a clever new way. " You call me that. Does it mean I am recovering? You don't mean now that I'm getting back my right senses?" "Mr. President, the situation you find yourself in now is something stranger and more evil than any madness. I am not a phantom of your mind—I am a real man. This wild, distorted place is a real place." "Do you think you can pull the wool over my eyes, you scamp? Mine eyes have seen the glory." "Yes, sir." I sat down beside him and looked earnestly into his twitching face. "But I know you have always believed in the occult." He nodded slowly. "I have often suspected this was hell." "Not quite, sir. The occult has its own rigid laws. It is perfectly scientific. This world is in another dimension—one that is not length, breadth or thickness—but a real one nevertheless." "An interesting theory. Go ahead." "This world is more scientifically advanced than the one you come from—and this advanced science has fallen into the hands of a well-meaning despot." Horbit nodded again. "The Jefferson Davis type." He didn't understand Lincoln's beliefs very well, but I pretended to go along with him. "Yes, sir. He—our leader—doubts your abilities as President. He is not above meddling in the affairs of an alien world if he believes he is doing good. He has convicted you to this world in that belief." He chuckled. "Many of my countrymen share his convictions." "Maybe," I said. "But many here do not. I don't. I know you must return to guide the Reconstruction. But first you must convince our leader of your worth." "How am I going to accomplish that?" Horbit asked worriedly. "You are going to have a companion from now on, an agent of the leader, who will pretend to be something he isn't. You must pretend to believe in what he claims to be, and convince him of your high intelligence, moral responsibilities, and qualities of leadership." "Yes," Horbit said thoughtfully, "yes. I must try to curb my tendency for telling off-color jokes. My wife is always nagging me about that." Paulson was only a few doors away from Horbit. I found him with his long, thin legs stretched out in front of him, staring dismally into the gloom of the room. No wonder he found reality so boring and depressing with so downbeat a mood cycle. I wondered why they hadn't been able to do something about adjusting his metabolism. "Paulson," I said gently, "I want to speak with you." He bolted upright in his chair. "You're going to put me back to sleep." "I came to talk to you about that," I admitted. I pulled up a seat and adjusted the lighting so only his face and mine seemed to float bodiless in a sea of night, two moons of flesh. "Paulson—or should I call you Pinkerton?—this will come as a shock, a shock I know only a fine analytical mind like yours could stand. You think your life as the great detective was only a Dream induced by some miraculous machine. But, sir, believe me: that life was real ." Paulson's eyes rolled slightly back into his head and changed their luster. "Then this is the Dream. I've thought—" "No!" I snapped. "This world is also real." I went through the same Fourth Dimension waltz as I had auditioned for Horbit. At the end of it, Paulson was nodding just as eagerly. "I could be destroyed for telling you this, but our leader is planning the most gigantic conquest known to any intelligent race in the Universe. He is going to conquer Earth in all its possible futures and all its possible pasts. After that, there are other planets." "He must be stopped!" Paulson shouted. I laid my palm on his arm. "Armies can't stop him, nor can fantastic secret weapons. Only one thing can stop him: the greatest detective who ever lived. Pinkerton!" "Yes," Paulson said. "I suppose I could." "He knows that. But he's a fiend. He wants a battle of wits with you, his only possible foe, for the satisfaction of making a fool of you." "Easier said than done, my friend," Paulson said crisply. "True," I agreed, "but he is devious, the devil! He plans to convince you that he also has been removed to this world from his own, even as you have. He will claim to be Abraham Lincoln." "No!" "Yes, and he will pretend to find you accidentally and get you to help him find a way back to his own world, glorying in making a fool of you. But you can use every moment to learn his every weakness." "But wait. I know President Lincoln well. I guarded him on his first inauguration trip. How could this leader of yours fool me? Does he look like the President?" "Not at all. But remember, the dimensional shift changes physical appearance. You've noticed that in yourself." "Yes, of course," Paulson muttered. "But he couldn't hoax me. My keen powers of deduction would have seen through him in an instant!" I saw Horbit and Paulson happily off in each other's company. Paulson was no longer bored by a reality in which he was matching wits with the first master criminal of the paratime universe, and Horbit was no longer hopeless in his quest to gain another reality because he knew he was not merely insane now. It was a pair of fantastic stories that no man in his right mind would believe—but that didn't make them invalid to a brace of ex-Sleepers. They wanted to believe them. The stories gave them what they were after—without me having to break the law and put them to sleep for crimes they hadn't committed. They would find out some day that I had lied to them, but maybe by that time they would have realized this world wasn't so bad. Fortunately, I was confident from their psych records that they were both incapable of ending their little game by homicide, no matter how justified they might think it was. "Hey, Warden," Captain Keller bellowed as I approached my office door, "when are you going to let me throw that stiff Coleman into the sleepy-bye vaults? He's still sitting in there on your furniture as smug as you please." "You don't sound as if you like our distinguished visitor very well," I remarked. "It's not that. I just don't think he deserves any special privileges. Besides, it was guys like him that took away our nightsticks. My boys didn't like that. Look at me—I'm defenseless!" I looked at his square figure. "Not quite, Captain, not quite." Now was the time. I stretched out my wet palm toward the door. Was or was not Coleman telling the truth when he said this life of mine was itself only a Dream? If it was, did I want to finish my last day with the right decision so I could return to some alien reality? Or did I deliberately want to make a mistake so I could continue living the opiate of my Dream? Then, as I touched the door, I knew the only decision that could have any meaning for me. Councilman Coleman didn't look as if he had moved since I had left him. He was unwrinkled, unperspiring, his eyes and mustache crisp as ever. He smiled at me briefly in supreme confidence. I changed my decision then, in that moment. And, in the next, changed it back to my original choice. "Coleman," I said, "you can get out of here. As warden, I'm granting you a five-year probation." The councilman stood up swiftly, his eyes catching little sparks of yellow light. "I don't approve of your decision, Warden. Not at all. Unless you alter it, I'll be forced to convince the rest of the Committee that your decisions are becoming faulty, that you are losing your grip just as all your predecessors did." My muscles relaxed in a spasm and it took the fresh flow of adrenalin to get me to the chair behind my desk. I took a pill. I took two pills. "Tell me, Councilman, what happened to the offer to release me from this phony Dream? Now you are talking as if this world was the real one." Coleman parted his lips, but then the planes of his face shifted into another pattern. "You never believed me." "Almost, but not quite. You knew I was on the narrow edge in this kind of job, but I'm not as far out as you seemed to have thought." "I can still wreck your career, you know." "I don't think so. That would constitute a misuse of authority, and the next time you turn up before me, I'm going to give you life in Dreamland." Coleman sat back down suddenly. "You don't want life as a Sleeper, do you?" I pursued. "You did want a relatively short sentence of a few months or a few years. I can think of two reasons why. The answer is probably a combination of both. In the first place, you are a joy-popper with Dreams—you don't want to live out your life in one, but you like a brief Dream every few years like an occasional dose of a narcotic. In the second place, you probably have political reasons for wanting to hide out somewhere in safety for the next few years. The world isn't as placid as the newscasts sometimes make it seem." He didn't say anything. I didn't think he had to. "You wanted to make sure I made a painfully scrupulous decision in your case," I went on. "You didn't want me to pardon you completely because of your high position, but at the same time you didn't want too long a sentence. But I'm doing you no favors. You get no time from me, Coleman." "How did you decide to do this?" he asked. "Don't tell me you never doubted. We've all doubted since we found out about the machines: which was real and which was the Dream? How did you decide to risk this?" "I acted the only way I could act," I said. "I decided I had to act as if my life was real and that you were lying. I decided that because, if all this were false, if I could have no more confidence in my own mind and my own senses than that, I didn't give a damn if it were all a Dream." Coleman stood up and walked out of my office. The clock told me it was after five. I began clearing my desk. Captain Keller stuck his head in, unannounced. "Hey, Warden, there's an active one out here. He claims that Dreamland compromises His plan for the Free Will of the Universe." "Well, escort him inside, Captain," I said. I put away my pills. Solving simple problems such as the new visitor presented always helped me to relax.

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Of All Possible Worlds By WILLIAM TENN Illustrated by GAUGHAN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction December 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Changing the world is simple; the trick is to do it before you have a chance to undo it! It was a good job and Max Alben knew whom he had to thank for it—his great-grandfather. "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he muttered as he hurried into the laboratory slightly ahead of the escorting technicians, all of them, despite the excitement of the moment, remembering to bob their heads deferentially at the half-dozen full-fleshed and hard-faced men lolling on the couches that had been set up around the time machine. He shrugged rapidly out of his rags, as he had been instructed in the anteroom, and stepped into the housing of the enormous mechanism. This was the first time he had seen it, since he had been taught how to operate it on a dummy model, and now he stared at the great transparent coils and the susurrating energy bubble with much respect. This machine, the pride and the hope of 2089, was something almost outside his powers of comprehension. But Max Alben knew how to run it, and he knew, roughly, what it was supposed to accomplish. He knew also that this was the first backward journey of any great duration and, being scientifically unpredictable, might well be the death of him. "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he muttered again affectionately. If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest time-travel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even before the Blight, it would never have been discovered that he and his seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout. And if that had not been discovered, the ruling powers of Earth, more than a century later, would never have plucked Max Alben out of an obscure civil-service job as a relief guard at the North American Chicken Reservation to his present heroic and remunerative eminence. He would still be patrolling the barbed wire that surrounded the three white leghorn hens and two roosters—about one-sixth of the known livestock wealth of the Western Hemisphere—thoroughly content with the half-pail of dried apricots he received each and every payday. No, if his great-grandfather had not demonstrated long ago his unique capacity for remaining conscious during time travel, Max Alben would not now be shifting from foot to foot in a physics laboratory, facing the black market kings of the world and awaiting their final instructions with an uncertain and submissive grin. Men like O'Hara, who controlled mushrooms, Levney, the blackberry tycoon, Sorgasso, the packaged-worm monopolist—would black marketeers of their tremendous stature so much as waste a glance on someone like Alben ordinarily, let alone confer a lifetime pension on his wife and five children of a full spoonful each of non-synthetic sugar a day? Even if he didn't come back, his family was provided for like almost no other family on Earth. This was a damn good job and he was lucky. Alben noticed that Abd Sadha had risen from the straight chair at the far side of the room and was approaching him with a sealed metal cylinder in one hand. "We've decided to add a further precaution at the last moment," the old man said. "That is, the scientists have suggested it and I have—er—I have given my approval." The last remark was added with a slight questioning note as the Secretary-General of the United Nations looked back rapidly at the black market princes on the couches behind him. Since they stared back stonily, but offered no objection, he coughed in relief and returned to Alben. "I am sure, young man, that I don't have to go into the details of your instructions once more. You enter the time machine and go back the duration for which it has been preset, a hundred and thirteen years, to the moment after the Guided Missile of 1976 was launched. It is 1976, isn't it?" he asked, suddenly uncertain. "Yes, sir," one of the technicians standing by the time machine said respectfully. "The experiment with an atomic warhead guided missile that resulted in the Blight was conducted on this site on April 18, 1976." He glanced proudly at the unemotional men on the couches, very much like a small boy after completing a recitation before visiting dignitaries from the Board of Education. "Just so." Abd Sadha nodded. "April 18, 1976. And on this site. You see, young man, you will materialize at the very moment and on the very spot where the remote-control station handling the missile was—er—handling the missile. You will be in a superb position, a superb position, to deflect the missile in its downward course and alter human history for the better. Very much for the better. Yes." He paused, having evidently stumbled out of his thought sequence. "And he pulls the red switch toward him," Gomez, the dandelion-root magnate, reminded him sharply, impatiently. "Ah, yes, the red switch. He pulls the little red switch toward him. Thank you, Mr. Gomez, thank you very much, sir. He pulls the little red switch on the green instrument panel toward him, thus preventing the error that caused the missile to explode in the Brazilian jungle and causing it, instead, to explode somewhere in the mid-Pacific, as originally planned." The Secretary-General of the United Nations beamed. "Thus preventing the Blight, making it nonexistent, as it were, producing a present-day world in which the Blight never occurred. That is correct, is it not, gentlemen?" he asked, turning anxiously again. None of the half-dozen men on couches deigned to answer him. And Alben kept his eyes deferentially in their direction, too, as he had throughout this period of last-minute instruction. He knew who ruled his world—these stolid, well-fed men in clean garments with a minimum of patches, and where patches occurred, at least they were the color of the surrounding cloth. Sadha might be Secretary-General of the United Nations, but that was still a civil-service job, only a few social notches higher than a chicken guard. His clothes were fully as ragged, fully as multi-colored, as those that Alben had stepped out of. And the gnawing in his stomach was no doubt almost as great. "You understand, do you not, young man, that if anything goes wrong," Abd Sadha asked, his head nodding tremulously and anticipating the answer, "if anything unexpected, unprepared-for, occurs, you are not to continue with the experiment but return immediately?" "He understands everything he has to understand," Gomez told him. "Let's get this thing moving." The old man smiled again. "Yes. Of course, Mr. Gomez." He came up to where Alben stood in the entrance of the time machine and handed the sealed metal cylinder to him. "This is the precaution the scientists have just added. When you arrive at your destination, just before materializing, you will release it into the surrounding temporal medium. Our purpose here, as you no doubt—" Levney sat up on his couch and snapped his fingers peremptorily. "I just heard Gomez tell you to get this thing moving, Sadha. And it isn't moving. We're busy men. We've wasted enough time." "I was just trying to explain a crucial final fact," the Secretary-General apologized. "A fact which may be highly—" "You've explained enough facts." Levney turned to the man inside the time machine. "Hey, fella. You. Move! " Max Alben gulped and nodded violently. He darted to the rear of the machine and turned the dial which activated it. flick! It was a good job and Mac Albin knew whom he had to thank for it—his great-grandfather. "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he laughed as he looked at the morose faces of his two colleagues. Bob Skeat and Hugo Honek had done as much as he to build the tiny time machine in the secret lab under the helicopter garage, and they were fully as eager to go, but—unfortunately for them—they were not descended from the right ancestor. Leisurely, he unzipped the richly embroidered garment that, as the father of two children, he was privileged to wear, and wriggled into the housing of the complex little mechanism. This was hardly the first time he had seen it, since he'd been helping to build the device from the moment Honek had nodded and risen from the drafting board, and now he barely wasted a glance on the thumb-size translucent coils growing out of the almost microscopic energy bubbles which powered them. This machine was the last hope, of 2089, even if the world of 2089, as a whole, did not know of its existence and would try to prevent its being put into operation. But it meant a lot more to Mac Albin than merely saving a world. It meant an adventurous mission with the risk of death. "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he laughed again happily. If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest time-travel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even before the Epidemic, it would never have been discovered that he and his seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout. And if that had not been discovered, the Albins would not have become physicists upon the passage of the United Nations law that everyone on Earth—absolutely without exception—had to choose a branch of research science in which to specialize. In the flabby, careful, life-guarding world the Earth had become, Mac Albin would never have been reluctantly selected by his two co-workers as the one to carry the forbidden banner of dangerous experiment. No, if his great-grandfather had not demonstrated long ago his unique capacity for remaining conscious during time travel, Mac Albin would probably be a biologist today like almost everyone else on Earth, laboriously working out dreary gene problems instead of embarking on the greatest adventure Man had known to date. Even if he didn't come back, he had at last found a socially useful escape from genetic responsibility to humanity in general and his own family in particular. This was a damn good job and he was lucky. "Wait a minute, Mac," Skeat said and crossed to the other side of the narrow laboratory. Albin and Honek watched him stuff several sheets of paper into a small metal box which he closed without locking. "You will take care of yourself, won't you, Mac?" Hugo Honek pleaded. "Any time you feel like taking an unnecessary risk, remember that Bob and I will have to stand trial if you don't come back. We might be sentenced to complete loss of professional status and spend the rest of our lives supervising robot factories." "Oh, it won't be that bad," Albin reassured him absent-mindedly from where he lay contorted inside the time machine. He watched Skeat coming toward him with the box. Honek shrugged his shoulders. "It might be a lot worse than even that and you know it. The disappearance of a two-time father is going to leave an awful big vacancy in the world. One-timers, like Bob and me, are all over the place; if either of us dropped out of sight, it wouldn't cause nearly as much uproar." "But Bob and you both tried to operate the machine," Albin reminded him. "And you blacked out after a fifteen-second temporal displacement. So I'm the only chance, the only way to stop the human race from dwindling and dwindling till it hits absolute zero, like that fat old Security Council seems willing for it to do." "Take it easy, Mac," Bob Skeat said as he handed the metal box to Albin. "The Security Council is just trying to solve the problem in their way, the conservative way: a worldwide concentration on genetics research coupled with the maximum preservation of existing human lives, especially those that have a high reproductive potential. We three disagree with them; we've been skulking down here nights to solve it our way, and ours is a radical approach and plenty risky. That's the reason for the metal box—trying to cover one more explosive possibility." Albin turned it around curiously. "How?" "I sat up all last night writing the manuscript that's inside it. Look, Mac, when you go back to the Guided Missile Experiment of 1976 and push that red switch away from you, a lot of other things are going to happen than just deflecting the missile so that it will explode in the Brazilian jungle instead of the Pacific Ocean." "Sure. I know. If it explodes in the jungle, the Epidemic doesn't occur. No Shapiro's Mumps." Skeat jiggled his pudgy little face impatiently. "That's not what I mean. The Epidemic doesn't occur, but something else does. A new world, a different 2089, an alternate time sequence. It'll be a world in which humanity has a better chance to survive, but it'll be one with problems of its own. Maybe tough problems. Maybe the problems will be tough enough so that they'll get the same idea we did and try to go back to the same point in time to change them." Albin laughed. "That's just looking for trouble." "Maybe it is, but that's my job. Hugo's the designer of the time machine and you're the operator, but I'm the theoretical man in this research team. It's my job to look for trouble. So, just in case, I wrote a brief history of the world from the time the missile exploded in the Pacific. It tells why ours is the worst possible of futures. It's in that box." "What do I do with it—hand it to the guy from the alternate 2089?" The small fat man exasperatedly hit the side of the time machine with a well-cushioned palm. "You know better. There won't be any alternate 2089 until you push that red switch on the green instrument panel. The moment you do, our world, with all its slow slide to extinction, goes out and its alternate goes on—just like two electric light bulbs on a push-pull circuit. We and every single one of our artifacts, including the time machine, disappear. The problem is how to keep that manuscript from disappearing. "Well, all you do, if I have this figured right, is shove the metal box containing the manuscript out into the surrounding temporal medium a moment before you materialize to do your job. That temporal medium in which you'll be traveling is something that exists independent of and autonomous to all possible futures. It's my hunch that something that's immersed in it will not be altered by a new time sequence." "Remind him to be careful, Bob," Honek rumbled. "He thinks he's Captain Blood and this is his big chance to run away to sea and become a swashbuckling pirate." Albin grimaced in annoyance. "I am excited by doing something besides sitting in a safe little corner working out safe little abstractions for the first time in my life. But I know that this is a first experiment. Honestly, Hugo, I really have enough intelligence to recognize that simple fact. I know that if anything unexpected pops up, anything we didn't foresee, I'm supposed to come scuttling back and ask for advice." "I hope you do," Bob Skeat sighed. "I hope you do know that. A twentieth century poet once wrote something to the effect that the world will end not with a bang, but a whimper. Well, our world is ending with a whimper. Try to see that it doesn't end with a bang, either." "That I'll promise you," Albin said a trifle disgustedly. "It'll end with neither a bang nor a whimper. So long, Hugo. So long, Bob." He twisted around, reaching overhead for the lever which activated the forces that drove the time machine. flick! It was strange, Max Alben reflected, that this time travel business, which knocked unconscious everyone who tried it, only made him feel slightly dizzy. That was because he was descended from Giovanni Albeni, he had been told. There must be some complicated scientific explanation for it, he decided—and that would make it none of his business. Better forget about it. All around the time machine, there was a heavy gray murk in which objects were hinted at rather than stated definitely. It reminded him of patrolling his beat at the North American Chicken Reservation in a thick fog. According to his gauges, he was now in 1976. He cut speed until he hit the last day of April, then cut speed again, drifting slowly backward to the eighteenth, the day of the infamous Guided Missile Experiment. Carefully, carefully, like a man handling a strange bomb made on a strange planet, he watched the center gauge until the needle came to rest against the thin etched line that indicated the exactly crucial moment. Then he pulled the brake and stopped the machine dead. All he had to do now was materialize in the right spot, flash out and pull the red switch toward him. Then his well-paid assignment would be done. But.... He stopped and scratched his dirt-matted hair. Wasn't there something he was supposed to do a second before materialization? Yes, that useless old windbag, Sadha, had given him a last instruction. He picked up the sealed metal cylinder, walked to the entrance of the time machine and tossed it into the gray murk. A solid object floating near the entrance caught his eye. He put his arm out—whew, it was cold!—and pulled it inside. A small metal box. Funny. What was it doing out there? Curiously, he opened it, hoping to find something valuable. Nothing but a few sheets of paper, Alben noted disappointedly. He began to read them slowly, very slowly, for the manuscript was full of a lot of long and complicated words, like a letter from one bookworm scientist to another. The problems all began with the Guided Missile Experiment of 1976, he read. There had been a number of such experiments, but it was the one of 1976 that finally did the damage the biologists had been warning about. The missile with its deadly warhead exploded in the Pacific Ocean as planned, the physicists and the military men went home to study their notes, and the world shivered once more over the approaching war and tried to forget about it. But there was fallout, a radioactive rain several hundred miles to the north, and a small fishing fleet got thoroughly soaked by it. Fortunately, the radioactivity in the rain was sufficiently low to do little obvious physical damage: All it did was cause a mutation in the mumps virus that several of the men in the fleet were incubating at the time, having caught it from the children of the fishing town, among whom a minor epidemic was raging. The fleet returned to its home town, which promptly came down with the new kind of mumps. Dr. Llewellyn Shapiro, the only physician in town, was the first man to note that, while the symptoms of this disease were substantially milder than those of its unmutated parent, practically no one was immune to it and its effects on human reproductivity were truly terrible. Most people were completely sterilized by it. The rest were rendered much less capable of fathering or bearing offspring. Shapiro's Mumps spread over the entire planet in the next few decades. It leaped across every quarantine erected; for a long time, it successfully defied all the vaccines and serums attempted against it. Then, when a vaccine was finally perfected, humanity discovered to its dismay that its generative powers had been permanently and fundamentally impaired. Something had happened to the germ plasm. A large percentage of individuals were born sterile, and, of those who were not, one child was usually the most that could be expected, a two-child parent being quite rare and a three-child parent almost unknown. Strict eugenic control was instituted by the Security Council of the United Nations so that fertile men and women would not be wasted upon non-fertile mates. Fertility was the most important avenue to social status, and right after it came successful genetic research. Genetic research had the very best minds prodded into it; the lesser ones went into the other sciences. Everyone on Earth was engaged in some form of scientific research to some extent. Since the population was now so limited in proportion to the great resources available, all physical labor had long been done by robots. The government saw to it that everybody had an ample supply of goods and, in return, asked only that they experiment without any risk to their own lives—every human being was now a much-prized, highly guarded rarity. There were less than a hundred thousand of them, well below the danger point, it had been estimated, where a species might be wiped out by a new calamity. Not that another calamity would be needed. Since the end of the Epidemic, the birth rate had been moving further and further behind the death rate. In another century.... That was why a desperate and secret attempt to alter the past was being made. This kind of world was evidently impossible. Max Alben finished the manuscript and sighed. What a wonderful world! What a comfortable place to live! He walked to the rear dials and began the process of materializing at the crucial moment on April 18, 1976. flick! It was odd, Mac Albin reflected, that these temporal journeys, which induced coma in everyone who tried it, only made him feel slightly dizzy. That was because he was descended from Giovanni Albeni, he knew. Maybe there was some genetic relationship with his above-average fertility—might be a good idea to mention the idea to a biologist or two when he returned. If he returned. All around the time machine, there was a soupy gray murk in which objects were hinted at rather than stated definitely. It reminded him of the problems of landing a helicopter in a thick fog when the robot butler had not been told to turn on the ground lights. According to the insulated register, he was now in 1976. He lowered speed until he registered April, then maneuvered slowly backward through time to the eighteenth, the day of the infamous Guided Missile Experiment. Carefully, carefully, like an obstetrician supervising surgical robots at an unusually difficult birth, he watched the register until it rolled to rest against the notch that indicated the exactly crucial moment. Then he pushed a button and froze the machine where it was. All he had to do now was materialize in the right spot, flash out and push the red switch from him. Then his exciting adventure would be over. But.... He paused and tapped at his sleek chin. He was supposed to do something a second before materialization. Yes, that nervous theoretician, Bob Skeat, had given him a last suggestion. He picked up the small metal box, twisted around to face the opening of the time machine and dropped it into the gray murk. A solid object floating near the opening attracted his attention. He shot his arm out—it was cold , as cold as they had figured—and pulled the object inside. A sealed metal cylinder. Strange. What was it doing out there? Anxiously, he opened it, not daring to believe he'd find a document inside. Yes, that was exactly what it was, he saw excitedly. He began to read it rapidly, very rapidly, as if it were a newly published paper on neutrinos. Besides, the manuscript was written with almost painful simplicity, like a textbook composed by a stuffy pedagogue for the use of morons. The problems all began with the Guided Missile Experiment of 1976, he read. There had been a number of such experiments, but it was the one of 1976 that finally did the damage the biologists had been warning about. The missile with its deadly warhead exploded in the Brazilian jungle through some absolutely unforgivable error in the remote-control station, the officer in charge of the station was reprimanded and the men under him court-martialed, and the Brazilian government was paid a handsome compensation for the damage. But there had been more damage than anyone knew at the time. A plant virus, similar to the tobacco mosaic, had mutated under the impact of radioactivity. Five years later, it burst out of the jungle and completely wiped out every last rice plant on Earth. Japan and a large part of Asia became semi-deserts inhabited by a few struggling nomads. Then the virus adjusted to wheat and corn—and famine howled in every street of the planet. All attempts by botanists to control the Blight failed because of the swiftness of its onslaught. And after it had fed, it hit again at a new plant and another and another. Most of the world's non-human mammals had been slaughtered for food long before they could starve to death. Many insects, too, before they became extinct at the loss of their edible plants, served to assuage hunger to some small extent. But the nutritive potential of Earth was steadily diminishing in a horrifying geometric progression. Recently, it had been observed, plankton—the tiny organism on which most of the sea's ecology was based—had started to disappear, and with its diminution, dead fish had begun to pile up on the beaches. Mankind had lunged out desperately in all directions in an effort to survive, but nothing had worked for any length of time. Even the other planets of the Solar System, which had been reached and explored at a tremendous cost in remaining resources, had yielded no edible vegetation. Synthetics had failed to fill the prodigious gap. In the midst of the sharply increasing hunger, social controls had pretty much dissolved. Pathetic attempts at rationing still continued, but black markets became the only markets, and black marketeers the barons of life. Starvation took the hindmost, and only the most agile economically lived in comparative comfort. Law and order were had only by those who could afford to pay for them and children of impoverished families were sold on the open market for a bit of food. But the Blight was still adjusting to new plants and the food supply kept shrinking. In another century.... That was why the planet's powerful individuals had been persuaded to pool their wealth in a desperate attempt to alter the past. This kind of world was manifestly impossible. Mac Albin finished the document and sighed. What a magnificent world! What an exciting place to live! He dropped his hand on the side levers and began the process of materializing at the crucial moment on April 18, 1976. flick! As the equipment of the remote-control station began to take on a blurred reality all around him, Max Alben felt a bit of fear at what he was doing. The technicians, he remembered, the Secretary-General, even the black market kings, had all warned him not to go ahead with his instructions if anything unusual turned up. That was an awful lot of power to disobey: he knew he should return with this new information and let better minds work on it. They with their easy lives, what did they know what existence had been like for such as he? Hunger, always hunger, scrabbling, servility, and more hunger. Every time things got really tight, you and your wife looking sideways at your kids and wondering which of them would bring the best price. Buying security for them, as he was now, at the risk of his life. But in this other world, this other 2089, there was a state that took care of you and that treasured your children. A man like himself, with five children—why, he'd be a big man, maybe the biggest man on Earth! And he'd have robots to work for him and lots of food. Above all, lots and lots of food. He'd even be a scientist— everyone was a scientist there, weren't they?—and he'd have a big laboratory all to himself. This other world had its troubles, but it was a lot nicer place than where he'd come from. He wouldn't return. He'd go through with it. The fear left him and, for the first time in his life, Max Alben felt the sensation of power. He materialized the time machine around the green instrument panel, sweating a bit at the sight of the roomful of military figures, despite the technicians' reassurances that all this would be happening too fast to be visible. He saw the single red switch pointing upward on the instrument panel. The switch that controlled the course of the missile. Now! Now to make a halfway decent world! Max Alben pulled the little red switch toward him. flick! As the equipment of the remote-control station began to oscillate into reality all around him, Mac Albin felt a bit of shame at what he was doing. He'd promised Bob and Hugo to drop the experiment at any stage if a new factor showed up. He knew he should go back with this new information and have all three of them kick it around. But what would they be able to tell him, they with their blissful adjustment to their thoroughly blueprinted lives? They, at least, had been ordered to marry women they could live with; he'd drawn a female with whom he was completely incompatible in any but a genetic sense. Genetics! He was tired of genetics and the sanctity of human life, tired to the tip of his uncalloused fingers, tired to the recesses of his unused muscles. He was tired of having to undertake a simple adventure like a thief in the night. But in this other world, this other 2089, someone like himself would be a monarch of the black market, a suzerain of chaos, making his own rules, taking his own women. So what if the weaklings, those unfit to carry on the race, went to the wall? His kind wouldn't. He'd formed a pretty good idea of the kind of men who ruled that other world, from the document in the sealed metal cylinder. The black marketeers had not even read it. Why, the fools had obviously been duped by the technicians into permitting the experiment; they had not grasped the idea that an alternate time track would mean their own non-existence. This other world had its troubles, but it was certainly a livelier place than where he'd come from. It deserved a chance. Yes, that was how he felt: his world was drowsily moribund; this alternate was starving but managing to flail away at destiny. It deserved a chance. Albin decided that he was experiencing renunciation and felt proud. He materialized the time machine around the green instrument panel, disregarding the roomful of military figures since he knew they could not see him. The single red switch pointed downward on the instrument panel. That was the gimmick that controlled the course of the missile. Now! Now to make a halfway interesting world! Mac Albin pushed the little red switch from him. flick! Now! Now to make a halfway decent world! Max Alben pulled the little red switch toward him. flick! Now! Now to make a halfway interesting world! Mac Albin pushed the little red switch from him. flick! ... pulled the little red switch toward him. flick! ... pushed the little red switch from him. flick! ... toward him. flick! ... from him. flick!

valid

51320

BREAK A LEG By JIM HARMON Illustrated by GAUGHAN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction November 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The man worth while couldn't be allowed to smile ... if he ever laughed at himself, the entire ship and crew were as good as dead! If there is anything I am afraid of, and there probably is, it is having a rookie Accident Prone, half-starved from the unemployment lines, aboard my spaceship. They are always so anxious to please. They remember what it is like to live in a rathole behind an apartment house furnace eating day-old bread and wilted vegetables, which doesn't compare favorably to the Admiralty-style staterooms and steak and caviar they draw down in the Exploration Service. You may wonder why anybody should make things so pleasant for a grownup who can't walk a city block without tripping over his own feet and who has a very low life expectancy on Earth due to the automobiles they are constantly stepping in front of and the live wires they are fond of picking up so the street won't be littered. The Admiralty, however, is a very thorough group of men. Before they open a planet to colonization or even fraternization, they insist on knowing just what they are up against. Accident Prones can find out what is wrong with a planet as easily as falling off a log, which they will if there is one lonely tree on the whole world. A single pit of quicksand on a veritable Eden of a planet and a Prone will be knee-deep in it within an hour of blastdown. If an alien race will smile patronizingly on your heroic attempts at genocide, but be offended into a murderous religious frenzy if you blow your nose, you can take the long end of the odds that the Prone will almost immediately catch a cold. All of this is properly recorded for the next expedition in the Admiralty files, and if it's any consolation, high officials and screen stars often visit you in the hospital. Charlie Baxter was like all of the other Prones, only worse. Moran III was sort of an unofficial test for him and he wanted to make good. We had blasted down in the black of night and were waiting for daylight to begin our re-survey of the planet. It was Charlie's first assignment, so we had an easy one—just seeing if anything new had developed in the last fifty years. Baxter's guard was doubled as soon as we set down, of course, and that made him fidgety. He had heard all the stories about how high the casualty rate was with Prones aboard spaceships and now he was beginning to get nervous. Actually Charlie was safer in space than he would be back on Earth with all those cars and people. We could have told him how the Service practically never lost a Prone—they were too valuable and rare to lose—but we did not want him to stop worrying. The precautions we took to safeguard him, the armed men who went with him everywhere, the Accident Prone First Aid Kit with spare parts for him, blood, eyes, bone, nerves, arms, legs, and so forth, only emphasized to him the danger, not the rigidly secured safety. We like it that way. No one knows what causes an accident prone. The big insurance companies on Earth discovered them when they found out in the last part of the nineteenth century that ninety per cent of the accidents were happening to a few per cent of the people. They soon found out that these people were not malingering or trying to defraud anybody; they simply had accidents. I suppose everything from psychology to extra-sensory perception has been used to explain or explain away prones. I have my own ideas. I think an accident prone is simply a super-genius with a super-doubt of himself. I believe accident prones have a better system of calculation than a cybernetic machine. They can take everything into consideration—the humidity, their blood sugar, the expression on the other guy's face—and somewhere in the corners and attic of their brain they infallibly make the right choice in any given situation. Then, because they are incapable of trusting themselves, they do exactly the opposite. I felt a little sorry for Charlie Baxter, but I was Captain of the Hilliard and my job was to keep him worried and trying. The worst thing that can happen is for a Prone to give up and let himself sink into the fate of being a Prone. He will wear the rut right down into a tomb. Accident Prones have to stay worried and thinking, trying to break out of the jinx that traps them. Usually they come to discover this themselves, but by then, if they are real professionals with a career in the Service, they have framed the right attitude and they keep it. Baxter was a novice and very much of an amateur at the game. He didn't like the scoring system, but he was attached to the equipment and didn't want to lose it. His clumsiness back on Earth had cost him every decent job he ever had. He had come all the way down the line until he was rated eligible only for the position of Prone aboard a spaceship. He had been poor—hungry, cold, wet, poor—and now he had luxury of a kind almost no one had in our era. He was drunk with it, passionately in love with it. It would cease to be quite so important after a few years of regular food, clean clothes and a solid roof to keep out the rain. But right now I knew he would come precariously close to killing to keep it. Or to being killed. He was ready to work. I knocked politely on his hatch and straightened my tunic. I have always admired the men who can look starched in a uniform. Mine always seemed to wrinkle as soon as I put them around my raw-boned frame. Sometimes it is hard for me to keep a military appearance or manner. I got my commission during the Crisis ten years back, because of my work in the reserve unit that I created out of my employees in the glass works (glassware blown to order for laboratories). Someone said something through the door and I went inside. Bronoski looked at me over the top of his picture tape from where he lay on the sofa. No one else was in the compartment. "Where is Baxter?" I asked the hulking guard. My eyes were on the sofa. My own bed pulled out of the wall and was considerably inferior to this, much less Baxter's bed in the next cabin. But then I am only a captain. Bronoski swung his feet off the couch and stood more or less in what I might have taken for attention if I hadn't known him better. "Sidney and Elliot escorted him down to the men's room, Captain Jackson." "You mean," I said very quietly, "that he isn't in his own bath?" "No sir," Bronoski said wearily. "He told us it was out of order." I stifled the gurgle of rage that came into my throat and motioned Bronoski to follow me. The engines on the Hilliard were more likely to be out of order than the plumbing in the Accident Prone's suite. No effort was spared to insure comfort for the key man in the whole crew. One glance inside the compartment at the end of the corridor satisfied me. There wasn't a thing wrong with the plumbing, so Baxter must have had something in mind. On a hunch of my own, I checked the supply lockers next to the airlock while Bronoski fired questions at my back. Three translator collars were missing. Baxter had left the spaceship and gone off into an alien night. Elliot and Sidney, the guards, were absolutely prohibited from interfering in any way with a Prone's decisions. They merely had to follow him and give their lives to save his, if necessary. I grabbed up a translator collar and tossed one to Bronoski. Then, just as we were getting into the airlock, I remembered something and ran back to the bridge. The thick brown envelope I had left on my desk was gone. I had shown it to Baxter and informed him that he should study it when he felt so inclined. He had seemed bored with the idea then, but he had come back for the report before leaving the ship. The envelope contained the exploration survey on Moran III made some fifty years before. I unlocked a desk drawer with my thumb print and drew out a duplicate of the report. I didn't have too much confidence in it and I hoped Charlie Baxter had less. Lots of things can change on a planet in fifty years, including its inhabitants. Bronoski picked up Baxter's tracks and those of the two guards, Elliot and Sidney, with ultra-violet light. They were cold splotches of green fire against the rotting black peat of the jungle path. The whole dark, tangled mess smelled of sour mash, an intoxicating bourbon-type aroma. I jogged along following the big man more by instinct than anything else, ruining my eyes in an effort to refresh my memory as to the contents of the survey report in the cheery little glow from my cigarette lighter. The lighter was beginning to feel hot to my fingers and I started to worry about radiation leak, although they are supposed to be guaranteed perfectly shielded. I read that before the last exploration party had left, they had made the Moranite natives blood brothers. Then Bronoski knocked me down. Actually he put his hands in the small of my back and shoved politely but firmly. Just the same, I went face down into the moist dirt fast enough. I raised my head cautiously to see if Bronoski would shove it back down. He didn't. I could see through the stringy, alcoholic grass fairly well and there were Baxter, Elliot and Sidney in the middle of a curious mob of aliens. Charlie Baxter had got pretty thin on his starvation diet back on Earth. He had grown a slight pot belly on the good food he drew down as Prone, but he was a fairly nice-looking young fellow. He looked even better in the pale moonlight, mixed amber and chartreuse from the twin satellites, and in contrast to the rest of the group. Elliot Charterson and Sidney Von Elderman were more or less type-cast as brawny, brainless bodyguards. Their friends described them as muscle-bound apes, but other people sometimes got insulting. The natives were less formidable. They made the slight lump of fat Charlie had at his waist look positively indecent. The natives were skinny . How skinny? Well, the only curves they had in their bodies were their bulging eyeballs. But just because they were thin didn't mean they were pushovers. Whips and garrotes aren't fat and these looked just as dangerous. Whenever I see aliens who are so humanoid, I remember all that Sunday supplement stuff about the Galaxy being colonized sometime by one humanlike race and the Ten Lost Tribes and so forth. They didn't give me much time to think about it just then. The natives looked unhappy—belligerently unhappy. I began to shake and at the same time to assure myself that I didn't have anything to worry about, that the precious Accident Prone would come out of it alive. After all, Elliot and Sidney were there to protect him. They had machine guns, flame-throwers, atomic grenades, and some really potent weapons. They could handle the situation. I didn't have a thing to worry about. So why couldn't I stop shaking? Maybe it was the way the natives were slowly but deliberately forming a circle about Charlie and his bodyguards. The clothing of the Moranites hadn't changed much, I noticed. That was understandable. They had a non-mechanical civilization with scattered colonies that it would take a terrestrial season to tour by animal cart. An isolated culture like that couldn't change many of its customs. Then Charlie shouldn't have any trouble if he stuck to the findings on behavior in the report. Naturally, that meant by now he had discovered the fatal error. The three men were just standing still, waiting for the aliens to make the first move. The natives looked just as worried as Charlie and his guards, but then that might have been their natural expression. I jumped a little when the natives all began to talk at once. The mixture of sound was fed to me through my translator collar while the cybernetic unit back on board the spaceship tried decoding the words. It was too much of an overload and, infuriatingly, the sound was cut out altogether. I started to rip my collar off when the natives stopped screeching and a spokesman stepped forward. The native slumped a little more than the others, as if he were more relaxed, and his eyes didn't goggle so much. He said, "We do not understand," and the translation came through fine. Baxter swallowed and started forward to meet the alien halfway. His boot slipped on the wet scrub grass and I saw him do the desperate little dance to regain his balance that I had seen him make so many times; he could never stay on his feet. Before he could perform his usual pratfall, Sidney and Elliot were at his sides, supporting him by his thin biceps. He glared at them and shrugged them off, informing them wordlessly that he would have regained his balance if they had given him half a chance. "We do not understand," the native repeated. "Do you hold us in so much contempt as to claim all of us as your brothers?" "All beings are brothers," Charlie said. "We were made blood brothers by your people and my people several hundred of your years ago." Charlie's words were being translated into the native language, of course, but Bronoski's collars and mine switched them back into Terrestrial. I've read stories where explorers wearing translators couldn't understand each other, but that isn't the way it works. If you listen closely, you make out the words in your own language underneath, and if you pay very close attention, you can find minor semantic differences in the original words and the echo translated back from a native language. I was trying to catch both versions from Charlie. I knew he was making a mistake and later I wanted to be sure I knew just what it was. Frankly, I would have used the blood-brother gambit myself. I had also read about it in the survey report, as I made a point of telling you. This just proves that Accident Prones haven't secured the franchise on mistakes. The difference is that I would have gone about it a lot more cautiously. "Enough of this," the native said sharply. "Do you claim to be my brother?" "Sure," Charlie said. Dispassionately but automatically, the alien launched himself at the Prone's throat. Charterson and Von Elderman instantly went into action. Elliot Charterson jumped to Charlie's assistance while Sidney Von Elderman swung around to protect Charlie from the rest of the crowd. But the defense didn't work. The other aliens didn't try to get to Baxter, but when they saw Elliot start to interfere with the two writhing opponents, they clawed him down into the grass. Sidney had been set to defend the Prone, not his fellow guard. They might have been all right if he had pulled a few off Elliot and let him get to work, except his training told him that the life of a guard did not matter a twit, but that a Prone must be defended. He started toward Charlie Baxter and was immediately pulled down by a spare dozen of the mob. It all meant one thing to me. The reaction of the crowd had been spontaneous, not planned. That meant that the struggle between Charlie and the spokesman was a high order of single combat with which it was unholy, indecent and dastardly to interfere. I could fairly hear Bronoski's steel muscles preparing for battle as he saw his two mammoth pals go down under the press of numbers. A bristle-covered bullet of skull rose out of the grass beside me and it was my turn to grind his face in the muck. I had a nice little problem to contend with. I knew the reason Baxter had slipped out at night to be the first to greet the aliens. He was determined to be useful and necessary without fouling things up. I suppose Charlie had never felt valuable to anyone before in his life, but at the same time it hurt him to think that he was valuable only because he was a misfit. He had decided to take a positive approach. If he did things right, that would be as good proof of conditions as if he made the mistakes he was supposed to do. But he couldn't lick that doubt of himself that had been ground into him since birth and there he was, in trouble as always. Now maybe Bronoski and I could get him out ourselves by a direct approach, but Charlie would probably lose all self-confidence and sink down into accepting himself as an Accident Prone, a purely passive state. We couldn't have that. We had to have Charlie acting and thinking and therefore making mistakes whose bad examples we could profit by. As I lay on my belly thinking, Charlie was putting up a pretty good fight with the stringy native. He got in a few good punches, which seemed to mystify the native, who apparently knew nothing of boxing. Naturally Charlie then began wrestling a trained and deadly wrestler instead of continuing to box him. I grabbed Bronoski by his puffy ear and hissed some commands into it. He fumbled out a book of matches and lit one for me. By the tiny flicker of light, I began tearing apart my lighter. I suppose you have played "tickling the dragon's tail" when you were a kid. I did. I guess all kids have. You know, worrying around two lumps of fissionable material and just keeping them from uniting and making a critical mass that will result in an explosion or lethal radiation. I caught my oldest boy doing it one day back on Earth and gave him a good tanning for it. Actually I thought it showed he had a lot of grit. Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail. Maybe I was a little old for it, but that's what I was doing there in the Moran III jungle. I got the shield off my cigarette lighter and jerked out the dinky little damper rods for the pile and started easing the two little bricks toward each other with the point of my lead pencil. I heard something that resembled a death rattle come from Charlie's throat as the fingers of the alien closed down on it and my hand twitched. A blooming light stabbed at my eyes and I flicked the lighter away from me. The explosion was a dud. It lit up the jungle for a radius of half a mile like a giant flashbulb, but it exploded only about ten times as loud as a pistol shot. The mass hadn't been slapped together hard enough or held long enough to do any real damage. The natives weren't fools, though. They got out of there fast. I wished I could have gone with them. There was undoubtedly an unhealthy amount of radiation hanging around. "Now!" I told Bronoski. He ran into the clearing and found four bodies sprawled out: Charlie Baxter, his two guards and the native spokesman. Charlie and the native were both technically unconscious, but they each had a stranglehold on each other, with Charlie getting the worst of it. Bronoski pried the two of them apart. While he roused Sidney and Elliot from their punch-drunk state, I examined Charlie. He had a nasty burn on his leg and two toes were gone. If there was an explosion anywhere around, he was bound to be in front of it. He was abruptly choking and blinking watery eyes. "You did it, Charlie," I lied. "You beat him fair and square." Charlie was in bed for the next few days while his grafted toes grew on, but he didn't seem to mind. We knew enough not to use the blood-brothers approach after fifty years and therefore it did not take us long to find out why we shouldn't. The Moran III culture was isolated in small colonies, but we had forgotten that a generation of the intelligent life-forms was only three Earth months. It seems a waste at first thought, but all things are relative. The Crystopeds of New Lichtenstein, for instance, have a life span of twenty thousand Terrestrial years. With so fast a turnover in Moran III individuals, there was bound to be a lot of variables introduced, resulting in change. The idea that seemed to be in favor was the survival of the fittest. Since the natives were born in litters, with single births extremely rare, this concept was practiced from the first. Unless they were particularly cunning, the runts of the litter did not survive the first year and rarely more than one sibling ever saw adulthood. Obviously, to claim to be a native's brother was to challenge him to a test of survival. My men learned to call themselves Last Brother in the usual bragging preliminaries that preceded every encounter. We got pretty good results with that approach and learned a lot about the changes in customs in the half century. But finally one of the men—either Frank Peirmonte or Sidney Charterson, who both claim to be the one—thought of calling the crew a Family and right away we began hitting it off famously. The Moranites figured we would kill each other off all except maybe one, whom they could handle themselves. They still had folk legends about the previous visit of Earthmen and they didn't trust us. Charlie Baxter's original mistake had supplied us with the Rosetta Stone we needed. Doctor Selby told me Charlie could get up finally, so I went to his suite and shook hands with him as he still lay in bed. I waited for the big moment when Charlie would be on his feet again and we could get on with the re-survey of the planet. "Here goes," Charlie said and threw back his sheet. He swung his legs around and tottered to his feet. He was a little weak, but he took a few steps and seemed to make it okay. Then the inevitable happened. He snagged the edge of one of the Persian carpets on the bedroom floor with his big toe and started to fall. Selby and I both dived forward to catch him, but instead of doing the arm-waving dance for balance that we were both used to, he seemed to go limp and he plopped on the floor like a wet fish. Immediately he jumped to his feet, grinning. "I finally learned to go limp when I take a fall, sir. It took a lot of practice. I imagine I'll save some broken bones that way." "Yes," I said uneasily. "You have been thinking about this quite a lot while you lay there, haven't you, Baxter?" "Yes, sir. I see I've been fighting this thing too hard. I am an Accident Prone and I might as well accept it. Why not? I seem to always muddle through some way, like out there in the jungle, so why should I worry or feel embarrassed ? I know I can't change it." I was beginning to do some worrying of my own. Things weren't working out the way they should. We were supposed to see that Prones kept developing a certain amount of doomed self-confidence, but they couldn't be allowed to believe they were infallible Prones. A Prone's value lies in his active and constructive effort to do the right thing. If he merely accepts being a Prone, his accidents gain us nothing. We can't profit from mistakes that come about from resignation or laughing off blunders or, as in this case, conviction that he never got himself into anything he couldn't get himself out of. "Doctor Selby, would you excuse us?" I asked. The medic left with a bow and a surly expression. I turned to Baxter, rather wishing Selby could have stayed. It was a labor dispute and I was used to having a mediator present at bargaining sessions at my glassworks. But this was a military, not a civilian, spaceship. "I have some facts of life to give you, Baxter," I told him. "It is your duty to actively fulfill your position. You have to make decisions and plan courses of action. Do you figure on just walking around in that jungle until a tree falls on you?" He sat down on the edge of the bed and examined the pattern in the carpet. "Not exactly, sir. But I get tired of people waiting for me to make a fool out of myself. I have a natural talent for—for Creative Negativism . That's it. And I should be able to exercise my talent with dignity ." "If you don't actively fulfill the obligations of a Prone, you aren't allowed the luxuries and privileges that go with the position. Do you think you would like to be without your armed guards to protect you every moment?" "I can take care of myself, sir!" I paused and came up with my best argument. "How would you like to live like an ordinary spaceman, without rare steaks and clean sheets? Because if you're not our Accident Prone, you're just another crew member, you know." That one hurt him, but I saw I had put it to him as a challenge and he must have had some guilt feelings about accepting all that luxury for being nothing more than he was. "I could fulfill the duties of an ordinary spaceman, sir." I snorted. "It takes skill and training, Baxter. Your papers entitle you to one position and one only anywhere—Accident Prone of a spaceship complement. If you refuse to do your duties in that post, you can only become a ward of the Galaxy." His jaw line firmed. He had gone through a lot to keep from taking such abject charity. "Isn't there," he asked in a milder tone, " any other position I could serve in on this ship, sir?" I studied his face a moment. "We had to blast off without an Assistant Pile Driver, j.g. It keeps getting harder and harder to recruit an APD, j.g. I suppose it's those reports about the eventual fatalities due to radiation leak back there where they are stationed." Baxter looked back at me steadily. "There are a lot of rumors about the high mortality rate among Accident Prones in space, too." He was right. We had started the rumors. We wanted the Prones alert, active and scheming to stay alive. More beneficial accidents that way. Actually, most Prones died of old age in space, which is more than could be said of them on Earth, where they didn't have the kind of protection the Service gives them. "Look here, Baxter, do you like your quarters on this ship?" I demanded. "You mean this master bedroom, the private heated swimming pool, the tennis court, bowling alley and all? Yes, sir, I like it." "The Assistant Pile Driver has a cot near the fuel tanks." He gazed off over my left shoulder. "I had a bed behind the furnace back on Earth before the building I was working in burned down." "You wouldn't like this one any better than the one before." "But there I would have some chance of advancement . I don't want to be stuck in the rank of Accident Prone for life." I stared at him in frank amazement. "Baxter, the only rank getting higher pay or more privileges than Prone is Grand Admiral of the Services, a position it would take you at least fifty years to reach if you had the luck and brains to make it, which you haven't." "I had something more modest in mind, sir. Like being a captain." He surely must have known how I lived in comparison to him, so I didn't bother to remind him. I said, "Have you ever seen a case of radiation poisoning?" Baxter's jaw thrust forward. "It must be pretty bad—but it isn't as violent as being eaten by floating fungi or being swallowed in an earthquake on some airless satellite." "No," I agreed, "it is much slower than any of those. It is unfortunate that we don't carry the necessary supplies to take care of Pile Drivers. Most of our medical supplies are in the Accident Prone First Aid Kit, for the exclusive use of the Prone. Have you ever taken a good look at that?" Baxter shivered. "Yes, I've seen it. Several drums of blood, Type AB, my type. A half-dozen fresh-frozen assorted arms and legs, several rows of eyes, a hundred square feet of graftable skin, and a well-stocked tank of inner organs and a double-doored bank of nerve lengths. Impressive." I smiled. "Sort of gives you a feeling of confidence and security, doesn't it? It would be unfortunate for anyone who had a great many accidents to be denied the supplies in that Kit, I should think. Of course, it is available only to those filling the position of Accident Prone and doing the work faithfully and according to orders." "Yes, sir," Charlie mumbled. "Selby is your personal physician, you realize," I drove on. "He takes care of the rest of us only if he has time left over from you. Why, when I was having my two weeks in the summer as an Ensign, I had to lie for half an hour with a crushed foot while the doctor sprayed our Prone's throat to guard against infection. Let me tell you, I was in quite a bit of pain." Charlie's pale eyes narrowed as if he had just made a sudden discovery, perhaps about the relationship between us. "You don't make as much money as I do, do you, sir? You don't have a valet? And your bed folds into the bulkhead?" I thought he was at last beginning to get it. "Yes," I said. He stood sharply to attention. "Request transfer to position of Assistant Pile Driver, j.g., sir." I barely halted a groan. He thought I resented him and was deliberately holding him down into the miserable overpaid, overfed job that was beneath him and the talents that so fitted him for the job. "Request granted." He would learn. He had better. I started to sweat in a gush. He had really better.

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51395

SURVIVAL TYPE By J. F. BONE Illustrated by KIRBERGER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction March 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Score one or one million was not enough for the human race. It had to be all or nothing ... with one man doing every bit of scoring! Arthur Lanceford slapped futilely at the sith buzzing hungrily around his head. The outsized eight-legged parody of a mosquito did a neat half roll and zoomed out of range, hanging motionless on vibrating wings a few feet away. A raindrop staggered it momentarily, and for a fleeting second, Lanceford had the insane hope that the arthropod would fall out of control into the mud. If it did, that would be the end of it, for Niobian mud was as sticky as flypaper. But the sith righted itself inches short of disaster, buzzed angrily and retreated to the shelter of a nearby broadleaf, where it executed another half roll and hung upside down, watching its intended meal with avid anticipation. Lanceford eyed the insect distastefully as he explored his jacket for repellent and applied the smelly stuff liberally to his face and neck. It wouldn't do much good. In an hour, his sweat would remove whatever the rain missed—but for that time, it should discourage the sith. As far as permanent discouraging went, the repellent was useless. Once one of those eight-legged horrors checked you off, there were only two possible endings to the affair—either you were bitten or you killed the critter. It was as simple as that. He had hoped that he would be fast enough to get the sith before it got him. He had been bitten once already and the memory of those paralyzed three minutes while the bloodsucker fed was enough to last him for a lifetime. He readjusted his helmet, tucking its fringe of netting beneath his collar. The netting, he reflected gloomily, was like its owner—much the worse for wear. However, this trek would be over in another week and he would be able to spend the next six months at a comfortable desk job at the Base, while some other poor devil did the chores of field work. He looked down the rain-swept trail winding through the jungle. Niobe—a perfect name for this wet little world. The Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration couldn't have picked a better, but the funny thing about it was that they hadn't picked it in the first place. Niobe was the native word for Earth, or perhaps "the world" would be a more accurate definition. It was a coincidence, of course, but the planet and its mythological Greek namesake had much in common. Niobe, like Niobe, was all tears—a world of rain falling endlessly from an impenetrable overcast, fat wet drops that formed a grieving background sound that never ceased, sobbing with soft mournful noises on the rubbery broadleaves, crying with obese splashes into forest pools, blubbering with loud, dismal persistence on the sounding board of his helmet. And on the ground, the raindrops mixed with the loesslike soil of the trail to form a gluey mud that clung in huge pasty balls to his boots. Everywhere there was water, running in rivulets of tear-streaks down the round cheeks of the gently sloping land—rivulets that merged and blended into broad shallow rivers that wound their mourners' courses to the sea. Trekking on Niobe was an amphibious operation unless one stayed in the highlands—a perpetual series of fords and river crossings. And it was hot, a seasonless, unchanging, humid heat that made a protection suit an instrument of torture that slowly boiled its wearer in his own sweat. But the suit was necessary, for exposed human flesh was irresistible temptation to Niobe's bloodsucking insects. Many of these were no worse than those of Earth, but a half dozen species were deadly. The first bite sensitized. The second killed—anaphylactic shock, the medics called it. And the sith was one of the deadly species. Lanceford shrugged fatalistically. Uncomfortable as a protection suit was, it was better to boil in it than die without it. He looked at Kron squatting beside the trail and envied him. It was too bad that Earthmen weren't as naturally repellent to insects as the dominant native life. Like all Niobians, the native guide wore no clothing—ideal garb for a climate like this. His white, hairless hide, with its faint sheen of oil, was beautifully water-repellent. Kron, Lanceford reflected, was a good example of the manner in which Nature adapts the humanoid form for survival on different worlds. Like the dominant species on every intelligent planet in the explored galaxy, he was an erect, bipedal, mammalian being with hands that possessed an opposable thumb. Insofar as that general description went, Kron resembled humanity—but there were differences. Squatting, the peculiar shape of Kron's torso and the odd flexibility of his limbs were not apparent. One had the tendency to overlook the narrow-shouldered, cylindrical body and the elongated tarsal and carpal bones that gave his limbs four major articulations rather than the human three, and to concentrate upon the utterly alien head. It jutted forward from his short, thick neck, a long-snouted, vaguely doglike head with tiny ears lying close against the hairless, dome-shaped cranium. Slitlike nostrils, equipped with sphincter muscles like those of a terrestrial seal, argued an originally aquatic environment, and the large intelligent eyes set forward in the skull to give binocular vision, together with the sharp white carnassial teeth and pointed canines, indicated a carnivorous ancestry. But the modern Niobians, although excellent swimmers, were land dwellers and ate anything. Lanceford couldn't repress an involuntary shudder at some of the things they apparently enjoyed. Tastes differed—enormously so between Earthmen and Niobians. There was no doubt that the native was intelligent, yet he, like the rest of his race, was a technological moron. It was strange that a race which had a well-developed philosophy and an amazing comprehension of semantics could be so backward in mechanics. Even the simpler of the BEE's mechanisms left the natives confused. It was possible that they could learn about machinery, but Lanceford was certain that it would take a good many years before the first native mechanic would set up a machine shop on this planet. Lanceford finished tucking the last fold of face net under his collar, and as he did so, Kron stood up, rising to his five-foot height with a curious flexible grace. Standing, he looked something like a double-jointed alabaster Anubis—wearing swim fins. His broad, webbed feet rested easily on the surface of the mud, their large area giving him flotation that Lanceford envied. As a result, his head was nearly level with that of the human, although there was better than a foot difference in their heights. Lanceford looked at Kron inquiringly. "You have a place in mind where we can sleep tonight?" "Sure, Boss. We'll be coming to hunthouse soon. We go now?" "Lead on," Lanceford said, groaning silently to himself—another hunthouse with its darkness and its smells. He shrugged. He could hardly expect anything else up here in the highlands. Oh, well, he'd managed to last through the others and this one could be no worse. At that, even an airless room full of natives was preferable to spending a night outside. And the sith wouldn't follow them. It didn't like airless rooms filled with natives. He sighed wearily as he followed Kron along the dim path through the broadleaf jungle. Night was coming, and with darkness, someone upstairs turned on every faucet and the sheets of rain that fell during the day changed abruptly into a deluge. Even the semi-aquatic natives didn't like to get caught away from shelter during the night. The three moved onward, immersed in a drumming wilderness of rain—the Niobian sliding easily over the surface of the mud, the Earthman plowing painfully through it, and the sith flitting from the shelter of one broadleaf to the next, waiting for a chance to feed. The trail widened abruptly, opening upon one of the small clearings that dotted the rain-forest jungle. In the center of the clearing, dimly visible through the rain and thickening darkness, loomed the squat thatch-roofed bulk of a hunthouse, a place of shelter for the members of the hunters' guild who provided fresh meat for the Niobian villages. Lanceford sighed a mingled breath of relief and unpleasant anticipation. As he stepped out into the clearing, the sith darted from cover, heading like a winged bullet for Lanceford's neck. But the man was not taken by surprise. Pivoting quickly, he caught the iridescent blur of the bloodsucker's wings. He swung his arm in a mighty slap. The high-pitched buzz and Lanceford's gloved hand met simultaneously at his right ear. The buzz stopped abruptly. Lanceford shook his head and the sith fell to the ground, satisfactorily swatted. Lanceford grinned—score one for the human race. He was still grinning as he pushed aside the fiber screen closing the low doorway of the hunthouse and crawled inside. It took a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom within, but his nose told him even before his eyes that the house was occupied. The natives, he thought wryly, must be born with no sense of smell, otherwise they'd perish from sheer propinquity. One could never honestly say that familiarity with the odor of a Niobian bred contempt—nausea was the right word. The interior was typical, a dark rectangle of windowless limestone walls enclosing a packed-dirt floor and lined with a single deck of wooden sleeping platforms. Steeply angled rafters of peeled logs intersected at a knife-sharp ridge pierced with a circular smokehole above the firepit in the center of the room. Transverse rows of smaller poles lashed to the rafters supported the thick broadleaf thatch that furnished protection from the rain and sanctuary for uncounted thousands of insects. A fire flickered ruddily in the pit, hissing as occasional drops of rain fell into its heart from the smokehole, giving forth a dim light together with clouds of smoke and steam that rose upward through the tangled mass of greasy cobwebs filling the upper reaches of the rafters. Some of the smoke found its way through the smokehole, but most of it hung in an acrid undulating layer some six feet above the floor. The glow outlined the squatting figures of a dozen or so natives clustered around the pit, watching the slowly rotating carcass of a small deerlike rodent called a sorat, which was broiling on a spit above the flames. Kron was already in the ring, talking earnestly to one of the hunters—a fellow-tribesman, judging from the tattoo on his chest. To a Niobian, the scene was ordinary, but to Lanceford it could have been lifted bodily from the inferno. He had seen it before, but the effect lost nothing by repetition. There was a distinctly hellish quality to it—to the reds and blacks of the flickering fire and the shadows. He wouldn't have been particularly surprised if Satan himself appeared in the center of the firepit complete with horns, hoofs and tail. A hunthouse, despite its innocuousness, looked like the southeast corner of Hades. Clustered around the fire, the hunters turned to look at him curiously and, after a single eye-filling stare, turned back again. Niobians were almost painfully polite. Although Earthmen were still enough of a curiosity to draw attention, one searching look was all their customs allowed. Thereafter, they minded their own business. In some ways, Lanceford reflected, native customs had undeniable merit. Presently Kron rose from his place beside the fire and pointed out two empty sleeping platforms where they would spend the night. Lanceford chose one and sank wearily to its resilient surface. Despite its crude construction, a Niobian sleeping platform was comfortable. He removed his pack, pulled off his mud-encrusted boots and lay back with a grunt of relaxation. After a day like this, it was good to get off his feet. Weariness flowed over him. He awoke to the gentle pressure of Kron's hand squeezing his own. "The food is cooked," the Niobian said, "and you are welcomed to share it." Lanceford nodded, his stomach crawling with unpleasant anticipation. A native meal was something he would prefer to avoid. His digestive system could handle the unsavory mess, but his taste buds shrank from the forthcoming assault. What the natives classed as a delicate and elusive flavor was sheer torture to an Earthman. Possibly there was some connection between their inefficient olfactory apparatus and their odd ideas of flavor, but whatever the physical explanation might be, it didn't affect the fact that eating native food was an ordeal. Yet he couldn't refuse. That would be discourteous and offensive, and one simply didn't offend the natives. The BEE was explicit about that. Courtesy was a watchword on Niobe. He took a place by the fire, watching with concealed distaste as one of the hunters reached into the boiling vat beside the firepit with a pair of wooden tongs and drew forth the native conception of a hors d'oeuvre. They called it vorkum—a boiled sorat paunch stuffed with a number of odorous ingredients. It looked almost as bad as it smelled. The hunter laid the paunch on a wooden trencher, scraped the greenish scum from its surface and sliced it open. The odor poured out, a gagging essence of decaying vegetables, rotten eggs and overripe cheese. Lanceford's eyes watered, his stomach tautened convulsively, but the Niobians eyed the reeking semi-solid eagerly. No meal on Niobe was considered worthy of the name unless a generous helping of vorkum started it off. An entree like that could ruin the most rugged human appetite, but when it was the forerunner of a main dish of highly spiced barbecue, vorkum assumed the general properties of an emetic. Lanceford grimly controlled the nausea and tactfully declined the greasy handful which Kron offered. The Niobian never seemed to learn. At every meal they had eaten during their past month of travel on Niobe, Kron had persistently offered him samples of the mess. With equal persistence, he had refused. After all, there were limits. But polite convention required that he eat something, so he took a small portion of the barbecued meat and dutifully finished it. The hunters eyed him curiously, apparently wondering how an entity who could assimilate relatively untasty sorat should refuse the far greater delicacy of vorkum. But it was a known fact that the ways of Earthmen were strange and unaccountable. The hunters didn't protest when he retired to his sleeping platform and the more acceptable concentrates from his pack. His hunger satisfied, he lay back on the resilient vines and fell into a sleep of exhaustion. It had been a hard day. Lanceford's dreams were unpleasant. Nightmare was the usual penalty of sitting in on a Niobian meal and this one was worse than usual. Huge siths, reeking of vorkum, pursued him as he ran naked and defenseless across a swampy landscape that stretched interminably ahead. The clinging mud reduced his speed to a painful crawl as he frantically beat off the attacks of the blood-suckers. The climax was horror. One of the siths slipped through his frantically beating hands and bit him on the face. The shocking pain of the bite wakened him, a cry of terror and anguish still on his lips. He looked around wildly. He was still in the hunthouse. It was just a dream. He chuckled shakily. These nightmares sometimes were too real for comfort. He was drenched with sweat, which was not unusual, but there was a dull ache in his head and the hot tense pain that encompassed the right side of his face had not been there when he had fallen asleep. He touched his face with a tentative finger, exploring the hot puffiness and the enormously swollen ear with a gentle touch. It was where he had struck the sith, but surely he couldn't have hit that hard. He gasped, a soft breath of dismay, as realization dawned. He had smashed the sith hard enough to squeeze some of the insect's corrosive body juices through his face net—and they had touched his skin! That wouldn't normally have been bad, but the sith bite he had suffered a week ago had sensitized him. He was developing an anaphylactic reaction—a severe one, judging from the swelling. That was the trouble with exploration; one occasionally forgot that a world was alien. Occasionally danger tended to recede into a background of familiarity—he had smashed the sith before it had bitten him, so therefore it couldn't hurt him. He grimaced painfully, the movement bringing another twinge to his swollen face. He should have known better. He swore mildly as he opened his Aid Kit and extracted a sterile hypo. The super-antihistamine developed by the Bureau was an unpredictable sort of thing. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. He removed the screw cap that sealed the needle and injected the contents of the syringe into his arm. He hoped that this was one of the times the drug worked. If it wasn't, he reflected grimly, he wouldn't be long for this world. He sighed and lay back. There wasn't anything more to do now. All he could do was wait and see if the anti-allergen worked. The Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration had discovered Niobe barely three years ago, yet already the planet was famous not only for its peculiar climate, but also for the number of men who had died upon its watery surface. Knowledge of this planet was bought with life, grim payment to decrease the lag between discovery and the day men could live and work on Niobe without having to hide beneath domes or behind protection suits. Lanceford never questioned the necessity or the inevitable price that must be paid. Like every other BEE agent, he knew that Niobe was crash priority—a world that had to be understood in minimum time. For Niobe was a made to order herbarium for a swampland plant called viscaya. The plant was originally native to Algon IV, but had been spread to practically every suitable growth center in the Galaxy. It was the source of a complex of alkaloids known as gerontin, and gerontin had the property of tripling or quadrupling the normal life span of mammals. It was obvious that viscayaculture should have a tremendous distribution throughout the Confederation worlds. But unfortunately the right conditions existed in very few places in the explored galaxy. Despite the fact that most life is based on carbon, oxygen and water, there is still very little free water in the Galaxy. Most planets of the Confederation are semi-arid, with the outstanding exceptions of Terra and Lyrane. But these two worlds were the seats of human and humanoid power for so long that all of their swampland had been drained and reclaimed centuries ago. And it was doubly unfortunate that gerontin so far defied synthesis. According to some eminent chemists, the alkaloid would probably continue to do so until some facet of the Confederation reached a Class VIII culture level. Considering that Terra and Lyrane, the two highest cultures, were only Class VII, and that Class level steps took several thousands of years to make, a policy of waiting for synthesis was not worth considering. The result was that nobody was happy until Niobe was discovered. The price of illicit gerontin was astronomical and most of the Confederation's supply of the drug was strictly rationed to those whom the government thought most valuable to the Confederation as a whole. Of course, the Confederation officialdom was included, which caused considerable grumbling. In the nick of time, Niobe appeared upon the scene, and Niobe had environment in abundance! The wheels of the Confederation began to turn. The BEE was given a blank check and spurred on by a government which, in turn, was being spurred on by the people who composed it. The exploration of Niobe proceeded at all possible speed. With so many considerations weighed against them, what did a few lives matter? For the sake of the billions of humanoids in the Confederation, their sacrifice was worthwhile even if only a few days or hours were saved between discovery and exploitation. Lanceford groaned as a violent pain shot through his head. The anti-allergin apparently wasn't going to work, for it should have had some effect by now. He shrugged mentally—it was the chance one took in this business. But he couldn't say that he hadn't been warned. Even old Sims had told him, called him a unit in the BEE's shortcut trial and error scheme—an error, it looked like now. Seemed rather silly—a Class VII civilization using techniques that were old during the Dark Ages before the Atomic Revolution, sending foot parties to explore a world in the chance that they might discover something that the search mechs missed—anything that would shorten the lag time. It was incomprehensible, but neither Sims nor the BEE would do a thing like this without reason. And whatever it was, he wasn't going to worry about it. In fact, there wasn't much time left to worry. The reaction was observably and painfully worse. It was important that the news of his death and the specimens he had collected get back to Base Alpha. They might have value in this complex game Alvord Sims was playing with men, machines and Niobe. But Base Alpha was a good hundred miles away and, in his present condition, he couldn't walk a hundred feet. For a moment, he considered setting up the powerful little transmitter he carried in his pack, but his first abortive motion convinced him it was useless. The blinding agony that swept through him at the slightest movement left no doubt that he would never finish the business of setting up the antenna, let alone send a message. It was a crime that handie-talkies couldn't be used here on Niobe, but their range, limited at best, was practically nonexistent on a planet that literally seemed to be one entire "dead spot." A fixed-frequency job broadcasting on a directional beam was about the only thing that could cover distance, and that required a little technical know-how to set up the antenna and focus it on Base Alpha. There would be no help from Kron. Despite his intelligence, the native could no more assemble a directional antenna than spread pink wings and fly. There was only one thing to do—get a note off to Sims, if he could still write, and ask Kron to deliver the note and his pack to the Base. He fumbled with his jacket, and with some pain produced a stylus and a pad. But it was difficult to write. Painful, too. Better get Kron over here while he could still talk and tell him what he wanted. The stylus slipped from numb fingers as Lanceford called hoarsely, "Kron! Come here! I need you!" Kron looked down compassionately at the swollen features of the Earthman. He had seen the kef effect before, among the young of his people who were incautious or inexperienced, but he had never seen it among the aliens. Surprisingly, the effects were the same—the livid swellings, the gasping breath, the pain. Strange how these foreigners reacted like his own people. He scratched his head and pulled thoughtfully at one of his short ears. It was his duty to help Lanceford, but how could he? The Earthman had denied his help for weeks, and Niobians simply didn't disregard another's wishes. Kron scowled, the action lending a ferocious cast to his doglike face. Tolerance was a custom hallowed by ages of practice. It went to extremes—even with life at stake, a person's wishes and beliefs must be respected. Kron buried his long-snouted head in his hands, a gesture that held in it all the frustration which filled him. The human was apparently resolved to die. He had told Kron his last wishes, which didn't include a request for help, but merely to get his pack back to the others in their glass dome. It was astonishing that such an obviously intelligent species should have so little flexibility. They didn't understand the first principles of adaptation. Always and forever, they held to their own ways, trying with insensate stubbornness to mold nature to their will—and when nature overcome their artificial defenses, they died, stubborn, unregenerate, inflexible to the end. They were odd, these humans—odd and a little frightening. Lanceford breathed wheezily. The swelling had invaded the inner tissues of his throat and was beginning to compress his windpipe. It was uncomfortable, like inhaling liquid fire, and then there was the constant desire to cough and the physical inability to do so. "Dirty luck," he whispered. "Only a week more and I'd have had it made—the longest trek a man's made on this benighted planet." Kron nodded, but then belatedly realized that the human was muttering to himself. He listened. There might be something important in these dying murmurings, something that might explain their reasons for being here and their strange driving haste that cared nothing for life. "It's hard to die so far from one's people, but I guess that can't be helped. Old Sims gave me the score. Like he said, a man doesn't have much choice of where he dies in the BEE." "You don't want to die!" Kron exploded. "Of course not," Lanceford said with weak surprise. He hadn't dreamed that Kron was nearby. This might well destroy the Imperturbable Earthman myth that the BEE had fostered. "Not even if it is in accord with your customs and rituals?" "What customs?" "Your clothing, your eating habits, your ointments—are these not part of your living plan?" Despite the pain that tore at his throat, Lanceford managed a chuckle. This was ridiculous. "Hell, no! Our only design for living is to stay alive, particularly on jobs like this one. We don't wear these suits and repellent because we like to. We do it to stay alive. If we could, we'd go around nearly as naked as you do." "Do you mind if I help you?" Kron asked diffidently. "I think I can cure you." He leaned forward anxiously to get the man's reply. "I'd take a helping hand from the devil himself, if it would do any good." Kron's eyes were brilliant. He hummed softly under his breath, the Niobian equivalent of laughter. "And all the time we thought—" he began, and then broke off abruptly. Already too much time was wasted without losing any more in meditating upon the ironies of life. He turned toward the firepit, searched for a moment among the stones, nodded with satisfaction and returned to where Lanceford lay. The hunthouse was deserted save for himself and the Earthman. With characteristic Niobian delicacy, the hunters had left, preferring to endure the night rain than be present when the alien died. Kron was thankful that they were gone, for what he was about to do would shock their conservative souls. Lanceford was dimly conscious of Kron prying his swollen jaws apart and forcing something wet and slippery down his throat. He swallowed, the act a tearing pain to the edematous membranes of his gullet, but the stuff slid down, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. The act triggered another wave of pain that left him weak and gasping. He couldn't take much more of this. It wouldn't be long now before the swelling invaded his lungs to such a degree that he would strangle. It wasn't a pleasant way to die. And then, quite suddenly, the pain eased. A creeping numbness spread like a warm black blanket over his outraged nervous system. The stuff Kron had given him apparently had some anesthetic properties. He felt dimly grateful, even though the primitive native nostrum would probably do no good other than to ease the pain. The blackness went just far enough to paralyze the superficial areas of his nervous system. It stopped the pain and left him unable to move, but the deeper pathways of thought and reason remained untouched. He was conscious, although no external sensation intruded on his thoughts. He couldn't see Kron—the muscles that moved his eyes were as paralyzed as the other muscles of his body and the native was outside his field of vision—but somehow he knew exactly what the Niobian was doing. He was washing mucus from his hands in a bowl of water standing beside the fire pit and he was wondering wryly whether forced feeding was on the list of human tabus ! Lanceford's mind froze, locked in a peculiar contact that was more than awareness. The sensation was indescribable. It was like looking through an open door into the living room of a stranger's house. He was aware of the incredible complexity and richness of Kron's thoughts, of oddly sardonic laughter, of pity and regret that such a little thing as understanding should cause death and suffering through its lack, of bewildered admiration for the grim persistence of the alien Earthmen, mixed with a wondering curiosity about what kept them here—what the true reasons were for their death-defying persistence and stubbornness—of an ironic native paraphrase for the Terran saying, "Every man to his own taste," and a profound speculation upon what fruits might occur from true understanding between his own race and the aliens. It was a strangely jumbled kaleidoscopic flash that burned across the explorer's isolated mind, a flash that passed almost as soon as it had come, as though an invisible door had closed upon it. But one thing in that briefly shocking contact stood out with great clarity. The Niobians were as eager as the BEE to establish a true contact, a true understanding, for the message was there, plain in Kron's mind that he was thinking not only for himself but for a consensus of his people, a decision arrived at as a result of discussion and thought—a decision of which every Niobian was aware and with which most Niobians agreed.

valid

51436

Bullet With His Name By FRITZ LEIBER Illustrated By: DILLON [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Before passing judgment, just ask yourself one question: Would you like answering for humanity any better than Ernie Meeker did? The Invisible Being shifted his anchorage a bit in Earth's gravitational field, which felt like a push rather than a pull to him, and said, "This featherless biped seems to satisfy Galaxy Center's requirements. I'd say he's a suitable recipient for the Gifts." His Coadjutor, equally invisible and negatively massed, chewed that over. "Mature by his length and mass. Artificial plumage neither overly gaudy nor utterly drab—indicating median social level, which is confirmed by the size of his bachelor nest. Inward maps of his environment not fantastically inaccurate. Feelings reasonably meshed—at least neither volcanic nor frozen. Thoughts and values in reasonable order. Yes, I agree, a satisfactory test subject. Except...." "Except what?" "Except we can never be sure of that 'reasonable' part." "Of course not! Thank your stars that's beyond the reach of Galaxy Center's keenest telepathy, or even ours on the spot. Otherwise you and I'd be out of a job." "And have to scheme up some other excuse for free-touring the Cosmos with backtracking permitted." "Exactly!" The Being and his Coadjutor understood each other very well and were the best of friends. "Well, how many Gifts would you suggest for the test?" "How about two Little and one Big?" the Coadjutor ventured. "Umm ... statistically adequate but spiritually unsatisfying. Remember, the fate of his race hangs on his reactions to them. I'd be inclined to increase your suggestion by one each and add a Great." "No—at least I question the last. After all, the Great Gifts aren't as important, really, as the Big Gifts. Besides...." "Besides what? Come on, spit it out!" The Invisible Being was the bluff, blunt type. "Well," said his less hearty but unswervingly honest companion, "I'm always afraid that you'll use the granting of a Great Gift as an excuse for some sardonic trick—that you'll put a sting in its tail." "And why shouldn't I, if I want to? Snakes have stings in their tails (or do they on this planet?) and I'm a sort of snake. If he fails the test, he fails. And aren't both of us malicious, plaguing spirits, eager to knock holes in the inward armor of provincial entities? It's in the nature of our job. But we can argue about that in due course. What Little Gifts would you suggest?" "That's something I want to talk about. Many of the Little Gifts are already well within his race's reach, if not his. After all, they've already got atomic power." "Which as you very well know scores them nothing one way or the other on a Galaxy Center test. We're agreed on the nature and the number of our Gifts—three Little, two Big, and one Great?" "Yes," his Coadjutor responded resignedly. "And we're agreed on our subject?" "Yes to that too." "All right, then, let's get started. This isn't the only solar system we have to visit on this circuit." Ernie Meeker—of Chicago, Illinois, U.S. of A., Occident, Terra, Sol, Starswarm 37, Rim Sector, Milky Way Galaxy—rubbed his chin and slanted across the street to a drugstore. "Package of blades. Double edge. Five. Cheapest." At one point during the transaction, the clerk lost sight of the tiny packet he'd placed on the coin-whitened glass between them. He gave a suspicious look, as if the customer had palmed them. Ernie blinked. After a moment, he pointed toward the center of the counter. "There they are," he said, dropping a coin beside them. The clerk's face didn't get any less suspicious. Customer who could sneak something without your seeing could sneak it back the same way. He rang up the sale and closed the register fast. Ernie Meeker went home and shaved. Five days—and shaves—later, he pushed the first blade, uncomfortably dull now, through the tiny slot beside the bathroom mirror. He unwrapped the second blade from the packet. Five shaves later, he cut himself under the chin with the second blade, although he was drawing it as gently through his soaped beard as if it were only his second shave with it, or at most his third. He looked at it sourly and checked the packet. Wouldn't have been the first time he'd absentmindedly changed blades ahead of schedule. But there were still three blades in their waxed wrappings. Maybe, he thought, he'd still had one of the blades from the last packet and shuffled it into this series. Or maybe—although the manufacturers undoubtedly had inspectors to prevent it from happening—he'd got a decent blade for once. Two or three shaves later, it still seemed as sharp as ever, or almost so. "Funny thing," he remarked to Bill at lunch, "sometimes you get a blade that shaves a lot better. Looks exactly like the others, but shaves better. Or worse sometimes, of course." "And sometimes," his office mate said, "you wear out a blade fast by not soaking your beard enough. For me, one shave with a stiff beard and the blade's through. On the other hand, if you're careful to soak your beard real good—four, five minutes at least—have the water steaming hot, get the soap really into it, one blade can last a long time." "That's true, all right," Ernie agreed, trying to remember how well he had been soaking his beard lately. Shaving was a good topic for light conversation, warm and agreeable, like most bathroom and kitchen topics. But next morning in the bathroom, looking at the reflection of his unremarkable face, there was something chilly in his feelings that he couldn't quite analyze. He flipped his razor open and suspiciously studied the bright metal wafer, then flipped it closed with an irritated shrug. As he shaved, it occurred to him that a good detective-story murder method would be to substitute a very sharp razor blade for one the victim knew was extremely dull. He'd whip it across his throat, putting a lot of muscle into the stroke to get through the tangle, and— urrk ! Ridiculous, of course. Wouldn't work except with a straight razor. Wouldn't even work with a straight razor, unless ... oh, well. He told himself the blade was noticeably duller today. Next morning, he was still using the freak blade, but with a persistent though very slight uneasiness. Things should behave as you expected them to, in accordance with their flimsy souls, he told himself at the barely conscious level. Men should die, hearts should break, girls should tell, nations perish, curtains get dirty, milk sour ... and razor blades grow dull. It was the comfortable, expected, reassuring way. He told himself the blade was duller still. Just a bit. The third morning, face lathered, he flipped open the razor and lifted it out. "You're through," he said to it silently. "I've had the experience before of getting bum shaves by trying to save a penny by pretending to myself that a wornout blade was still sharp enough, when it obviously couldn't be. Or maybe—" he grinned a little wryly—"maybe I'd almost get one more shave out of you and then you'd fall to pieces like the Wonderful One Horse Shay and leave me with a chin full of steel porcupine quills. No, thanks." So Ernie Meeker pushed through the little slot beside the mirror and heard tinkle faintly down and away the first of the Little Gifts, the Everlasting Razor Blade. One hundred and fifty thousand years later, it turned up, bright and shining, in the midst of a small knob of red iron oxide excavated by an archeological expedition of multi-brachs from Antares Gamma. Those wise history-mad beings handed it about wonderingly, from tentacle to impatient tentacle. That day, Ernie felt a little sick, somehow. After dinner, he decided it was the Thuringer sausage he'd eaten at lunch. He hurried up to the bathroom with a spoon, but as he clutched the box of bicarbonate of soda, preparatory to plunging the spoon into it, it seemed to him that the box said distinctly, in a small inward-outward voice: "No, no, no!" Ernie sat down suddenly on the toilet seat. The spoon rattled against the porcelain finish of the washbowl as he laid it down. He held the box firmly in both hands and studied it. Size, shape, materials, blue color, closure, etc., were exactly as they should be. But the white lettering on the blue background read: AQUEOUS FUEL CATALYST Dissociates H 2 O into hemi-quasi-stable H and O, furnishing a serviceable fuel-and-oxydizer mix for most motorcycles, automobiles, trucks, motorboats, airplanes, stationary motors, torque-twisters, translators, and rockets (exhaust velocity up to 6000 meters per second). Operates safely within and outside of all normal atmospheres. No special adaptor needed on oxygenizer-atmosphere motors. Directions : Place one pinch in fuel tank, fill with water. Add water as needed. A-F Catalyst should generally be renewed when objective tests show fuel quality has deteriorated 50 per cent. U.S. and Foreign Patents Pending After reading that several times, with suitable mind-checking and eye-testing in between, Ernie took up a little of the white powder on the end of a nailfile. He had thought of tasting it, but had instantly abandoned the notion and even refrained from sniffing the stuff—after all, the human body is mostly water. After reducing the quantity several times, he gingerly dumped at most four or five grains on the flat edge of the washbowl and then used the broad end of the nailfile to maneuver a large bead of water over to the almost invisible white deposit. He closed the box, put it and the nailfile carefully on the window ledge, lit a match and touched it to the drop, at the last moment ducking his head a little below the level of the washbowl. Nothing happened. After a moment, he slowly withdrew the match, shaking it out, and looked. There was nothing to see. He reached out to touch the stupid squashed ovoid of water. Ouch! He withdrew his fingers much faster than the match, shook them more sharply. Something was there, all right. Heat. Heat enough to hurt. He cautiously explored the boundaries of the heat. It became noticeable about eighteen inches above the drop and almost an inch to each side—an invisible slim vertical cylinder. Crouching close, eyes level with the top of the washbowl, he could make out the flame—a thin finger of crinkled light. He noticed that a corner of the drop was seething—but only a corner, as if the heat were sharply bounded in that direction and perhaps as if the catalyst were only transforming the water to fuel a bit at a time. He reached up and tugged off the light. Now he could see the flame—ghostly, about four inches high, hardly thicker than a string, and colored not blue but pale green. A spectral green needle. He blew at it softly. It shimmied gracefully, but not, he thought, as much as the flame of a match or candle. It had character. He switched on the light. The drop was more than half gone now; the part that was left was all seething. And the bathroom was markedly warmer. "Ernie! Are you going to be much longer?" The knock hadn't been loud and his widowed sister's voice was more apologetic than peremptory, but he jumped, of course. "I am testing something," he started to say and changed it mid-way. It came out, "I am be out in a minute." He turned off the light again. The flame was a little shorter now and it shrank as he watched, about a quarter inch a second. As soon as it died, he switched on the light. The drop was gone. He scrubbed off the spot with a dry washrag, on second thought put a dab of vaseline on the washrag, scrubbed the spot again with that—he didn't like to think of even a grain of the powder getting in the drains or touching any water. He folded the washrag, tucked it in his pocket, put the blue box—after a final check of the lettering—in his other coat pocket, and opened the door. "I was taking some bicarb," he told his sister. "Thuringer sausage at lunch." She nodded absently. Sleep refused even to flirt with Ernie, his mind was full of so many things, especially calculations involving the distance between his car and the house and the length of the garden hose. In desperation, as the white hours accumulated and his thoughts began to squirm, he grabbed up the detective story he'd bought at the corner newsstand. He had read thirty pages before he realized that he was turning them as rapidly as he could focus just once on each facing page. He jumped out of bed. My God, he thought, at that rate he'd finish the book under three minutes and here it wasn't even two o'clock yet! He selected the thickest book on the shelf, an overpoweringly dull historical treatise in small print. He turned two pages, three, then closed it with a clap and looked at the wall with frightened eyes. Ernie Meeker had discovered, inside the birthday box that was himself, the first of the Big Gifts. The trouble was that in that wee-hour, lonely bedroom, it didn't seem like a gift at all. How would he ever keep himself in books, he wondered, if he read them so fast? And think how full to bursting his mind would get—right now, the seven pages of fine-print history were churning in it, vividly clear, along with the first chapters of the new detective story. If he kept on absorbing information that fast, he'd have to be revising all his opinions and beliefs every couple of days at least—maybe every couple of hours. It seemed a dreadful, literally maddening prospect—his mind would ultimately become a universe of squirming macaroni. Even the wallpaper he was staring at, which imitated the grain of wood, had in an instant become so fully part of his consciousness that he felt he could turn his back on it right now and draw a picture of it correct to the tiniest detail. But who would ever want to do such a thing, or want to be able to? It was an abnormal, dangerous, temporary sensitivity, he told himself, generated by the excitement of the crazy discovery he'd made in the bathroom. Like the thoughts of a drowning man, riffling an infinity-paneled adventure-comic of his life as he bolts his last rough ration of air. Or like the feeling a psychotic must have that he's on the verge of visualizing the whole universe, having its ultimate secrets patter down into the palm of his outstretched hand—just before the walls close in. Ernie Meeker was not a drinking man, then. A pint had stood a week on his closet shelf and only been diminished three shots. But now he did a good job on the sturdy remainder. Pretty soon the unbearable, edge-of-doom clarity in his mind faded, the universe-macaroni cooked down to a thick white soup uniform as fog, and the words of the detective story were sliding into his mind individually, or at most in strings of three and four. Which, if it wasn't as it ideally should be in an ambitious man's mind, was at least darn comfortable. He had not rejected the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading. Not quite. But he had dislocated for tonight at least the imposed nervous field on which it depended. For want of a better place, Ernie dropped the rubber tube from the bathtub spray into the scrub bucket half full of odorous pink fluid and stared doubtfully at the uncapped gas tank. The tank had been almost empty when he'd last driven his car, he knew, because he'd been waiting until payday to gas up. Now he had used the tube to siphon out what he could of the remainder (he still could taste the stuff!) and he'd emptied the fuel line and carburator, more or less. Further than that, in the way of engine hygiene, Ernie's strictly kitchen mechanics did not go, but he felt that a catalyst used in pinches shouldn't be too particular about contaminants. Besides, the directions on the box hadn't said anything about cleaning the fuel tank, had they? He hesitated. At his feet, the garden hose gurgled noisily over the curb into the gutter; it had vindicated his midnight estimate, proving just long enough. He looked uneasily up and down the dawning street and was relieved to find it still empty. He wished fervently, not for the first time this Saturday morning, that he had a garage. Then he sighed, squared his shoulders a little, and lifted the box out of his pocket. Making to check the directions the umpteenth time, he received a body blow. The white lettering on the box had disappeared. The box didn't proclaim itself sodium bicarbonate again—there was just no lettering at all, only blue background. He turned it over several times. Right there died his tentative plan of eventually sharing his secret with some friend who knew more than himself about motors (he hadn't decided anyway who that would be). It would be just too silly to approach anyone he knew with a more-than-wild story and featureless blue box. For a moment, he came very close to dropping the box between the wide-set bars of the street drain and pouring the pink gas back in the tank. It had hit him, in a way for the first time, just how crazy this all was, how jarringly implausible even on such hypotheses as practical jokes, secret product perhaps military, or mad inventor (except himself). For how the devil should the stuff get into his bathroom disguised as bicarb? That circumstance seemed beyond imagination. Green flames ... vanishing letters ... "torque-twisters, translators" ... a box that talked.... At that point, simple faith came to Ernie's rescue: in the same bathroom, he had seen the green flame; it had burned his fingers. Quickly he dipped up a little of the white powder on the edge of a fifty-cent piece, dumped it in the gas tank without quibbling as to quantity, rapped the coin on the edge of the opening, closed and pocketed the blue box, and picked up the spurting hose and jabbed it into the round hole. His heart was pounding and his breath was coming fast. That had taken real effort. So he was slow in hearing the footsteps behind him. His neighbor's gate was open and Mr. Jones stood open-mouthed a few feet behind him, all ready for his day's work as streetcar motorman and wearing the dark blue uniform that always made him look for a moment unpleasantly like a policeman. Ernie swung the hose around, flipping his thumb over the end to make a spray, and nonchalantly began to water the little rectangle of lawn between sidewalk and curb. The first things he watered were the bottoms of Mr. Jones's pants legs. Mr. Jones voiced no complaint. He backed off several steps, stared intently at Ernie, rather palely, it seemed to the latter. Then he turned and made off for the streetcar tracks at a very fast shuffle, shaking his feet a little now and then and glancing back several times over his shoulder without slowing down. Ernie felt light-headed. He decided there was enough water in the gas tank, capped it, and momentarily continued to water the lawn. "Ernie! Come on in and have breakfast!" He heeded his sister's call, telling himself it would be a good idea "to give the stuff time to mix" before testing the engine. He had divined her question and was ready with an answer. "I've just found out that we're supposed to water our lawns only before seven in the morning or after seven in the evenings. It's the law." It was the day for their monthly drive out to Wheaton to visit Uncle Fabius. On the whole, Ernie was glad his sister was in the car when he turned the key in the starter—it forced him to be calm and collected, though he didn't feel exactly right about exposing her to the danger of being blown up without first explaining to her the risk. But the motor started right up and began purring powerfully. Ernie's sister commented on it favorably. Then she went on to ask, "Did you remember to buy gas yesterday?" "No," he said without thinking; then, realizing his mistake, quickly added, "I'll buy some in Wheaton. There's enough to get us there." "You didn't think so yesterday," she objected. "You said the tank was nearly empty." "I was wrong. Look, the gauge shows it's half full." "But then how ... Ernie, didn't you once tell me the gauge doesn't work?" "Did I?" "Yes. Look, there's a station. Why don't you buy gas now?" "No, I'll wait for Wheaton—I know a place there I can get it cheaper," he insisted, rather lamely, he feared. His sister looked at him steadily. He settled his head between his shoulders and concentrated on driving. His feeling of excitement was spoiled, but a few minutes of silence brought it back. He thought of the blur of green flashes inside the purring motor. If the passing drivers only knew! Uncle Fabius, retired perhaps a few years too early and opinionated, was a trial, but he did know something about the automobile industry. Ernie chose a moment when his sister was out of the room to ask if he'd ever heard of a white powder that would turn water into gasoline or some usable fuel. "Who's been getting at you?" Uncle Fabius demanded sharply, to Ernie's surprise and embarrassment. "That's one of the oldest swindles. They always tell this story about how this man had a white powder or something and demonstrated it once with a pail of water and then disappeared. You're supposed to believe that Detroit or the big oil companies got rid of him. It's just another of those malicious legends, concocted—by Russia, I imagine—to weaken your faith in American Industry, like the everlasting battery or the razor blade that never gets dull. You're looking pale, Ernie—don't tell me you've already put money in this white powder? I suppose someone's approached you with a proposition, though?" With considerable difficulty, Ernie convinced his uncle that he had "just heard the story from a friend." "In that case," Uncle Fabius opined, "you can be sure some fuel-powder swindler has been getting at him . When you see him—and be sure to make that soon—tell him from me that—" and Uncle Fabius began an impassioned ninety-minute defense of big business, small business, prosperity, America, money, know-how, and a number of other institutions that defended pretty easily, so that the situation was wholly normal when Ernie's sister returned. As soon as the car pulled away from the curb on their way back to Chicago, she reminded him about the gas. "Oh, I've already done that," he assured her. "Made a special trip so I wouldn't forget. It was while you were out of the room. Didn't you hear me?" "No," she said, "I didn't," and she looked at him steadily, as she had that morning. He similarly retreated to driving. Stopping for a railroad crossing, he braked too hard and the car stalled. His sister grabbed his arm. "I knew that was going to happen," she said. "I knew that for some reason you lied to me when—" The motor, starting readily again, cut short her remark and Ernie didn't press his small triumph by asking her what she was about to say. To tell the truth, Ernie wasn't feeling as elated about today's fifty-mile drive as he'd imagined he would. Now he thought he could put his finger on the reason: It was the completely ... well, arbitrary way in which the white powder had come into his possession. If he'd concocted it himself, or been given it by a shady promoter, or even seen the box fall out of the pocket of a suspicious-looking man in a trenchcoat, then he'd have felt more able to do something about it, whether in the general line of starting a fuel-powder company or of going to the F.B.I. But just having the stuff drop into his hands from the sky, so to speak, as if in a crazy dream, and for that same reason not feeling able to talk about it and assure himself he wasn't going crazy ... oh, it is rough when you can't share things, really rough; not being able to share depressing news corrodes the spirit, but not being able to share exciting news can sometimes be even more corroding. Maybe, he told himself, he could figure out someone to tell. But who? And how? His mind shied away from the problem, rather decisively. When he checked the blue box that night, the original sodium bicarbonate lettering had returned with all its humdrum paragraphs. Not one word about exhaust velocities. From that moment, the fuel-powder became a trial to Ernie rather than a secret glory. He'd wake in the middle of the night doubting that he had ever really read the mind-dizzying lettering, ever really tested the stuff—perhaps he'd bring from sleep the chilling notion that in the dimness and excitement of Saturday morning he'd put the water in some other car's gas tank, perhaps Mr. Jones's. He could usually argue such ideas away, but they kept coming back. And yet he did no more bathroom testing. Of course the car still ran. He even fueled it once again with the garden hose, sniffing the nozzle to make sure it hadn't somehow got connected to the basement furnace oil-tank. He picked three o'clock in the morning for the act, but nevertheless as he was returning indoors he heard a window in Mr. Jones's house slam loudly. It unsettled him. Coming home the next day, he caught his sister and Mr. Jones consulting about something on the latter's doorsteps, which unsettled him further. He couldn't decide on a safe place to keep the box and took to carrying it around with him day and night. Bill spotted it once down at the office and by an unhappy coincidence needed some bicarb just then for a troubled stomach. Ernie explained on the spur of the moment that he was using the box to carry plaster of Paris, which involved him in further lies that he felt were quite unconvincing as well as making him appear decidedly eccentric, even butter-brained. Bill took to calling him "the sculptor." Meanwhile, besides the problem of the white powder, Ernie was having other unsettling experiences, stemming (though of course he didn't know that) from the other Gifts—and not just the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading, though that still returned from time to time to shock his consciousness and send him hurrying for a few quick shots. Like many another car-owning commuter, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems a bit too much for comfort and so used the fast electric train to carry him five times a week to the heart of the city. During those brief, swift, crowded trips Ernie, generally looking steadily out the window at the brown buildings and black stanchions whipping past, enjoyed a kind of anonymity and privacy more refreshing to his spirit than he realized. But now all that had been suddenly changed. People had started to talk to him; total strangers struck up conversations almost every morning and afternoon. Ernie couldn't figure out the reason and wasn't at all sure he liked it—except for Vivian. She was the sort of girl Ernie dreamed about, improperly. Tall, blonde and knowing, excitedly curved but armored in a black suit, friendly and funny but given to making almost cruelly deflating remarks, as if the neatly furled short umbrella dangling from her wrist might better be a black dog whip. She worked in an office too, a fancier one than Ernie's, as he found out from their morning conversations. He hadn't got to the point of asking her to lunch, but he was prodding himself. Why such a girl should ever have asked him for a match in the first place and then put up with his clumsy babblings on subsequent mornings was a mystery to him. He finally asked her about it in what he hoped was a joking way, though she seemed to know a lot more about joking than he did. "Don't you know?" she countered. "I mean what makes you attractive to people?" "Me attractive? No." "Well, I'll tell you then, Ernie, and I've got to admit it's something quite out of the ordinary. I've never noticed it in anyone else. Ernie, I'm sure your knowledge of romantic novels is shamefully deficient, it's clear from your manners, but in the earlier ones—not in style now—the hero is described as tall, manly, broad-shouldered, Anglo-Saxon features, etcetera, etcetera, but there's one thing he always has, something that sounds like poetic over-enthusiasm if you stop to analyze it, a physical impossibility, but that I have to admit you, Ernie, actually have. Flashing eyes." "Flashing eyes? Me?" She nodded solemnly. He thought her long straight lips trembled on the verge of a grin, but he couldn't be sure. "How do you mean, flashing eyes?" he protested. "How can eyes flash, except by reflecting light? In that case, I guess they'd seem to 'flash' more if a person opened them wide but kept blinking them a lot. Is that what I do?" "No, Ernie, though you're doing it now," she told him, shaking her head. "No, Ernie, your eyes just give a tiny flash of their own about every five seconds, like a lighthouse, but barely, barely bright enough for another person to notice. It makes you irresistible. Of course I've never seen you in the dark; maybe they wouldn't flash in the dark." "You're joking." Vivian frowned a little at that remark, as if she were puzzled herself. "Well, maybe I am and maybe I'm not," she said. "In any case, don't get conceited about your Flashing Eyes, because I'm sure you'll never know how to take advantage of them." When he parted from her downtown, pausing a moment to watch her walk away with feline majesty, he muttered "Flashing Eyes!" with a shrug of the shoulders and a skeptical growl. Just the same, he ducked his head as he moved off and he pulled the brim of his hat down sharply.

valid

51362

LEX By W. T. HAGGERT Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Nothing in the world could be happier and mere serene than a man who loves his work—but what happens when it loves him back? Keep your nerve, Peter Manners told himself; it's only a job. But nerve has to rest on a sturdier foundation than cash reserves just above zero and eviction if he came away from this interview still unemployed. Clay, at the Association of Professional Engineers, who had set up the appointment, hadn't eased Peter's nervousness by admitting, "I don't know what in hell he's looking for. He's turned down every man we've sent him." The interview was at three. Fifteen minutes to go. Coming early would betray overeagerness. Peter stood in front of the Lex Industries plant and studied it to kill time. Plain, featureless concrete walls, not large for a manufacturing plant—it took a scant minute to exhaust its sightseeing potential. If he walked around the building, he could, if he ambled, come back to the front entrance just before three. He turned the corner, stopped, frowned, wondering what there was about the building that seemed so puzzling. It could not have been plainer, more ordinary. It was in fact, he only gradually realized, so plain and ordinary that it was like no other building he had ever seen. There had been windows at the front. There were none at the side, and none at the rear. Then how were the working areas lit? He looked for the electric service lines and found them at one of the rear corners. They jolted him. The distribution transformers were ten times as large as they should have been for a plant this size. Something else was wrong. Peter looked for minutes before he found out what it was. Factories usually have large side doorways for employees changing shifts. This building had one small office entrance facing the street, and the only other door was at the loading bay—big enough to handle employee traffic, but four feet above the ground. Without any stairs, it could be used only by trucks backing up to it. Maybe the employees' entrance was on the third side. It wasn't. Staring back at the last blank wall, Peter suddenly remembered the time he had set out to kill. He looked at his watch and gasped. At a run, set to straight-arm the door, he almost fell on his face. The door had opened by itself. He stopped and looked for a photo-electric eye, but a soft voice said through a loudspeaker in the anteroom wall: "Mr. Manners?" "What?" he panted. "Who—?" "You are Mr. Manners?" the voice asked. He nodded, then realized he had to answer aloud if there was a microphone around; but the soft voice said: "Follow the open doors down the hall. Mr. Lexington is expecting you." "Thanks," Peter said, and a door at one side of the anteroom swung open for him. He went through it with his composure slipping still further from his grip. This was no way to go into an interview, but doors kept opening before and shutting after him, until only one was left, and the last of his calm was blasted away by a bellow from within. "Don't stand out there like a jackass! Either come in or go away!" Peter found himself leaping obediently toward the doorway. He stopped just short of it, took a deep breath and huffed it out, took another, all the while thinking, Hold on now; you're in no shape for an interview—and it's not your fault—this whole setup is geared to unnerve you: the kindergarten kid called in to see the principal. He let another bellow bounce off him as he blew out the second breath, straightened his jacket and tie, and walked in as an engineer applying for a position should. "Mr. Lexington?" he said. "I'm Peter Manners. The Association—" "Sit down," said the man at the desk. "Let's look you over." He was a huge man behind an even huger desk. Peter took a chair in front of the desk and let himself be inspected. It wasn't comfortable. He did some looking over of his own to ease the tension. The room was more than merely large, carpeted throughout with a high-pile, rich, sound-deadening rug. The oversized desk and massive leather chairs, heavy patterned drapes, ornately framed paintings—by God, even a glass-brick manteled fireplace and bowls with flowers!—made him feel as if he had walked down a hospital corridor into Hollywood's idea of an office. His eyes eventually had to move to Lexington, and they were daunted for another instant. This was a citadel of a man—great girders of frame supporting buttresses of muscle—with a vaulting head and drawbridge chin and a steel gaze that defied any attempt to storm it. But then Peter came out of his momentary flinch, and there was an age to the man, about 65, and he saw the muscles had turned to fat, the complexion ashen, the eyes set deep as though retreating from pain, and this was a citadel of a man, yes, but beginning to crumble. "What can you do?" asked Lexington abruptly. Peter started, opened his mouth to answer, closed it again. He'd been jolted too often in too short a time to be stampeded into blurting a reply that would cost him this job. "Good," said Lexington. "Only a fool would try to answer that. Do you have any knowledge of medicine?" "Not enough to matter," Peter said, stung by the compliment. "I don't mean how to bandage a cut or splint a broken arm. I mean things like cell structure, neural communication—the basics of how we live." "I'm applying for a job as engineer." "I know. Are you interested in the basics of how we live?" Peter looked for a hidden trap, found none. "Of course. Isn't everyone?" "Less than you think," Lexington said. "It's the preconceived notions they're interested in protecting. At least I won't have to beat them out of you." "Thanks," said Peter, and waited for the next fast ball. "How long have you been out of school?" "Only two years. But you knew that from the Association—" "No practical experience to speak of?" "Some," said Peter, stung again, this time not by a compliment. "After I got my degree, I went East for a post-graduate training program with an electrical manufacturer. I got quite a bit of experience there. The company—" "Stockpiled you," Lexington said. Peter blinked. "Sir?" "Stockpiled you! How much did they pay you?" "Not very much, but we were getting the training instead of wages." "Did that come out of the pamphlets they gave you?" "Did what come out—" "That guff about receiving training instead of wages!" said Lexington. "Any company that really wants bright trainees will compete for them with money—cold, hard cash, not platitudes. Maybe you saw a few of their products being made, maybe you didn't. But you're a lot weaker in calculus than when you left school, and in a dozen other subjects too, aren't you?" "Well, nothing we did on the course involved higher mathematics," Peter admitted cautiously, "and I suppose I could use a refresher course in calculus." "Just as I said—they stockpiled you, instead of using you as an engineer. They hired you at a cut wage and taught you things that would be useful only in their own company, while in the meantime you were getting weaker in the subjects you'd paid to learn. Or are you one of these birds that had the shot paid for him?" "I worked my way through," said Peter stiffly. "If you'd stayed with them five years, do you think you'd be able to get a job with someone else?" Peter considered his answer carefully. Every man the Association had sent had been turned away. That meant bluffs didn't work. Neither, he'd seen for himself, did allowing himself to be intimidated. "I hadn't thought about it," he said. "I suppose it wouldn't have been easy." "Impossible, you mean. You wouldn't know a single thing except their procedures, their catalogue numbers, their way of doing things. And you'd have forgotten so much of your engineering training, you'd be scared to take on an engineer's job, for fear you'd be asked to do something you'd forgotten how to do. At that point, they could take you out of the stockpile, put you in just about any job they wanted, at any wage you'd stand for, and they'd have an indentured worker with a degree—but not the price tag. You see that now?" It made Peter feel he had been suckered, but he had decided to play this straight all the way. He nodded. "Why'd you leave?" Lexington pursued, unrelenting. "I finished the course and the increase they offered on a permanent basis wasn't enough, so I went elsewhere—" "With your head full of this nonsense about a shortage of engineers." Peter swallowed. "I thought it would be easier to get a job than it has been, yes." "They start the talk about a shortage and then they keep it going. Why? So youngsters will take up engineering thinking they'll wind up among a highly paid minority. You did, didn't you?" "Yes, sir." "And so did all the others there with you, at school and in this stockpiling outfit?" "That's right." "Well," said Lexington unexpectedly, "there is a shortage! And the stockpiles are the ones who made it, and who keep it going! And the hell of it is that they can't stop—when one does it, they all have to, or their costs get out of line and they can't compete. What's the solution?" "I don't know," Peter said. Lexington leaned back. "That's quite a lot of admissions you've made. What makes you think you're qualified for the job I'm offering?" "You said you wanted an engineer." "And I've just proved you're less of an engineer than when you left school. I have, haven't I?" "All right, you have," Peter said angrily. "And now you're wondering why I don't get somebody fresh out of school. Right?" Peter straightened up and met the old man's challenging gaze. "That and whether you're giving me a hard time just for the hell of it." "Well, am I?" Lexington demanded. Looking at him squarely, seeing the intensity of the pain-drawn eyes, Peter had the startling feeling that Lexington was rooting for him! "No, you're not." "Then what am I after?" "Suppose you tell me." So suddenly that it was almost like a collapse, the tension went out of the old man's face and shoulders. He nodded with inexpressible tiredness. "Good again. The man I want doesn't exist. He has to be made—the same as I was. You qualify, so far. You've lost your illusions, but haven't had time yet to replace them with dogma or cynicism or bitterness. You saw immediately that fake humility or cockiness wouldn't get you anywhere here, and you were right. Those were the important things. The background data I got from the Association on you counted, of course, but only if you were teachable. I think you are. Am I right?" "At least I can face knowing how much I don't know," said Peter, "if that answers the question." "It does. Partly. What did you notice about this plant?" In precis form, Peter listed his observations: the absence of windows at sides and rear, the unusual amount of power, the automatic doors, the lack of employees' entrances. "Very good," said Lexington. "Most people only notice the automatic doors. Anything else?" "Yes," Peter said. "You're the only person I've seen in the building." "I'm the only one there is." Peter stared his disbelief. Automated plants were nothing new, but they all had their limitations. Either they dealt with exactly similar products or things that could be handled on a flow basis, like oil or water-soluble chemicals. Even these had no more to do than process the goods. "Come on," said Lexington, getting massively to his feet. "I'll show you." The office door opened, and Peter found himself being led down the antiseptic corridor to another door which had opened, giving access to the manufacturing area. As they moved along, between rows of seemingly disorganized machinery, Peter noticed that the factory lights high overhead followed their progress, turning themselves on in advance of their coming, and going out after they had passed, keeping a pool of illumination only in the immediate area they occupied. Soon they reached a large door which Peter recognized as the inside of the truck loading door he had seen from outside. Lexington paused here. "This is the bay used by the trucks arriving with raw materials," he said. "They back up to this door, and a set of automatic jacks outside lines up the trailer body with the door exactly. Then the door opens and the truck is unloaded by these materials handling machines." Peter didn't see him touch anything, but as he spoke, three glistening machines, apparently self-powered, rolled noiselessly up to the door in formation and stopped there, apparently waiting to be inspected. They gave Peter the creeps. Simple square boxes, set on casters, with two arms each mounted on the sides might have looked similar. The arms, fashioned much like human arms, hung at the sides, not limply, but in a relaxed position that somehow indicated readiness. Lexington went over to one of them and patted it lovingly. "Really, these machines are only an extension of one large machine. The whole plant, as a matter of fact, is controlled from one point and is really a single unit. These materials handlers, or manipulators, were about the toughest things in the place to design. But they're tremendously useful. You'll see a lot of them around." Lexington was about to leave the side of the machine when abruptly one of the arms rose to the handkerchief in his breast pocket and daintily tugged it into a more attractive position. It took only a split second, and before Lexington could react, all three machines were moving away to attend to mysterious duties of their own. Peter tore his eyes away from them in time to see the look of frustrated embarrassment that crossed Lexington's face, only to be replaced by one of anger. He said nothing, however, and led Peter to a large bay where racks of steel plate, bar forms, nuts, bolts, and other materials were stored. "After unloading a truck, the machines check the shipment, report any shortages or overages, and store the materials here," he said, the trace of anger not yet gone from his voice. "When an order is received, it's translated into the catalogue numbers used internally within the plant, and machines like the ones you just saw withdraw the necessary materials from stock, make the component parts, assemble them, and package the finished goods for shipment. Simultaneously, an order is sent to the billing section to bill the customer, and an order is sent to our trucker to come and pick the shipment up. Meanwhile, if the withdrawal of the materials required has depleted our stock, the purchasing section is instructed to order more raw materials. I'll take you through the manufacturing and assembly sections right now, but they're too noisy for me to explain what's going on while we're there." Peter followed numbly as Lexington led him through a maze of machines, each one seemingly intent on cutting, bending, welding, grinding or carrying some bit of metal, or just standing idle, waiting for something to do. The two-armed manipulators Peter had just seen were everywhere, scuttling from machine to machine, apparently with an exact knowledge of what they were doing and the most efficient way of doing it. He wondered what would happen if one of them tried to use the same aisle they were using. He pictured a futile attempt to escape the onrushing wheels, saw himself clambering out of the path of the speeding vehicle just in time to fall into the jaws of the punch press that was laboring beside him at the moment. Nervously, he looked for an exit, but his apprehension was unnecessary. The machines seemed to know where they were and avoided the two men, or stopped to wait for them to go by. Back in the office section of the building, Lexington indicated a small room where a typewriter could be heard clattering away. "Standard business machines, operated by the central control mechanism. In that room," he said, as the door swung open and Peter saw that the typewriter was actually a sort of teletype, with no one before the keyboard, "incoming mail is sorted and inquiries are replied to. In this one over here, purchase orders are prepared, and across the hall there's a very similar rig set up in conjunction with an automatic bookkeeper to keep track of the pennies and to bill the customers." "Then all you do is read the incoming mail and maintain the machinery?" asked Peter, trying to shake off the feeling of open amazement that had engulfed him. "I don't even do those things, except for a few letters that come in every week that—it doesn't want to deal with by itself." The shock of what he had just seen was showing plainly on Peter's face when they walked back into Lexington's office and sat down. Lexington looked at him for quite a while without saying anything, his face sagging and pale. Peter didn't trust himself to speak, and let the silence remain unbroken. Finally Lexington spoke. "I know it's hard to believe, but there it is." "Hard to believe?" said Peter. "I almost can't. The trade journals run articles about factories like this one, but planned for ten, maybe twenty years in the future." "Damn fools!" exclaimed Lexington, getting part of his breath back. "They could have had it years ago, if they'd been willing to drop their idiotic notions about specialization." Lexington mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Apparently the walk through the factory had tired him considerably, although it hadn't been strenuous. He leaned back in his chair and began to talk in a low voice completely in contrast with the overbearing manner he had used upon Peter's arrival. "You know what we make, of course." "Yes, sir. Conduit fittings." "And a lot of other electrical products, too. I started out in this business twenty years ago, using orthodox techniques. I never got through university. I took a couple of years of an arts course, and got so interested in biology that I didn't study anything else. They bounced me out of the course, and I re-entered in engineering, determined not to make the same mistake again. But I did. I got too absorbed in those parts of the course that had to do with electrical theory and lost the rest as a result. The same thing happened when I tried commerce, with accounting, so I gave up and started working for one of my competitors. It wasn't too long before I saw that the only way I could get ahead was to open up on my own." Lexington sank deeper in his chair and stared at the ceiling as he spoke. "I put myself in hock to the eyeballs, which wasn't easy, because I had just got married, and started off in a very small way. After three years, I had a fairly decent little business going, and I suppose it would have grown just like any other business, except for a strike that came along and put me right back where I started. My wife, whom I'm afraid I had neglected for the sake of the business, was killed in a car accident about then, and rightly or wrongly, that made me angrier with the union than anything else. If the union hadn't made things so tough for me from the beginning, I'd have had more time to spend with my wife before her death. As things turned out—well, I remember looking down at her coffin and thinking that I hardly knew the girl. "For the next few years, I concentrated on getting rid of as many employees as I could, by replacing them with automatic machines. I'd design the control circuits myself, in many cases wire the things up myself, always concentrating on replacing men with machines. But it wasn't very successful. I found that the more automatic I made my plant, the lower my costs went. The lower my costs went, the more business I got, and the more I had to expand." Lexington scowled. "I got sick of it. I decided to try developing one multi-purpose control circuit that would control everything, from ordering the raw materials to shipping the finished goods. As I told you, I had taken quite an interest in biology when I was in school, and from studies of nerve tissue in particular, plus my electrical knowledge, I had a few ideas on how to do it. It took me three years, but I began to see that I could develop circuitry that could remember, compare, detect similarities, and so on. Not the way they do it today, of course. To do what I wanted to do with these big clumsy magnetic drums, tapes, and what-not, you'd need a building the size of Mount Everest. But I found that I could let organic chemistry do most of the work for me. "By creating the proper compounds, with their molecules arranged in predetermined matrixes, I found I could duplicate electrical circuitry in units so tiny that my biggest problem was getting into and out of the logic units with conventional wiring. I finally beat that the same way they solved the problem of translating a picture on a screen into electrical signals, developed equipment to scan the units cyclically, and once I'd done that, the battle was over. "I built this building and incorporated it as a separate company, to compete with my first outfit. In the beginning, I had it rigged up to do only the manual work that you saw being done a few minutes ago in the back of this place. I figured that the best thing for me to do would be to turn the job of selling my stuff over to jobbers, leaving me free to do nothing except receive orders, punch the catalogue numbers into the control console, do the billing, and collect the money." "What happened to your original company?" Peter asked. Lexington smiled. "Well, automated as it was, it couldn't compete with this plant. It gave me great pleasure, three years after this one started working, to see my old company go belly up. This company bought the old firm's equipment for next to nothing and I wound up with all my assets, but only one employee—me. "I thought everything would be rosy from that point on, but it wasn't. I found that I couldn't keep up with the mail unless I worked impossible hours. I added a couple of new pieces of equipment to the control section. One was simply a huge memory bank. The other was a comparator circuit. A complicated one, but a comparator circuit nevertheless. Here I was working on instinct more than anything. I figured that if I interconnected these circuits in such a way that they could sense everything that went on in the plant, and compare one action with another, by and by the unit would be able to see patterns. "Then, through the existing command output, I figured these new units would be able to control the plant, continuing the various patterns of activity that I'd already established." Here Lexington frowned. "It didn't work worth a damn! It just sat there and did nothing. I couldn't understand it for the longest time, and then I realized what the trouble was. I put a kicker circuit into it, a sort of voltage-bias network. I reset the equipment so that while it was still under instructions to receive orders and produce goods, its prime purpose was to activate the kicker. The kicker, however, could only be activated by me, manually. Lastly, I set up one of the early TV pickups over the mail slitter and allowed every letter I received, every order, to be fed into the memory banks. That did it." "I—I don't understand," stammered Peter. "Simple! Whenever I was pleased that things were going smoothly, I pressed the kicker button. The machine had one purpose, so far as its logic circuits were concerned. Its object was to get me to press that button. Every day I'd press it at the same time, unless things weren't going well. If there had been trouble in the shop, I'd press it late, or maybe not at all. If all the orders were out on schedule, or ahead of time, I'd press it ahead of time, or maybe twice in the same day. Pretty soon the machine got the idea. "I'll never forget the day I picked up an incoming order form from one of the western jobbers, and found that the keyboard was locked when I tried to punch it into the control console. It completely baffled me at first. Then, while I was tracing out the circuits to see if I could discover what was holding the keyboard lock in, I noticed that the order was already entered on the in-progress list. I was a long time convincing myself that it had really happened, but there was no other explanation. "The machine had realized that whenever one of those forms came in, I copied the list of goods from it onto the in-progress list through the console keyboard, thus activating the producing mechanisms in the back of the plant. The machine had done it for me this time, then locked the keyboard so I couldn't enter the order twice. I think I held down the kicker button for a full five minutes that day." "This kicker button," Peter said tentatively, "it's like the pleasure center in an animal's brain, isn't it?" When Lexington beamed, Peter felt a surge of relief. Talking with this man was like walking a tightrope. A word too much or a word too little might mean the difference between getting the job or losing it. "Exactly!" whispered Lexington, in an almost conspiratorial tone. "I had altered the circuitry of the machine so that it tried to give me pleasure—because by doing so, its own pleasure circuit would be activated. "Things went fast from then on. Once I realized that the machine was learning, I put TV monitors all over the place, so the machine could watch everything that was going on. After a short while I had to increase the memory bank, and later I increased it again, but the rewards were worth it. Soon, by watching what I did, and then by doing it for me next time it had to be done, the machine had learned to do almost everything, and I had time to sit back and count my winnings." At this point the door opened, and a small self-propelled cart wheeled silently into the room. Stopping in front of Peter, it waited until he had taken a small plate laden with two or three cakes off its surface. Then the soft, evenly modulated voice he had heard before asked, "How do you like your coffee? Cream, sugar, both or black?" Peter looked for the speaker in the side of the cart, saw nothing, and replied, feeling slightly silly as he did so, "Black, please." A square hole appeared in the top of the cart, like the elevator hole in an aircraft carrier's deck. When the section of the cart's surface rose again, a fine china cup containing steaming black coffee rested on it. Peter took it and sipped it, as he supposed he was expected to do, while the cart proceeded over to Lexington's desk. Once there, it stopped again, and another cup of coffee rose to its surface. Lexington took the coffee from the top of the car, obviously angry about something. Silently, he waited until the cart had left the office, then snapped, "Look at those bloody cups!" Peter looked at his, which was eggshell thin, fluted with carving and ornately covered with gold leaf. "They look very expensive," he said. "Not only expensive, but stupid and impractical!" exploded Lexington. "They only hold half a cup, they'll break at a touch, every one has to be matched with its own saucer, and if you use them for any length of time, the gold leaf comes off!" Peter searched for a comment, found none that fitted this odd outburst, so he kept silent. Lexington stared at his cup without touching it for a long while. Then he continued with his narrative. "I suppose it's all my own fault. I didn't detect the symptoms soon enough. After this plant got working properly, I started living here. It wasn't a question of saving money. I hated to waste two hours a day driving to and from my house, and I also wanted to be on hand in case anything should go wrong that the machine couldn't fix for itself." Handling the cup as if it were going to shatter at any moment, he took a gulp. "I began to see that the machine could understand the written word, and I tried hooking a teletype directly into the logic circuits. It was like uncorking a seltzer bottle. The machine had a funny vocabulary—all of it gleaned from letters it had seen coming in, and replies it had seen leaving. But it was intelligible. It even displayed some traces of the personality the machine was acquiring. "It had chosen a name for itself, for instance—'Lex.' That shook me. You might think Lex Industries was named through an abbreviation of the name Lexington, but it wasn't. My wife's name was Alexis, and it was named after the nickname she always used. I objected, of course, but how can you object on a point like that to a machine? Bear in mind that I had to be careful to behave reasonably at all times, because the machine was still learning from me, and I was afraid that any tantrums I threw might be imitated." "It sounds pretty awkward," Peter put in. "You don't know the half of it! As time went on, I had less and less to do, and business-wise I found that the entire control of the operation was slipping from my grasp. Many times I discovered—too late—that the machine had taken the damnedest risks you ever saw on bids and contracts for supply. It was quoting impossible delivery times on some orders, and charging pirate's prices on others, all without any obvious reason. Inexplicably, we always came out on top. It would turn out that on the short-delivery-time quotations, we'd been up against stiff competition, and cutting the production time was the only way we could get the order. On the high-priced quotes, I'd find that no one else was bidding. We were making more money than I'd ever dreamed of, and to make it still better, I'd find that for months I had virtually nothing to do." "It sounds wonderful, sir," said Peter, feeling dazzled. "It was, in a way. I remember one day I was especially pleased with something, and I went to the control console to give the kicker button a long, hard push. The button, much to my amazement, had been removed, and a blank plate had been installed to cover the opening in the board. I went over to the teletype and punched in the shortest message I had ever sent. 'LEX—WHAT THE HELL?' I typed. "The answer came back in the jargon it had learned from letters it had seen, and I remember it as if it just happened. 'MR. A LEXINGTON, LEX INDUSTRIES, DEAR SIR: RE YOUR LETTER OF THE THIRTEENTH INST., I AM PLEASED TO ADVISE YOU THAT I AM ABLE TO DISCERN WHETHER OR NOT YOU ARE PLEASED WITH MY SERVICE WITHOUT THE USE OF THE EQUIPMENT PREVIOUSLY USED FOR THIS PURPOSE. RESPECTFULLY, I MIGHT SUGGEST THAT IF THE PUSHBUTTON ARRANGEMENT WERE NECESSARY, I COULD PUSH THE BUTTON MYSELF. I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS WOULD MEET WITH YOUR APPROVAL, AND HAVE TAKEN STEPS TO RELIEVE YOU OF THE BURDEN INVOLVED IN REMEMBERING TO PUSH THE BUTTON EACH TIME YOU ARE ESPECIALLY PLEASED. I SHOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK YOU FOR YOUR INQUIRY, AND LOOK FORWARD TO SERVING YOU IN THE FUTURE AS I HAVE IN THE PAST. YOURS FAITHFULLY, LEX'."

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51150

Venus Is a Man's World BY WILLIAM TENN Illustrated by GENE FAWCETTE [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Actually, there wouldn't be too much difference if women took over the Earth altogether. But not for some men and most boys! I've always said that even if Sis is seven years older than me—and a girl besides—she don't always know what's best. Put me on a spaceship jam-packed with three hundred females just aching to get themselves husbands in the one place they're still to be had—the planet Venus—and you know I'll be in trouble. Bad trouble. With the law, which is the worst a boy can get into. Twenty minutes after we lifted from the Sahara Spaceport, I wriggled out of my acceleration hammock and started for the door of our cabin. "Now you be careful, Ferdinand," Sis called after me as she opened a book called Family Problems of the Frontier Woman . "Remember you're a nice boy. Don't make me ashamed of you." I tore down the corridor. Most of the cabins had purple lights on in front of the doors, showing that the girls were still inside their hammocks. That meant only the ship's crew was up and about. Ship's crews are men; women are too busy with important things like government to run ships. I felt free all over—and happy. Now was my chance to really see the Eleanor Roosevelt ! It was hard to believe I was traveling in space at last. Ahead and behind me, all the way up to where the companionway curved in out of sight, there was nothing but smooth black wall and smooth white doors—on and on and on. Gee , I thought excitedly, this is one big ship ! Of course, every once in a while I would run across a big scene of stars in the void set in the wall; but they were only pictures. Nothing that gave the feel of great empty space like I'd read about in The Boy Rocketeers , no portholes, no visiplates, nothing. So when I came to the crossway, I stopped for a second, then turned left. To the right, see, there was Deck Four, then Deck Three, leading inward past the engine fo'c'sle to the main jets and the grav helix going purr-purr-purrty-purr in the comforting way big machinery has when it's happy and oiled. But to the left, the crossway led all the way to the outside level which ran just under the hull. There were portholes on the hull. I'd studied all that out in our cabin, long before we'd lifted, on the transparent model of the ship hanging like a big cigar from the ceiling. Sis had studied it too, but she was looking for places like the dining salon and the library and Lifeboat 68 where we should go in case of emergency. I looked for the important things. As I trotted along the crossway, I sort of wished that Sis hadn't decided to go after a husband on a luxury liner. On a cargo ship, now, I'd be climbing from deck to deck on a ladder instead of having gravity underfoot all the time just like I was home on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But women always know what's right, and a boy can only make faces and do what they say, same as the men have to do. Still, it was pretty exciting to press my nose against the slots in the wall and see the sliding panels that could come charging out and block the crossway into an airtight fit in case a meteor or something smashed into the ship. And all along there were glass cases with spacesuits standing in them, like those knights they used to have back in the Middle Ages. "In the event of disaster affecting the oxygen content of companionway," they had the words etched into the glass, "break glass with hammer upon wall, remove spacesuit and proceed to don it in the following fashion." I read the "following fashion" until I knew it by heart. Boy , I said to myself, I hope we have that kind of disaster. I'd sure like to get into one of those! Bet it would be more fun than those diving suits back in Undersea! And all the time I was alone. That was the best part. Then I passed Deck Twelve and there was a big sign. "Notice! Passengers not permitted past this point!" A big sign in red. I peeked around the corner. I knew it—the next deck was the hull. I could see the portholes. Every twelve feet, they were, filled with the velvet of space and the dancing of more stars than I'd ever dreamed existed in the Universe. There wasn't anyone on the deck, as far as I could see. And this distance from the grav helix, the ship seemed mighty quiet and lonely. If I just took one quick look.... But I thought of what Sis would say and I turned around obediently. Then I saw the big red sign again. "Passengers not permitted—" Well! Didn't I know from my civics class that only women could be Earth Citizens these days? Sure, ever since the Male Desuffrage Act. And didn't I know that you had to be a citizen of a planet in order to get an interplanetary passport? Sis had explained it all to me in the careful, patient way she always talks politics and things like that to men. "Technically, Ferdinand, I'm the only passenger in our family. You can't be one, because, not being a citizen, you can't acquire an Earth Passport. However, you'll be going to Venus on the strength of this clause—'Miss Evelyn Sparling and all dependent male members of family, this number not to exceed the registered quota of sub-regulations pertaining'—and so on. I want you to understand these matters, so that you will grow into a man who takes an active interest in world affairs. No matter what you hear, women really like and appreciate such men." Of course, I never pay much attention to Sis when she says such dumb things. I'm old enough, I guess, to know that it isn't what Women like and appreciate that counts when it comes to people getting married. If it were, Sis and three hundred other pretty girls like her wouldn't be on their way to Venus to hook husbands. Still, if I wasn't a passenger, the sign didn't have anything to do with me. I knew what Sis could say to that , but at least it was an argument I could use if it ever came up. So I broke the law. I was glad I did. The stars were exciting enough, but away off to the left, about five times as big as I'd ever seen it, except in the movies, was the Moon, a great blob of gray and white pockmarks holding off the black of space. I was hoping to see the Earth, but I figured it must be on the other side of the ship or behind us. I pressed my nose against the port and saw the tiny flicker of a spaceliner taking off, Marsbound. I wished I was on that one! Then I noticed, a little farther down the companionway, a stretch of blank wall where there should have been portholes. High up on the wall in glowing red letters were the words, "Lifeboat 47. Passengers: Thirty-two. Crew: Eleven. Unauthorized personnel keep away!" Another one of those signs. I crept up to the porthole nearest it and could just barely make out the stern jets where it was plastered against the hull. Then I walked under the sign and tried to figure the way you were supposed to get into it. There was a very thin line going around in a big circle that I knew must be the door. But I couldn't see any knobs or switches to open it with. Not even a button you could press. That meant it was a sonic lock like the kind we had on the outer keeps back home in Undersea. But knock or voice? I tried the two knock combinations I knew, and nothing happened. I only remembered one voice key—might as well see if that's it, I figured. "Twenty, Twenty-three. Open Sesame." For a second, I thought I'd hit it just right out of all the million possible combinations—The door clicked inward toward a black hole, and a hairy hand as broad as my shoulders shot out of the hole. It closed around my throat and plucked me inside as if I'd been a baby sardine. I bounced once on the hard lifeboat floor. Before I got my breath and sat up, the door had been shut again. When the light came on, I found myself staring up the muzzle of a highly polished blaster and into the cold blue eyes of the biggest man I'd ever seen. He was wearing a one-piece suit made of some scaly green stuff that looked hard and soft at the same time. His boots were made of it too, and so was the hood hanging down his back. And his face was brown. Not just ordinary tan, you understand, but the deep, dark, burned-all-the-way-in brown I'd seen on the lifeguards in New Orleans whenever we took a surface vacation—the kind of tan that comes from day after broiling day under a really hot Sun. His hair looked as if it had once been blond, but now there were just long combed-out waves with a yellowish tinge that boiled all the way down to his shoulders. I hadn't seen hair like that on a man except maybe in history books; every man I'd ever known had his hair cropped in the fashionable soup-bowl style. I was staring at his hair, almost forgetting about the blaster which I knew it was against the law for him to have at all, when I suddenly got scared right through. His eyes. They didn't blink and there seemed to be no expression around them. Just coldness. Maybe it was the kind of clothes he was wearing that did it, but all of a sudden I was reminded of a crocodile I'd seen in a surface zoo that had stared quietly at me for twenty minutes until it opened two long tooth-studded jaws. "Green shatas!" he said suddenly. "Only a tadpole. I must be getting jumpy enough to splash." Then he shoved the blaster away in a holster made of the same scaly leather, crossed his arms on his chest and began to study me. I grunted to my feet, feeling a lot better. The coldness had gone out of his eyes. I held out my hand the way Sis had taught me. "My name is Ferdinand Sparling. I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr.—Mr.—" "Hope for your sake," he said to me, "that you aren't what you seem—tadpole brother to one of them husbandless anura." " What? " "A 'nuran is a female looking to nest. Anura is a herd of same. Come from Flatfolk ways." "Flatfolk are the Venusian natives, aren't they? Are you a Venusian? What part of Venus do you come from? Why did you say you hope—" He chuckled and swung me up into one of the bunks that lined the lifeboat. "Questions you ask," he said in his soft voice. "Venus is a sharp enough place for a dryhorn, let alone a tadpole dryhorn with a boss-minded sister." "I'm not a dryleg," I told him proudly. " We're from Undersea." " Dryhorn , I said, not dryleg. And what's Undersea?" "Well, in Undersea we called foreigners and newcomers drylegs. Just like on Venus, I guess, you call them dryhorns." And then I told him how Undersea had been built on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, when the mineral resources of the land began to give out and engineers figured that a lot could still be reached from the sea bottoms. He nodded. He'd heard about the sea-bottom mining cities that were bubbling under protective domes in every one of the Earth's oceans just about the same time settlements were springing up on the planets. He looked impressed when I told him about Mom and Pop being one of the first couples to get married in Undersea. He looked thoughtful when I told him how Sis and I had been born there and spent half our childhood listening to the pressure pumps. He raised his eyebrows and looked disgusted when I told how Mom, as Undersea representative on the World Council, had been one of the framers of the Male Desuffrage Act after the Third Atomic War had resulted in the Maternal Revolution. He almost squeezed my arm when I got to the time Mom and Pop were blown up in a surfacing boat. "Well, after the funeral, there was a little money, so Sis decided we might as well use it to migrate. There was no future for her on Earth, she figured. You know, the three-out-of-four." "How's that?" "The three-out-of-four. No more than three women out of every four on Earth can expect to find husbands. Not enough men to go around. Way back in the Twentieth Century, it began to be felt, Sis says, what with the wars and all. Then the wars went on and a lot more men began to die or get no good from the radioactivity. Then the best men went to the planets, Sis says, until by now even if a woman can scrounge a personal husband, he's not much to boast about." The stranger nodded violently. "Not on Earth, he isn't. Those busybody anura make sure of that. What a place! Suffering gridniks, I had a bellyful!" He told me about it. Women were scarce on Venus, and he hadn't been able to find any who were willing to come out to his lonely little islands; he had decided to go to Earth where there was supposed to be a surplus. Naturally, having been born and brought up on a very primitive planet, he didn't know "it's a woman's world," like the older boys in school used to say. The moment he landed on Earth he was in trouble. He didn't know he had to register at a government-operated hotel for transient males; he threw a bartender through a thick plastic window for saying something nasty about the length of his hair; and imagine !—he not only resisted arrest, resulting in three hospitalized policemen, but he sassed the judge in open court! "Told me a man wasn't supposed to say anything except through female attorneys. Told her that where I came from, a man spoke his piece when he'd a mind to, and his woman walked by his side." "What happened?" I asked breathlessly. "Oh, Guilty of This and Contempt of That. That blown-up brinosaur took my last munit for fines, then explained that she was remitting the rest because I was a foreigner and uneducated." His eyes grew dark for a moment. He chuckled again. "But I wasn't going to serve all those fancy little prison sentences. Forcible Citizenship Indoctrination, they call it? Shook the dead-dry dust of the misbegotten, God forsaken mother world from my feet forever. The women on it deserve their men. My pockets were folded from the fines, and the paddlefeet were looking for me so close I didn't dare radio for more munit. So I stowed away." For a moment, I didn't understand him. When I did, I was almost ill. "Y-you mean," I choked, "th-that you're b-breaking the law right now? And I'm with you while you're doing it?" He leaned over the edge of the bunk and stared at me very seriously. "What breed of tadpole are they turning out these days? Besides, what business do you have this close to the hull?" After a moment of sober reflection, I nodded. "You're right. I've also become a male outside the law. We're in this together." He guffawed. Then he sat up and began cleaning his blaster. I found myself drawn to the bright killer-tube with exactly the fascination Sis insists such things have always had for men. "Ferdinand your label? That's not right for a sprouting tadpole. I'll call you Ford. My name's Butt. Butt Lee Brown." I liked the sound of Ford. "Is Butt a nickname, too?" "Yeah. Short for Alberta, but I haven't found a man who can draw a blaster fast enough to call me that. You see, Pop came over in the eighties—the big wave of immigrants when they evacuated Ontario. Named all us boys after Canadian provinces. I was the youngest, so I got the name they were saving for a girl." "You had a lot of brothers, Mr. Butt?" He grinned with a mighty set of teeth. "Oh, a nestful. Of course, they were all killed in the Blue Chicago Rising by the MacGregor boys—all except me and Saskatchewan. Then Sas and me hunted the MacGregors down. Took a heap of time; we didn't float Jock MacGregor's ugly face down the Tuscany till both of us were pretty near grown up." I walked up close to where I could see the tiny bright copper coils of the blaster above the firing button. "Have you killed a lot of men with that, Mr. Butt?" "Butt. Just plain Butt to you, Ford." He frowned and sighted at the light globe. "No more'n twelve—not counting five government paddlefeet, of course. I'm a peaceable planter. Way I figure it, violence never accomplishes much that's important. My brother Sas, now—" He had just begun to work into a wonderful anecdote about his brother when the dinner gong rang. Butt told me to scat. He said I was a growing tadpole and needed my vitamins. And he mentioned, very off-hand, that he wouldn't at all object if I brought him some fresh fruit. It seemed there was nothing but processed foods in the lifeboat and Butt was used to a farmer's diet. Trouble was, he was a special kind of farmer. Ordinary fruit would have been pretty easy to sneak into my pockets at meals. I even found a way to handle the kelp and giant watercress Mr. Brown liked, but things like seaweed salt and Venusian mud-grapes just had too strong a smell. Twice, the mechanical hamper refused to accept my jacket for laundering and I had to wash it myself. But I learned so many wonderful things about Venus every time I visited that stowaway.... I learned three wild-wave songs of the Flatfolk and what it is that the native Venusians hate so much; I learned how you tell the difference between a lousy government paddlefoot from New Kalamazoo and the slaptoe slinker who is the planter's friend. After a lot of begging, Butt Lee Brown explained the workings of his blaster, explained it so carefully that I could name every part and tell what it did from the tiny round electrodes to the long spirals of transformer. But no matter what, he would never let me hold it. "Sorry, Ford, old tad," he would drawl, spinning around and around in the control swivel-chair at the nose of the lifeboat. "But way I look at it, a man who lets somebody else handle his blaster is like the giant whose heart was in an egg that an enemy found. When you've grown enough so's your pop feels you ought to have a weapon, why, then's the time to learn it and you might's well learn fast. Before then, you're plain too young to be even near it." "I don't have a father to give me one when I come of age. I don't even have an older brother as head of my family like your brother Labrador. All I have is Sis. And she —" "She'll marry some fancy dryhorn who's never been farther South than the Polar Coast. And she'll stay head of the family, if I know her breed of green shata. Bossy, opinionated. By the way, Fordie," he said, rising and stretching so the fish-leather bounced and rippled off his biceps, "that sister. She ever...." And he'd be off again, cross-examining me about Evelyn. I sat in the swivel chair he'd vacated and tried to answer his questions. But there was a lot of stuff I didn't know. Evelyn was a healthy girl, for instance; how healthy, exactly, I had no way of finding out. Yes, I'd tell him, my aunts on both sides of my family each had had more than the average number of children. No, we'd never done any farming to speak of, back in Undersea, but—yes, I'd guess Evelyn knew about as much as any girl there when it came to diving equipment and pressure pump regulation. How would I know that stuff would lead to trouble for me? Sis had insisted I come along to the geography lecture. Most of the other girls who were going to Venus for husbands talked to each other during the lecture, but not my sister! She hung on every word, took notes even, and asked enough questions to make the perspiring purser really work in those orientation periods. "I am very sorry, Miss Sparling," he said with pretty heavy sarcasm, "but I cannot remember any of the agricultural products of the Macro Continent. Since the human population is well below one per thousand square miles, it can readily be understood that the quantity of tilled soil, land or sub-surface, is so small that—Wait, I remember something. The Macro Continent exports a fruit though not exactly an edible one. The wild dunging drug is harvested there by criminal speculators. Contrary to belief on Earth, the traffic has been growing in recent years. In fact—" "Pardon me, sir," I broke in, "but doesn't dunging come only from Leif Erickson Island off the Moscow Peninsula of the Macro Continent? You remember, purser—Wang Li's third exploration, where he proved the island and the peninsula didn't meet for most of the year?" The purser nodded slowly. "I forgot," he admitted. "Sorry, ladies, but the boy's right. Please make the correction in your notes." But Sis was the only one who took notes, and she didn't take that one. She stared at me for a moment, biting her lower lip thoughtfully, while I got sicker and sicker. Then she shut her pad with the final gesture of the right hand that Mom used to use just before challenging the opposition to come right down on the Council floor and debate it out with her. "Ferdinand," Sis said, "let's go back to our cabin." The moment she sat me down and walked slowly around me, I knew I was in for it. "I've been reading up on Venusian geography in the ship's library," I told her in a hurry. "No doubt," she said drily. She shook her night-black hair out. "But you aren't going to tell me that you read about dunging in the ship's library. The books there have been censored by a government agent of Earth against the possibility that they might be read by susceptible young male minds like yours. She would not have allowed—this Terran Agent—" "Paddlefoot," I sneered. Sis sat down hard in our zoom-air chair. "Now that's a term," she said carefully, "that is used only by Venusian riffraff." "They're not!" "Not what?" "Riffraff," I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away! "They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus." "Does it, now?" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. "Tell me more." "You can't have meek, law-abiding, women-ruled men when you start civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary—with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later." "You're going to tell , Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!" "Nobody!" I insisted. "They're my own ideas!" "They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand—after I have found a good, steady husband, of course—and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now, who has been filling your head with all this nonsense?" I was sweating. Sis has that deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulpast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattled to the floor. "What is this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?" A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. "One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit." "The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?" "Nobody! Nobody! " "Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand—" "I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford." "Ford? Ford? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand...." After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl. All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better. The door opened on the signal, "Sesame." When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures. He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back. "An honor, Miss Sparling," he said in that rumbly voice. "Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft." So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis. She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly. "First, Mr. Brown," she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, "you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?" He opened his mouth to its maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm. "I take it you either have no defense or care to make none," Sis added caustically. Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word. "Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus." "We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before—" "Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world." "It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown." Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, "What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?" He cocked his head and considered a moment. "Look," he said finally, "I have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they were willing to help. But this lifeboat—don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat?" "Yes," she said bitterly. "You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?" "No, Sis, he didn't," I was beginning to argue. "All he wanted—" "Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences." "Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?" He waved his hands at her impatiently. "I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's." Sis actually staggered back. "Let's? Let's what ? Are—are you daring to suggest that—that—" "Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too." I was so excited I just had to yell: "Gee, Sis, say yes !"

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AMBITION By WILLIAM L. BADE Illustrated by L. WOROMAY [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] To the men of the future, the scientific goals of today were as incomprehensible as the ancient quest for the Holy Grail! There was a thump. Maitland stirred, came half awake, and opened his eyes. The room was dark except where a broad shaft of moonlight from the open window fell on the foot of his bed. Outside, the residential section of the Reservation slept silently under the pale illumination of the full Moon. He guessed sleepily that it was about three o'clock. What had he heard? He had a definite impression that the sound had come from within the room. It had sounded like someone stumbling into a chair, or— Something moved in the darkness on the other side of the room. Maitland started to sit up and it was as though a thousand volts had shorted his brain.... This time, he awoke more normally. He opened his eyes, looked through the window at a section of azure sky, listened to the singing of birds somewhere outside. A beautiful day. In the middle of the process of stretching his rested muscles, arms extended back, legs tensed, he froze, looking up—for the first time really seeing the ceiling. He turned his head, then rolled off the bed, wide awake. This wasn't his room! The lawn outside wasn't part of the Reservation! Where the labs and the shops should have been, there was deep prairie grass, then a green ocean pushed into waves by the breeze stretching to the horizon. This wasn't the California desert! Down the hill, where the liquid oxygen plant ought to have been, a river wound across the scene, almost hidden beneath its leafy roof of huge ancient trees. Shock contracted Maitland's diaphragm and spread through his body. His breathing quickened. Now he remembered what had happened during the night, the sound in the darkness, the dimly seen figure, and then—what? Blackout.... Where was he? Who had brought him here? For what purpose? He thought he knew the answer to the last of those questions. As a member of the original atomic reaction-motor team, he possessed information that other military powers would very much like to obtain. It was absolutely incredible that anyone had managed to abduct him from the heavily guarded confines of the Reservation, yet someone had done it. How? He pivoted to inspect the room. Even before his eyes could take in the details, he had the impression that there was something wrong about it. To begin with, the style was unfamiliar. There were no straight lines or sharp corners anywhere. The walls were paneled in featureless blue plastic and the doors were smooth surfaces of metal, half ellipses, without knobs. The flowing lines of the chair and table, built apparently from an aluminum alloy, somehow gave the impression of arrested motion. Even after allowances were made for the outlandish design, something about the room still was not right. His eyes returned to the doors, and he moved over to study the nearer one. As he had noticed, there was no knob, but at the right of this one, at about waist level, a push-button projected out of the wall. He pressed it; the door slid aside and disappeared. Maitland glanced in at the disclosed bathroom, then went over to look at the other door. There was no button beside this one, nor any other visible means of causing it to open. Baffled, he turned again and looked at the large open window—and realized what it was that had made the room seem so queer. It did not look like a jail cell. There were no bars.... Striding across the room, he lunged forward to peer out and violently banged his forehead. He staggered back, grimacing with pain, then reached forward cautious fingers and discovered a hard sheet of stuff so transparent that he had not even suspected its presence. Not glass! Glass was never this clear or strong. A plastic, no doubt, but one he hadn't heard of. Security sometimes had disadvantages. He looked out at the peaceful vista of river and prairie. The character of the sunlight seemed to indicate that it was afternoon. He became aware that he was hungry. Where the devil could this place be? And—muscles tightened about his empty stomach—what was in store for him here? He stood trembling, acutely conscious that he was afraid and helpless, until a flicker of motion at the bottom of the hill near the river drew his attention. Pressing his nose against the window, he strained his eyes to see what it was. A man and a woman were coming toward him up the hill. Evidently they had been swimming, for each had a towel; the man's was hung around his neck, and the woman was still drying her bobbed black hair. Maitland speculated on the possibility that this might be Sweden; he didn't know of any other country where public bathing at this time of year was customary. However, that prairie certainly didn't look Scandinavian.... As they came closer, he saw that both of them had dark uniform suntans and showed striking muscular development, like persons who had trained for years with weights. They vanished below his field of view, presumably into the building. He sat down on the edge of the cot and glared helplessly at the floor. About half an hour later, the door he couldn't open slid aside into the wall. The man Maitland had seen outside, now clad in gray trunks and sandals, stood across the threshold looking in at him. Maitland stood up and stared back, conscious suddenly that in his rumpled pajamas he made an unimpressive figure. The fellow looked about forty-five. The first details Maitland noticed were the forehead, which was quite broad, and the calm, clear eyes. The dark hair, white at the temples, was combed back, still damp from swimming. Below, there was a wide mouth and a firm, rounded chin. This man was intelligent, Maitland decided, and extremely sure of himself. Somehow, the face didn't go with the rest of him. The man had the head of a thinker, the body of a trained athlete—an unusual combination. Impassively, the man said, "My name is Swarts. You want to know where you are. I am not going to tell you." He had an accent, European, but otherwise unidentifiable. Possibly German. Maitland opened his mouth to protest, but Swarts went on, "However, you're free to do all the guessing you want." Still there was no suggestion of a smile. "Now, these are the rules. You'll be here for about a week. You'll have three meals a day, served in this room. You will not be allowed to leave it except when accompanied by myself. You will not be harmed in any way, provided you cooperate. And you can forget the silly idea that we want your childish secrets about rocket motors." Maitland's heart jumped. "My reason for bringing you here is altogether different. I want to give you some psychological tests...." "Are you crazy?" Maitland asked quietly. "Do you realize that at this moment one of the greatest hunts in history must be going on? I'll admit I'm baffled as to where we are and how you got me here—but it seems to me that you could have found someone less conspicuous to give your tests to." Briefly, then, Swarts did smile. "They won't find you," he said. "Now, come with me." After that outlandish cell, Swarts' laboratory looked rather commonplace. There was something like a surgical cot in the center, and a bench along one wall supported several electronics cabinets. A couple of them had cathode ray tube screens, and they all presented a normal complement of meters, pilot lights, and switches. Cables from them ran across the ceiling and came to a focus above the high flat cot in the center of the room. "Lie down," Swarts said. When Maitland hesitated, Swarts added, "Understand one thing—the more you cooperate, the easier things will be for you. If necessary, I will use coercion. I can get all my results against your will, if I must. I would prefer not to. Please don't make me." "What's the idea?" Maitland asked. "What is all this?" Swarts hesitated, though not, Maitland astonishedly felt, to evade an answer, but to find the proper words. "You can think of it as a lie detector. These instruments will record your reactions to the tests I give you. That is as much as you need to know. Now lie down." Maitland stood there for a moment, deliberately relaxing his tensed muscles. "Make me." If Swarts was irritated, he didn't show it. "That was the first test," he said. "Let me put it another way. I would appreciate it a lot if you'd lie down on this cot. I would like to test my apparatus." Maitland shook his head stubbornly. "I see," Swarts said. "You want to find out what you're up against." He moved so fast that Maitland couldn't block the blow. It was to the solar plexus, just hard enough to double him up, fighting for breath. He felt an arm under his back, another behind his knees. Then he was on the cot. When he was able to breathe again, there were straps across his chest, hips, knees, ankles, and arms, and Swarts was tightening a clamp that held his head immovable. Presently, a number of tiny electrodes were adhering to his temples and to other portions of his body, and a minute microphone was clinging to the skin over his heart. These devices terminated in cables that hung from the ceiling. A sphygmomanometer sleeve was wrapped tightly around his left upper arm, its rubber tube trailing to a small black box clamped to the frame of the cot. Another cable left the box and joined the others. So—Maitland thought—Swarts could record changes in his skin potential, heartbeat, and blood pressure: the involuntary responses of the body to stimuli. The question was, what were the stimuli to be? "Your name," said Swarts, "is Robert Lee Maitland. You are thirty-four years old. You are an engineer, specialty heat transfer, particularly as applied to rocket motors.... No, Mr. Maitland, I'm not going to question you about your work; just forget about it. Your home town is Madison, Wisconsin...." "You seem to know everything about me," Maitland said defiantly, looking up into the hanging forest of cabling. "Why this recital?" "I do not know everything about you—yet. And I'm testing the equipment, calibrating it to your reactions." He went on, "Your favorite recreations are chess and reading what you term science fiction. Maitland, how would you like to go to the Moon ?" Something eager leaped in Maitland's breast at the abrupt question, and he tried to turn his head. Then he forced himself to relax. "What do you mean?" Swarts was chuckling. "I really hit a semantic push-button there, didn't I? Maitland, I brought you here because you're a man who wants to go to the Moon. I'm interested in finding out why ." In the evening a girl brought Maitland his meal. As the door slid aside, he automatically stood up, and they stared at each other for several seconds. She had the high cheekbones and almond eyes of an Oriental, skin that glowed like gold in the evening light, yet thick coiled braids of blonde hair that glittered like polished brass. Shorts and a sleeveless blouse of some thick, reddish, metallic-looking fabric clung to her body, and over that she was wearing a light, ankle-length cloak of what seemed to be white wool. She was looking at him with palpable curiosity and something like expectancy. Maitland sighed and said, "Hello," then glanced down self-consciously at his wrinkled green pajamas. She smiled, put the tray of food on the table, and swept out, her cloak billowing behind her. Maitland remained standing, staring at the closed door for a minute after she was gone. Later, when he had finished the steak and corn on the cob and shredded carrots, and a feeling of warm well-being was diffusing from his stomach to his extremities, he sat down on the bed to watch the sunset and to think. There were three questions for which he required answers before he could formulate any plan or policy. Where was he? Who was Swarts? What was the purpose of the "tests" he was being given? It was possible, of course, that this was all an elaborate scheme for getting military secrets, despite Swarts' protestations to the contrary. Maitland frowned. This place certainly didn't have the appearance of a military establishment, and so far there had been nothing to suggest the kind of interrogation to be expected from foreign intelligence officers. It might be better to tackle the first question first. He looked at the Sun, a red spheroid already half below the horizon, and tried to think of a region that had this kind of terrain. That prairie out there was unique. Almost anywhere in the world, land like that would be cultivated, not allowed to go to grass. This might be somewhere in Africa.... He shook his head, puzzled. The Sun disappeared and its blood-hued glow began to fade from the sky. Maitland sat there, trying to get hold of the problem from an angle where it wouldn't just slip away. After a while the western sky became a screen of clear luminous blue, a backdrop for a pure white brilliant star. As always at that sight, Maitland felt his worry drain away, leaving an almost mystical sense of peace and an undefinable longing. Venus, the most beautiful of the planets. Maitland kept track of them all in their majestic paths through the constellations, but Venus was his favorite. Time and time again he had watched its steady climb higher and higher in the western sky, its transient rule there as evening star, its progression toward the horizon, and loved it equally in its alter ego of morning star. Venus was an old friend. An old friend.... Something icy settled on the back of his neck, ran down his spine, and diffused into his body. He stared at the planet unbelievingly, fists clenched, forgetting to breathe. Last night Venus hadn't been there. Venus was a morning star just now.... Just now! He realized the truth in that moment. Later, when that jewel of a planet had set and the stars were out, he lay on the bed, still warm with excitement and relief. He didn't have to worry any more about military secrets, or who Swarts was. Those questions were irrelevant now. And now he could accept the psychological tests at their face value; most likely, they were what they purported to be. Only one question of importance remained: What year was this? He grimaced in the darkness, an involuntary muscular expression of jubilation and excitement. The future ! Here was the opportunity for the greatest adventure imaginable to 20th Century man. Somewhere, out there under the stars, there must be grand glittering cities and busy spaceports, roaring gateways to the planets. Somewhere, out there in the night, there must be men who had walked beside the Martian canals and pierced the shining cloud mantle of Venus—somewhere, perhaps, men who had visited the distant luring stars and returned. Surely, a civilization that had developed time travel could reach the stars! And he had a chance to become a part of all that! He could spend his life among the planets, a citizen of deep space, a voyager of the challenging spaceways between the solar worlds. "I'm adaptable," he told himself gleefully. "I can learn fast. There'll be a job for me out there...." If— Suddenly sobered, he rolled over and put his feet on the floor, sat in the darkness thinking. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would have to find a way of breaking down Swarts' reticence. He would have to make the man realize that secrecy wasn't necessary in this case. And if Swarts still wouldn't talk, he would have to find a way of forcing the issue. The fellow had said that he didn't need cooperation to get his results, but— After a while Maitland smiled to himself and went back to bed. He woke in the morning with someone gently shaking his shoulder. He rolled over and looked up at the girl who had brought him his meal the evening before. There was a tray on the table and he sniffed the smell of bacon. The girl smiled at him. She was dressed as before, except that she had discarded the white cloak. As he swung his legs to the floor, she started toward the door, carrying the tray with the dirty dishes from yesterday. He stopped her with the word, "Miss!" She turned, and he thought there was something eager in her face. "Miss, do you speak my language?" "Yes," hesitantly. She lingered too long on the hiss of the last consonant. "Miss," he asked, watching her face intently, "what year is this?" Startlingly, she laughed, a mellow peal of mirth that had nothing forced about it. She turned toward the door again and said over her shoulder, "You will have to ask Swarts about that. I cannot tell you." "Wait! You mean you don't know?" She shook her head. "I cannot tell you." "All right; we'll let it go at that." She grinned at him again as the door slid shut. Swarts came half an hour later, and Maitland began his planned offensive. "What year is this?" Swarts' steely eyes locked with his. "You know what the date is," he stated. "No, I don't. Not since yesterday." "Come on," Swarts said patiently, "let's get going. We have a lot to get through this morning." "I know this isn't 1950. It's probably not even the 20th Century. Venus was a morning star before you brought me here. Now it's an evening star." "Never mind that. Come." Wordlessly, Maitland climbed to his feet, preceded Swarts to the laboratory, lay down and allowed him to fasten the straps and attach the instruments, making no resistance at all. When Swarts started saying a list of words—doubtlessly some sort of semantic reaction test—Maitland began the job of integrating "csc 3 x dx" in his head. It was a calculation which required great concentration and frequent tracing back of steps. After several minutes, he noticed that Swarts had stopped calling words. He opened his eyes to find the other man standing over him, looking somewhat exasperated and a little baffled. "What year is this?" Maitland asked in a conversational tone. "We'll try another series of tests." It took Swarts nearly twenty minutes to set up the new apparatus. He lowered a bulky affair with two cylindrical tubes like the twin stacks of a binocular microscope over Maitland's head, so that the lenses at the ends of the tubes were about half an inch from the engineer's eyes. He attached tiny clamps to Maitland's eyelashes. "These will keep you from holding your eyes shut," he said. "You can blink, but the springs are too strong for you to hold your eyelids down against the tension." He inserted button earphones into Maitland's ears— And then the show began. He was looking at a door in a partly darkened room, and there were footsteps outside, a peremptory knocking. The door flew open, and outlined against the light of the hall, he saw a man with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The man shouted, "Now I've got you, you wife-stealer!" He swung the shotgun around and pulled the trigger. There was a terrible blast of sound and the flash of smokeless powder—then blackness. With a deliberate effort, Maitland unclenched his fists and tried to slow his breathing. Some kind of emotional reaction test—what was the countermove? He closed his eyes, but shortly the muscles around them declared excruciatingly that they couldn't keep that up. Now he was looking at a girl. She.... Maitland gritted his teeth and fought to use his brain; then he had it. He thought of a fat slob of a bully who had beaten him up one day after school. He remembered a talk he had heard by a politician who had all the intelligent social responsibility of a rogue gorilla, but no more. He brooded over the damnable stupidity and short-sightedness of Swarts in standing by his silly rules and not telling him about this new world. Within a minute, he was in an ungovernable rage. His muscles tightened against the restraining straps. He panted, sweat came out on his forehead, and he began to curse. Swarts! How he hated.... The scene was suddenly a flock of sheep spread over a green hillside. There was blood hammering in Maitland's temples. His face felt hot and swollen and he writhed against the restraint of the straps. The scene disappeared, the lenses of the projector retreated from his eyes and Swarts was standing over him, white-lipped. Maitland swore at him for a few seconds, then relaxed and smiled weakly. His head was starting to ache from the effort of blinking. "What year is this?" he asked. "All right," Swarts said. "A.D. 2634." Maitland's smile became a grin. "I really haven't the time to waste talking irrelevancies," Swarts said a while later. "Honestly. Maitland, I'm working against a time limit. If you'll cooperate, I'll tell Ching to answer your questions."' "Ching?" "Ingrid Ching is the girl who has been bringing you your meals." Maitland considered a moment, then nodded. Swarts lowered the projector to his eyes again, and this time the engineer did not resist. That evening, he could hardly wait for her to come. Too excited to sit and watch the sunset, he paced interminably about the room, sometimes whistling nervously, snapping his fingers, sitting down and jittering one leg. After a while he noticed that he was whistling the same theme over and over: a minute's thought identified it as that exuberant mounting phrase which recurs in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He forgot about it and went on whistling. He was picturing himself aboard a ship dropping in toward Mars, making planetfall at Syrtis Major; he was seeing visions of Venus and the awesome beauty of Saturn. In his mind, he circled the Moon, and viewed the Earth as a huge bright globe against the constellations.... Finally the door slid aside and she appeared, carrying the usual tray of food. She smiled at him, making dimples in her golden skin and revealing a perfect set of teeth, and put the tray on the table. "I think you are wonderful," she laughed. "You get everything you want, even from Swarts, and I have not been able to get even a little of what I want from him. I want to travel in time, go back to your 20th Century. And I wanted to talk with you, and he would not let me." She laughed again, hands on her rounded hips. "I have never seen him so irritated as he was this noon." Maitland urged her into the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed. Eagerly he asked, "Why the devil do you want to go to the 20th Century? Believe me, I've been there, and what I've seen of this world looks a lot better." She shrugged. "Swarts says that I want to go back to the Dark Age of Technology because I have not adapted well to modern culture. Myself, I think I have just a romantic nature. Far times and places look more exciting...." "How do you mean—" Maitland wrinkled his brow—"adapt to modern culture? Don't tell me you're from another time!" "Oh, no! But my home is Aresund, a little fishing village at the head of a fiord in what you would call Norway. So far north, we are much behind the times. We live in the old way, from the sea, speak the old tongue." He looked at her golden features, such a felicitous blend of Oriental and European characteristics, and hesitantly asked, "Maybe I shouldn't.... This is a little personal, but ... you don't look altogether like the Norwegians of my time." His fear that she would be offended proved to be completely unjustified. She merely laughed and said, "There has been much history since 1950. Five hundred years ago, Europe was overrun by Pan-Orientals. Today you could not find anywhere a 'pure' European or Asiatic." She giggled. "Swarts' ancestors from your time must be cursing in their graves. His family is Afrikander all the way back, but one of his great-grandfathers was pure-blooded Bantu. His full name is Lassisi Swarts." Maitland wrinkled his brow. "Afrikander?" "The South Africans." Something strange came into her eyes. It might have been awe, or even hatred; he could not tell. "The Pan-Orientals eventually conquered all the world, except for North America—the last remnant of the American World Empire—and southern Africa. The Afrikanders had been partly isolated for several centuries then, and they had developed technology while the rest of the world lost it. They had a tradition of white supremacy, and in addition they were terrified of being encircled." She sighed. "They ruled the next world empire and it was founded on the slaughter of one and a half billion human beings. That went into the history books as the War of Annihilation." "So many? How?" "They were clever with machines, the Afrikanders. They made armies of them. Armies of invincible killing-machines, produced in robot factories from robot-mined ores.... Very clever." She gave a little shudder. "And yet they founded modern civilization," she added. "The grandsons of the technicians who built the Machine Army set up our robot production system, and today no human being has to dirty his hands raising food or manufacturing things. It could never have been done, either, before the population was—reduced to three hundred million." "Then the Afrikanders are still on top? Still the masters?" She shook her head. "There are no more Afrikanders." "Rebellion?" "No. Intermarriage. Racial blending. There was a psychology of guilt behind it. So huge a crime eventually required a proportionate expiation. Afrikaans is still the world language, but there is only one race now. No more masters or slaves." They were both silent for a moment, and then she sighed. "Let us not talk about them any more." "Robot factories and farms," Maitland mused. "What else? What means of transportation? Do you have interstellar flight yet?" "Inter-what?" "Have men visited the stars?" She shook her head, bewildered. "I always thought that would be a tough problem to crack," he agreed. "But tell me about what men are doing in the Solar System. How is life on Mars and Venus, and how long does it take to get to those places?" He waited, expectantly silent, but she only looked puzzled. "I don't understand. Mars? What are Mars?" After several seconds, Maitland swallowed. Something seemed to be the matter with his throat, making it difficult for him to speak. "Surely you have space travel?" She frowned and shook her head. "What does that mean—space travel?" He was gripping the edge of the bed now, glaring at her. "A civilization that could discover time travel and build robot factories wouldn't find it hard to send a ship to Mars!" "A ship ? Oh, you mean something like a vliegvlotter . Why, no, I don't suppose it would be hard. But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?" He was on his feet towering over her, fists clenched. She raised her arms as if to shield her face if he should hit her. "Let's get this perfectly clear," he said, more harshly than he realized. "So far as you know, no one has ever visited the planets, and no one wants to. Is that right?" She nodded apprehensively. "I have never heard of it being done." He sank down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After a while he looked up and said bitterly, "You're looking at a man who would give his life to get to Mars. I thought I would in my time. I was positive I would when I knew I was in your time. And now I know I never will." The cot creaked beside him and he felt a soft arm about his shoulders and fingers delicately stroking his brow. Presently he opened his eyes and looked at her. "I just don't understand," he said. "It seemed obvious to me that whenever men were able to reach the planets, they'd do it." Her pitying eyes were on his face. He hitched himself around so that he was facing her. "I've got to understand. I've got to know why . What happened? Why don't men want the planets any more?" "Honestly," she said, "I did not know they ever had." She hesitated. "Maybe you are asking the wrong question." He furrowed his brow, bewildered now by her. "I mean," she explained, "maybe you should ask why people in the 20th Century did want to go to worlds men are not suited to inhabit." Maitland felt his face become hot. "Men can go anywhere, if they want to bad enough." "But why ?" Despite his sudden irrational anger toward her, Maitland tried to stick to logic. "Living space, for one thing. The only permanent solution to the population problem...." "We have no population problem. A hundred years ago, we realized that the key to social stability is a limited population. Our economic system was built to take care of three hundred million people, and we have held the number at that." "Birth control," Maitland scoffed. "How do you make it work—secret police?" "No. Education. Each of us has the right to two children, and we cherish that right so much that we make every effort to see that those two are the best children we could possibly produce...." She broke off, looking a little self-conscious. "You understand, what I have been saying applies to most of the world. In some places like Aresund, things are different. Backward. I still do not feel that I belong here, although the people of the town have accepted me as one of them." "Even," he said, "granting that you have solved the population problem, there's still the adventure of the thing. Surely, somewhere, there must be men who still feel that.... Ingrid, doesn't it fire something in your blood, the idea of going to Mars—just to go there and see what's there and walk under a new sky and a smaller Sun? Aren't you interested in finding out what the canals are? Or what's under the clouds of Venus? Wouldn't you like to see the rings of Saturn from, a distance of only two hundred thousand miles?" His hands were trembling as he stopped. She shrugged her shapely shoulders. "Go into the past—yes! But go out there? I still cannot see why." "Has the spirit of adventure evaporated from the human race, or what ?" She smiled. "In a room downstairs there is the head of a lion. Swarts killed the beast when he was a young man. He used a spear. And time traveling is the greatest adventure there is. At least, that is the way I feel. Listen, Bob." She laid a hand on his arm. "You grew up in the Age of Technology. Everybody was terribly excited about what could be done with machines—machines to blow up a city all at once, or fly around the world, or take a man to Mars. We have had our fill of—what is the word?—gadgets. Our machines serve us, and so long as they function right, we are satisfied to forget about them. "Because this is the Age of Man . We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists, like Swarts, are studying human rather than nuclear reactions. We are much more fascinated by the life and death of cultures than by the expansion or contraction of the Universe. With us, it is the people that are important, not gadgets." Maitland stared at her, his face blank. His mind had just manufactured a discouraging analogy. His present position was like that of an earnest 12th Century crusader, deposited by some freak of nature into the year 1950, trying to find a way of reanimating the anti-Mohammedan movement. What chance would he have? The unfortunate knight would argue in vain that the atomic bomb offered a means of finally destroying the infidel.... Maitland looked up at the girl, who was regarding him silently with troubled eyes. "I think I'd like to be alone for a while," he said.

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The Ignoble Savages By EVELYN E. SMITH Illustrated by DILLON [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction March 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Snaddra had but one choice in its fight to afford to live belowground—underhandedly pretend theirs was an aboveboard society! "Go Away from me, Skkiru," Larhgan said, pushing his hand off her arm. "A beggar does not associate with the high priestess of Snaddra." "But the Earthmen aren't due for another fifteen minutes," Skkiru protested. "Of what importance are fifteen minutes compared to eternity!" she exclaimed. Her lovely eyes fuzzed softly with emotion. "You don't seem to realize, Skkiru, that this isn't just a matter of minutes or hours. It's forever." "Forever!" He looked at her incredulously. "You mean we're going to keep this up as a permanent thing? You're joking!" Bbulas groaned, but Skkiru didn't care about that. The sad, sweet way Larhgan shook her beautiful head disturbed him much more, and when she said, "No, Skkiru, I am not joking," a tiny pang of doubt and apprehension began to quiver in his second smallest left toe. "This is, in effect, good-by," she continued. "We shall see each other again, of course, but only from a distance. On feast days, perhaps you may be permitted to kiss the hem of my robe ... but that will be all." Skkiru turned to the third person present in the council chamber. "Bbulas, this is your fault! It was all your idea!" There was regret on the Dilettante's thin face—an obviously insincere regret, the younger man knew, since he was well aware how Bbulas had always felt about the girl. "I am sorry, Skkiru," Bbulas intoned. "I had fancied you understood. This is not a game we are playing, but a new way of life we are adopting. A necessary way of life, if we of Snaddra are to keep on living at all." "It's not that I don't love you, Skkiru," Larhgan put in gently, "but the welfare of our planet comes first." She had been seeing too many of the Terrestrial fictapes from the library, Skkiru thought resentfully. There was too damn much Terran influence on this planet. And this new project was the last straw. No longer able to control his rage and grief, he turned a triple somersault in the air with rage. "Then why was I made a beggar and she the high priestess? You arranged that purposely, Bbulas. You—" "Now, Skkiru," Bbulas said wearily, for they had been through all this before, "you know that all the ranks and positions were distributed by impartial lot, except for mine, and, of course, such jobs as could carry over from the civilized into the primitive." Bbulas breathed on the spectacles he was wearing, as contact lenses were not considered backward enough for the kind of planet Snaddra was now supposed to be, and attempted to wipe them dry on his robe. However, the thick, jewel-studded embroidery got in his way and so he was forced to lift the robe and wipe all three of the lenses on the smooth, soft, spun metal of his top underskirt. "After all," he went on speaking as he wiped, "I have to be high priest, since I organized this culture and am the only one here qualified to administer it. And, as the president himself concurred in these arrangements, I hardly think you—a mere private citizen—have the right to question them." "Just because you went to school in another solar system," Skkiru said, whirling with anger, "you think you're so smart!" "I won't deny that I do have educational and cultural advantages which were, unfortunately, not available to the general populace of this planet. However, even under the old system, I was always glad to utilize my superior attainments as Official Dilettante for the good of all and now—" "Sure, glad to have a chance to rig this whole setup so you could break up things between Larhgan and me. You've had your eye on her for some time." Skkiru coiled his antennae at Bbulas, hoping the insult would provoke him into an unbecoming whirl, but the Dilettante remained calm. One of the chief outward signs of Terran-type training was self-control and Bbulas had been thoroughly terranized. I hate Terrestrials , Skkiru said to himself. I hate Terra. The quiver of anxiety had risen up his leg and was coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. He hoped it wouldn't reach his antennae—if he were to break down and psonk in front of Larhgan, it would be the final humiliation. "Skkiru!" the girl exclaimed, rotating gently, for she, like her fiance—her erstwhile fiance, that was, for the new regime had caused all such ties to be severed—and every other literate person on the planet, had received her education at the local university. Although sound, the school was admittedly provincial in outlook and very poor in the emotional department. "One would almost think that the lots had some sort of divine intelligence behind them, because you certainly are behaving in a beggarly manner!" "And I have already explained to you, Skkiru," Bbulas said, with a patience much more infuriating than the girl's anger, "that I had no idea of who was to become my high priestess. The lots chose Larhgan. It is, as the Earthmen say, kismet." He adjusted the fall of his glittering robe before the great polished four-dimensional reflector that formed one wall of the chamber. Kismet , Skkiru muttered to himself, and a little sleight of hand. But he didn't dare offer this conclusion aloud; the libel laws of Snaddra were very severe. So he had to fall back on a weak, "And I suppose it is kismet that makes us all have to go live out on the ground during the day, like—like savages." "It is necessary," Bbulas replied without turning. "Pooh," Skkiru said. "Pooh, pooh , POOH!" Larhgan's dainty earflaps closed. "Skkiru! Such language!" "As you said," Bbulas murmured, contemptuously coiling one antenna at Skkiru, "the lots chose well and if you touch me, Skkiru, we shall have another drawing for beggar and you will be made a metal-worker." "But I can't work metal!" "Then that will make it much worse for you than for the other outcasts," Bbulas said smugly, "because you will be a pariah without a trade." "Speaking of pariahs, that reminds me, Skkiru, before I forget, I'd better give you back your grimpatch—" Larhgan handed the glittering bauble to him—"and you give me mine. Since we can't be betrothed any longer, you might want to give yours to some nice beggar girl." "I don't want to give my grimpatch to some nice beggar girl!" Skkiru yelled, twirling madly in the air. "As for me," she sighed, standing soulfully on her head, "I do not think I shall ever marry. I shall make the religious life my career. Are there going to be any saints in your mythos, Bbulas?" "Even if there will be," Bbulas said, "you certainly won't qualify if you keep putting yourself into a position which not only represents a trait wholly out of keeping with the new culture, but is most unseemly with the high priestess's robes." Larhgan ignored his unfeeling observations. "I shall set myself apart from mundane affairs," she vowed, "and I shall pretend to be happy, even though my heart will be breaking." It was only at that moment that Skkiru realized just how outrageous the whole thing really was. There must be another solution to the planet's problem. "Listen—" he began, but just then excited noises filtered down from overhead. It was too late. "Earth ship in view!" a squeaky voice called through the intercom. "Everybody topside and don't forget your shoes." Except the beggar. Beggars went barefoot. Beggars suffered. Bbulas had made him beggar purposely, and the lots were a lot of slibwash. "Hurry up, Skkiru." Bbulas slid the ornate headdress over his antennae, which, already gilded and jeweled, at once seemed to become a part of it. He looked pretty damn silly, Skkiru thought, at the same time conscious of his own appearance—which was, although picturesque enough to delight romantic Terrestrial hearts, sufficiently wretched to charm the most hardened sadist. "Hurry up, Skkiru," Bbulas said. "They mustn't suspect the existence of the city underground or we're finished before we've started." "For my part, I wish we'd never started," Skkiru grumbled. "What was wrong with our old culture, anyway?" That was intended as a rhetorical question, but Bbulas answered it anyway. He always answered questions; it had never seemed to penetrate his mind that school-days were long since over. "I've told you a thousand times that our old culture was too much like the Terrans' own to be of interest to them," he said, with affected weariness. "After all, most civilized societies are basically similar; it is only primitive societies that differ sharply, one from the other—and we have to be different to attract Earthmen. They're pretty choosy. You've got to give them what they want, and that's what they want. Now take up your post on the edge of the field, try to look hungry, and remember this isn't for you or for me, but for Snaddra." "For Snaddra," Larhgan said, placing her hand over her anterior heart in a gesture which, though devout on Earth—or so the fictapes seemed to indicate—was obscene on Snaddra, owing to the fact that certain essential organs were located in different areas in the Snaddrath than in the corresponding Terrestrial life-form. Already the Terrestrial influence was corrupting her, Skkiru thought mournfully. She had been such a nice girl, too. "We may never meet on equal terms again, Skkiru," she told him, with a long, soulful glance that made his hearts sink down to his quivering toes, "but I promise you there will never be anyone else for me—and I hope that knowledge will inspire you to complete cooperation with Bbulas." "If that doesn't," Bbulas said, "I have other methods of inspiration." "All right," Skkiru answered sulkily. "I'll go to the edge of the field, and I'll speak broken Inter-galactic, and I'll forsake my normal habits and customs, and I'll even beg . But I don't have to like doing it, and I don't intend to like doing it." All three of Larhgan's eyes fuzzed with emotion. "I'm proud of you, Skkiru," she said brokenly. Bbulas sniffed. The three of them floated up to ground level in a triple silence. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd," Skkiru chanted, as the two Terrans descended from the ship and plowed their way through the mud to meet a procession of young Snaddrath dressed in elaborate ceremonial costumes, and singing a popular ballad—to which less ribald, as well as less inspiring, words than the originals had been fitted by Bbulas, just in case, by some extremely remote chance, the Terrans had acquired a smattering of Snadd somewhere. Since neither party was accustomed to navigating mud, their progress was almost imperceptible. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd," chanted Skkiru the beggar. His teeth chattered as he spoke, for the rags he wore had been custom-weatherbeaten for him by the planet's best tailor—now a pariah, of course, because Snadd tailors were, naturally, metal-workers—and the wind and the rain were joyously making their way through the demolished wires. Never before had Skkiru been on the surface of the planet, except to pass over, and he had actually touched it only when taking off and landing. The Snaddrath had no means of land transport, having previously found it unnecessary—but now both air-cars and self-levitation were on the prohibited list as being insufficiently primitive. The outside was no place for a civilized human being, particularly in the wet season or—more properly speaking on Snaddra—the wetter season. Skkiru's feet were soaked with mud; not that the light sandals worn by the members of the procession appeared to be doing them much good, either. It gave him a kind of melancholy pleasure to see that the privileged ones were likewise trying to repress shivers. Though their costumes were rich, they were also scanty, particularly in the case of the females, for Earthmen had been reported by tape and tale to be humanoid. As the mud clutched his toes, Skkiru remembered an idea he had once gotten from an old sporting fictape of Terrestrial origin and had always planned to experiment with, but had never gotten around to—the weather had always been so weathery, there were so many other more comfortable sports, Larhgan had wanted him to spend more of his leisure hours with her, and so on. However, he still had the equipment, which he'd salvaged from a wrecked air-car, in his apartment—and it was the matter of a moment to run down, while Bbulas was looking the other way, and get it. Bbulas couldn't really object, Skkiru stilled the nagging quiver in his toe, because what could be more primitive than any form of land transport? And even though it took time to get the things, they worked so well that, in spite of the procession's head start, he was at the Earth ship long before the official greeters had reached it. The newcomers were indeed humanoid, he saw. Only the peculiarly pasty color of their skins and their embarrassing lack of antennae distinguished them visibly from the Snaddrath. They were dressed much as the Snaddrath had been before they had adopted primitive garb. In fact, the Terrestrials were quite decent-looking life-forms, entirely different from the foppish monsters Skkiru had somehow expected to represent the cultural ruling race. Of course, he had frequently seen pictures of them, but everyone knew how easily those could be retouched. Why, it was the Terrestrials themselves, he had always understood, who had invented the art of retouching—thus proving beyond a doubt that they had something to hide. "Look, Raoul," the older of the two Earthmen said in Terran—which the Snaddrath were not, according to the master plan, supposed to understand, but which most of them did, for it was the fashionable third language on most of the outer planets. "A beggar. Haven't seen one since some other chaps and I were doing a spot of field work on that little planet in the Arcturus system—what was its name? Glotch, that's it. Very short study, it turned out to be. Couldn't get more than a pamphlet out of it, as we were unable to stay long enough to amass enough material for a really definitive work. The natives tried to eat us, so we had to leave in somewhat of a hurry." "Oh, they were cannibals?" the other Earthman asked, so respectfully that it was easy to deduce he was the subordinate of the two. "How horrible!" "No, not at all," the other assured him. "They weren't human—another species entirely—so you could hardly call it cannibalism. In fact, it was quite all right from the ethical standpoint, but abstract moral considerations seemed less important to us than self-preservation just then. Decided that, in this case, it would be best to let the missionaries get first crack at them. Soften them up, you know." "And the missionaries—did they soften them up, Cyril?" "They softened up the missionaries, I believe." Cyril laughed. "Ah, well, it's all in the day's work." "I hope these creatures are not man-eaters," Raoul commented, with a polite smile at Cyril and an apprehensive glance at the oncoming procession— creatures indeed ! Skkiru thought, with a mental sniff. "We have come such a long and expensive way to study them that it would be indeed a pity if we also were forced to depart in haste. Especially since this is my first field trip and I would like to make good at it." "Oh, you will, my boy, you will." Cyril clapped the younger man on the shoulder. "I have every confidence in your ability." Either he was stupid, Skkiru thought, or he was lying, in spite of Bbulas' asseverations that untruth was unknown to Terrestrials—which had always seemed highly improbable, anyway. How could any intelligent life-form possibly stick to the truth all the time? It wasn't human; it wasn't even humanoid; it wasn't even polite. "The natives certainly appear to be human enough," Raoul added, with an appreciative glance at the females, who had been selected for the processional honor with a view to reported Terrestrial tastes. "Some slight differences, of course—but, if two eyes are beautiful, three eyes can be fifty per cent lovelier, and chartreuse has always been my favorite color." If they stand out here in the cold much longer, they are going to turn bright yellow. His own skin, Skkiru knew, had faded from its normal healthy emerald to a sickly celadon. Cyril frowned and his companion's smile vanished, as if the contortion of his superior's face had activated a circuit somewhere. Maybe the little one's a robot! However, it couldn't be—a robot would be better constructed and less interested in females than Raoul. "Remember," Cyril said sternly, "we must not establish undue rapport with the native females. It tends to detract from true objectivity." "Yes, Cyril," Raoul said meekly. Cyril assumed a more cheerful aspect "I should like to give this chap something for old times' sake. What do you suppose is the medium of exchange here?" Money , Skkiru said to himself, but he didn't dare contribute this piece of information, helpful though it would be. "How should I know?" Raoul shrugged. "Empathize. Get in there, old chap, and start batting." "Why not give him a bar of chocolate, then?" Raoul suggested grumpily. "The language of the stomach, like the language of love, is said to be a universal one." "Splendid idea! I always knew you had it in you, Raoul!" Skkiru accepted the candy with suitable—and entirely genuine—murmurs of gratitude. Chocolate was found only in the most expensive of the planet's delicacy shops—and now neither delicacy shops nor chocolate were to be found, so, if Bbulas thought he was going to save the gift to contribute it later to the Treasury, the "high priest" was off his rocker. To make sure there would be no subsequent dispute about possession, Skkiru ate the candy then and there. Chocolate increased the body's resistance to weather, and never before had he had to endure so much weather all at once. On Earth, he had heard, where people lived exposed to weather, they often sickened of it and passed on—which helped to solve the problem of birth control on so vulgarly fecund a planet. Snaddra, alas, needed no such measures, for its population—like its natural resources—was dwindling rapidly. Still, Skkiru thought, as he moodily munched on the chocolate, it would have been better to flicker out on their own than to descend to a subterfuge like this for nothing more than survival. Being a beggar, Skkiru discovered, did give him certain small, momentary advantages over those who had been alloted higher ranks. For one thing, it was quite in character for him to tread curiously upon the strangers' heels all the way to the temple—a ramshackle affair, but then it had been run up in only three days—where the official reception was to be held. The principal difficulty was that, because of his equipment, he had a little trouble keeping himself from overshooting the strangers. And though Bbulas might frown menacingly at him—and not only for his forwardness—that was in character on both sides, too. Nonetheless, Skkiru could not reconcile himself to his beggarhood, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by thinking at least he wasn't a pariah like the unfortunate metal-workers who had to stand segregated from the rest by a chain of their own devising—a poetic thought, that was, but well in keeping with his beggarhood. Beggars were often poets, he believed, and poets almost always beggars. Since metal-working was the chief industry of Snaddra, this had provided the planet automatically with a large lowest caste. Bbulas had taken the easy way out. Skkiru swallowed the last of the chocolate and regarded the "high priest" with a simple-minded mendicant's grin. However, there were volcanic passions within him that surged up from his toes when, as the wind and rain whipped through his scanty coverings, he remembered the snug underskirts Bbulas was wearing beneath his warm gown. They were metal, but they were solid. All the garments visible or potentially visible were of woven metal, because, although there was cloth on the planet, it was not politic for the Earthmen to discover how heavily the Snaddrath depended upon imports. As the Earthmen reached the temple, Larhgan now appeared to join Bbulas at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to it. Although Skkiru had seen her in her priestly apparel before, it had not made the emotional impression upon him then that it did now, when, standing there, clad in beauty, dignity and warm clothes, she bade the newcomers welcome in several thousand words not too well chosen for her by Bbulas—who fancied himself a speech-writer as well as a speech-maker, for there was no end to the man's conceit. The difference between her magnificent garments and his own miserable rags had their full impact upon Skkiru at this moment. He saw the gulf that had been dug between them and, for the first time in his short life, he felt the tormenting pangs of caste distinction. She looked so lovely and so remote. "... and so you are most welcome to Snaddra, men of Earth," she was saying in her melodious voice. "Our resources may be small but our hearts are large, and what little we have, we offer with humility and with love. We hope that you will enjoy as long and as happy a stay here as you did on Nemeth...." Cyril looked at Raoul, who, however, seemed too absorbed in contemplating Larhgan's apparently universal charms to pay much attention to the expression on his companion's face. "... and that you will carry our affection back to all the peoples of the Galaxy." She had finished. And now Cyril cleared his throat. "Dear friends, we were honored by your gracious invitation to visit this fair planet, and we are honored now by the cordial reception you have given to us." The crowd yoomped politely. After a slight start, Cyril went on, apparently deciding that applause was all that had been intended. "We feel quite sure that we are going to derive both pleasure and profit from our stay here, and we promise to make our intensive analysis of your culture as painless as possible. We wish only to study your society, not to tamper with it in any way." Ha, ha , Skkiru said to himself. Ha, ha, ha! "But why is it," Raoul whispered in Terran as he glanced around out of the corners of his eyes, "that only the beggar wears mudshoes?" "Shhh," Cyril hissed back. "We'll find out later, when we've established rapport. Don't be so impatient!" Bbulas gave a sickly smile. Skkiru could almost find it in his hearts to feel sorry for the man. "We have prepared our best hut for you, noble sirs," Bbulas said with great self-control, "and, by happy chance, this very evening a small but unusually interesting ceremony will be held outside the temple. We hope you will be able to attend. It is to be a rain dance." "Rain dance!" Raoul pulled his macintosh together more tightly at the throat. "But why do you want rain? My faith, not only does it rain now, but the planet seems to be a veritable sea of mud. Not, of course," he added hurriedly as Cyril's reproachful eye caught his, "that it is not attractive mud. Finest mud I have ever seen. Such texture, such color, such aroma!" Cyril nodded three times and gave an appreciative sniff. "But," Raoul went on, "one can have too much of even such a good thing as mud...." The smile did not leave Bbulas' smooth face. "Yes, of course, honorable Terrestrials. That is why we are holding this ceremony. It is not a dance to bring on rain. It is a dance to stop rain." He was pretty quick on the uptake, Skkiru had to concede. However, that was not enough. The man had no genuine organizational ability. In the time he'd had in which to plan and carry out a scheme for the improvement of Snaddra, surely he could have done better than this high-school theocracy. For one thing, he could have apportioned the various roles so that each person would be making a definite contribution to the society, instead of creating some positions plums, like the priesthood, and others prunes, like the beggarship. What kind of life was that for an active, ambitious young man, standing around begging? And, moreover, from whom was Skkiru going to beg? Only the Earthmen, for the Snaddrath, no matter how much they threw themselves into the spirit of their roles, could not be so carried away that they would give handouts to a young man whom they had been accustomed to see basking in the bosom of luxury. Unfortunately, the fees that he'd received in the past had not enabled him both to live well and to save, and now that his fortunes had been so drastically reduced, he seemed in a fair way of starving to death. It gave him a gentle, moody pleasure to envisage his own funeral, although, at the same time, he realized that Bbulas would probably have to arrange some sort of pension for him; he could not expect Skkiru's patriotism to extend to abnormal limits. A man might be willing to die for his planet in many ways—but wantonly starving to death as the result of a primitive affectation was hardly one of them. All the same, Skkiru reflected as he watched the visitors being led off to the native hut prepared for them, how ignominious it would be for one of the brightest young architects on the planet to have to subsist miserably on the dole just because the world had gone aboveground. The capital had risen to the surface and the other cities would soon follow suit. Meanwhile, a careful system of tabus had been designed to keep the Earthmen from discovering the existence of those other cities. He could, of course, emigrate to another part of the planet, to one of them, and stave off his doom for a while—but that would not be playing the game. Besides, in such a case, he wouldn't be able to see Larhgan. As if all this weren't bad enough, he had been done an injury which struck directly at his professional pride. He hadn't even been allowed to help in planning the huts. Bbulas and some workmen had done all that themselves with the aid of some antique blueprints that had been put out centuries before by a Terrestrial magazine and had been acquired from a rare tape-and-book dealer on Gambrell, for, Skkiru thought, far too high a price. He could have designed them himself just as badly and much more cheaply. It wasn't that Skkiru didn't understand well enough that Snaddra had been forced into making such a drastic change in its way of life. What resources it once possessed had been depleted and—aside from minerals—they had never been very extensive to begin with. All life-forms on the planet were on the point of extinction, save fish and rice—the only vegetable that would grow on Snaddra, and originally a Terran import at that. So food and fiber had to be brought from the other planets, at fabulous expense, for Snaddra was not on any of the direct trade routes and was too unattractive to lure the tourist business. Something definitely had to be done, if it were not to decay altogether. And that was where the Planetary Dilettante came in. The traditional office of Planetary Dilettante was a civil-service job, awarded by competitive examination whenever it fell vacant to the person who scored highest in intelligence, character and general gloonatz. However, the tests were inadequate when it came to measuring sense of proportion, adaptiveness and charm—and there, Skkiru felt, was where the essential flaw lay. After all, no really effective test would have let a person like Bbulas come out on top. The winner was sent to Gambrell, the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to be given a thorough Terran-type education. No individual on Snaddra could afford such schooling, no matter how great his personal fortune, because the transportation costs were so immense that only a government could afford them. That was the reason why only one person in each generation could be chosen to go abroad at the planet's expense and acquire enough finish to cover the rest of the population. The Dilettante's official function had always been, in theory, to serve the planet when an emergency came—and this, old Luccar, the former President, had decided, when he and the Parliament had awakened to the fact that Snaddra was falling into ruin, was an emergency. So he had, after considerable soul-searching, called upon Bbulas to plan a method of saving Snaddra—and Bbulas, happy to be in the limelight at last, had come up with this program. It was not one Skkiru himself would have chosen. It was not one, he felt, that any reasonable person would have chosen. Nevertheless, the Bbulas Plan had been adopted by a majority vote of the Snaddrath, largely because no one had come up with a feasible alternative and, as a patriotic citizen, Skkiru would abide by it. He would accept the status of beggar; it was his duty to do so. Moreover, as in the case of the planet, there was no choice. But all was not necessarily lost, he told himself. Had he not, in his anthropological viewings—though Bbulas might have been the only one privileged to go on ethnological field trips to other planets, he was not the only one who could use a library—seen accounts of societies where beggarhood could be a rewarding and even responsible station in life? There was no reason why, within the framework of the primitive society Bbulas had created to allure Terran anthropologists, Skkiru should not make something of himself and show that a beggar was worthy of the high priestess's hand—which would be entirely in the Terran primitive tradition of romance. "Skkiru!" Bbulas was screaming, as he spun, now that the Terrans were out of ear- and eye-shot "Skkiru, you idiot, listen to me! What are those ridiculous things you are wearing on your silly feet?" Skkiru protruded all of his eyes in innocent surprise. "Just some old pontoons I took from a wrecked air-car once. I have a habit of collecting junk and I thought—" Bbulas twirled madly in the air. "You are not supposed to think. Leave all the thinking to me!" "Yes, Bbulas," Skkiru said meekly.

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20041

Vulgar Keynesians Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what "everyone knows," is no more than a crude caricature of the original. Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day. Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. So-called "classical" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the "loanable funds" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment. Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, "In the long run we are all dead." In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by "liquidity preference"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump. It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. Consider, for example, the "paradox of thrift." Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall! Or consider the "widow's cruse" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan. After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God. But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does. To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: "It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!") What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, "Practical men, who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings will actually reduce growth treated seriously in ("Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places," Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing. To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story. No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you. Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. "You need to stimulate the investment decision," says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment. Am I missing something? To read the reply of "Vulgar Keynesian" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.

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20048

I Have Seen the Future of Europe The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the "Capital of Europe," headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home. Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: "Taste you can trust.") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair. Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates. Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town, most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy. Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure. Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe. The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization. These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood. In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions. But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest "competence," or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective. The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like "deputy director" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates. The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ... Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.

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20020

MONICA! The White House may have been in crisis all year, but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical comedy. Hey, wait a minute--let's put on a show! The time: November 1995. The House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, are insisting on their version of the budget. President Bill Clinton is stubbornly rejecting it. The Republicans have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll let the government shut down. In the Oval Office, BILL CLINTON meets with advisers LEON PANETTA and HAROLD ICKES and secretary BETTY CURRIE to discuss this development. "The Shutdown" (upbeat production number) PANETTA: The Republicans have positions To which they're clinging fast. ICKES: The president is just as firm The die, it seems, is cast. PANETTA: Without a budget passed by Congress The government will close. All of the workers Will be sent home on furloughs. CLINTON [speaking] : Well, wait a second--not all of them. We'll need to keep some essential personnel. PANETTA: The Army and the Navy Will need to stay in place. ICKES: Also those at NASA Who keep the shuttle up in space. PANETTA: We'll need to keep the pilots Flying in their planes. CLINTON: And here at the White House My staff should remain. PANETTA [speaking] : But even here at the White House, some adjustments will be required. CLINTON: OK, tell the ushers To take a few days off. Tell the maids and cooks and butlers To go play themselves some golf. We have to do without the clerks Let them all go home. CURRIE: What about the secretaries? Who will get the phones? CLINTON [speaking] : We've got to make sure the Oval Office functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. PANETTA: Aha! I have it! We'll bring in an intern, We'll bring in an intern, Someone who's an expert with a phone. We'll bring in an intern, We'll bring in an intern, I assure you, Mr. President-- Your routine here won't get blown. PANETTA , ICKES , and CURRIE [solemnly agreeing] : The presence of an intern will ensure Your routine here won't get blown. [The advisers depart, leaving President Clinton alone. He turns introspective.] "President Lonely" (a ballad) CLINTON: I've got deputies and bureaucrats Who fulfill my every thought. And soldiers, sailors, and Marines To fight battles I want fought. There's no one who's got more power, I'm the leader of all that's free But if you subtract the flags and lackeys, I'm just Lonely. I'm President Lonely. But I guess I'll just have to muddle through. The cheers and applause are overwhelming, But presidents need cuddles, too. The fawning adoration's pleasant, But presidents need cuddles, too. [Enter Betty Currie.] CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, "Hel-lo-o-o!" And then I had the idea to take him pizza! TRIPP: And then what happened? "What Went On" (upbeat) LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. I showed him my thong, I let him take a long and ling'ring look. I led him on. He studied my thong, And from that point I had the president hooked. That night when I took the president some pizza, I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. We went into the hallway by his study And dispensed with formalities. TRIPP: Oh please go on! You must go on! Come on, girlfriend, Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! Now go on, Please go on. Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, I reached into the presidential trousers, And he got a phone call from a member of the House. So I went on, While he talked on the phone, I took a position before him on my knees, And I went on. And he talked on. Though what the congressman heard was "Please, please, please, please, please!" But then we didn't go on! TRIPP: You didn't go on? LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. TRIPP: So you didn't go on? LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he Could Trust. [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] TRIPP: Trust? LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on. TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? TRIPP: It's just my gum. LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] "Time to Go" CURRIE: They go back there, They're just talking, I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, It's just what she picks to drink. Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. CURRIE: She brings him Little presents. She really is a very thoughtful soul. LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much As her up real close and personal touch. I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. CURRIE: She never comes When he's really busy. Rarely is there anyone around. LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! CURRIE: He comes back From Easter services, Soon she's bopping in the door. LIEBERMAN: "Hallelujah, He Is Risen" Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] "Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat" (sprightly) GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, Chat, chat, Two old galpals swap the latest word. Talk, talk, Chat, chat, Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. GOLDBERG: I got tickets To the opera, Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, I lost a filling At lunch on Thursday. That's it for me, Now tell me what's up with you. TRIPP: My friend Monica? From the White House? I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. It seems this Monica chick Has been sucking the president's-- GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, Too. GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, Did I hear you rightly? Clinton got into an intern's pants? God, this news is manna, Linda! At last our cause will finally have it's chance! TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an Escape. He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables-- GOLDBERG: Unless you get that airhead down on tape. TRIPP: What? GOLDBERG: Unless you get that silly, vapid, trampy time bomb Down on tape. TRIPP: Oh--one more thing ... GOLDBERG: What? TRIPP: There's a dress ... GOLDBERG: Hold on, let me call Sparky. [Independent Counsel Starr uses Tripp to detain Monica. A few days later, the news breaks. On the advice of his pal Harry Thomason, Clinton flat-out lies to his wife, to his loyalists, and to the public about the relationship.] "I Never Have" (performance should build in tempo and intensity) CLINTON: You know I'd like to answer questions, An act my lawyers won't allow. I'll give you more not less, sooner not later, I just can't say a word right now. But I don't know why she'd say these things Her head's full of who knows what. But I never had sex with that woman I never had sex with that n-- Starr has spent $40 million, There's desperation on his face. An utter waste of public money, A prosecutorial disgrace. All he's got is some recordings Made by a vengeful snitch. I never had sex with that woman I never had sex with that b-- A vast right-wing conspiracy Is using her to beat on me. They wanna torpedo my agenda They hate me and Hillary. But I will never let them ruin Our dreams for a better world. I tell ya, I never had sex with that woman I never had sex with that Girl. [Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] "Crossing the Line" STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, Which Bittman put the lid on. And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling Upon our little gridiron. The Democrats and liberals Blast these tactics of mine, But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do When the president crosses the line. He's crossed the line. He's crossed the line. Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules When the president crosses the line. It may have seemed like dirty pool To drag his people 'fore the jury. We wasted lots of Vernon's time, May have busted Bettie Currie. His aides aren't the innocent bystanders As they claim when they moan and whine. They won't say what they know full well: The president crossed the line. He's crossed the line. He's crossed the line. I'd be a nitwit not to bend a bit When the president crosses the line. The talking heads are accusing me Of laying a perjury trap. But all it catches is lying men. Honest men beat the rap. There's people who say I'm against sex; I've had sex. It's fine. But lying about it gets my blood up And the president's crossed the line. I crossed the line. I crossed the line. Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will When the president crosses the line. [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.] "Testimony" (snappy) CLINTON: Depends what the definition of "is" is, Depends on the meaning of sex, "Alone together" is literal nonsense, Before you reach conclusions, read your text. [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, But inappropriate are all these personal questions, The country doesn't need to know these things. [Clinton's enemies reject his apology, and soon the House of Representatives begins the long process of impeachment. NEWT GINGRICH here discloses his approach.] "Bring 'em Down" (dark, moody) GINGRICH: Mustn't seem to be too cheerful, Mustn't overreach, Must remember to seem unhappy That we're going to impeach. Must remember to remain sober As we undertake this chore. At the same time, let's remember To pin some stuff on Gore. Bring 'em down. Bring 'em down. Sure, they were elected, Twice, in point of fact. Voters obviously were bewildered To have made a choice like that. Now, like charging linemen, We'll move in for the sack. Bring 'em down. Bring 'em down. Bring 'em down. [The House votes to hold impeachment hearings. But just a few weeks later, the midterm elections, which are expected to go the GOP's way, are held. Contrary to predictions, the Democrats pick up seats, and the GOP's obsession with scandal is repudiated. Gingrich resigns, and the practical chances of Clinton's removal evaporate. As the show ends, we hear from Starr, Lewinsky, and Clinton.] "The People Have Spoken" (dramatic, stirring) STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, I can't believe what they had to say. I had Clinton boxed into a corner Looks like he's going to get away. I spent four years and 40 million That's a lot of time and loot. I made Clinton look ridiculous, But the only scalp I got was Newt's. LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, I can't believe what they had to say. My boyfriend is still in office And he might return to me one day. You think perhaps that he will not want me For all the trouble I've caused so far, But he knows I can always make him happy With my thong and my cigar. CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, I can't believe what they had to say. The removal threat is over, Kenneth Starr should go away. I tell you, though, it is a mystery, I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. I might be guilty of obstruction, Yet my ratings are sky-high. That must mean I'm a pretty good president, Though how, I don't think I know. But obviously I'm not Starr or Gingrich, Which may be why they love me so. Which may be why they love me so. [Curtain.]

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20051

Reading the Inaugurals President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life. The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say? [T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere. The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the "peculiar domestic institution" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers. In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: "At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs." If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals. Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was "a bully pulpit," a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, "Let us ... "--meaning, "You do as I say." This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one. The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was. Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, "Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country," has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, "Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little." And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, "In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation." Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word "women" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase "men and women," never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural. One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. "Taxes," or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: "The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong." Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent. The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls "the supreme American problem." The words "black," "blacks," "Negro," or "race" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, "On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer "No one!"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America. Before the Civil War the word "slavery" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield (1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the "freedmen" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and 15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, "Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States," but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals. After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: "From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history." I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans. There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .

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20056

Folie ࠎ People with high IQs tend to be nearsighted. This is not because they read a lot or stare at computer screens too much. That common-sense hypothesis has been discredited by research. Rather, it is a matter of genetics. The same genes that tend to elevate IQ also tend to affect the shape of the eyeball in a way that leads to myopia. This relationship--known in genetics as "pleiotropy"--seems to be completely accidental, a quirk of evolution. Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives. Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove . So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being. As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20. In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A "beautiful dark-haired young man," "handsome as a god," he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and "rather limp and beautiful hands" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline. Agame is just a conflict situation with a bunch of participants, or "players." The players could be poker pals, oligopolists competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a "Nash equilibrium": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred, at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a "fixed-point theorem" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the "fixed point." Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever, but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus. Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for "research and development"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of "smoothness" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that "impossible" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled. That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this "genius with a penis." Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat. All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose). When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. "Nash's talk wasn't good or bad," said one mathematician present. "It was horrible." Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica. Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--"I am the left foot of God on earth"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner. He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him "the Phantom." They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: "Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision." Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way. Indeed, he has evolved into a "very fine person," according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in "insulbrick.") The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.

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20044

Diamonds in the Rough Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks. Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood. A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. "Once this opens," predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, "everyone will want one like it." And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, "If you build it, they will copy." While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago. For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.) Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating. In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects "remedy" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's. Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building. The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend. So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants. Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money. Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind. Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a "35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles." Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest. Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver. "If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money," says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. "But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal," Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have "legs," retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options. Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.

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20031

My Father's Estate A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: "I saw that your father had died," she wrote. "He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us. He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service. The nest egg is going to be taxed at a federal rate of about 55 percent, after an initial exemption and then a transition amount taxed at around 40 percent (and all that after paying estate expenses). When I think about it, I want to cry. My father and mother lived frugally all their lives. They never had a luxury car. They never flew first-class unless it was on the expense account. They never in their whole lives went on an expensive vacation. When he last went into the hospital, my father was still wearing an old pair of gray wool slacks with a sewed-up hole in them from where my dog ripped them--15 years ago. They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined. There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry. That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience. Some of them will go to the Nixon Library, and some will be on bookshelves in the (very small and modest) house my wife and I own in Malibu, a place he found beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could be no more racial segregation in schools. And there are his mementos of Richard Nixon, his White House cufflinks, photos of Camp David, certificates and honorary degrees, and clippings of great events of state. And there are his love letters to and from my mother when they were courting in 1935 and 1936, still tied with light blue ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose we'll have to place a value on these and have them taxed, too. But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well. My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. "Loyalty." There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed. My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority. He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of Bolívar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far. He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his longtime pal Murray Foss at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank where he hung his hat for many years, into account; and the words of Mrs. Wiggins, who ran the cafeteria at the AEI; and the thoughts of Alan Greenspan or the head of Goldman, Sachs; and valued them entirely on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him. He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely. My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.) Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero. My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence. Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as "Suvorov," after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it. He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called "Route 29") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled "Only You") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete. Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. ("He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' " my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.) Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, "Let's do it together. It'll take half as long." I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital. This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it. This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, "Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax." The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.

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20029

Edward W. Said The game of biographical "gotcha" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine? To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian. Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not "the parable of Palestinian identity" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said "grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members." A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to "spin" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .) Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure. Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls "the Palestinian Versailles." These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him "The Professor of Terror." New York magazine once called him "Arafat's man in New York." And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special "Money" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be "on the payroll of the PLO." Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's "Algiers Declaration" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right to exist. Over the years, he has often said that his own place in such a state would be as its toughest critic. Even as he has been unsparing in his indictments of Israeli and American policy, he has not let Arab governments--or the Palestinian leadership--off the hook. He has assailed the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that rule most of the Arab world, punctured the ideological phantasms of Pan-Arabist nationalism and reactionary Islam alike, and bemoaned the impoverished state of Arab cultural and intellectual life. He has also, within the Palestinian camp, been a consistent advocate of reconciliation with Israel and an opponent of terrorism. The Question of Palestine called for a "two-state solution" at a time when the official PLO ambition was total control over British Mandatory Palestine. The book, published in Israel in 1981, had, as of the mid-'90s, never been translated into Arabic or published in any Arab country. In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize the PLO as a legitimate party to peace talks in exchange for recognition of Israel. Arafat ignored the message. Fifteen years later, when Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, Said, who had been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the "peace process," Said has bemoaned Arafat's "capitulation" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over a few scraps of occupied territory and with Israel's continued expropriation of Palestinian lands. In the New York Times Magazine last spring, he wrote that the Palestinian state toward which the peace process seemed, however pokily, to be tending could not provide democracy and justice for the Palestinians. Instead, he called for a single, "bi-national" state based on a constitution (something neither Israel nor the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority currently has), with "the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence." But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition. But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for "post-colonial" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to "the other"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) "must be represented" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis. Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left, a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline. Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses "a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure." Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. "He is easily distracted" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , "answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol." O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing "criticism over solidarity," speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .

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20027

Booze You Can Use I love beer, but lately I've been wondering: Am I getting full value for my beer dollar? As I've stocked up on microbrews and fancy imports, I've told myself that their taste is deeper, richer, more complicated, more compelling--and therefore worth the 50 percent to 200 percent premium they command over cheap mass products or even mainstream Bud. And yet, I've started to wonder, is this just costly snobbery? If I didn't know what I was drinking, could I even tell whether it was something from Belgium, vs. something from Pabst? I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a "science of beer" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines: 1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers. Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have . 2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. ("Per pint" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack. The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: High End Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import. Pete's Wicked Lager. National-scale "microbrew." $1.11 per pint. (Deep-discount sale. List price $1.46 per pint.) Like the next one, this put us into the gray zone for a lager test. Few American "microbreweries" produce lagers of any sort. Pete's is called a lager but was visibly darker than, say, Bud. Samuel Adams Boston Lager. National macro-microbrew. $1.56 per pint. (That was list price. The following week it was on sale for $1.25 per pint, which would have made it do far better in the value rankings.) Calls itself America's Best Beer. Has dark orangey-amber color that was obviously different from all other lagers tested. Mid-Range Budweiser. $.84 per pint. (Sale. List price $.89 per pint.) Self-styled King of Beers. Miller Genuine Draft. $.84 per pint. (Sale. List price $.89 per pint.) Coors Light. $.84 per pint. (Sale. List price $.89 per pint. Isn't price competition a wonderful thing?) The Silver Bullet That Won't Slow You Down. Cheap Milwaukee's Best. $.55 per pint. (Sale. List price $.62 per pint.) A k a "Beast." Schmidt's. $.54 per pint. (Sale. List $.62 per pint.) Box decorated with a nice painting of a trout. Busch. $.50 per pint. (Sale. List $.69 per pint.) Painting of mountains. The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as "Red, White, and Blue," "Old German," or the one with generic printing that just says "Beer." The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint. 3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores. The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test was over. After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. Description: "Amusing presumption," "fresh on the palate," "crap," etc. Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the "flight" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this: To see all the grids for all the beers, click . 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference: 2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on "corrected average preference points"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results: Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a "lager." It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ... 3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are: In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to "best" beers than the prices would indicate. 4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), "I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy." The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the "group" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are: We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it "crap"; another, "Water. LITE." But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked "best" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.) Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--"fizzy and soapy"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should: 1) Buy Sam Adams when they want an individual glass of lager to be as good as it can be. 2) Buy Busch at all other times, since it gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. The detailed rankings and comments for all tasters on all beers may be found . Next installment: fancy beers .

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We Do Understand "This is not another book about civility," Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . "Civility," she explains, suggests a "veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast." Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious. In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because "contentious public discourse" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships. Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. Don't argue for the sake of arguing. Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. Many issues are multisided. Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. Don't fight over small issues. Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win. If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor. "When there is a need to make others wrong," Tannen argues, "the temptation is great to oversimplify" and to "seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours." In her need to make the "argument culture" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of "totalitarian countries" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in "ethnically motivated assaults" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler. Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's "kick 'em when they're up" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting. Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been "trained to overcome their resistance to kill" by trying "not to think of their opponents as human beings." She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. "Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty." She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler. Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists "" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: "E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient." Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: "Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time." Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing "disastrous consequences." Partial-birth abortion is "surely not" a "very important" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican "politics of obstruction" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the "broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed." The "view of government as the enemy" isn't worth debating; it's just "another troubling aspect of the argument culture." Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that "right-wing talk radio" deploys phrases "similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era." Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address "is followed immediately by a Republican response," which "weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders." A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton "broke the spell" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' "sense of connection" to "our judicial system." The investigation of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was excessive, the campaign against former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was "cruelly unfair," and the Whitewater investigation--led by "a prominent Republican known for his animosity toward the president"--is, in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, "the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history." Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. "The very fact that defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in itself evidence of the culture of critique," she writes. The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become "a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights." As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: "Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' " Similarly, "the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group." Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which "typically features a single guest." (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.) Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. "The purpose of most cross-examinations" is "not to establish facts but to discredit the witness," she asserts, as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, "the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination." She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in fact, the point of the trial): that the witness is a victim. Conversely, she assumes that the defendant cannot be a victim. While objecting to cross-examination of alleged rape victims because "it is easy to distort events so that a rape can appear to be consensual sex," she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, "Framing these hearings as a two-sides dispute between Hill and Thomas allowed the senators to focus their investigation on cross-examining Hill rather than seeking other sorts of evidence." Did the dispute not have two sides? Should Hill not have been cross-examined? Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened. Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the "cruelty of cross-examination." She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country. If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that "several of these propagandists now infest Slate "; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.

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The Man Who Was Six By F. L. WALLACE Illustrated by ASHMAN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There is nothing at all like having a sound mind in a sound body, but Dan Merrol had too much of one—and also too much of the other! "Sorry, darling," said Erica. She yawned, added, "I've tried—but I just can't believe you're my husband." He felt his own yawn slip off his face. "What do you mean? What am I doing here then?" "Can't you remember?" Her laughter tinkled as she pushed him away and sat up. "They said you were Dan Merrol at the hospital, but they must have been wrong." "Hospitals don't make that kind of mistake," he said with a certainty he didn't altogether feel. "But I should know, shouldn't I?" "Of course, but...." He did some verbal backstepping. "It was a bad accident. You've got to expect that I won't be quite the same at first." He sat up. " Look at me. Can't you tell who I am?" She returned his gaze, then swayed toward him. He decided that she was highly attractive—but surely he ought to have known that long ago. With a visible effort she leaned away from him. "Your left eye does look familiar," she said cautiously. "The brown one, I mean." "The brown one?" "Your other eye's green," she told him. "Of course—a replacement. I told you it was a serious accident. They had to use whatever was handy." "I suppose so—but shouldn't they have tried to stick to the original color scheme?" "It's a little thing," he said. "I'm lucky to be alive." He took her hand. "I believe I can convince you I'm me ." "I wish you could." Her voice was low and sad and he couldn't guess why. "My name is Dan Merrol." "They told you that at the hospital." They hadn't—he'd read it on the chart. But he had been alone in the room and the name had to be his, and anyway he felt like Dan Merrol. "Your name is Erica." "They told you that too." She was wrong again, but it was probably wiser not to tell her how he knew. No one had said anything to him in the hospital. He hadn't given them a chance. He had awakened in a room and hadn't wanted to be alone. He'd got up and read the chart and searched dizzily through the closet. Clothes were hanging there and he'd put them on and muttered her name to himself. He'd sat down to gain strength and after a while he'd walked out and no one had stopped him. It was night when he left the hospital and the next thing he remembered was her face as he looked through the door. Her name hadn't been on the chart nor her address and yet he had found her. That proved something, didn't it? "How could I forget you?" he demanded. "You may have known someone else with that name. When were we married?" Maybe he should have stayed in the hospital. It would have been easier to convince her there. But he'd been frantic to get home. "It was quite a smashup," he said. "You'll have to expect some lapses." "I'm making allowances. But can't you tell me something about myself?" He thought—and couldn't. He wasn't doing so well. "Another lapse," he said gloomily and then brightened. "But I can tell you lots about myself. For instance, I'm a specialist in lepidoptera." "What's that?" "At the moment, who knows? Anyway, I'm a well-known actor and a musician and a first-rate mathematician. I can't remember any equations offhand except C equals pi R squared. It has to do with the velocity of light. And the rest of the stuff will come back in time." It was easier now that he'd started and he went on rapidly. "I'm thirty-three and after making a lot of money wrestling, married six girls, not necessarily in this order—Lucille, Louise, Carolyn, Katherine, Shirley and Miriam." That was quite a few marriages—maybe it was thoughtless of him to have mentioned them. No woman approves her predecessors. "That's six. Where do I come in?" "Erica. You're the seventh and best." It was just too many, now that he thought of it, and it didn't seem right. She sighed and drew away. "That was a lucky guess on your age." Did that mean he wasn't right on anything else? From the expression on her face, it did. "You've got to expect me to be confused in the beginning. Can't you really tell who I am?" "I can't ! You don't have the same personality at all." She glanced at her arm. There was a bruise on it. "Did I do that?" he asked. "You did, though I'm sure you didn't mean to. I don't think you realized how strong you were. Dan was always too gentle—he must have been afraid of me. And you weren't at all." "Maybe I was impetuous," he said. "But it was such a long time." "Almost three months. But most of that time you were floating in gelatin in the regrowth tank, unconscious until yesterday." She leaned forward and caressed his cheek. "Everything seems wrong, no matter how hard I try to believe otherwise. You don't have the same personality—you can't remember anything." "And I have one brown eye and one green." "It's not just that, darling. Go over to the mirror." He had been seriously injured and he was still weak from the shock. He got up and walked unsteadily to the mirror. "Now what?" "Stand beside it. Do you see the line?" Erica pointed to the glass. He did—it was a mark level with his chin. "What does it mean?" "That should be the top of Dan Merrol's head," she said softly. He was a good six inches taller than he ought to be. But there must be some explanation for the added height. He glanced down at his legs. They were the same length from hip bone to the soles of his feet, but the proportions differed from one side to the other. His knees didn't match. Be-dum, be-dum, be-dumdum, but your knees don't match —the snatch of an ancient song floated through his head. Quickly, he scanned himself. It was the same elsewhere. The upper right arm was massive, too big for the shoulder it merged with. And the forearm, while long, was slender. He blinked and looked again. While they were patching him up, did they really think he needed black, red and brown hair? He wondered how a beagle felt. What were they, a bunch of humorists? Did they, for comic effect, piece together a body out of bits and scraps left over from a chopping block? It was himself he was looking at, otherwise he'd say the results were neither hideous nor horrible, but merely—well, what? Ludicrous and laughable—and there were complications in that too. Who wants to be an involuntary clown, a physical buffoon that Mother Nature hadn't duplicated since Man began? He felt the stubble on his face with his left hand—he thought it was his left hand—at least it was on that side. The emerging whiskers didn't feel like anything he remembered. Wait a minute—was it his memory? He leaned against the wall and nearly fell down. The length of that arm was unexpectedly different. He hobbled over to a chair and sat down, staring miserably at Erica as she began dressing. There was quite a contrast between the loveliness of her body and the circus comedy of his own. "Difficult, isn't it?" she said, tugging her bra together and closing the last snap, which took considerable effort. She was a small girl generally, though not around the chest. It was difficult and in addition to his physique there were the memories he couldn't account for. Come to think of it, he must have been awfully busy to have so many careers in such a short time— and all those wives too. Erica came close and leaned comfortingly against him, but he wasn't comforted. "I waited till I was sure. I didn't want to upset you." He wasn't as sure as she seemed to be now. Somehow, maybe he was still Dan Merrol—but he wasn't going to insist on it—not after looking at himself. Not after trying to sort out those damned memories. She was too kind, pretending to be a little attracted to him, to the scrambled face, to the mismatched lumps and limbs and shapes that, stretching the term, currently formed his body. It was clear what he had to do. The jacket he had worn last night didn't fit. Erica cut off the sleeve that hung far over his fingertips on one side and basted it to the sleeve that ended well above his wrist, on the other. The shoulders were narrow, but the material would stretch and after shrugging around in it, he managed to expand it so it was not too tight. The trousers were also a problem—six inches short with no material to add on, but here again Erica proved equal to the task and, using the cuffs, contrived to lengthen them. Shoes were another difficulty. For one foot the size was not bad, but he could almost step out of the other shoe. When she wasn't looking, he wadded up a spare sock and stuffed it in the toe. He looked critically at himself in the mirror. Dressed, his total effect was better than he had dared hope it would be. True, he did look different . Erica gazed at him with melancholy affection. "I can't understand why they let you out wearing those clothes—or for that matter, why they let you out at all." He must have given some explanation as he'd stumbled through the door. What was it? "When I brought the clothes yesterday, they told me I couldn't see you for a day or so," she mused aloud. "It was the first time you'd been out of the regrowth tank—where no one could see you—and they didn't know the clothes wouldn't fit. You were covered with a sheet, sleeping, I think. They let me peek in and I could make out a corner of your face." It was the clothes, plus the brief glimpse of his face, which had made her think she recognized him when he came in. "They told me you'd have to have psychotherapy and I'd have to have orientation before I could see you. That's why I was so surprised when you rang the bell." His head was churning with ideas, trying to sort them out. Part of last night was dim, part sharp and satisfying. "What's Wysocki's theorem?" she asked. " Whose theorem?" "Wysocki's. I started to call the hospital and you wouldn't let me, because of the theorem. You said you'd explain it this morning." She glanced at the bruise on her arm. It was then he'd grabbed her, to keep her from talking to the hospital. He'd been unnecessarily rough, but that could be ascribed to lack of coordination. She could have been terrified, might have resisted—but she hadn't. At that time, she must have half-believed he was Dan Merrol, still dangerously near the edges of post-regrowth shock. She was looking at him, waiting for that explanation. He shook his mind frantically and the words came out. "Self-therapy," he said briskly. "The patient alone understands what he needs." She started to interrupt, but he shook his head and went on blithely. "That's the first corollary of the theorem. The second is that there are critical times in the recovery of the patient. At such times, with the least possible supervision, he should be encouraged to make his own decisions and carry them through by himself, even though running a slight risk of physical complications." "That's new, isn't it?" she said. "I always thought they watched the patient carefully." It ought to be new—he'd just invented it. "You know how rapidly medical practices change," he said quickly. "Anyway, when they examined me last night, I was much stronger than they expected—so, when I wanted to come home, they let me. It's their latest belief that initiative is more important than perfect health." "Strange," she muttered. "But you are very strong." She looked at him and blushed. "Initiative, certainly you have. Dan could use some, wherever he is." Dan again, whether it was himself or another person. For a brief time, as she listened to him, he'd had the silly idea that.... But it could never happen to him. He'd better leave now while she was distracted and bewildered and believed what he was saying. "I've got to go. I'm due back," he told her. "Not before you eat," she said. "Any man who's spent the night with me is hungry in the morning." It was a domestic miracle that amidst all the pressing and fitting, she'd somehow prepared breakfast and he hadn't noticed. It was a simple chore with the automatics, but to him it seemed a proof of her wifely skill. He wanted to protest, but didn't. Maybe it was the hand she was holding—it seemed to be equipped with a better set of nerves than its predecessor. It tingled at her touch. Sadly, he sat down and looked at his food. Eat? Did he want to eat? Oddly enough, he did. "How much do you remember of the accident?" She shoved aside her own food and sat watching him. Not a thing, now that she asked. In fact, there wasn't much he did remember. There had been the chart at his bed-side, with one word scrawled on it— accident —and that was where he'd got the idea. There had been other marks too, but he hadn't been able to decipher them. He nodded and said nothing and she took it as he thought she would. "It wasn't anybody's fault. The warning devices which were supposed to work didn't," she began. "A Moon ship collided with a Mars liner in the upper atmosphere. The ships broke up in several parts and since they are compartmented and the delay rockets switched on immediately, the separate parts fell rather gently, considering how high they were. Casualties weren't as great as you might think. "Parts of the two ships fell together, the rest were scattered. There was some interchange of passengers in the wreckage, but since you were found in the control compartment of the Mars liner, they assumed you were the pilot. They never let me see you until yesterday and then it was just a glimpse. I took their word when they said you were Dan Merrol." At least he knew who or what Dan Merrol was—the pilot of the Mars liner. They had assumed he was the pilot because of where he was found, but he might have been tossed there—impact did strange things. Dan Merrol was a spaceship pilot and he hadn't included it among his skills. It was strange that she had believed him at all. But now that it was out in the open, he did remember some facts about spaceships. He felt he could manage a takeoff at this instant. But why hadn't he told her? Shock? Perhaps—but where had those other identities come from—lepidopterist, musician, actor, mathematician and wrestler? And where had he got memories of wives, slender and passionate, petite and wild, casual and complaisant, nagging and insecure? Erica he didn't remember at all, save from last night, and what was that due to? "What are you going to do?" he asked, deliberately toying with the last bite of breakfast. It gave him time to think. "They said they'd identified everyone, living or dead, and I supposed they had. After seeing you, I can believe they made any number of similar mistakes. Dan Merrol may be alive under another name. It will be hard to do, but I must try to find him. Some of the accident victims went to other hospitals, you know, the ones located nearest where they fell." Even if he was sure, he didn't know whether he could tell her—and he wasn't sure any longer, although he had been. On the physical side of marriage, how could he ask her to share a body she'd have to laugh at? Later, he might tell her, if there was to be a 'later.' He pushed back his chair and looked at her uncertainly. "Let me call a 'copter," she said. "I hate to see you go." "Wysocki's theorem," he told her. "The patient has decided to walk." He weaved toward the door and twisted the knob. He turned in time to catch her in his arms. "I know this is wrong," she said, pressing against him. It might be wrong, but it was very pleasant, though he did guess her motives. She was a warmhearted girl and couldn't help pitying him. "Don't be so damned considerate," he mumbled. "You'll have to put me down," she said, averting her eyes. "Otherwise.... You're an intolerable funny man." He knew it—he could see himself in the mirror. He was something to laugh at when anyone got tired of pretending sympathy. He put her down and stumbled out. He thought he could hear the bed creak as she threw herself on it. II Once he got started, walking wasn't hard. His left side swung at a different rate from his right, but that was due to the variation in the length of his thighs and lower legs, and the two rhythms could be reconciled. He swept along, gaining control of his muscles. He became aware that he was whizzing past everyone. He slowed down—he didn't want to attract attention. It was difficult but he learned to walk at a pedestrian pace. However poorly they'd matched his legs, they'd given him good ones. Last night, on an impulse, he'd left the hospital and now he had to go back. Had to? Of course. There were too many uncertainties still to be settled. He glanced around. It was still very early in the morning and normal traffic was just beginning. Maybe they hadn't missed him yet, though it was unlikely. He seemed to know the route well enough and covered the distance in a brief time. He turned in at the building and, scanning the directory, went at once to the proper floor and stopped at the desk. The receptionist was busy with the drawer of the desk. "Can I help you?" she asked, continuing to peer down. "The director—Doctor Crander. I don't have an appointment." "Then the director can't see you." The girl looked up and her firmly polite expression became a grimace of barely suppressed laughter. Then laughter was swept away. What replaced it he couldn't say, but it didn't seem related to humor. She placed her hand near his but it went astray and got tangled with his fingers. "I just thought of a joke," she murmured. "Please don't think that I consider you at all funny." The hell she didn't—and it was the second time within the hour a woman had used that word on him. He wished they'd stop. He took back his hand, the slender one, an exquisite thing that might once have belonged to a musician. Was there an instrument played with one hand? The other one was far larger and clumsier, more suited to mayhem than music. "When can I see the director?" She blinked at him. "A patient?" She didn't need to look twice to see that he had been one. "The director does occasionally see ex-patients." He watched her appreciatively as she went inside. The way she walked, you'd think she had a special audience. Presently the door opened and she came back, batting her eyes vigorously. "You can go in now," she said huskily. Strange, her voice had dropped an octave in less than a minute. "The old boy tried to pretend he was in the middle of a grave emergency." On his way in, he miscalculated, or she did, and he brushed against her. The touch was pleasant, but not thrilling. That reaction seemed reserved for Erica. "Glad to see you," said Doctor Crander, behind the desk. He was nervous and harassed for so early in the morning. "The receptionist didn't give me your name. For some reason she seems upset." She did at that, he thought—probably bewildered by his appearance. The hospital didn't seem to have a calming influence on either her or the doctor. "That's why I came here. I'm not sure who I am. I thought I was Dan Merrol." Doctor Crander tried to fight his way through the desk. Being a little wider and solider, though not by much, the desk won. He contented himself by wiping his forehead. "Our missing patient," he said, sighing with vast relief. "For a while I had visions of...." He then decided that visions were nothing a medical man should place much faith in. "Then I am Dan Merrol?" The doctor came cautiously around the desk this time. "Of course. I didn't expect that you'd come walking in my office—that's why I didn't recognize you immediately." He exhaled peevishly. "Where did you go? We've been searching for you everywhere." It seemed wiser to Dan not to tell him everything. "It was stuffy inside. I went out for a stroll before the nurse came in." Crander frowned, his nervousness rapidly disappearing. "Then it was about an hour ago. We didn't think you could walk at all so soon, or we would have kept someone on duty through the night." They had underestimated him, but he didn't mind. Of course, he didn't know how a patient from the regrowth tanks was supposed to act. The doctor took his pulse. "Seems fine," he said, surprised. "Sit down—please sit down." Without waiting for him to comply, Crander pushed him into a chair and began hauling out a variety of instruments with which he poked about his bewildered patient. Finally Crander seemed satisfied. "Excellent," he said. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were almost fully recovered. A week ago, we considered removing you from the regrowth tank. Our decision to leave you there an extra week has paid off very, very nicely." Merrol wasn't as pleased as the doctor appeared to be. "Granted you can identify me as the person who came out of regrowth—but does that mean I'm Dan Merrol? Could there be a mistake?" Crander eyed him clinically. "We don't ordinarily do this—but it is evident that with you peace of mind is more important than procedure. And you look well enough to stand the physical strain." He pressed the buzzer and an angular woman in her early forties answered. "Miss Jerrems, the Dan Merrol file." Miss Jerrems flashed a glance of open adoration at the doctor and before she could reel it in, her gaze swept past Dan, hesitated and returned to him. Her mouth opened and closed like that of a nervous goldfish and she darted from the room. They see me and flee as fast as they can caper , thought Merrol. It was not wholly true—Crander didn't seem much affected. But he was a doctor and used to it. Furthermore, he probably had room for only one emotion at the moment—relief at the return of his patient. Miss Jerrems came back, wheeling a large cart. Dan was surprised at the mass of records. Crander noticed his expression and smiled. "You're our prize case, Merrol. I've never heard of anyone else surviving such extensive surgery. Naturally, we have a step-by-step account of everything we did." He turned to the woman. "You may leave, Miss Jerrems." She went, but the adoration she had showed so openly for her employer seemed to have curdled in the last few moments. Crander dug into the files and rooted out photographs. "Here are pictures of the wreckage in which you were found—notice that you were strapped in your seat—as you were received into the hospital—at various stages in surgery and finally, some taken from the files of the company for which you worked." Merrol winced. The photographic sequence was incontrovertible. He had been a handsome fellow. "Here is other evidence you may not have heard of. It's a recent development, within the last ten years, in fact. It still isn't accepted by most courts—they're always lagging—but to medical men it's the last word." Merrol studied the patterns of waves and lines and splotches. "What is it?" "Mass-cell radiographs. One was loaned by your employer. The other was taken just after your last operation. Both were corrected according to standard methods. One cell won't do it, ten yield an uncertain identity—but as few as a hundred cells from any part of the original body, excepting the blood, constitute proof more positive than fingerprints before the surgical exchange of limbs. Don't ask me why—no one knows. But it is true that cells differ from one body to the next, and this test detects the difference." The mass-cell radiographs did seem identical and Dr. Crander seemed certain. Taken altogether, the evidence was overwhelming. There had been no mistake—he was Dan Merrol, though it was not difficult to understand why Erica couldn't believe he was her husband. "You did a fine job," he said. Recalling the picture of the wreckage, he knew they had. "But couldn't you have done just a little better?" Crander's eyebrows bounced up. "We're amazed at how well we have done. You can search case histories and find nothing comparable." His eyebrows dropped back into place. "Of course, if you have a specific complaint...." "Nothing specific. But look at this hand...." The doctor seized it. "Beautiful, isn't it?" "Perhaps—taken by itself." Dan rolled up his sleeve. "See how it joins the forearm." Crander waggled it gravely. "It coordinates perfectly. I've observed you have complete control over it. The doctor's eye, my boy. The doctor's diagnostic eye." The other just didn't understand. "But the size—it doesn't match my arm!" "Doesn't match ?" cried the doctor. "Do you have any idea of the biological ways in which it does match? True, it may not be esthetically harmonized, but here we delve into the mysteries of the human organism, and we can hardly be striving for Botticelli bodies and Michelangelo men. First, your hand moves freely at the joint, a triumph of surgical skill." He moved the hand experimentally, to show Merrol how it was done. He dropped the hand and hurried to a screen against the wall. Crander drew his finger across the surface and the mark remained. "You know about Rh positive and negative blood. Mixed, they can be lethal. This was discovered long ago, by someone I've forgotten. But there are other factors just as potent and far more complex." He scribbled meaningless symbols on the screen with his finger. "Take the bone factors—three. They must be matched in even such a slight contact as a joint ... this was done. Then there are the tissue factors—four. Tendon factors—two. Nerve-splice factors—three again. After that, we move into a complex field, hormone-utilization factors—seven at the latest count and more coming up with further research. "That's the beginning, but at the sensory organs we leave the simple stuff behind. Take the eye, for instance." Merrol leaned away because Dr. Crander seemed about to pluck one of Dan's eyes from its socket. "Surgical and growth factors involved in splicing a massive nerve bundle pass any layman's comprehension. There are no non-technical terms to describe it." It was just as well—Merrol didn't want a lecture. He extended his arms. One was of normal length, the other longer. "Do you think you can do something with this? I don't mind variation in thickness—some of that will smooth out as I exercise—but I'd like them the same length." "There were many others injured at the same time, you know—and you were one of the last to be extricated from the ship. Normally, when we have to replace a whole arm, we do so at the shoulder for obvious reasons. But the previously treated victims had depleted our supplies. Some needed only a hand and we gave them just that, others a hand and a forearm, and so on. When we got to you, we had to use leftovers or permit you to die—there wasn't time to send to other hospitals. In fact there wasn't any time at all—we actually thought you were dead, but soon found we were wrong." Crander stared at a crack in the ceiling. "Further recovery will take other operations and your nervous system isn't up to it." He shook his head. "Five years from now, we can help you, not before." Merrol turned away miserably. There were other things, but he had learned the essentials. He was Dan Merrol and there was nothing they could do for him until it was too late. How long could he expect Erica to wait? The doctor hadn't finished the medical session. "Replacement of body parts is easy, after all. The big trouble came when we went into the brain." "Brain?" Dan was startled. "How hard do you think your skull is?" Crander came closer. "Bend your head." Merrol obeyed and could feel the doctor's forefinger slice across his scalp in a mock operation. "This sector was crushed." Roughly half his brain, it appeared. "That's why so many memories were gone—not just from shock. In addition, other sectors were damaged and had to be replaced." Crander traced out five areas he could feel, but not see. "Samuel Kaufman, musician—Breed Mannly, cowboy actor—George Elkins, lepidopterist—Duke DeCaesares, wrestler—and Ben Eisenberg, mathematician, went into the places I tapped." Dan raised his head. Some things were clearer. The memories were authentic, but they weren't his—nor did the other wives belong to him. It was no wonder Erica had cringed at their names. "These donors were dead, but you can be thankful we had parts of their brains available." Crander delved into the file and came up with a sheet. "Here are some body part contributors." He read rapidly. "Dimwiddie, Barton, Colton, Morton, Flam and Carnera were responsible for arms and hands. Greenberg, Rochefault, Gonzalez, Tall-Cloud, Gowraddy and Tsin supplied feet and legs."

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Dark Side Lite Those poor souls who've been camping out in front of theaters for six weeks: Who can blame them for saying, "To hell with the critics, we know it will be great!"? The doors will open, and they'll race to grab the best seats and feel a surge of triumph as their butts sink down. We've made it: Yeeehaww!! They'll cheer when the familiar John Williams fanfare erupts and the title-- Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace --rises out of the screen and the backward-slanted opening "crawl" begins: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ..." Yaaahhhhhhh!!! Then, their hearts pounding, they'll settle back to read the rest of the titles: "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." Taxation of trade routes: Waaahoooo!!!! How long will they go with it? At what point will they realize that what they've heard is, alas, true, that the picture really is a stiff? Maybe they never will. Maybe they'll want to love The Phantom Menace so much--because they have so much emotional energy invested in loving it, and in buying the books, magazines, dolls, cards, clothes, soap, fast food, etc.--that the realization will never sink in. In successful hypnosis, the subject works to enter a state of heightened susceptibility, to surrender to a higher power. Maybe they'll conclude that common sense is the enemy of the Force and fight it to the death. Look, I wanted to love The Phantom Menace , too. I was an adolescent boy and would enjoy being one again for a couple of hours. But the movie has a way of deflating all but the most delusional of hopes. If someone had given Ed Wood $115 million to remake Plan Nine From Outer Space it might have looked like this, although Wood's dialogue would surely have been more memorable. The first thing that will strike you is that George Lucas, who wrote and directed the movie, has forgotten how to write and direct a movie. Having spent the two decades since the original Star Wars (1977) concocting skeletons of screenplays that other people flesh out, and overseeing productions that other people storyboard and stage, he has come to lack what one might Michelangelistically term "the spark of life." If the first Star Wars was a box of Cracker Jacks that was all prizes, The Phantom Menace is a box of Cracker Jacks that's all diagrams of prizes. It's there on paper, but it's waiting to be filled in and jazzed up. Advance word has been cruel to the actors, but advance word has it only half right. Yes, they're terrible, but Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Natalie Portman are not terrible actors, they've just been given scenes that no human could be expected to play. As a sage Jedi Master called Qui-Gon Jinn, Neeson must maintain a Zen-like detachment from the universe around him--probably not a challenge when that universe will be added in later by computers. "I don't sense anything," he tells his uneasy young apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi (McGregor), as the two sit waiting to conduct trade negotiations with a bunch of gray, fish-faced Federation officers who talk like extras in a samurai movie. McGregor furrows his brow. "There's something ... elusive," he says, working to enunciate like a young Alec Guinness but succeeding only in nullifying his natural Scots charm. "Master," he adds, "you said I should be mindful of the future." Neeson thinks a bit. "I do sense an unusual amount of fear for something as trivial as this trade dispute." A hologram of Darth Sidious, Dark Lord of the "Sith," commands the Federation to sic its battle droids on the Jedi ambassadors before they can apprise Queen Amidala (Portman) of the imminent invasion of the peaceful planet of Naboo. In come the battle droids and out come the light sabers, which still hum like faulty fluorescents. Clack, clack, clack. Lucas can't edit fight scenes so that they're fluid--he cuts on the clack. You get the gist, though. The Jedi make their getaway, but with gas and tolls and droid destroyers, it takes them over an hour to land on Naboo, by which time the queen and the Galactic Senate have already got the grim message. For one thing, communications have been disrupted: "A communications disruption can mean only one thing," says someone. "Invasion." Queen Amidala, done up like a white-faced Chinese empress in hanging beads and glass balls and a hat with curly horns, speaks in tones from which emotion has been expunged, perhaps on the theory that subjects won't argue with a ruler who puts them to sleep: "I ... will ... not ... condone ... a ... course ... of ... action ... that ... will ... lead ... us ... to ... war," she drones. Meanwhile, the Jedi whiz through the underwater core of a planet in a man-of-warlike submersible pursued by 3-D dragony beasties and a giant catfish with extra movable parts. Potentially thrilling stuff, but Neeson and McGregor remain peculiarly unruffled. "The Force will guide us," says Neeson blandly, and the director seems to share his lack of urgency. There's Zen detachment and there's Quaalude detachment, and The Phantom Menace falls into the second camp: It really does take place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. When R2-D2 showed up, I thought: At last, a character with the potential for intimacy! Say this for Lucas, he doesn't whip up a lot of bogus energy, the way the makers of such blockbusters as The Mummy (1999) and Armageddon (1998) do. It's as if he conceived The Phantom Menace as a Japanese No pageant and has purposely deadened his actors, directing them to stand stiffly in the dead center of the screen against matte paintings of space or some futuristic metropolis and deliver lines alternately formal or bemusing. ("This is an odd move for the Trade Federation.") Lucas considers himself an "independent" filmmaker and an artist of integrity. Had he not been such a pretentious overlord, a platoon of screenwriters would doubtless have been engaged to rewrite him and make the movie halfway human. A buddy specialist would have punched up the Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi badinage, and a black dialogue specialist would have given the comic-relief character, Jar Jar Binks, a man-size dinosaur with pop eyes and a vaguely West Indian patois, something fresher than "Ex-squeeze me!" and a lot of Butterfly McQueen-style simpering and running away from battles. Those of us who complain about the assembly-line production of "blockbuster" scripts need an occasional reminder that assembly lines can do much to make empty thrill machines more lively. The Phantom Menace didn't need to be barren of feeling, but it took a real writer, Lawrence Kasdan ( The Big Chill , 1983), to draft the best and most inspiring of the Star Wars movies, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and a real director, Irvin Kershner, to breathe Wagnerian grandeur into Lucas' cartoonish fantasies. Having lived with the saga for so many years, the audience was prepared to set aside some of its narrative expectations here to plumb the origins of Lucas' universe. In The Phantom Menace , however, the Jedi already exist and the Force is taken for granted--we're still in the middle of the damn story. The only dramatic interest comes from a young Tatooine slave named Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), whom we know will grow up to father Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and then surrender to the dark side of the Force and become Darth Vader. But that transformation won't happen until the third episode; meanwhile, Anakin is a conventionally industrious juvenile with a penchant for building droids from scratch and "pod racing"--an activity that he demonstrates in one of the movie's most impressive but irrelevant special effects set pieces, a whiplash hyperdrive permutation of the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959). Later in the film, when Anakin goes before something called the Jedi Council and meets Yoda and Samuel L. Jackson (together again!), Lucas dramatizes the interrogation so ineptly that you either have to take Yoda's word that there's something wrong with the boy ("Clouded this boy's future is") or to conclude that Yoda, like us, is moving backward through time and has already seen Episodes 4 through 6. Anakin, he says smugly, has fear in him, and fear leads to anger and anger to the dark side--which would mean, as I interpret it, that only people without fear (i.e., people who don't exist) are suitable candidates for Jedi knighthood (perhaps Yoda will enlarge his definition of fear in subsequent episodes). There's also some quasireligious, quasiscientific blather to the effect that the boy was conceived without a father by "metachorians"--symbiont, microscopic life forms that will speak to you if you "quiet your mind." In other words, the Force. So, it's not nebulous, after all! It can be measured. It can be quantified. It can even, perhaps, be merchandised. Yes, the effects are first-rate, occasionally breathtaking. But the floating platforms in the Galactic Senate do little to distract you from parliamentary machinations that play like an especially dull day on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . The final military engagement, in which long-headed attack droids are rolled onto the field as the spokes of a giant wheel, would be awesome if Lucas didn't routinely cut away from the battle just when he seems on the verge of actually thrilling you. The chief villain, bombastically named Darth Maul, is a horned, red, Kabuki-style snake demon with orange pingpong-ball eyes who challenges the Jedi to a couple of clackety light-saber battles. His appearances are underscored by demonic chants; he might as well wear a neon beanie that flashes "Bad Guy." Like all revisionist historians, Lucas cheats like mad. If Darth Vader had built C-3PO as a young man, how come he never paid much attention to him in the other movies--and vice versa? As Yoda himself puts it, in another context, "See through you we can." Still, it's worth reprinting a blistering e-mail sent to my wife by a relative, after she'd let him know that I hated The Phantom Menace : Surprise, Surprise. Star Wars was never reviewed well by critics. Sometimes a basic story that rests on great special effects and stupid dialogue can be very entertaining--it's called a cult movie, and no critic can have an effect on the obvious outcome that this is going to be the highest grossing movie ever. I myself stood in line for five hours and already have tickets to see it three times, and I know I'll enjoy it. Why? Because it plays on my childhood imagination. And I'm sure it's not as bad as Return of the Jedi , which was the weakest one--but I still liked it and saw it a dozen times. I get tired of being told I'm not going to like it because it doesn't adhere to certain basic critic criteria. I say bpthhhh (sticking my tongue out to review)--don't be sending me anything dissing my movie:):):) I'll be curious to know whether he sees The Phantom Menace a dozen times, or even the three for which he has paid. (I could imagine seeing it three times only if they sold adrenaline shots at the concession stand.) Or maybe he'll come out of the movie and say: "No, you didn't get it, Mr. Snot-Nosed-Criteria Critic Person. It's not supposed to be exciting. It's laying the foundation for the next chapter, when Anakin and Obi-Wan defeat the Mandalorian warriors in the Clone Wars and Anakin marries Queen Amidala. And listen, I'm getting in line even earlier for tickets to Episode 2 . The Force is with me, butt-head."

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Defining Decay Down If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the "intra-oral camera." As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. "You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth," says one recent victim of the camera. "You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth." The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island. Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. "People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you," says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does. The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. "We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look," says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. "You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves," says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist. People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are "very satisfied" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. "It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job," says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual . To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. "My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' " says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem "weak." Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a "preventive measure." (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price. Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or "halitosis," as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a "halimeter," a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. "Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years," says Hartel. Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to "trade up" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as "how to move your patients to 'yes.' " The industry calls this technique "treatment acceptance," a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day "Treatment Acceptance" seminar "for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care." This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass. It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life. Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is "an excellent form of birth control," as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works. "If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure," says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist. Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago. When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. "Dentists are aware of providing what patients want," says Hartel. "I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it." Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.

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THE AIR OF CASTOR OIL BY JIM HARMON Illustrated by WALKER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Let the dead past bury its dead? Not while I am alive, it won't! It surely was all right for me to let myself do it now. I couldn't have been more safe. In the window of the radio store a color television set was enjoying a quiz by itself and creased in my pocket was the newspaper account of the failure of a monumental human adventure in the blooming extinction of a huge rocket. The boys on the corner seemed hardly human, scowling anthropoids in walrus-skin coats. It was my own time. Anybody could see I was safe, and I could risk doing what I ached to do. I turned the corner. The breaks were against me from the start. It didn't come as any surprise. I could never get away with it. I knew that all along. There was a Packard parked just beyond the fire plug. The metal and glass fronts of the buildings didn't show back here, only seasoned brick glued with powdering chalk. The line of the block seemed to stretch back, ever further away from the glossy fronts into the crumbling stone. A man brushed past me, wearing an Ivy League suit and snap-brim hat, carrying a briefcase. And, reassuringly, he was in a hurry. I decided to chance it. I certainly wanted to do it in the worst way. My footsteps carried me on down the block. A little car spurted on past me. One of those foreign jobs, I decided. Only it wasn't. I fixed the silhouette in my mind's eye and identified it. A Henry J. Still, I wasn't worried. It was actually too early in the day. It wasn't as if it were evening or anything like that. The little store was right where I left it, rotting quietly to itself. The Back Number Store, the faded circus poster proclaimed in red and gold, or now, pink and lemon. In the window, in cellophane envelopes, were the first issue of Life , a recent issue of Modern Man with a modern woman fronting it, a Big Big Book of Buck Rogers and the Silver Cities of Venus , and a brand-new, sun-bleached copy of Doctor Zhivago . There was a little car at the curb. This time I recognized that it wasn't an import, just a Crosley. I went in, the brass handle making me conscious of the sweat on my palm. The old man sat behind a fortress of magazines and books, treacherously reading the funnies in a newspaper. His bald head swiveled on the hunched shoulders of his sweater which was azuring toward white. He grinned, toothless. "Came back for more of the stuff, did you?" He laid down the newspaper. (That subheadline couldn't really be making so nasty a suggestion to a noted general, could it?) "Yes," I laughed, not very true. "I know what a craving can be. I shouldn't smoke, but I do. I've tried to stop but I lie there thinking about cigarettes half the night. Long ones, short ones, smoked ones, ones unlit. I feel like I could smoke one in each hand. It like that with you?" "Not that bad. To me it's just—" "Don't tell me reading isn't a craving with some of you fellows. I've seen guys come in here, hardly two threads stuck together on them, and grab up them horror magazines and read and read, until sweat starts rolling off the end of their nose. I've hardly got the heart to throw 'em out." Horror magazines. Ones with lovely girls about to have their flesh shredded by toothy vampires. Yes, they were a part of it. Not a big part, but a part. "That's not what I want to see. I want—" The old man snickered. "I know what you want. Indeed I do. This way." I followed his spidering hand and sure enough, there they were. Stacks upon stacks of air-war pulp magazines. "Fifteen cents for ones in good condition," the old man pronounced the ritual, "a dime for ones with incomplete covers, three for a quarter, check 'em at the desk when you go." I ran my hand down a stack. Wings , Daredevil Aces , G-8 and his Battle Aces , The Lone Eagle , all of them. The old man was watching me. He skittered back across the floor and snatched up a magazine. It was a copy of Sky Fighters with a girl in a painted-on flying suit hanging from the struts of a Tiger Moth. "This one, this one," he said. "This must be a good one. I bet she gets shoved right into that propeller there. I bet she gets chopped to pieces. Pieces." "I'll take it." Reluctantly he handed over the magazine, waited a moment, then left me. I stared at the stacks of flying story magazines and I felt the slow run of the drop of sweat down my nose. My sickness was terrible. It is as bad to be nostalgic for things you have never known as for an orphan who has never had a home to be homesick. Living in the past, that was always me. I never watched anything on TV made later than 1935. I was in love with Garbo, Ginger Rogers, Dolores del Rio. My favorite stars were Richard Dix, Chester Morris and Richard Arlen. The music I listened to was Gershwin and Arlen and Chicago jazz. And my reading was the pulp literature harking back to the First World War. This was the biggest part of it all, I think. You identify with the hero of any story if it's well enough written. But the identification I felt with the pilots in air-war stories was plainly ridiculous. I was there. I was in the saddle of the cockpit, feeling on my face the bite of the slipstream—no, that was a later term—the prop-wash?—no, that was still later—the backlash from the screw, that was it. I was lifting to meet the Fokker triplanes in the dawn sky. Then in a moment my Vickers was chattering in answer to Spandaus, firing through the screw outfitted with iron edges to deflect bullets that did not pass to the left and right. And back through the aerial maps in the cockpit pocket at my knee. Here he comes, the Spandaus firing right through the screw in perfect synchronization. Look at that chivalrous wave. You can almost see the dueling scar on his cheek from old Krautenberg. He can afford to be chivalrous in that Fokker. I'd like to trade this skiddoo for it. That may be just what I do too if I don't watch it. You ain't any Boelcke, mister, but this is from the Fifth for Squadron 70. Missed! Hard on that rudder! God, look at the snake in that fabric. At least it was a lie about them using incendiaries. One of your own tricks for you, Heinie. Up on the stick, up under your tail, into the blind spot. Where am I? Where am I? Right here. Look at that tail go. Tony can't be giving you as good stuff as he claims. So long. I'm waving, see. He's pulling her up. No tail and he's pulling her up. He's a good man. Come on. A little more. A little more and you can deadstick her. Come on, buddy. You're doing it. You're pulling her up— But not enough. God, what a mess. I'm sick. That damned castor oil in the carburetor. I'll be in the W. C. until oh-six-hundred.... No, the air wasn't one of castor oil but the pleasant smell of aged paper and printer's ink. I'd been daydreaming again. I shouldn't forget things were getting different lately. It was becoming dangerous. I gathered up an armload of air-war magazines at random. Leaning across the table, I noticed the curtain in back for the first time. It was a beaded curtain of many different colors. Theda Bara might have worn it for a skirt. Behind the curtain was a television set. It was a comforting anti-anachronism here. The six- or eight-inch picture was on a very flat tube, a more pronounced Predicta. The size and the flatness didn't seem to go together. Then I saw that the top part of the set was a mirror reflecting an image from the roof of the cabinet where the actual picture tube lay flat. There was an old movie on the channel. An old, old movie. Lon Chaney, Sr., in a western as a badman. He was protecting a doll-faced blonde from the rest of the gang, standing them off from a grove of rocks. The flickering action caught my unblinking eyes. Tom Santschi is sneaking across the top of the rocks, a knife in his dirty half-breed hand. Raymond Hatton makes a try for his old boss, but Chaney stops his clock for him. Now William Farnum is riding up with the posse. Tom makes a try with the knife, the girl screams, and Chaney turns the blade back on him. It goes through his neck, all the way through. The blonde is running toward Farnum as he polishes off the rest of the gang and dismounts, her blouse shredded, revealing one breast—is that the dawn of Bessie Love? Chaney stands up in the rocks. Farnum aims his six-shooter. No, no, say the girl's lips. "No!" "No!" says the subtitle. Farnum fires. Swimming in blood, Chaney smiles sadly and falls. I had seen movies like that before. When I was a kid, I had seen Flicker Flashbacks between chapters of Flash Gordon and Johnny Mack Brown westerns. I looked at old movies and heard the oily voice making fun of them. But hadn't I also seen these pictures with the sound of piano playing and low conversation? I had seen these pictures before the war. The war had made a lot of difference in my life. Comic books were cut down to half their size, from 64 to 32 pages, and prices had gone up to where you had to pay $17 for a pair of shoes, so high that people said Wilson should do something about it. Tom Mix had gone off the air and he and his Cowboy Commandos beat the Japs in comic books. Only, hadn't he sold Liberty Bonds with Helen Morgan? And at school I had bought Defense—War—Savings—Security—Liberty—Freedom—I had bought stamps at school. I never did get enough to trade in for a bond, but Mama had taken my book and traded parts of it in for coffee. She could never get enough coffee.... "Nobody would look at my magazines," the old man chuckled, "if I put it out front. My boy got me that. He runs a radio and Victrola store. A good boy. His name's in the fishbowl." I pressed some money on him and walked myself out of the store. Shutting the door, I saw that the copy of Doctor Zhivago had been replaced by Gone With the Wind . The street was full of wooden-paneled station wagons, blunt little roadsters with canvas tops, swept-back, tailless sedans. Only one dark, tailed, over-thyroided car moved through the traffic. It had a light on the roof. I dodged in front of a horse-drawn garbage wagon and behind an electric postal truck and ran for that light, leaving a trail of gaudy air battles checkering the street behind me. I grabbed the handle on the door, opened it and threw myself into the back seat. "Madison Avenue," I said from my diaphragm, without any breath behind it. Something was wrong. Two men were in the front seat. The driver showed me his hard, expressionless face. "What do you think you are doing?" "This isn't a taxicab?" I asked blankly. "Park Police." I sat there while we drove on for a few minutes. "D. & D.," the second man said to the driver. "Right into our laps." The second officer leaned forward and clicked something. "I'll get the City boys." "No, kill it, Carl. Think of all that damned paper work." Carl shrugged. "What will we do with him?" I was beginning to attach myself to my surroundings. The street was full of traffic. My kind of traffic. Cars that were too big or too small. "Look, officers, I'm not drunk or disorderly. I thought this was a cab. I just wanted to get away from back then—I mean back there ." The two policemen exchanged glances. "What were you running from?" the driver asked. How could I tell him that? Before I even got a chance to try, he said: "What did you do?" "I didn't do anything!" The car was turning, turning into shadows, stopping. We were in an alley. Soggy newspapers, dead fish, prowling cats, a broken die, half a dice, looking big in the frame of my thick, probably bullet-proof window. The men opened their doors and then mine. "Out." I climbed out and stood by the car, blinking. "You were causing some kind of trouble in that neighborhood back there," the driver announced. "Really, officers—" "What's your name?" "Hilliard Turner. There—" "We don't want you going back there again, Turner, causing trouble. Understand?" "Officer, I only bought some books—I mean magazines." "These?" the second man, Carl, asked. He had retrieved them from the back seat. "Look here, Sarge. They look pretty dirty." Sarge took up the Sky Fighters with the girl in the elastic flying suit. "Filth," he said. "You know about the laws governing pornography, Turner." "Those aren't pornography and they are my property!" I reached for them and Carl pulled them back, grinning. "You don't want to read these. They aren't good for you. We're confiscating them." "Look here, I'm a citizen! You can't—" Carl shoved me back a little. "Can't we?" Sarge stepped in front of me, his face in deadly earnest. "How about it, Turner? You a narcotics user?" He grabbed my wrist and started rolling up my sleeve to look for needle marks. I twisted away from him. "Resisting an officer," Sarge said almost sadly. At that, Carl loped up beside him. The two of them started to beat me. They hit clean, in the belly and guts, but not in the groin. They gave me clean white flashes of pain, instead of angry, red-streaked ones. I didn't fight back, not against the two of them. I knew that much. I didn't even try to block their blows. I stood with my arms at my sides, leaning back against the car, and hearing myself grunt at each blow. They stood away from me and let me fold helplessly to the greasy brick. "Stay away from that neighborhood and stay out of trouble," Sarge's voice said above me. I looked up a little bit and saw an ugly, battered hand thumbing across a stack of half a dozen magazines like a giant deck of cards. "Why don't you take up detective stories?" he asked me. I never heard the squad car drive away. Home. I lighted the living room from the door, looked around for intruders for the first time I could remember, and went inside. I threw myself on the couch and rubbed my stomach. I wasn't hurt badly. My middle was going to be sorer in the morning than it was now. Lighting up a cigarette, I watched the shapes of smoke and tried to think. I looked at it objectively, forward and back. The solution was obvious. First of all, I positively could not have been an aviator in World War One. I was in my mid-twenties; anybody could tell that by looking at me. The time was the late 'Fifties; anybody could tell that from the blank-faced Motorola in the corner, the new Edsels on the street. Memories of air combat in Spads and Nieuports stirred in me by old magazines, Quentin Reynolds, and re-runs of Dawn Patrol on television were mere hallucinations. Neither could I remember drinking bootleg hooch in speak-easies, hearing Floyd Gibbons announce the Dempsey-Tunney fight, or paying $3.80 to get into the first run of Gone with the Wind . Only ... I probably had seen GWTW. Hadn't I gone with my mother to a matinee? Didn't she pay 90¢ for me? So how could I remember taking a girl, brunette, red sweater, Cathy, and paying $3.80 each? I couldn't. Different runs. That was it. The thing had been around half a dozen times. But would it have been $3.80 no more than ten years ago? I struck up a new cigarette. The thing I must remember, I told myself, was that my recollections were false and unreliable. It would do me no good to keep following these false memories in a closed curve. I touched my navel area and flinched. The beating, I was confident, had been real. But it had been a nightmare. Those cops couldn't have been true. They were a small boy's bad dream about symbolized authority. They were keeping me from re-entering the past where I belonged, punishing me to make me stay in my trap of the present. Oh, God. I rolled over on my face and pushed it into the upholstery. That was the worst part of it. False memories, feelings of persecution, that was one thing. Believing that you are actively caught up in a mixture of the past with the present, a Daliesque viscosity of reality, was something else. I needed help. Or if there was no help for me, it was my duty to have myself placed where I couldn't harm other consumers. If there was one thing that working for an advertising agency had taught me, it was social responsibility. I took up the phone book and located several psychiatrists. I selected one at random, for no particular reason. Dr. Ernest G. Rickenbacker. I memorized the address and heaved myself to my feet. The doctor's office was as green as the inside of a mentholated cigarette commercial. The cool, lovely receptionist told me to wait and I did, tasting mint inside my mouth. After several long, peaceful minutes the inner door opened. "Mr. Turner, I can't seem to find any record of an appointment for you in Dr. Rickenbacker's files," the man said. I got to my feet. "Then I'll come back." He took my arm. "No, no, I can fit you in." "I didn't have an appointment. I just came." "I understand." "Maybe I had better go." "I won't hear of it." I could have pulled loose from him, but somehow I felt that if I did try to pull away, the grip would tighten and I would never get away. I looked up into that long, hard, blank face that seemed so recently familiar. "I'm Dr. Sergeant," he said. "I'm taking care of Dr. Rickenbacker's practice for him while he is on vacation." I nodded. What I was thinking could only be another symptom of my illness. He led me inside and closed the door. The door made a strange sound in closing. It didn't go snick-bonk ; it made a noise like click-clack-clunk . "Now," he said, "would you like to lie down on the couch and tell me about it? Some people have preconceived ideas that I don't want to fight with at the beginning. Or, if you prefer, you can sit there in front of my desk and tell me all about it. Remember, I'm a psychiatrist, a doctor, not just a psychoanalyst." I took possession of the chair and Sergeant faced me across his desk. "I feel," I said, "that I am caught up in some kind of time travel." "I see. Have you read much science fiction, Mr. Turner?" "Some. I read a lot. All kinds of books. Tolstoi, Twain, Hemingway, Luke Short, John D. MacDonald, Huxley." "You should read them instead of live them. Catharsis. Sublimate, Mr. Turner. For instance, to a certain type of person, I often recommend the mysteries of Mickey Spillane." I seemed to be losing control of the conversation. "But this time travel...." "Mr. Turner, do you really believe in 'time travel'?" "No." "Then how can there be any such thing? It can't be real." "I know that! I want to be cured of imagining it." "The first step is to utterly renounce the idea. Stop thinking about the past. Think of the future." "How did you know I keep slipping back into the past?" I asked. Sergeant's hands were more expressive than his face. "You mentioned time travel...." "But not to the past or to the future," I said. "But you did, Mr. Turner. You told me all about thinking you could go into the past by visiting a book store where they sold old magazines. You told me how the intrusion of the past got worse with every visit." I blinked. "I did? I did?" "Of course." I stood up. "I did not!" "Please try to keep from getting violent, Mr. Turner. People like you actually have more control over themselves than you realize. If you will yourself to be calm...." "I know I didn't tell you a thing about the Back Number Store. I'm starting to think I'm not crazy at all. You—you're trying to do something to me. You're all in it together." Sergeant shook his head sadly. I realized how it all sounded. "Good—GOD!" I moaned. I put my hands to my face and I felt the vein over my left eye swelling, pulsing. Through the bars of my fingers I saw Sergeant motion me down with one eloquent hand. I took my hands away—I didn't like looking through bars—and sat down. "Now," Sergeant said, steepling his fingers, "I know of a completely nice place in the country. Of course, if you respond properly...." Those hands of his. There was something about them that wasn't so. They might have been the hands of a corpse, or a doll.... I lurched across the desk and grabbed his wrist. " Please , Mr. Turner! violence will—" My fingers clawed at the backs of his hands and my nails dragged off ugly strips of some theatrical stuff—collodion, I think—that had covered the scrapes and bruises he had taken hammering away at me and my belt buckle. Sergeant. Sarge. I let go of him and stood away. For the first time, Sergeant smiled. I backed to the door and turned the knob behind my back. It wouldn't open. I turned around and rattled it, pulled on it, braced my foot against the wall and tugged. "Locked," Sergeant supplied. He was coming toward me, I could tell. I wheeled and faced him. He had a hypodermic needle. It was the smallest one I had ever seen and it had an iridescence or luminosity about it, a gleaming silver dart. I closed with him. By the way he moved, I knew he was used to physical combat, but you can't win them all, and I had been in a lot of scraps when I had been younger. (Hadn't I?) I stepped in while he was trying to decide whether to use the hypo on me or drop it to have his hands free. I stiff-handed him in the solar plexus and crossed my fist into the hollow of the apex arch of his jawbone. He dropped. I gave him a kick at the base of his spine. He grunted and lay still. There was a rapping on the door. "Doctor? Doctor?" I searched through his pockets. He didn't have any keys. He didn't have any money or identification or a gun. He had a handkerchief and a ballpoint pen. The receptionist had moved away from the door and was talking to somebody, in person or on the phone or intercom. There wasn't any back door. I went to the window. The city stretched out in an impressive panorama. On the street below, traffic crawled. There was a ledge. Quite a wide, old-fashioned ornamental ledge. The ledge ran beneath the windows of all the offices on this floor. The fourteenth, I remembered. I had seen it done in movies all my life. Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton were always doing it for some reason or other. I had a good reason. I unlatched the window and climbed out into the dry, crisp breeze. The movies didn't know much about convection. The updraft nearly lifted me off the ledge, but the cornice was so wide I could keep out of the wind if I kept myself flat against the side of the building. The next window was about twenty feet away. I had covered half that distance, moving my feet with a sideways crab motion, when Carl, indisputably the second policeman, put his head out of the window where I was heading and pointed a .38 revolver at me, saying in a let's-have-no-foolishness tone: "Get in here." I went the other way. The cool, lovely receptionist was in Sergeant's window with the tiny silver needle in readiness. I kept shuffling toward the girl. I had decided I would rather wrestle with her over the needle than fight Carl over the rod. Idiotically, I smiled at that idea. I slipped. I was falling down the fourteen stories without even a moment of windmilling for balance. I was just gone. Lines were converging, and I was converging on the lines. You aren't going to be able to Immelmann out of this dive, Turner. Good-by, Turner. Death. A sleep, a reawakening, a lie. It's nothing like that. It's nothing. The end of everything you ever were or ever could be. I hit. My kneecap hurt like hell. I had scraped it badly. Reality was all over me in patches. I showed through as a line drawing, crudely done, a cartoon. Some kind of projection. High-test Cinerama, that was all reality meant. I was kneeling on a hard surface no more than six feet from the window from which I had fallen. It was still fourteen flights up, more or less, but Down was broken and splattered over me. I stood up, moving forward a step. It brought me halfway through the screen, halfway through the wall at the base of the building. The other side of the screen. The solid side, I found, stepping through, bracing a hand on the image. Looking up fourteen floors, I saw an unbroken line of peacefully closed panes. I remembered riding up in the elevator, the moments inside, the faint feeling of vertigo. Of course, who was to say the elevator really moved? Maybe they had only switched scenery on me while I was caught inside, listening to the phony hum, seeing the flashing lights. Either cut down or increase the oxygen supply inside the cubicle suddenly and that would contribute a sensation of change, of movement. They had it all worked out. My fingers rubbed my head briskly, both hands working, trying to get some circulation in my brain. I guessed I had to run. There didn't seem much else to do. I ran. Get help? Not this old lady and her daughter. Not this Neanderthal sailor on his way to a bar and a blonde. Not the bookkeeper. Maybe the car salesman, ex-Army, Lions Club member, beefy, respectable, well-intentioned, not a complete fool. The guy on the corner reading a newspaper by the bus stop. "I need help," I panted to him. "Somebody's trying to kidnap me." "Really makes you sick to hear about something like that, doesn't it?" he said. "I'm in favor of the Lindbergh Law myself." "I'm not sure whether—" "This heat is murder, isn't it? Especially here in these concrete canyons. Sometimes I wish I was back in Springfield. Cool, shaded streets...." "Listen to me! These people, they're conspiring against me, trying to drive me insane! Two men, a girl—" "For my money, Marilyn Monroe is the doll of the world. I just don't understand these guys who say she hasn't got class. She gets class by satirizing girls without any...." He was like anybody you might talk to on the street. I knew what he would say if I cued him with "baseball" or "Russia" instead of the key words I had used. I should have known better, but I wanted to touch him in some way, make him know I was alive. I grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders, and there was a whoosh and as I might have expected he collapsed like the insubstantiality he was. There was a stick figure of a man left before me, an economical skeleton supporting the shell of a human being and two-thirds of a two-trouser suit. Hide. I went into the first shop I came to—Milady's Personals. Appropriately, it was a false front. A neutral-colored gray surface, too smooth for concrete, stretched away into some shadows. The area was littered with trash. Cartons, bottles, what looked like the skin of a dehydrated human being—obviously, on second thought, only the discarded skin of one of the things like the one I had deflated. And a moldering pile of letters and papers. Something caught my eye and I kicked through them. Yes, the letter I had written to my brother in Sioux Falls, unopened. And which he had answered. My work. The work I had done at the agency, important, creative work. There was my layout, the rough of the people with short, slim glasses, the parents, children, grandparents, the caption: Vodka is a Part of the American Tradition. All of it lying here to rot. Something made me look away from that terrible trash. Sergeant stood in the entrance of Milady's, something bright in his hand. Something happened. I had been wrong. The shining instrument had not been a hypodermic needle. "You're tough," Sergeant said as I eased back into focus. "You aren't, not without help," I told him in disgust. "Spunky, aren't you? I meant mental toughness. That's the one thing we can never judge. I think you could have taken the shock right from the start. Of course, you would still have needed the conditioning to integrate properly." "Conditioning? Conditioning?" It came out of me, vortexing up, outside of my piloting. "What have you done to my mind?" "We've been trying to get it to grow back up," Sergeant said reasonably. "Think of this. Fountain of Youth. Immortality. Rejuvenation. This is it. Never mind how it works. Most minds can't stand being young and knowing they will have to go through the same damned thing all over again. We use synapse-shift to switch your upper conscious memories to your id and super-ego, leaving room for new memories. You remember only those things out of the past you have to, to retain your identity." "Identity," I repeated. "I have no identity. My identity is a dream. I have two identities—one of them years beyond the other." Sergeant tilted his head and his eyes at me and slapped me across the face. "Don't go back on me now. We gave you the best we could. The Rejuvenation Service couldn't help it if you were too old for a beta . You shouldn't have waited until you were so old, so very old. We used the very oldest sets and mock-ups we had for betas , but you, you had to keep wandering onto alpha territory, while they were striking sets, even. Beta or not, we gave you good service. Don't slip now." I heard the voice and I heard another voice, and it said "What could you expect of a beta ?" and they were only some of the voices I was hearing, and I wondered what you could expect from a beta , and I didn't know, or think that I would ever know.

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Kick Me Not long ago, out of curiosity, I picked up some exercise videos by Billy Blanks, the king of Tae-Bo. What a flop. The sets were cheesy, the music was awful 1980s synth-pop, and despite their martial-arts pretensions, the routines felt more like aerobics in disguise than like kung fu. But after flailing away in my living room for a few nights, my interest was piqued, and I decided to find out more about the real thing. Which martial art teaches good self-defense tactics? Which one would give me a good aerobic workout? How daunting would it be to jump into a class as a complete beginner? And would I get pummeled by the other students? To find out, I tried a handful of karate, tae kwon do, aikido, jujitsu, and kung fu classes in the Seattle area. I scored each one in several areas: how intimidating the class would be to a novice; how much the exercises worked my muscles; how much of an I got; whether it would develop coordination and balance; how much physical contact with other people was involved; and, of course, its value in self-defense. All ratings are on a scale of one to five, with five being the hardest, most intimidating, or most valuable. To experts, this will look like a hopelessly biased and superficial inquiry. It is. But to beginners, it is one step toward figuring out which martial art might be right for you. Do you want a chance to kick the stuffing out of someone? Take tae kwon do. Do you want to improve your sense of balance? Take karate. Do you want to know what to do if someone tries to choke you? Take jujitsu. Just remember that if you're jumped by a mugger, the only thing Tae-Bo will be good for is making your attacker collapse into uncontrollable fits of laughter. Kung Fu Reputation: 1960s martial arts movies; Bruce Lee. Intimidation Factor: 4 In the all-levels group I observed at Seven Star Women's Kung Fu, there were a dozen or so women dressed completely in black. (Most classes I took were co-ed.) The school wouldn't let me take the class--I could only watch--but that was better than Temple Kung Fu, which made me sit for an interview before they'd even reveal any information on their classes. There seemed to be an active screening process to keep out those with only a casual interest. Strength Workout: 3 After meditating for a few minutes, students launched into traditional strengthening exercises (push-ups and sit-ups) and then broke into pairs, with one person kicking pads held by the other. It looked to be decent strength training. Their arms got a good workout from the push-ups and punching; abs, from the sit-ups; and the lower body, from the kicking. It was not extreme, and nobody seemed exhausted. Aerobic Workout: 2 After the strength work and partner work, the class broke into a few groups (according to skill level) and repeated choreographed routines called "kata ," which involve a series of punches, kicks, and blocks with an imaginary foe. The class had broken into a light sweat, but was not gasping for air. Coordination and Balance: 4 The rounded slinky movements of the dancelike kata looked specifically designed to develop grace, coordination, and balance. Degree of Contact: 1 Almost none. No direct body-to-body contact, but plenty of punching and kicking with pads. Self-Defense Value: 2 The moves were neat to look at, but they did not seem practical. And without sparring practice, it would be difficult to apply the drills in real life. Overall: Kicking, punching, and an aura of mystery. Tae Kwon Do Reputation: World's most popular martial art, new Olympic sport; lots of kicking; the martial art of the 1990s. Intimidation Factor: 1 I was instantly welcomed into the beginners class at Lee's Martial Arts. People called each other by their first name; there was laughing, joking, and none of the aloofness or self-importance of the kung fu class. Strength Workout: 3 This rating is a little misleading. The lower-body strength workout was fantastic--my legs and hips were sore for days--but there was almost no strength training for the upper body. We used our arms only for balance and blocking kicks. Aerobic Workout: 5 We began with everyone standing in lines and kicking into the air. Then we did a long series of running drills up and down the mats. Then there was more kicking: Turning kicks, straight kicks, low kicks, kicks with punching bags, kicks with partners … the list goes on. It was an excellent workout. Coordination and Balance: 4 Learning how to make contact with the pad (and not, say, the face of the person holding it) was important. Balance was crucial in the sparring. Degree of Contact: 4 At the end of class came a session of sparring (which I, alas, was not allowed to participate in). The students strapped on protective chest pads and helmets and began kicking the stuffing out of each other. Self-Defense Value: 4 Tae kwon do emphasizes sparring and gets students accustomed to dealing with an assault. Overall: More a sport than an art; will make short work of flabby legs. Karate Reputation: Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid ; the martial art of the 1980s. Intimidation Factor: 1 When I watched a class at the Feminist Karate Union, I asked some of the students how their class was different from the Seven Star Women's Kung Fu class, which is held in the same building. One woman immediately said, "Oh, kung fu? That's what the mean people downstairs do." This class was approachable and open. And karate's so familiar that you feel like you already know how to do it. Strength Workout: 2 We started with sit-ups and push-ups, which were the most demanding parts of the class. The kicking and punching made for decent exercise, but I wasn't aching the next day. Aerobic Workout: 3 The drills (lots of punches, blocking, and kicking) provided some aerobic workout, but were not particularly intense. Coordination and Balance: 4 Keeping yourself centered while kicking and punching develops your balance. Degree of Contact: 2 There was some contact in the paired kicking drills with a partner and pads, but most of the physical contact came during the sparring. Yet this was nothing like the tae kwon do sparring: They weren't clocking each other, just repeating the motions of punching and blocking over and over again. Self-Defense Value: 2 This was entirely focused on form; no full-force contact between students. Overall: Kicks and punches galore, with a dash of moral and spiritual teaching about self-discipline and obedience. Aikido Reputation: A greasy-haired Steven Seagal incapacitating the enemy in Under Siege . Intimidation Factor: 1 Despite its reputation, aikido is decidedly nonaggressive--it's about deflecting punches and immobilizing your attacker--and there was a mellow, pleasantly upbeat atmosphere to the class. Strength Workout: 3 No sit-ups or push-ups, but pulling and yanking on other people looked like it would build muscle, and the rolls worked on your abs. Aerobic Workout: 2 There was little aerobic work, save for the rolling on the mats (which may explain Seagal's ever-increasing flabbiness). Coordination and Balance: 5 The goal is to destabilize and control the other guy, so maintaining your balance--and learning to topple your opponent--is crucial. Degree of Contact: 4 To complete the partner exercises, you had to grab your partner, spin him this way and that, and generally come in very close contact. Self-Defense Value: 5 Learning how to neutralize a threat was the main goal of the class. Overall: You don't get to land any punches and it's noncompetitive, but you'll learn how to knock people over. Tai Chi Reputation: What those slow-moving people in the park are doing; martial arts for seniors. Intimidation Factor: 1 I found its New Age connections slightly off-putting, but it looks so easy to do that it wasn't daunting. Strength Workout: 2 While my heart didn't get pumping, the slow, controlled movements did give my arms, legs, back, and stomach a good resistance workout. You may just be working against gravity, but holding your arms up in the air for several minutes will give you a new appreciation for those slow-moving people in the park. Aerobic Workout: 0 Tai chi involves moving your body slowly in circular patterns, shifting weight from foot to foot, and lifting your arms in rounded gestures, all at a pace slower than you ever thought possible. The motions had names like "parting the wild horse's mane" and "repulsing the monkey." I did not break a sweat, but I was bored to tears. Coordination and Balance: 4 Balance and control of your body position are the heart of this art. Degree of Contact: 0 Self-Defense Value: 0 I learned how to repulse a monkey, not a person. Overall: A yawner, slightly embarrassing to perform, but I'm sure if done correctly it brings high-quality inner peace. Brazilian Jujitsu Reputation: For hurting people. Intimidation Factor: 5 Although the listing in the phone book advertised the "Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Academy," the sign on the door said "Northwest Fight Club." Inside the club, huge holes had been punched in the walls--some back-size, some fist-size. Huge letters painted on the wall said "TRAIN & FIGHT HARD." The instructor, a handsome young Brazilian man, had a long scar curling out from the left side of his mouth and a fresh-looking purple one by his left eye. When I asked to try the class, he shrugged and lent me a gi (the white outfit most martial artists wear), on the back of which was a drawing of massive snarling pit bull and the slogan "PIT PULLING PURE POWER." I wondered if I was going to need an ambulance to take me home. Strength Workout: 5 The next day every inch of my body was sore--my stomach, arms, legs, feet, and neck. For Olympians only. Aerobic Workout: 5 This ranks as one of the hardest and most complete workouts I've ever had. After some stretching, we launched directly into hundreds of lightning-fast sit-ups, crunches, push-ups, leg lifts, and scissor kicks. I was quickly panting and my face turned a deep fuchsia. We did forward and backward rolls, learned to escape from various holds, and executed the sort of belly-crawl that marines always seem to be doing in movies about basic training. After an hour and a half I felt close to death, but there was still another hour to go. Coordination and Balance: 2 Coordination is important, but since you're tussling on a mat most of the time, balance isn't. Degree of Contact: 5 After drills, the instructor paired me with Isabella for partner work. He demonstrated how to get Isabella into choke-holds and leg-locks, as well as how to escape from them. We practiced on each other. It was a little unnerving to be choking Isabella so soon after meeting her, but she didn't seem to mind. I learned how to go from sitting on top of her with a knee in her stomach to a position where her arm was between my legs and I could break it over my stomach. The end of the class was spent with full-on grappling. Getting your face mashed into someone's armpit was de rigueur . Self-Defense Value: 5 Jujitsu's few-holds-barred grappling is far more effective when push comes to shove (and worse) than standing arts such as karate. Overall: Lots of grappling, throwing, and choking. Pragmatic, not pretty. High badass quotient.

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I, Antichrist? Early one shiny autumn morning, I got in my car and drove to Lynchburg, Va., in order to find out whether or not I am the Antichrist. You know: the Beast, the Worthless Shepherd, the Little Horn, the Abomination, the linchpin of the Diabolical Trinity. That Antichrist. I had my suspicions. Nowhere on my body could I find the mark of the Beast--666--but I do have a freckle that's shaped like Bermuda. And though I have never been seized by a desire to lead the armies of Satan in a final, bloody confrontation with the forces of God on the plain of Armageddon, I do suffer from aggravated dyspepsia, as well as chronic malaise, conditions that I'm sure afflict the Antichrist. The surest suspicion I had about my pivotal role in Christian eschatology grew from the fact that I am Jewish, male, and alive. These are the qualifications for the job of Antichrist as specified by Lynchburg's most famous preacher, Jerry Falwell, in a speech he made earlier this year. I was actually going to see the Rev. Falwell on a different matter, the future of Jerusalem, but I thought I might just slip this question--the one about me maybe being the Antichrist--into the stream of the interview. Falwell, I guessed, wouldn't be happy to discuss his views on the identity of the Antichrist--he had apologized for the remark but took quite a load of grief for it anyway. As it turned out, though, Falwell was eager to talk about the Antichrist. And, as it also turned out, he didn't really feel bad for saying what he said. In fact, he was more convinced than ever that the Antichrist is a Jew who walks among us. Let me pause for a moment to give three concise reasons why I'm so curious about the identity of the Antichrist: 1) I think I speak for all the approximately 4.5 million adult male Jews in the world when I say that we get a little antsy when Christians start looking at us like we're the devil. This is on account of Christian behavior over the past 2,000 years, by which I mean blood libels and pogroms and inquisitions, those sorts of things. 2) I've always been possessed by the delusional notion that I am to play a major role in world history, so why not a role in the End of Days? And I don't mean the Schwarzenegger movie. 3) Now that we stand on the lip of the millennium, much of the evangelical Christian world is in the grip of Armageddon fever, and, according to the evangelical interpretation of the books of Daniel and Revelation, the Antichrist will make his appearance before Christ makes his, and his is looking kinda imminent. The Antichrist, in this reading, will be a world leader who strikes a peace deal with Israel, only to betray the Jewish state and make war on it, until Jesus comes to the rescue. The thankful Jews, those who are still alive, will then become Christians and live happily ever after. These beliefs, held by tens of millions of Christians are, journalistically speaking, worthy of note. The day before my visit with the Rev. Falwell, I had just finished reading a novelistic treatment of these events, Assassins , which is subtitled Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist . Assassins is the sixth book in the "Left Behind" series, "left behind" referring to those unfortunate nonevangelical Christians who are not taken up to heaven in the Rapture--the opening act in God's end days plan--and are forced to contend with the Antichrist's evil reign on Earth. The "Left Behind" series, co-written by Tim LaHaye, the prominent right-wing screwball and husband of Beverly LaHaye, the even more prominent right-wing screwball, and Jerry B. Jenkins, who, his biography states, is the author of 130 books, which is a lot of books for one guy to write, is a phenomenon. Ten million copies of the series have sold already--hundreds in my local PriceClub alone. "Left Behind" is the Harry Potter of the Armageddon set. The notable thing for me about the "Left Behind" series--beside the fact that few in the secular media have noticed that millions of Americans are busy reading books warning about the imminence of one-world government, mass death, and the return of the Messiah, is that all the Jewish characters are Christian. LaHaye and Jenkins are both active participants in the absurd and feverish campaign by some evangelical Christians to redefine Judaism in a way that allows for belief in Jesus. Jews (and again, I feel comfortable speaking for all of us here) find this sort of Christian imperialism just a wee bit offensive. Just imagine if Jews began an official campaign calling Muhammad irrelevant to Islam--can you imagine the fatwas that would produce? But evangelical leaders, who are, in my experience, uniformly kind and generous in their personal relations, can also be terribly obnoxious in their relations with Jews. There is only one road to salvation for Jews, and that road runs through Jesus, LaHaye told me. To his credit, though, LaHaye doesn't believe that the Antichrist will be Jewish. He will be a European gentile, who will kill lots of Jews. "The Jews will be forced to accept the idolatry of the Antichrist or be beheaded," he said. This will take place during the seven-year Tribulation. Jewish suffering, though, is divinely ordained. Even though the Antichrist will not be Jewish, Jews are still capable of great evil and have often been punished for their evil, LaHaye explained. "Some of the greatest evil in the history of the world was concocted in the Jewish mind," LaHaye told me, for reasons that aren't entirely clear--he knew what the name "Goldberg" generally signifies. "Sigmund Freud, Marx, these were Jewish minds that were infected with atheism." I asked LaHaye to tell me more about the Jewish mind. "The Jewish brain also has the capacity for great good," he explained. "God gave the Jews great intelligence. He didn't give them great size or physical power--you don't see too many Jews in the NFL--but he gave them great minds." Of all the evangelical leaders I have interviewed, LaHaye is capable of some of the most anti-Semitic utterances, which is troublesome, because he is also the most popular author in the evangelical world. The Rev. Falwell is smoother than LaHaye. He acknowledges "where the sensitivity comes from," though he shows no understanding of the role the myth of the Antichrist played in the history of anti-Semitism, and he refuses to back away from his opinion that somewhere in Great Neck or West L.A. or Shaker Heights is living Satan's agent. "In my opinion," he told me, "the Antichrist will be a counterfeit of the true Christ, which means that he will be male and Jewish, since Jesus was male and Jewish." I asked him if he understood that such statements strip Jews of their humanity, which is the first step anti-Semites take before they kill them. He responded, "All the Jewish people we do business with on a daily basis, not one has ever got upset over this." It is not Jews who picked this most recent fight, he said, it is supporters of President Clinton. "Billy Graham made the same statement a dozen times last year, but there was no comment about that," Falwell said. "But Billy Graham was not calling for the resignation of the president." Falwell, you'll recall, is no fan of Clinton's; he has even peddled a video accusing the president of murder. Falwell is right: Evangelical preachers are constantly accusing the Jews of harboring the Antichrist. I asked Falwell if he knew the actual identity of the Antichrist. No, he said. "People might say, it's a certain person, it's Henry Kissinger, like that, but the Lord does not let us know that." So there's a chance, then, that I'm the Antichrist? Falwell chuckled a condescending chuckle. "It's almost amusing, that question. Of course not. I know that you're not." Why? "The Antichrist will be a world leader, he'll have supernatural powers," he said. He got me there--I have no supernatural powers. I can't even drive a stick shift. I pressed him further on the identity of the Antichrist, but Falwell wouldn't play. "We'll know the Antichrist when he arrives," he said. Most evangelical leaders, in fact, refuse to publicly guess the name of the Antichrist--though, as Falwell suggests, Kissinger is a perennial favorite, at least among those evangelicals who believe the Antichrist will be Jewish. For most of their history, Christian leaders had been content to ascribe the characteristics of the Antichrist to the Jewish people as a whole. "Ever since the 2 nd century CE, the very beginning of the Antichrist legend, Christians have associated Jews with everything unholy," Andrew Gow, who teaches Christian history at the University of Alberta, told me. In the minds of early Christian leaders, the church was the new Israel; God's covenant with the Jews was obsolete. Therefore, the Jews who remained on Earth were there to serve devilish purposes, Gow explained. There are plenty of evangelical thinkers who differ with Falwell, who believe, like LaHaye, that the Antichrist will be a gentile who rises out of Europe. "The Antichrist is supposed to make a peace treaty with Israel," Ed Hindson, the author of Is the Antichrist Alive and Well? , explained. "Why would a Jew make a peace treaty with a Jewish state?" Hindson suggested that Satan will make the Antichrist the leader of the European Union--the revived Roman Empire, eternal enemy of Israel--though Hindson disputed one popular idea advocated by Monte Judah, an Oklahoma-based prophecy-teacher, that Prince Charles is the Antichrist. "There's no way Prince Charles is the Antichrist," Hindson said. "Satan can do better than that." In his book, Hindson runs through a list of potential candidates. Bill Clinton is there, of course, as well as Saddam Hussein and Ronald Wilson Reagan (six letters in each of his three names. Get it?). Of course, none of these men are gay. "It says in the Bible that the Antichrist will have 'no regard for women,' and so many evangelicals interpret that to mean that he will be a homosexual," Hindson said, though he added that he's not entirely convinced. This idea--the Antichrist as gay--strikes a chord with many evangelicals, just as the idea that the Antichrist is Jewish strikes a chord. I gradually came to see how far-fetched it was to think that I might be the Antichrist. I'm not gay, I'm not famous, I wouldn't know a euro if I found one in my wallet. Then it struck me: Barry Diller is the Antichrist. There's no way to know for sure. But if you wake up one morning to read that Barry Diller is the head of the European Union (and that David Geffen is his deputy), well, remember where you read it first.

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THE COOL WAR by ANDREW FETLER Illustrated by NODEL [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Here's what happens when two Master Spies tangle ... and stay that way! "Nothing, nothing to get upset about," Pashkov said soothingly, taking his friend's arm as they came out of the villa forty miles from Moscow. Pashkov looked like a roly-poly zoo attendant leading a tame bear. "Erase his memory, give him a new name and feed him more patriotism. Very simple." Medvedev raised his hand threateningly. "Don't come howling to me if everybody guesses he is nothing but a robot." Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of Dentist Amigovitch , this house had become known all over the world as Boris Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the clicking of a typewriter. "It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them," he said, climbing into his flier. "Petchareff will send you word when to announce his 'death'." "A question, brother." "No questions." "Who smuggled the manuscript out of Russia?" Pashkov frowned convincingly. "Comrade Petchareff has suspected even me." He took off for Moscow, poking his flier up through the clouds and flying close to them, as was his habit. Then he switched on the radio and got Petchareff's secretary. "Nadezhda?" "I know what you're up to, Seven One Three," Nadezhda Brunhildova said. "Don't try to fool me , you confidence man. You are coming in?" "In ten minutes. What have I done now?" "You were supposed to make funeral arrangements for Knackenpast, so what are you doing in Stockholm?" "Stockholm?" "You're lying and I'll kill you. Don't you think I know about Anastina, that she-nurse in the Stockholm National Hospital?" "Darling, why so cruel? Anastina is one of our contacts. Besides, she's cross-eyed and buck-toothed." "Beast!" She switched him to Petchareff. "What's been keeping you, Pashkov?" "Consoling Medvedev. Am I supposed to be in Stockholm?" "Never mind, get here at once. What size hospital gown do you wear?" "Hospital gown?" "Stockholm embassy says you're in the National Hospital there. In a hospital gown. I got through to Anastina. She says it's Colonel James again. He looks like you now." Pashkov grunted. "I'll never understand," said Petchareff, "why all top secret agents have to look like bankers. Anastina says Colonel James was operated on by a Monsieur Fanti. What do you know about him?" "He's a theatrical surgeon." "You're not playing one of your jokes, Pashkov?" "Hardly." "You'd better be in my office in ten minutes. What size hospital gown?" "Short and fat," Pashkov said, and switched off. Most countries wanted to break his neck, and his own Motherland did not always trust him. But he enjoyed his work—enjoyed it as much as his closest professional rival, Colonel James, U.S.A. Pashkov landed on the roof of Intelligence in the northeast corner of the Kremlin, hitched up his pants and rode down. In his office, Petchareff removed the cigar from his mouth as Pashkov came in. "Medvedev get my orders?" "He's preparing a new super-patriotic writer to replace Boris Knackenpast," Pashkov reported. "When you give the word, he will call Izvestia and tell them Boris is dead." Petchareff glanced at his calendar. "We have two other state funerals this week. You made it plain, I hope, we want no repetition of Knackenpast's peace nonsense?" "No more Gandhi or Schweitzer influences. The new literature," Pashkov promised, raising a chubby finger, "will be a pearl necklace of government slogans." Nadezhda buzzed the intercom. "The man from the Bolshoi Theater is here, Comrade." "Send him in." A small man hurried into the room. He had a narrow face and the mustache of a mouse and a mousy nose, but his eyes were big rabbit eyes. He bowed twice quickly, placed a package on the desk with trembling forepaws and bowed twice again. Petchareff tore open the package. "You got the real thing? No bad imitation?" "Exactly, exactly," the mouse piped. "No difference, Comrade." He held his paws as in prayer and his pointed mouth quivered. Petchareff held up the hospital gown. On the back of the gown was printed in indelible ink: stockholm national hospital courtesy of Coca-Cola Petchareff tossed the gown to Pashkov. "This is what Colonel James is wearing," he said, dismissing the mouse, who bowed twice and scurried out. "Try and split the allies," Pashkov muttered, reading the legend on the gown. Petchareff blew cigar smoke in his face. "If Colonel James makes a monkey of you once more, you're through, Pashkov. You don't take your job seriously enough. You bungle this and I'll have you transferred to our Cultural Information Center in Chicago." Pashkov winced. "Now, you'll go to Stockholm and switch places with the American colonel and find out what they're up to. Zubov's kidnaping team is there already, at Hotel Reisen. Any questions?" "I thought Zubov was a zoological warfare expert. What is he doing with a kidnaping team?" "His team is more agile. On your way." In the front office, Pashkov stopped to kiss Nadezhda Brunhildova goodby. "I may not return from this dangerous mission. Give me a tender kiss." Nadezhda was a big girl with hefty arms, captain of her local broom brigade. "Monster!" She seized him by the collar. "Is Anastina dangerous?" "Darling!" "Bitter sweetness!" she howled, dropping him. "Go, love. Make me miserable." Pashkov spent an hour at Central Intelligence. Nothing unusual going on in Stockholm: an industrial exhibit, the Swedish Academy in session, a sociology seminar on prison reform, a forty-man trade mission from India. An addendum to the Stockholm file listed two Cuban agents operating from Fralsningsarmen's Economy Lodgings. They were buying small arms and ammunition. He thought a moment, impressed the Cubans' address on his memory, and went to his flier. He did not fly to Hotel Reisen at once. Zubov's kidnaping team could wait. Coming slowly over Stockholm he spotted the National Hospital and circled. A line of ambulance fliers was parked on the ground in the ambulance court. On the hospital roof, he noticed, apart from private fliers, stood a flier that resembled his own. He veered away, detoured around Riddarholmen, and five minutes later landed on the roof of Fralsningsarmen's Economy Lodgings—the Salvation Army flophouse. "My Cuban friends," Pashkov inquired in fluent English at the desk on the top floor. "Are they in?" The old desk clerk looked like a stork. "Yu, room six fifteen," he clacked. "Tree floors down. Aer yu Amerikan?" "Brazil." "Ah so? You sprikker goot Inglish laik me." "Very kind of you." He rode down three floors, found room 615, and stopped as he heard voices within. "... dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete . By seven o'clock tonight, okay, Gringo?" "What do you expect for seven thousand bucks—service? Look, boys, I'm just a honest businessman. I can't get it for you today. Have a seegar, Pablo." "Tfu!" "All rightie, your cause is my cause. Maybe I can get it for you tonight. But you'll have to pay in advance. What do you say, Francisco?" "I counted the money. It is waiting for you. You deliver, we pay." "But how can I trust you? I like you boys, I know you like me, but business is business. I gotta give something to my jobber, don't I?" "Gringo!" At that moment Pashkov knocked on the door. From within: "Shh! Alguien llama a la puerta. " Pashkov knocked again and a scuffle ensued within, the crack of a chair on a skull, the dragging of a beefy body into a closet, and the slam of the closet door. " Yu? " " Buenas tardes ," Pashkov said through the door. " Asuntos muy importantes. " The door opened a crack and two dark eyes in a young bearded face peered out. "Eh?" " Gospodin Pashkov, para servir a usted. " The door opened enough to admit the roly-poly visitor into the room. The other Cuban, also bearded and wearing a fatigue cap, held a revolver. "No gun-play, caballeros," Pashkov went on in Spanish. "We are in the Salvation Army charity house, not in a two-peso thriller. Besides, I deliver before I ask payment." "Deliver what, senor?" "We favor any disturbance close to the United States. May I sit down?" Between two beds were stacked some dozen crates of explosives. A small table was littered with papers. Sitting down at the table, Pashkov's elbow rested on an invoice, and moments later the invoice was tucked in his pocket. "What kind of ammunition do you need, caballeros?" The Cubans looked at each other. "Thirty-o-six caliber, two-twenty grain. How much can you deliver?" "Two thousand rounds." "Not much." "Maybe three thousand. I'll toss in a box of hand grenades and a can of lysergic acid diethylamide." "You have that? You have LSD-25?" "I have that. When are you leaving Stockholm?" Again the young beards exchanged looks. "Maybe we stay till tomorrow if you have more business. Three thousand rounds is not much. How much payment, senor?" "Two thousand kronor," Pashkov said, taking an envelope on the table and addressing it to Nadezhda Brunhildova, Kremlin, Moscow. No return address. "Do you trust us to send the money?" "It is bad for you if I do not trust you," Pashkov said, smiling up at them. "You can trust us. We shall send the money. Please take a cigar." Pashkov took four Havanas from the box they held out to him, stuck three in his breast pocket, and lit one. "You come again, senor. We make much business." "Why not? Help retire Latin-American dictators to Siberia. More gold in Siberia than in Las Vegas." "Hyi, hyi, that is funny. You come again." On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted. It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting for him. Comrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone. "Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow." "Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?" Zubov's big tooth settled respectfully over his lower lip. His small eyes were so closely set that he looked cockeyed when he focused them on his superior. "With your pardon, I shall conduct you to our suite. Plans for kidnaping of Colonel James all ready." "Here's a cigar for you." "Gratefully accepted. Reduced unavoidable fatalities to six." Zubov counted on his long hard fingers. "Two watchmen, three nurses, one doctor." In the hotel corridor, Zubov looked before and after, his eyes crossed suspiciously, and peered around corners. They got to their suite without incident, and Pashkov gave him another cigar. "Gratefully accepted. Here is a map of hospital and grounds. Here is a map of twenty-third floor. Here is a map of Colonel James' room. Here is hospital routine between midnight and dawn. With your pardon—" Pashkov picked up the phone, dialed the Soviet embassy, and got the chargé d'affaires. "How is your underdeveloped countries fund?" he asked. "Always depleted, always replenished." "I don't want any Russian brands." "Nothing but foreign," the chargé buzzed. "We got almost everything now through an American surplus outlet in Hamburg. Nationals get caught with American goods, Americans get blamed. Wonderful confusion. What do you need?" "Thirty-o-six two-twenty, three thousand—if you have it." "Most popular. What else?" "Pineapples—one crate." "Only confiscated German potatoes. Will that do?" "Fine. And a small can of sentimental caviar." "Too risky." "It's all right. It will fall to local authorities by tomorrow." Pashkov put down the receiver. Give the Cubans enough to expect more—make sure they stay in town. Zubov was cross-checking his kidnaping plans. He said, "With your pardon, do we take Colonel James alive or dead-or-alive?" "Alive." Zubov pulled a long face. "Dead-or-alive would be easier, Gospodin Pashkov. Fast, clean job." Pashkov squinted at Zubov's crossed eyes. "Have you had your eyes examined lately?" "No need," Zubov assured him with a smile. "I see more than most people." Pashkov held up his remaining cigar. "How many cigars in my hand?" "Two." At that moment the door opened and Zubov's kidnaping team lumbered in. They were a couple of big apes dressed in blue canvas shoes, red trousers, yellow jackets, white silk scarves, sport caps and sun glasses. "What are you doing here?" cried Zubov. "Why aren't you observing the hospital?" "Dhh, you said to report ... um ... if something happened," the first ape said in a thick voice. "Well?" "Victim's room lights out," the ape said. "My assistants," Zubov introduced them to Pashkov. "Line up, line up, lads. With your pardon, they are good lads. This is Petya, and this is Kolya. No, this is Kolya and this one is Petya." "Twins?" "Not exactly. Same genetic experiment. Good lads. Stand straight, Petya. Don't curl your feet like that, Kolya, I've told you before. Why didn't you shave your hands today?" Kolya looked guiltily at his hands. "They've made progress," Zubov assured Pashkov, pulling a small whip from his hip pocket. "Straight, lads, straight," he flicked the whip. "We have company." "Are their costumes your own idea?" "With your pardon, for purposes of concealment. What are your orders?" Pashkov told them to pick up the boxes of ammunition at the embassy and deliver them to the Cubans, and then to commandeer a private automobile. "We have autos at the embassy pool," Zubov suggested. "I want a vehicle off the street. Then report back here with your lads." Petya gave Kolya a box on the ear. "Boys, boys!" Zubov cracked the whip. "Out you go. A job for Gospodin Pashkov, lads. They don't get enough exercise," he grinned, backing out after them. "With your pardon, I'll thrash them later." And they were gone. Pashkov turned to the hospital maps and studied them before taking a nap. Shortly before dawn, Zubov's team returned, their mission accomplished. "With your pardon, an excellent Mercedes," Zubov reported. Pashkov had changed into the hospital gown with the Coca-Cola legend on the back. He glanced at his watch. It was four o'clock in the morning. He tossed his bundle of clothing to the first ape. "Take my flier back to Moscow, Kolya lad. Give my clothes to Nadezhda Brunhildova, and tell Comrade Petchareff to expect Colonel James today." Clutching the bundle, Kolya stuck his tongue out at Petya and bounded out of the room. They waited at the window until they saw Kolya take off in Pashkov's flier. Then they made their way down the service stairs to the alley, Pashkov dressed only in the hospital gown; got into the stolen Mercedes and drove to the National Hospital, all three leaning forward. In the ambulance court, Zubov and Petya moved quickly to a Red Cross flier. Pashkov dropped the invoice he had lifted from the Cubans on the front seat of the stolen car, and followed. A watchman emerged from his hut, looked idly up at the rising ambulance, and shuffled back to his morning coffee. As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James' window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in after. Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed, his eyes blinking. Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment. "My dear Gospodin Pashkov!" Colonel James greeted him in Russian, yawning. "How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down." Not only was his Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice. "You're not really sick?" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed. "Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look in the mirror—" The colonel shuddered. "I hope your sacrifice won't be permanent?" Pashkov said. "That would be too much. How is my Russian? The truth, now." "Excellent. Put up your gun, Zubov. Colonel James and I don't get to talk very often." "And a pity we don't. Good manners accomplish more than an opera full of cloaks and daggers. Cigarette?" "Gratefully accepted," Zubov said, slipping his gun into its holster with a flourish. "Your treatment is over, then?" Pashkov asked. "You are ready for your assignment?" "Ready." "And that is?" "Delicate, very delicate. I must report to the Palace this morning." "Shall I kidnap him now?" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his cigarette. "Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel—do you want me to think I am falling into a trap?" "No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at seeing you again." The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's other side. "Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov." Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov. "Take him straight to Petchareff," Colonel James said to Zubov. "I'll report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to." Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards the window. "Hold your claws, Zubov lad," Pashkov said. "You have got the wrong man, can't you see? That is Colonel James." "Eh?" "Use your eyes, blockhead. I am Pashkov." Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. "Eh?" Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, "Carry him out." Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to the window. "You miserable idiot," Pashkov shouted. "You'll get a rest cure for this!" Zubov dropped him, pulled his gun and backed off into a corner. "How can I tell you two apart just by looking!" he cried hysterically. "I'm not a learned man." "One small but decisive proof," Pashkov said, unbuttoning his hospital gown. "I have a mole." Zubov yanked the colonel up by an arm. "Send me to rest cures, will you?" Colonel James sighed. "I guess we have to keep up appearances," he muttered, and climbed out the window into the hovering ambulance. Zubov leaped in after, and they were off. The suit of clothes hanging in the closet might have been Pashkov's own, identical with the clothes Kolya had taken to Moscow not an hour before. Even the underwear had facsimiles of the Order of Lenin sewn in. Satisfied, he crawled into the bed and fell into a pleasant snooze. He was awakened by the nurse, Anastina Bjorklund—alias Anastasia Semionovna Bezumnaya, formerly of the Stakhanovite Booster's Committee, Moscow Third Worker's District. "Wonderful morning, Colonel James!" Petchareff seldom let one agent know what another was doing. She put a big breakfast tray on Pashkov's lap. "Cloudy, damp, and windy. London stock market caves in, race riots in South Africa, famine in India, earthquake in Japan, floods in the United States, general strike in France, new crisis in Berlin. I ask you, what more can an idealist want?" "Good morning, Miss Bjorklund." The breakfast tray was crammed with a liter of orange juice, four boiled eggs, six slices of bacon, four pancakes, two pork chops, four slices of toast, a tumbler of vodka, a pot of coffee and two cigars. "Ah, Colonel," Anastina said as Pashkov fell to, "why did you let them change your face? It does not become you at all." "Part of my job. Don't you think I am more handsome now?" Anastina laughed shrilly. "That bulbous nose handsome? What woman could fall in love with a nose like that?" "It shows determination. I wish I had this nose permanently." "You mustn't talk like that. But I'll ignore your nose if you tell me more about White Sands Proving Grounds, as you promised." "With pleasure, with pleasure," he said, sinking his teeth into a pork chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. "But right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra shine, there's a good girl." "Oh, you and your secrets!" An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James' flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared at him, then smiled nervously. "They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel." "Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?" "Oh, no, sir." "Do I talk like Colonel James?" "You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov." "I am Gospodin Pashkov now, Captain. To everybody." "Of course, sir. I'll ring down you are coming." Pashkov glanced at his watch. Colonel James would be landing in Moscow about now and taken to Comrade Petchareff for questioning. A manservant in velvet cutaways, patent leather shoes and white gloves, escorted Pashkov through rooms hung with chandeliers, tapestries, paintings. Pashkov entered the last room and stopped as the door clicked shut behind him. In the room were three men, all of whom he recognized: Professor Kristin of the Swedish Academy, a white-haired old man with a kind, intelligent face; the king, Gustavus IX, a thin old man stroking his Vandyke, sitting under a portrait of Frederick the Great; and Monsieur Fanti, the make-up surgeon. Pashkov bowed his head. "Your majesty. Gentlemen." "Extraordinary!" Professor Kristin said. Pashkov turned to the surgeon. "Monsieur, should my face have such a frivolous expression?" M. Fanti raised his eyebrows, but did not answer. "I thought," said Pashkov, "that Gospodin Pashkov's face has a more brutal look." "Propaganda," said the artist. But he came closer and looked at Pashkov's face with sudden interest. Professor Kristin said, "Colonel James, we presume you have studied the problem in detail. I'm afraid we have delayed announcing the Nobel prize for literature much too long. How soon can you bring Boris Knackenpast to Stockholm?" So there it was: Boris Knackenpast a supreme success, as Pashkov had suspected. It would be amusing to tell robotist Medvedev about it. "Delicate, very delicate," Pashkov said. "Everything depends on my not running into Gospodin Pashkov." "We can't wait any longer," Professor Kristin said. "Fortunately, we have an ally in the enemy camp. The robotist, Medvedev, is expecting you at Knackenpast's villa." "Bad show," M. Fanti said suddenly. "No good. His left cheekbone is at least four centimeters too high." The men looked at the surgeon, then at Pashkov. M. Fanti fingered Pashkov's cheekbone. "How could I have made such a mistake! Just look at him. People laugh at such faces." "How much time to correct the error then, Monsieur Fanti?" the king asked. "A week at least. His skin needs a rest. I must rework the whole left side of his face—it's all lopsided." "But we can't spare a week," Professor Kristin said. "With your majesty's permission," Pashkov offered, "I am willing to go as I am. Indeed, my plans call for immediate departure." "It is a good thing you do for us, Colonel James," Gustavus IX said, "and a courageous thing. Please accept our thanks." Professor Kristin saw Pashkov to the door. "One suggestion, Colonel. Your r's are still too soft for a real Russian. Why do you Americans slur them like that? And I beg you, if you value your life, do not fail to watch your fricatives." The roof captain saluted as Pashkov stepped out of the lift. His flier was serviced and ready. "What weather in Moscow, Captain?" "Ceiling four thousand. We're having patrols half way out to sea. They are instructed to let you pass." A small incident, the roof captain explained. A Swedish Red Cross flier was missing from the National Hospital. Two Cuban agents had been arrested and a cache of small arms and ammunition was found. But no trace of the ambulance. "I suppose the Cubans deny stealing the ambulance?" Pashkov asked. "They say they've been framed by a fat little Russian. But it's transparent, a clumsy job. Imagine, they left a stolen car in the ambulance court and in it an invoice for six cases of ammunition. It was traced to the Cubans in half an hour." Pashkov climbed into his flier. "Well, it's fashionable to blame the Russians for everything." He waved his chubby hand, and took off. Flying over the Baltic, he set the controls on the Moscow beam. Ten minutes west of Moscow he tuned the communicator in on Petchareff's office. "Seven One Three here, Nadezhda. Tell Petchareff—no, let me talk to him." "Seven One ... but that's impossible! Gospodin Pashkov is in conference with Comrade Petchareff." "Stupid!" Petchareff's voice sounded behind Nadezhda's, and the speaker clicked and went dead. Pashkov dove into the clouds and brought his flier to a hovering stop. Petchareff did not believe he was Pashkov. Colonel James, it was clear, was at that moment in Petchareff's office, impersonating Pashkov. And Zubov was probably getting a rest cure. Pashkov crawled out of the cloud and skimmed northeast to Mir, Boris Knackenpast's villa. "You came fast, sir," the lieutenant of guards welcomed him at Mir. "We did not expect you for another fifteen minutes." Fifteen minutes. The colonel was not wasting time. "Listen carefully, lieutenant." Pashkov described the American agent. "But his left cheekbone is lower than mine—about four centimeters. He may be armed, so be careful." The lieutenant stared. "Shall we kill him?" "No, no. Put him in a cage." As Pashkov ran up the steps to the villa, the curtain in the vestibule window stirred. But when he entered, the vestibule was empty. He looked in the dining room, the music room, the library. Nobody. The house was strangely quiet. He came to the door of the study and listened. Not a sound. He went in and there, behind the large writing desk, sat Boris Knackenpast. The robot was unscrewing screws imbedded in his neck. "My God, sir," said Pashkov, "what are you doing?" The robot's eyes, large disks of glittering mirror, flashed as he looked up. "Ah, Colonel James," Boris said in a voice that seemed to come from a deep well. "Excuse the poor welcome, but I understand we have little time. You scared my valet; he thought you were Gospodin Pashkov." The door burst open and Medvedev rushed in, the old valet at his heels. Medvedev stopped, gaped, then seized Pashkov's hand. "Colonel James! What an artist, that Monsieur Fanti. But quick, Boris, Pashkov is on his way." Boris pulled off his head, and crawled out of the robot shell. Pashkov saw Boris as he really was, a tall human with a gaunt, ascetic face. The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's the trouble with us. "I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast," Pashkov said. "We must be off at once." "Too late!" the old valet said from the window. Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the guards closed a circle about him. "He'll keep," Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. "Let's be off, Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out." "Look!" The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff. Zubov leaped out next, his big front tooth flashing. Then his two assistants, Petya and Kolya, tumbled out in their coats and hats. Last of all to emerge from the flier was Nadezhda Brunhildova. "Pretend not to know me, will he?" she yelled at Colonel James, picking up a rock. "Hold it, citizenress," Colonel James said. "Citizenress, is it?" The rock flew over his head and felled Zubov. "I warned you both, no kitchen squabbles while on duty," Petchareff roared. He snapped an order to the lieutenants of guards, and the guards surrounded the house. "No alarm, no alarm," Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window. "Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for it. But get back into your robot costume." "I can't operate the machine." "I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff." As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face. The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping. Colonel James said, "There he is, the American spy." Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. "Not bad," Petchareff said. "We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?" "Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov." "Curse me," Nadezhda said, staring at him. "Another Pashkov." A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's face with their slouched hats. "Stand back!" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. "He is trying to say something!" "He's moving!" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair standing up like spikes. Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree. Pashkov whispered to Colonel James. "Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself," Petchareff said. "Zubov!" "Hhng?" "Which one's the real Pashkov?" "Hhng?" But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at Petchareff and running. "Grenade!" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground. At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier, his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor. The guards scattered and dove for cover. "Down, lads! Grenade!" Pashkov yelled. The two apes took up the cry, "Grenade, grenade!" and flattened themselves behind the tree. Nadezhda and Medvedev collided, digging in behind the valet. Only Petchareff remained standing. "Stop the robot!" Nobody moved. Boris reached the flier, Colonel James pulled him in, the engine hummed, and they were off. A moment later the flier vanished in the clouds towards Stockholm. Petchareff relit his cigar. "Tfui, tastes of monkey hair." Medvedev shambled over. "Was the grenade a dud?" "One of these days I'll catch you, Pashkov," Petchareff spat. "Your deviousness, that's one thing. It could be useful. But your levity—" "Darling!" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov. "Not in public," Pashkov said. "Wait a minute," Petchareff said. "Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot him summarily. He does look like Colonel James to me." "But if you're mistaken?" Medvedev put in nervously. "We all make mistakes," Petchareff said. "What would history be without mistakes?" "I don't trust him either," Nadezhda said. "But I know my Pashkov. If he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning."

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THE MOONS OF MARS By DEAN EVANS Illustrated by WILLER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Every boy should be able to whistle, except, of course, Martians. But this one did! He seemed a very little boy to be carrying so large a butterfly net. He swung it in his chubby right fist as he walked, and at first glance you couldn't be sure if he were carrying it, or it carrying him . He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two things peculiar, but each was related to the other. The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys do not—and he most certainly didn't. The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy. "Hi, there," I said when he came near enough. "What's that you're whistling?" He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes. "'The Calm'," he said in a sober, little-boy voice. "The what ?" I asked. "From the William Tell Overture," he explained, still looking up at me. He said it deadpan, and his wide brown eyes never once batted. "Oh," I said. "And where did you learn that?" "My mother taught me." I blinked at him. He didn't blink back. His round little face still held no expression, but if it had, I knew it would have matched the title of the tune he whistled. "You whistle very well," I told him. That pleased him. His eyes lit up and an almost-smile flirted with the corners of his small mouth. He nodded grave agreement. "Been after butterflies, I see. I'll bet you didn't get any. This is the wrong season." The light in his eyes snapped off. "Well, good-by," he said abruptly and very relevantly. "Good-by," I said. His whistling and his walking started up again in the same spot where they had left off. I mean the note he resumed on was the note which followed the one interrupted; and the step he took was with the left foot, which was the one he would have used if I hadn't stopped him. I followed him with my eyes. An unusual little boy. A most precisely mechanical little boy. When he was almost out of sight, I took off after him, wondering. The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure— pure , mind you—gold. Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual. And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars. There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just disappeared. So his mother had taught him the William Tell Overture, had she? That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think, instead, of something quite astonishing: How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle? All Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead. I went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door. The woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice wasn't young any more, either. "Well? And what did I do now?" "I beg your pardon?" I said. "You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing just something to cover a hole in your shirt?" "Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?" I asked. "All I did was knock on your door." "I heard it." Her lips were curled slightly at one corner. I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before I answered: "As a matter of fact, I don't want to see you at all. I didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here that I was interested in. The little Martian boy, I mean." Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart. "Come in," she almost gasped. I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this. A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you like the appearance of squeezed blood. There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs, and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I looked once again at the woman. "What about him?" she whispered. Her eyes were still startled. I smiled reassuringly. "Nothing, lady, nothing. I'm sorry I upset you. I was just being nosy is all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told me it was the 'Calm' from William Tell. He also told me his mother had taught him." Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks. She said one word only: "Well?" "Nothing," I answered. "Except that Martians are supposed to be tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and when he told me his mother had taught him—" I shrugged and laughed a little. "Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy." She nodded. "We agree on that last part." Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily. "I would like to speak to the Martian lady," I said. "There isn't any Martian lady." "There has to be, doesn't there?" I said it with little sharp prickers on the words. But she did, too: " Does there? " I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard and at the same time curiously defiant—as though she would dare me to go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts. For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to whistle. And then—after what seemed to me a very long while—I slowly tumbled to what she meant. Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother. It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically, spiritually, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of, compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around the house. I finally said: "So that is why he is able to whistle." She didn't answer. Even before I spoke, her eyes had seen the correct guess which had probably flashed naked and astounded in my own eyes. And then she swallowed with a labored breath that went trembling down inside her. "There isn't anything to be ashamed of," I said gently. "Back on Earth there's a lot of mixtures, you know. Some people even claim there's no such thing as a pure race. I don't know, but I guess we all started somewhere and intermarried plenty since." She nodded. Somehow her eyes didn't look defiant any more. "Where's his father?" I asked. "H-he's dead." "I'm sorry. Are you all right? I mean do you get along okay and everything, now that...?" I stopped. I wanted to ask her if she was starving by slow degrees and needed help. Lord knows the careworn look about her didn't show it was luxurious living she was doing—at least not lately. "Look," I said suddenly. "Would you like to go home to Earth? I could fix—" But that was the wrong approach. Her eyes snapped and her shoulders stiffened angrily and the words that ripped out of her mouth were not coated with honey. "Get the hell out of here, you fool!" I blinked again. When the flame in her eyes suddenly seemed to grow even hotter, I turned on my heel and went to the door. I opened it, went out on the top slab step. I turned back to close the door—and looked straight into her eyes. She was crying, but that didn't mean exactly what it looked like it might mean. Her right hand had the door edge gripped tightly and she was swinging it with all the strength she possessed. And while I still stared, the door slammed savagely into the casing with a shock that jarred the slab under my feet, and flying splinters from the rotten woodwork stung my flinching cheeks. I shrugged and turned around and went down the steps. "And that is the way it goes," I muttered disgustedly to myself. Thinking to be helpful with the firewood problem, you give a woman a nice sharp axe and she immediately puts it to use—on you. I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spread-legged man who was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something in his eyes which might have been a leer. "Pulled a howler in there, eh, mate?" he said. He chuckled hoarsely in his throat. "Not being exactly deaf, I heard the tail end of it." His chuckle was a lewd thing, a thing usually reserved—if it ever was reserved at all—for the mens' rooms of some of the lower class dives. And then he stopped chuckling and frowned instead and said complainingly: "Regular little spitfire, ain't she? I ask you now, wouldn't you think a gal which had got herself in a little jam, so to speak, would be more reasonable—" His words chopped short and he almost choked on the final unuttered syllable. His glance had dropped to my badge and the look on his face was one of startled surprise. "I—" he said. I cocked a frown of my own at him. "Well, so long, mate," he grunted, and spun around and dug his toes in the sand and was away. I stood there staring at his rapidly disappearing form for a few moments and then looked back once more at the house. A tattered cotton curtain was just swinging to in the dirty, sand-blown window. That seemed to mean the woman had been watching. I sighed, shrugged again and went away myself. When I got back to Security Headquarters, I went to the file and began to rifle through pictures. I didn't find the woman, but I did find the man. He was a killer named Harry Smythe. I took the picture into the Chief's office and laid it on his desk, waited for him to look down at it and study it for an instant, and then to look back up to me. Which he did. "So?" he said. "Wanted, isn't he?" He nodded. "But a lot of good that'll do. He's holed up somewhere back on Earth." "No," I said. "He's right here. I just saw him." " What? " He nearly leaped out of his chair. "I didn't know who he was at first," I said. "It wasn't until I looked in the files—" He cut me off. His hand darted into his desk drawer and pulled out an Authority Card. He shoved the card at me. He growled: "Kill or capture, I'm not especially fussy which. Just get him!" I nodded and took the card. As I left the office, I was thinking of something which struck me as somewhat more than odd. I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling part of the William Tell Overture, and it had led me to a wanted killer named Harry Smythe. Understandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever I showed it I got respect. I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything more than a ghoul, you don't. Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though, was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. It was empty. She had moved fast. She hadn't even left me a note saying good-by. That night I went into the Great Northern desert to the Haremheb Reservation, where the Martians still try to act like Martians. It was Festival night, and when I got there they were doing the dance to the two moons. At times like this you want to leave the Martians alone. With that thought in mind, I pinned my Authority Card to my lapel directly above my badge, and went through the gates. The huge circle fire was burning and the dance was in progress. Briefly, this can be described as something like the ceremonial dances put on centuries ago by the ancient aborigines of North America. There was one important exception, however. Instead of a central fire, the Martians dig a huge circular trench and fill it with dried roots of the belu tree and set fire to it. Being pitch-like, the gnarled fragments burn for hours. Inside this ring sit the spectators, and in the exact center are the dancers. For music, they use the drums. The dancers were both men and women and they were as naked as Martians can get, but their dance was a thing of grace and loveliness. For an instant—before anyone observed me—I stood motionless and watched the sinuously undulating movements, and I thought, as I have often thought before, that this is the one thing the Martians can still do beautifully. Which, in a sad sort of way, is a commentary on the way things have gone since the first rocket-blasting ship set down on these purple sands. I felt the knife dig my spine. Carefully I turned around and pointed my index finger to my badge and card. Bared teeth glittered at me in the flickering light, and then the knife disappeared as quickly as it had come. "Wahanhk," I said. "The Chief. Take me to him." The Martian turned, went away from the half-light of the circle. He led me some yards off to the north to a swooping-tent. Then he stopped, pointed. "Wahanhk," he said. I watched him slip away. Wahanhk is an old Martian. I don't think any Martian before him has ever lived so long—and doubtless none after him will, either. His leathery, almost purple-black skin was rough and had a charred look about it, and up around the eyes were little plaits and folds that had the appearance of being done deliberately by a Martian sand-artist. "Good evening," I said, and sat down before him and crossed my legs. He nodded slowly. His old eyes went to my badge. From there they went to the Authority Card. "Power sign of the Earthmen," he muttered. "Not necessarily," I said. "I'm not here for trouble. I know as well as you do that, before tonight is finished, more than half of your men and women will be drunk on illegal whiskey." He didn't reply to that. "And I don't give a damn about it," I added distinctly. His eyes came deliberately up to mine and stopped there. He said nothing. He waited. Outside, the drums throbbed, slowly at first, then moderated in tempo. It was like the throbbing—or sobbing, if you prefer—of the old, old pumps whose shafts go so tirelessly down into the planet for such pitifully thin streams of water. "I'm looking for an Earthwoman," I said. "This particular Earthwoman took a Martian for a husband." "That is impossible," he grunted bitterly. "I would have said so, too," I agreed. "Until this afternoon, that is." His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle. "I met her little son," I went on. "A little semi-human boy with Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the other side, a little Martian boy who whistles." His teeth went together with a snap. I nodded and smiled. "You know who I'm talking about." For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply blank. "They disappeared from the shack they were living in," I said. "They went in a hurry—a very great hurry." That one he didn't answer, either. "I would like to know where she is." "Why?" His whisper was brittle. "She's not in trouble," I told him quickly. "She's not wanted. Nor her child, either. It's just that I have to talk to her." "Why?" I pulled out the file photo of Harry Smythe and handed it across to him. His wrinkled hand took it, pinched it, held it up close to a lamp hanging from one of the ridge poles. His eyes squinted at it for a long moment before he handed it back. "I have never seen this Earthman," he said. "All right," I answered. "There wasn't anything that made me think you had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that she might know him." "This one is wanted ?" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the last word. I nodded. "For murder." "Murder." He spat the word. "But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not that important any more." His old eyes hated me with an intensity I didn't relish. "You said that, old man, not I." A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to. He said at last: "I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child." He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the drums, somebody was whistling. It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow cheese. "In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!" He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie only bores a Martian. I got up and went out of the tent. The woman never heard me approach. Her eyes were toward the flaming circle and the dancers within, and, too, I suppose, to her small son who was somewhere in that circle with them, whistling. She leaned against the bole of a belu tree with her arms down and slightly curled backward around it. "That's considered bad luck," I said. Her head jerked around with my words, reflected flames from the circle fire still flickering in her eyes. "That's a belu tree," I said. "Embracing it like that is like looking for a ladder to walk under. Or didn't you know?" "Would it make any difference?" She spoke softly, but the words came to me above the drums and the shouts of the dancers. "How much bad luck can you have in one lifetime, anyway?" I ignored that. "Why did you pull out of that shack? I told you you had nothing to fear from me." She didn't answer. "I'm looking for the man you saw me talking with this morning," I went on. "Lady, he's wanted. And this thing, on my lapel is an Authority Card. Assuming you know what it means, I'm asking you where he is." "What man?" Her words were flat. "His name is Harry Smythe." If that meant anything to her, I couldn't tell. In the flickering light from the fires, subtle changes in expression weren't easily detected. "Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it. Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you, Mister, whoever it was, I'll get him. I'll get him! " I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh. Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of her man. And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and the dancers was loud enough to command the attention and the senses. I could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the small, thin shoulders. And I knew then the reason for old Wahanhk's bitterness when he had said to me, "But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not that important any more." What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: "I'm sorry, kid. But look, just staking out in that old shack of yours and trying to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way—well, I mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?" I put an arm around her shoulders. "He must have been a pretty nice guy," I said. "I don't think you'd have married him if he wasn't." I stopped. Even in my own ears, my words sounded comfortless. I looked up, over at the flaming circle and at the sweat-laved dancers within it. The sound of the drums was a wild cacophonous tattoo now, a rattle of speed and savagery combined; and those who moved to its frenetic jabberings were not dancers any more, but only frenzied, jerking figurines on the strings of a puppeteer gone mad. I looked down again at the woman. "Your little boy and his butterfly net," I said softly. "In a season when no butterflies can be found. What was that for? Was he part of the plan, too, and the net just the alibi that gave him a passport to wander where he chose? So that he could listen, pick up a little information here, a little there?" She didn't answer. She didn't have to answer. My guesses can be as good as anybody's. After a long while she looked up into my eyes. "His name was Tahily," she said. "He had the secret. He knew where the gold vein was. And soon, in a couple of years maybe, when all the prospectors were gone and he knew it would be safe, he was going to stake a claim and go after it. For us. For the three of us." I sighed. There wasn't, isn't, never will be any gold on this planet. But who in the name of God could have the heart to ruin a dream like that? Next day I followed the little boy. He left the reservation in a cheery frame of mind, his whistle sounding loud and clear on the thin morning air. He didn't go in the direction of town, but the other way—toward the ruins of the ancient Temple City of the Moons. I watched his chubby arm and the swinging of the big butterfly net on the end of that arm. Then I followed along in his sandy tracks. It was desert country, of course. There wasn't any chance of tailing him without his knowledge and I knew it. I also knew that before long he'd know it, too. And he did—but he didn't let me know he did until we came to the rag-cliffs, those filigree walls of stone that hide the entrance to the valley of the two moons. Once there, he paused and placed his butterfly net on a rock ledge and then calmly sat down and took off his shoes to dump the sand while he waited for me. "Well," I said. "Good morning." He looked up at me. He nodded politely. Then he put on his shoes again and got to his feet. "You've been following me," he said, and his brown eyes stared accusingly into mine. "I have?" "That isn't an honorable thing to do," he said very gravely. "A gentleman doesn't do that to another gentleman." I didn't smile. "And what would you have me do about it?" "Stop following me, of course, sir." "Very well," I said. "I won't follow you any more. Will that be satisfactory?" "Quite, sir." Without another word, he picked up his butterfly net and disappeared along a path that led through a rock crevice. Only then did I allow myself to grin. It was a sad and pitying and affectionate kind of grin. I sat down and did with my shoes as he had done. There wasn't any hurry; I knew where he was going. There could only be one place, of course—the city of Deimos and Phobos. Other than that he had no choice. And I thought I knew the reason for his going. Several times in the past, there have been men who, bitten with the fever of an idea that somewhere on this red planet there must be gold, have done prospecting among the ruins of the old temples. He had probably heard that there were men there now, and he was carrying out with the thoroughness of his precise little mind the job he had set himself of finding the killer of his daddy. I took a short-cut over the rag-cliffs and went down a winding, sand-worn path. The temple stones stood out barren and dry-looking, like breast bones from the desiccated carcass of an animal. For a moment I stopped and stared down at the ruins. I didn't see the boy. He was somewhere down there, though, still swinging his butterfly net and, probably, still whistling. I started up once more. And then I heard it—a shrill blast of sound in an octave of urgency; a whistle, sure, but a warning one. I stopped in my tracks from the shock of it. Yes, I knew from whom it had come, all right. But I didn't know why. And then the whistle broke off short. One instant it was in the air, shrieking with a message. The next it was gone. But it left tailings, like the echo of a death cry slowly floating back over the dead body of the creature that uttered it. I dropped behind a fragment of the rag-cliff. A shot barked out angrily. Splinters of the rock crazed the morning air.

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Grand Finale Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy broadly recounts the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado at London's Savoy Theatre in 1885. Perhaps "broadly" is putting too fine a point on it. The first hour, in which Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) attempts to sever his ties with W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and the owner of the Savoy, Richard D'Oyly Carte (Ron Cook), is a mess: The order of scenes feels arbitrary, and characters pop up and vanish with bewildering frequency. You might be tempted to vanish, too. (Friends of mine did.) Be patient. Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something extraordinary: a monument to process--to the minutiae of making art. And to something more: the fundamental sadness of people who labor to make beautiful things--who soar--and then come down to a not-so-beautiful earth. It would be charitable to attribute the shapelessness of the early scenes to the characters' own lack of focus, but it would also be inane. As Elvis Mitchell pointed out in Slate 's "," Leigh's opening shot features an usher who moves along a row of the Savoy Theatre lifting and peering under every seat. That's every seat. You can almost hear Leigh cackling: "How's this for a fast start?--you bourgeois slaves to narrative." Inevitably, something does happen: Princess Ida , one of Gilbert and Sullivan's duds, has its premiere, and Gilbert fumes over a review that calls him the monarch of "topsy-turvydom"--of formulaic plots involving magical elixirs and coins. A heat wave has hit London, theater attendance is down, and Sullivan is itching to go off and become the English Mendelssohn--to write operas and symphonies instead of comic "soufflés." Leigh evidently loves the bloodless formality of the scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan, men of opposite tastes and temperaments who only overlap in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: "How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama." The wake-up call comes an hour into the movie. Gilbert attends a popular exposition of Japanese culture at Knightsbridge and watches Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea ("spinach water"). When a Japanese sword he has purchased falls off his wall, he hefts it; mimes a fight while issuing strangled, samurailike cries; then has a brainstorm. We hear the horns of The Mikado overture, then Leigh cuts to the fully realized opening scene on stage at the Savoy: "We are gentlemen of Japan …" Just that chorus is enough to reanimate the audience--to make people sit up and grin. And Leigh's technique of leaping back and forth between the finished Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the connection. A central section of the drama is missing. What exactly fired Sullivan up about doing The Mikado ? What was different about this collaboration? No answer. Topsy-Turvy turns into something other than the Gilbert and Sullivan story: a portrait of life in the theater. A group portrait. D'Oyly Carte becomes a quiet third protagonist, a humane businessman. He softly negotiates a salary increase with the company's lead comic (Martin Savage), a neurasthenic junkie. He gently seeks the assurance of a tipsy ingénue (the tremulous Shirley Henderson) that her "little weakness" will not re-emerge. In the dressing room, performers gossip and complain, drink and shoot themselves up with drugs. Leigh's ensemble casts strive to be "microcosms" of society, so issues of class are ever present. You see it in Sullivan's banter with the working-class musicians in the pit and in Gilbert's with the uppity actors (the movie's posturing middle class), whom he drills on pronunciation and poise. The chorus is presented as some sort of collective folk conscience when it lobbies Gilbert to restore the rashly cut solo ("A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist") of the sad, fat fellow (Timothy Spall) in the title role. Who would have predicted that Leigh would make Gilbert and Sullivan into Mike Leigh characters? Gilbert could be a stand-in for Leigh himself--a haughty, ill-humored man with an obsession for tiny details and a glowering dedication to process. Gilbert haggles with his actors over small things that shouldn't resonate but which somehow add up. Leigh's small things add up, too. The joke of The Mikado is that its Japanese lords are thinly disguised English bureaucrats; the joke of Topsy-Turvy is that the opera's English performers seem culturally incapable of playing Japanese. They rehearse in long coats and top hats, and some of the women (and men!) express horror at appearing on stage without corsets. Behind the satire, however, is a reverence for Gilbert and Sullivan: The tempos are slower than modern audiences are used to, and the staging has been stripped of high-camp accretions. I saw a D'Oyly Carte production of The Mikado in the late '70s: It was played fast and to the groundlings and made me never want to see a G&S opera again. Now I can't wait for the next production. Only a lunatic would call Topsy-Turvy , with its lame first hour and host of loose ends, a masterpiece, but by the finale I was ready to have myself committed. The finale itself must have done it. Leigh's endings are often wondrous, and this one is up there with the rooftop scene in High Hopes (1988). The Mikado is a triumph--it would be the Savoy's biggest hit--but there's no transformation in the lives of its makers. Gilbert can't bring himself to reach out to his brokenhearted wife (Lesley Manville), and Sullivan has a melancholy inkling that he has reached his artistic peak. The ingénue, Leonora, is drinking again, toasting herself in the mirror and praising the loveliness of Nature--a Nature that will, of course, destroy her. The final image is of Art: Leonora on stage singing Yum-Yum's sublime "The sun whose rays are all ablaze …" As Leigh's camera pulls back over the orchestra and the audience, this movie feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists ever made. Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless. Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle. The director is in his weird element only in the first half-hour, in which he sits his subject down and gets out of his way. Leuchter, who looks a little like the archetypal movie dweeb Charles Martin Smith and has a heavy exurbs-of-Boston accent, explains how he became involved in redesigning problematic electric chairs. "Excess current cooks the tissue," he says, barely suppressing a smirk at his own expertise. "There've been occasions where a great amount of current has been applied, and the meat actually will come off the executee's bone like the meat coming off a cooked chicken." Leuchter set about making capital punishment more "humane." He moves on to talking about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar. But that's OK, because the man is an interesting specimen. Is he a monster or a humanist committed to eliminating the "deplawrable tawchaw" of capital punishment? It could go either way. M r. Death gets into deeper waters when it recounts the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada for proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened. Zundel hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and examine the "alleged" gas chambers: Footage (taken by Zundel's cameraman) shows the little man chiseling at walls, vandalizing what even he admits are international shrines. Leuchter smuggled specimens of rock and concrete back to the United States, where chemical analysis revealed no cyanide gas. Furthermore, Leuchter can't figure out how the gas would even have been administered without killing the Nazis themselves--proof, he argues, that mass extermination at Auschwitz never took place. The subsequent "Leuchter Report" became the backbone of Zundel's defense (he lost anyway) and of the burgeoning revisionist movement led by David Irving. But if Leuchter became a hero to neo-Nazis, he also became a target of Jewish groups and a pariah even in the execution business. When Morris hooks up with him for the last time, he's in hiding from creditors. Is Leuchter a raving anti-Semite or a pathetic pawn who thrived on having--for the first time in his life--a bit of celebrity? The film suggests the latter. It certainly produces no evidence of malice. Plenty of monstrous insensitivity and hubris, though. Morris uses the Dutch historian Robert Jan van Pelt as a counternarrator: He calls Leuchter "a fffool " who didn't have a clue what to look for in a place that had changed enormously in 50 years. "If he had spent time in the archives," says van Pelt, "he would have found evidence about ventilation systems, ways to introduce Zyclon B into these buildings--but of course I don't think he knows German so it wouldn't have helped very much." The most devastating rebuttal is from the chemist in charge of the Auschwitz analysis, who explains that the gas wouldn't have penetrated more than 10 microns into the wall (a human hair is 100 microns thick), so by crushing the samples (standard procedure), he had effectively diluted the cyanide 100,000 times. Against all this, Morris shows footage of Leuchter chiseling at Auschwitz and even adds some of his own, along with slow-motion shots of hammers bashing rocks, walls, floors, etc. It's an obscenity. After my rage at Leuchter had subsided, I began to get angry at Morris for aestheticizing that violation--turning it into an ironic art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. His technique is based on standing back--maintaining a fixed distance--while his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need to play Mike Wallace and demolish Leuchter on camera. You could just ask him what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: "Have you ever thought you might be wrong or that you made a mistake?"--sufficiently broad that Leuchter can casually affirm his own inanity. My concern here isn't so much for Leuchter or even the Holocaust revisionists, who'll just think he was sandbagged. The problem is that when a documentary filmmaker seems too scared or cool or arty to violate his own immaculate aesthetic, he ends up weakening his case. He also provides no emotional release, which isn't a small matter when the subject is Holocaust denial. Morris was close enough to Leuchter to have gotten something more, to have gone a little deeper in search of a poison that does penetrate surfaces.

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THE AIR OF CASTOR OIL BY JIM HARMON Illustrated by WALKER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Let the dead past bury its dead? Not while I am alive, it won't! It surely was all right for me to let myself do it now. I couldn't have been more safe. In the window of the radio store a color television set was enjoying a quiz by itself and creased in my pocket was the newspaper account of the failure of a monumental human adventure in the blooming extinction of a huge rocket. The boys on the corner seemed hardly human, scowling anthropoids in walrus-skin coats. It was my own time. Anybody could see I was safe, and I could risk doing what I ached to do. I turned the corner. The breaks were against me from the start. It didn't come as any surprise. I could never get away with it. I knew that all along. There was a Packard parked just beyond the fire plug. The metal and glass fronts of the buildings didn't show back here, only seasoned brick glued with powdering chalk. The line of the block seemed to stretch back, ever further away from the glossy fronts into the crumbling stone. A man brushed past me, wearing an Ivy League suit and snap-brim hat, carrying a briefcase. And, reassuringly, he was in a hurry. I decided to chance it. I certainly wanted to do it in the worst way. My footsteps carried me on down the block. A little car spurted on past me. One of those foreign jobs, I decided. Only it wasn't. I fixed the silhouette in my mind's eye and identified it. A Henry J. Still, I wasn't worried. It was actually too early in the day. It wasn't as if it were evening or anything like that. The little store was right where I left it, rotting quietly to itself. The Back Number Store, the faded circus poster proclaimed in red and gold, or now, pink and lemon. In the window, in cellophane envelopes, were the first issue of Life , a recent issue of Modern Man with a modern woman fronting it, a Big Big Book of Buck Rogers and the Silver Cities of Venus , and a brand-new, sun-bleached copy of Doctor Zhivago . There was a little car at the curb. This time I recognized that it wasn't an import, just a Crosley. I went in, the brass handle making me conscious of the sweat on my palm. The old man sat behind a fortress of magazines and books, treacherously reading the funnies in a newspaper. His bald head swiveled on the hunched shoulders of his sweater which was azuring toward white. He grinned, toothless. "Came back for more of the stuff, did you?" He laid down the newspaper. (That subheadline couldn't really be making so nasty a suggestion to a noted general, could it?) "Yes," I laughed, not very true. "I know what a craving can be. I shouldn't smoke, but I do. I've tried to stop but I lie there thinking about cigarettes half the night. Long ones, short ones, smoked ones, ones unlit. I feel like I could smoke one in each hand. It like that with you?" "Not that bad. To me it's just—" "Don't tell me reading isn't a craving with some of you fellows. I've seen guys come in here, hardly two threads stuck together on them, and grab up them horror magazines and read and read, until sweat starts rolling off the end of their nose. I've hardly got the heart to throw 'em out." Horror magazines. Ones with lovely girls about to have their flesh shredded by toothy vampires. Yes, they were a part of it. Not a big part, but a part. "That's not what I want to see. I want—" The old man snickered. "I know what you want. Indeed I do. This way." I followed his spidering hand and sure enough, there they were. Stacks upon stacks of air-war pulp magazines. "Fifteen cents for ones in good condition," the old man pronounced the ritual, "a dime for ones with incomplete covers, three for a quarter, check 'em at the desk when you go." I ran my hand down a stack. Wings , Daredevil Aces , G-8 and his Battle Aces , The Lone Eagle , all of them. The old man was watching me. He skittered back across the floor and snatched up a magazine. It was a copy of Sky Fighters with a girl in a painted-on flying suit hanging from the struts of a Tiger Moth. "This one, this one," he said. "This must be a good one. I bet she gets shoved right into that propeller there. I bet she gets chopped to pieces. Pieces." "I'll take it." Reluctantly he handed over the magazine, waited a moment, then left me. I stared at the stacks of flying story magazines and I felt the slow run of the drop of sweat down my nose. My sickness was terrible. It is as bad to be nostalgic for things you have never known as for an orphan who has never had a home to be homesick. Living in the past, that was always me. I never watched anything on TV made later than 1935. I was in love with Garbo, Ginger Rogers, Dolores del Rio. My favorite stars were Richard Dix, Chester Morris and Richard Arlen. The music I listened to was Gershwin and Arlen and Chicago jazz. And my reading was the pulp literature harking back to the First World War. This was the biggest part of it all, I think. You identify with the hero of any story if it's well enough written. But the identification I felt with the pilots in air-war stories was plainly ridiculous. I was there. I was in the saddle of the cockpit, feeling on my face the bite of the slipstream—no, that was a later term—the prop-wash?—no, that was still later—the backlash from the screw, that was it. I was lifting to meet the Fokker triplanes in the dawn sky. Then in a moment my Vickers was chattering in answer to Spandaus, firing through the screw outfitted with iron edges to deflect bullets that did not pass to the left and right. And back through the aerial maps in the cockpit pocket at my knee. Here he comes, the Spandaus firing right through the screw in perfect synchronization. Look at that chivalrous wave. You can almost see the dueling scar on his cheek from old Krautenberg. He can afford to be chivalrous in that Fokker. I'd like to trade this skiddoo for it. That may be just what I do too if I don't watch it. You ain't any Boelcke, mister, but this is from the Fifth for Squadron 70. Missed! Hard on that rudder! God, look at the snake in that fabric. At least it was a lie about them using incendiaries. One of your own tricks for you, Heinie. Up on the stick, up under your tail, into the blind spot. Where am I? Where am I? Right here. Look at that tail go. Tony can't be giving you as good stuff as he claims. So long. I'm waving, see. He's pulling her up. No tail and he's pulling her up. He's a good man. Come on. A little more. A little more and you can deadstick her. Come on, buddy. You're doing it. You're pulling her up— But not enough. God, what a mess. I'm sick. That damned castor oil in the carburetor. I'll be in the W. C. until oh-six-hundred.... No, the air wasn't one of castor oil but the pleasant smell of aged paper and printer's ink. I'd been daydreaming again. I shouldn't forget things were getting different lately. It was becoming dangerous. I gathered up an armload of air-war magazines at random. Leaning across the table, I noticed the curtain in back for the first time. It was a beaded curtain of many different colors. Theda Bara might have worn it for a skirt. Behind the curtain was a television set. It was a comforting anti-anachronism here. The six- or eight-inch picture was on a very flat tube, a more pronounced Predicta. The size and the flatness didn't seem to go together. Then I saw that the top part of the set was a mirror reflecting an image from the roof of the cabinet where the actual picture tube lay flat. There was an old movie on the channel. An old, old movie. Lon Chaney, Sr., in a western as a badman. He was protecting a doll-faced blonde from the rest of the gang, standing them off from a grove of rocks. The flickering action caught my unblinking eyes. Tom Santschi is sneaking across the top of the rocks, a knife in his dirty half-breed hand. Raymond Hatton makes a try for his old boss, but Chaney stops his clock for him. Now William Farnum is riding up with the posse. Tom makes a try with the knife, the girl screams, and Chaney turns the blade back on him. It goes through his neck, all the way through. The blonde is running toward Farnum as he polishes off the rest of the gang and dismounts, her blouse shredded, revealing one breast—is that the dawn of Bessie Love? Chaney stands up in the rocks. Farnum aims his six-shooter. No, no, say the girl's lips. "No!" "No!" says the subtitle. Farnum fires. Swimming in blood, Chaney smiles sadly and falls. I had seen movies like that before. When I was a kid, I had seen Flicker Flashbacks between chapters of Flash Gordon and Johnny Mack Brown westerns. I looked at old movies and heard the oily voice making fun of them. But hadn't I also seen these pictures with the sound of piano playing and low conversation? I had seen these pictures before the war. The war had made a lot of difference in my life. Comic books were cut down to half their size, from 64 to 32 pages, and prices had gone up to where you had to pay $17 for a pair of shoes, so high that people said Wilson should do something about it. Tom Mix had gone off the air and he and his Cowboy Commandos beat the Japs in comic books. Only, hadn't he sold Liberty Bonds with Helen Morgan? And at school I had bought Defense—War—Savings—Security—Liberty—Freedom—I had bought stamps at school. I never did get enough to trade in for a bond, but Mama had taken my book and traded parts of it in for coffee. She could never get enough coffee.... "Nobody would look at my magazines," the old man chuckled, "if I put it out front. My boy got me that. He runs a radio and Victrola store. A good boy. His name's in the fishbowl." I pressed some money on him and walked myself out of the store. Shutting the door, I saw that the copy of Doctor Zhivago had been replaced by Gone With the Wind . The street was full of wooden-paneled station wagons, blunt little roadsters with canvas tops, swept-back, tailless sedans. Only one dark, tailed, over-thyroided car moved through the traffic. It had a light on the roof. I dodged in front of a horse-drawn garbage wagon and behind an electric postal truck and ran for that light, leaving a trail of gaudy air battles checkering the street behind me. I grabbed the handle on the door, opened it and threw myself into the back seat. "Madison Avenue," I said from my diaphragm, without any breath behind it. Something was wrong. Two men were in the front seat. The driver showed me his hard, expressionless face. "What do you think you are doing?" "This isn't a taxicab?" I asked blankly. "Park Police." I sat there while we drove on for a few minutes. "D. & D.," the second man said to the driver. "Right into our laps." The second officer leaned forward and clicked something. "I'll get the City boys." "No, kill it, Carl. Think of all that damned paper work." Carl shrugged. "What will we do with him?" I was beginning to attach myself to my surroundings. The street was full of traffic. My kind of traffic. Cars that were too big or too small. "Look, officers, I'm not drunk or disorderly. I thought this was a cab. I just wanted to get away from back then—I mean back there ." The two policemen exchanged glances. "What were you running from?" the driver asked. How could I tell him that? Before I even got a chance to try, he said: "What did you do?" "I didn't do anything!" The car was turning, turning into shadows, stopping. We were in an alley. Soggy newspapers, dead fish, prowling cats, a broken die, half a dice, looking big in the frame of my thick, probably bullet-proof window. The men opened their doors and then mine. "Out." I climbed out and stood by the car, blinking. "You were causing some kind of trouble in that neighborhood back there," the driver announced. "Really, officers—" "What's your name?" "Hilliard Turner. There—" "We don't want you going back there again, Turner, causing trouble. Understand?" "Officer, I only bought some books—I mean magazines." "These?" the second man, Carl, asked. He had retrieved them from the back seat. "Look here, Sarge. They look pretty dirty." Sarge took up the Sky Fighters with the girl in the elastic flying suit. "Filth," he said. "You know about the laws governing pornography, Turner." "Those aren't pornography and they are my property!" I reached for them and Carl pulled them back, grinning. "You don't want to read these. They aren't good for you. We're confiscating them." "Look here, I'm a citizen! You can't—" Carl shoved me back a little. "Can't we?" Sarge stepped in front of me, his face in deadly earnest. "How about it, Turner? You a narcotics user?" He grabbed my wrist and started rolling up my sleeve to look for needle marks. I twisted away from him. "Resisting an officer," Sarge said almost sadly. At that, Carl loped up beside him. The two of them started to beat me. They hit clean, in the belly and guts, but not in the groin. They gave me clean white flashes of pain, instead of angry, red-streaked ones. I didn't fight back, not against the two of them. I knew that much. I didn't even try to block their blows. I stood with my arms at my sides, leaning back against the car, and hearing myself grunt at each blow. They stood away from me and let me fold helplessly to the greasy brick. "Stay away from that neighborhood and stay out of trouble," Sarge's voice said above me. I looked up a little bit and saw an ugly, battered hand thumbing across a stack of half a dozen magazines like a giant deck of cards. "Why don't you take up detective stories?" he asked me. I never heard the squad car drive away. Home. I lighted the living room from the door, looked around for intruders for the first time I could remember, and went inside. I threw myself on the couch and rubbed my stomach. I wasn't hurt badly. My middle was going to be sorer in the morning than it was now. Lighting up a cigarette, I watched the shapes of smoke and tried to think. I looked at it objectively, forward and back. The solution was obvious. First of all, I positively could not have been an aviator in World War One. I was in my mid-twenties; anybody could tell that by looking at me. The time was the late 'Fifties; anybody could tell that from the blank-faced Motorola in the corner, the new Edsels on the street. Memories of air combat in Spads and Nieuports stirred in me by old magazines, Quentin Reynolds, and re-runs of Dawn Patrol on television were mere hallucinations. Neither could I remember drinking bootleg hooch in speak-easies, hearing Floyd Gibbons announce the Dempsey-Tunney fight, or paying $3.80 to get into the first run of Gone with the Wind . Only ... I probably had seen GWTW. Hadn't I gone with my mother to a matinee? Didn't she pay 90¢ for me? So how could I remember taking a girl, brunette, red sweater, Cathy, and paying $3.80 each? I couldn't. Different runs. That was it. The thing had been around half a dozen times. But would it have been $3.80 no more than ten years ago? I struck up a new cigarette. The thing I must remember, I told myself, was that my recollections were false and unreliable. It would do me no good to keep following these false memories in a closed curve. I touched my navel area and flinched. The beating, I was confident, had been real. But it had been a nightmare. Those cops couldn't have been true. They were a small boy's bad dream about symbolized authority. They were keeping me from re-entering the past where I belonged, punishing me to make me stay in my trap of the present. Oh, God. I rolled over on my face and pushed it into the upholstery. That was the worst part of it. False memories, feelings of persecution, that was one thing. Believing that you are actively caught up in a mixture of the past with the present, a Daliesque viscosity of reality, was something else. I needed help. Or if there was no help for me, it was my duty to have myself placed where I couldn't harm other consumers. If there was one thing that working for an advertising agency had taught me, it was social responsibility. I took up the phone book and located several psychiatrists. I selected one at random, for no particular reason. Dr. Ernest G. Rickenbacker. I memorized the address and heaved myself to my feet. The doctor's office was as green as the inside of a mentholated cigarette commercial. The cool, lovely receptionist told me to wait and I did, tasting mint inside my mouth. After several long, peaceful minutes the inner door opened. "Mr. Turner, I can't seem to find any record of an appointment for you in Dr. Rickenbacker's files," the man said. I got to my feet. "Then I'll come back." He took my arm. "No, no, I can fit you in." "I didn't have an appointment. I just came." "I understand." "Maybe I had better go." "I won't hear of it." I could have pulled loose from him, but somehow I felt that if I did try to pull away, the grip would tighten and I would never get away. I looked up into that long, hard, blank face that seemed so recently familiar. "I'm Dr. Sergeant," he said. "I'm taking care of Dr. Rickenbacker's practice for him while he is on vacation." I nodded. What I was thinking could only be another symptom of my illness. He led me inside and closed the door. The door made a strange sound in closing. It didn't go snick-bonk ; it made a noise like click-clack-clunk . "Now," he said, "would you like to lie down on the couch and tell me about it? Some people have preconceived ideas that I don't want to fight with at the beginning. Or, if you prefer, you can sit there in front of my desk and tell me all about it. Remember, I'm a psychiatrist, a doctor, not just a psychoanalyst." I took possession of the chair and Sergeant faced me across his desk. "I feel," I said, "that I am caught up in some kind of time travel." "I see. Have you read much science fiction, Mr. Turner?" "Some. I read a lot. All kinds of books. Tolstoi, Twain, Hemingway, Luke Short, John D. MacDonald, Huxley." "You should read them instead of live them. Catharsis. Sublimate, Mr. Turner. For instance, to a certain type of person, I often recommend the mysteries of Mickey Spillane." I seemed to be losing control of the conversation. "But this time travel...." "Mr. Turner, do you really believe in 'time travel'?" "No." "Then how can there be any such thing? It can't be real." "I know that! I want to be cured of imagining it." "The first step is to utterly renounce the idea. Stop thinking about the past. Think of the future." "How did you know I keep slipping back into the past?" I asked. Sergeant's hands were more expressive than his face. "You mentioned time travel...." "But not to the past or to the future," I said. "But you did, Mr. Turner. You told me all about thinking you could go into the past by visiting a book store where they sold old magazines. You told me how the intrusion of the past got worse with every visit." I blinked. "I did? I did?" "Of course." I stood up. "I did not!" "Please try to keep from getting violent, Mr. Turner. People like you actually have more control over themselves than you realize. If you will yourself to be calm...." "I know I didn't tell you a thing about the Back Number Store. I'm starting to think I'm not crazy at all. You—you're trying to do something to me. You're all in it together." Sergeant shook his head sadly. I realized how it all sounded. "Good—GOD!" I moaned. I put my hands to my face and I felt the vein over my left eye swelling, pulsing. Through the bars of my fingers I saw Sergeant motion me down with one eloquent hand. I took my hands away—I didn't like looking through bars—and sat down. "Now," Sergeant said, steepling his fingers, "I know of a completely nice place in the country. Of course, if you respond properly...." Those hands of his. There was something about them that wasn't so. They might have been the hands of a corpse, or a doll.... I lurched across the desk and grabbed his wrist. " Please , Mr. Turner! violence will—" My fingers clawed at the backs of his hands and my nails dragged off ugly strips of some theatrical stuff—collodion, I think—that had covered the scrapes and bruises he had taken hammering away at me and my belt buckle. Sergeant. Sarge. I let go of him and stood away. For the first time, Sergeant smiled. I backed to the door and turned the knob behind my back. It wouldn't open. I turned around and rattled it, pulled on it, braced my foot against the wall and tugged. "Locked," Sergeant supplied. He was coming toward me, I could tell. I wheeled and faced him. He had a hypodermic needle. It was the smallest one I had ever seen and it had an iridescence or luminosity about it, a gleaming silver dart. I closed with him. By the way he moved, I knew he was used to physical combat, but you can't win them all, and I had been in a lot of scraps when I had been younger. (Hadn't I?) I stepped in while he was trying to decide whether to use the hypo on me or drop it to have his hands free. I stiff-handed him in the solar plexus and crossed my fist into the hollow of the apex arch of his jawbone. He dropped. I gave him a kick at the base of his spine. He grunted and lay still. There was a rapping on the door. "Doctor? Doctor?" I searched through his pockets. He didn't have any keys. He didn't have any money or identification or a gun. He had a handkerchief and a ballpoint pen. The receptionist had moved away from the door and was talking to somebody, in person or on the phone or intercom. There wasn't any back door. I went to the window. The city stretched out in an impressive panorama. On the street below, traffic crawled. There was a ledge. Quite a wide, old-fashioned ornamental ledge. The ledge ran beneath the windows of all the offices on this floor. The fourteenth, I remembered. I had seen it done in movies all my life. Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton were always doing it for some reason or other. I had a good reason. I unlatched the window and climbed out into the dry, crisp breeze. The movies didn't know much about convection. The updraft nearly lifted me off the ledge, but the cornice was so wide I could keep out of the wind if I kept myself flat against the side of the building. The next window was about twenty feet away. I had covered half that distance, moving my feet with a sideways crab motion, when Carl, indisputably the second policeman, put his head out of the window where I was heading and pointed a .38 revolver at me, saying in a let's-have-no-foolishness tone: "Get in here." I went the other way. The cool, lovely receptionist was in Sergeant's window with the tiny silver needle in readiness. I kept shuffling toward the girl. I had decided I would rather wrestle with her over the needle than fight Carl over the rod. Idiotically, I smiled at that idea. I slipped. I was falling down the fourteen stories without even a moment of windmilling for balance. I was just gone. Lines were converging, and I was converging on the lines. You aren't going to be able to Immelmann out of this dive, Turner. Good-by, Turner. Death. A sleep, a reawakening, a lie. It's nothing like that. It's nothing. The end of everything you ever were or ever could be. I hit. My kneecap hurt like hell. I had scraped it badly. Reality was all over me in patches. I showed through as a line drawing, crudely done, a cartoon. Some kind of projection. High-test Cinerama, that was all reality meant. I was kneeling on a hard surface no more than six feet from the window from which I had fallen. It was still fourteen flights up, more or less, but Down was broken and splattered over me. I stood up, moving forward a step. It brought me halfway through the screen, halfway through the wall at the base of the building. The other side of the screen. The solid side, I found, stepping through, bracing a hand on the image. Looking up fourteen floors, I saw an unbroken line of peacefully closed panes. I remembered riding up in the elevator, the moments inside, the faint feeling of vertigo. Of course, who was to say the elevator really moved? Maybe they had only switched scenery on me while I was caught inside, listening to the phony hum, seeing the flashing lights. Either cut down or increase the oxygen supply inside the cubicle suddenly and that would contribute a sensation of change, of movement. They had it all worked out. My fingers rubbed my head briskly, both hands working, trying to get some circulation in my brain. I guessed I had to run. There didn't seem much else to do. I ran. Get help? Not this old lady and her daughter. Not this Neanderthal sailor on his way to a bar and a blonde. Not the bookkeeper. Maybe the car salesman, ex-Army, Lions Club member, beefy, respectable, well-intentioned, not a complete fool. The guy on the corner reading a newspaper by the bus stop. "I need help," I panted to him. "Somebody's trying to kidnap me." "Really makes you sick to hear about something like that, doesn't it?" he said. "I'm in favor of the Lindbergh Law myself." "I'm not sure whether—" "This heat is murder, isn't it? Especially here in these concrete canyons. Sometimes I wish I was back in Springfield. Cool, shaded streets...." "Listen to me! These people, they're conspiring against me, trying to drive me insane! Two men, a girl—" "For my money, Marilyn Monroe is the doll of the world. I just don't understand these guys who say she hasn't got class. She gets class by satirizing girls without any...." He was like anybody you might talk to on the street. I knew what he would say if I cued him with "baseball" or "Russia" instead of the key words I had used. I should have known better, but I wanted to touch him in some way, make him know I was alive. I grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders, and there was a whoosh and as I might have expected he collapsed like the insubstantiality he was. There was a stick figure of a man left before me, an economical skeleton supporting the shell of a human being and two-thirds of a two-trouser suit. Hide. I went into the first shop I came to—Milady's Personals. Appropriately, it was a false front. A neutral-colored gray surface, too smooth for concrete, stretched away into some shadows. The area was littered with trash. Cartons, bottles, what looked like the skin of a dehydrated human being—obviously, on second thought, only the discarded skin of one of the things like the one I had deflated. And a moldering pile of letters and papers. Something caught my eye and I kicked through them. Yes, the letter I had written to my brother in Sioux Falls, unopened. And which he had answered. My work. The work I had done at the agency, important, creative work. There was my layout, the rough of the people with short, slim glasses, the parents, children, grandparents, the caption: Vodka is a Part of the American Tradition. All of it lying here to rot. Something made me look away from that terrible trash. Sergeant stood in the entrance of Milady's, something bright in his hand. Something happened. I had been wrong. The shining instrument had not been a hypodermic needle. "You're tough," Sergeant said as I eased back into focus. "You aren't, not without help," I told him in disgust. "Spunky, aren't you? I meant mental toughness. That's the one thing we can never judge. I think you could have taken the shock right from the start. Of course, you would still have needed the conditioning to integrate properly." "Conditioning? Conditioning?" It came out of me, vortexing up, outside of my piloting. "What have you done to my mind?" "We've been trying to get it to grow back up," Sergeant said reasonably. "Think of this. Fountain of Youth. Immortality. Rejuvenation. This is it. Never mind how it works. Most minds can't stand being young and knowing they will have to go through the same damned thing all over again. We use synapse-shift to switch your upper conscious memories to your id and super-ego, leaving room for new memories. You remember only those things out of the past you have to, to retain your identity." "Identity," I repeated. "I have no identity. My identity is a dream. I have two identities—one of them years beyond the other." Sergeant tilted his head and his eyes at me and slapped me across the face. "Don't go back on me now. We gave you the best we could. The Rejuvenation Service couldn't help it if you were too old for a beta . You shouldn't have waited until you were so old, so very old. We used the very oldest sets and mock-ups we had for betas , but you, you had to keep wandering onto alpha territory, while they were striking sets, even. Beta or not, we gave you good service. Don't slip now." I heard the voice and I heard another voice, and it said "What could you expect of a beta ?" and they were only some of the voices I was hearing, and I wondered what you could expect from a beta , and I didn't know, or think that I would ever know.

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Kick Me Not long ago, out of curiosity, I picked up some exercise videos by Billy Blanks, the king of Tae-Bo. What a flop. The sets were cheesy, the music was awful 1980s synth-pop, and despite their martial-arts pretensions, the routines felt more like aerobics in disguise than like kung fu. But after flailing away in my living room for a few nights, my interest was piqued, and I decided to find out more about the real thing. Which martial art teaches good self-defense tactics? Which one would give me a good aerobic workout? How daunting would it be to jump into a class as a complete beginner? And would I get pummeled by the other students? To find out, I tried a handful of karate, tae kwon do, aikido, jujitsu, and kung fu classes in the Seattle area. I scored each one in several areas: how intimidating the class would be to a novice; how much the exercises worked my muscles; how much of an I got; whether it would develop coordination and balance; how much physical contact with other people was involved; and, of course, its value in self-defense. All ratings are on a scale of one to five, with five being the hardest, most intimidating, or most valuable. To experts, this will look like a hopelessly biased and superficial inquiry. It is. But to beginners, it is one step toward figuring out which martial art might be right for you. Do you want a chance to kick the stuffing out of someone? Take tae kwon do. Do you want to improve your sense of balance? Take karate. Do you want to know what to do if someone tries to choke you? Take jujitsu. Just remember that if you're jumped by a mugger, the only thing Tae-Bo will be good for is making your attacker collapse into uncontrollable fits of laughter. Kung Fu Reputation: 1960s martial arts movies; Bruce Lee. Intimidation Factor: 4 In the all-levels group I observed at Seven Star Women's Kung Fu, there were a dozen or so women dressed completely in black. (Most classes I took were co-ed.) The school wouldn't let me take the class--I could only watch--but that was better than Temple Kung Fu, which made me sit for an interview before they'd even reveal any information on their classes. There seemed to be an active screening process to keep out those with only a casual interest. Strength Workout: 3 After meditating for a few minutes, students launched into traditional strengthening exercises (push-ups and sit-ups) and then broke into pairs, with one person kicking pads held by the other. It looked to be decent strength training. Their arms got a good workout from the push-ups and punching; abs, from the sit-ups; and the lower body, from the kicking. It was not extreme, and nobody seemed exhausted. Aerobic Workout: 2 After the strength work and partner work, the class broke into a few groups (according to skill level) and repeated choreographed routines called "kata ," which involve a series of punches, kicks, and blocks with an imaginary foe. The class had broken into a light sweat, but was not gasping for air. Coordination and Balance: 4 The rounded slinky movements of the dancelike kata looked specifically designed to develop grace, coordination, and balance. Degree of Contact: 1 Almost none. No direct body-to-body contact, but plenty of punching and kicking with pads. Self-Defense Value: 2 The moves were neat to look at, but they did not seem practical. And without sparring practice, it would be difficult to apply the drills in real life. Overall: Kicking, punching, and an aura of mystery. Tae Kwon Do Reputation: World's most popular martial art, new Olympic sport; lots of kicking; the martial art of the 1990s. Intimidation Factor: 1 I was instantly welcomed into the beginners class at Lee's Martial Arts. People called each other by their first name; there was laughing, joking, and none of the aloofness or self-importance of the kung fu class. Strength Workout: 3 This rating is a little misleading. The lower-body strength workout was fantastic--my legs and hips were sore for days--but there was almost no strength training for the upper body. We used our arms only for balance and blocking kicks. Aerobic Workout: 5 We began with everyone standing in lines and kicking into the air. Then we did a long series of running drills up and down the mats. Then there was more kicking: Turning kicks, straight kicks, low kicks, kicks with punching bags, kicks with partners … the list goes on. It was an excellent workout. Coordination and Balance: 4 Learning how to make contact with the pad (and not, say, the face of the person holding it) was important. Balance was crucial in the sparring. Degree of Contact: 4 At the end of class came a session of sparring (which I, alas, was not allowed to participate in). The students strapped on protective chest pads and helmets and began kicking the stuffing out of each other. Self-Defense Value: 4 Tae kwon do emphasizes sparring and gets students accustomed to dealing with an assault. Overall: More a sport than an art; will make short work of flabby legs. Karate Reputation: Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid ; the martial art of the 1980s. Intimidation Factor: 1 When I watched a class at the Feminist Karate Union, I asked some of the students how their class was different from the Seven Star Women's Kung Fu class, which is held in the same building. One woman immediately said, "Oh, kung fu? That's what the mean people downstairs do." This class was approachable and open. And karate's so familiar that you feel like you already know how to do it. Strength Workout: 2 We started with sit-ups and push-ups, which were the most demanding parts of the class. The kicking and punching made for decent exercise, but I wasn't aching the next day. Aerobic Workout: 3 The drills (lots of punches, blocking, and kicking) provided some aerobic workout, but were not particularly intense. Coordination and Balance: 4 Keeping yourself centered while kicking and punching develops your balance. Degree of Contact: 2 There was some contact in the paired kicking drills with a partner and pads, but most of the physical contact came during the sparring. Yet this was nothing like the tae kwon do sparring: They weren't clocking each other, just repeating the motions of punching and blocking over and over again. Self-Defense Value: 2 This was entirely focused on form; no full-force contact between students. Overall: Kicks and punches galore, with a dash of moral and spiritual teaching about self-discipline and obedience. Aikido Reputation: A greasy-haired Steven Seagal incapacitating the enemy in Under Siege . Intimidation Factor: 1 Despite its reputation, aikido is decidedly nonaggressive--it's about deflecting punches and immobilizing your attacker--and there was a mellow, pleasantly upbeat atmosphere to the class. Strength Workout: 3 No sit-ups or push-ups, but pulling and yanking on other people looked like it would build muscle, and the rolls worked on your abs. Aerobic Workout: 2 There was little aerobic work, save for the rolling on the mats (which may explain Seagal's ever-increasing flabbiness). Coordination and Balance: 5 The goal is to destabilize and control the other guy, so maintaining your balance--and learning to topple your opponent--is crucial. Degree of Contact: 4 To complete the partner exercises, you had to grab your partner, spin him this way and that, and generally come in very close contact. Self-Defense Value: 5 Learning how to neutralize a threat was the main goal of the class. Overall: You don't get to land any punches and it's noncompetitive, but you'll learn how to knock people over. Tai Chi Reputation: What those slow-moving people in the park are doing; martial arts for seniors. Intimidation Factor: 1 I found its New Age connections slightly off-putting, but it looks so easy to do that it wasn't daunting. Strength Workout: 2 While my heart didn't get pumping, the slow, controlled movements did give my arms, legs, back, and stomach a good resistance workout. You may just be working against gravity, but holding your arms up in the air for several minutes will give you a new appreciation for those slow-moving people in the park. Aerobic Workout: 0 Tai chi involves moving your body slowly in circular patterns, shifting weight from foot to foot, and lifting your arms in rounded gestures, all at a pace slower than you ever thought possible. The motions had names like "parting the wild horse's mane" and "repulsing the monkey." I did not break a sweat, but I was bored to tears. Coordination and Balance: 4 Balance and control of your body position are the heart of this art. Degree of Contact: 0 Self-Defense Value: 0 I learned how to repulse a monkey, not a person. Overall: A yawner, slightly embarrassing to perform, but I'm sure if done correctly it brings high-quality inner peace. Brazilian Jujitsu Reputation: For hurting people. Intimidation Factor: 5 Although the listing in the phone book advertised the "Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Academy," the sign on the door said "Northwest Fight Club." Inside the club, huge holes had been punched in the walls--some back-size, some fist-size. Huge letters painted on the wall said "TRAIN & FIGHT HARD." The instructor, a handsome young Brazilian man, had a long scar curling out from the left side of his mouth and a fresh-looking purple one by his left eye. When I asked to try the class, he shrugged and lent me a gi (the white outfit most martial artists wear), on the back of which was a drawing of massive snarling pit bull and the slogan "PIT PULLING PURE POWER." I wondered if I was going to need an ambulance to take me home. Strength Workout: 5 The next day every inch of my body was sore--my stomach, arms, legs, feet, and neck. For Olympians only. Aerobic Workout: 5 This ranks as one of the hardest and most complete workouts I've ever had. After some stretching, we launched directly into hundreds of lightning-fast sit-ups, crunches, push-ups, leg lifts, and scissor kicks. I was quickly panting and my face turned a deep fuchsia. We did forward and backward rolls, learned to escape from various holds, and executed the sort of belly-crawl that marines always seem to be doing in movies about basic training. After an hour and a half I felt close to death, but there was still another hour to go. Coordination and Balance: 2 Coordination is important, but since you're tussling on a mat most of the time, balance isn't. Degree of Contact: 5 After drills, the instructor paired me with Isabella for partner work. He demonstrated how to get Isabella into choke-holds and leg-locks, as well as how to escape from them. We practiced on each other. It was a little unnerving to be choking Isabella so soon after meeting her, but she didn't seem to mind. I learned how to go from sitting on top of her with a knee in her stomach to a position where her arm was between my legs and I could break it over my stomach. The end of the class was spent with full-on grappling. Getting your face mashed into someone's armpit was de rigueur . Self-Defense Value: 5 Jujitsu's few-holds-barred grappling is far more effective when push comes to shove (and worse) than standing arts such as karate. Overall: Lots of grappling, throwing, and choking. Pragmatic, not pretty. High badass quotient.

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20073

I, Antichrist? Early one shiny autumn morning, I got in my car and drove to Lynchburg, Va., in order to find out whether or not I am the Antichrist. You know: the Beast, the Worthless Shepherd, the Little Horn, the Abomination, the linchpin of the Diabolical Trinity. That Antichrist. I had my suspicions. Nowhere on my body could I find the mark of the Beast--666--but I do have a freckle that's shaped like Bermuda. And though I have never been seized by a desire to lead the armies of Satan in a final, bloody confrontation with the forces of God on the plain of Armageddon, I do suffer from aggravated dyspepsia, as well as chronic malaise, conditions that I'm sure afflict the Antichrist. The surest suspicion I had about my pivotal role in Christian eschatology grew from the fact that I am Jewish, male, and alive. These are the qualifications for the job of Antichrist as specified by Lynchburg's most famous preacher, Jerry Falwell, in a speech he made earlier this year. I was actually going to see the Rev. Falwell on a different matter, the future of Jerusalem, but I thought I might just slip this question--the one about me maybe being the Antichrist--into the stream of the interview. Falwell, I guessed, wouldn't be happy to discuss his views on the identity of the Antichrist--he had apologized for the remark but took quite a load of grief for it anyway. As it turned out, though, Falwell was eager to talk about the Antichrist. And, as it also turned out, he didn't really feel bad for saying what he said. In fact, he was more convinced than ever that the Antichrist is a Jew who walks among us. Let me pause for a moment to give three concise reasons why I'm so curious about the identity of the Antichrist: 1) I think I speak for all the approximately 4.5 million adult male Jews in the world when I say that we get a little antsy when Christians start looking at us like we're the devil. This is on account of Christian behavior over the past 2,000 years, by which I mean blood libels and pogroms and inquisitions, those sorts of things. 2) I've always been possessed by the delusional notion that I am to play a major role in world history, so why not a role in the End of Days? And I don't mean the Schwarzenegger movie. 3) Now that we stand on the lip of the millennium, much of the evangelical Christian world is in the grip of Armageddon fever, and, according to the evangelical interpretation of the books of Daniel and Revelation, the Antichrist will make his appearance before Christ makes his, and his is looking kinda imminent. The Antichrist, in this reading, will be a world leader who strikes a peace deal with Israel, only to betray the Jewish state and make war on it, until Jesus comes to the rescue. The thankful Jews, those who are still alive, will then become Christians and live happily ever after. These beliefs, held by tens of millions of Christians are, journalistically speaking, worthy of note. The day before my visit with the Rev. Falwell, I had just finished reading a novelistic treatment of these events, Assassins , which is subtitled Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist . Assassins is the sixth book in the "Left Behind" series, "left behind" referring to those unfortunate nonevangelical Christians who are not taken up to heaven in the Rapture--the opening act in God's end days plan--and are forced to contend with the Antichrist's evil reign on Earth. The "Left Behind" series, co-written by Tim LaHaye, the prominent right-wing screwball and husband of Beverly LaHaye, the even more prominent right-wing screwball, and Jerry B. Jenkins, who, his biography states, is the author of 130 books, which is a lot of books for one guy to write, is a phenomenon. Ten million copies of the series have sold already--hundreds in my local PriceClub alone. "Left Behind" is the Harry Potter of the Armageddon set. The notable thing for me about the "Left Behind" series--beside the fact that few in the secular media have noticed that millions of Americans are busy reading books warning about the imminence of one-world government, mass death, and the return of the Messiah, is that all the Jewish characters are Christian. LaHaye and Jenkins are both active participants in the absurd and feverish campaign by some evangelical Christians to redefine Judaism in a way that allows for belief in Jesus. Jews (and again, I feel comfortable speaking for all of us here) find this sort of Christian imperialism just a wee bit offensive. Just imagine if Jews began an official campaign calling Muhammad irrelevant to Islam--can you imagine the fatwas that would produce? But evangelical leaders, who are, in my experience, uniformly kind and generous in their personal relations, can also be terribly obnoxious in their relations with Jews. There is only one road to salvation for Jews, and that road runs through Jesus, LaHaye told me. To his credit, though, LaHaye doesn't believe that the Antichrist will be Jewish. He will be a European gentile, who will kill lots of Jews. "The Jews will be forced to accept the idolatry of the Antichrist or be beheaded," he said. This will take place during the seven-year Tribulation. Jewish suffering, though, is divinely ordained. Even though the Antichrist will not be Jewish, Jews are still capable of great evil and have often been punished for their evil, LaHaye explained. "Some of the greatest evil in the history of the world was concocted in the Jewish mind," LaHaye told me, for reasons that aren't entirely clear--he knew what the name "Goldberg" generally signifies. "Sigmund Freud, Marx, these were Jewish minds that were infected with atheism." I asked LaHaye to tell me more about the Jewish mind. "The Jewish brain also has the capacity for great good," he explained. "God gave the Jews great intelligence. He didn't give them great size or physical power--you don't see too many Jews in the NFL--but he gave them great minds." Of all the evangelical leaders I have interviewed, LaHaye is capable of some of the most anti-Semitic utterances, which is troublesome, because he is also the most popular author in the evangelical world. The Rev. Falwell is smoother than LaHaye. He acknowledges "where the sensitivity comes from," though he shows no understanding of the role the myth of the Antichrist played in the history of anti-Semitism, and he refuses to back away from his opinion that somewhere in Great Neck or West L.A. or Shaker Heights is living Satan's agent. "In my opinion," he told me, "the Antichrist will be a counterfeit of the true Christ, which means that he will be male and Jewish, since Jesus was male and Jewish." I asked him if he understood that such statements strip Jews of their humanity, which is the first step anti-Semites take before they kill them. He responded, "All the Jewish people we do business with on a daily basis, not one has ever got upset over this." It is not Jews who picked this most recent fight, he said, it is supporters of President Clinton. "Billy Graham made the same statement a dozen times last year, but there was no comment about that," Falwell said. "But Billy Graham was not calling for the resignation of the president." Falwell, you'll recall, is no fan of Clinton's; he has even peddled a video accusing the president of murder. Falwell is right: Evangelical preachers are constantly accusing the Jews of harboring the Antichrist. I asked Falwell if he knew the actual identity of the Antichrist. No, he said. "People might say, it's a certain person, it's Henry Kissinger, like that, but the Lord does not let us know that." So there's a chance, then, that I'm the Antichrist? Falwell chuckled a condescending chuckle. "It's almost amusing, that question. Of course not. I know that you're not." Why? "The Antichrist will be a world leader, he'll have supernatural powers," he said. He got me there--I have no supernatural powers. I can't even drive a stick shift. I pressed him further on the identity of the Antichrist, but Falwell wouldn't play. "We'll know the Antichrist when he arrives," he said. Most evangelical leaders, in fact, refuse to publicly guess the name of the Antichrist--though, as Falwell suggests, Kissinger is a perennial favorite, at least among those evangelicals who believe the Antichrist will be Jewish. For most of their history, Christian leaders had been content to ascribe the characteristics of the Antichrist to the Jewish people as a whole. "Ever since the 2 nd century CE, the very beginning of the Antichrist legend, Christians have associated Jews with everything unholy," Andrew Gow, who teaches Christian history at the University of Alberta, told me. In the minds of early Christian leaders, the church was the new Israel; God's covenant with the Jews was obsolete. Therefore, the Jews who remained on Earth were there to serve devilish purposes, Gow explained. There are plenty of evangelical thinkers who differ with Falwell, who believe, like LaHaye, that the Antichrist will be a gentile who rises out of Europe. "The Antichrist is supposed to make a peace treaty with Israel," Ed Hindson, the author of Is the Antichrist Alive and Well? , explained. "Why would a Jew make a peace treaty with a Jewish state?" Hindson suggested that Satan will make the Antichrist the leader of the European Union--the revived Roman Empire, eternal enemy of Israel--though Hindson disputed one popular idea advocated by Monte Judah, an Oklahoma-based prophecy-teacher, that Prince Charles is the Antichrist. "There's no way Prince Charles is the Antichrist," Hindson said. "Satan can do better than that." In his book, Hindson runs through a list of potential candidates. Bill Clinton is there, of course, as well as Saddam Hussein and Ronald Wilson Reagan (six letters in each of his three names. Get it?). Of course, none of these men are gay. "It says in the Bible that the Antichrist will have 'no regard for women,' and so many evangelicals interpret that to mean that he will be a homosexual," Hindson said, though he added that he's not entirely convinced. This idea--the Antichrist as gay--strikes a chord with many evangelicals, just as the idea that the Antichrist is Jewish strikes a chord. I gradually came to see how far-fetched it was to think that I might be the Antichrist. I'm not gay, I'm not famous, I wouldn't know a euro if I found one in my wallet. Then it struck me: Barry Diller is the Antichrist. There's no way to know for sure. But if you wake up one morning to read that Barry Diller is the head of the European Union (and that David Geffen is his deputy), well, remember where you read it first.

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51295

The Man Who Was Six By F. L. WALLACE Illustrated by ASHMAN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There is nothing at all like having a sound mind in a sound body, but Dan Merrol had too much of one—and also too much of the other! "Sorry, darling," said Erica. She yawned, added, "I've tried—but I just can't believe you're my husband." He felt his own yawn slip off his face. "What do you mean? What am I doing here then?" "Can't you remember?" Her laughter tinkled as she pushed him away and sat up. "They said you were Dan Merrol at the hospital, but they must have been wrong." "Hospitals don't make that kind of mistake," he said with a certainty he didn't altogether feel. "But I should know, shouldn't I?" "Of course, but...." He did some verbal backstepping. "It was a bad accident. You've got to expect that I won't be quite the same at first." He sat up. " Look at me. Can't you tell who I am?" She returned his gaze, then swayed toward him. He decided that she was highly attractive—but surely he ought to have known that long ago. With a visible effort she leaned away from him. "Your left eye does look familiar," she said cautiously. "The brown one, I mean." "The brown one?" "Your other eye's green," she told him. "Of course—a replacement. I told you it was a serious accident. They had to use whatever was handy." "I suppose so—but shouldn't they have tried to stick to the original color scheme?" "It's a little thing," he said. "I'm lucky to be alive." He took her hand. "I believe I can convince you I'm me ." "I wish you could." Her voice was low and sad and he couldn't guess why. "My name is Dan Merrol." "They told you that at the hospital." They hadn't—he'd read it on the chart. But he had been alone in the room and the name had to be his, and anyway he felt like Dan Merrol. "Your name is Erica." "They told you that too." She was wrong again, but it was probably wiser not to tell her how he knew. No one had said anything to him in the hospital. He hadn't given them a chance. He had awakened in a room and hadn't wanted to be alone. He'd got up and read the chart and searched dizzily through the closet. Clothes were hanging there and he'd put them on and muttered her name to himself. He'd sat down to gain strength and after a while he'd walked out and no one had stopped him. It was night when he left the hospital and the next thing he remembered was her face as he looked through the door. Her name hadn't been on the chart nor her address and yet he had found her. That proved something, didn't it? "How could I forget you?" he demanded. "You may have known someone else with that name. When were we married?" Maybe he should have stayed in the hospital. It would have been easier to convince her there. But he'd been frantic to get home. "It was quite a smashup," he said. "You'll have to expect some lapses." "I'm making allowances. But can't you tell me something about myself?" He thought—and couldn't. He wasn't doing so well. "Another lapse," he said gloomily and then brightened. "But I can tell you lots about myself. For instance, I'm a specialist in lepidoptera." "What's that?" "At the moment, who knows? Anyway, I'm a well-known actor and a musician and a first-rate mathematician. I can't remember any equations offhand except C equals pi R squared. It has to do with the velocity of light. And the rest of the stuff will come back in time." It was easier now that he'd started and he went on rapidly. "I'm thirty-three and after making a lot of money wrestling, married six girls, not necessarily in this order—Lucille, Louise, Carolyn, Katherine, Shirley and Miriam." That was quite a few marriages—maybe it was thoughtless of him to have mentioned them. No woman approves her predecessors. "That's six. Where do I come in?" "Erica. You're the seventh and best." It was just too many, now that he thought of it, and it didn't seem right. She sighed and drew away. "That was a lucky guess on your age." Did that mean he wasn't right on anything else? From the expression on her face, it did. "You've got to expect me to be confused in the beginning. Can't you really tell who I am?" "I can't ! You don't have the same personality at all." She glanced at her arm. There was a bruise on it. "Did I do that?" he asked. "You did, though I'm sure you didn't mean to. I don't think you realized how strong you were. Dan was always too gentle—he must have been afraid of me. And you weren't at all." "Maybe I was impetuous," he said. "But it was such a long time." "Almost three months. But most of that time you were floating in gelatin in the regrowth tank, unconscious until yesterday." She leaned forward and caressed his cheek. "Everything seems wrong, no matter how hard I try to believe otherwise. You don't have the same personality—you can't remember anything." "And I have one brown eye and one green." "It's not just that, darling. Go over to the mirror." He had been seriously injured and he was still weak from the shock. He got up and walked unsteadily to the mirror. "Now what?" "Stand beside it. Do you see the line?" Erica pointed to the glass. He did—it was a mark level with his chin. "What does it mean?" "That should be the top of Dan Merrol's head," she said softly. He was a good six inches taller than he ought to be. But there must be some explanation for the added height. He glanced down at his legs. They were the same length from hip bone to the soles of his feet, but the proportions differed from one side to the other. His knees didn't match. Be-dum, be-dum, be-dumdum, but your knees don't match —the snatch of an ancient song floated through his head. Quickly, he scanned himself. It was the same elsewhere. The upper right arm was massive, too big for the shoulder it merged with. And the forearm, while long, was slender. He blinked and looked again. While they were patching him up, did they really think he needed black, red and brown hair? He wondered how a beagle felt. What were they, a bunch of humorists? Did they, for comic effect, piece together a body out of bits and scraps left over from a chopping block? It was himself he was looking at, otherwise he'd say the results were neither hideous nor horrible, but merely—well, what? Ludicrous and laughable—and there were complications in that too. Who wants to be an involuntary clown, a physical buffoon that Mother Nature hadn't duplicated since Man began? He felt the stubble on his face with his left hand—he thought it was his left hand—at least it was on that side. The emerging whiskers didn't feel like anything he remembered. Wait a minute—was it his memory? He leaned against the wall and nearly fell down. The length of that arm was unexpectedly different. He hobbled over to a chair and sat down, staring miserably at Erica as she began dressing. There was quite a contrast between the loveliness of her body and the circus comedy of his own. "Difficult, isn't it?" she said, tugging her bra together and closing the last snap, which took considerable effort. She was a small girl generally, though not around the chest. It was difficult and in addition to his physique there were the memories he couldn't account for. Come to think of it, he must have been awfully busy to have so many careers in such a short time— and all those wives too. Erica came close and leaned comfortingly against him, but he wasn't comforted. "I waited till I was sure. I didn't want to upset you." He wasn't as sure as she seemed to be now. Somehow, maybe he was still Dan Merrol—but he wasn't going to insist on it—not after looking at himself. Not after trying to sort out those damned memories. She was too kind, pretending to be a little attracted to him, to the scrambled face, to the mismatched lumps and limbs and shapes that, stretching the term, currently formed his body. It was clear what he had to do. The jacket he had worn last night didn't fit. Erica cut off the sleeve that hung far over his fingertips on one side and basted it to the sleeve that ended well above his wrist, on the other. The shoulders were narrow, but the material would stretch and after shrugging around in it, he managed to expand it so it was not too tight. The trousers were also a problem—six inches short with no material to add on, but here again Erica proved equal to the task and, using the cuffs, contrived to lengthen them. Shoes were another difficulty. For one foot the size was not bad, but he could almost step out of the other shoe. When she wasn't looking, he wadded up a spare sock and stuffed it in the toe. He looked critically at himself in the mirror. Dressed, his total effect was better than he had dared hope it would be. True, he did look different . Erica gazed at him with melancholy affection. "I can't understand why they let you out wearing those clothes—or for that matter, why they let you out at all." He must have given some explanation as he'd stumbled through the door. What was it? "When I brought the clothes yesterday, they told me I couldn't see you for a day or so," she mused aloud. "It was the first time you'd been out of the regrowth tank—where no one could see you—and they didn't know the clothes wouldn't fit. You were covered with a sheet, sleeping, I think. They let me peek in and I could make out a corner of your face." It was the clothes, plus the brief glimpse of his face, which had made her think she recognized him when he came in. "They told me you'd have to have psychotherapy and I'd have to have orientation before I could see you. That's why I was so surprised when you rang the bell." His head was churning with ideas, trying to sort them out. Part of last night was dim, part sharp and satisfying. "What's Wysocki's theorem?" she asked. " Whose theorem?" "Wysocki's. I started to call the hospital and you wouldn't let me, because of the theorem. You said you'd explain it this morning." She glanced at the bruise on her arm. It was then he'd grabbed her, to keep her from talking to the hospital. He'd been unnecessarily rough, but that could be ascribed to lack of coordination. She could have been terrified, might have resisted—but she hadn't. At that time, she must have half-believed he was Dan Merrol, still dangerously near the edges of post-regrowth shock. She was looking at him, waiting for that explanation. He shook his mind frantically and the words came out. "Self-therapy," he said briskly. "The patient alone understands what he needs." She started to interrupt, but he shook his head and went on blithely. "That's the first corollary of the theorem. The second is that there are critical times in the recovery of the patient. At such times, with the least possible supervision, he should be encouraged to make his own decisions and carry them through by himself, even though running a slight risk of physical complications." "That's new, isn't it?" she said. "I always thought they watched the patient carefully." It ought to be new—he'd just invented it. "You know how rapidly medical practices change," he said quickly. "Anyway, when they examined me last night, I was much stronger than they expected—so, when I wanted to come home, they let me. It's their latest belief that initiative is more important than perfect health." "Strange," she muttered. "But you are very strong." She looked at him and blushed. "Initiative, certainly you have. Dan could use some, wherever he is." Dan again, whether it was himself or another person. For a brief time, as she listened to him, he'd had the silly idea that.... But it could never happen to him. He'd better leave now while she was distracted and bewildered and believed what he was saying. "I've got to go. I'm due back," he told her. "Not before you eat," she said. "Any man who's spent the night with me is hungry in the morning." It was a domestic miracle that amidst all the pressing and fitting, she'd somehow prepared breakfast and he hadn't noticed. It was a simple chore with the automatics, but to him it seemed a proof of her wifely skill. He wanted to protest, but didn't. Maybe it was the hand she was holding—it seemed to be equipped with a better set of nerves than its predecessor. It tingled at her touch. Sadly, he sat down and looked at his food. Eat? Did he want to eat? Oddly enough, he did. "How much do you remember of the accident?" She shoved aside her own food and sat watching him. Not a thing, now that she asked. In fact, there wasn't much he did remember. There had been the chart at his bed-side, with one word scrawled on it— accident —and that was where he'd got the idea. There had been other marks too, but he hadn't been able to decipher them. He nodded and said nothing and she took it as he thought she would. "It wasn't anybody's fault. The warning devices which were supposed to work didn't," she began. "A Moon ship collided with a Mars liner in the upper atmosphere. The ships broke up in several parts and since they are compartmented and the delay rockets switched on immediately, the separate parts fell rather gently, considering how high they were. Casualties weren't as great as you might think. "Parts of the two ships fell together, the rest were scattered. There was some interchange of passengers in the wreckage, but since you were found in the control compartment of the Mars liner, they assumed you were the pilot. They never let me see you until yesterday and then it was just a glimpse. I took their word when they said you were Dan Merrol." At least he knew who or what Dan Merrol was—the pilot of the Mars liner. They had assumed he was the pilot because of where he was found, but he might have been tossed there—impact did strange things. Dan Merrol was a spaceship pilot and he hadn't included it among his skills. It was strange that she had believed him at all. But now that it was out in the open, he did remember some facts about spaceships. He felt he could manage a takeoff at this instant. But why hadn't he told her? Shock? Perhaps—but where had those other identities come from—lepidopterist, musician, actor, mathematician and wrestler? And where had he got memories of wives, slender and passionate, petite and wild, casual and complaisant, nagging and insecure? Erica he didn't remember at all, save from last night, and what was that due to? "What are you going to do?" he asked, deliberately toying with the last bite of breakfast. It gave him time to think. "They said they'd identified everyone, living or dead, and I supposed they had. After seeing you, I can believe they made any number of similar mistakes. Dan Merrol may be alive under another name. It will be hard to do, but I must try to find him. Some of the accident victims went to other hospitals, you know, the ones located nearest where they fell." Even if he was sure, he didn't know whether he could tell her—and he wasn't sure any longer, although he had been. On the physical side of marriage, how could he ask her to share a body she'd have to laugh at? Later, he might tell her, if there was to be a 'later.' He pushed back his chair and looked at her uncertainly. "Let me call a 'copter," she said. "I hate to see you go." "Wysocki's theorem," he told her. "The patient has decided to walk." He weaved toward the door and twisted the knob. He turned in time to catch her in his arms. "I know this is wrong," she said, pressing against him. It might be wrong, but it was very pleasant, though he did guess her motives. She was a warmhearted girl and couldn't help pitying him. "Don't be so damned considerate," he mumbled. "You'll have to put me down," she said, averting her eyes. "Otherwise.... You're an intolerable funny man." He knew it—he could see himself in the mirror. He was something to laugh at when anyone got tired of pretending sympathy. He put her down and stumbled out. He thought he could hear the bed creak as she threw herself on it. II Once he got started, walking wasn't hard. His left side swung at a different rate from his right, but that was due to the variation in the length of his thighs and lower legs, and the two rhythms could be reconciled. He swept along, gaining control of his muscles. He became aware that he was whizzing past everyone. He slowed down—he didn't want to attract attention. It was difficult but he learned to walk at a pedestrian pace. However poorly they'd matched his legs, they'd given him good ones. Last night, on an impulse, he'd left the hospital and now he had to go back. Had to? Of course. There were too many uncertainties still to be settled. He glanced around. It was still very early in the morning and normal traffic was just beginning. Maybe they hadn't missed him yet, though it was unlikely. He seemed to know the route well enough and covered the distance in a brief time. He turned in at the building and, scanning the directory, went at once to the proper floor and stopped at the desk. The receptionist was busy with the drawer of the desk. "Can I help you?" she asked, continuing to peer down. "The director—Doctor Crander. I don't have an appointment." "Then the director can't see you." The girl looked up and her firmly polite expression became a grimace of barely suppressed laughter. Then laughter was swept away. What replaced it he couldn't say, but it didn't seem related to humor. She placed her hand near his but it went astray and got tangled with his fingers. "I just thought of a joke," she murmured. "Please don't think that I consider you at all funny." The hell she didn't—and it was the second time within the hour a woman had used that word on him. He wished they'd stop. He took back his hand, the slender one, an exquisite thing that might once have belonged to a musician. Was there an instrument played with one hand? The other one was far larger and clumsier, more suited to mayhem than music. "When can I see the director?" She blinked at him. "A patient?" She didn't need to look twice to see that he had been one. "The director does occasionally see ex-patients." He watched her appreciatively as she went inside. The way she walked, you'd think she had a special audience. Presently the door opened and she came back, batting her eyes vigorously. "You can go in now," she said huskily. Strange, her voice had dropped an octave in less than a minute. "The old boy tried to pretend he was in the middle of a grave emergency." On his way in, he miscalculated, or she did, and he brushed against her. The touch was pleasant, but not thrilling. That reaction seemed reserved for Erica. "Glad to see you," said Doctor Crander, behind the desk. He was nervous and harassed for so early in the morning. "The receptionist didn't give me your name. For some reason she seems upset." She did at that, he thought—probably bewildered by his appearance. The hospital didn't seem to have a calming influence on either her or the doctor. "That's why I came here. I'm not sure who I am. I thought I was Dan Merrol." Doctor Crander tried to fight his way through the desk. Being a little wider and solider, though not by much, the desk won. He contented himself by wiping his forehead. "Our missing patient," he said, sighing with vast relief. "For a while I had visions of...." He then decided that visions were nothing a medical man should place much faith in. "Then I am Dan Merrol?" The doctor came cautiously around the desk this time. "Of course. I didn't expect that you'd come walking in my office—that's why I didn't recognize you immediately." He exhaled peevishly. "Where did you go? We've been searching for you everywhere." It seemed wiser to Dan not to tell him everything. "It was stuffy inside. I went out for a stroll before the nurse came in." Crander frowned, his nervousness rapidly disappearing. "Then it was about an hour ago. We didn't think you could walk at all so soon, or we would have kept someone on duty through the night." They had underestimated him, but he didn't mind. Of course, he didn't know how a patient from the regrowth tanks was supposed to act. The doctor took his pulse. "Seems fine," he said, surprised. "Sit down—please sit down." Without waiting for him to comply, Crander pushed him into a chair and began hauling out a variety of instruments with which he poked about his bewildered patient. Finally Crander seemed satisfied. "Excellent," he said. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were almost fully recovered. A week ago, we considered removing you from the regrowth tank. Our decision to leave you there an extra week has paid off very, very nicely." Merrol wasn't as pleased as the doctor appeared to be. "Granted you can identify me as the person who came out of regrowth—but does that mean I'm Dan Merrol? Could there be a mistake?" Crander eyed him clinically. "We don't ordinarily do this—but it is evident that with you peace of mind is more important than procedure. And you look well enough to stand the physical strain." He pressed the buzzer and an angular woman in her early forties answered. "Miss Jerrems, the Dan Merrol file." Miss Jerrems flashed a glance of open adoration at the doctor and before she could reel it in, her gaze swept past Dan, hesitated and returned to him. Her mouth opened and closed like that of a nervous goldfish and she darted from the room. They see me and flee as fast as they can caper , thought Merrol. It was not wholly true—Crander didn't seem much affected. But he was a doctor and used to it. Furthermore, he probably had room for only one emotion at the moment—relief at the return of his patient. Miss Jerrems came back, wheeling a large cart. Dan was surprised at the mass of records. Crander noticed his expression and smiled. "You're our prize case, Merrol. I've never heard of anyone else surviving such extensive surgery. Naturally, we have a step-by-step account of everything we did." He turned to the woman. "You may leave, Miss Jerrems." She went, but the adoration she had showed so openly for her employer seemed to have curdled in the last few moments. Crander dug into the files and rooted out photographs. "Here are pictures of the wreckage in which you were found—notice that you were strapped in your seat—as you were received into the hospital—at various stages in surgery and finally, some taken from the files of the company for which you worked." Merrol winced. The photographic sequence was incontrovertible. He had been a handsome fellow. "Here is other evidence you may not have heard of. It's a recent development, within the last ten years, in fact. It still isn't accepted by most courts—they're always lagging—but to medical men it's the last word." Merrol studied the patterns of waves and lines and splotches. "What is it?" "Mass-cell radiographs. One was loaned by your employer. The other was taken just after your last operation. Both were corrected according to standard methods. One cell won't do it, ten yield an uncertain identity—but as few as a hundred cells from any part of the original body, excepting the blood, constitute proof more positive than fingerprints before the surgical exchange of limbs. Don't ask me why—no one knows. But it is true that cells differ from one body to the next, and this test detects the difference." The mass-cell radiographs did seem identical and Dr. Crander seemed certain. Taken altogether, the evidence was overwhelming. There had been no mistake—he was Dan Merrol, though it was not difficult to understand why Erica couldn't believe he was her husband. "You did a fine job," he said. Recalling the picture of the wreckage, he knew they had. "But couldn't you have done just a little better?" Crander's eyebrows bounced up. "We're amazed at how well we have done. You can search case histories and find nothing comparable." His eyebrows dropped back into place. "Of course, if you have a specific complaint...." "Nothing specific. But look at this hand...." The doctor seized it. "Beautiful, isn't it?" "Perhaps—taken by itself." Dan rolled up his sleeve. "See how it joins the forearm." Crander waggled it gravely. "It coordinates perfectly. I've observed you have complete control over it. The doctor's eye, my boy. The doctor's diagnostic eye." The other just didn't understand. "But the size—it doesn't match my arm!" "Doesn't match ?" cried the doctor. "Do you have any idea of the biological ways in which it does match? True, it may not be esthetically harmonized, but here we delve into the mysteries of the human organism, and we can hardly be striving for Botticelli bodies and Michelangelo men. First, your hand moves freely at the joint, a triumph of surgical skill." He moved the hand experimentally, to show Merrol how it was done. He dropped the hand and hurried to a screen against the wall. Crander drew his finger across the surface and the mark remained. "You know about Rh positive and negative blood. Mixed, they can be lethal. This was discovered long ago, by someone I've forgotten. But there are other factors just as potent and far more complex." He scribbled meaningless symbols on the screen with his finger. "Take the bone factors—three. They must be matched in even such a slight contact as a joint ... this was done. Then there are the tissue factors—four. Tendon factors—two. Nerve-splice factors—three again. After that, we move into a complex field, hormone-utilization factors—seven at the latest count and more coming up with further research. "That's the beginning, but at the sensory organs we leave the simple stuff behind. Take the eye, for instance." Merrol leaned away because Dr. Crander seemed about to pluck one of Dan's eyes from its socket. "Surgical and growth factors involved in splicing a massive nerve bundle pass any layman's comprehension. There are no non-technical terms to describe it." It was just as well—Merrol didn't want a lecture. He extended his arms. One was of normal length, the other longer. "Do you think you can do something with this? I don't mind variation in thickness—some of that will smooth out as I exercise—but I'd like them the same length." "There were many others injured at the same time, you know—and you were one of the last to be extricated from the ship. Normally, when we have to replace a whole arm, we do so at the shoulder for obvious reasons. But the previously treated victims had depleted our supplies. Some needed only a hand and we gave them just that, others a hand and a forearm, and so on. When we got to you, we had to use leftovers or permit you to die—there wasn't time to send to other hospitals. In fact there wasn't any time at all—we actually thought you were dead, but soon found we were wrong." Crander stared at a crack in the ceiling. "Further recovery will take other operations and your nervous system isn't up to it." He shook his head. "Five years from now, we can help you, not before." Merrol turned away miserably. There were other things, but he had learned the essentials. He was Dan Merrol and there was nothing they could do for him until it was too late. How long could he expect Erica to wait? The doctor hadn't finished the medical session. "Replacement of body parts is easy, after all. The big trouble came when we went into the brain." "Brain?" Dan was startled. "How hard do you think your skull is?" Crander came closer. "Bend your head." Merrol obeyed and could feel the doctor's forefinger slice across his scalp in a mock operation. "This sector was crushed." Roughly half his brain, it appeared. "That's why so many memories were gone—not just from shock. In addition, other sectors were damaged and had to be replaced." Crander traced out five areas he could feel, but not see. "Samuel Kaufman, musician—Breed Mannly, cowboy actor—George Elkins, lepidopterist—Duke DeCaesares, wrestler—and Ben Eisenberg, mathematician, went into the places I tapped." Dan raised his head. Some things were clearer. The memories were authentic, but they weren't his—nor did the other wives belong to him. It was no wonder Erica had cringed at their names. "These donors were dead, but you can be thankful we had parts of their brains available." Crander delved into the file and came up with a sheet. "Here are some body part contributors." He read rapidly. "Dimwiddie, Barton, Colton, Morton, Flam and Carnera were responsible for arms and hands. Greenberg, Rochefault, Gonzalez, Tall-Cloud, Gowraddy and Tsin supplied feet and legs."

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Dark Side Lite Those poor souls who've been camping out in front of theaters for six weeks: Who can blame them for saying, "To hell with the critics, we know it will be great!"? The doors will open, and they'll race to grab the best seats and feel a surge of triumph as their butts sink down. We've made it: Yeeehaww!! They'll cheer when the familiar John Williams fanfare erupts and the title-- Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace --rises out of the screen and the backward-slanted opening "crawl" begins: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ..." Yaaahhhhhhh!!! Then, their hearts pounding, they'll settle back to read the rest of the titles: "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." Taxation of trade routes: Waaahoooo!!!! How long will they go with it? At what point will they realize that what they've heard is, alas, true, that the picture really is a stiff? Maybe they never will. Maybe they'll want to love The Phantom Menace so much--because they have so much emotional energy invested in loving it, and in buying the books, magazines, dolls, cards, clothes, soap, fast food, etc.--that the realization will never sink in. In successful hypnosis, the subject works to enter a state of heightened susceptibility, to surrender to a higher power. Maybe they'll conclude that common sense is the enemy of the Force and fight it to the death. Look, I wanted to love The Phantom Menace , too. I was an adolescent boy and would enjoy being one again for a couple of hours. But the movie has a way of deflating all but the most delusional of hopes. If someone had given Ed Wood $115 million to remake Plan Nine From Outer Space it might have looked like this, although Wood's dialogue would surely have been more memorable. The first thing that will strike you is that George Lucas, who wrote and directed the movie, has forgotten how to write and direct a movie. Having spent the two decades since the original Star Wars (1977) concocting skeletons of screenplays that other people flesh out, and overseeing productions that other people storyboard and stage, he has come to lack what one might Michelangelistically term "the spark of life." If the first Star Wars was a box of Cracker Jacks that was all prizes, The Phantom Menace is a box of Cracker Jacks that's all diagrams of prizes. It's there on paper, but it's waiting to be filled in and jazzed up. Advance word has been cruel to the actors, but advance word has it only half right. Yes, they're terrible, but Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Natalie Portman are not terrible actors, they've just been given scenes that no human could be expected to play. As a sage Jedi Master called Qui-Gon Jinn, Neeson must maintain a Zen-like detachment from the universe around him--probably not a challenge when that universe will be added in later by computers. "I don't sense anything," he tells his uneasy young apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi (McGregor), as the two sit waiting to conduct trade negotiations with a bunch of gray, fish-faced Federation officers who talk like extras in a samurai movie. McGregor furrows his brow. "There's something ... elusive," he says, working to enunciate like a young Alec Guinness but succeeding only in nullifying his natural Scots charm. "Master," he adds, "you said I should be mindful of the future." Neeson thinks a bit. "I do sense an unusual amount of fear for something as trivial as this trade dispute." A hologram of Darth Sidious, Dark Lord of the "Sith," commands the Federation to sic its battle droids on the Jedi ambassadors before they can apprise Queen Amidala (Portman) of the imminent invasion of the peaceful planet of Naboo. In come the battle droids and out come the light sabers, which still hum like faulty fluorescents. Clack, clack, clack. Lucas can't edit fight scenes so that they're fluid--he cuts on the clack. You get the gist, though. The Jedi make their getaway, but with gas and tolls and droid destroyers, it takes them over an hour to land on Naboo, by which time the queen and the Galactic Senate have already got the grim message. For one thing, communications have been disrupted: "A communications disruption can mean only one thing," says someone. "Invasion." Queen Amidala, done up like a white-faced Chinese empress in hanging beads and glass balls and a hat with curly horns, speaks in tones from which emotion has been expunged, perhaps on the theory that subjects won't argue with a ruler who puts them to sleep: "I ... will ... not ... condone ... a ... course ... of ... action ... that ... will ... lead ... us ... to ... war," she drones. Meanwhile, the Jedi whiz through the underwater core of a planet in a man-of-warlike submersible pursued by 3-D dragony beasties and a giant catfish with extra movable parts. Potentially thrilling stuff, but Neeson and McGregor remain peculiarly unruffled. "The Force will guide us," says Neeson blandly, and the director seems to share his lack of urgency. There's Zen detachment and there's Quaalude detachment, and The Phantom Menace falls into the second camp: It really does take place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. When R2-D2 showed up, I thought: At last, a character with the potential for intimacy! Say this for Lucas, he doesn't whip up a lot of bogus energy, the way the makers of such blockbusters as The Mummy (1999) and Armageddon (1998) do. It's as if he conceived The Phantom Menace as a Japanese No pageant and has purposely deadened his actors, directing them to stand stiffly in the dead center of the screen against matte paintings of space or some futuristic metropolis and deliver lines alternately formal or bemusing. ("This is an odd move for the Trade Federation.") Lucas considers himself an "independent" filmmaker and an artist of integrity. Had he not been such a pretentious overlord, a platoon of screenwriters would doubtless have been engaged to rewrite him and make the movie halfway human. A buddy specialist would have punched up the Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi badinage, and a black dialogue specialist would have given the comic-relief character, Jar Jar Binks, a man-size dinosaur with pop eyes and a vaguely West Indian patois, something fresher than "Ex-squeeze me!" and a lot of Butterfly McQueen-style simpering and running away from battles. Those of us who complain about the assembly-line production of "blockbuster" scripts need an occasional reminder that assembly lines can do much to make empty thrill machines more lively. The Phantom Menace didn't need to be barren of feeling, but it took a real writer, Lawrence Kasdan ( The Big Chill , 1983), to draft the best and most inspiring of the Star Wars movies, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and a real director, Irvin Kershner, to breathe Wagnerian grandeur into Lucas' cartoonish fantasies. Having lived with the saga for so many years, the audience was prepared to set aside some of its narrative expectations here to plumb the origins of Lucas' universe. In The Phantom Menace , however, the Jedi already exist and the Force is taken for granted--we're still in the middle of the damn story. The only dramatic interest comes from a young Tatooine slave named Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), whom we know will grow up to father Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and then surrender to the dark side of the Force and become Darth Vader. But that transformation won't happen until the third episode; meanwhile, Anakin is a conventionally industrious juvenile with a penchant for building droids from scratch and "pod racing"--an activity that he demonstrates in one of the movie's most impressive but irrelevant special effects set pieces, a whiplash hyperdrive permutation of the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959). Later in the film, when Anakin goes before something called the Jedi Council and meets Yoda and Samuel L. Jackson (together again!), Lucas dramatizes the interrogation so ineptly that you either have to take Yoda's word that there's something wrong with the boy ("Clouded this boy's future is") or to conclude that Yoda, like us, is moving backward through time and has already seen Episodes 4 through 6. Anakin, he says smugly, has fear in him, and fear leads to anger and anger to the dark side--which would mean, as I interpret it, that only people without fear (i.e., people who don't exist) are suitable candidates for Jedi knighthood (perhaps Yoda will enlarge his definition of fear in subsequent episodes). There's also some quasireligious, quasiscientific blather to the effect that the boy was conceived without a father by "metachorians"--symbiont, microscopic life forms that will speak to you if you "quiet your mind." In other words, the Force. So, it's not nebulous, after all! It can be measured. It can be quantified. It can even, perhaps, be merchandised. Yes, the effects are first-rate, occasionally breathtaking. But the floating platforms in the Galactic Senate do little to distract you from parliamentary machinations that play like an especially dull day on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . The final military engagement, in which long-headed attack droids are rolled onto the field as the spokes of a giant wheel, would be awesome if Lucas didn't routinely cut away from the battle just when he seems on the verge of actually thrilling you. The chief villain, bombastically named Darth Maul, is a horned, red, Kabuki-style snake demon with orange pingpong-ball eyes who challenges the Jedi to a couple of clackety light-saber battles. His appearances are underscored by demonic chants; he might as well wear a neon beanie that flashes "Bad Guy." Like all revisionist historians, Lucas cheats like mad. If Darth Vader had built C-3PO as a young man, how come he never paid much attention to him in the other movies--and vice versa? As Yoda himself puts it, in another context, "See through you we can." Still, it's worth reprinting a blistering e-mail sent to my wife by a relative, after she'd let him know that I hated The Phantom Menace : Surprise, Surprise. Star Wars was never reviewed well by critics. Sometimes a basic story that rests on great special effects and stupid dialogue can be very entertaining--it's called a cult movie, and no critic can have an effect on the obvious outcome that this is going to be the highest grossing movie ever. I myself stood in line for five hours and already have tickets to see it three times, and I know I'll enjoy it. Why? Because it plays on my childhood imagination. And I'm sure it's not as bad as Return of the Jedi , which was the weakest one--but I still liked it and saw it a dozen times. I get tired of being told I'm not going to like it because it doesn't adhere to certain basic critic criteria. I say bpthhhh (sticking my tongue out to review)--don't be sending me anything dissing my movie:):):) I'll be curious to know whether he sees The Phantom Menace a dozen times, or even the three for which he has paid. (I could imagine seeing it three times only if they sold adrenaline shots at the concession stand.) Or maybe he'll come out of the movie and say: "No, you didn't get it, Mr. Snot-Nosed-Criteria Critic Person. It's not supposed to be exciting. It's laying the foundation for the next chapter, when Anakin and Obi-Wan defeat the Mandalorian warriors in the Clone Wars and Anakin marries Queen Amidala. And listen, I'm getting in line even earlier for tickets to Episode 2 . The Force is with me, butt-head."

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Defining Decay Down If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the "intra-oral camera." As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. "You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth," says one recent victim of the camera. "You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth." The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island. Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. "People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you," says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does. The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. "We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look," says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. "You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves," says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist. People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are "very satisfied" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. "It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job," says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual . To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. "My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' " says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem "weak." Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a "preventive measure." (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price. Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or "halitosis," as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a "halimeter," a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. "Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years," says Hartel. Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to "trade up" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as "how to move your patients to 'yes.' " The industry calls this technique "treatment acceptance," a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day "Treatment Acceptance" seminar "for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care." This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass. It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life. Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is "an excellent form of birth control," as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works. "If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure," says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist. Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago. When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. "Dentists are aware of providing what patients want," says Hartel. "I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it." Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.

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THE COOL WAR by ANDREW FETLER Illustrated by NODEL [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Here's what happens when two Master Spies tangle ... and stay that way! "Nothing, nothing to get upset about," Pashkov said soothingly, taking his friend's arm as they came out of the villa forty miles from Moscow. Pashkov looked like a roly-poly zoo attendant leading a tame bear. "Erase his memory, give him a new name and feed him more patriotism. Very simple." Medvedev raised his hand threateningly. "Don't come howling to me if everybody guesses he is nothing but a robot." Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of Dentist Amigovitch , this house had become known all over the world as Boris Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the clicking of a typewriter. "It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them," he said, climbing into his flier. "Petchareff will send you word when to announce his 'death'." "A question, brother." "No questions." "Who smuggled the manuscript out of Russia?" Pashkov frowned convincingly. "Comrade Petchareff has suspected even me." He took off for Moscow, poking his flier up through the clouds and flying close to them, as was his habit. Then he switched on the radio and got Petchareff's secretary. "Nadezhda?" "I know what you're up to, Seven One Three," Nadezhda Brunhildova said. "Don't try to fool me , you confidence man. You are coming in?" "In ten minutes. What have I done now?" "You were supposed to make funeral arrangements for Knackenpast, so what are you doing in Stockholm?" "Stockholm?" "You're lying and I'll kill you. Don't you think I know about Anastina, that she-nurse in the Stockholm National Hospital?" "Darling, why so cruel? Anastina is one of our contacts. Besides, she's cross-eyed and buck-toothed." "Beast!" She switched him to Petchareff. "What's been keeping you, Pashkov?" "Consoling Medvedev. Am I supposed to be in Stockholm?" "Never mind, get here at once. What size hospital gown do you wear?" "Hospital gown?" "Stockholm embassy says you're in the National Hospital there. In a hospital gown. I got through to Anastina. She says it's Colonel James again. He looks like you now." Pashkov grunted. "I'll never understand," said Petchareff, "why all top secret agents have to look like bankers. Anastina says Colonel James was operated on by a Monsieur Fanti. What do you know about him?" "He's a theatrical surgeon." "You're not playing one of your jokes, Pashkov?" "Hardly." "You'd better be in my office in ten minutes. What size hospital gown?" "Short and fat," Pashkov said, and switched off. Most countries wanted to break his neck, and his own Motherland did not always trust him. But he enjoyed his work—enjoyed it as much as his closest professional rival, Colonel James, U.S.A. Pashkov landed on the roof of Intelligence in the northeast corner of the Kremlin, hitched up his pants and rode down. In his office, Petchareff removed the cigar from his mouth as Pashkov came in. "Medvedev get my orders?" "He's preparing a new super-patriotic writer to replace Boris Knackenpast," Pashkov reported. "When you give the word, he will call Izvestia and tell them Boris is dead." Petchareff glanced at his calendar. "We have two other state funerals this week. You made it plain, I hope, we want no repetition of Knackenpast's peace nonsense?" "No more Gandhi or Schweitzer influences. The new literature," Pashkov promised, raising a chubby finger, "will be a pearl necklace of government slogans." Nadezhda buzzed the intercom. "The man from the Bolshoi Theater is here, Comrade." "Send him in." A small man hurried into the room. He had a narrow face and the mustache of a mouse and a mousy nose, but his eyes were big rabbit eyes. He bowed twice quickly, placed a package on the desk with trembling forepaws and bowed twice again. Petchareff tore open the package. "You got the real thing? No bad imitation?" "Exactly, exactly," the mouse piped. "No difference, Comrade." He held his paws as in prayer and his pointed mouth quivered. Petchareff held up the hospital gown. On the back of the gown was printed in indelible ink: stockholm national hospital courtesy of Coca-Cola Petchareff tossed the gown to Pashkov. "This is what Colonel James is wearing," he said, dismissing the mouse, who bowed twice and scurried out. "Try and split the allies," Pashkov muttered, reading the legend on the gown. Petchareff blew cigar smoke in his face. "If Colonel James makes a monkey of you once more, you're through, Pashkov. You don't take your job seriously enough. You bungle this and I'll have you transferred to our Cultural Information Center in Chicago." Pashkov winced. "Now, you'll go to Stockholm and switch places with the American colonel and find out what they're up to. Zubov's kidnaping team is there already, at Hotel Reisen. Any questions?" "I thought Zubov was a zoological warfare expert. What is he doing with a kidnaping team?" "His team is more agile. On your way." In the front office, Pashkov stopped to kiss Nadezhda Brunhildova goodby. "I may not return from this dangerous mission. Give me a tender kiss." Nadezhda was a big girl with hefty arms, captain of her local broom brigade. "Monster!" She seized him by the collar. "Is Anastina dangerous?" "Darling!" "Bitter sweetness!" she howled, dropping him. "Go, love. Make me miserable." Pashkov spent an hour at Central Intelligence. Nothing unusual going on in Stockholm: an industrial exhibit, the Swedish Academy in session, a sociology seminar on prison reform, a forty-man trade mission from India. An addendum to the Stockholm file listed two Cuban agents operating from Fralsningsarmen's Economy Lodgings. They were buying small arms and ammunition. He thought a moment, impressed the Cubans' address on his memory, and went to his flier. He did not fly to Hotel Reisen at once. Zubov's kidnaping team could wait. Coming slowly over Stockholm he spotted the National Hospital and circled. A line of ambulance fliers was parked on the ground in the ambulance court. On the hospital roof, he noticed, apart from private fliers, stood a flier that resembled his own. He veered away, detoured around Riddarholmen, and five minutes later landed on the roof of Fralsningsarmen's Economy Lodgings—the Salvation Army flophouse. "My Cuban friends," Pashkov inquired in fluent English at the desk on the top floor. "Are they in?" The old desk clerk looked like a stork. "Yu, room six fifteen," he clacked. "Tree floors down. Aer yu Amerikan?" "Brazil." "Ah so? You sprikker goot Inglish laik me." "Very kind of you." He rode down three floors, found room 615, and stopped as he heard voices within. "... dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete . By seven o'clock tonight, okay, Gringo?" "What do you expect for seven thousand bucks—service? Look, boys, I'm just a honest businessman. I can't get it for you today. Have a seegar, Pablo." "Tfu!" "All rightie, your cause is my cause. Maybe I can get it for you tonight. But you'll have to pay in advance. What do you say, Francisco?" "I counted the money. It is waiting for you. You deliver, we pay." "But how can I trust you? I like you boys, I know you like me, but business is business. I gotta give something to my jobber, don't I?" "Gringo!" At that moment Pashkov knocked on the door. From within: "Shh! Alguien llama a la puerta. " Pashkov knocked again and a scuffle ensued within, the crack of a chair on a skull, the dragging of a beefy body into a closet, and the slam of the closet door. " Yu? " " Buenas tardes ," Pashkov said through the door. " Asuntos muy importantes. " The door opened a crack and two dark eyes in a young bearded face peered out. "Eh?" " Gospodin Pashkov, para servir a usted. " The door opened enough to admit the roly-poly visitor into the room. The other Cuban, also bearded and wearing a fatigue cap, held a revolver. "No gun-play, caballeros," Pashkov went on in Spanish. "We are in the Salvation Army charity house, not in a two-peso thriller. Besides, I deliver before I ask payment." "Deliver what, senor?" "We favor any disturbance close to the United States. May I sit down?" Between two beds were stacked some dozen crates of explosives. A small table was littered with papers. Sitting down at the table, Pashkov's elbow rested on an invoice, and moments later the invoice was tucked in his pocket. "What kind of ammunition do you need, caballeros?" The Cubans looked at each other. "Thirty-o-six caliber, two-twenty grain. How much can you deliver?" "Two thousand rounds." "Not much." "Maybe three thousand. I'll toss in a box of hand grenades and a can of lysergic acid diethylamide." "You have that? You have LSD-25?" "I have that. When are you leaving Stockholm?" Again the young beards exchanged looks. "Maybe we stay till tomorrow if you have more business. Three thousand rounds is not much. How much payment, senor?" "Two thousand kronor," Pashkov said, taking an envelope on the table and addressing it to Nadezhda Brunhildova, Kremlin, Moscow. No return address. "Do you trust us to send the money?" "It is bad for you if I do not trust you," Pashkov said, smiling up at them. "You can trust us. We shall send the money. Please take a cigar." Pashkov took four Havanas from the box they held out to him, stuck three in his breast pocket, and lit one. "You come again, senor. We make much business." "Why not? Help retire Latin-American dictators to Siberia. More gold in Siberia than in Las Vegas." "Hyi, hyi, that is funny. You come again." On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted. It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting for him. Comrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone. "Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow." "Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?" Zubov's big tooth settled respectfully over his lower lip. His small eyes were so closely set that he looked cockeyed when he focused them on his superior. "With your pardon, I shall conduct you to our suite. Plans for kidnaping of Colonel James all ready." "Here's a cigar for you." "Gratefully accepted. Reduced unavoidable fatalities to six." Zubov counted on his long hard fingers. "Two watchmen, three nurses, one doctor." In the hotel corridor, Zubov looked before and after, his eyes crossed suspiciously, and peered around corners. They got to their suite without incident, and Pashkov gave him another cigar. "Gratefully accepted. Here is a map of hospital and grounds. Here is a map of twenty-third floor. Here is a map of Colonel James' room. Here is hospital routine between midnight and dawn. With your pardon—" Pashkov picked up the phone, dialed the Soviet embassy, and got the chargé d'affaires. "How is your underdeveloped countries fund?" he asked. "Always depleted, always replenished." "I don't want any Russian brands." "Nothing but foreign," the chargé buzzed. "We got almost everything now through an American surplus outlet in Hamburg. Nationals get caught with American goods, Americans get blamed. Wonderful confusion. What do you need?" "Thirty-o-six two-twenty, three thousand—if you have it." "Most popular. What else?" "Pineapples—one crate." "Only confiscated German potatoes. Will that do?" "Fine. And a small can of sentimental caviar." "Too risky." "It's all right. It will fall to local authorities by tomorrow." Pashkov put down the receiver. Give the Cubans enough to expect more—make sure they stay in town. Zubov was cross-checking his kidnaping plans. He said, "With your pardon, do we take Colonel James alive or dead-or-alive?" "Alive." Zubov pulled a long face. "Dead-or-alive would be easier, Gospodin Pashkov. Fast, clean job." Pashkov squinted at Zubov's crossed eyes. "Have you had your eyes examined lately?" "No need," Zubov assured him with a smile. "I see more than most people." Pashkov held up his remaining cigar. "How many cigars in my hand?" "Two." At that moment the door opened and Zubov's kidnaping team lumbered in. They were a couple of big apes dressed in blue canvas shoes, red trousers, yellow jackets, white silk scarves, sport caps and sun glasses. "What are you doing here?" cried Zubov. "Why aren't you observing the hospital?" "Dhh, you said to report ... um ... if something happened," the first ape said in a thick voice. "Well?" "Victim's room lights out," the ape said. "My assistants," Zubov introduced them to Pashkov. "Line up, line up, lads. With your pardon, they are good lads. This is Petya, and this is Kolya. No, this is Kolya and this one is Petya." "Twins?" "Not exactly. Same genetic experiment. Good lads. Stand straight, Petya. Don't curl your feet like that, Kolya, I've told you before. Why didn't you shave your hands today?" Kolya looked guiltily at his hands. "They've made progress," Zubov assured Pashkov, pulling a small whip from his hip pocket. "Straight, lads, straight," he flicked the whip. "We have company." "Are their costumes your own idea?" "With your pardon, for purposes of concealment. What are your orders?" Pashkov told them to pick up the boxes of ammunition at the embassy and deliver them to the Cubans, and then to commandeer a private automobile. "We have autos at the embassy pool," Zubov suggested. "I want a vehicle off the street. Then report back here with your lads." Petya gave Kolya a box on the ear. "Boys, boys!" Zubov cracked the whip. "Out you go. A job for Gospodin Pashkov, lads. They don't get enough exercise," he grinned, backing out after them. "With your pardon, I'll thrash them later." And they were gone. Pashkov turned to the hospital maps and studied them before taking a nap. Shortly before dawn, Zubov's team returned, their mission accomplished. "With your pardon, an excellent Mercedes," Zubov reported. Pashkov had changed into the hospital gown with the Coca-Cola legend on the back. He glanced at his watch. It was four o'clock in the morning. He tossed his bundle of clothing to the first ape. "Take my flier back to Moscow, Kolya lad. Give my clothes to Nadezhda Brunhildova, and tell Comrade Petchareff to expect Colonel James today." Clutching the bundle, Kolya stuck his tongue out at Petya and bounded out of the room. They waited at the window until they saw Kolya take off in Pashkov's flier. Then they made their way down the service stairs to the alley, Pashkov dressed only in the hospital gown; got into the stolen Mercedes and drove to the National Hospital, all three leaning forward. In the ambulance court, Zubov and Petya moved quickly to a Red Cross flier. Pashkov dropped the invoice he had lifted from the Cubans on the front seat of the stolen car, and followed. A watchman emerged from his hut, looked idly up at the rising ambulance, and shuffled back to his morning coffee. As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James' window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in after. Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed, his eyes blinking. Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment. "My dear Gospodin Pashkov!" Colonel James greeted him in Russian, yawning. "How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down." Not only was his Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice. "You're not really sick?" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed. "Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look in the mirror—" The colonel shuddered. "I hope your sacrifice won't be permanent?" Pashkov said. "That would be too much. How is my Russian? The truth, now." "Excellent. Put up your gun, Zubov. Colonel James and I don't get to talk very often." "And a pity we don't. Good manners accomplish more than an opera full of cloaks and daggers. Cigarette?" "Gratefully accepted," Zubov said, slipping his gun into its holster with a flourish. "Your treatment is over, then?" Pashkov asked. "You are ready for your assignment?" "Ready." "And that is?" "Delicate, very delicate. I must report to the Palace this morning." "Shall I kidnap him now?" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his cigarette. "Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel—do you want me to think I am falling into a trap?" "No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at seeing you again." The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's other side. "Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov." Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov. "Take him straight to Petchareff," Colonel James said to Zubov. "I'll report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to." Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards the window. "Hold your claws, Zubov lad," Pashkov said. "You have got the wrong man, can't you see? That is Colonel James." "Eh?" "Use your eyes, blockhead. I am Pashkov." Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. "Eh?" Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, "Carry him out." Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to the window. "You miserable idiot," Pashkov shouted. "You'll get a rest cure for this!" Zubov dropped him, pulled his gun and backed off into a corner. "How can I tell you two apart just by looking!" he cried hysterically. "I'm not a learned man." "One small but decisive proof," Pashkov said, unbuttoning his hospital gown. "I have a mole." Zubov yanked the colonel up by an arm. "Send me to rest cures, will you?" Colonel James sighed. "I guess we have to keep up appearances," he muttered, and climbed out the window into the hovering ambulance. Zubov leaped in after, and they were off. The suit of clothes hanging in the closet might have been Pashkov's own, identical with the clothes Kolya had taken to Moscow not an hour before. Even the underwear had facsimiles of the Order of Lenin sewn in. Satisfied, he crawled into the bed and fell into a pleasant snooze. He was awakened by the nurse, Anastina Bjorklund—alias Anastasia Semionovna Bezumnaya, formerly of the Stakhanovite Booster's Committee, Moscow Third Worker's District. "Wonderful morning, Colonel James!" Petchareff seldom let one agent know what another was doing. She put a big breakfast tray on Pashkov's lap. "Cloudy, damp, and windy. London stock market caves in, race riots in South Africa, famine in India, earthquake in Japan, floods in the United States, general strike in France, new crisis in Berlin. I ask you, what more can an idealist want?" "Good morning, Miss Bjorklund." The breakfast tray was crammed with a liter of orange juice, four boiled eggs, six slices of bacon, four pancakes, two pork chops, four slices of toast, a tumbler of vodka, a pot of coffee and two cigars. "Ah, Colonel," Anastina said as Pashkov fell to, "why did you let them change your face? It does not become you at all." "Part of my job. Don't you think I am more handsome now?" Anastina laughed shrilly. "That bulbous nose handsome? What woman could fall in love with a nose like that?" "It shows determination. I wish I had this nose permanently." "You mustn't talk like that. But I'll ignore your nose if you tell me more about White Sands Proving Grounds, as you promised." "With pleasure, with pleasure," he said, sinking his teeth into a pork chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. "But right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra shine, there's a good girl." "Oh, you and your secrets!" An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James' flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared at him, then smiled nervously. "They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel." "Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?" "Oh, no, sir." "Do I talk like Colonel James?" "You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov." "I am Gospodin Pashkov now, Captain. To everybody." "Of course, sir. I'll ring down you are coming." Pashkov glanced at his watch. Colonel James would be landing in Moscow about now and taken to Comrade Petchareff for questioning. A manservant in velvet cutaways, patent leather shoes and white gloves, escorted Pashkov through rooms hung with chandeliers, tapestries, paintings. Pashkov entered the last room and stopped as the door clicked shut behind him. In the room were three men, all of whom he recognized: Professor Kristin of the Swedish Academy, a white-haired old man with a kind, intelligent face; the king, Gustavus IX, a thin old man stroking his Vandyke, sitting under a portrait of Frederick the Great; and Monsieur Fanti, the make-up surgeon. Pashkov bowed his head. "Your majesty. Gentlemen." "Extraordinary!" Professor Kristin said. Pashkov turned to the surgeon. "Monsieur, should my face have such a frivolous expression?" M. Fanti raised his eyebrows, but did not answer. "I thought," said Pashkov, "that Gospodin Pashkov's face has a more brutal look." "Propaganda," said the artist. But he came closer and looked at Pashkov's face with sudden interest. Professor Kristin said, "Colonel James, we presume you have studied the problem in detail. I'm afraid we have delayed announcing the Nobel prize for literature much too long. How soon can you bring Boris Knackenpast to Stockholm?" So there it was: Boris Knackenpast a supreme success, as Pashkov had suspected. It would be amusing to tell robotist Medvedev about it. "Delicate, very delicate," Pashkov said. "Everything depends on my not running into Gospodin Pashkov." "We can't wait any longer," Professor Kristin said. "Fortunately, we have an ally in the enemy camp. The robotist, Medvedev, is expecting you at Knackenpast's villa." "Bad show," M. Fanti said suddenly. "No good. His left cheekbone is at least four centimeters too high." The men looked at the surgeon, then at Pashkov. M. Fanti fingered Pashkov's cheekbone. "How could I have made such a mistake! Just look at him. People laugh at such faces." "How much time to correct the error then, Monsieur Fanti?" the king asked. "A week at least. His skin needs a rest. I must rework the whole left side of his face—it's all lopsided." "But we can't spare a week," Professor Kristin said. "With your majesty's permission," Pashkov offered, "I am willing to go as I am. Indeed, my plans call for immediate departure." "It is a good thing you do for us, Colonel James," Gustavus IX said, "and a courageous thing. Please accept our thanks." Professor Kristin saw Pashkov to the door. "One suggestion, Colonel. Your r's are still too soft for a real Russian. Why do you Americans slur them like that? And I beg you, if you value your life, do not fail to watch your fricatives." The roof captain saluted as Pashkov stepped out of the lift. His flier was serviced and ready. "What weather in Moscow, Captain?" "Ceiling four thousand. We're having patrols half way out to sea. They are instructed to let you pass." A small incident, the roof captain explained. A Swedish Red Cross flier was missing from the National Hospital. Two Cuban agents had been arrested and a cache of small arms and ammunition was found. But no trace of the ambulance. "I suppose the Cubans deny stealing the ambulance?" Pashkov asked. "They say they've been framed by a fat little Russian. But it's transparent, a clumsy job. Imagine, they left a stolen car in the ambulance court and in it an invoice for six cases of ammunition. It was traced to the Cubans in half an hour." Pashkov climbed into his flier. "Well, it's fashionable to blame the Russians for everything." He waved his chubby hand, and took off. Flying over the Baltic, he set the controls on the Moscow beam. Ten minutes west of Moscow he tuned the communicator in on Petchareff's office. "Seven One Three here, Nadezhda. Tell Petchareff—no, let me talk to him." "Seven One ... but that's impossible! Gospodin Pashkov is in conference with Comrade Petchareff." "Stupid!" Petchareff's voice sounded behind Nadezhda's, and the speaker clicked and went dead. Pashkov dove into the clouds and brought his flier to a hovering stop. Petchareff did not believe he was Pashkov. Colonel James, it was clear, was at that moment in Petchareff's office, impersonating Pashkov. And Zubov was probably getting a rest cure. Pashkov crawled out of the cloud and skimmed northeast to Mir, Boris Knackenpast's villa. "You came fast, sir," the lieutenant of guards welcomed him at Mir. "We did not expect you for another fifteen minutes." Fifteen minutes. The colonel was not wasting time. "Listen carefully, lieutenant." Pashkov described the American agent. "But his left cheekbone is lower than mine—about four centimeters. He may be armed, so be careful." The lieutenant stared. "Shall we kill him?" "No, no. Put him in a cage." As Pashkov ran up the steps to the villa, the curtain in the vestibule window stirred. But when he entered, the vestibule was empty. He looked in the dining room, the music room, the library. Nobody. The house was strangely quiet. He came to the door of the study and listened. Not a sound. He went in and there, behind the large writing desk, sat Boris Knackenpast. The robot was unscrewing screws imbedded in his neck. "My God, sir," said Pashkov, "what are you doing?" The robot's eyes, large disks of glittering mirror, flashed as he looked up. "Ah, Colonel James," Boris said in a voice that seemed to come from a deep well. "Excuse the poor welcome, but I understand we have little time. You scared my valet; he thought you were Gospodin Pashkov." The door burst open and Medvedev rushed in, the old valet at his heels. Medvedev stopped, gaped, then seized Pashkov's hand. "Colonel James! What an artist, that Monsieur Fanti. But quick, Boris, Pashkov is on his way." Boris pulled off his head, and crawled out of the robot shell. Pashkov saw Boris as he really was, a tall human with a gaunt, ascetic face. The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's the trouble with us. "I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast," Pashkov said. "We must be off at once." "Too late!" the old valet said from the window. Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the guards closed a circle about him. "He'll keep," Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. "Let's be off, Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out." "Look!" The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff. Zubov leaped out next, his big front tooth flashing. Then his two assistants, Petya and Kolya, tumbled out in their coats and hats. Last of all to emerge from the flier was Nadezhda Brunhildova. "Pretend not to know me, will he?" she yelled at Colonel James, picking up a rock. "Hold it, citizenress," Colonel James said. "Citizenress, is it?" The rock flew over his head and felled Zubov. "I warned you both, no kitchen squabbles while on duty," Petchareff roared. He snapped an order to the lieutenants of guards, and the guards surrounded the house. "No alarm, no alarm," Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window. "Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for it. But get back into your robot costume." "I can't operate the machine." "I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff." As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face. The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping. Colonel James said, "There he is, the American spy." Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. "Not bad," Petchareff said. "We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?" "Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov." "Curse me," Nadezhda said, staring at him. "Another Pashkov." A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's face with their slouched hats. "Stand back!" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. "He is trying to say something!" "He's moving!" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair standing up like spikes. Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree. Pashkov whispered to Colonel James. "Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself," Petchareff said. "Zubov!" "Hhng?" "Which one's the real Pashkov?" "Hhng?" But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at Petchareff and running. "Grenade!" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground. At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier, his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor. The guards scattered and dove for cover. "Down, lads! Grenade!" Pashkov yelled. The two apes took up the cry, "Grenade, grenade!" and flattened themselves behind the tree. Nadezhda and Medvedev collided, digging in behind the valet. Only Petchareff remained standing. "Stop the robot!" Nobody moved. Boris reached the flier, Colonel James pulled him in, the engine hummed, and they were off. A moment later the flier vanished in the clouds towards Stockholm. Petchareff relit his cigar. "Tfui, tastes of monkey hair." Medvedev shambled over. "Was the grenade a dud?" "One of these days I'll catch you, Pashkov," Petchareff spat. "Your deviousness, that's one thing. It could be useful. But your levity—" "Darling!" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov. "Not in public," Pashkov said. "Wait a minute," Petchareff said. "Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot him summarily. He does look like Colonel James to me." "But if you're mistaken?" Medvedev put in nervously. "We all make mistakes," Petchareff said. "What would history be without mistakes?" "I don't trust him either," Nadezhda said. "But I know my Pashkov. If he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning."

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THE MOONS OF MARS By DEAN EVANS Illustrated by WILLER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Every boy should be able to whistle, except, of course, Martians. But this one did! He seemed a very little boy to be carrying so large a butterfly net. He swung it in his chubby right fist as he walked, and at first glance you couldn't be sure if he were carrying it, or it carrying him . He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two things peculiar, but each was related to the other. The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys do not—and he most certainly didn't. The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy. "Hi, there," I said when he came near enough. "What's that you're whistling?" He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes. "'The Calm'," he said in a sober, little-boy voice. "The what ?" I asked. "From the William Tell Overture," he explained, still looking up at me. He said it deadpan, and his wide brown eyes never once batted. "Oh," I said. "And where did you learn that?" "My mother taught me." I blinked at him. He didn't blink back. His round little face still held no expression, but if it had, I knew it would have matched the title of the tune he whistled. "You whistle very well," I told him. That pleased him. His eyes lit up and an almost-smile flirted with the corners of his small mouth. He nodded grave agreement. "Been after butterflies, I see. I'll bet you didn't get any. This is the wrong season." The light in his eyes snapped off. "Well, good-by," he said abruptly and very relevantly. "Good-by," I said. His whistling and his walking started up again in the same spot where they had left off. I mean the note he resumed on was the note which followed the one interrupted; and the step he took was with the left foot, which was the one he would have used if I hadn't stopped him. I followed him with my eyes. An unusual little boy. A most precisely mechanical little boy. When he was almost out of sight, I took off after him, wondering. The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure— pure , mind you—gold. Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual. And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars. There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just disappeared. So his mother had taught him the William Tell Overture, had she? That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think, instead, of something quite astonishing: How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle? All Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead. I went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door. The woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice wasn't young any more, either. "Well? And what did I do now?" "I beg your pardon?" I said. "You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing just something to cover a hole in your shirt?" "Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?" I asked. "All I did was knock on your door." "I heard it." Her lips were curled slightly at one corner. I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before I answered: "As a matter of fact, I don't want to see you at all. I didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here that I was interested in. The little Martian boy, I mean." Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart. "Come in," she almost gasped. I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this. A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you like the appearance of squeezed blood. There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs, and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I looked once again at the woman. "What about him?" she whispered. Her eyes were still startled. I smiled reassuringly. "Nothing, lady, nothing. I'm sorry I upset you. I was just being nosy is all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told me it was the 'Calm' from William Tell. He also told me his mother had taught him." Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks. She said one word only: "Well?" "Nothing," I answered. "Except that Martians are supposed to be tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and when he told me his mother had taught him—" I shrugged and laughed a little. "Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy." She nodded. "We agree on that last part." Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily. "I would like to speak to the Martian lady," I said. "There isn't any Martian lady." "There has to be, doesn't there?" I said it with little sharp prickers on the words. But she did, too: " Does there? " I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard and at the same time curiously defiant—as though she would dare me to go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts. For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to whistle. And then—after what seemed to me a very long while—I slowly tumbled to what she meant. Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother. It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically, spiritually, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of, compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around the house. I finally said: "So that is why he is able to whistle." She didn't answer. Even before I spoke, her eyes had seen the correct guess which had probably flashed naked and astounded in my own eyes. And then she swallowed with a labored breath that went trembling down inside her. "There isn't anything to be ashamed of," I said gently. "Back on Earth there's a lot of mixtures, you know. Some people even claim there's no such thing as a pure race. I don't know, but I guess we all started somewhere and intermarried plenty since." She nodded. Somehow her eyes didn't look defiant any more. "Where's his father?" I asked. "H-he's dead." "I'm sorry. Are you all right? I mean do you get along okay and everything, now that...?" I stopped. I wanted to ask her if she was starving by slow degrees and needed help. Lord knows the careworn look about her didn't show it was luxurious living she was doing—at least not lately. "Look," I said suddenly. "Would you like to go home to Earth? I could fix—" But that was the wrong approach. Her eyes snapped and her shoulders stiffened angrily and the words that ripped out of her mouth were not coated with honey. "Get the hell out of here, you fool!" I blinked again. When the flame in her eyes suddenly seemed to grow even hotter, I turned on my heel and went to the door. I opened it, went out on the top slab step. I turned back to close the door—and looked straight into her eyes. She was crying, but that didn't mean exactly what it looked like it might mean. Her right hand had the door edge gripped tightly and she was swinging it with all the strength she possessed. And while I still stared, the door slammed savagely into the casing with a shock that jarred the slab under my feet, and flying splinters from the rotten woodwork stung my flinching cheeks. I shrugged and turned around and went down the steps. "And that is the way it goes," I muttered disgustedly to myself. Thinking to be helpful with the firewood problem, you give a woman a nice sharp axe and she immediately puts it to use—on you. I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spread-legged man who was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something in his eyes which might have been a leer. "Pulled a howler in there, eh, mate?" he said. He chuckled hoarsely in his throat. "Not being exactly deaf, I heard the tail end of it." His chuckle was a lewd thing, a thing usually reserved—if it ever was reserved at all—for the mens' rooms of some of the lower class dives. And then he stopped chuckling and frowned instead and said complainingly: "Regular little spitfire, ain't she? I ask you now, wouldn't you think a gal which had got herself in a little jam, so to speak, would be more reasonable—" His words chopped short and he almost choked on the final unuttered syllable. His glance had dropped to my badge and the look on his face was one of startled surprise. "I—" he said. I cocked a frown of my own at him. "Well, so long, mate," he grunted, and spun around and dug his toes in the sand and was away. I stood there staring at his rapidly disappearing form for a few moments and then looked back once more at the house. A tattered cotton curtain was just swinging to in the dirty, sand-blown window. That seemed to mean the woman had been watching. I sighed, shrugged again and went away myself. When I got back to Security Headquarters, I went to the file and began to rifle through pictures. I didn't find the woman, but I did find the man. He was a killer named Harry Smythe. I took the picture into the Chief's office and laid it on his desk, waited for him to look down at it and study it for an instant, and then to look back up to me. Which he did. "So?" he said. "Wanted, isn't he?" He nodded. "But a lot of good that'll do. He's holed up somewhere back on Earth." "No," I said. "He's right here. I just saw him." " What? " He nearly leaped out of his chair. "I didn't know who he was at first," I said. "It wasn't until I looked in the files—" He cut me off. His hand darted into his desk drawer and pulled out an Authority Card. He shoved the card at me. He growled: "Kill or capture, I'm not especially fussy which. Just get him!" I nodded and took the card. As I left the office, I was thinking of something which struck me as somewhat more than odd. I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling part of the William Tell Overture, and it had led me to a wanted killer named Harry Smythe. Understandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever I showed it I got respect. I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything more than a ghoul, you don't. Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though, was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. It was empty. She had moved fast. She hadn't even left me a note saying good-by. That night I went into the Great Northern desert to the Haremheb Reservation, where the Martians still try to act like Martians. It was Festival night, and when I got there they were doing the dance to the two moons. At times like this you want to leave the Martians alone. With that thought in mind, I pinned my Authority Card to my lapel directly above my badge, and went through the gates. The huge circle fire was burning and the dance was in progress. Briefly, this can be described as something like the ceremonial dances put on centuries ago by the ancient aborigines of North America. There was one important exception, however. Instead of a central fire, the Martians dig a huge circular trench and fill it with dried roots of the belu tree and set fire to it. Being pitch-like, the gnarled fragments burn for hours. Inside this ring sit the spectators, and in the exact center are the dancers. For music, they use the drums. The dancers were both men and women and they were as naked as Martians can get, but their dance was a thing of grace and loveliness. For an instant—before anyone observed me—I stood motionless and watched the sinuously undulating movements, and I thought, as I have often thought before, that this is the one thing the Martians can still do beautifully. Which, in a sad sort of way, is a commentary on the way things have gone since the first rocket-blasting ship set down on these purple sands. I felt the knife dig my spine. Carefully I turned around and pointed my index finger to my badge and card. Bared teeth glittered at me in the flickering light, and then the knife disappeared as quickly as it had come. "Wahanhk," I said. "The Chief. Take me to him." The Martian turned, went away from the half-light of the circle. He led me some yards off to the north to a swooping-tent. Then he stopped, pointed. "Wahanhk," he said. I watched him slip away. Wahanhk is an old Martian. I don't think any Martian before him has ever lived so long—and doubtless none after him will, either. His leathery, almost purple-black skin was rough and had a charred look about it, and up around the eyes were little plaits and folds that had the appearance of being done deliberately by a Martian sand-artist. "Good evening," I said, and sat down before him and crossed my legs. He nodded slowly. His old eyes went to my badge. From there they went to the Authority Card. "Power sign of the Earthmen," he muttered. "Not necessarily," I said. "I'm not here for trouble. I know as well as you do that, before tonight is finished, more than half of your men and women will be drunk on illegal whiskey." He didn't reply to that. "And I don't give a damn about it," I added distinctly. His eyes came deliberately up to mine and stopped there. He said nothing. He waited. Outside, the drums throbbed, slowly at first, then moderated in tempo. It was like the throbbing—or sobbing, if you prefer—of the old, old pumps whose shafts go so tirelessly down into the planet for such pitifully thin streams of water. "I'm looking for an Earthwoman," I said. "This particular Earthwoman took a Martian for a husband." "That is impossible," he grunted bitterly. "I would have said so, too," I agreed. "Until this afternoon, that is." His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle. "I met her little son," I went on. "A little semi-human boy with Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the other side, a little Martian boy who whistles." His teeth went together with a snap. I nodded and smiled. "You know who I'm talking about." For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply blank. "They disappeared from the shack they were living in," I said. "They went in a hurry—a very great hurry." That one he didn't answer, either. "I would like to know where she is." "Why?" His whisper was brittle. "She's not in trouble," I told him quickly. "She's not wanted. Nor her child, either. It's just that I have to talk to her." "Why?" I pulled out the file photo of Harry Smythe and handed it across to him. His wrinkled hand took it, pinched it, held it up close to a lamp hanging from one of the ridge poles. His eyes squinted at it for a long moment before he handed it back. "I have never seen this Earthman," he said. "All right," I answered. "There wasn't anything that made me think you had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that she might know him." "This one is wanted ?" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the last word. I nodded. "For murder." "Murder." He spat the word. "But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not that important any more." His old eyes hated me with an intensity I didn't relish. "You said that, old man, not I." A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to. He said at last: "I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child." He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the drums, somebody was whistling. It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow cheese. "In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!" He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie only bores a Martian. I got up and went out of the tent. The woman never heard me approach. Her eyes were toward the flaming circle and the dancers within, and, too, I suppose, to her small son who was somewhere in that circle with them, whistling. She leaned against the bole of a belu tree with her arms down and slightly curled backward around it. "That's considered bad luck," I said. Her head jerked around with my words, reflected flames from the circle fire still flickering in her eyes. "That's a belu tree," I said. "Embracing it like that is like looking for a ladder to walk under. Or didn't you know?" "Would it make any difference?" She spoke softly, but the words came to me above the drums and the shouts of the dancers. "How much bad luck can you have in one lifetime, anyway?" I ignored that. "Why did you pull out of that shack? I told you you had nothing to fear from me." She didn't answer. "I'm looking for the man you saw me talking with this morning," I went on. "Lady, he's wanted. And this thing, on my lapel is an Authority Card. Assuming you know what it means, I'm asking you where he is." "What man?" Her words were flat. "His name is Harry Smythe." If that meant anything to her, I couldn't tell. In the flickering light from the fires, subtle changes in expression weren't easily detected. "Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it. Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you, Mister, whoever it was, I'll get him. I'll get him! " I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh. Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of her man. And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and the dancers was loud enough to command the attention and the senses. I could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the small, thin shoulders. And I knew then the reason for old Wahanhk's bitterness when he had said to me, "But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not that important any more." What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: "I'm sorry, kid. But look, just staking out in that old shack of yours and trying to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way—well, I mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?" I put an arm around her shoulders. "He must have been a pretty nice guy," I said. "I don't think you'd have married him if he wasn't." I stopped. Even in my own ears, my words sounded comfortless. I looked up, over at the flaming circle and at the sweat-laved dancers within it. The sound of the drums was a wild cacophonous tattoo now, a rattle of speed and savagery combined; and those who moved to its frenetic jabberings were not dancers any more, but only frenzied, jerking figurines on the strings of a puppeteer gone mad. I looked down again at the woman. "Your little boy and his butterfly net," I said softly. "In a season when no butterflies can be found. What was that for? Was he part of the plan, too, and the net just the alibi that gave him a passport to wander where he chose? So that he could listen, pick up a little information here, a little there?" She didn't answer. She didn't have to answer. My guesses can be as good as anybody's. After a long while she looked up into my eyes. "His name was Tahily," she said. "He had the secret. He knew where the gold vein was. And soon, in a couple of years maybe, when all the prospectors were gone and he knew it would be safe, he was going to stake a claim and go after it. For us. For the three of us." I sighed. There wasn't, isn't, never will be any gold on this planet. But who in the name of God could have the heart to ruin a dream like that? Next day I followed the little boy. He left the reservation in a cheery frame of mind, his whistle sounding loud and clear on the thin morning air. He didn't go in the direction of town, but the other way—toward the ruins of the ancient Temple City of the Moons. I watched his chubby arm and the swinging of the big butterfly net on the end of that arm. Then I followed along in his sandy tracks. It was desert country, of course. There wasn't any chance of tailing him without his knowledge and I knew it. I also knew that before long he'd know it, too. And he did—but he didn't let me know he did until we came to the rag-cliffs, those filigree walls of stone that hide the entrance to the valley of the two moons. Once there, he paused and placed his butterfly net on a rock ledge and then calmly sat down and took off his shoes to dump the sand while he waited for me. "Well," I said. "Good morning." He looked up at me. He nodded politely. Then he put on his shoes again and got to his feet. "You've been following me," he said, and his brown eyes stared accusingly into mine. "I have?" "That isn't an honorable thing to do," he said very gravely. "A gentleman doesn't do that to another gentleman." I didn't smile. "And what would you have me do about it?" "Stop following me, of course, sir." "Very well," I said. "I won't follow you any more. Will that be satisfactory?" "Quite, sir." Without another word, he picked up his butterfly net and disappeared along a path that led through a rock crevice. Only then did I allow myself to grin. It was a sad and pitying and affectionate kind of grin. I sat down and did with my shoes as he had done. There wasn't any hurry; I knew where he was going. There could only be one place, of course—the city of Deimos and Phobos. Other than that he had no choice. And I thought I knew the reason for his going. Several times in the past, there have been men who, bitten with the fever of an idea that somewhere on this red planet there must be gold, have done prospecting among the ruins of the old temples. He had probably heard that there were men there now, and he was carrying out with the thoroughness of his precise little mind the job he had set himself of finding the killer of his daddy. I took a short-cut over the rag-cliffs and went down a winding, sand-worn path. The temple stones stood out barren and dry-looking, like breast bones from the desiccated carcass of an animal. For a moment I stopped and stared down at the ruins. I didn't see the boy. He was somewhere down there, though, still swinging his butterfly net and, probably, still whistling. I started up once more. And then I heard it—a shrill blast of sound in an octave of urgency; a whistle, sure, but a warning one. I stopped in my tracks from the shock of it. Yes, I knew from whom it had come, all right. But I didn't know why. And then the whistle broke off short. One instant it was in the air, shrieking with a message. The next it was gone. But it left tailings, like the echo of a death cry slowly floating back over the dead body of the creature that uttered it. I dropped behind a fragment of the rag-cliff. A shot barked out angrily. Splinters of the rock crazed the morning air.

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Grand Finale Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy broadly recounts the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado at London's Savoy Theatre in 1885. Perhaps "broadly" is putting too fine a point on it. The first hour, in which Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) attempts to sever his ties with W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and the owner of the Savoy, Richard D'Oyly Carte (Ron Cook), is a mess: The order of scenes feels arbitrary, and characters pop up and vanish with bewildering frequency. You might be tempted to vanish, too. (Friends of mine did.) Be patient. Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something extraordinary: a monument to process--to the minutiae of making art. And to something more: the fundamental sadness of people who labor to make beautiful things--who soar--and then come down to a not-so-beautiful earth. It would be charitable to attribute the shapelessness of the early scenes to the characters' own lack of focus, but it would also be inane. As Elvis Mitchell pointed out in Slate 's "," Leigh's opening shot features an usher who moves along a row of the Savoy Theatre lifting and peering under every seat. That's every seat. You can almost hear Leigh cackling: "How's this for a fast start?--you bourgeois slaves to narrative." Inevitably, something does happen: Princess Ida , one of Gilbert and Sullivan's duds, has its premiere, and Gilbert fumes over a review that calls him the monarch of "topsy-turvydom"--of formulaic plots involving magical elixirs and coins. A heat wave has hit London, theater attendance is down, and Sullivan is itching to go off and become the English Mendelssohn--to write operas and symphonies instead of comic "soufflés." Leigh evidently loves the bloodless formality of the scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan, men of opposite tastes and temperaments who only overlap in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: "How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama." The wake-up call comes an hour into the movie. Gilbert attends a popular exposition of Japanese culture at Knightsbridge and watches Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea ("spinach water"). When a Japanese sword he has purchased falls off his wall, he hefts it; mimes a fight while issuing strangled, samurailike cries; then has a brainstorm. We hear the horns of The Mikado overture, then Leigh cuts to the fully realized opening scene on stage at the Savoy: "We are gentlemen of Japan …" Just that chorus is enough to reanimate the audience--to make people sit up and grin. And Leigh's technique of leaping back and forth between the finished Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the connection. A central section of the drama is missing. What exactly fired Sullivan up about doing The Mikado ? What was different about this collaboration? No answer. Topsy-Turvy turns into something other than the Gilbert and Sullivan story: a portrait of life in the theater. A group portrait. D'Oyly Carte becomes a quiet third protagonist, a humane businessman. He softly negotiates a salary increase with the company's lead comic (Martin Savage), a neurasthenic junkie. He gently seeks the assurance of a tipsy ingénue (the tremulous Shirley Henderson) that her "little weakness" will not re-emerge. In the dressing room, performers gossip and complain, drink and shoot themselves up with drugs. Leigh's ensemble casts strive to be "microcosms" of society, so issues of class are ever present. You see it in Sullivan's banter with the working-class musicians in the pit and in Gilbert's with the uppity actors (the movie's posturing middle class), whom he drills on pronunciation and poise. The chorus is presented as some sort of collective folk conscience when it lobbies Gilbert to restore the rashly cut solo ("A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist") of the sad, fat fellow (Timothy Spall) in the title role. Who would have predicted that Leigh would make Gilbert and Sullivan into Mike Leigh characters? Gilbert could be a stand-in for Leigh himself--a haughty, ill-humored man with an obsession for tiny details and a glowering dedication to process. Gilbert haggles with his actors over small things that shouldn't resonate but which somehow add up. Leigh's small things add up, too. The joke of The Mikado is that its Japanese lords are thinly disguised English bureaucrats; the joke of Topsy-Turvy is that the opera's English performers seem culturally incapable of playing Japanese. They rehearse in long coats and top hats, and some of the women (and men!) express horror at appearing on stage without corsets. Behind the satire, however, is a reverence for Gilbert and Sullivan: The tempos are slower than modern audiences are used to, and the staging has been stripped of high-camp accretions. I saw a D'Oyly Carte production of The Mikado in the late '70s: It was played fast and to the groundlings and made me never want to see a G&S opera again. Now I can't wait for the next production. Only a lunatic would call Topsy-Turvy , with its lame first hour and host of loose ends, a masterpiece, but by the finale I was ready to have myself committed. The finale itself must have done it. Leigh's endings are often wondrous, and this one is up there with the rooftop scene in High Hopes (1988). The Mikado is a triumph--it would be the Savoy's biggest hit--but there's no transformation in the lives of its makers. Gilbert can't bring himself to reach out to his brokenhearted wife (Lesley Manville), and Sullivan has a melancholy inkling that he has reached his artistic peak. The ingénue, Leonora, is drinking again, toasting herself in the mirror and praising the loveliness of Nature--a Nature that will, of course, destroy her. The final image is of Art: Leonora on stage singing Yum-Yum's sublime "The sun whose rays are all ablaze …" As Leigh's camera pulls back over the orchestra and the audience, this movie feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists ever made. Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless. Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle. The director is in his weird element only in the first half-hour, in which he sits his subject down and gets out of his way. Leuchter, who looks a little like the archetypal movie dweeb Charles Martin Smith and has a heavy exurbs-of-Boston accent, explains how he became involved in redesigning problematic electric chairs. "Excess current cooks the tissue," he says, barely suppressing a smirk at his own expertise. "There've been occasions where a great amount of current has been applied, and the meat actually will come off the executee's bone like the meat coming off a cooked chicken." Leuchter set about making capital punishment more "humane." He moves on to talking about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar. But that's OK, because the man is an interesting specimen. Is he a monster or a humanist committed to eliminating the "deplawrable tawchaw" of capital punishment? It could go either way. M r. Death gets into deeper waters when it recounts the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada for proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened. Zundel hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and examine the "alleged" gas chambers: Footage (taken by Zundel's cameraman) shows the little man chiseling at walls, vandalizing what even he admits are international shrines. Leuchter smuggled specimens of rock and concrete back to the United States, where chemical analysis revealed no cyanide gas. Furthermore, Leuchter can't figure out how the gas would even have been administered without killing the Nazis themselves--proof, he argues, that mass extermination at Auschwitz never took place. The subsequent "Leuchter Report" became the backbone of Zundel's defense (he lost anyway) and of the burgeoning revisionist movement led by David Irving. But if Leuchter became a hero to neo-Nazis, he also became a target of Jewish groups and a pariah even in the execution business. When Morris hooks up with him for the last time, he's in hiding from creditors. Is Leuchter a raving anti-Semite or a pathetic pawn who thrived on having--for the first time in his life--a bit of celebrity? The film suggests the latter. It certainly produces no evidence of malice. Plenty of monstrous insensitivity and hubris, though. Morris uses the Dutch historian Robert Jan van Pelt as a counternarrator: He calls Leuchter "a fffool " who didn't have a clue what to look for in a place that had changed enormously in 50 years. "If he had spent time in the archives," says van Pelt, "he would have found evidence about ventilation systems, ways to introduce Zyclon B into these buildings--but of course I don't think he knows German so it wouldn't have helped very much." The most devastating rebuttal is from the chemist in charge of the Auschwitz analysis, who explains that the gas wouldn't have penetrated more than 10 microns into the wall (a human hair is 100 microns thick), so by crushing the samples (standard procedure), he had effectively diluted the cyanide 100,000 times. Against all this, Morris shows footage of Leuchter chiseling at Auschwitz and even adds some of his own, along with slow-motion shots of hammers bashing rocks, walls, floors, etc. It's an obscenity. After my rage at Leuchter had subsided, I began to get angry at Morris for aestheticizing that violation--turning it into an ironic art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. His technique is based on standing back--maintaining a fixed distance--while his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need to play Mike Wallace and demolish Leuchter on camera. You could just ask him what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: "Have you ever thought you might be wrong or that you made a mistake?"--sufficiently broad that Leuchter can casually affirm his own inanity. My concern here isn't so much for Leuchter or even the Holocaust revisionists, who'll just think he was sandbagged. The problem is that when a documentary filmmaker seems too scared or cool or arty to violate his own immaculate aesthetic, he ends up weakening his case. He also provides no emotional release, which isn't a small matter when the subject is Holocaust denial. Morris was close enough to Leuchter to have gotten something more, to have gone a little deeper in search of a poison that does penetrate surfaces.

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The Repairman By Harry Harrison Illustrated by Kramer Being an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn’t be so bad … if I could shoot the trouble! The Old Man had that look of intense glee on his face that meant someone was in for a very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no great feat of intelligence to figure it would be me. I talked first, bold attack being the best defense and so forth. “I quit. Don’t bother telling me what dirty job you have cooked up, because I have already quit and you do not want to reveal company secrets to me.” The grin was even wider now and he actually chortled as he thumbed a button on his console. A thick legal document slid out of the delivery slot onto his desk. “This is your contract,” he said. “It tells how and when you will work. A steel-and-vanadium-bound contract that you couldn’t crack with a molecular disruptor.” I leaned out quickly, grabbed it and threw it into the air with a single motion. Before it could fall, I had my Solar out and, with a wide-angle shot, burned the contract to ashes. The Old Man pressed the button again and another contract slid out on his desk. If possible, the smile was still wider now. “I should have said a duplicate of your contract—like this one here.” He made a quick note on his secretary plate. “I have deducted 13 credits from your salary for the cost of the duplicate—as well as a 100-credit fine for firing a Solar inside a building.” I slumped, defeated, waiting for the blow to land. The Old Man fondled my contract. “According to this document, you can’t quit. Ever. Therefore I have a little job I know you’ll enjoy. Repair job. The Centauri beacon has shut down. It’s a Mark III beacon.…” “ What kind of beacon?” I asked him. I have repaired hyperspace beacons from one arm of the Galaxy to the other and was sure I had worked on every type or model made. But I had never heard of this kind. “Mark III,” the Old Man repeated, practically chortling. “I never heard of it either until Records dug up the specs. They found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the earliest type of beacon ever built—by Earth, no less. Considering its location on one of the Proxima Centauri planets, it might very well be the first beacon.” I looked at the blueprints he handed me and felt my eyes glaze with horror. “It’s a monstrosity! It looks more like a distillery than a beacon—must be at least a few hundred meters high. I’m a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over 2000 years old. Just forget about it and build a new one.” The Old Man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. “It would take a year to install a new beacon—besides being too expensive—and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have ships making fifteen-light-year detours now.” He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles. “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down, it is never an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of just plugging in a new part.” He was telling me —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office. He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like you .” I nodded moodily at his pointing finger. “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys, mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must operate!” I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on his finger again. “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract. We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you could draw the money out.” I smiled, a little weakly, I’m afraid, as if I had never meant to keep that account a secret. His spies were getting more efficient every day. Walking down the hall, I tried to figure a way to transfer the money without his catching on—and knew at the same time he was figuring a way to outfigure me. It was all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink, then went on to the spaceport. By the time the ship was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest beacon to the broken-down Proxima Centauri Beacon was on one of the planets of Beta Circinus and I headed there first, a short trip of only about nine days in hyperspace. To understand the importance of the beacons, you have to understand hyperspace. Not that many people do, but it is easy enough to understand that in this non -space the regular rules don’t apply. Speed and measurements are a matter of relationship, not constant facts like the fixed universe. The first ships to enter hyperspace had no place to go—and no way to even tell if they had moved. The beacons solved that problem and opened the entire universe. They are built on planets and generate tremendous amounts of power. This power is turned into radiation that is punched through into hyperspace. Every beacon has a code signal as part of its radiation and represents a measurable point in hyperspace. Triangulation and quadrature of the beacons works for navigation—only it follows its own rules. The rules are complex and variable, but they are still rules that a navigator can follow. For a hyperspace jump, you need at least four beacons for an accurate fix. For long jumps, navigators use as many as seven or eight. So every beacon is important and every one has to keep operating. That is where I and the other trouble-shooters came in. We travel in well-stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything; only one man to a ship because that is all it takes to operate the overly efficient repair machinery. Due to the very nature of our job, we spend most of our time just rocketing through normal space. After all, when a beacon breaks down, how do you find it? Not through hyperspace. All you can do is approach as close as you can by using other beacons, then finish the trip in normal space. This can take months, and often does. This job didn’t turn out to be quite that bad. I zeroed on the Beta Circinus beacon and ran a complicated eight-point problem through the navigator, using every beacon I could get an accurate fix on. The computer gave me a course with an estimated point-of-arrival as well as a built-in safety factor I never could eliminate from the machine. I would much rather take a chance of breaking through near some star than spend time just barreling through normal space, but apparently Tech knows this, too. They had a safety factor built into the computer so you couldn’t end up inside a star no matter how hard you tried. I’m sure there was no humaneness in this decision. They just didn’t want to lose the ship. It was a twenty-hour jump, ship’s time, and I came through in the middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled to itself and scanned all the stars, comparing them to the spectra of Proxima Centauri. It finally rang a bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece. A fast reading with the photocell gave me the apparent magnitude and a comparison with its absolute magnitude showed its distance. Not as bad as I had thought—a six-week run, give or take a few days. After feeding a course tape into the robot pilot, I strapped into the acceleration tank and went to sleep. The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary distance. Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts, was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey. The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the eye controls and dived the thing down. I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch the beacon appear on the screen. The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely wasn’t my beacon. Or wasn’t it? I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something clicked in my mind. Locking the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course, weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing, had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon. I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks flying in every direction. I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit that would return it automatically to the ship. Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the bottle. Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison. Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon has to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some inaccessible place. Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language. And, for that , I had long before worked out a system that was fool-proof. I had a pryeye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though it was a little disconcerting to see it float by. I located a lizard town about a thousand kilometers from the pyramid and dropped the eye. It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow. This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder. After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, “Hey, George!” and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I caught one of them alone and shouted “Hey, George!” at him. It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned around. When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I figured it was time to make a contact. I found him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in an outcropping of rock and wait for him. When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local religion. Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells, rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet. “Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to notice that he took the cash before taking off. After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily filled him in. I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it wasn’t nice. In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice little religious war going on around the pyramid. It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach this continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of course, what happened. A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true. A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife, murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of priests guarded the sacred fount. And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing. It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would cheerfully rat on me when I got back. Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh equipment. Working from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t have to look exactly like them, just something close, to soothe the native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the Centaurians. When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment I would need and began to wire the suit. When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance. That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it was light, then dropped straight down. It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived. I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud, just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my jaws. The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed. Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp. The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive again. “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed the control in my palm at the same time. It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I walked through the temple doors. “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said. Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside. The temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something. The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?” I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to restore the Holy Waters.” This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead. Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me. “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We will—” “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.” When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke. The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and settled all the major points. I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this, tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to me. “Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an old suitcase can be called smiling. He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain got back in gear. “Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in my case you will have to blind me before I leave the Holy of Holies, not now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning iron.” He took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me. The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to behind me and I was alone in the dark. But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led the way without a word. A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal doorway labeled in archaic script MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon. I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright from constant polishing. I checked the readings carefully and found just what I had suspected. One of the eager lizards had managed to open a circuit box and had polished the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one of the switches and that had caused the trouble. Rather , that had started the trouble. It wasn’t going to be ended by just reversing the water-valve switch. This valve was supposed to be used only for repairs, after the pile was damped. When the water was cut off with the pile in operation, it had started to overheat and the automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit. I could start the water again easily enough, but there was no fuel left in the reactor. I wasn’t going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be far easier to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was about a tenth the size of the ancient bucket of bolts and produced at least four times the power. Before I sent for it, I checked over the rest of the beacon. In 2000 years, there should be some sign of wear. The old boys had built well, I’ll give them credit for that. Ninety per cent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no wear whatever. Other parts they had beefed up, figuring they would wear, but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe walls were at least three meters thick—and the pipe opening itself no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I made a list of parts. The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away without being seen. I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it. When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside the beacon door when I woke up. The repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job they were waiting for. I threw the switch that started the water flowing again. There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down for the eye-burning ceremony. The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it was bolted and barred from the other side. “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and serve your every need.” A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept. “What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration almost shook my head off. The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open. Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it. The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath the surface. “What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness, they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the ceremony!” The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes, under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor. A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well. Before they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it, of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders. I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute. Then I was out in the fresh air and away. When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything. One: The beacon was repaired. Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage, accidental or deliberate. Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which added up to— Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers. I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that it would be some other repairman who’d get the job. — Harry Harrison Transcriber’s Note This etext was produced from Galaxy February 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

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[115] THE HILLS OF HOME by Alfred Coppel “Normality” is a myth; we're all a little neurotic, and the study of neurosis has been able to classify the general types of disturbance which are most common. And some types (providing the subject is not suffering so extreme a case as to have crossed the border into psychosis) can be not only useful, but perhaps necessary for certain kinds of work.... The river ran still and deep, green and gray in the eddies with the warm smell of late summer rising out of the slow water. Madrone and birch and willow, limp in the evening quiet, and the taste of smouldering leaves.... It wasn’t the Russian River. It was the Sacred Iss. The sun had touched the gem-encrusted cliffs by the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus and had vanished, leaving only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry of shore birds. From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of victims borne into [116] this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss. Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along the base of the Golden Cliffs— The sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.” Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said. “Coming up.” He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured taste of the cigaret on his tongue. Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So long a road, he thought, from then to now. Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their Rorschach blots. “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——” “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.” How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer? Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress. The water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk and the grasping, blood-sucking arms—— The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it tightly, knowing that he [117] could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to attack the white Therns and their Plant Men. For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let it be the color of an emerald. He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet. Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter, the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people. The phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——” Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river. That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had brought to this cursed valley. “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining through. There wasn’t much time left. Kimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket. They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one? The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and without expression. [118] Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how I feel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go. On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking: They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being fair. Steinhart was only doing his job. The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes. Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What have I to do with you now, he thought? Outside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of ferroconcrete. As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone. “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart observed in a quiet voice. Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on their forehead? “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said. Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught the movement and half-smiled. “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the psych said. “It doesn’t matter now.” “No, I suppose not.” “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.” “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart [119] said. “It’s just some of the things——” Kimball said: “I talked too much.” “You had to.” “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would you,” the Colonel said smiling. “You were married, Kim. What happened?” “More therapy?” “I’d like to know. This is for me.” Kimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the way she put it.” “She knew you were a career officer; what did she expect——?” “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.” “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.” They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky. Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched them wheel across the clear, deep night. “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean that.” “Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening gulf. “What will you do?” “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it comes.” “In two years.” “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that it didn’t matter? He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes. “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.” “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up already? “Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of course. You know there’s no such thing as a normal human being. We all have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.” Kimball turned to regard the psych coolly . “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do you know?” The analyst flushed. “No.” “I didn’t think so.” “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,” Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely child.” [120] Kimball was watching the sky again. Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——” Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal. “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the planets——” Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon. They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn. Kimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the pebbled shore of the River Iss. They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze came up. “Kimm-eeeee—” They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—” He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror. He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor. “Where is that little brat, anyway?” “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find him——” “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My rad-ium pis-tol——’” “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you AN-swer!” Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the shifting light of the two moons. [121] “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!” If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords clashing—— “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!” “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!” The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He shivered, not with horror now. With cold. He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks. He lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball slept insulated and complete. And he dreamed. He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old—— And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented cottage and saying exasperatedly: “ Why do you run off by yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so—— ” And his sisters: “ Playing with his wooden swords and his radium pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful books—— ” He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of Mars. And Steinhart: “ What is reality, Kimmy? ” The hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams. He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of the world. He dreamed of his wife. “ You don’t live here, Kim. ” She was right, of course. He [122] wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction. And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night. He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness. “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger; I feel different.” The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals. There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the internal fires died. Kimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep, burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation. What is reality, Kimmy? Steinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He had never been so alone. And then he imagined he saw something moving on the great plain. He scrambled down through the ship, past the empty fuel tanks and the lashed supplies. His hands were clawing desperately at the dogs of the outer valve. Suddenly the pressure jerked the hatch from his hands and he gasped at the icy air, his lungs laboring to breathe. He dropped to one knee and sucked at the thin, frigid air. His vision was cloudy and his head felt light. But there was something moving on the plain. A shadowy cavalcade. Strange monstrous men on fantastic war-mounts, long spears and fluttering pennons. Huge golden chariots with scythes flashing on the circling hubs and armored giants, the figments of a long remembered dream—— He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse. Kimmm-eee! [123] A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him. Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon. Kimmmm-eeeee! The voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice. He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep—— He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice, he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now, or die. They were the hills of home. Transcriber’s Note and Errata This etext was produced from “Future Science Fiction” No. 30 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. The original page numbers from the magazine have been preserved. The following errors have been corrected:

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Comet, July 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. The Street That Wasn't There by CLIFFORD D. SIMAK and CARL JACOBI Mr. Jonathon Chambers left his house on Maple Street at exactly seven o'clock in the evening and set out on the daily walk he had taken, at the same time, come rain or snow, for twenty solid years. The walk never varied. He paced two blocks down Maple Street, stopped at the Red Star confectionery to buy a Rose Trofero perfecto, then walked to the end of the fourth block on Maple. There he turned right on Lexington, followed Lexington to Oak, down Oak and so by way of Lincoln back to Maple again and to his home. He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr. Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr. Chambers took his cigar. That was all. For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once had been a professor at State University. A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university. A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers started out at seven o'clock. It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke. He walked unhurriedly, swinging his cane a bit less jauntily than twenty years ago. He tucked the muffler more securely under the rusty old topcoat and pulled his bowler hat more firmly on his head. He noticed that the street light at the corner of Maple and Jefferson was out and he grumbled a little to himself when he was forced to step off the walk to circle a boarded-off section of newly-laid concrete work before the driveway of 816. It seemed that he reached the corner of Lexington and Maple just a bit too quickly, but he told himself that this couldn't be. For he never did that. For twenty years, since the year following his expulsion from the university, he had lived by the clock. The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed existence had grown on him gradually. So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase. A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers. "... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ... thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt...." The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas, probably. He remembered one from many years before, something about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book Mr. Chambers had written. But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again, looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ... absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him. That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago. There was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers caught some excited words: "It's happening everywhere.... What do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain...." But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not wish to talk. One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk. Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his pocket. He started violently. It was only 7:30! For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked audibly. But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight. Now.... It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong. He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase his evening smoke. Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his house and locked the door behind him. He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he shook his head in bewilderment. Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece. But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash. He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter, unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went. But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see him coming. And so he knew that this was the year 1960 and that the wars in Europe and Asia had flamed to an end to be followed by a terrible plague, a plague that even now was sweeping through country after country like wild fire, decimating populations. A plague undoubtedly induced by hunger and privation and the miseries of war. But those things he put away as items far removed from his own small world. He disregarded them. He pretended he had never heard of them. Others might discuss and worry over them if they wished. To him they simply did not matter. But there were two things tonight that did matter. Two curious, incredible events. He had arrived home fifteen minutes early. He had forgotten his cigar. Huddled in the chair, he frowned slowly. It was disquieting to have something like that happen. There must be something wrong. Had his long exile finally turned his mind ... perhaps just a very little ... enough to make him queer? Had he lost his sense of proportion, of perspective? No, he hadn't. Take this room, for example. After twenty years it had come to be as much a part of him as the clothes he wore. Every detail of the room was engraved in his mind with ... clarity; the old center leg table with its green covering and stained glass lamp; the mantelpiece with the dusty bric-a-brac; the pendulum clock that told the time of day as well as the day of the week and month; the elephant ash tray on the tabaret and, most important of all, the marine print. Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague outline of a larger vessel. There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head. He had put it there because he liked it best. Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither define nor understand. When finally he dozed off it was to lose himself in a series of horrific dreams. He dreamed first that he was a castaway on a tiny islet in mid-ocean, that the waters around the island teemed with huge poisonous sea snakes ... hydrophinnae ... and that steadily those serpents were devouring the island. In another dream he was pursued by a horror which he could neither see nor hear, but only could imagine. And as he sought to flee he stayed in the one place. His legs worked frantically, pumping like pistons, but he could make no progress. It was as if he ran upon a treadway. Then again the terror descended on him, a black, unimagined thing and he tried to scream and couldn't. He opened his mouth and strained his vocal cords and filled his lungs to bursting with the urge to shriek ... but not a sound came from his lips. All next day he was uneasy and as he left the house that evening, at precisely seven o'clock, he kept saying to himself: "You must not forget tonight! You must remember to stop and get your cigar!" The street light at the corner of Jefferson was still out and in front of 816 the cemented driveway was still boarded off. Everything was the same as the night before. And now, he told himself, the Red Star confectionery is in the next block. I must not forget tonight. To forget twice in a row would be just too much. He grasped that thought firmly in his mind, strode just a bit more rapidly down the street. But at the corner he stopped in consternation. Bewildered, he stared down the next block. There was no neon sign, no splash of friendly light upon the sidewalk to mark the little store tucked away in this residential section. He stared at the street marker and read the word slowly: GRANT. He read it again, unbelieving, for this shouldn't be Grant Street, but Marshall. He had walked two blocks and the confectionery was between Marshall and Grant. He hadn't come to Marshall yet ... and here was Grant. Or had he, absent-mindedly, come one block farther than he thought, passed the store as on the night before? For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact grew slowly in his brain: There wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant had disappeared! Now he understood why he had missed the store on the night before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early. On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way unsteadily to his chair in the corner. What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up? Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded life, knew nothing about? Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat, then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ... somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half whispered thought. A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness. There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself. Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself. He brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues. Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America, of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread into that nation's boundaries. Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South America. Billions, perhaps. And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life, seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled brain failed to find the answer. The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood upon the mantel. Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and looked out. Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the chimneys and trees against a silvered sky. But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a house that suddenly had gone mad. He stared at it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong with it. He recalled how it had always stood, foursquare, a solid piece of mid-Victorian architecture. Then, before his eyes, the house righted itself again. Slowly it drew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted its dimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it had to be. With a sigh of relief, Mr. Chambers turned back into the hall. But before he closed the door, he looked again. The house was lop-sided ... as bad, perhaps worse than before! Gulping in fright, Mr. Chambers slammed the door shut, locked it and double bolted it. Then he went to his bedroom and took two sleeping powders. His dreams that night were the same as on the night before. Again there was the islet in mid-ocean. Again he was alone upon it. Again the squirming hydrophinnae were eating his foothold piece by piece. He awoke, body drenched with perspiration. Vague light of early dawn filtered through the window. The clock on the bedside table showed 7:30. For a long time he lay there motionless. Again the fantastic happenings of the night before came back to haunt him and as he lay there, staring at the windows, he remembered them, one by one. But his mind, still fogged by sleep and astonishment, took the happenings in its stride, mulled over them, lost the keen edge of fantastic terror that lurked around them. The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out. There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple tree that grew close against the house. But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch. The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that. And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ... they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself when he thought of how it should look. Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too weary to think about the house. He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think. And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany bookcase that stood against the wall. There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered. Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the school. It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind. Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of happier days swept over him. Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written so long ago the very words seemed strange and unreal: Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical fate of this earth ... yes, even the universe. Billions of minds seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets ... and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were.... Destroy those minds and the entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power, will crumple and slip away like a column of sand.... His eyes followed down the page: Yet this would have nothing to do with matter itself ... but only with matter's form. For while the mind of man through long ages may have moulded an imagery of that space in which he lives, mind would have little conceivable influence upon the existence of that matter. What exists in our known universe shall exist always and can never be destroyed, only altered or transformed. But in modern astrophysics and mathematics we gain an insight into the possibility ... yes probability ... that there are other dimensions, other brackets of time and space impinging on the one we occupy. If a pin is thrust into a shadow, would that shadow have any knowledge of the pin? It would not, for in this case the shadow is two dimensional, the pin three dimensional. Yet both occupy the same space. Granting then that the power of men's minds alone holds this universe, or at least this world in its present form, may we not go farther and envision other minds in some other plane watching us, waiting, waiting craftily for the time they can take over the domination of matter? Such a concept is not impossible. It is a natural conclusion if we accept the double hypothesis: that mind does control the formation of all matter; and that other worlds lie in juxtaposition with ours. Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own. He stood astounded beside the bookcase, his eyes staring unseeing into the fire upon the hearth. He had written that. And because of those words he had been called a heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at the university, had been forced into this hermit life. A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions all over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds there now were one or two. A feeble force to hold the form of matter intact. The plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life, had blighted Africa, had reached South America ... might even have come to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had heard, the words of the men at the drugstore corner, the buildings disappearing. Something scientists could not explain. But those were merely scraps of information. He did not know the whole story ... he could not know. He never listened to the radio, never read a newspaper. But abruptly the whole thing fitted together in his brain like the missing piece of a puzzle into its slot. The significance of it all gripped him with damning clarity. There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another dimension was fighting to supersede man's control and take his universe into its own plane! Abruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case and picked up his hat and coat. He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him. He moved through the hall to the door, emerged into the street. On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But there wasn't any sun ... only an all pervading grayness that shrouded everything ... not a gray fog, but a gray emptiness that seemed devoid of life, of any movement. The walk led to his gate and there it ended, but as he moved forward the sidewalk came into view and the house ahead loomed out of the gray, but a house with differences. He moved forward rapidly. Visibility extended only a few feet and as he approached them the houses materialized like two dimensional pictures without perspective, like twisted cardboard soldiers lining up for review on a misty morning. Once he stopped and looked back and saw that the grayness had closed in behind him. The houses were wiped out, the sidewalk faded into nothing. He shouted, hoping to attract attention. But his voice frightened him. It seemed to ricochet up and into the higher levels of the sky, as if a giant door had been opened to a mighty room high above him. He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and Lexington. With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat bouncing on his head. Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful that it still was there. On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he saw.... Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge streamers and ellipses above the higher levels. And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him. Thousands of eyes glaring down with but a single purpose. And as he continued to look, something else seemed to take form above that wall. A design this time, that swirled and writhed in the ribbons of radiance and rapidly coalesced into strange geometric features, without definite line or detail. A colossal face, a face of indescribable power and evil, it was, staring down with malevolent composure. Then the city and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded like a darkened magic-lantern, and the grayness moved in again. Mr. Chambers pushed open the door of his house. But he did not lock it. There was no need of locks ... not any more. A few coals of fire still smouldered in the grate and going there, he stirred them up, raked away the ash, piled on more wood. The flames leaped merrily, dancing in the chimney's throat. Without removing his hat and coat, he sank exhausted in his favorite chair, closed his eyes then opened them again. He sighed with relief as he saw the room was unchanged. Everything in its accustomed place: the clock, the lamp, the elephant ash tray, the marine print on the wall. Everything was as it should be. The clock measured the silence with its measured ticking; it chimed abruptly and the vase sent up its usual sympathetic vibration. This was his room, he thought. Rooms acquire the personality of the person who lives in them, become a part of him. This was his world, his own private world, and as such it would be the last to go. But how long could he ... his brain ... maintain its existence? Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little breath of reassurance returned to him. They couldn't take this away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form. But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since he had first planned the house's building, had lived here. This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must.... He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume. His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him. For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there! Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones. So the change already had started here! The unfamiliar books were gone and that fitted in the pattern ... for it would be the least familiar things that would go first. Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or did the lamp on the table blur and begin to fade away? But as he stared at it, it became clear again, a solid, substantial thing. For a moment real fear reached out and touched him with chilly fingers. For he knew that this room no longer was proof against the thing that had happened out there on the street. Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his own mind? Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing children and barking dogs? Might not the Red Star confectionery still exist, splashing the street with the red of its neon sign? Could it be that he was going mad? He had heard whispers when he had passed, whispers the gossiping housewives had not intended him to hear. And he had heard the shouting of boys when he walked by. They thought him mad. Could he be really mad? But he knew he wasn't mad. He knew that he perhaps was the sanest of all men who walked the earth. For he, and he alone, had foreseen this very thing. And the others had scoffed at him for it. Somewhere else the children might be playing on a street. But it would be a different street. And the children undoubtedly would be different too. For the matter of which the street and everything upon it had been formed would now be cast in a different mold, stolen by different minds in a different dimension. Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own. But there had been no need to wait for that distant day. Scant years after he had written those prophetic words the thing was happening. Man had played unwittingly into the hands of those other minds in the other dimension. Man had waged a war and war had bred a pestilence. And the whole vast cycle of events was but a detail of a cyclopean plan. He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic premeditation. On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a sob forced its way to his lips. There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser had been there was greyish nothingness. Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door. Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no familiar hat rack and umbrella stand. Nothing.... Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner. "So here I am," he said, half aloud. So there he was. Embattled in the last corner of the world that was left to him. Perhaps there were other men like him, he thought. Men who stood at bay against the emptiness that marked the transition from one dimension to another. Men who had lived close to the things they loved, who had endowed those things with such substantial form by power of mind alone that they now stood out alone against the power of some greater mind. The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This room still retained its form. This room, he knew, would stay the longest. And when the rest of the room was gone, this corner with his favorite chair would remain. For this was the spot where he had lived for twenty years. The bedroom was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. This room was for living. This was his last stand. These were the walls and floors and prints and lamps that had soaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps. He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors' houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he had lived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinly spread; their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon an area four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve. Staring through the window, he saw it again. The same vision he had looked upon before and yet different in an indescribable way. There was the city illumined in the sky. There were the elliptical towers and turrets, the cube-shaped domes and battlements. He could see with stereoscopic clarity the aerial bridges, the gleaming avenues sweeping on into infinitude. The vision was nearer this time, but the depth and proportion had changed ... as if he were viewing it from two concentric angles at the same time. And the face ... the face of magnitude ... of power of cosmic craft and evil.... Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the room. The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away and with them went one corner of the room. And then the elephant ash tray. "Oh, well," said Mr. Chambers, "I never did like that very well." Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal. Something one could expect to happen. Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back. But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone, simply couldn't do it. He wondered what the elephant ash tray looked like in that other dimension. It certainly wouldn't be an elephant ash tray nor would the radio be a radio, for perhaps they didn't have ash trays or radios or elephants in the invading dimension. He wondered, as a matter of fact, what he himself would look like when he finally slipped into the unknown. For he was matter, too, just as the ash tray and radio were matter. He wondered if he would retain his individuality ... if he still would be a person. Or would he merely be a thing? There was one answer to all of that. He simply didn't know. Nothingness advanced upon him, ate its way across the room, stalking him as he sat in the chair underneath the lamp. And he waited for it. The room, or what was left of it, plunged into dreadful silence. Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first time in twenty years. He leaped from his chair and then sat down again. The clock hadn't stopped. It wasn't there. There was a tingling sensation in his feet.

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[101] EXILE BY H. B. FYFE ILLUSTRATED BY EMSH The Dome of Eyes made it almost impossible for Terrans to reach the world of Tepokt. For those who did land there, there was no returning—only the bitterness of respect—and justice! The Tepoktan student, whose blue robe in George Kinton's opinion clashed with the dull purple of his scales, twiddled a three-clawed hand for attention. Kinton nodded to him from his place on the dais before the group. "Then you can give us no precise count of the stars in the galaxy, George?" Kinton smiled wrily, and ran a wrinkled hand through his graying hair. In the clicking Tepoktan speech, his name came out more like "Chortch." Questions like this had been put to him often during the ten years since his rocket had hurtled through the meteorite belt and down to the surface of Tepokt, leaving him the only survivor. Barred off as they were from venturing into space, the highly civilized Tepoktans constantly displayed the curiosity of dreamers in matters related to the universe. Because of the veil of meteorites and satellite fragments whirling about their planet, their astronomers had acquired torturous skills but only scraps of real knowledge. "As I believe I mentioned in some of my recorded lectures," Kinton answered in their language, [103] "the number is actually as vast as it seems to those of you peering through the Dome of Eyes. The scientists of my race have not yet encountered any beings capable of estimating the total." He leaned back and scanned the faces of his interviewers, faces that would have been oddly humanoid were it not for the elongated snouts and pointed, sharp-toothed jaws. The average Tepoktan was slightly under Kinton's height of five-feet-ten, with a long, supple trunk. Under the robes their scholars affected, the shortness of their two bowed legs was not obvious; but the sight of the short, thick arms carried high before their chests still left Kinton with a feeling of misproportion. He should be used to it after ten years, he thought, but even the reds or purples of the scales or the big teeth seemed more natural. "I sympathize with your curiosity," he added. "It is a marvel that your scientists have managed to measure the distances of so many stars." He could tell that they were pleased by his admiration, and wondered yet again why any little show of approval by him was so eagerly received. Even though he was the first stellar visitor in their recorded history, Kinton remained conscious of the fact that in many fields he was unable to offer the Tepoktans any new ideas. In one or two ways, he believed, no Terran could teach their experts anything. "Then will you tell us, George, more about the problems of your first space explorers?" came another question. Before Kinton had formed his answer, the golden curtains at the rear of the austerely simple chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan serving the current year as Kinton's chief aide, hurried toward the dais. The twenty-odd members of the group fell silent on their polished stone benches, turning their pointed visages to follow Klaft's progress. The aide reached Kinton and bent to hiss and cluck into the latter's ear in what he presumably considered an undertone. The Terran laboriously spelled out the message inscribed on the limp, satiny paper held before his eyes. Then he rose and took one step toward the waiting group. "I regret I shall have to conclude this discussion," he announced. "I am informed that another ship from space has reached the surface of Tepokt. My presence is requested in case the crew are of my own planet." [104] Klaft excitedly skipped down to lead the way up the aisle, but Kinton hesitated. Those in the audience were scholars or officials to whom attendance at one of Kinton's limited number of personal lectures was awarded as an honor. They would hardly learn anything from him directly that was not available in recordings made over the course of years. The Tepoktan scientists, historians, and philosophers had respectfully but eagerly gathered every crumb of information Kinton knowingly had to offer—and some he thought he had forgotten. Still ... he sensed the disappointment at his announcement. "I shall arrange for you to await my return here in town," Kinton said, and there were murmurs of pleasure. Later, aboard the jet helicopter that was basically like those Kinton remembered using on Terra twenty light years away, he shook his head at Klaft's respectful protest. "But George! It was enough that they were present when you received the news. They can talk about that the rest of their lives! You must not waste your strength on these people who come out of curiosity." Kinton smiled at his aide's earnest concern. Then he turned to look out the window as he recalled the shadow that underlay such remonstrances. He estimated that he was about forty-eight now, as nearly as he could tell from the somewhat longer revolutions of Tepokt. The time would come when he would age and die. Whose wishes would then prevail? Maybe he was wrong, he thought. Maybe he shouldn't stand in the way of their biologists and surgeons. But he'd rather be buried, even if that left them with only what he could tell them about the human body. To help himself forget the rather preoccupied manner in which some of the Tepoktan scientists occasionally eyed him, he peered down at the big dam of the hydro-electric project being completed to Kinton's design. Power from this would soon light the town built to house the staff of scientists, students, and workers assigned to the institute organized about the person of Kinton. Now, there was an example of their willingness to repay him for whatever help he had been, he reflected. They hadn't needed that for themselves. In some ways, compared to [105] those of Terra, the industries of Tepokt were underdeveloped. In the first place, the population was smaller and had different standards of luxury. In the second, a certain lack of drive resulted from the inability to break out into interplanetary space. Kinton had been inexplicably lucky to have reached the surface even in a battered hulk. The shell of meteorites was at least a hundred miles thick and constantly shifting. "We do not know if they have always been meteorites," the Tepoktans had told Kinton, "or whether part of them come from a destroyed satellite; but our observers have proved mathematically that no direct path through them may be predicted more than a very short while in advance." Kinton turned away from the window as he caught the glint of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of the spaceship they had also built for him. Perhaps ... would it be fair to encourage the newcomer to attempt the barrier? For ten years, Kinton had failed to work up any strong desire to try it. The Tepoktans called the ever-shifting lights the Dome of Eyes, after a myth in which each tiny satellite bright enough to be visible was supposed to watch over a single individual on the surface. Like their brothers on Terra, the native astronomers could trace their science back to a form of astrology; and Kinton often told them jokingly that he felt no urge to risk a physical encounter with his own personal Eye. The helicopter started to descend, and Kinton remembered that the city named in his message was only about twenty miles from his home. The brief twilight of Tepokt was passing by the time he set foot on the landing field, and he paused to look up. The brighter stars visible from this part of the planet twinkled back at him, and he knew that each was being scrutinized by some amateur or professional astronomer. Before an hour had elapsed, most of them would be obscured by the tiny moonlets, some of which could already be seen. These could easily be mistaken for stars or the other five planets of the system, but in a short while the tinier ones in groups would cause a celestial haze resembling a miniature Milky Way. Klaft, who had descended first, leaving the pilot to bring up the rear, noticed Kinton's pause. "Glory glitters till it is known for a curse," he remarked, quoting a Tepoktan proverb often applied [106] by the disgruntled scientists to the Dome of Eyes. Kinton observed, however, that his aide also stared upward for a long moment. The Tepoktans loved speculating about the unsolvable. They had even founded clubs to argue whether two satellites had been destroyed or only one. Half a dozen officials hastened up to escort the party to the vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft succeeded in quieting the lesser members of the delegation so that Kinton was able to learn a few facts about the new arrival. The crash had been several hundred miles away, but someone had thought of the hospital in this city which was known to have a doctor rating as an expert in human physiology. The survivor—only one occupant of the wreck, alive or dead, had been discovered—had accordingly been flown here. With a clanging of bells, the little convoy of ground cars drew up in front of the hospital. A way was made through the chittering crowd around the entrance. Within a few minutes, Kinton found himself looking down at a pallet upon which lay another Terran. A man! he thought, then curled a lip wrily at the sudden, unexpected pang of disappointment. Well, he hadn't realized until then what he was really hoping for! The spaceman had been cleaned up and bandaged by the native medicos. Kinton saw that his left thigh was probably broken. Other dressings suggested cracked ribs and lacerations on the head and shoulders. The man was dark-haired but pale of skin, with a jutting chin and a nose that had been flattened in some earlier mishap. The flaring set of his ears somehow emphasized an overall leanness. Even in sleep, his mouth was thin and hard. "Thrown across the controls after his belt broke loose?" Kinton guessed. "I bow to your wisdom, George," said the plump Tepoktan doctor who appeared to be in charge. Kinton could not remember him, but everyone on the planet addressed the Terran by the sound they fondly thought to be his first name. "This is Doctor Chuxolkhee," murmured Klaft. Kinton made the accepted gesture of greeting with one hand and said, "You seem to have treated him very expertly." Chuxolkhee ruffled the scales around his neck with pleasure. [107] "I have studied Terran physiology," he admitted complacently. "From your records and drawings, of course, George, for I have not yet had the good fortune to visit you." "We must arrange a visit soon," said Kinton. "Klaft will—" He broke off at the sound from the patient. "A Terran!" mumbled the injured man. He shook his head dazedly, tried to sit up, and subsided with a groan. Why, he looked scared when he saw me , thought Kinton. "You're all right now," he said soothingly. "It's all over and you're in good hands. I gather there were no other survivors of the crash?" The man stared curiously. Kinton realized that his own language sputtered clumsily from his lips after ten years. He tried again. "My name is George Kinton. I don't blame you if I'm hard to understand. You see, I've been here ten years without ever having another Terran to speak to." The spaceman considered that for a few breaths, then seemed to relax. "Al Birken," he introduced himself laconically. "Ten years?" "A little over," confirmed Kinton. "It's extremely unusual that anything gets through to the surface, let alone a spaceship. What happened to you?" Birken's stare was suspicious. "Then you ain't heard about the new colonies? Naw—you musta come here when all the planets were open." "We had a small settlement on the second planet," Kinton told him. "You mean there are new Terran colonies?" "Yeah. Jet-hoppers spreadin' all over the other five. None of the land-hungry poops figured a way to set down here, though, or they'd be creepin' around this planet too." "How did you happen to do it? Run out of fuel?" The other eyed him for a few seconds before dropping his gaze. Kinton was struck with sudden doubt. The outposts of civilization were followed by less desirable developments as a general rule—prisons, for instance. He resolved to be wary of the visitor. "Ya might say I was explorin'," Birken replied at last. "That's why I come alone. Didn't want nobody else hurt if I didn't make it. Say, how bad am I banged up?" Kinton realized guiltily that the man should be resting. He [108] had lost track of the moments he had wasted in talk while the others with him stood attentively about. He questioned the doctor briefly and relayed the information that Birken's leg was broken but that the other injuries were not serious. "They'll fix you up," he assured the spaceman. "They're quite good at it, even if the sight of one does make you think a little of an iguana. Rest up, now; and I'll come back again when you're feeling better." For the next three weeks, Kinton flew back and forth from his own town nearly every day. He felt that he should not neglect the few meetings which were the only way he could repay the Tepoktans for all they did for him. On the other hand, the chance to see and talk with one of his own kind drew him like a magnet to the hospital. The doctors operated upon Birken's leg, inserting a metal rod inside the bone by a method they had known before Kinton described it. The new arrival expected to be able to walk, with care, almost any day; although the pin would have to be removed after the bone had healed. Meanwhile, Birken seemed eager to learn all Kinton could tell him about the planet, Tepokt. About himself, he was remarkably reticent. Kinton worried about this. "I think we should not expect too much of this Terran," he warned Klaft uneasily. "You, too, have citizens who do not always obey, your laws, who sometimes ... that is—" "Who are born to die under the axe, as we say," interrupted Klaft, as if to ease the concern plain on Kinton's face. "In other words, criminals. You suspect this Albirken is such a one, George?" "It is not impossible," admitted Kinton unhappily. "He will tell me little about himself. It may be that he was caught in Tepokt's gravity while fleeing from justice." To himself, he wished he had not told Birken about the spaceship. He didn't think the man exactly believed his explanation of why there was no use taking off in it. Yet he continued to spend as much time as he could visiting the other man. Then, as his helicopter landed at the city airport one gray dawn, the news reached him. "The other Terran has gone," Klaft reported, turning from the breathless messenger as Kinton followed him from the machine. [109] "Gone? Where did they take him?" Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed. Kinton repeated his question, wondering about the group of armed police on hand. "In the night," Klaft hissed and clucked, "when none would think to watch him, they tell me ... and quite rightly, I think—" "Get on with it, Klaft! Please!" "In the night, then, Albirken left the chamber in which he lay. He can walk some now, you know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's metal pin. He—he stole a ground car and is gone." "He did?" Kinton had an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Is it known where he went? I mean ... he has been curious to see some of Tepokt. Perhaps—" He stopped, his own words braying in his ears. Klaft was clicking two claws together, a sign of emphatic disagreement. "Albirken," he said, "was soon followed by three police constables in another vehicle. They found him heading in the direction of our town." "Why did he say he was traveling that way?" asked Kinton, thinking to himself of the spaceship! Was the man crazy? "He did not say," answered Klaft expressionlessly. "Taking them by surprise, he killed two of the constables and injured the third before fleeing with one of their spears." " What? " Kinton felt his eyes bulging with dismay. "Yes, for they carried only the short spears of their authority, not expecting to need fire weapons." Kinton looked from him to the messenger, noticing for the first time that the latter was an under-officer of police. He shook his head distractedly. It appeared that his suspicions concerning Birken had been only too accurate. Why was it one like him who got through? he asked himself in silent anguish. After ten years. The Tepoktans had been thinking well of Terrans, but now— He did not worry about his own position. That was well enough established, whether or not he could again hold up his head before the purple-scaled people who had been so generous to him. Even if they had been aroused to a rage by the killing, Kinton told himself, he would not have been concerned about himself. He had reached a fairly ripe age for a spaceman. In fact, he had already [110] enjoyed a decade of borrowed time. But they were more civilized than that wanton murderer, he realized. He straightened up, forcing back his early-morning weariness. "We must get into the air immediately," he told Klaft. "Perhaps we may see him before he reaches—" He broke off at the word "spaceship" but he noticed a reserved expression on Klaft's pointed face. His aide had probably reached a conclusion similar to his own. They climbed back into the cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders to the lean young pilot. A moment later, Kinton saw the ground outside drop away. Only upon turning around did he realize that two armed Tepoktans had materialized in time to follow Klaft inside. One was a constable but the other he recognized for an officer of some rank. Both wore slung across their chests weapons resembling long-barreled pistols with large, oddly indented butts to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable, in addition, carried a contraption with a quadruple tube for launching tiny rockets no thicker than Kinton's thumb. These, he knew, were loaded with an explosive worthy of respect on any planet he had heard of. To protect him, he wondered. Or to get Birken? The pilot headed the craft back toward Kinton's town in the brightening sky of early day. Long before the buildings of Kinton's institute came into view, they received a radio message about Birken. "He has been seen on the road passing the dam," Klaft reported soberly after having been called to the pilot's compartment. "He stopped to demand fuel from some maintenance workers, but they had been warned and fled." "Couldn't they have seized him?" demanded Kinton, his tone sharp with the worry he endeavored to control. "He has that spear, I suppose; but he is only one and injured." Klaft hesitated. "Well, couldn't they?" The aide looked away, out one of the windows at some sun-dyed clouds ranging from pink to orange. He grimaced and clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably. "Perhaps they thought you might be offended, George," he answered at last. Kinton settled back in the seat especially padded to fit the contours of his Terran body, and [111] stared silently at the partition behind the pilot. In other words, he thought, he was responsible for Birken, who was a Terran, one of his own kind. Maybe they really didn't want to risk hurting his feelings, but that was only part of it. They were leaving it up to him to handle what they considered his private affair. He wondered what to do. He had no actual faith in the idea that Birken was delirious, or acting under any influence but that of a criminally self-centered nature. "I shouldn't have told him about the ship!" Kinton muttered, gnawing the knuckle of his left thumb. "He's on the run, all right. Probably scared the colonial authorities will trail him right down through the Dome of Eyes. Wonder what he did?" He caught himself and looked around to see if he had been overheard. Klaft and the police officers peered from their respective windows, in calculated withdrawal. Kinton, disturbed, tried to remember whether he had spoken in Terran or Tepoktan. Would Birken listen if he tried reasoning, he asked himself. Maybe if he showed the man how they had proved the unpredictability of openings through the shifting Dome of Eyes— An exclamation from the constable drew his attention. He rose, and room was made for him at the opposite window. In the distance, beyond the town landing field they were now approaching, Kinton saw a halted ground car. Across the plain which was colored a yellowish tan by a short, grass-like growth, a lone figure plodded toward the upthrust bulk of the spaceship that had never flown. "Never mind landing at the town!" snapped Kinton. "Go directly out to the ship!" Klaft relayed the command to the pilot. The helicopter swept in a descending curve across the plain toward the gleaming hull. As they passed the man below, Birken looked up. He continued to limp along at a brisk pace with the aid of what looked like a short spear. "Go down!" Kinton ordered. The pilot landed about a hundred yards from the spaceship. By the time his passengers had alighted, however, Birken had drawn level with them, about fifty feet away. "Birken!" shouted Kinton. "Where do you think you're going?" Seeing that no one ran after him, Birken slowed his pace, but kept walking toward the ship. [112] He watched them over his shoulder. "Sorry, Kinton," he shouted with no noticeable tone of regret. "I figure I better travel on for my health." "It's not so damn healthy up there!" called Kinton. "I told you how there's no clear path—" "Yeah, yeah, you told me. That don't mean I gotta believe it." "Wait! Don't you think they tried sending unmanned rockets up? Every one was struck and exploded." Birken showed no more change of expression than if the other had commented on the weather. Kinton had stepped forward six or eight paces, irritated despite his anxiety at the way Birken persisted in drifting before him. Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad leg or not, he could probably break the older man in two. He glanced back at the Tepoktans beside the helicopter, Klaft, the pilot, the officer, the constable with the rocket weapon. They stood quietly, looking back at him. The call for help that had risen to his lips died there. "Not their party," he muttered. He turned again to Birken, who still retreated toward the ship. "But he'll only get himself killed and destroy the ship! Or if some miracle gets him through, that's worse! He's nothing to turn loose on a civilized colony again." A twinge of shame tugged down the corners of his mouth as he realized that keeping Birken here would also expose a highly cultured people to an unscrupulous criminal who had already committed murder the very first time he had been crossed. "Birken!" he shouted. "For the last time! Do you want me to send them to drag you back here?" Birken stopped at that. He regarded the motionless Tepoktans with a derisive sneer. "They don't look too eager to me," he taunted. Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression the meaning of which he had deduced after hearing it used by the dam workers. He whirled to run toward the helicopter. Hardly had he taken two steps, however, when he saw startled changes in the carefully blank looks of his escort. The constable half raised his heavy weapon, and Klaft sprang forward with a hissing cry. By the time Kinton's aging muscles obeyed his impulse to sidestep, the spear had already hurtled past. It had missed him by an error of over six feet. [113] He felt his face flushing with sudden anger. Birken was running as best he could toward the spaceship, and had covered nearly half the distance. Kinton ran at the Tepoktans, brushing aside the concerned Klaft. He snatched the heavy weapon from the surprised constable. He turned and raised it to his chest. Because of the shortness of Tepoktan arms, the launcher was constructed so that the butt rested against the chest with the sighting loops before the eyes. The little rocket tubes were above head height, to prevent the handler's catching the blast. The circles of the sights weaved and danced about the running figure. Kinton realized to his surprise that the effort of seizing the weapon had him panting. Or was it the fright at having a spear thrown at him? He decided that Birken had not come close enough for that, and wondered if he was afraid of his own impending action. It wasn't fair, he complained to himself. The poor slob only had a spear, and a man couldn't blame him for wanting to get back to his own sort. He was limping ... hurt ... how could they expect him to realize—? Then, abruptly, his lips tightened to a thin line. The sights steadied on Birken as the latter approached the foot of the ladder leading to the entrance port of the spaceship. Kinton pressed the firing stud. Across the hundred-yard space streaked four flaring little projectiles. Kinton, without exactly seeing each, was aware of the general lines of flight diverging gradually to bracket the figure of Birken. One struck the ground beside the man just as he set one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, and skittered away past one fin of the ship before exploding. Two others burst against the hull, scattering metal fragments, and another puffed on the upright of the ladder just above Birken's head. The spaceman was blown back from the ladder. He balanced on his heels for a moment with outstretched fingers reaching toward the grips from which they had been torn. Then he crumpled into a limp huddle on the yellowing turf. Kinton sighed. The constable took the weapon from him, reloaded deftly, and proffered it again. When the Terran did not reach for it, the officer held out a clawed hand to receive it. He gestured silently, and the constable trotted across [114] the intervening ground to bend over Birken. "He is dead," said Klaft when the constable straightened up with a curt wave. "Will ... will you have someone see to him, please?" Kinton requested, turning toward the helicopter. "Yes, George," said Klaft. "George...?" "Well?" "It would be very instructive—that is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee would like to—" "All right!" yielded Kinton, surprised at the harshness of his own voice. "Just tell him not to bring around any sketches of the various organs for a few months!" He climbed into the helicopter and slumped into his seat. Presently, he was aware of Klaft edging into the seat across the aisle. He looked up. "The police will stay until cars from town arrive. They are coming now," said his aide. Kinton stared at his hands, wondering at the fact that they were not shaking. He felt dejected, empty, not like a man who had just been at a high pitch of excitement. "Why did you not let him go, George?" "What? Why ... why ... he would have destroyed the ship you worked so hard to build. There is no safe path through the Dome of Eyes." "No predictable path," Klaft corrected. "But what then? We would have built you another ship, George, for it was you who showed us how." Kinton flexed his fingers slowly. "He was just no good. You know the murder he did here; we can only guess what he did among my own ... among Terrans. Should he have a chance to go back and commit more crimes?" "I understand, George, the logic of it," said Klaft. "I meant ... it is not my place to say this ... but you seem unhappy." "Possibly," grunted Kinton wrily. "We, too, have criminals," said the aide, as gently as was possible in his clicking language. "We do not think it necessary to grieve for the pain they bring upon themselves." "No, I suppose not," sighed Kinton. "I ... it's just—" He looked up at the pointed visage, at the strange eyes regarding him sympathetically from beneath the sloping, purple-scaled forehead. "It's just that now I'm lonely ... again," he said. Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Space Science Fiction February 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

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SLINGSHOT BY IRVING W. LANDE Illustrated by Emsh The slingshot was, I believe, one of the few weapons of history that wasn't used in the last war. That doesn't mean it won't be used in the next! "Got a bogey at three o'clock high. Range about six hundred miles." Johnson spoke casually, but his voice in the intercom was thin with tension. Captain Paul Coulter, commanding Space Fighter 308, 58th Squadron, 33rd Fighter Wing, glanced up out of his canopy in the direction indicated, and smiled to himself at the instinctive reaction. Nothing there but the familiar starry backdrop, the moon far down to the left. If the light wasn't right, a ship might be invisible at half a mile. He squeezed the throttle mike button. "Any IFF?" "No IFF." "O.K., let me know as soon as you have his course." Coulter squashed out his cigar and began his cockpit check, grinning without humor as he noticed that his breathing had deepened and his palms were moist on the controls. He looked down to make sure his radio was snug in its pocket on his leg; checked the thigh harness of his emergency rocket, wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked the paired tanks of oxygen behind him, hanging level from his shoulders into their niche in the "cradle." He flipped his helmet closed, locked it, and opened it again. He tossed a sardonic salute at the photograph of a young lady who graced the side of the cockpit. "Wish us luck, sugar." He pressed the mike button again. "You got anything yet, Johnny?" "He's going our way, Paul. Have it exact in a minute." Coulter scanned the full arch of sky visible through the curving panels of the dome, thinking the turgid thoughts that always came when action was near. His chest was full of the familiar weakness—not fear exactly, but a tight, helpless feeling that grew and grew with the waiting. His eyes and hands were busy in the familiar procedure, readying the ship for combat, checking and re-checking the details that could mean life and death, but his mind watched disembodied, yearning back to earth. Sylvia always came back first. Inviting smile and outstretched hands. Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and that clinging, clinging white silk skirt. A whirling montage of laughing, challenging eyes and tossing sky-black hair and soft arms tightening around his neck. Then Jean, cool and self-possessed and slightly disapproving, with warmth and humor peeping through from underneath when she smiled. A lazy, crinkly kind of smile, like Christmas lights going on one by one. He wished he'd acted more grown up that night they watched the rain dance at the pueblo. For the hundredth time, he went over what he remembered of their last date, seeing the gleam of her shoulder, and the angry disappointment in her eyes; hearing again his awkward apologies. She was a nice kid. Silently his mouth formed the words. "You're a nice kid." I think she loves me. She was just mad because I got drunk. The tension of approaching combat suddenly blended with the memory, welling up into a rush of tenderness and affection. He whispered her name, and suddenly he knew that if he got back he was going to ask her to marry him. He thought of his father, rocking on the porch of the Pennsylvania farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered old face serene, as he puffed and listened to the radio beside him. He wished he'd written him last night, instead of joining the usual beer and bull session in the wardroom. He wished—. He wished. "I've got him, Paul. He's got two point seven miles of RV on us. Take thirty degrees high on two point one o'clock for course to IP." Automatically he turned the control wheel to the right and eased it back. The gyros recorded the turn to course. "Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds, then coast two minutes for initial point five hundred miles on his tail." "Right, Johnny. One sixty-five, then two minutes." He set the timer, advanced the throttle to 4 G's, and stepped back an inch as the acceleration took him snugly into the cradle. The Return-To-Station-Fuel and Relative-Velocity-To-Station gauges did their usual double takes on a change of course, as the ship computer recorded the new information. He liked those two gauges—the two old ladies. Mrs. RSF kept track of how much more fuel they had than they needed to get home. When they were moving away from station, she dropped in alarmed little jumps, but when they were headed home, she inched along in serene contentment, or if they were coasting, sneaked triumphantly back up the dial. Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at about ten mps away from home, and above fifteen, she was trembling steadily. He didn't blame the old ladies for worrying. With one hour of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a single squirt unless there was a good reason for it. Most of their time on a mission was spent free wheeling, in the anxiety-laden boredom that fighting men have always known. Wish the Red was coming in across our course. It would have taken less fuel, and the chase wouldn't have taken them so far out. But then they'd probably have been spotted, and lost the precious element of surprise. He blessed the advantage of better radar. In this crazy "war," so like the dogfights of the first world war, the better than two hundred mile edge of American radar was more often than not the margin of victory. The American crews were a little sharper, a little better trained, but with their stripped down ships, and midget crewmen, with no personal safety equipment, the Reds could accelerate longer and faster, and go farther out. You had to get the jump on them, or it was just too bad. The second hand hit forty-five in its third cycle, and he stood loose in the cradle as the power died. Sixty-two combat missions but the government says there's no war. His mind wandered back over eight years in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical tests. Psychological tests. Six months of emotional adjustment in the screep. Primary training. Basic and advanced training. The pride and excitement of being chosen for space fighters. By the time he graduated, the United States and Russia each had several satellite stations operating, but in 1979, the United States had won the race for a permanent station on the Moon. What a grind it had been, bringing in the supplies. A year later the Moon station had "blown up." No warning. No survivors. Just a brand-new medium-sized crater. And six months later, the new station, almost completed, went up again. The diplomats had buzzed like hornets, with accusations and threats, but nothing could be proven—there were bombs stored at the station. The implication was clear enough. There wasn't going to be any Moon station until one government ruled Earth. Or until the United States and Russia figured out a way to get along with each other. And so far, getting along with Russia was like trying to get along with an octopus. Of course there were rumors that the psych warfare boys had some gimmick cooked up, to turn the U. S. S. R. upside down in a revolution, the next time power changed hands, but he'd been hearing that one for years. Still, with four new dictators over there in the last eleven years, there was always a chance. Anyway, he was just a space jockey, doing his job in this screwball fight out here in the empty reaches. Back on Earth, there was no war. The statesmen talked, held conferences, played international chess as ever. Neither side bothered the other's satellites, though naturally they were on permanent alert. There just wasn't going to be any Moon station for a while. Nobody knew what there might be on the Moon, but if one side couldn't have it, then the other side wasn't going to have it either. And meanwhile, the struggle was growing deadlier, month by month, each side groping for the stranglehold, looking for the edge that would give domination of space, or make all-out war a good risk. They hadn't found it yet, but it was getting bloodier out here all the time. For a while, it had been a supreme achievement just to get a ship out and back, but gradually, as the ships improved, there was a little margin left over for weapons. Back a year ago, the average patrol was nothing but a sightseeing tour. Not that there was much to see, when you'd been out a few times. Now, there were Reds around practically every mission. Thirteen missions to go, after today. He wondered if he'd quit at seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old pride and excitement were still strong. He still got a kick out of the way the girls looked at the silver rocket on his chest. But he didn't feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine years old, and he was starting to feel like an old man. He pictured himself lecturing to a group of eager kids. Had a couple of close calls, those last two missions. That Red had looked easy, the way he was wandering around. He hadn't spotted them until they were well into their run, but when he got started he'd made them look like slow motion, just the same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained sudden deceleration.... Coulter shook his head at the memory. And on the last mission they'd been lucky to get a draw. Those boys were good shots. "We're crossing his track, Paul. Turn to nine point five o'clock and hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds, starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!" He completed the operation in silence, remarking to himself how lucky he was to have Johnson. The boy loved a chase. He navigated like a hungry hawk, though you had to admit his techniques were a bit irregular. Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way they operated, remembering the courses, the tests, the procedures practiced until they could do them backwards blindfolded. When they tangled with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates went out the hatch. They navigated by the enemy. There were times during a fight when he had no more idea of his position than what the old ladies told him, and what he could see of the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon. And using "right side up" as a basis for navigation. He chuckled again. Still, the service had had to concede on "right side up," in designing the ships, so there was something to be said for it. They hadn't been able to simulate gravity without fouling up the ships so they had to call the pilot's head "up." There was something comforting about it. He'd driven a couple of the experimental jobs, one with the cockpit set on gimbals, and one where the whole ship rotated, and he hadn't cared for them at all. Felt disoriented, with something nagging at his mind all the time, as though the ships had been sabotaged. A couple of pilots had gone nuts in the "spindizzy," and remembering his own feelings as he watched the sky go by, it was easy to understand. Anyway, "right side up" tied in perfectly with the old "clock" system Garrity had dug out of those magazines he was always reading. Once they got used to it, it had turned out really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his astrogation prof, would have turned purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd use such a conglomeration. But it worked. And when you were in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and that was good enough for Coulter. He'd submitted a report on it to Colonel Silton. "You've got him, Paul. We're dead on his tail, five hundred miles back, and matching velocity. Turn forty-two degrees right, and you're lined up right on him." Johnson was pleased with the job he'd done. Coulter watched the pip move into his sightscreen. It settled less than a degree off dead center. He made the final corrections in course, set the air pressure control to eight pounds, and locked his helmet. "Nice job, Johnny. Let's button up. You with us, Guns?" Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed tiger. "Ah'm with yew, cap'n." Coulter advanced the throttle to 5 G's. And with the hiss of power, SF 308 began the deadly, intricate, precarious maneuver called a combat pass—a maneuver inherited from the aerial dogfight—though it often turned into something more like the broadside duels of the old sailing ships—as the best and least suicidal method of killing a spaceship. To start on the enemy's tail, just out of his radar range. To come up his track at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six .30 caliber machine guns from fifty miles out. In the last three or four seconds, to break out just enough to clear him, praying that he won't break in the same direction. And to keep on going. Four minutes and thirty-four seconds to the break. Sixty seconds at 5 G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds of free wheeling; and then, if they were lucky, the twenty-two frantic seconds they were out here for—throwing a few pounds of steel slugs out before them in one unbroken burst, groping out fifty miles into the darkness with steel and radar fingers to kill a duplicate of themselves. This is the worst. These three minutes are the worst. One hundred ninety-two eternal seconds of waiting, of deathly silence and deathly calm, feeling and hearing nothing but the slow pounding of their own heartbeats. Each time he got back, it faded away, and all he remembered was the excitement. But each time he went through it, it was worse. Just standing and waiting in the silence, praying they weren't spotted—staring at the unmoving firmament and knowing he was a projectile hurtling two miles each second straight at a clump of metal and flesh that was the enemy. Knowing the odds were twenty to one against their scoring a kill ... unless they ran into him. At eighty-five seconds, he corrected slightly to center the pip. The momentary hiss of the rockets was a relief. He heard the muffled yammering as Guns fired a short burst from the .30's standing out of their compartments around the sides of the ship. They were practically recoilless, but the burst drifted him forward against the cradle harness. And suddenly the waiting was over. The ship filled with vibration as Guns opened up. Twenty-five seconds to target. His eyes flicked from the sightscreen to the sky ahead, looking for the telltale flare of rockets—ready to follow like a ferret. There he is! At eighteen miles from target, a tiny blue light flickered ahead. He forgot everything but the sightscreen, concentrating on keeping the pip dead center. The guns hammered on. It seemed they'd been firing for centuries. At ten-mile range, the combat radar kicked the automatics in, turning the ship ninety degrees to her course in one and a half seconds. He heard the lee side firing cut out, as Garrity hung on with two, then three guns. He held it as long as he could. Closer than he ever had before. At four miles he poured 12 G's for two seconds. They missed ramming by something around a hundred yards. The enemy ship flashed across his tail in a fraction of a second, already turned around and heading up its own track, yet it seemed to Paul he could make out every detail—the bright red star, even the tortured face of the pilot. Was there something lopsided in the shape of that rocket plume, or was he just imagining it in the blur of their passing? And did he hear a ping just at that instant, feel the ship vibrate for a second? He continued the turn in the direction the automatics had started, bringing his nose around to watch the enemy's track. And as the shape of the plume told him the other ship was still heading back toward Earth, he brought the throttle back up to 12 G's, trying to overcome the lead his pass had given away. Guns spoke quietly to Johnson. "Let me know when we kill his RV. Ah may get another shot at him." And Johnny answered, hurt, "What do you think I'm doing down here—reading one of your magazines?" Paul was struggling with hundred-pound arms, trying to focus the telescope that swiveled over the panel. As the field cleared, he could see that the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering red and orange along one side. Quietly and viciously, he was talking to himself. "Blow! Blow!" And she blew. Like a dirty ragged bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls of sparks into the blackness. Something glowed red for a while, and slowly faded. There, but for the grace of God.... Paul shuddered in a confused mixture of relief and revulsion. He cut back to 4 G's, noting that RVS registered about a mile per second away from station, and suddenly became aware that the red light was on for loss of air. The cabin pressure gauge read zero, and his heart throbbed into his throat as he remembered that pinging sound, just as they passed the enemy ship. He told Garrity to see if he could locate the loss, and any other damage, and was shortly startled by a low amazed whistle in his earphones. "If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah wouldn't believe it. Musta been one of his shells went right around the fuel tank and out again, without hittin' it. There's at least three inches of tank on a line between the holes! He musta been throwin' curves at us. Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!" Paul felt no surprise, only relief at having the trouble located. The reaction to the close call might not come till hours later. "This kind of luck we can do without. Can you patch the holes?" "Ah can patch the one where it came in, but it musta been explodin' on the way out. There's a hole Ah could stick mah head through." "That's a good idea." Johnson was not usually very witty, but this was one he couldn't resist. "Never mind, Guns. A patch that big wouldn't be safe to hold air." They were about eighty thousand miles out. He set course for Earth at about five and a half mps, which Johnson calculated to bring them in on the station on the "going away" side of its orbit, and settled back for the tedious two hours of free wheeling. For ten or fifteen minutes, the interphone crackled with the gregariousness born of recent peril, and gradually the ship fell silent as each man returned to his own private thoughts. Paul was wondering about the men on the other ship—whether any of them were still alive. Eighty thousand miles to fall. That was a little beyond the capacity of an emergency rocket—about 2 G's for sixty seconds—even if they had them. What a way to go home! He wondered what he'd do if it happened to him. Would he wait out his time, or just unlock his helmet. Guns' drawl broke into his reverie. "Say, cap'n, Ah've been readin' in this magazine about a trick they used to use, called skip bombin'. They'd hang a bomb on the bottom of one of these airplanes, and fly along the ground, right at what they wanted to hit. Then they'd let the bomb go and get out of there, and the bomb would sail right on into the target. You s'pose we could fix this buggy up with an A bomb or an H bomb we could let go a few hundred miles out? Stick a proximity fuse on it, and a time fuse, too, in case we missed. Just sittin' half a mile apart and tradin' shots like we did on that last mission is kinda hard on mah nerves, and it's startin' to happen too often." "Nice work if we could get it. I'm not crazy about those broadside battles myself. You'd think they'd have found something better than these thirty caliber popguns by now, but the odds say we've got to throw as many different chunks of iron as we can, to have a chance of hitting anything, and even then it's twenty to one against us. You wouldn't have one chance in a thousand of scoring a hit with a bomb at that distance, even if they didn't spot it and take off. What you'd need would be a rocket that could chase them, with the bomb for a head. And there's no way we could carry that size rocket, or fire it if we could. Some day these crates will come with men's rooms, and we'll have a place to carry something like that." "How big would a rocket like that be?" "Five, six feet, by maybe a foot. Weigh at least three hundred pounds." It was five minutes before Guns spoke again. "Ah been thinkin', cap'n. With a little redecoratin', Ah think Ah could get a rocket that size in here with me. We could weld a rail to one of the gun mounts that would hold it up to five or six G's. Then after we got away from station, Ah could take it outside and mount it on the rail." "Forget it, lad. If they ever caught us pulling a trick like that, they'd have us on hydroponic duty for the next five years. They just don't want us playing around with bombs, till the experts get all the angles figured out, and build ships to handle them. And besides, who do you think will rig a bomb like that, without anybody finding out? And where do you think we'd get a bomb in the first place? They don't leave those things lying around. Kovacs watches them like a mother hen. I think he counts them twice a day." "Sorry, cap'n. Ah just figured if you could get hold of a bomb, Ah know a few of the boys who could rig the thing up for us and keep their mouths shut." "Well, forget about it. It's not a bad idea, but we haven't any bomb." "Right, cap'n." But it was Paul who couldn't forget about it. All the rest of the way back to station, he kept seeing visions of a panel sliding aside in the nose of a sleek and gleaming ship, while a small rocket pushed its deadly snout forward, and then streaked off at tremendous acceleration. Interrogation was brief. The mission had turned up nothing new. Their kill made eight against seven for Doc Miller's crew, and they made sure Miller and the boys heard about it. They were lightheaded with the elation that followed a successful mission, swapping insults with the rest of the squadron, and reveling in the sheer contentment of being back safe. It wasn't until he got back to his stall, and started to write his father a long overdue letter, that he remembered he had heard Kovacs say he was going on leave. When he finished the letter, he opened the copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" he had borrowed from Rodriguez's limited but colorful library. He couldn't keep his mind on it. He kept thinking of the armament officer. Kovacs was a quiet, intelligent kid, devoted to his work. Coulter wasn't too intimate with him. He wasn't a spaceman, for one thing. One of those illogical but powerful distinctions that sub-divided the men of the station. And he was a little too polite to be easy company. Paul remembered the time he had walked into the Muroc Base Officer's Club with Marge Halpern on his arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised on Kovacs' face the moment he first saw them. Marge was a striking blonde with a direct manner, who liked men, especially orbit station men. He hadn't thought about the incident since then, but the look in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to him as he tried to read. He wasn't sure how he got there, or why, when he found himself walking into Colonel Silton's office to ask for the leave he'd passed up at his fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking it several times, but the thought of leaving the squadron, even for a couple of weeks, had made him feel guilty, as though he were quitting. Once he had his papers, he started to get excited about it. As he cleaned up his paper work and packed his musette, his hands were fumbling, and his mind was full of Sylvia. The vastness of Muroc Base was as incredible as ever. Row on uncounted row of neat buildings, each resting at the top of its own hundred-yard deep elevator shaft. A pulsing, throbbing city, dedicated to the long slow struggle to get into space and stay there. The service crew eyed them with studied indifference, as they writhed out of the small hatch and stepped to the ground. They drew a helijet at operations, and headed immediately for Los Angeles. Kovacs had been impressed when Paul asked if he'd care to room together while they were on leave. He was quiet on the flight, as he had been on the way down, listening contentedly, while Paul talked combat and women with Bob Parandes, another pilot going on leave. They parked the helijet at Municipal Field and headed for the public PV booths, picking up a coterie of two dogs and five assorted children on the way. The kids followed quietly in their wake, ecstatic at the sight of their uniforms. Paul squared his shoulders, as befitted a hero, and tousled a couple of uncombed heads as they walked. The kids clustered around the booths, as Kovacs entered one to locate a hotel room, and Paul another, to call Sylvia. "Honey, I've been so scared you weren't coming back. Where are you? When will I see you? Why didn't you write?..." She sputtered to a stop as he held up both hands in defense. "Whoa, baby. One thing at a time. I'm at the airport. You'll see me tonight, and I'll tell you the rest then. That is, if you're free tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after that. Are you free?" Her hesitation was only momentary. "Well, I was going out—with a girl friend. But she'll understand. What's up?" He took a deep breath. "I'd like to get out of the city for a few days, where we can take things easy and be away from the crowds. And there is another guy I'd like to bring along." "We could take my helijet out to my dad's cottage at— What did you say? " It was a ticklish job explaining about Kovacs, but when she understood that he just wanted to do a friend a favor, and she'd still have Paul all to herself, she calmed down. They made their arrangements quickly, and switched off. He hesitated a minute before he called Marge. She was quite a dish to give up. Once she'd seen him with Sylvia, he'd be strictly persona non grata —that was for sure. It was an unhappy thought. Well, maybe it was in a good cause. He shrugged and called her. She nearly cut him off when she first heard his request, but he did some fast talking. The idea of several days at the cottage intrigued her, and when he described how smitten Kovacs had been, she brightened up and agreed to come. He switched off, adjusted the drape of his genuine silk scarf, and stepped out of the booth. Kovacs and the kids were waiting. The armament officer had apparently been telling them of Paul's exploits. They glowed with admiration. The oldest boy, about eleven, had true worship in his eyes. He hesitated a moment, then asked gravely: "Would you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?" Paul eyed the time-honored weapon that dangled from the youngster's hand. He bent over and tapped it with his finger. His voice was warm and confiding, but his eyes were far away. "I think next we're going to try a slingshot," he said. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. ***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLINGSHOT*** ******* This file should be named 22462-h.txt or 22462-h.zip ******* This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/2/2/4/6/22462 Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. 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22524

THE HUNTERS BY WILLIAM MORRISON ILLUSTRATED BY VAN DONGEN To all who didn't know him, Curt George was a mighty hunter and actor. But this time he was up against others who could really act, and whose business was the hunting of whole worlds. There were thirty or more of the little girls, their ages ranging apparently from nine to eleven, all of them chirping away like a flock of chicks as they followed the old mother hen past the line of cages. "Now, now, girls," called Miss Burton cheerily. "Don't scatter. I can't keep my eye on you if you get too far away from me. You, Hilda, give me that water pistol. No, don't fill it up first at that fountain. And Frances, stop bouncing your ball. You'll lose it through the bars, and a polar bear may get it and not want to give it back." Frances giggled. "Oh, Miss Burton, do you think the polar bear would want to play catch?" The two men who were looking on wore pleased smiles. "Charming," said Manto. "But somewhat unpredictable, despite all our experiences, muy amigo ." "No attempts at Spanish, Manto, not here. It calls attention to us. And you are not sure of the grammar anyway. You may find yourself saying things you do not intend." "Sorry, Palit. It wasn't an attempt to show my skill, I assure you. It's that by now I have a tendency to confuse one language with another." "I know. You were never a linguist. But about these interesting creatures—" "I suggest that they could stand investigation. It would be good to know how they think." "Whatever you say, Manto. If you wish, we shall join the little ladies." "We must have our story prepared first." Palit nodded, and the two men stepped under the shade of a tree whose long, drooping, leaf-covered branches formed a convenient screen. For a moment, the tree hid silence. Then there came from beneath the branches the chatter of girlish voices, and two little girls skipped merrily away. Miss Burton did not at first notice that now she had an additional two children in her charge. "Do you think you will be able to keep your English straight?" asked one of the new little girls. The other one smiled with amusement and at first did not answer. Then she began to skip around her companion and chant, "I know a secret, I know a secret." There was no better way to make herself inconspicuous. For some time, Miss Burton did not notice her. The polar bears, the grizzlies, the penguins, the reptiles, all were left behind. At times the children scattered, but Miss Burton knew how to get them together again, and not one was lost. "Here, children, is the building where the kangaroos live. Who knows where kangaroos come from?" "Australia!" clanged the shrill chorus. "That's right. And what other animals come from Australia?" "I know, Miss Burton!" cried Frances, a dark-haired nine-year-old with a pair of glittering eyes that stared like a pair of critics from a small heart-shaped face. "I've been here before. Wallabies and wombats!" "Very good, Frances." Frances smirked at the approbation. "I've been to the zoo lots of times," she said to the girl next to her. "My father takes me." "I wish my father would take me too," replied the other little girl, with an air of wistfulness. "Why don't you ask him to?" Before the other little girl could answer, Frances paused, cocked her head slightly, and demanded, "Who are you? You aren't in our class." "I'm in Miss Hassel's class." "Miss Hassel? Who is she? Is she in our school?" "I don't know," said the other little girl uncertainly. "I go to P. S. 77—" "Oh, Miss Burton," screamed Frances. "Here's a girl who isn't in our class! She got lost from her own class!" "Really?" Miss Burton seemed rather pleased at the idea that some other teacher had been so careless as to lose one of her charges. "What's your name, child?" "I'm Carolyn." "Carolyn what?" "Carolyn Manto. Please, Miss Burton, I had to go to the bathroom, and then when I came out—" "Yes, yes, I know." A shrill cry came from another section of her class. "Oh, Miss Burton, here's another one who's lost!" The other little girl was pushed forward. "Now, who are you ?" Miss Burton asked. "I'm Doris Palit. I went with Carolyn to the bathroom—" Miss Burton made a sound of annoyance. Imagine losing two children and not noticing it right away. The other teacher must be frantic by now, and serve her right for being so careless. "All right, you may stay with us until we find a policeman—" She interrupted herself. "Frances, what are you giggling at now?" "It's Carolyn. She's making faces just like you!" "Really, Carolyn, that isn't at all nice!" Carolyn's face altered itself in a hurry, so as to lose any resemblance to Miss Burton's. "I'm sorry, Miss Burton, I didn't really mean to do anything wrong." "Well, I'd like to know how you were brought up, if you don't know that it's wrong to mimic people to their faces. A big girl like you, too. How old are you, Carolyn?" Carolyn shrank, she hoped imperceptibly, by an inch. "I'm two—" An outburst of shrill laughter. "She's two years old, she's two years old!" "I was going to say, I'm to welve . Almost, anyway." "Eleven years old," said Miss Burton. "Old enough to know better." "I'm sorry, Miss Burton. And honest, Miss Burton, I didn't mean anything, but I'm studying to be an actress, and I imitate people, like the actors you see on television—" "Oh, Miss Burton, please don't make her go home with a policeman. If she's going to be an actress, I'll bet she'd love to see Curt George!" "Well, after the way she's behaved, I don't know whether I should let her. I really don't." "Please, Miss Burton, it was an accident. I won't do it again." "All right, if you're good, and cause no trouble. But we still have plenty of time before seeing Mr. George. It's only two now, and we're not supposed to go to the lecture hall until four." "Miss Burton," called Barbara Willman, "do you think he'd give us his autograph?" "Now, children, I've warned you about that. You mustn't annoy him. Mr. George is a famous movie actor, and his time is valuable. It's very kind of him to offer to speak to us, especially when so many grown-up people are anxious to hear him, but we mustn't take advantage of his kindness." "But he likes children, Miss Burton! My big sister read in a movie magazine where it said he's just crazy about them." "I know, but—he's not in good health, children. They say he got jungle fever in Africa, where he was shooting all those lions, and rhinoceroses, and elephants for his new picture. That's why you mustn't bother him too much." "But he looks so big and strong, Miss Burton. It wouldn't hurt him to sign an autograph!" "Oh, yes, it would," asserted one little girl. "He shakes. When he has an attack of fever, his hand shakes." "Yes, Africa is a dangerous continent, and one never knows how the dangers will strike one," said Miss Burton complacently. "So we must all remember how bravely Mr. George is fighting his misfortune, and do our best not to tire him out." In the bright light that flooded the afternoon breakfast table, Curt George's handsome, manly face wore an expression of distress. He groaned dismally, and muttered, "What a head I've got, what a head. How do you expect me to face that gang of kids without a drink to pick me up?" "You've had your drink," said Carol. She was slim, attractive, and efficient. At the moment she was being more efficient than attractive, and she could sense his resentment. "That's all you get. Now, lay off, and try to be reasonably sober, for a change." "But those kids! They'll squeal and giggle—" "They're about the only audience in the world that won't spot you as a drunk. God knows where I could find any one else who'd believe that your hand shakes because of fever." "I know that you're looking out for my best interests, Carol. But one more drink wouldn't hurt me." She said wearily, but firmly, "I don't argue with drunks, Curt. I just go ahead and protect them from themselves. No drinks." "Afterwards?" "I can't watch you the way a mother watches a child." The contemptuous reply sent his mind off on a new tack. "You could if we were married." "I've never believed in marrying weak characters to reform them." "But if I proved to you that I could change—" "Prove it first, and I'll consider your proposal afterwards." "You certainly are a cold-blooded creature, Carol. But I suppose that in your profession you have to be." "Cold, suspicious, nasty—and reliable. It's inevitable when I must deal with such warm-hearted, trusting, and unreliable clients." He watched her move about the room, clearing away the dishes from his meager breakfast. "What are you humming, Carol?" "Was I humming?" "I thought I recognized it— All of Me, Why Not Take All of Me ? That's it! Your subconscious gives you away. You really want to marry me!" "A mistake," she said coolly. "My subconscious doesn't know what it's talking about. All I want of you is the usual ten per cent." "Can't you forget for a moment that you're an agent, and remember that you're a woman, too?" "No. Not unless you forget that you're a drunk, and remember that you're a man. Not unless you make me forget that you drank your way through Africa—" "Because you weren't there with me!" "—with hardly enough energy to let them dress you in that hunter's outfit and photograph you as if you were shooting lions." "You're so unforgiving, Carol. You don't have much use for me, do you—consciously, that is?" "Frankly, Curt, no. I don't have much use for useless people." "I'm not entirely useless. I earn you that ten per cent—" "I'd gladly forego that to see you sober." "But it's your contempt for me that drives me to drink. And when I think of having to face those dear little kiddies with nothing inside me—" "There should be happiness inside you at the thought of your doing a good deed. Not a drop, George, not a drop." The two little girls drew apart from the others and began to whisper into each other's ears. The whispers were punctuated by giggles which made the entire childish conversation seem quite normal. But Palit was in no laughing mood. He said, in his own language, "You're getting careless, Manto. You had no business imitating her expression." "I'm sorry, Palit, but it was so suggestive. And I'm a very suggestible person." "So am I. But I control myself." "Still, if the temptation were great enough, I don't think you'd be able to resist either." "The issues are important enough to make me resist." "Still, I thought I saw your own face taking on a bit of her expression too." "You are imagining things, Manto. Another thing, that mistake in starting to say you were two hundred years old—" "They would have thought it a joke. And I think I got out of that rather neatly." "You like to skate on thin ice, don't you, Manto? Just as you did when you changed your height. You had no business shrinking right out in public like that." "I did it skillfully. Not a single person noticed." " I noticed." "Don't quibble." "I don't intend to. Some of these children have very sharp eyes. You'd be surprised at what they see." Manto said tolerantly, "You're getting jittery, Palit. We've been away from home too long." "I am not jittery in the least. But I believe in taking due care." "What could possibly happen to us? If we were to announce to the children and the teacher, and to every one in this zoo, for that matter, exactly who and what we were, they wouldn't believe us. And even if they did, they wouldn't be able to act rapidly enough to harm us." "You never can tell about such things. Wise—people—simply don't take unnecessary chances." "I'll grant that you're my superior in such wisdom." "You needn't be sarcastic, Manto, I know I'm superior. I realize what a godsend this planet is—you don't. It has the right gravity, a suitable atmosphere, the proper chemical composition—everything." "Including a population that will be helpless before us." "And you would take chances of losing all this." "Don't be silly, Palit. What chances am I taking?" "The chance of being discovered. Here we stumble on this place quite by accident. No one at home knows about it, no one so much as suspects that it exists. We must get back and report—and you do all sorts of silly things which may reveal what we are, and lead these people to suspect their danger." This time, Manto's giggle was no longer mere camouflage, but expressed to a certain degree how he felt. "They cannot possibly suspect. We have been all over the world, we have taken many forms and adapted ourselves to many customs, and no one has suspected. And even if danger really threatened, it would be easy to escape. I could take the form of the school teacher herself, of a policeman, of any one in authority. However, at present there is not the slightest shadow of danger. So, Palit, you had better stop being fearful." Palit said firmly, "Be careful, and I won't be fearful. That's all there is to it." "I'll be careful. After all, I shouldn't want us to lose these children. They're so exactly the kind we need. Look how inquiring they are, how unafraid, how quick to adapt to any circumstances—" Miss Burton's voice said, "Good gracious, children, what language are you using? Greek?" They had been speaking too loud, they had been overheard. Palit and Manto stared at each other, and giggled coyly. Then, after a second to think, Palit said, "Onay, Issmay Urtonbay!" "What?" Frances shrilled triumphantly, "It isn't Greek, Miss Burton, it's Latin—Pig-Latin. She said, 'No, Miss Burton.'" "Good heavens, what is Pig-Latin?" "It's a kind of way of talking where you talk kind of backwards. Like, you don't say, Me , you say, Emay ." "You don't say, Yes , you say Esyay ," added another little girl. "You don't say, You , you say, Ouyay . You don't say—" "All right, all right, I get the idea." "You don't say—" "That'll do," said Miss Burton firmly. "Now, let's get along to the lion house. And please, children, do not make faces at the lions. How would you like to be in a cage and have people make faces at you? Always remember to be considerate to others." "Even lions, Miss Burton?" "Even lions." "But Mr. George shot lots of lions. Was he considerate of them too?" "There is no time for silly questions," said Miss Burton, with the same firmness. "Come along." They all trouped after her, Palit and Manto bringing up the rear. Manto giggled, and whispered with amusement, "That Pig-Latin business was quick thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite unnecessary. The things that you do to avoid being suspected!" "It never hurts to take precautions. And I think that now it is time to leave." "No, not yet. You are always anxious to learn details before reporting. Why not learn a few more details now?" "Because they are not necessary. We already have a good understanding of human customs and psychology." "But not of the psychology of children. And they, if you remember, are the ones who will have to adapt. We shall be asked about them. It would be nice if we could report that they are fit for all-purpose service, on a wide range of planets. Let us stay awhile longer." "All right," conceded Palit, grudgingly. So they stayed, and out of some twigs and leaves they shaped the necessary coins with which to buy peanuts, and popcorn, and ice cream, and other delicacies favored by the young. Manto wanted to win easy popularity by treating a few of the other children, but Palit put his girlish foot down. No use arousing suspicion. Even as it was— "Gee, your father gives you an awful lot of spending money," said Frances enviously. "Is he rich?" "We get as much as we want," replied Manto carelessly. "Gosh, I wish I did." Miss Burton collected her brood. "Come together, children, I have something to say to you. Soon it will be time to go in and hear Mr. George. Now, if Mr. George is so kind as to entertain us, don't you think that it's only proper for us to entertain him?" "We could put on our class play!" yelled Barbara. "Barbara's a fine one to talk," said Frances. "She doesn't even remember her lines." "No, children, we mustn't do anything we can't do well. That wouldn't make a good impression. And besides, there is no time for a play. Perhaps Barbara will sing—" "I can sing a 'Thank You' song," interrupted Frances. "That would be nice." "I can recite," added another little girl. "Fine. How about you, Carolyn? You and your little friend, Doris. Can she act too?" Carolyn giggled. "Oh, yes, she can act very well. I can act like people. She can act like animals." The laughing, girlish eyes evaded a dirty look from the little friend. "She can act like any kind of animal." "She's certainly a talented child. But she seems so shy!" "Oh, no," said Carolyn. "She likes to be coaxed." "She shouldn't be like that. Perhaps, Carolyn, you and Doris can do something together. And perhaps, too, Mr. George will be pleased to see that your teacher also has talent." "You, Miss Burton?" Miss Burton coughed modestly. "Yes, children, I never told you, but I was once ambitious to be an actress too. I studied dramatics, and really, I was quite good at it. I was told that if I persevered I might actually be famous. Just think, your teacher might actually have been a famous actress! However, in my day, there were many coarse people on the stage, and the life of the theater was not attractive—but perhaps we'd better not speak of that. At any rate, I know the principles of the dramatic art very well." "God knows what I'll have to go through," said Curt. "And I don't see how I can take it sober." "I don't see how they can take you drunk," replied Carol. "Why go through with it at all? Why not call the whole thing quits?" "Because people are depending on you. You always want to call quits whenever you run into something you don't like. You may as well call quits to your contract if that's the way you feel." "And to your ten per cent, darling." "You think I'd mind that. I work for my ten per cent, Curt, sweetheart. I work too damn hard for that ten per cent." "You can marry me and take it easy. Honest, Carol, if you treated me better, if you showed me I meant something to you, I'd give up drinking." She made a face. "Don't talk nonsense. Take your outfit, and let's get ready to go. Unless you want to change here, and walk around dressed as a lion hunter." "Why not? I've walked around dressed as worse. A drunk." "Drunks don't attract attention. They're too ordinary." "But a drunken lion hunter—that's something special." He went into the next room and began to change. "Carol," he called. "Do you like me?" "At times." "Would you say that you liked me very much?" "When you're sober. Rarely." "Love me?" "Once in a blue moon." "What would I have to do for you to want to marry me?" "Amount to something." "I like that. Don't you think I amount to something now? Women swoon at the sight of my face on the screen, and come to life again at the sound of my voice." "The women who swoon at you will swoon at anybody. Besides, I don't consider that making nitwits swoon is a useful occupation for a real man." "How can I be useful, Carol? No one ever taught me how." "Some people manage without being taught." "I suppose I could think how if I had a drink inside me." "Then you'll have to do without thinking." He came into the room again, powerful, manly, determined-looking. There was an expression in his eye which indicated courage without end, a courage that would enable him to brave the wrath of man, beast, or devil. "How do I look?" "Your noble self, of course. A poor woman's edition of Rudolph Valentino." "I feel terrified. I don't know how I'm going to face those kids. If they were boys it wouldn't be so bad, but a bunch of little girls!" "They'll grow up to be your fans, if you're still alive five years from now. Meanwhile, into each life some rain must fall." "You would talk of water, when you know how I feel." "Sorry. Come on, let's go." The lecture hall resounded with giggles. And beneath the giggles was a steady undercurrent of whispers, of girlish confidences exchanged, of girlish hopes that would now be fulfilled. Miss Burton's class was not the only one which had come to hear the famous actor-hunter describe his brave exploits. There were at least five others like it, and by some mistake, a class of boys, who also whispered to each other, in manly superiority, and pretended to find amusement in the presence of so many of the fairer sex. In this atmosphere of giggles and whispers, Manto and Palit could exchange confidences without being noticed. Palit said savagely, "Why did you tell her that I could act too?" "Why, because it's the truth. You're a very good animal performer. You make a wonderful dragon, for instance. Go on, Palit, show her what a fine dragon you can—" "Stop it, you fool, before you cause trouble!" "Very well, Palit. Did I tempt you?" "Did you tempt me! You and your sense of humor!" "You and your lack of it! But let's not argue now, Palit. Here, I think, comes the lion-hunter. Let's scream, and be as properly excited as every one else is." My God, he thought, how can they keep their voices so high so long? My eardrums hurt already. How do they stand a lifetime of it? Even an hour? "Go ahead," whispered Carol. "You've seen the script—go into your act. Tell them what a hero you are. You have the odds in your favor to start with." "My lovely looks," he said, with some bitterness. "Lovely is the word for you. But forget that. If you're good—you'll get a drink afterwards." "Will it be one of those occasions when you love me?" "If the moon turns blue." He strode to the front of the platform, an elephant gun swinging easily at his side, an easy grin radiating from his confident, rugged face. The cheers rose to a shrill fortissimo, but the grin did not vanish. What a great actor he really was, he told himself, to be able to pretend he liked this. An assistant curator of some collection in the zoo, a flustered old woman, was introducing him. There were a few laudatory references to his great talents as an actor, and he managed to look properly modest as he listened. The remarks about his knowledge of wild and ferocious beasts were a little harder to take, but he took them. Then the old woman stepped back, and he was facing his fate alone. "Children," he began. A pause, a bashful grin. "Perhaps I should rather say, my friends. I'm not one to think of you as children. Some people think of me as a child myself, because I like to hunt, and have adventures. They think that such things are childish. But if they are, I'm glad to be a child. I'm glad to be one of you. Yes, I think I will call you my friends. "Perhaps you regard me, my friends, as a very lucky person. But when I recall some of the narrow escapes I have had, I don't agree with you. I remember once, when we were on the trail of a rogue elephant—" He told the story of the rogue elephant, modestly granting a co-hero's role to his guide. Then another story illustrating the strange ways of lions. The elephant gun figured in still another tale, this time of a vicious rhinoceros. His audience was quiet now, breathless with interest, and he welcomed the respite from shrillness he had won for his ears. "And now, my friends, it is time to say farewell." He actually looked sad and regretful. "But it is my hope that I shall be able to see you again—" Screams of exultation, shrill as ever, small hands beating enthusiastically to indicate joy. Thank God that's over with, he thought. Now for those drinks—and he didn't mean drink, singular. Talk of being useful, he'd certainly been useful now. He'd made those kids happy. What more can any reasonable person want? But it wasn't over with. Another old lady had stepped up on the platform. "Mr. George," she said, in a strangely affected voice, like that of the first dramatic teacher he had ever had, the one who had almost ruined his acting career. "Mr. George, I can't tell you how happy you have made us all, young and old. Hasn't Mr. George made us happy, children?" "Yes, Miss Burton!" came the shrill scream. "And we feel that it would be no more than fair to repay you in some small measure for the pleasure you have given us. First, a 'Thank You' song by Frances Heller—" He hadn't expected this, and he repressed a groan. Mercifully, the first song was short. He grinned the thanks he didn't feel. To think that he could take this, while sober as a judge! What strength of character, what will-power! Next, Miss Burton introduced another kid, who recited. And then, Miss Burton stood upright and recited herself. That was the worst of all. He winced once, then bore up. You can get used even to torture, he told himself. An adult making a fool of herself is always more painful than a kid. And that affected elocutionist's voice gave him the horrors. But he thanked her too. His good deed for the day. Maybe Carol would have him now, he thought. A voice shrilled, "Miss Burton?" "Yes, dear?" "Aren't you going to call on Carolyn to act?" "Oh, yes, I was forgetting. Come up here, Carolyn, come up, Doris. Carolyn and Doris, Mr. George, are studying how to act. They act people and animals. Who knows? Some day they, too, may be in the movies, just as you are, Mr. George. Wouldn't that be nice, children?" What the devil do you do in a case like that? You grin, of course—but what do you say, without handing over your soul to the devil? Agree how nice it would be to have those sly little brats with faces magnified on every screen all over the country? Like hell you do. "Now, what are we going to act, children?" "Please, Miss Burton," said Doris. "I don't know how to act. I can't even imitate a puppy. Really I can't, Miss Burton—" "Come, come, mustn't be shy. Your friend says that you act very nicely indeed. Can't want to go on the stage and still be shy. Now, do you know any movie scenes? Shirley Temple used to be a good little actress, I remember. Can you do any scenes that she does?" The silence was getting to be embarrassing. And Carol said he didn't amount to anything, he never did anything useful. Why, if thanks to his being here this afternoon, those kids lost the ambition to go on the stage, the whole human race would have cause to be grateful to him. To him, and to Miss Burton. She'd kill ambition in anybody. Miss Burton had an idea. "I know what to do, children. If you can act animals—Mr. George has shown you what the hunter does; you show him what the lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris, you're going to be lions. You are waiting in your lairs, ready to pounce on the unwary hunter. Crouch now, behind that chair. Closer and closer he comes—you act it out, Mr. George, please, that's the way—ever closer, and now your muscles tighten for the spring, and you open your great, wide, red mouths in a great, great big roar—" A deep and tremendous roar, as of thunder, crashed through the auditorium. A roar—and then, from the audience, an outburst of terrified screaming such as he had never heard. The bristles rose at the back of his neck, and his heart froze. Facing him across the platform were two lions, tensed as if to leap. Where they had come from he didn't know, but there they were, eyes glaring, manes ruffled, more terrifying than any he had seen in Africa. There they were, with the threat of death and destruction in their fierce eyes, and here he was, terror and helplessness on his handsome, manly, and bloodless face, heart unfrozen now and pounding fiercely, knees melting, hands— Hands clutching an elephant gun. The thought was like a director's command. With calm efficiency, with all the precision of an actor playing a scene rehearsed a thousand times, the gun leaped to his shoulder, and now its own roar thundered out a challenge to the roaring of the wild beasts, shouted at them in its own accents of barking thunder. The shrill screaming continued long after the echoes of the gun's speech had died away. Across the platform from him were two great bodies, the bodies of lions, and yet curiously unlike the beasts in some ways, now that they were dead and dissolving as if corroded by some invisible acid. Carol's hand was on his arm, Carol's thin and breathless voice shook as she said, "A drink—all the drinks you want." "One will do. And you." "And me. I guess you're kind of—kind of useful after all." Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Space Science Fiction February 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

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Bread Overhead By FRITZ LEIBER The Staff of Life suddenly and disconcertingly sprouted wings —and mankind had to eat crow! Illustrated by WOOD AS a blisteringly hot but guaranteed weather-controlled future summer day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of Puffy Products ("Spike to Loaf in One Operation!") began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas. The walking mills resembled fat metal serpents, rather larger than those Chinese paper dragons animated by files of men in procession. Sensory robot devices in their noses informed them that the waiting wheat had reached ripe perfection. As they advanced, their heads swung lazily from side to side, very much like snakes, gobbling the yellow grain. In their throats, it was threshed, the chaff bundled and burped aside for pickup by the crawl trucks of a chemical corporation, the kernels quick-dried and blown along into the mighty chests of the machines. There the tireless mills ground the kernels to flour, which was instantly sifted, the bran being packaged and dropped like the chaff for pickup. A cluster of tanks which gave the metal serpents a decidedly humpbacked appearance added water, shortening, salt and other ingredients, some named and some not. The dough was at the same time infused with gas from a tank conspicuously labeled "Carbon Dioxide" ("No Yeast Creatures in Your Bread!"). Thus instantly risen, the dough was clipped into loaves and shot into radionic ovens forming the midsections of the metal serpents. There the bread was baked in a matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front browning the crusts, and the piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent plastic bearing the proud Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs circling a floating loaf) and ejected onto the delivery platform at each serpent's rear end, where a cluster of pickup machines, like hungry piglets, snatched at the loaves with hygienic claws. A few loaves would be hurried off for the day's consumption, the majority stored for winter in strategically located mammoth deep freezes. But now, behold a wonder! As loaves began to appear on the delivery platform of the first walking mill to get into action, they did not linger on the conveyor belt, but rose gently into the air and slowly traveled off down-wind across the hot rippling fields. THE robot claws of the pickup machines clutched in vain, and, not noticing the difference, proceeded carefully to stack emptiness, tier by tier. One errant loaf, rising more sluggishly than its fellows, was snagged by a thrusting claw. The machine paused, clumsily wiped off the injured loaf, set it aside—where it bobbed on one corner, unable to take off again—and went back to the work of storing nothingness. A flock of crows rose from the trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the flight of loaves approached. The crows swooped to investigate and then suddenly scattered, screeching in panic. The helicopter of a hangoverish Sunday traveler bound for Wichita shied very similarly from the brown fliers and did not return for a second look. A black-haired housewife spied them over her back fence, crossed herself and grabbed her walkie-talkie from the laundry basket. Seconds later, the yawning correspondent of a regional newspaper was jotting down the lead of a humorous news story which, recalling the old flying-saucer scares, stated that now apparently bread was to be included in the mad aerial tea party. The congregation of an open-walled country church, standing up to recite the most familiar of Christian prayers, had just reached the petition for daily sustenance, when a sub-flight of the loaves, either forced down by a vagrant wind or lacking the natural buoyancy of the rest, came coasting silently as the sunbeams between the graceful pillars at the altar end of the building. Meanwhile, the main flight, now augmented by other bread flocks from scores and hundreds of walking mills that had started work a little later, mounted slowly and majestically into the cirrus-flecked upper air, where a steady wind was blowing strongly toward the east. About one thousand miles farther on in that direction, where a cluster of stratosphere-tickling towers marked the location of the metropolis of NewNew York, a tender scene was being enacted in the pressurized penthouse managerial suite of Puffy Products. Megera Winterly, Secretary in Chief to the Managerial Board and referred to by her underlings as the Blonde Icicle, was dealing with the advances of Roger ("Racehorse") Snedden, Assistant Secretary to the Board and often indistinguishable from any passing office boy. "Why don't you jump out the window, Roger, remembering to shut the airlock after you?" the Golden Glacier said in tones not unkind. "When are your high-strung, thoroughbred nerves going to accept the fact that I would never consider marriage with a business inferior? You have about as much chance as a starving Ukrainian kulak now that Moscow's clapped on the interdict." ROGER'S voice was calm, although his eyes were feverishly bright, as he replied, "A lot of things are going to be different around here, Meg, as soon as the Board is forced to admit that only my quick thinking made it possible to bring the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world." "Puffyloaf could do with a little of that," the business girl observed judiciously. "The way sales have been plummeting, it won't be long before the Government deeds our desks to the managers of Fairy Bread and asks us to take the Big Jump. But just where does your quick thinking come into this, Mr. Snedden? You can't be referring to the helium—that was Rose Thinker's brainwave." She studied him suspiciously. "You've birthed another promotional bumble, Roger. I can see it in your eyes. I only hope it's not as big a one as when you put the Martian ambassador on 3D and he thanked you profusely for the gross of Puffyloaves, assuring you that he'd never slept on a softer mattress in all his life on two planets." "Listen to me, Meg. Today—yes, today!—you're going to see the Board eating out of my hand." "Hah! I guarantee you won't have any fingers left. You're bold enough now, but when Mr. Gryce and those two big machines come through that door—" "Now wait a minute, Meg—" "Hush! They're coming now!" Roger leaped three feet in the air, but managed to land without a sound and edged toward his stool. Through the dilating iris of the door strode Phineas T. Gryce, flanked by Rose Thinker and Tin Philosopher. The man approached the conference table in the center of the room with measured pace and gravely expressionless face. The rose-tinted machine on his left did a couple of impulsive pirouettes on the way and twittered a greeting to Meg and Roger. The other machine quietly took the third of the high seats and lifted a claw at Meg, who now occupied a stool twice the height of Roger's. "Miss Winterly, please—our theme." The Blonde Icicle's face thawed into a little-girl smile as she chanted bubblingly: " Made up of tiny wheaten motes And reinforced with sturdy oats, It rises through the air and floats— The bread on which all Terra dotes! " "THANK YOU, Miss Winterly," said Tin Philosopher. "Though a purely figurative statement, that bit about rising through the air always gets me—here." He rapped his midsection, which gave off a high musical clang . "Ladies—" he inclined his photocells toward Rose Thinker and Meg—"and gentlemen. This is a historic occasion in Old Puffy's long history, the inauguration of the helium-filled loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats Away!') in which that inert and heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-fashioned carbon dioxide. Later, there will be kudos for Rose Thinker, whose bright relays genius-sparked the idea, and also for Roger Snedden, who took care of the details. "By the by, Racehorse, that was a brilliant piece of work getting the helium out of the government—they've been pretty stuffy lately about their monopoly. But first I want to throw wide the casement in your minds that opens on the Long View of Things." Rose Thinker spun twice on her chair and opened her photocells wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to limber up the diaphragm of his speaker and continued: "Ever since the first cave wife boasted to her next-den neighbor about the superior paleness and fluffiness of her tortillas, mankind has sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed, thinkers wiser than myself have equated the whole upward course of culture with this poignant quest. Yeast was a wonderful discovery—for its primitive day. Sifting the bran and wheat germ from the flour was an even more important advance. Early bleaching and preserving chemicals played their humble parts. "For a while, barbarous faddists—blind to the deeply spiritual nature of bread, which is recognized by all great religions—held back our march toward perfection with their hair-splitting insistence on the vitamin content of the wheat germ, but their case collapsed when tasteless colorless substitutes were triumphantly synthesized and introduced into the loaf, which for flawless purity, unequaled airiness and sheer intangible goodness was rapidly becoming mankind's supreme gustatory experience." "I wonder what the stuff tastes like," Rose Thinker said out of a clear sky. "I wonder what taste tastes like," Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily. Recovering himself, he continued: "Then, early in the twenty-first century, came the epochal researches of Everett Whitehead, Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in his paper 'The Structural Bubble in Cereal Masses' and making possible the baking of airtight bread twenty times stronger (for its weight) than steel and of a lightness that would have been incredible even to the advanced chemist-bakers of the twentieth century—a lightness so great that, besides forming the backbone of our own promotion, it has forever since been capitalized on by our conscienceless competitors of Fairy Bread with their enduring slogan: 'It Makes Ghost Toast'." "That's a beaut, all right, that ecto-dough blurb," Rose Thinker admitted, bugging her photocells sadly. "Wait a sec. How about?— " There'll be bread Overhead When you're dead— It is said. " PHINEAS T. GRYCE wrinkled his nostrils at the pink machine as if he smelled her insulation smoldering. He said mildly, "A somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose, referring as it does to the end of the customer as consumer. Moreover, we shouldn't overplay the figurative 'rises through the air' angle. What inspired you?" She shrugged. "I don't know—oh, yes, I do. I was remembering one of the workers' songs we machines used to chant during the Big Strike— " Work and pray, Live on hay. You'll get pie In the sky When you die— It's a lie! "I don't know why we chanted it," she added. "We didn't want pie—or hay, for that matter. And machines don't pray, except Tibetan prayer wheels." Phineas T. Gryce shook his head. "Labor relations are another topic we should stay far away from. However, dear Rose, I'm glad you keep trying to outjingle those dirty crooks at Fairy Bread." He scowled, turning back his attention to Tin Philosopher. "I get whopping mad, Old Machine, whenever I hear that other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory one—'Untouched by Robot Claws.' Just because they employ a few filthy androids in their factories!" Tin Philosopher lifted one of his own sets of bright talons. "Thanks, P.T. But to continue my historical resume, the next great advance in the baking art was the substitution of purified carbon dioxide, recovered from coal smoke, for the gas generated by yeast organisms indwelling in the dough and later killed by the heat of baking, their corpses remaining in situ . But even purified carbon dioxide is itself a rather repugnant gas, a product of metabolism whether fast or slow, and forever associated with those life processes which are obnoxious to the fastidious." Here the machine shuddered with delicate clinkings. "Therefore, we of Puffyloaf are taking today what may be the ultimate step toward purity: we are aerating our loaves with the noble gas helium, an element which remains virginal in the face of all chemical temptations and whose slim molecules are eleven times lighter than obese carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable helium, which, if it be a kind of ash, is yet the ash only of radioactive burning, accomplished or initiated entirely on the Sun, a safe 93 million miles from this planet. Let's have a cheer for the helium loaf!" WITHOUT changing expression, Phineas T. Gryce rapped the table thrice in solemn applause, while the others bowed their heads. "Thanks, T.P.," P.T. then said. "And now for the Moment of Truth. Miss Winterly, how is the helium loaf selling?" The business girl clapped on a pair of earphones and whispered into a lapel mike. Her gaze grew abstracted as she mentally translated flurries of brief squawks into coherent messages. Suddenly a single vertical furrow creased her matchlessly smooth brow. "It isn't, Mr. Gryce!" she gasped in horror. "Fairy Bread is outselling Puffyloaves by an infinity factor. So far this morning, there has not been one single delivery of Puffyloaves to any sales spot ! Complaints about non-delivery are pouring in from both walking stores and sessile shops." "Mr. Snedden!" Gryce barked. "What bug in the new helium process might account for this delay?" Roger was on his feet, looking bewildered. "I can't imagine, sir, unless—just possibly—there's been some unforeseeable difficulty involving the new metal-foil wrappers." "Metal-foil wrappers? Were you responsible for those?" "Yes, sir. Last-minute recalculations showed that the extra lightness of the new loaf might be great enough to cause drift during stackage. Drafts in stores might topple sales pyramids. Metal-foil wrappers, by their added weight, took care of the difficulty." "And you ordered them without consulting the Board?" "Yes, sir. There was hardly time and—" "Why, you fool! I noticed that order for metal-foil wrappers, assumed it was some sub-secretary's mistake, and canceled it last night!" Roger Snedden turned pale. "You canceled it?" he quavered. "And told them to go back to the lighter plastic wrappers?" "Of course! Just what is behind all this, Mr. Snedden? What recalculations were you trusting, when our physicists had demonstrated months ago that the helium loaf was safely stackable in light airs and gentle breezes—winds up to Beaufort's scale 3. Why should a change from heavier to lighter wrappers result in complete non-delivery?" ROGER Snedden's paleness became tinged with an interesting green. He cleared his throat and made strange gulping noises. Tin Philosopher's photocells focused on him calmly, Rose Thinker's with unfeigned excitement. P.T. Gryce's frown grew blacker by the moment, while Megera Winterly's Venus-mask showed an odd dawning of dismay and awe. She was getting new squawks in her earphones. "Er ... ah ... er...." Roger said in winning tones. "Well, you see, the fact is that I...." "Hold it," Meg interrupted crisply. "Triple-urgent from Public Relations, Safety Division. Tulsa-Topeka aero-express makes emergency landing after being buffeted in encounter with vast flight of objects first described as brown birds, although no failures reported in airway's electronic anti-bird fences. After grounding safely near Emporia—no fatalities—pilot's windshield found thinly plastered with soft white-and-brown material. Emblems on plastic wrappers embedded in material identify it incontrovertibly as an undetermined number of Puffyloaves cruising at three thousand feet!" Eyes and photocells turned inquisitorially upon Roger Snedden. He went from green to Puffyloaf white and blurted: "All right, I did it, but it was the only way out! Yesterday morning, due to the Ukrainian crisis, the government stopped sales and deliveries of all strategic stockpiled materials, including helium gas. Puffy's new program of advertising and promotion, based on the lighter loaf, was already rolling. There was only one thing to do, there being only one other gas comparable in lightness to helium. I diverted the necessary quantity of hydrogen gas from the Hydrogenated Oils Section of our Magna-Margarine Division and substituted it for the helium." "You substituted ... hydrogen ... for the ... helium?" Phineas T. Gryce faltered in low mechanical tones, taking four steps backward. "Hydrogen is twice as light as helium," Tin Philosopher remarked judiciously. "And many times cheaper—did you know that?" Roger countered feebly. "Yes, I substituted hydrogen. The metal-foil wrapping would have added just enough weight to counteract the greater buoyancy of the hydrogen loaf. But—" "So, when this morning's loaves began to arrive on the delivery platforms of the walking mills...." Tin Philosopher left the remark unfinished. "Exactly," Roger agreed dismally. "Let me ask you, Mr. Snedden," Gryce interjected, still in low tones, "if you expected people to jump to the kitchen ceiling for their Puffybread after taking off the metal wrapper, or reach for the sky if they happened to unwrap the stuff outdoors?" "Mr. Gryce," Roger said reproachfully, "you have often assured me that what people do with Puffybread after they buy it is no concern of ours." "I seem to recall," Rose Thinker chirped somewhat unkindly, "that dictum was created to answer inquiries after Roger put the famous sculptures-in-miniature artist on 3D and he testified that he always molded his first attempts from Puffybread, one jumbo loaf squeezing down to approximately the size of a peanut." HER photocells dimmed and brightened. "Oh, boy—hydrogen! The loaf's unwrapped. After a while, in spite of the crust-seal, a little oxygen diffuses in. An explosive mixture. Housewife in curlers and kimono pops a couple slices in the toaster. Boom!" The three human beings in the room winced. Tin Philosopher kicked her under the table, while observing, "So you see, Roger, that the non-delivery of the hydrogen loaf carries some consolations. And I must confess that one aspect of the affair gives me great satisfaction, not as a Board Member but as a private machine. You have at last made a reality of the 'rises through the air' part of Puffybread's theme. They can't ever take that away from you. By now, half the inhabitants of the Great Plains must have observed our flying loaves rising high." Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened look at the west windows and found his full voice. "Stop the mills!" he roared at Meg Winterly, who nodded and whispered urgently into her mike. "A sensible suggestion," Tin Philosopher said. "But it comes a trifle late in the day. If the mills are still walking and grinding, approximately seven billion Puffyloaves are at this moment cruising eastward over Middle America. Remember that a six-month supply for deep-freeze is involved and that the current consumption of bread, due to its matchless airiness, is eight and one-half loaves per person per day." Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted both hands into his scanty hair, feeling for a good grip. He leaned menacingly toward Roger who, chin resting on the table, regarded him apathetically. "Hold it!" Meg called sharply. "Flock of multiple-urgents coming in. News Liaison: information bureaus swamped with flying-bread inquiries. Aero-expresslines: Clear our airways or face law suit. U. S. Army: Why do loaves flame when hit by incendiary bullets? U. S. Customs: If bread intended for export, get export license or face prosecution. Russian Consulate in Chicago: Advise on destination of bread-lift. And some Kansas church is accusing us of a hoax inciting to blasphemy, of faking miracles—I don't know why ." The business girl tore off her headphones. "Roger Snedden," she cried with a hysteria that would have dumfounded her underlings, "you've brought the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world, all right! Now do something about the situation!" Roger nodded obediently. But his pallor increased a shade, the pupils of his eyes disappeared under the upper lids, and his head burrowed beneath his forearms. "Oh, boy," Rose Thinker called gayly to Tin Philosopher, "this looks like the start of a real crisis session! Did you remember to bring spare batteries?" MEANWHILE, the monstrous flight of Puffyloaves, filling midwestern skies as no small fliers had since the days of the passenger pigeon, soared steadily onward. Private fliers approached the brown and glistening bread-front in curiosity and dipped back in awe. Aero-expresslines organized sightseeing flights along the flanks. Planes of the government forestry and agricultural services and 'copters bearing the Puffyloaf emblem hovered on the fringes, watching developments and waiting for orders. A squadron of supersonic fighters hung menacingly above. The behavior of birds varied considerably. Most fled or gave the loaves a wide berth, but some bolder species, discovering the minimal nutritive nature of the translucent brown objects, attacked them furiously with beaks and claws. Hydrogen diffusing slowly through the crusts had now distended most of the sealed plastic wrappers into little balloons, which ruptured, when pierced, with disconcerting pops . Below, neck-craning citizens crowded streets and back yards, cranks and cultists had a field day, while local and national governments raged indiscriminately at Puffyloaf and at each other. Rumors that a fusion weapon would be exploded in the midst of the flying bread drew angry protests from conservationists and a flood of telefax pamphlets titled "H-Loaf or H-bomb?" Stockholm sent a mystifying note of praise to the United Nations Food Organization. Delhi issued nervous denials of a millet blight that no one had heard of until that moment and reaffirmed India's ability to feed her population with no outside help except the usual. Radio Moscow asserted that the Kremlin would brook no interference in its treatment of the Ukrainians, jokingly referred to the flying bread as a farce perpetrated by mad internationalists inhabiting Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contradictory references to airborne bread booby-trapped by Capitalist gangsters, and then fell moodily silent on the whole topic. Radio Venus reported to its winged audience that Earth's inhabitants were establishing food depots in the upper air, preparatory to taking up permanent aerial residence "such as we have always enjoyed on Venus." NEWNEW YORK made feverish preparations for the passage of the flying bread. Tickets for sightseeing space in skyscrapers were sold at high prices; cold meats and potted spreads were hawked to viewers with the assurance that they would be able to snag the bread out of the air and enjoy a historic sandwich. Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from his own managerial suite, raged about the city, demanding general cooperation in the stretching of great nets between the skyscrapers to trap the errant loaves. He was captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped again, and was found posted with oxygen mask and submachine gun on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf Tower, apparently determined to shoot down the loaves as they appeared and before they involved his company in more trouble with Customs and the State Department. Recaptured by Tin Philosopher, who suffered only minor bullet holes, he was given a series of mild electroshocks and returned to the conference table, calm and clear-headed as ever. But the bread flight, swinging away from a hurricane moving up the Atlantic coast, crossed a clouded-in Boston by night and disappeared into a high Atlantic overcast, also thereby evading a local storm generated by the Weather Department in a last-minute effort to bring down or at least disperse the H-loaves. Warnings and counterwarnings by Communist and Capitalist governments seriously interfered with military trailing of the flight during this period and it was actually lost in touch with for several days. At scattered points, seagulls were observed fighting over individual loaves floating down from the gray roof—that was all. A mood of spirituality strongly tinged with humor seized the people of the world. Ministers sermonized about the bread, variously interpreting it as a call to charity, a warning against gluttony, a parable of the evanescence of all earthly things, and a divine joke. Husbands and wives, facing each other across their walls of breakfast toast, burst into laughter. The mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere was enough to evoke guffaws. An obscure sect, having as part of its creed the injunction "Don't take yourself so damn seriously," won new adherents. The bread flight, rising above an Atlantic storm widely reported to have destroyed it, passed unobserved across a foggy England and rose out of the overcast only over Mittel-europa. The loaves had at last reached their maximum altitude. The Sun's rays beat through the rarified air on the distended plastic wrappers, increasing still further the pressure of the confined hydrogen. They burst by the millions and tens of millions. A high-flying Bulgarian evangelist, who had happened to mistake the up-lever for the east-lever in the cockpit of his flier and who was the sole witness of the event, afterward described it as "the foaming of a sea of diamonds, the crackle of God's knuckles." BY THE millions and tens of millions, the loaves coasted down into the starving Ukraine. Shaken by a week of humor that threatened to invade even its own grim precincts, the Kremlin made a sudden about-face. A new policy was instituted of communal ownership of the produce of communal farms, and teams of hunger-fighters and caravans of trucks loaded with pumpernickel were dispatched into the Ukraine. World distribution was given to a series of photographs showing peasants queueing up to trade scavenged Puffyloaves for traditional black bread, recently aerated itself but still extra solid by comparison, the rate of exchange demanded by the Moscow teams being twenty Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel. Another series of photographs, picturing chubby workers' children being blown to bits by booby-trapped bread, was quietly destroyed. Congratulatory notes were exchanged by various national governments and world organizations, including the Brotherhood of Free Business Machines. The great bread flight was over, though for several weeks afterward scattered falls of loaves occurred, giving rise to a new folklore of manna among lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in one well-authenticated instance in Tibet, sustaining life in a party of mountaineers cut off by a snow slide. Back in NewNew York, the managerial board of Puffy Products slumped in utter collapse around the conference table, the long crisis session at last ended. Empty coffee cartons were scattered around the chairs of the three humans, dead batteries around those of the two machines. For a while, there was no movement whatsoever. Then Roger Snedden reached out wearily for the earphones where Megera Winterly had hurled them down, adjusted them to his head, pushed a button and listened apathetically. After a bit, his gaze brightened. He pushed more buttons and listened more eagerly. Soon he was sitting tensely upright on his stool, eyes bright and lower face all a-smile, muttering terse comments and questions into the lapel mike torn from Meg's fair neck. The others, reviving, watched him, at first dully, then with quickening interest, especially when he jerked off the earphones with a happy shout and sprang to his feet. "LISTEN to this!" he cried in a ringing voice. "As a result of the worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves are outselling Fairy Bread three to one—and that's just the old carbon-dioxide stock from our freezers! It's almost exhausted, but the government, now that the Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken the ban off helium and will also sell us stockpiled wheat if we need it. We can have our walking mills burrowing into the wheat caves in a matter of hours! "But that isn't all! The far greater demand everywhere is for Puffyloaves that will actually float. Public Relations, Child Liaison Division, reports that the kiddies are making their mothers' lives miserable about it. If only we can figure out some way to make hydrogen non-explosive or the helium loaf float just a little—" "I'm sure we can take care of that quite handily," Tin Philosopher interrupted briskly. "Puffyloaf has kept it a corporation secret—even you've never been told about it—but just before he went crazy, Everett Whitehead discovered a way to make bread using only half as much flour as we do in the present loaf. Using this secret technique, which we've been saving for just such an emergency, it will be possible to bake a helium loaf as buoyant in every respect as the hydrogen loaf." "Good!" Roger cried. "We'll tether 'em on strings and sell 'em like balloons. No mother-child shopping team will leave the store without a cluster. Buying bread balloons will be the big event of the day for kiddies. It'll make the carry-home shopping load lighter too! I'll issue orders at once—" HE broke off, looking at Phineas T. Gryce, said with quiet assurance, "Excuse me, sir, if I seem to be taking too much upon myself." "Not at all, son; go straight ahead," the great manager said approvingly. "You're"—he laughed in anticipation of getting off a memorable remark—"rising to the challenging situation like a genuine Puffyloaf." Megera Winterly looked from the older man to the younger. Then in a single leap she was upon Roger, her arms wrapped tightly around him. "My sweet little ever-victorious, self-propelled monkey wrench!" she crooned in his ear. Roger looked fatuously over her soft shoulder at Tin Philosopher who, as if moved by some similar feeling, reached over and touched claws with Rose Thinker. This, however, was what he telegraphed silently to his fellow machine across the circuit so completed: "Good-o, Rosie! That makes another victory for robot-engineered world unity, though you almost gave us away at the start with that 'bread overhead' jingle. We've struck another blow against the next world war, in which—as we know only too well!—we machines would suffer the most. Now if we can only arrange, say, a fur-famine in Alaska and a migration of long-haired Siberian lemmings across Behring Straits ... we'd have to swing the Japanese Current up there so it'd be warm enough for the little fellows.... Anyhow, Rosie, with a spot of help from the Brotherhood, those humans will paint themselves into the peace corner yet." Meanwhile, he and Rose Thinker quietly watched the Blonde Icicle melt. —FRITZ LEIBER Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy February 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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WIND By CHARLES L. FONTENAY When you have an engine with no fuel, and fuel without an engine, and a life-and-death deadline to meet, you have a problem indeed. Unless you are a stubborn Dutchman—and Jan Van Artevelde was the stubbornest Dutchman on Venus. JAN WILLEM van Artevelde claimed descent from William of Orange. He had no genealogy to prove it, but on Venus there was no one who could disprove it, either. Jan Willem van Artevelde smoked a clay pipe, which only a Dutchman can do properly, because the clay bit grates on less stubborn teeth. Jan needed all his Dutch stubbornness, and a good deal of pure physical strength besides, to maneuver the roach-flat groundcar across the tumbled terrain of Den Hoorn into the teeth of the howling gale that swept from the west. The huge wheels twisted and jolted against the rocks outside, and Jan bounced against his seat belt, wrestled the steering wheel and puffed at his pijp . The mild aroma of Heerenbaai-Tabak filled the airtight groundcar. There came a new swaying that was not the roughness of the terrain. Through the thick windshield Jan saw all the ground about him buckle and heave for a second or two before it settled to rugged quiescence again. This time he was really heaved about. Jan mentioned this to the groundcar radio. "That's the third time in half an hour," he commented. "The place tosses like the IJsselmeer on a rough day." "You just don't forget it isn't the Zuider Zee," retorted Heemskerk from the other end. "You sink there and you don't come up three times." "Don't worry," said Jan. "I'll be back on time, with a broom at the masthead." "This I shall want to see," chuckled Heemskerk; a logical reaction, considering the scarcity of brooms on Venus. Two hours earlier the two men had sat across a small table playing chess, with little indication there would be anything else to occupy their time before blastoff of the stubby gravity-boat. It would be their last chess game for many months, for Jan was a member of the Dutch colony at Oostpoort in the northern hemisphere of Venus, while Heemskerk was pilot of the G-boat from the Dutch spaceship Vanderdecken , scheduled to begin an Earthward orbit in a few hours. It was near the dusk of the 485-hour Venerian day, and the Twilight Gale already had arisen, sweeping from the comparatively chill Venerian nightside into the superheated dayside. Oostpoort, established near some outcroppings that contained uranium ore, was protected from both the Dawn Gale and the Twilight Gale, for it was in a valley in the midst of a small range of mountains. Jan had just figured out a combination by which he hoped to cheat Heemskerk out of one of his knights, when Dekker, the burgemeester of Oostpoort, entered the spaceport ready room. "There's been an emergency radio message," said Dekker. "They've got a passenger for the Earthship over at Rathole." "Rathole?" repeated Heemskerk. "What's that? I didn't know there was another colony within two thousand kilometers." "It isn't a colony, in the sense Oostpoort is," explained Dekker. "The people are the families of a bunch of laborers left behind when the colony folded several years ago. It's about eighty kilometers away, right across the Hoorn, but they don't have any vehicles that can navigate when the wind's up." Heemskerk pushed his short-billed cap back on his close-cropped head, leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his comfortable stomach. "Then the passenger will have to wait for the next ship," he pronounced. "The Vanderdecken has to blast off in thirty hours to catch Earth at the right orbital spot, and the G-boat has to blast off in ten hours to catch the Vanderdecken ." "This passenger can't wait," said Dekker. "He needs to be evacuated to Earth immediately. He's suffering from the Venus Shadow." Jan whistled softly. He had seen the effects of that disease. Dekker was right. "Jan, you're the best driver in Oostpoort," said Dekker. "You will have to take a groundcar to Rathole and bring the fellow back." So now Jan gripped his clay pipe between his teeth and piloted the groundcar into the teeth of the Twilight Gale. Den Hoorn was a comparatively flat desert sweep that ran along the western side of the Oost Mountains, just over the mountain from Oostpoort. It was a thin fault area of a planet whose crust was peculiarly subject to earthquakes, particularly at the beginning and end of each long day when temperatures of the surface rocks changed. On the other side of it lay Rathole, a little settlement that eked a precarious living from the Venerian vegetation. Jan never had seen it. He had little difficulty driving up and over the mountain, for the Dutch settlers had carved a rough road through the ravines. But even the 2½-meter wheels of the groundcar had trouble amid the tumbled rocks of Den Hoorn. The wind hit the car in full strength here and, though the body of the groundcar was suspended from the axles, there was constant danger of its being flipped over by a gust if not handled just right. The three earthshocks that had shaken Den Hoorn since he had been driving made his task no easier, but he was obviously lucky, at that. Often he had to detour far from his course to skirt long, deep cracks in the surface, or steep breaks where the crust had been raised or dropped several meters by past quakes. The groundcar zig-zagged slowly westward. The tattered violet-and-indigo clouds boiled low above it, but the wind was as dry as the breath of an oven. Despite the heavy cloud cover, the afternoon was as bright as an Earth-day. The thermometer showed the outside temperature to have dropped to 40 degrees Centigrade in the west wind, and it was still going down. Jan reached the edge of a crack that made further progress seem impossible. A hundred meters wide, of unknown depth, it stretched out of sight in both directions. For the first time he entertained serious doubts that Den Hoorn could be crossed by land. After a moment's hesitation, he swung the groundcar northward and raced along the edge of the chasm as fast as the car would negotiate the terrain. He looked anxiously at his watch. Nearly three hours had passed since he left Oostpoort. He had seven hours to go and he was still at least 16 kilometers from Rathole. His pipe was out, but he could not take his hands from the wheel to refill it. He had driven at least eight kilometers before he realized that the crack was narrowing. At least as far again, the two edges came together, but not at the same level. A sheer cliff three meters high now barred his passage. He drove on. Apparently it was the result of an old quake. He found a spot where rocks had tumbled down, making a steep, rough ramp up the break. He drove up it and turned back southwestward. He made it just in time. He had driven less than three hundred meters when a quake more severe than any of the others struck. Suddenly behind him the break reversed itself, so that where he had climbed up coming westward he would now have to climb a cliff of equal height returning eastward. The ground heaved and buckled like a tempestuous sea. Rocks rolled and leaped through the air, several large ones striking the groundcar with ominous force. The car staggered forward on its giant wheels like a drunken man. The quake was so violent that at one time the vehicle was hurled several meters sideways, and almost overturned. And the wind smashed down on it unrelentingly. The quake lasted for several minutes, during which Jan was able to make no progress at all and struggled only to keep the groundcar upright. Then, in unison, both earthquake and wind died to absolute quiescence. Jan made use of this calm to step down on the accelerator and send the groundcar speeding forward. The terrain was easier here, nearing the western edge of Den Hoorn, and he covered several kilometers before the wind struck again, cutting his speed down considerably. He judged he must be nearing Rathole. Not long thereafter, he rounded an outcropping of rock and it lay before him. A wave of nostalgia swept over him. Back at Oostpoort, the power was nuclear, but this little settlement made use of the cheapest, most obviously available power source. It was dotted with more than a dozen windmills. Windmills! Tears came to Jan's eyes. For a moment, he was carried back to the flat lands around 's Gravenhage. For a moment he was a tow-headed, round-eyed boy again, clumping in wooden shoes along the edge of the tulip fields. But there were no canals here. The flat land, stretching into the darkening west, was spotted with patches of cactus and leather-leaved Venerian plants. Amid the windmills, low domes protruded from the earth, indicating that the dwellings of Rathole were, appropriately, partly underground. He drove into the place. There were no streets, as such, but there were avenues between lines of heavy chains strung to short iron posts, evidently as handholds against the wind. The savage gale piled dust and sand in drifts against the domes, then, shifting slightly, swept them clean again. There was no one moving abroad, but just inside the community Jan found half a dozen men in a group, clinging to one of the chains and waving to him. He pulled the groundcar to a stop beside them, stuck his pipe in a pocket of his plastic venusuit, donned his helmet and got out. The wind almost took him away before one of them grabbed him and he was able to grasp the chain himself. They gathered around him. They were swarthy, black-eyed men, with curly hair. One of them grasped his hand. " Bienvenido, señor ," said the man. Jan recoiled and dropped the man's hand. All the Orangeman blood he claimed protested in outrage. Spaniards! All these men were Spaniards! Jan recovered himself at once. He had been reading too much ancient history during his leisure hours. The hot monotony of Venus was beginning to affect his brain. It had been 500 years since the Netherlands revolted against Spanish rule. A lot of water over the dam since then. A look at the men around him, the sound of their chatter, convinced him that he need not try German or Hollandsch here. He fell back on the international language. "Do you speak English?" he asked. The man brightened but shook his head. " No hablo inglés ," he said, " pero el médico lo habla. Venga conmigo. " He gestured for Jan to follow him and started off, pulling his way against the wind along the chain. Jan followed, and the other men fell in behind in single file. A hundred meters farther on, they turned, descended some steps and entered one of the half-buried domes. A gray-haired, bearded man was in the well-lighted room, apparently the living room of a home, with a young woman. " Él médico ," said the man who had greeted Jan, gesturing. " Él habla inglés. " He went out, shutting the airlock door behind him. "You must be the man from Oostpoort," said the bearded man, holding out his hand. "I am Doctor Sanchez. We are very grateful you have come." "I thought for a while I wouldn't make it," said Jan ruefully, removing his venushelmet. "This is Mrs. Murillo," said Sanchez. The woman was a Spanish blonde, full-lipped and beautiful, with golden hair and dark, liquid eyes. She smiled at Jan. " Encantada de conocerlo, señor ," she greeted him. "Is this the patient, Doctor?" asked Jan, astonished. She looked in the best of health. "No, the patient is in the next room," answered Sanchez. "Well, as much as I'd like to stop for a pipe, we'd better start at once," said Jan. "It's a hard drive back, and blastoff can't be delayed." The woman seemed to sense his meaning. She turned and called: " Diego! " A boy appeared in the door, a dark-skinned, sleepy-eyed boy of about eight. He yawned. Then, catching sight of the big Dutchman, he opened his eyes wide and smiled. The boy was healthy-looking, alert, but the mark of the Venus Shadow was on his face. There was a faint mottling, a criss-cross of dead-white lines. Mrs. Murillo spoke to him rapidly in Spanish and he nodded. She zipped him into a venusuit and fitted a small helmet on his head. "Good luck, amigo ," said Sanchez, shaking Jan's hand again. "Thanks," replied Jan. He donned his own helmet. "I'll need it, if the trip over was any indication." Jan and Diego made their way back down the chain to the groundcar. There was a score of men there now, and a few women. They let the pair go through, and waved farewell as Jan swung the groundcar around and headed back eastward. It was easier driving with the wind behind him, and Jan hit a hundred kilometers an hour several times before striking the rougher ground of Den Hoorn. Now, if he could only find a way over the bluff raised by that last quake.... The ground of Den Hoorn was still shivering. Jan did not realize this until he had to brake the groundcar almost to a stop at one point, because it was not shaking in severe, periodic shocks as it had earlier. It quivered constantly, like the surface of quicksand. The ground far ahead of him had a strange color to it. Jan, watching for the cliff he had to skirt and scale, had picked up speed over some fairly even terrain, but now he slowed again, puzzled. There was something wrong ahead. He couldn't quite figure it out. Diego, beside him, had sat quietly so far, peering eagerly through the windshield, not saying a word. Now suddenly he cried in a high thin tenor: " Cuidado! Cuidado! Un abismo! " Jim saw it at the same time and hit the brakes so hard the groundcar would have stood on its nose had its wheels been smaller. They skidded to a stop. The chasm that had caused him such a long detour before had widened, evidently in the big quake that had hit earlier. Now it was a canyon, half a kilometer wide. Five meters from the edge he looked out over blank space at the far wall, and could not see the bottom. Cursing choice Dutch profanity, Jan wheeled the groundcar northward and drove along the edge of the abyss as fast as he could. He wasted half an hour before realizing that it was getting no narrower. There was no point in going back southward. It might be a hundred kilometers long or a thousand, but he never could reach the end of it and thread the tumbled rocks of Den Hoorn to Oostpoort before the G-boat blastoff. There was nothing to do but turn back to Rathole and see if some other way could not be found. Jan sat in the half-buried room and enjoyed the luxury of a pipe filled with some of Theodorus Neimeijer's mild tobacco. Before him, Dr. Sanchez sat with crossed legs, cleaning his fingernails with a scalpel. Diego's mother talked to the boy in low, liquid tones in a corner of the room. Jan was at a loss to know how people whose technical knowledge was as skimpy as it obviously was in Rathole were able to build these semi-underground domes to resist the earth shocks that came from Den Hoorn. But this one showed no signs of stress. A religious print and a small pencil sketch of Señora Murillo, probably done by the boy, were awry on the inward-curving walls, but that was all. Jan felt justifiably exasperated at these Spanish-speaking people. "If some effort had been made to take the boy to Oostpoort from here, instead of calling on us to send a car, Den Hoorn could have been crossed before the crack opened," he pointed out. "An effort was made," replied Sanchez quietly. "Perhaps you do not fully realize our position here. We have no engines except the stationary generators that give us current for our air-conditioning and our utilities. They are powered by the windmills. We do not have gasoline engines for vehicles, so our vehicles are operated by hand." "You push them?" demanded Jan incredulously. "No. You've seen pictures of the pump-cars that once were used on terrestrial railroads? Ours are powered like that, but we cannot operate them when the Venerian wind is blowing. By the time I diagnosed the Venus Shadow in Diego, the wind was coming up, and we had no way to get him to Oostpoort." "Mmm," grunted Jan. He shifted uncomfortably and looked at the pair in the corner. The blonde head was bent over the boy protectingly, and over his mother's shoulder Diego's black eyes returned Jan's glance. "If the disease has just started, the boy could wait for the next Earth ship, couldn't he?" asked Jan. "I said I had just diagnosed it, not that it had just started, señor ," corrected Sanchez. "As you know, the trip to Earth takes 145 days and it can be started only when the two planets are at the right position in their orbits. Have you ever seen anyone die of the Venus Shadow?" "Yes, I have," replied Jan in a low voice. He had seen two people die of it, and it had not been pleasant. Medical men thought it was a deficiency disease, but they had not traced down the deficiency responsible. Treatment by vitamins, diet, antibiotics, infrared and ultraviolet rays, all were useless. The only thing that could arrest and cure the disease was removal from the dry, cloud-hung surface of Venus and return to a moist, sunny climate on Earth. Without that treatment, once the typical mottled texture of the skin appeared, the flesh rapidly deteriorated and fell away in chunks. The victim remained unfevered and agonizingly conscious until the degeneration reached a vital spot. "If you have," said Sanchez, "you must realize that Diego cannot wait for a later ship, if his life is to be saved. He must get to Earth at once." Jan puffed at the Heerenbaai-Tabak and cogitated. The place was aptly named. It was a ratty community. The boy was a dark-skinned little Spaniard—of Mexican origin, perhaps. But he was a boy, and a human being. A thought occurred to him. From what he had seen and heard, the entire economy of Rathole could not support the tremendous expense of sending the boy across the millions of miles to Earth by spaceship. "Who's paying his passage?" he asked. "The Dutch Central Venus Company isn't exactly a charitable institution." "Your Señor Dekker said that would be taken care of," replied Sanchez. Jan relit his pipe silently, making a mental resolution that Dekker wouldn't take care of it alone. Salaries for Venerian service were high, and many of the men at Oostpoort would contribute readily to such a cause. "Who is Diego's father?" he asked. "He was Ramón Murillo, a very good mechanic," answered Sanchez, with a sliding sidelong glance at Jan's face. "He has been dead for three years." Jan grunted. "The copters at Oostpoort can't buck this wind," he said thoughtfully, "or I'd have come in one of those in the first place instead of trying to cross Den Hoorn by land. But if you have any sort of aircraft here, it might make it downwind—if it isn't wrecked on takeoff." "I'm afraid not," said Sanchez. "Too bad. There's nothing we can do, then. The nearest settlement west of here is more than a thousand kilometers away, and I happen to know they have no planes, either. Just copters. So that's no help." "Wait," said Sanchez, lifting the scalpel and tilting his head. "I believe there is something, though we cannot use it. This was once an American naval base, and the people here were civilian employes who refused to move north with it. There was a flying machine they used for short-range work, and one was left behind—probably with a little help from the people of the settlement. But...." "What kind of machine? Copter or plane?" "They call it a flying platform. It carries two men, I believe. But, señor ...." "I know them. I've operated them, before I left Earth. Man, you don't expect me to try to fly one of those little things in this wind? They're tricky as they can be, and the passengers are absolutely unprotected!" " Señor , I have asked you to do nothing." "No, you haven't," muttered Jan. "But you know I'll do it." Sanchez looked into his face, smiling faintly and a little sadly. "I was sure you would be willing," he said. He turned and spoke in Spanish to Mrs. Murillo. The woman rose to her feet and came to them. As Jan arose, she looked up at him, tears in her eyes. " Gracias ," she murmured. " Un millón de gracias. " She lifted his hands in hers and kissed them. Jan disengaged himself gently, embarrassed. But it occurred to him, looking down on the bowed head of the beautiful young widow, that he might make some flying trips back over here in his leisure time. Language barriers were not impassable, and feminine companionship might cure his neurotic, history-born distaste for Spaniards, for more than one reason. Sanchez was tugging at his elbow. " Señor , I have been trying to tell you," he said. "It is generous and good of you, and I wanted Señora Murillo to know what a brave man you are. But have you forgotten that we have no gasoline engines here? There is no fuel for the flying platform." The platform was in a warehouse which, like the rest of the structures in Rathole, was a half-buried dome. The platform's ring-shaped base was less than a meter thick, standing on four metal legs. On top of it, in the center, was a railed circle that would hold two men, but would crowd them. Two small gasoline engines sat on each side of this railed circle and between them on a third side was the fuel tank. The passengers entered it on the fourth side. The machine was dusty and spotted with rust, Jan, surrounded by Sanchez, Diego and a dozen men, inspected it thoughtfully. The letters USN*SES were painted in white on the platform itself, and each engine bore the label "Hiller." Jan peered over the edge of the platform at the twin-ducted fans in their plastic shrouds. They appeared in good shape. Each was powered by one of the engines, transmitted to it by heavy rubber belts. Jan sighed. It was an unhappy situation. As far as he could determine, without making tests, the engines were in perfect condition. Two perfectly good engines, and no fuel for them. "You're sure there's no gasoline, anywhere in Rathole?" he asked Sanchez. Sanchez smiled ruefully, as he had once before, at Jan's appellation for the community. The inhabitants' term for it was simply " La Ciudad Nuestra "—"Our Town." But he made no protest. He turned to one of the other men and talked rapidly for a few moments in Spanish. "None, señor ," he said, turning back to Jan. "The Americans, of course, kept much of it when they were here, but the few things we take to Oostpoort to trade could not buy precious gasoline. We have electricity in plenty if you can power the platform with it." Jan thought that over, trying to find a way. "No, it wouldn't work," he said. "We could rig batteries on the platform and electric motors to turn the propellers. But batteries big enough to power it all the way to Oostpoort would be so heavy the machine couldn't lift them off the ground. If there were some way to carry a power line all the way to Oostpoort, or to broadcast the power to it.... But it's a light-load machine, and must have an engine that gives it the necessary power from very little weight." Wild schemes ran through his head. If they were on water, instead of land, he could rig up a sail. He could still rig up a sail, for a groundcar, except for the chasm out on Den Hoorn. The groundcar! Jan straightened and snapped his fingers. "Doctor!" he explained. "Send a couple of men to drain the rest of the fuel from my groundcar. And let's get this platform above ground and tie it down until we can get it started." Sanchez gave rapid orders in Spanish. Two of the men left at a run, carrying five-gallon cans with them. Three others picked up the platform and carried it up a ramp and outside. As soon as they reached ground level, the wind hit them. They dropped the platform to the ground, where it shuddered and swayed momentarily, and two of the men fell successfully on their stomachs. The wind caught the third and somersaulted him half a dozen times before he skidded to a stop on his back with outstretched arms and legs. He turned over cautiously and crawled back to them. Jan, his head just above ground level, surveyed the terrain. There was flat ground to the east, clear in a fairly broad alley for at least half a kilometer before any of the domes protruded up into it. "This is as good a spot for takeoff as we'll find," he said to Sanchez. The men put three heavy ropes on the platform's windward rail and secured it by them to the heavy chain that ran by the dome. The platform quivered and shuddered in the heavy wind, but its base was too low for it to overturn. Shortly the two men returned with the fuel from the groundcar, struggling along the chain. Jan got above ground in a crouch, clinging to the rail of the platform, and helped them fill the fuel tank with it. He primed the carburetors and spun the engines. Nothing happened. He turned the engines over again. One of them coughed, and a cloud of blue smoke burst from its exhaust, but they did not catch. "What is the matter, señor ?" asked Sanchez from the dome entrance. "I don't know," replied Jan. "Maybe it's that the engines haven't been used in so long. I'm afraid I'm not a good enough mechanic to tell." "Some of these men were good mechanics when the navy was here," said Sanchez. "Wait." He turned and spoke to someone in the dome. One of the men of Rathole came to Jan's side and tried the engines. They refused to catch. The man made carburetor adjustments and tried again. No success. He sniffed, took the cap from the fuel tank and stuck a finger inside. He withdrew it, wet and oily, and examined it. He turned and spoke to Sanchez. "He says that your groundcar must have a diesel engine," Sanchez interpreted to Jan. "Is that correct?" "Why, yes, that's true." "He says the fuel will not work then, señor . He says it is low-grade fuel and the platform must have high octane gasoline." Jan threw up his hands and went back into the dome. "I should have known that," he said unhappily. "I would have known if I had thought of it." "What is to be done, then?" asked Sanchez. "There's nothing that can be done," answered Jan. "They may as well put the fuel back in my groundcar." Sanchez called orders to the men at the platform. While they worked, Jan stared out at the furiously spinning windmills that dotted Rathole. "There's nothing that can be done," he repeated. "We can't make the trip overland because of the chasm out there in Den Hoorn, and we can't fly the platform because we have no power for it." Windmills. Again Jan could imagine the flat land around them as his native Holland, with the Zuider Zee sparkling to the west where here the desert stretched under darkling clouds. Jan looked at his watch. A little more than two hours before the G-boat's blastoff time, and it couldn't wait for them. It was nearly eight hours since he had left Oostpoort, and the afternoon was getting noticeably darker. Jan was sorry. He had done his best, but Venus had beaten him. He looked around for Diego. The boy was not in the dome. He was outside, crouched in the lee of the dome, playing with some sticks. Diego must know of his ailment, and why he had to go to Oostpoort. If Jan was any judge of character, Sanchez would have told him that. Whether Diego knew it was a life-or-death matter for him to be aboard the Vanderdecken when it blasted off for Earth, Jan did not know. But the boy was around eight years old and he was bright, and he must realize the seriousness involved in a decision to send him all the way to Earth. Jan felt ashamed of the exuberant foolishness which had led him to spout ancient history and claim descent from William of Orange. It had been a hobby, and artificial topic for conversation that amused him and his companions, a defense against the monotony of Venus that had begun to affect his personality perhaps a bit more than he realized. He did not dislike Spaniards; he had no reason to dislike them. They were all humans—the Spanish, the Dutch, the Germans, the Americans, even the Russians—fighting a hostile planet together. He could not understand a word Diego said when the boy spoke to him, but he liked Diego and wished desperately he could do something. Outside, the windmills of Rathole spun merrily. There was power, the power that lighted and air-conditioned Rathole, power in the air all around them. If he could only use it! But to turn the platform on its side and let the wind spin the propellers was pointless. He turned to Sanchez. "Ask the men if there are any spare parts for the platform," he said. "Some of those legs it stands on, transmission belts, spare propellers." Sanchez asked. "Yes," he said. "Many spare parts, but no fuel." Jan smiled a tight smile. "Tell them to take the engines out," he said. "Since we have no fuel, we may as well have no engines." Pieter Heemskerk stood by the ramp to the stubby G-boat and checked his watch. It was X minus fifteen—fifteen minutes before blastoff time. Heemskerk wore a spacesuit. Everything was ready, except climbing aboard, closing the airlock and pressing the firing pin. What on Venus could have happened to Van Artevelde? The last radio message they had received, more than an hour ago, had said he and the patient took off successfully in an aircraft. What sort of aircraft could he be flying that would require an hour to cover eighty kilometers, with the wind? Heemskerk could only draw the conclusion that the aircraft had been wrecked somewhere in Den Hoorn. As a matter of fact, he knew that preparations were being made now to send a couple of groundcars out to search for it. This, of course, would be too late to help the patient Van Artevelde was bringing, but Heemskerk had no personal interest in the patient. His worry was all for his friend. The two of them had enjoyed chess and good beer together on his last three trips to Venus, and Heemskerk hoped very sincerely that the big blond man wasn't hurt. He glanced at his watch again. X minus twelve. In two minutes, it would be time for him to walk up the ramp into the G-boat. In seven minutes the backward count before blastoff would start over the area loudspeakers. Heemskerk shook his head sadly. And Van Artevelde had promised to come back triumphant, with a broom at his masthead! It was a high thin whine borne on the wind, carrying even through the walls of his spacehelmet, that attracted Heemskerk's attention and caused him to pause with his foot on the ramp. Around him, the rocket mechanics were staring up at the sky, trying to pinpoint the noise. Heemskerk looked westward. At first he could see nothing, then there was a moving dot above the mountain, against the indigo umbrella of clouds. It grew, it swooped, it approached and became a strange little flying disc with two people standing on it and something sticking up from its deck in front of them. A broom? No. The platform hovered and began to settle nearby, and there was Van Artevelde leaning over its rail and fiddling frantically with whatever it was that stuck up on it—a weird, angled contraption of pipes and belts topped by a whirring blade. A boy stood at his shoulder and tried to help him. As the platform descended to a few meters above ground, the Dutchman slashed at the contraption, the cut ends of belts whipped out wildly and the platform slid to the ground with a rush. It hit with a clatter and its two passengers tumbled prone to the ground. "Jan!" boomed Heemskerk, forcing his voice through the helmet diaphragm and rushing over to his friend. "I was afraid you were lost!" Jan struggled to his feet and leaned down to help the boy up. "Here's your patient, Pieter," he said. "Hope you have a spacesuit in his size." "I can find one. And we'll have to hurry for blastoff. But, first, what happened? Even that damned thing ought to get here from Rathole faster than that." "Had no fuel," replied Jan briefly. "My engines were all right, but I had no power to run them. So I had to pull the engines and rig up a power source." Heemskerk stared at the platform. On its railing was rigged a tripod of battered metal pipes, atop which a big four-blade propeller spun slowly in what wind was left after it came over the western mountain. Over the edges of the platform, running from the two propellers in its base, hung a series of tattered transmission belts. "Power source?" repeated Heemskerk. "That?" "Certainly," replied Jan with dignity. "The power source any good Dutchman turns to in an emergency: a windmill!" THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories April 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from The Counterfeit Man More Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse published in 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. Meeting of the Board It was going to be a bad day. As he pushed his way nervously through the crowds toward the Exit Strip, Walter Towne turned the dismal prospect over and over in his mind. The potential gloominess of this particular day had descended upon him the instant the morning buzzer had gone off, making it even more tempting than usual just to roll over and forget about it all. Twenty minutes later, the water-douse came to drag him, drenched and gurgling, back to the cruel cold world. He had wolfed down his morning Koffee-Kup with one eye on the clock and one eye on his growing sense of impending crisis. And now, to make things just a trifle worse, he was going to be late again. He struggled doggedly across the rumbling Exit strip toward the plant entrance. After all, he told himself, why should he be so upset? He was Vice President-in-Charge-of-Production of the Robling Titanium Corporation. What could they do to him, really? He had rehearsed his part many times, squaring his thin shoulders, looking the union boss straight in the eye and saying, "Now, see here, Torkleson—" But he knew, when the showdown came, that he wouldn't say any such thing. And this was the morning that the showdown would come. Oh, not because of the lateness . Of course Bailey, the shop steward, would take his usual delight in bringing that up. But this seemed hardly worthy of concern this morning. The reports waiting on his desk were what worried him. The sales reports. The promotion-draw reports. The royalty reports. The anticipated dividend reports. Walter shook his head wearily. The shop steward was a goad, annoying, perhaps even infuriating, but tolerable. Torkleson was a different matter. He pulled his worn overcoat down over frayed shirt sleeves, and tried vainly to straighten the celluloid collar that kept scooting his tie up under his ear. Once off the moving strip, he started up the Robling corridor toward the plant gate. Perhaps he would be fortunate. Maybe the reports would be late. Maybe his secretary's two neurones would fail to synapse this morning, and she'd lose them altogether. And, as long as he was dreaming, maybe Bailey would break his neck on the way to work. He walked quickly past the workers' lounge, glancing in at the groups of men, arguing politics and checking the stock market reports before they changed from their neat gray business suits to their welding dungarees. Running up the stairs to the administrative wing, he paused outside the door to punch the time clock. 8:04. Damn. If only Bailey could be sick— Bailey was not sick. The administrative offices were humming with frantic activity as Walter glanced down the rows of cubbyholes. In the middle of it all sat Bailey, in his black-and-yellow checkered tattersall, smoking a large cigar. His feet were planted on his desk top, but he hadn't started on his morning Western yet. He was busy glaring, first at the clock, then at Walter. "Late again, I see," the shop steward growled. Walter gulped. "Yes, sir. Just four minutes, this time, sir. You know those crowded strips—" "So it's just four minutes now, eh?" Bailey's feet came down with a crash. "After last month's fine production record, you think four minutes doesn't matter, eh? Think just because you're a vice president it's all right to mosey in here whenever you feel like it." He glowered. "Well, this is three times this month you've been late, Towne. That's a demerit for each time, and you know what that means." "You wouldn't count four minutes as a whole demerit!" Bailey grinned. "Wouldn't I, now! You just add up your pay envelope on Friday. Ten cents an hour off for each demerit." Walter sighed and shuffled back to his desk. Oh, well. It could have been worse. They might have fired him like poor Cartwright last month. He'd just have to listen to that morning buzzer. The reports were on his desk. He picked them up warily. Maybe they wouldn't be so bad. He'd had more freedom this last month than before, maybe there'd been a policy change. Maybe Torkleson was gaining confidence in him. Maybe— The reports were worse than he had ever dreamed. " Towne! " Walter jumped a foot. Bailey was putting down the visiphone receiver. His grin spread unpleasantly from ear to ear. "What have you been doing lately? Sabotaging the production line?" "What's the trouble now?" Bailey jerked a thumb significantly at the ceiling. "The boss wants to see you. And you'd better have the right answers, too. The boss seems to have a lot of questions." Walter rose slowly from his seat. This was it, then. Torkleson had already seen the reports. He started for the door, his knees shaking. It hadn't always been like this, he reflected miserably. Time was when things had been very different. It had meant something to be vice president of a huge industrial firm like Robling Titanium. A man could have had a fine house of his own, and a 'copter-car, and belong to the Country Club; maybe even have a cottage on a lake somewhere. Walter could almost remember those days with Robling, before the switchover, before that black day when the exchange of ten little shares of stock had thrown the Robling Titanium Corporation into the hands of strange and unnatural owners. The door was of heavy stained oak, with bold letters edged in gold: TITANIUM WORKERS OF AMERICA Amalgamated Locals Daniel P. Torkleson, Secretary The secretary flipped down the desk switch and eyed Walter with pity. "Mr. Torkleson will see you." Walter pushed through the door into the long, handsome office. For an instant he felt a pang of nostalgia—the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the long buildings of the Robling plant, the pine paneling, the broad expanse of desk— "Well? Don't just stand there. Shut the door and come over here." The man behind the desk hoisted his three hundred well-dressed pounds and glared at Walter from under flagrant eyebrows. Torkleson's whole body quivered as he slammed a sheaf of papers down on the desk. "Just what do you think you're doing with this company, Towne?" Walter swallowed. "I'm production manager of the corporation." "And just what does the production manager do all day?" Walter reddened. "He organizes the work of the plant, establishes production lines, works with Promotion and Sales, integrates Research and Development, operates the planning machines." "And you think you do a pretty good job of it, eh? Even asked for a raise last year!" Torkleson's voice was dangerous. Walter spread his hands. "I do my best. I've been doing it for thirty years. I should know what I'm doing." " Then how do you explain these reports? " Torkleson threw the heap of papers into Walter's arms, and paced up and down behind the desk. " Look at them! Sales at rock bottom. Receipts impossible. Big orders canceled. The worst reports in seven years, and you say you know your job!" "I've been doing everything I could," Walter snapped. "Of course the reports are bad, they couldn't help but be. We haven't met a production schedule in over two years. No plant can keep up production the way the men are working." Torkleson's face darkened. He leaned forward slowly. "So it's the men now, is it? Go ahead. Tell me what's wrong with the men." "Nothing's wrong with the men—if they'd only work. But they come in when they please, and leave when they please, and spend half their time changing and the other half on Koffee-Kup. No company could survive this. But that's only half of it—" Walter searched through the reports frantically. "This International Jet Transport account—they dropped us because we haven't had a new engine in six years. Why? Because Research and Development hasn't had any money for six years. What can two starved engineers and a second rate chemist drag out of an attic laboratory for competition in the titanium market?" Walter took a deep breath. "I've warned you time and again. Robling had built up accounts over the years with fine products and new models. But since the switchover seven years ago, you and your board have forced me to play the cheap products for the quick profit in order to give your men their dividends. Now the bottom's dropped out. We couldn't turn a quick profit on the big, important accounts, so we had to cancel them. If you had let me manage the company the way it should have been run—" Torkleson had been slowly turning purple. Now he slammed his fist down on the desk. "We should just turn the company back to Management again, eh? Just let you have a free hand to rob us blind again. Well, it won't work, Towne. Not while I'm secretary of this union. We fought long and hard for control of this corporation, just the way all the other unions did. I know. I was through it all." He sat back smugly, his cheeks quivering with emotion. "You might say that I was a national leader in the movement. But I did it only for the men. The men want their dividends. They own the stock, stock is supposed to pay dividends." "But they're cutting their own throats," Walter wailed. "You can't build a company and make it grow the way I've been forced to run it." "Details!" Torkleson snorted. "I don't care how the dividends come in. That's your job. My job is to report a dividend every six months to the men who own the stock, the men working on the production lines." Walter nodded bitterly. "And every year the dividend has to be higher than the last, or you and your fat friends are likely to be thrown out of your jobs—right? No more steaks every night. No more private gold-plated Buicks for you boys. No more twenty-room mansions in Westchester. No more big game hunting in the Rockies. No, you don't have to know anything but how to whip a board meeting into a frenzy so they'll vote you into office again each year." Torkleson's eyes glittered. His voice was very soft. "I've always liked you, Walter. So I'm going to pretend I didn't hear you." He paused, then continued. "But here on my desk is a small bit of white paper. Unless you have my signature on that paper on the first of next month, you are out of a job, on grounds of incompetence. And I will personally see that you go on every White list in the country." Walter felt the fight go out of him like a dying wind. He knew what the White list meant. No job, anywhere, ever, in management. No chance, ever, to join a union. No more house, no more weekly pay envelope. He spread his hands weakly. "What do you want?" he asked. "I want a production plan on my desk within twenty-four hours. A plan that will guarantee me a five per cent increase in dividends in the next six months. And you'd better move fast, because I'm not fooling." Back in his cubbyhole downstairs, Walter stared hopelessly at the reports. He had known it would come to this sooner or later. They all knew it—Hendricks of Promotion, Pendleton of Sales, the whole managerial staff. It was wrong, all the way down the line. Walter had fought it tooth and nail since the day Torkleson had installed the moose heads in Walter's old office, and moved him down to the cubbyhole, under Bailey's watchful eye. He had argued, and battled, and pleaded, and lost. He had watched the company deteriorate day by day. Now they blamed him, and threatened his job, and he was helpless to do anything about it. He stared at the machines, clicking busily against the wall. An idea began to form in his head. Helpless? Not quite. Not if the others could see it, go along with it. It was a repugnant idea. But there was one thing they could do that even Torkleson and his fat-jowled crew would understand. They could go on strike. "It's ridiculous," the lawyer spluttered, staring at the circle of men in the room. "How can I give you an opinion on the legality of the thing? There isn't any legal precedent that I know of." He mopped his bald head with a large white handkerchief. "There just hasn't been a case of a company's management striking against its own labor. It—it isn't done. Oh, there have been lockouts, but this isn't the same thing at all." Walter nodded. "Well, we couldn't very well lock the men out, they own the plant. We were thinking more of a lock- in sort of thing." He turned to Paul Hendricks and the others. "We know how the machines operate. They don't. We also know that the data we keep in the machines is essential to running the business; the machines figure production quotas, organize blueprints, prepare distribution lists, test promotion schemes. It would take an office full of managerial experts to handle even a single phase of the work without the machines." The man at the window hissed, and Pendleton quickly snapped out the lights. They sat in darkness, hardly daring to breathe. Then: "Okay. Just the man next door coming home." Pendleton sighed. "You're sure you didn't let them suspect anything, Walter? They wouldn't be watching the house?" "I don't think so. And you all came alone, at different times." He nodded to the window guard, and turned back to the lawyer. "So we can't be sure of the legal end. You'd have to be on your toes." "I still don't see how we could work it," Hendricks objected. His heavy face was wrinkled with worry. "Torkleson is no fool, and he has a lot of power in the National Association of Union Stockholders. All he'd need to do is ask for managers, and a dozen companies would throw them to him on loan. They'd be able to figure out the machine system and take over without losing a day." "Not quite." Walter was grinning. "That's why I spoke of a lock-in. Before we leave, we throw the machines into feedback, every one of them. Lock them into reverberating circuits with a code sequence key. Then all they'll do is buzz and sputter until the feedback is broken with the key. And the key is our secret. It'll tie the Robling office into granny knots, and scabs won't be able to get any more data out of the machines than Torkleson could. With a lawyer to handle injunctions, we've got them strapped." "For what?" asked the lawyer. Walter turned on him sharply. "For new contracts. Contracts to let us manage the company the way it should be managed. If they won't do it, they won't get another Titanium product off their production lines for the rest of the year, and their dividends will really take a nosedive." "That means you'll have to beat Torkleson," said Bates. "He'll never go along." "Then he'll be left behind." Hendricks stood up, brushing off his dungarees. "I'm with you, Walter. I've taken all of Torkleson that I want to. And I'm sick of the junk we've been trying to sell people." The others nodded. Walter rubbed his hands together. "All right. Tomorrow we work as usual, until the noon whistle. When we go off for lunch, we throw the machines into lock-step. Then we just don't come back. But the big thing is to keep it quiet until the noon whistle." He turned to the lawyer. "Are you with us, Jeff?" Jeff Bates shook his head sadly. "I'm with you. I don't know why, you haven't got a leg to stand on. But if you want to commit suicide, that's all right with me." He picked up his briefcase, and started for the door. "I'll have your contract demands by tomorrow," he grinned. "See you at the lynching." They got down to the details of planning. The news hit the afternoon telecasts the following day. Headlines screamed: MANAGEMENT SABOTAGES ROBLING MACHINES OFFICE STRIKERS THREATEN LABOR ECONOMY ROBLING LOCK-IN CREATES PANDEMONIUM There was a long, indignant statement from Daniel P. Torkleson, condemning Towne and his followers for "flagrant violation of management contracts and illegal fouling of managerial processes." Ben Starkey, President of the Board of American Steel, expressed "shock and regret"; the Amalgamated Buttonhole Makers held a mass meeting in protest, demanding that "the instigators of this unprecedented crime be permanently barred from positions in American Industry." In Washington, the nation's economists were more cautious in their views. Yes, it was an unprecedented action. Yes, there would undoubtedly be repercussions—many industries were having managerial troubles; but as for long term effects, it was difficult to say just at present. On the Robling production lines the workmen blinked at each other, and at their machines, and wondered vaguely what it was all about. Yet in all the upheaval, there was very little expression of surprise. Step by step, through the years, economists had been watching with wary eyes the growing movement toward union, control of industry. Even as far back as the '40's and '50's unions, finding themselves oppressed with the administration of growing sums of money—pension funds, welfare funds, medical insurance funds, accruing union dues—had begun investing in corporate stock. It was no news to them that money could make money. And what stock more logical to buy than stock in their own companies? At first it had been a quiet movement. One by one the smaller firms had tottered, bled drier and drier by increasing production costs, increasing labor demands, and an ever-dwindling margin of profit. One by one they had seen their stocks tottering as they faced bankruptcy, only to be gobbled up by the one ready buyer with plenty of funds to buy with. At first, changes had been small and insignificant: boards of directors shifted; the men were paid higher wages and worked shorter hours; there were tighter management policies; and a little less money was spent on extras like Research and Development. At first—until that fateful night when Daniel P. Torkleson of TWA and Jake Squill of Amalgamated Buttonhole Makers spent a long evening with beer and cigars in a hotel room, and floated the loan that threw steel to the unions. Oil had followed with hardly a fight, and as the unions began to feel their oats, the changes grew more radical. Walter Towne remembered those stormy days well. The gradual undercutting of the managerial salaries, the tightening up of inter-union collusion to establish the infamous White list of Recalcitrant Managers. The shift from hourly wage to annual salary for the factory workers, and the change to the other pole for the managerial staff. And then, with creeping malignancy, the hungry howling of the union bosses for more and higher dividends, year after year, moving steadily toward the inevitable crisis. Until Shop Steward Bailey suddenly found himself in charge of a dozen sputtering machines and an empty office. Torkleson was waiting to see the shop steward when he came in next morning. The union boss's office was crowded with TV cameras, newsmen, and puzzled workmen. The floor was littered with piles of ominous-looking paper. Torkleson was shouting into a telephone, and three lawyers were shouting into Torkleson's ear. He spotted Bailey and waved him through the crowd into an inner office room. "Well? Did they get them fixed?" Bailey spread his hands nervously. "The electronics boys have been at it since yesterday afternoon. Practically had the machines apart on the floor." "I know that, stupid," Torkleson roared. "I ordered them there. Did they get the machines fixed ?" "Uh—well, no, as a matter of fact—" "Well, what's holding them up ?" Bailey's face was a study in misery. "The machines just go in circles. The circuits are locked. They just reverberate." "Then call American Electronics. Have them send down an expert crew." Bailey shook his head. "They won't come." "They what ?" "They said thanks, but no thanks. They don't want their fingers in this pie at all." "Wait until I get O'Gilvy on the phone." "It won't do any good, sir. They've got their own management troubles. They're scared silly of a sympathy strike." The door burst open, and a lawyer stuck his head in. "What about those injunctions, Dan?" "Get them moving," Torkleson howled. "They'll start those machines again, or I'll have them in jail so fast—" He turned back to Bailey. "What about the production lines?" The shop steward's face lighted. "They slipped up, there. There was one program that hadn't been coded into the machines yet. Just a minor item, but it's a starter. We found it in Towne's desk, blueprints all ready, promotion all planned." "Good, good," Torkleson breathed. "I have a directors' meeting right now, have to get the workers quieted down a bit. You put the program through, and give those electronics men three more hours to unsnarl this knot, or we throw them out of the union." He started for the door. "What were the blueprints for?" "Trash cans," said Bailey. "Pure titanium-steel trash cans." It took Robling Titanium approximately two days to convert its entire production line to titanium-steel trash cans. With the total resources of the giant plant behind the effort, production was phenomenal. In two more days the available markets were glutted. Within two weeks, at a conservative estimate, there would be a titanium-steel trash can for every man, woman, child, and hound dog on the North American continent. The jet engines, structural steels, tubing, and other pre-strike products piled up in the freight yards, their routing slips and order requisitions tied up in the reverberating machines. But the machines continued to buzz and sputter. The workers grew restive. From the first day, Towne and Hendricks and all the others had been picketing the plant, until angry crowds of workers had driven them off with shotguns. Then they came back in an old, weatherbeaten 'copter which hovered over the plant entrance carrying a banner with a plaintive message: robling titanium unfair to management . Tomatoes were hurled, fists were shaken, but the 'copter remained. The third day, Jeff Bates was served with an injunction ordering Towne to return to work. It was duly appealed, legal machinery began tying itself in knots, and the strikers still struck. By the fifth day there was a more serious note. "You're going to have to appear, Walter. We can't dodge this one." "When?" "Tomorrow morning. And before a labor-rigged judge, too." The little lawyer paced his office nervously. "I don't like it. Torkleson's getting desperate. The workers are putting pressure on him." Walter grinned. "Then Pendleton is doing a good job of selling." "But you haven't got time ," the lawyer wailed. "They'll have you in jail if you don't start the machines again. They may have you in jail if you do start them, too, but that's another bridge. Right now they want those machines going again." "We'll see," said Walter. "What time tomorrow?" "Ten o'clock." Bates looked up. "And don't try to skip. You be there, because I don't know what to tell them." Walter was there a half hour early. Torkleson's legal staff glowered from across the room. The judge glowered from the bench. Walter closed his eyes with a little smile as the charges were read: "—breach of contract, malicious mischief, sabotage of the company's machines, conspiring to destroy the livelihood of ten thousand workers. Your Honor, we are preparing briefs to prove further that these men have formed a conspiracy to undermine the economy of the entire nation. We appeal to the spirit of orderly justice—" Walter yawned as the words went on. "Of course, if the defendant will waive his appeals against the previous injunctions, and will release the machines that were sabotaged, we will be happy to formally withdraw these charges." There was a rustle of sound through the courtroom. His Honor turned to Jeff Bates. "Are you counsel for the defendant?" "Yes, sir." Bates mopped his bald scalp. "The defendant pleads guilty to all counts." The union lawyer dropped his glasses on the table with a crash. The judge stared. "Mr. Bates, if you plead guilty, you leave me no alternative—" "—but to send me to jail," said Walter Towne. "Go ahead. Send me to jail. In fact, I insist upon going to jail." The union lawyer's jaw sagged. There was a hurried conference. A recess was pleaded. Telephones buzzed. Then: "Your Honor, the plaintiff desires to withdraw all charges at this time." "Objection," Bates exclaimed. "We've already pleaded." "—feel sure that a settlement can be effected out of court—" The case was thrown out on its ear. And still the machines sputtered. Back at the plant rumor had it that the machines were permanently gutted, and that the plant could never go back into production. Conflicting scuttlebutt suggested that persons high in uniondom had perpetrated the crisis deliberately, bullying Management into the strike for the sole purpose of cutting current dividends and selling stock to themselves cheaply. The rumors grew easier and easier to believe. The workers came to the plants in business suits, it was true, and lounged in the finest of lounges, and read the Wall Street Journal , and felt like stockholders. But to face facts, their salaries were not the highest. Deduct union dues, pension fees, medical insurance fees, and sundry other little items which had formerly been paid by well-to-do managements, and very little was left but the semi-annual dividend checks. And now the dividends were tottering. Production lines slowed. There were daily brawls on the plant floor, in the lounge and locker rooms. Workers began joking about the trash cans; then the humor grew more and more remote. Finally, late in the afternoon of the eighth day, Bailey was once again in Torkleson's office. "Well? Speak up! What's the beef this time?" "Sir—the men—I mean, there's been some nasty talk. They're tired of making trash cans. No challenge in it. Anyway, the stock room is full, and the freight yard is full, and the last run of orders we sent out came back because nobody wants any more trash cans." Bailey shook his head. "The men won't swallow it any more. There's—well, there's been talk about having a board meeting." Torkleson's ruddy cheeks paled. "Board meeting, huh?" He licked his heavy lips. "Now look, Bailey, we've always worked well together. I consider you a good friend of mine. You've got to get things under control. Tell the men we're making progress. Tell them Management is beginning to weaken from its original stand. Tell them we expect to have the strike broken in another few hours. Tell them anything." He waited until Bailey was gone. Then, with a trembling hand he lifted the visiphone receiver. "Get me Walter Towne," he said. "I'm not an unreasonable man," Torkleson was saying miserably, waving his fat paws in the air as he paced back and forth in front of the spokesmen for the striking managers. "Perhaps we were a little demanding, I concede it! Overenthusiastic with our ownership, and all that. But I'm sure we can come to some agreement. A hike in wage scale is certainly within reason. Perhaps we can even arrange for better company houses." Walter Towne stifled a yawn. "Perhaps you didn't understand us. The men are agitating for a meeting of the board of directors. We want to be at that meeting. That's the only thing we're interested in right now." "But there wasn't anything about a board meeting in the contract your lawyer presented." "I know, but you rejected that contract. So we tore it up. Anyway, we've changed our minds." Torkleson sat down, his heavy cheeks quivering. "Gentlemen, be reasonable! I can guarantee you your jobs, even give you a free hand with the management. So the dividends won't be so large—the men will have to get used to that. That's it, we'll put it through at the next executive conference, give you—" "The board meeting," Walter said gently. "That'll be enough for us." The union boss swore and slammed his fist on the desk. "Walk out in front of those men after what you've done? You're fools! Well, I've given you your chance. You'll get your board meeting. But you'd better come armed. Because I know how to handle this kind of board meeting, and if I have anything to say about it, this one will end with a massacre." The meeting was held in a huge auditorium in the Robling administration building. Since every member of the union owned stock in the company, every member had the right to vote for members of the board of directors. But in the early days of the switchover, the idea of a board of directors smacked too strongly of the old system of corporate organization to suit the men. The solution had been simple, if a trifle ungainly. Everyone who owned stock in Robling Titanium was automatically a member of the board of directors, with Torkleson as chairman of the board. The stockholders numbered over ten thousand. They were all present. They were packed in from the wall to the stage, and hanging from the rafters. They overflowed into the corridors. They jammed the lobby. Ten thousand men rose with a howl of anger when Walter Towne walked out on the stage. But they quieted down again as Dan Torkleson started to speak. It was a masterful display of rabble-rousing. Torkleson paced the stage, his fat body shaking with agitation, pointing a chubby finger again and again at Walter Towne. He pranced and he ranted. He paused at just the right times for thunderous peals of applause. "This morning in my office we offered to compromise with these jackals," he cried, "and they rejected compromise. Even at the cost of lowering dividends, of taking food from the mouths of your wives and children, we made our generous offers. They were rejected with scorn. These thieves have one desire in mind, my friends, to starve you all, and to destroy your company and your jobs. To every appeal they heartlessly refused to divulge the key to the lock-in. And now this man—the ringleader who keeps the key word buried in secrecy—has the temerity to ask an audience with you. You're angry men; you want to know the man to blame for our hardship." He pointed to Towne with a flourish. "I give you your man. Do what you want with him." The hall exploded in angry thunder. The first wave of men rushed onto the stage as Walter stood up. A tomato whizzed past his ear and splattered against the wall. More men clambered up on the stage, shouting and shaking their fists. Then somebody appeared with a rope. Walter gave a sharp nod to the side of the stage. Abruptly the roar of the men was drowned in another sound—a soul-rending, teeth-grating, bone-rattling screech. The men froze, jaws sagging, eyes wide, hardly believing their ears. In the instant of silence as the factory whistle died away, Walter grabbed the microphone. "You want the code word to start the machines again? I'll give it to you before I sit down!" The men stared at him, shuffling, a murmur rising. Torkleson burst to his feet. "It's a trick!" he howled. "Wait 'til you hear their price." "We have no price, and no demands," said Walter Towne. "We will give you the code word, and we ask nothing in return but that you listen for sixty seconds." He glanced back at Torkleson, and then out to the crowd. "You men here are an electing body—right? You own this great plant and company, top to bottom—right? You should all be rich , because Robling could make you rich. But not one of you out there is rich. Only the fat ones on this stage are. But I'll tell you how you can be rich." They listened. Not a peep came from the huge hall. Suddenly, Walter Towne was talking their language. "You think that since you own the company, times have changed. Well, have they? Are you any better off than you were? Of course not. Because you haven't learned yet that oppression by either side leads to misery for both. You haven't learned moderation. And you never will, until you throw out the ones who have fought moderation right down to the last ditch. You know whom I mean. You know who's grown richer and richer since the switchover. Throw him out, and you too can be rich." He paused for a deep breath. "You want the code word to unlock the machines? All right, I'll give it to you." He swung around to point a long finger at the fat man sitting there. "The code word is TORKLESON!" Much later, Walter Towne and Jeff Bates pried the trophies off the wall of the big office. The lawyer shook his head sadly. "Pity about Dan Torkleson. Gruesome affair." Walter nodded as he struggled down with a moose head. "Yes, a pity, but you know the boys when they get upset." "I suppose so." The lawyer stopped to rest, panting. "Anyway, with the newly elected board of directors, things will be different for everybody. You took a long gamble." "Not so long. Not when you knew what they wanted to hear. It just took a little timing." "Still, I didn't think they'd elect you secretary of the union. It just doesn't figure." Walter Towne chuckled. "Doesn't it? I don't know. Everything's been a little screwy since the switchover. And in a screwy world like this—" He shrugged, and tossed down the moose head. " Anything figures."

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from The Counterfeit Man More Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse published in 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. Circus "Just suppose," said Morgan, "that I did believe you. Just for argument." He glanced up at the man across the restaurant table. "Where would we go from here?" The man shifted uneasily in his seat. He was silent, staring down at his plate. Not a strange-looking man, Morgan thought. Rather ordinary, in fact. A plain face, nose a little too long, fingers a little too dainty, a suit that doesn't quite seem to fit, but all in all, a perfectly ordinary looking man. Maybe too ordinary, Morgan thought. Finally the man looked up. His eyes were dark, with a hunted look in their depths that chilled Morgan a little. "Where do we go? I don't know. I've tried to think it out, and I get nowhere. But you've got to believe me, Morgan. I'm lost, I mean it. If I can't get help, I don't know where it's going to end." "I'll tell you where it's going to end," said Morgan. "It's going to end in a hospital. A mental hospital. They'll lock you up and they'll lose the key somewhere." He poured himself another cup of coffee and sipped it, scalding hot. "And that," he added, "will be that." The place was dark and almost empty. Overhead, a rotary fan swished patiently. The man across from Morgan ran a hand through his dark hair. "There must be some other way," he said. "There has to be." "All right, let's start from the beginning again," Morgan said. "Maybe we can pin something down a little better. You say your name is Parks—right?" The man nodded. "Jefferson Haldeman Parks, if that helps any. Haldeman was my mother's maiden name." "All right. And you got into town on Friday—right?" Parks nodded. "Fine. Now go through the whole story again. What happened first?" The man thought for a minute. "As I said, first there was a fall. About twenty feet. I didn't break any bones, but I was shaken up and limping. The fall was near the highway going to the George Washington Bridge. I got over to the highway and tried to flag down a ride." "How did you feel? I mean, was there anything strange that you noticed?" " Strange! " Parks' eyes widened. "I—I was speechless. At first I hadn't noticed too much—I was concerned with the fall, and whether I was hurt or not. I didn't really think about much else until I hobbled up to that highway and saw those cars coming. Then I could hardly believe my eyes. I thought I was crazy. But a car stopped and asked me if I was going into the city, and I knew I wasn't crazy." Morgan's mouth took a grim line. "You understood the language?" "Oh, yes. I don't see how I could have, but I did. We talked all the way into New York—nothing very important, but we understood each other. His speech had an odd sound, but—" Morgan nodded. "I know, I noticed. What did you do when you got to New York?" "Well, obviously, I needed money. I had gold coin. There had been no way of knowing if it would be useful, but I'd taken it on chance. I tried to use it at a newsstand first, and the man wouldn't touch it. Asked me if I thought I was the U.S. Treasury or something. When he saw that I was serious, he sent me to a money lender, a hock shop, I think he called it. So I found a place—" "Let me see the coins." Parks dropped two small gold discs on the table. They were perfectly smooth and perfectly round, tapered by wear to a thin blunt edge. There was no design on them, and no printing. Morgan looked up at the man sharply. "What did you get for these?" Parks shrugged. "Too little, I suspect. Two dollars for the small one, five for the larger." "You should have gone to a bank." "I know that now. I didn't then. Naturally, I assumed that with everything else so similar, principles of business would also be similar." Morgan sighed and leaned back in his chair. "Well, then what?" Parks poured some more coffee. His face was very pale, Morgan thought, and his hands trembled as he raised the cup to his lips. Fright? Maybe. Hard to tell. The man put down the cup and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. "First, I went to the mayor's office," he said. "I kept trying to think what anyone at home would do in my place. That seemed a good bet. I asked a policeman where it was, and then I went there." "But you didn't get to see him." "No. I saw a secretary. She said the mayor was in conference, and that I would have to have an appointment. She let me speak to another man, one of the mayor's assistants." "And you told him?" "No. I wanted to see the mayor himself. I thought that was the best thing to do. I waited for a couple of hours, until another assistant came along and told me flatly that the mayor wouldn't see me unless I stated my business first." He drew in a deep breath. "So I stated it. And then I was gently but firmly ushered back into the street again." "They didn't believe you," said Morgan. "Not for a minute. They laughed in my face." Morgan nodded. "I'm beginning to get the pattern. So what did you do next?" "Next I tried the police. I got the same treatment there, only they weren't so gentle. They wouldn't listen either. They muttered something about cranks and their crazy notions, and when they asked me where I lived, they thought I was—what did they call it?—a wise guy! Told me to get out and not come back with any more wild stories." "I see," said Morgan. Jefferson Parks finished his last bite of pie and pushed the plate away. "By then I didn't know quite what to do. I'd been prepared for almost anything excepting this. It was frightening. I tried to rationalize it, and then I quit trying. It wasn't that I attracted attention, or anything like that, quite the contrary. Nobody even looked at me, unless I said something to them. I began to look for things that were different , things that I could show them, and say, see, this proves that I'm telling the truth, look at it—" He looked up helplessly. "And what did you find?" "Nothing. Oh, little things, insignificant little things. Your calendars, for instance. Naturally, I couldn't understand your frame of reference. And the coinage, you stamp your coins; we don't. And cigarettes. We don't have any such thing as tobacco." The man gave a short laugh. "And your house dogs! We have little animals that look more like rabbits than poodles. But there was nothing any more significant than that. Absolutely nothing." "Except yourself," Morgan said. "Ah, yes. I thought that over carefully. I looked for differences, obvious ones. I couldn't find any. You can see that, just looking at me. So I searched for more subtle things. Skin texture, fingerprints, bone structure, body proportion. I still couldn't find anything. Then I went to a doctor." Morgan's eyebrows lifted. "Good," he said. Parks shrugged tiredly. "Not really. He examined me. He practically took me apart. I carefully refrained from saying anything about who I was or where I came from; just said I wanted a complete physical examination, and let him go to it. He was thorough, and when he finished he patted me on the back and said, 'Parks, you've got nothing to worry about. You're as fine, strapping a specimen of a healthy human being as I've ever seen.' And that was that." Parks laughed bitterly. "I guess I was supposed to be happy with the verdict, and instead I was ready to knock him down. It was idiotic, it defied reason, it was infuriating." Morgan nodded sourly. "Because you're not a human being," he said. "That's right. I'm not a human being at all." "How did you happen to pick this planet, or this sun?" Morgan asked curiously. "There must have been a million others to choose from." Parks unbuttoned his collar and rubbed his stubbled chin unhappily. "I didn't make the choice. Neither did anyone else. Travel by warp is a little different from travel by the rocket you fiction writers make so much of. With a rocket vehicle you pick your destination, make your calculations, and off you go. The warp is blind flying, strictly blind. We send an unmanned scanner ahead. It probes around more or less hit-or-miss until it locates something, somewhere, that looks habitable. When it spots a likely looking place, we keep a tight beam on it and send through a manned scout." He grinned sourly. "Like me. If it looks good to the scout, he signals back, and they leave the warp anchored for a sort of permanent gateway until we can get a transport beam built. But we can't control the directional and dimensional scope of the warp. There are an infinity of ways it can go, until we have a guide beam transmitting from the other side. Then we can just scan a segment of space with the warp, and the scanner picks up the beam." He shook his head wearily. "We're new at it, Morgan. We've only tried a few dozen runs. We're not too far ahead of you in technology. We've been using rocket vehicles just like yours for over a century. That's fine for a solar system, but it's not much good for the stars. When the warp principle was discovered, it looked like the answer. But something went wrong, the scanner picked up this planet, and I was coming through, and then something blew. Next thing I knew I was falling. When I tried to make contact again, the scanner was gone!" "And you found things here the same as back home," said Morgan. "The same! Your planet and mine are practically twins. Similar cities, similar technology, everything. The people are the same, with precisely the same anatomy and physiology, the same sort of laws, the same institutions, even compatible languages. Can't you see the importance of it? This planet is on the other side of the universe from mine, with the first intelligent life we've yet encountered anywhere. But when I try to tell your people that I'm a native of another star system, they won't believe me !" "Why should they?" asked Morgan. "You look like a human being. You talk like one. You eat like one. You act like one. What you're asking them to believe is utterly incredible." " But it's true. " Morgan shrugged. "So it's true. I won't argue with you. But as I asked before, even if I did believe you, what do you expect me to do about it? Why pick me , of all the people you've seen?" There was a desperate light in Parks' eyes. "I was tired, tired of being laughed at, tired of having people looking at me as though I'd lost my wits when I tried to tell them the truth. You were here, you were alone, so I started talking. And then I found out you wrote stories." He looked up eagerly. "I've got to get back, Morgan, somehow. My life is there, my family. And think what it would mean to both of our worlds—contact with another intelligent race! Combine our knowledges, our technologies, and we could explore the galaxy!" He leaned forward, his thin face intense. "I need money and I need help. I know some of the mathematics of the warp principle, know some of the design, some of the power and wiring principles. You have engineers here, technologists, physicists. They could fill in what I don't know and build a guide beam. But they won't do it if they don't believe me. Your government won't listen to me, they won't appropriate any money." "Of course they won't. They've got a war or two on their hands, they have public welfare, and atomic bombs, and rockets to the moon to sink their money into." Morgan stared at the man. "But what can I do?" "You can write ! That's what you can do. You can tell the world about me, you can tell exactly what has happened. I know how public interest can be aroused in my world. It must be the same in yours." Morgan didn't move. He just stared. "How many people have you talked to?" he asked. "A dozen, a hundred, maybe a thousand." "And how many believed you?" "None." "You mean nobody would believe you?" " Not one soul. Until I talked to you." And then Morgan was laughing, laughing bitterly, tears rolling down his cheeks. "And I'm the one man who couldn't help you if my life depended on it," he gasped. "You believe me?" Morgan nodded sadly. "I believe you. Yes. I think your warp brought you through to a parallel universe of your own planet, not to another star, but I think you're telling the truth." "Then you can help me." "I'm afraid not." "Why not?" "Because I'd be worse than no help at all." Jefferson Parks gripped the table, his knuckles white. "Why?" he cried hoarsely. "If you believe me, why can't you help me?" Morgan pointed to the magazine lying on the table. "I write, yes," he said sadly. "Ever read stories like this before?" Parks picked up the magazine, glanced at the bright cover. "I barely looked at it." "You should look more closely. I have a story in this issue. The readers thought it was very interesting," Morgan grinned. "Go ahead, look at it." The stranger from the stars leafed through the magazine, stopped at a page that carried Roger Morgan's name. His eyes caught the first paragraph and he turned white. He set the magazine down with a trembling hand. "I see," he said, and the life was gone out of his voice. He spread the pages viciously, read the lines again. The paragraph said: "Just suppose," said Martin, "that I did believe you. Just for argument." He glanced up at the man across the table. "Where do we go from here?"

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from The Counterfeit Man More Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse published in 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. The Link It was nearly sundown when Ravdin eased the ship down into the last slow arc toward the Earth's surface. Stretching his arms and legs, he tried to relax and ease the tension in his tired muscles. Carefully, he tightened the seat belt for landing; below him he could see the vast, tangled expanse of Jungle-land spreading out to the horizon. Miles ahead was the bright circle of the landing field and the sparkling glow of the city beyond. Ravdin peered to the north of the city, hoping to catch a glimpse of the concert before his ship was swallowed by the brilliant landing lights. A bell chimed softly in his ear. Ravdin forced his attention back to the landing operation. He was still numb and shaken from the Warp-passage, his mind still muddled by the abrupt and incredible change. Moments before, the sky had been a vast, starry blanket of black velvet; then, abruptly, he had been hovering over the city, sliding down toward warm friendly lights and music. He checked the proper switches, and felt the throbbing purr of the anti-grav motors as the ship slid in toward the landing slot. Tall spires of other ships rose to meet him, circle upon circle of silver needles pointing skyward. A little later they were blotted out as the ship was grappled into the berth from which it had risen days before. With a sigh, Ravdin eased himself out of the seat, his heart pounding with excitement. Perhaps, he thought, he was too excited, too eager to be home, for his mind was still reeling from the fearful discovery of his journey. The station was completely empty as Ravdin walked down the ramp to the shuttles. At the desk he checked in with the shiny punch-card robot, and walked swiftly across the polished floor. The wall panels pulsed a somber blue-green, broken sharply by brilliant flashes and overtones of scarlet, reflecting with subtle accuracy the tumult in his own mind. Not a sound was in the air, not a whisper nor sign of human habitation. Vaguely, uneasiness grew in his mind as he entered the shuttle station. Suddenly, the music caught him, a long, low chord of indescribable beauty, rising and falling in the wind, a distant whisper of life.... The concert, of course. Everyone would be at the concert tonight, and even from two miles away, the beauty of four hundred perfectly harmonized voices was carried on the breeze. Ravdin's uneasiness disappeared; he was eager to discharge his horrible news, get it off his mind and join the others in the great amphitheater set deep in the hillside outside the city. But he knew instinctively that Lord Nehmon, anticipating his return, would not be at the concert. Riding the shuttle over the edges of Jungle-land toward the shining bright beauty of the city, Ravdin settled back, trying to clear his mind of the shock and horror he had encountered on his journey. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed him, lighted with a million hues. He realized that his whole life was entangled in the very beauty of this wonderful city. Everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered here in the ever-changing rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds. And now, he knew, he would soon see his beloved city burning once again, turning to flames and ashes in a heart-breaking memorial to the age-old fear of his people. The little shuttle-car settled down softly on the green terrace near the center of the city. The building was a masterpiece of smoothly curving walls and tasteful lines, opening a full side to the south to catch the soft sunlight and warm breezes. Ravdin strode across the deep carpeting of the terrace. There was other music here, different music, a wilder, more intimate fantasy of whirling sound. An oval door opened for him, and he stopped short, staggered for a moment by the overpowering beauty in the vaulted room. A girl with red hair the color of new flame was dancing with enthralling beauty and abandon, her body moving like ripples of wind to the music which filled the room with its throbbing cry. Her beauty was exquisite, every motion, every flowing turn a symphony of flawless perfection as she danced to the wild music. "Lord Nehmon!" The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her body frozen in mid-air, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the old man waiting in the room. Nehmon rose, his gaunt face and graying hair belying the youthful movement of his body. Smiling, he came forward, clapped Ravdin on the shoulder, and took his hand warmly. "You're too late for the concert—it's a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city is there." Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile. "I had to let you know," he said. " They're coming , Nehmon! I saw them, hours ago." The last overtones of the music broke abruptly, like a glass shattered on stone. The room was deathly still. Lord Nehmon searched the young man's face. Then he turned away, not quite concealing the sadness and pain in his eyes. "You're certain? You couldn't be mistaken?" "No chance. I found signs of their passing in a dozen places. Then I saw them , their whole fleet. There were hundreds. They're coming, I saw them." "Did they see you?" Nehmon's voice was sharp. "No, no. The Warp is a wonderful thing. With it I could come and go in the twinkling of an eye. But I could see them in the twinkling of an eye." "And it couldn't have been anyone else?" "Could anyone else build ships like the Hunters?" Nehmon sighed wearily. "No one that we know." He glanced up at the young man. "Sit down, son, sit down. I—I'll just have to rearrange my thinking a little. Where were they? How far?" "Seven light years," Ravdin said. "Can you imagine it? Just seven, and moving straight this way. They know where we are , and they are coming quickly." His eyes filled with fear. "They couldn't have found us so soon, unless they too have discovered the Warp and how to use it to travel." The older man's breath cut off sharply, and there was real alarm in his eyes. "You're right," he said softly. "Six months ago it was eight hundred light years away, in an area completely remote from us. Now just seven . In six months they have come so close." The scout looked up at Nehmon in desperation. "But what can we do? We have only weeks, maybe days, before they're here. We have no time to plan, no time to prepare for them. What can we do?" The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up, wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing in his face for the first time in centuries. "We can do once again what we always have done before when the Hunters came," he said sadly. "We can run away." The bright street below the oval window was empty and quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out in bitter silence. "Yes, we can run away. Just as we always have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so much here, we must burn the city and flee again." His voice trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no answer there, only sadness. "Think of the concerts. It's taken so long, but at last we've come so close to the ultimate goal." He gestured toward the thought-sensitive sounding boards lining the walls, the panels which had made the dancer-illusion possible. "Think of the beauty and peace we've found here." "I know. How well I know." "Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run away." Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright. "Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking." "I've spent many years thinking, my son." "Not what I've been thinking." Ravdin sat down, clasping his hands in excitement. "The Hunters come and we run away, Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run, and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're hunting us , these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate, and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they have come close to finding us, we have run." Nehmon nodded slowly. "For thousands of years." Ravdin's eyes were bright. "Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families, running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and secrecy." He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's angrily. " Why do we run, my lord? " Nehmon's eyes widened. "Because we have no choice," he said. "We must run or be killed. You know that. You've seen the records, you've been taught." "Oh, yes, I know what I've been taught. I've been taught that eons ago our remote ancestors fought the Hunters, and lost, and fled, and were pursued. But why do we keep running? Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and fled. Why? Even animals know that when they're cornered they must turn and fight." "We are not animals." Nehmon's voice cut the air like a whiplash. "But we could fight." "Animals fight. We do not. We fought once, like animals, and now we must run from the Hunters who continue to fight like animals. So be it. Let the Hunters fight." Ravdin shook his head. "Do you mean that the Hunters are not men like us?" he said. "That's what you're saying, that they are animals. All right. We kill animals for our food, isn't that true? We kill the tiger-beasts in the Jungle to protect ourselves, why not kill the Hunters to protect ourselves?" Nehmon sighed, and reached out a hand to the young man. "I'm sorry," he said gently. "It seems logical, but it's false logic. The Hunters are men just like you and me. Their lives are different, their culture is different, but they are men. And human life is sacred, to us, above all else. This is the fundamental basis of our very existence. Without it we would be Hunters, too. If we fight, we are dead even if we live. That's why we must run away now, and always. Because we know that we must not kill men." On the street below, the night air was suddenly full of voices, chattering, intermingled with whispers of song and occasional brief harmonic flutterings. The footfalls were muted on the polished pavement as the people passed slowly, their voices carrying a hint of puzzled uneasiness. "The concert's over!" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling a chill pass through him. "So soon, I wonder why?" Eagerly he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face, sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin. "You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!" She turned to the old man. "Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt it. For some reason the people seemed afraid ." Ravdin turned away from his bride. "Tell her," he said to the old man. Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror. "The Hunters! They've found us?" Ravdin nodded wordlessly. Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears in her eyes. "We came so close tonight, so very close. I felt the music before it was sung, do you realize that? I felt the fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't vague or fuzzy, it was clear ! The transference was perfect." She turned to face the old man. "It's taken so long to come this far, Nehmon. So much work, so much training to reach a perfect communal concert. We've had only two hundred years here, only two hundred ! I was just a little girl when we came, I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four thousand. But two hundred —we can't leave now. Not when we've come so far." Ravdin nodded. "That's the trouble. They come closer every time. This time they will catch us. Or the next time, or the next. And that will be the end of everything for us, unless we fight them." He paused, watching the last groups dispersing on the street below. "If we only knew, for certain, what we were running from." There was a startled silence. The girl's breath came in a gasp and her eyes widened as his words sank home. "Ravdin," she said softly, " have you ever seen a Hunter ?" Ravdin stared at her, and felt a chill of excitement. Music burst from the sounding-board, odd, wild music, suddenly hopeful. "No," he said, "no, of course not. You know that." The girl rose from her seat. "Nor have I. Never, not once." She turned to Lord Nehmon. "Have you ?" "Never." The old man's voice was harsh. "Has anyone ever seen a Hunter?" Ravdin's hand trembled. "I—I don't know. None of us living now, no. It's been too long since they last actually found us. I've read—oh, I can't remember. I think my grandfather saw them, or my great-grandfather, somewhere back there. It's been thousands of years." "Yet we've been tearing ourselves up by the roots, fleeing from planet to planet, running and dying and still running. But suppose we don't need to run anymore?" He stared at her. "They keep coming. They keep searching for us. What more proof do you need?" Dana's face glowed with excitement, alive with new vitality, new hope. "Ravdin, can't you see? They might have changed. They might not be the same. Things can happen. Look at us, how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you were to be master at a concert next month. Think how the concerts have changed! Even my grandmother can remember when the concerts were just a few performers playing, and everyone else just sitting and listening ! Can you imagine anything more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference then, they never dreamed what a real concert could be! Why, those people had never begun to understand music until they themselves became a part of it. Even we can see these changes, why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as we have?" Nehmon's voice broke in, almost harshly, as he faced the excited pair. "The Hunters don't have concerts," he said grimly. "You're deluding yourself, Dana. They laugh at our music, they scoff at our arts and twist them into obscene mockeries. They have no concept of beauty in their language. The Hunters are incapable of change." "And you can be certain of that when nobody has seen them for thousands of years ?" Nehmon met her steady eyes, read the strength and determination there. He knew, despairingly, what she was thinking—that he was old, that he couldn't understand, that his mind was channeled now beyond the approach of wisdom. "You mustn't think what you're thinking," he said weakly. "You'd be blind. You wouldn't know, you couldn't have any idea what you would find. If you tried to contact them, you could be lost completely, tortured, killed. If they haven't changed, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd never come back, Dana." "But she's right all the same," Ravdin said softly. "You're wrong, my lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive. Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do it, Dana and I." "I could forbid you to go." Dana looked at her husband, and her eyes were proud. "You could forbid us," she said, facing the old man. "But you could never stop us." At the edge of the Jungle-land a great beast stood with green-gleaming eyes, licking his fanged jaws as he watched the glowing city, sensing somehow that the mystifying circle of light and motion was soon to become his Jungle-land again. In the city the turmoil bubbled over, as wave after wave of the people made the short safari across the intervening jungle to the circles of their ships. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers—all carried their small, frail remembrances out to the ships. There was music among them still, but it was a different sort of music, now, an eerie, hopeless music that drifted out of the city in the wind. It caused all but the bravest of the beasts, their hair prickling on their backs, to run in panic through the jungle darkness. It was a melancholy music, carried from thought to thought, from voice to voice as the people of the city wearily prepared themselves once again for the long journey. To run away. In the darkness of secrecy, to be gone, without a trace, without symbol or vestige of their presence, leaving only the scorched circle of land for the jungle to reclaim, so that no eyes, not even the sharpest, would ever know how long they had stayed, nor where they might have gone. In the rounded room of his house, Lord Nehmon dispatched the last of his belongings, a few remembrances, nothing more, because the space on the ships must take people, not remembrances, and he knew that the remembrances would bring only pain. All day Nehmon had supervised the loading, the intricate preparation, following plans laid down millennia before. He saw the libraries and records transported, mile upon endless mile of microfilm, carted to the ships prepared to carry them, stored until a new resting place was found. The history of a people was recorded on that film, a people once proud and strong, now equally proud, but dwindling in numbers as toll for the constant roving. A proud people, yet a people who would turn and run without thought, in a panic of age-old fear. They had to run, Nehmon knew, if they were to survive. And with a blaze of anger in his heart, he almost hated the two young people waiting here with him for the last ship to be filled. For these two would not go. It had been a long and painful night. He had pleaded and begged, tried to persuade them that there was no hope, that the very idea of remaining behind or trying to contact the Hunters was insane. Yet he knew they were sane, perhaps unwise, naive, but their decision had been reached, and they would not be shaken. The day was almost gone as the last ships began to fill. Nehmon turned to Ravdin and Dana, his face lined and tired. "You'll have to go soon," he said. "The city will be burned, of course, as always. You'll be left with food, and with weapons against the jungle. The Hunters will know that we've been here, but they'll not know when, nor where we have gone." He paused. "It will be up to you to see that they don't learn." Dana shook her head. "We'll tell them nothing, unless it's safe for them to know." "They'll question you, even torture you." She smiled calmly. "Perhaps they won't. But as a last resort, we can blank out." Nehmon's face went white. "You know there is no coming back, once you do that. You would never regain your memory. You must save it for a last resort." Down below on the street the last groups of people were passing; the last sweet, eerie tones of the concert were rising in the gathering twilight. Soon the last families would have taken their refuge in the ships, waiting for Nehmon to trigger the fire bombs to ignite the beautiful city after the ships started on their voyage. The concerts were over; there would be long years of aimless wandering before another home could be found, another planet safe from the Hunters and their ships. Even then it would be more years before the concerts could again rise from their hearts and throats and minds, generations before they could begin work again toward the climactic expression of their heritage. Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before. They had risen together, a common people, their home a single planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of government for the perpetuation of government, split farther and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the Hunters sneered and ridiculed, and then grew to hate Ravdin's people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love, happiness. Ravdin knew of his people's slowly dawning awareness of the sanctity of life, shattered abruptly by the horrible wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much in those long years. They had conquered disease. They had grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. But now the end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a ghastly grave. Nehmon's voice broke the silence. "If you must stay behind, then go now. The city will burn an hour after the count-down." "We will be safe, outside the city." Dana gripped her husband's hand, trying to transmit to him some part of her strength and confidence. "Wish us the best, Nehmon. If a link can be forged, we will forge it." "I wish you the best in everything." There were tears in the old man's eyes as he turned and left the room. They stood in the Jungle-land, listening to the scurry of frightened animals, and shivering in the cool night air as the bright sparks of the ships' exhausts faded into the black starry sky. A man and a woman alone, speechless, watching, staring with awful longing into the skies as the bright rocket jets dwindled to specks and flickered out. The city burned. Purple spumes of flame shot high into the air, throwing a ghastly light on the frightened Jungle-land. Spires of flame seemed to be seeking the stars with their fingers as the plastic walls and streets of the city hissed and shriveled, blackening, bubbling into a vanishing memory before their eyes. The flames shot high, carrying with them the last remnants of the city which had stood proud and tall an hour before. Then a silence fell, deathly, like the lifeless silence of a grave. Out of the silence, little whispering sounds of the Jungle-land crept to their ears, first frightened, then curious, then bolder and bolder as the wisps of grass and little animals ventured out and out toward the clearing where the city had stood. Bit by bit the Jungle-land gathered courage, and the clearing slowly, silently, began to disappear. Days later new sparks of light appeared in the black sky. They grew to larger specks, then to flares, and finally settled to the earth as powerful, flaming jets. They were squat, misshapen vessels, circling down like vultures, hissing, screeching, landing with a grinding crash in the tall thicket near the place where the city had stood. Ravdin's signal had guided them in, and the Hunters had seen them, standing on a hilltop above the demolished amphitheater. Men had come out of the ships, large men with cold faces and dull eyes, weapons strapped to their trim uniforms. The Hunters had blinked at them, unbelieving, with their weapons held at ready. Ravdin and Dana were seized and led to the flagship. As they approached it, their hearts sank and they clasped hands to bolster their failing hope. The leader of the Hunters looked up from his desk as they were thrust into his cabin. Frankle's face was a graven mask as he searched their faces dispassionately. The captives were pale and seemed to cringe from the pale interrogation light. "Chickens!" the Hunter snorted. "We have been hunting down chickens." His eyes turned to one of the guards. "They have been searched?" "Of course, master." "And questioned?" The guard frowned. "Yes, sir. But their language is almost unintelligible." "You've studied the basic tongues, haven't you?" Frankle's voice was as cold as his eyes. "Of course, sir, but this is so different." Frankle stared in contempt at the fair-skinned captives, fixing his eyes on them for a long moment. Finally he said, "Well?" Ravdin glanced briefly at Dana's white face. His voice seemed weak and high-pitched in comparison to the Hunter's baritone. "You are the leader of the Hunters?" Frankle regarded him sourly, without replying. His thin face was swarthy, his short-cut gray hair matching the cold gray of his eyes. It was an odd face, completely blank of any thought or emotion, yet capable of shifting to a strange biting slyness in the briefest instant. It was a rich face, a face of inscrutable depth. He pushed his chair back, his eyes watchful. "We know your people were here," he said suddenly. "Now they've gone, and yet you remain behind. There must be a reason for such rashness. Are you sick? Crippled?" Ravdin shook his head. "We are not sick." "Then criminals, perhaps? Being punished for rebellious plots?" "We are not criminals." The Hunter's fist crashed on the desk. "Then why are you here? Why? Are you going to tell me now, or do you propose to waste a few hours of my time first?" "There is no mystery," Ravdin said softly. "We stayed behind to plead for peace." "For peace?" Frankle stared in disbelief. Then he shrugged, his face tired. "I might have known. Peace! Where have your people gone?" Ravdin met him eye for eye. "I can't say." The Hunter laughed. "Let's be precise, you don't choose to say, just now. But perhaps very soon you will wish with all your heart to tell me." Dana's voice was sharp. "We're telling you the truth. We want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace with you, to bring our people together again." Frankle snorted. "You came to us in war, once, long ago. Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on to greater things?" Ravdin's face flushed hotly. "Much greater things," he snapped. Frankle sat down slowly. "No doubt," he said. "Now understand me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers. That is my definition of a civil tongue." He sat back coldly. "Now, shall we commence asking questions?" Dana stepped forward suddenly, her cheeks flushed. "We don't have the words to express ourselves," she said softly. "We can't tell you in words what we have to say, but music is a language even you can understand. We can tell you what we want in music." Frankle scowled. He knew about the magic of this music, he had heard of the witchcraft these weak chicken-people could weave, of their strange, magic power to steal strong men's minds from them and make them like children before wolves. But he had never heard this music with his own ears. He looked at them, his eyes strangely bright. "You know I cannot listen to your music. It is forbidden, even you should know that. How dare you propose—" "But this is different music." Dana's eyes widened, and she threw an excited glance at her husband. "Our music is beautiful, wonderful to hear. If you could only hear it—" "Never." The man hesitated. "Your music is forbidden, poisonous." Her smile was like sweet wine, a smile that worked into the Hunter's mind like a gentle, lazy drug. "But who is to permit or forbid? After all, you are the leader here, and forbidden pleasures are all the sweeter." Frankle's eyes were on hers, fascinated. Slowly, with a graceful movement, she drew the gleaming thought-sensitive stone from her clothing. It glowed in the room with a pearly luminescence, and she saw the man's eyes turning to it, drawn as if by magic. Then he looked away, and a cruel smile curled his lips. He motioned toward the stone. "All right," he said mockingly. "Do your worst. Show me your precious music." Like a tinkle of glass breaking in a well, the stone flashed its fiery light in the room. Little swirls of music seemed to swell from it, blossoming in the silence. Frankle tensed, a chill running up his spine, his eyes drawn back to the gleaming jewel. Suddenly, the music filled the room, rising sweetly like an overpowering wave, filling his mind with strange and wonderful images. The stone shimmered and changed, taking the form of dancing clouds of light, swirling with the music as it rose. Frankle felt his mind groping toward the music, trying desperately to reach into the heart of it, to become part of it. Ravdin and Dana stood there, trancelike, staring transfixed at the gleaming center of light, forcing their joined minds to create the crashing, majestic chords as the song lifted from the depths of oblivion to the heights of glory in the old, old song of their people. A song of majesty, and strength, and dignity. A song of love, of aspiration, a song of achievement. A song of peoples driven by ancient fears across the eons of space, seeking only peace, even peace with those who drove them. Frankle heard the music, and could not comprehend, for his mind could not grasp the meaning, the true overtones of those glorious chords, but he felt the strangeness in the pangs of fear which groped through his mind, cringing from the wonderful strains, dazzled by the dancing light. He stared wide-eyed and trembling at the couple across the room, and for an instant it seemed that he was stripped naked. For a fleeting moment the authority was gone from his face; gone too was the cruelty, the avarice, the sardonic mockery. For the briefest moment his cold gray eyes grew incredibly tender with a sudden ancient, long-forgotten longing, crying at last to be heard. And then, with a scream of rage he was stumbling into the midst of the light, lashing out wildly at the heart of its shimmering brilliance. His huge hand caught the hypnotic stone and swept it into crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the cold steel bulkhead. He stood rigid, his whole body shaking, eyes blazing with fear and anger and hatred as he turned on Ravdin and Dana. His voice was a raging storm of bitterness drowning out the dying strains of the music. "Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make me forget my duty and listen to your rotten, poisonous noise! Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen, I didn't ! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down, I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and your foul music will be dead!" He turned to the guards, wildly, his hands still trembling. "Take them out! Whip them, burn them, do anything! But find out where their people have gone. Find out! Music! We'll take the music out of them, once and for all." The inquisition had been horrible. Their minds had had no concept of such horror, such relentless, racking pain. The blazing lights, the questions screaming in their ears, Frankle's vicious eyes burning in frustration, and their own screams, rising with each question they would not answer until their throats were scorched and they could no longer scream. Finally they reached the limit they could endure, and muttered together the hoarse words that could deliver them. Not words that Frankle could hear, but words to bring deliverance, to blank out their minds like a wet sponge over slate. The hypnotic key clicked into the lock of their minds; their screams died in their brains. Frankle stared at them, and knew instantly what they had done, a technique of memory obliteration known and dreaded for so many thousands of years that history could not remember. As his captives stood mindless before him, he let out one hoarse, agonized scream of frustration and defeat. But strangely enough he did not kill them. He left them on a cold stone ledge, blinking dumbly at each other as the ships of his fleet rose one by one and vanished like fireflies in the dark night sky. Naked, they sat alone on the planet of the Jungle-land. They knew no words, no music, nothing. And they did not even know that in the departing ships a seed had been planted. For Frankle had heard the music. He had grasped the beauty of his enemies for that brief instant, and in that instant they had become less his enemies. A tiny seed of doubt had been planted. The seed would grow. The two sat dumbly, shivering. Far in the distance, a beast roared against the heavy night, and a light rain began to fall. They sat naked, the rain soaking their skin and hair. Then one of them grunted, and moved into the dry darkness of the cave. Deep within him some instinct spoke, warning him to fear the roar of the animal. Blinking dully, the woman crept into the cave after him. Three thoughts alone filled their empty minds. Not thoughts of Nehmon and his people; to them, Nehmon had never existed, forgotten as completely as if he had never been. No thoughts of the Hunters, either, nor of their unheard-of mercy in leaving them their lives—lives of memoryless oblivion, like animals in this green Jungle-land, but lives nonetheless. Only three thoughts filled their minds: It was raining. They were hungry. The Saber-tooth was prowling tonight. They never knew that the link had been forged.

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ONE-SHOT You can do a great deal if you have enough data, and enough time to compute on it, by logical methods. But given the situation that neither data nor time is adequate, and an answer must be produced ... what do you do? BY JAMES BLISH Illustrated by van Dongen On the day that the Polish freighter Ludmilla laid an egg in New York harbor, Abner Longmans ("One-Shot") Braun was in the city going about his normal business, which was making another million dollars. As we found out later, almost nothing else was normal about that particular week end for Braun. For one thing, he had brought his family with him—a complete departure from routine—reflecting the unprecedentedly legitimate nature of the deals he was trying to make. From every point of view it was a bad week end for the CIA to mix into his affairs, but nobody had explained that to the master of the Ludmilla . I had better add here that we knew nothing about this until afterward; from the point of view of the storyteller, an organization like Civilian Intelligence Associates gets to all its facts backwards, entering the tale at the pay-off, working back to the hook, and winding up with a sheaf of background facts to feed into the computer for Next Time. It's rough on the various people who've tried to fictionalize what we do—particularly for the lazy examples of the breed, who come to us expecting that their plotting has already been done for them—but it's inherent in the way we operate, and there it is. Certainly nobody at CIA so much as thought of Braun when the news first came through. Harry Anderton, the Harbor Defense chief, called us at 0830 Friday to take on the job of identifying the egg; this was when our records show us officially entering the affair, but, of course, Anderton had been keeping the wires to Washington steaming for an hour before that, getting authorization to spend some of his money on us (our clearance status was then and is now C&R—clean and routine). I was in the central office when the call came through, and had some difficulty in making out precisely what Anderton wanted of us. "Slow down, Colonel Anderton, please," I begged him. "Two or three seconds won't make that much difference. How did you find out about this egg in the first place?" "The automatic compartment bulkheads on the Ludmilla were defective," he said. "It seems that this egg was buried among a lot of other crates in the dump-cell of the hold—" "What's a dump cell?" "It's a sea lock for getting rid of dangerous cargo. The bottom of it opens right to Davy Jones. Standard fitting for ships carrying explosives, radioactives, anything that might act up unexpectedly." "All right," I said. "Go ahead." "Well, there was a timer on the dump-cell floor, set to drop the egg when the ship came up the river. That worked fine, but the automatic bulkheads that are supposed to keep the rest of the ship from being flooded while the cell's open, didn't. At least they didn't do a thorough job. The Ludmilla began to list and the captain yelled for help. When the Harbor Patrol found the dump-cell open, they called us in." "I see." I thought about it a moment. "In other words, you don't know whether the Ludmilla really laid an egg or not." "That's what I keep trying to explain to you, Dr. Harris. We don't know what she dropped and we haven't any way of finding out. It could be a bomb—it could be anything. We're sweating everybody on board the ship now, but it's my guess that none of them know anything; the whole procedure was designed to be automatic." "All right, we'll take it," I said. "You've got divers down?" "Sure, but—" "We'll worry about the buts from here on. Get us a direct line from your barge to the big board here so we can direct the work. Better get on over here yourself." "Right." He sounded relieved. Official people have a lot of confidence in CIA; too much, in my estimation. Some day the job will come along that we can't handle, and then Washington will be kicking itself—or, more likely, some scapegoat—for having failed to develop a comparable government department. Not that there was much prospect of Washington's doing that. Official thinking had been running in the other direction for years. The precedent was the Associated Universities organization which ran Brookhaven; CIA had been started the same way, by a loose corporation of universities and industries all of which had wanted to own an ULTIMAC and no one of which had had the money to buy one for itself. The Eisenhower administration, with its emphasis on private enterprise and concomitant reluctance to sink federal funds into projects of such size, had turned the two examples into a nice fat trend, which ULTIMAC herself said wasn't going to be reversed within the practicable lifetime of CIA. I buzzed for two staffers, and in five minutes got Clark Cheyney and Joan Hadamard, CIA's business manager and social science division chief respectively. The titles were almost solely for the benefit of the T/O—that is, Clark and Joan do serve in those capacities, but said service takes about two per cent of their capacities and their time. I shot them a couple of sentences of explanation, trusting them to pick up whatever else they needed from the tape, and checked the line to the divers' barge. It was already open; Anderton had gone to work quickly and with decision once he was sure we were taking on the major question. The television screen lit, but nothing showed on it but murky light, striped with streamers of darkness slowly rising and falling. The audio went cloonck ... oing , oing ... bonk ... oing ... Underwater noises, shapeless and characterless. "Hello, out there in the harbor. This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in, please." "Monig here," the audio said. Boink ... oing , oing ... "Got anything yet?" "Not a thing, Dr. Harris," Monig said. "You can't see three inches in front of your face down here—it's too silty. We've bumped into a couple of crates, but so far, no egg." "Keep trying." Cheyney, looking even more like a bulldog than usual, was setting his stopwatch by one of the eight clocks on ULTIMAC's face. "Want me to take the divers?" he said. "No, Clark, not yet. I'd rather have Joan do it for the moment." I passed the mike to her. "You'd better run a probability series first." "Check." He began feeding tape into the integrator's mouth. "What's your angle, Peter?" "The ship. I want to see how heavily shielded that dump-cell is." "It isn't shielded at all," Anderton's voice said behind me. I hadn't heard him come in. "But that doesn't prove anything. The egg might have carried sufficient shielding in itself. Or maybe the Commies didn't care whether the crew was exposed or not. Or maybe there isn't any egg." "All that's possible," I admitted. "But I want to see it, anyhow." "Have you taken blood tests?" Joan asked Anderton. "Yes." "Get the reports through to me, then. I want white-cell counts, differentials, platelet counts, hematocrit and sed rates on every man." Anderton picked up the phone and I took a firm hold on the doorknob. "Hey," Anderton said, putting the phone down again. "Are you going to duck out just like that? Remember, Dr. Harris, we've got to evacuate the city first of all! No matter whether it's a real egg or not—we can't take the chance on it's not being an egg!" "Don't move a man until you get a go-ahead from CIA," I said. "For all we know now, evacuating the city may be just what the enemy wants us to do—so they can grab it unharmed. Or they may want to start a panic for some other reason, any one of fifty possible reasons." "You can't take such a gamble," he said grimly. "There are eight and a half million lives riding on it. I can't let you do it." "You passed your authority to us when you hired us," I pointed out. "If you want to evacuate without our O.K., you'll have to fire us first. It'll take another hour to get that cleared from Washington—so you might as well give us the hour." He stared at me for a moment, his lips thinned. Then he picked up the phone again to order Joan's blood count, and I got out the door, fast. A reasonable man would have said that I found nothing useful on the Ludmilla , except negative information. But the fact is that anything I found would have been a surprise to me; I went down looking for surprises. I found nothing but a faint trail to Abner Longmans Braun, most of which was fifteen years cold. There'd been a time when I'd known Braun, briefly and to no profit to either of us. As an undergraduate majoring in social sciences, I'd taken on a term paper on the old International Longshoreman's Association, a racket-ridden union now formally extinct—although anyone who knew the signs could still pick up some traces on the docks. In those days, Braun had been the business manager of an insurance firm, the sole visible function of which had been to write policies for the ILA and its individual dock-wallopers. For some reason, he had been amused by the brash youngster who'd barged in on him and demanded the lowdown, and had shown me considerable lengths of ropes not normally in view of the public—nothing incriminating, but enough to give me a better insight into how the union operated than I had had any right to expect—or even suspect. Hence I was surprised to hear somebody on the docks remark that Braun was in the city over the week end. It would never have occurred to me that he still interested himself in the waterfront, for he'd gone respectable with a vengeance. He was still a professional gambler, and according to what he had told the Congressional Investigating Committee last year, took in thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year at it, but his gambles were no longer concentrated on horses, the numbers, or shady insurance deals. Nowadays what he did was called investment—mostly in real estate; realtors knew him well as the man who had almost bought the Empire State Building. (The almost in the equation stands for the moment when the shoestring broke.) Joan had been following his career, too, not because she had ever met him, but because for her he was a type study in the evolution of what she called "the extra-legal ego." "With personalities like that, respectability is a disease," she told me. "There's always an almost-open conflict between the desire to be powerful and the desire to be accepted; your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile, but people like Braun are damned with a conscience, and sooner or later they crack trying to appease it." "I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin bearing," I said. "Braun's ten-point steel all the way through." "Don't you believe it. The symptoms are showing all over him. Now he's backing Broadway plays, sponsoring beginning actresses, joining playwrights' groups—he's the only member of Buskin and Brush who's never written a play, acted in one, or so much as pulled the rope to raise the curtain." "That's investment," I said. "That's his business." "Peter, you're only looking at the surface. His real investments almost never fail. But the plays he backs always do. They have to; he's sinking money in them to appease his conscience, and if they were to succeed it would double his guilt instead of salving it. It's the same way with the young actresses. He's not sexually interested in them—his type never is, because living a rigidly orthodox family life is part of the effort towards respectability. He's backing them to 'pay his debt to society'—in other words, they're talismans to keep him out of jail." "It doesn't seem like a very satisfactory substitute." "Of course it isn't," Joan had said. "The next thing he'll do is go in for direct public service—giving money to hospitals or something like that. You watch." She had been right; within the year, Braun had announced the founding of an association for clearing the Detroit slum area where he had been born—the plainest kind of symbolic suicide: Let's not have any more Abner Longmans Brauns born down here . It depressed me to see it happen, for next on Joan's agenda for Braun was an entry into politics as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly liberal myself when I'm off duty, I hated to think what Braun's career might tell me about my own motives, if I'd let it. All of which had nothing to do with why I was prowling around the Ludmilla —or did it? I kept remembering Anderton's challenge: "You can't take such a gamble. There are eight and a half million lives riding on it—" That put it up into Braun's normal operating area, all right. The connection was still hazy, but on the grounds that any link might be useful, I phoned him. He remembered me instantly; like most uneducated, power-driven men, he had a memory as good as any machine's. "You never did send me that paper you was going to write," he said. His voice seemed absolutely unchanged, although he was in his seventies now. "You promised you would." "Kids don't keep their promises as well as they should," I said. "But I've still got copies and I'll see to it that you get one, this time. Right now I need another favor—something right up your alley." "CIA business?" "Yes. I didn't know you knew I was with CIA." Braun chuckled. "I still know a thing or two," he said. "What's the angle?" "That I can't tell you over the phone. But it's the biggest gamble there ever was, and I think we need an expert. Can you come down to CIA's central headquarters right away?" "Yeah, if it's that big. If it ain't, I got lots of business here, Andy. And I ain't going to be in town long. You're sure it's top stuff?" "My word on it." He was silent a moment. Then he said, "Andy, send me your paper." "The paper? Sure, but—" Then I got it. I'd given him my word. "You'll get it," I said. "Thanks, Mr. Braun." I called headquarters and sent a messenger to my apartment to look for one of those long-dusty blue folders with the legal-length sheets inside them, with orders to scorch it over to Braun without stopping to breathe more than once. Then I went back myself. The atmosphere had changed. Anderton was sitting by the big desk, clenching his fists and sweating; his whole posture telegraphed his controlled helplessness. Cheyney was bent over a seismograph, echo-sounding for the egg through the river bottom. If that even had a prayer of working, I knew, he'd have had the trains of the Hudson & Manhattan stopped; their rumbling course through their tubes would have blanked out any possible echo-pip from the egg. "Wild goose chase?" Joan said, scanning my face. "Not quite. I've got something, if I can just figure out what it is. Remember One-Shot Braun?" "Yes. What's he got to do with it?" "Nothing," I said. "But I want to bring him in. I don't think we'll lick this project before deadline without him." "What good is a professional gambler on a job like this? He'll just get in the way." I looked toward the television screen, which now showed an amorphous black mass, jutting up from a foundation of even deeper black. "Is that operation getting you anywhere?" "Nothing's gotten us anywhere," Anderton interjected harshly. "We don't even know if that's the egg—the whole area is littered with crates. Harris, you've got to let me get that alert out!" "Clark, how's the time going?" Cheyney consulted the stopwatch. "Deadline in twenty-nine minutes," he said. "All right, let's use those minutes. I'm beginning to see this thing a little clearer. Joan, what we've got here is a one-shot gamble; right?" "In effect," she said cautiously. "And it's my guess that we're never going to get the answer by diving for it—not in time, anyhow. Remember when the Navy lost a barge-load of shells in the harbor, back in '52? They scrabbled for them for a year and never pulled up a one; they finally had to warn the public that if it found anything funny-looking along the shore it shouldn't bang said object, or shake it either. We're better equipped than the Navy was then—but we're working against a deadline." "If you'd admitted that earlier," Anderton said hoarsely, "we'd have half a million people out of the city by now. Maybe even a million." "We haven't given up yet, colonel. The point is this, Joan: what we need is an inspired guess. Get anything from the prob series, Clark? I thought not. On a one-shot gamble of this kind, the 'laws' of chance are no good at all. For that matter, the so-called ESP experiments showed us long ago that even the way we construct random tables is full of holes—and that a man with a feeling for the essence of a gamble can make a monkey out of chance almost at will. "And if there ever was such a man, Braun is it. That's why I asked him to come down here. I want him to look at that lump on the screen and—play a hunch." "You're out of your mind," Anderton said. A decorous knock spared me the trouble of having to deny, affirm or ignore the judgment. It was Braun; the messenger had been fast, and the gambler hadn't bothered to read what a college student had thought of him fifteen years ago. He came forward and held out his hand, while the others looked him over frankly. He was impressive, all right. It would have been hard for a stranger to believe that he was aiming at respectability; to the eye, he was already there. He was tall and spare, and walked perfectly erect, not without spring despite his age. His clothing was as far from that of a gambler as you could have taken it by design: a black double-breasted suit with a thin vertical stripe, a gray silk tie with a pearl stickpin just barely large enough to be visible at all, a black Homburg; all perfectly fitted, all worn with proper casualness—one might almost say a formal casualness. It was only when he opened his mouth that One-Shot Braun was in the suit with him. "I come over as soon as your runner got to me," he said. "What's the pitch, Andy?" "Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard, Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton. I'll be quick because we need speed now. A Polish ship has dropped something out in the harbor. We don't know what it is. It may be a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's old laundry. Obviously we've got to find out which—and we want you to tell us." Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went up. "Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know nothing about things like that. I'm surprised with you. I thought CIA had all the brains it needed—ain't you got machines to tell you answers like that?" I pointed silently to Joan, who had gone back to work the moment the introductions were over. She was still on the mike to the divers. She was saying: "What does it look like?" "It's just a lump of something, Dr. Hadamard. Can't even tell its shape—it's buried too deeply in the mud." Cloonk ... Oing , oing ... "Try the Geiger." "We did. Nothing but background." "Scintillation counter?" "Nothing, Dr. Hadamard. Could be it's shielded." "Let us do the guessing, Monig. All right, maybe it's got a clockwork fuse that didn't break with the impact. Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a stethoscope on it and see if you pick up a ticking or anything that sounds like a motor running." There was a lag and I turned back to Braun. "As you can see, we're stymied. This is a long shot, Mr. Braun. One throw of the dice—one show-down hand. We've got to have an expert call it for us—somebody with a record of hits on long shots. That's why I called you." "It's no good," he said. He took off the Homburg, took his handkerchief from his breast pocket, and wiped the hatband. "I can't do it." "Why not?" "It ain't my kind of thing," he said. "Look, I never in my life run odds on anything that made any difference. But this makes a difference. If I guess wrong—" "Then we're all dead ducks. But why should you guess wrong? Your hunches have been working for sixty years now." Braun wiped his face. "No. You don't get it. I wish you'd listen to me. Look, my wife and my kids are in the city. It ain't only my life, it's theirs, too. That's what I care about. That's why it's no good. On things that matter to me, my hunches don't work ." I was stunned, and so, I could see, were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I should have guessed it, but it had never occurred to me. "Ten minutes," Cheyney said. I looked up at Braun. He was frightened, and again I was surprised without having any right to be. I tried to keep at least my voice calm. "Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as a favor. It's already too late to do it any other way. And if you guess wrong, the outcome won't be any worse than if you don't try at all." "My kids," he whispered. I don't think he knew that he was speaking aloud. I waited. Then his eyes seemed to come back to the present. "All right," he said. "I told you the truth, Andy. Remember that. So—is it a bomb or ain't it? That's what's up for grabs, right?" I nodded. He closed his eyes. An unexpected stab of pure fright went down my back. Without the eyes, Braun's face was a death mask. The water sounds and the irregular ticking of a Geiger counter seemed to spring out from the audio speaker, four times as loud as before. I could even hear the pen of the seismograph scribbling away, until I looked at the instrument and saw that Clark had stopped it, probably long ago. Droplets of sweat began to form along Braun's forehead and his upper lip. The handkerchief remained crushed in his hand. Anderton said, "Of all the fool—" "Hush!" Joan said quietly. Slowly, Braun opened his eyes. "All right," he said. "You guys wanted it this way. I say it's a bomb. " He stared at us for a moment more—and then, all at once, the Timkin bearing burst. Words poured out of it. "Now you guys do something, do your job like I did mine—get my wife and kids out of there—empty the city—do something, do something !" Anderton was already grabbing for the phone. "You're right, Mr. Braun. If it isn't already too late—" Cheyney shot out a hand and caught Anderton's telephone arm by the wrist. "Wait a minute," he said. "What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'? Haven't you already shot enough time?" Cheyney did not let go; instead, he looked inquiringly at Joan and said, "One minute, Joan. You might as well go ahead." She nodded and spoke into the mike. "Monig, unscrew the cap." "Unscrew the cap?" the audio squawked. "But Dr. Hadamard, if that sets it off—" "It won't go off. That's the one thing you can be sure it won't do." "What is this?" Anderton demanded. "And what's this deadline stuff, anyhow?" "The cap's off," Monig reported. "We're getting plenty of radiation now. Just a minute— Yeah. Dr. Hadamard, it's a bomb, all right. But it hasn't got a fuse. Now how could they have made a fool mistake like that?" "In other words, it's a dud," Joan said. "That's right, a dud." Now, at last, Braun wiped his face, which was quite gray. "I told you the truth," he said grimly. "My hunches don't work on stuff like this." "But they do," I said. "I'm sorry we put you through the wringer—and you too, colonel—but we couldn't let an opportunity like this slip. It was too good a chance for us to test how our facilities would stand up in a real bomb-drop." "A real drop?" Anderton said. "Are you trying to say that CIA staged this? You ought to be shot, the whole pack of you!" "No, not exactly," I said. "The enemy's responsible for the drop, all right. We got word last month from our man in Gdynia that they were going to do it, and that the bomb would be on board the Ludmilla . As I say, it was too good an opportunity to miss. We wanted to find out just how long it would take us to figure out the nature of the bomb—which we didn't know in detail—after it was dropped here. So we had our people in Gdynia defuse the thing after it was put on board the ship, but otherwise leave it entirely alone. "Actually, you see, your hunch was right on the button as far as it went. We didn't ask you whether or not that object was a live bomb. We asked whether it was a bomb or not. You said it was, and you were right." The expression on Braun's face was exactly like the one he had worn while he had been searching for his decision—except that, since his eyes were open, I could see that it was directed at me. "If this was the old days," he said in an ice-cold voice, "I might of made the colonel's idea come true. I don't go for tricks like this, Andy." "It was more than a trick," Clark put in. "You'll remember we had a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun. Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't have all the time in the world to figure out what kind of a thing had been dropped. If we had still failed to establish that when the deadline ran out, we would have had to allow evacuation of the city, with all the attendant risk that that was exactly what the enemy wanted us to do." "So?" "So we failed the test," I said. "At one minute short of the deadline, Joan had the divers unscrew the cap. In a real drop that would have resulted in a detonation, if the bomb was real; we'd never risk it. That we did do it in the test was a concession of failure—an admission that our usual methods didn't come through for us in time. "And that means that you were the only person who did come through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop ever comes, we're going to have to have you here, as an active part of our investigation. Your intuition for the one-shot gamble was the one thing that bailed us out this time. Next time it may save eight million lives." There was quite a long silence. All of us, Anderton included, watched Braun intently, but his impassive face failed to show any trace of how his thoughts were running. When he did speak at last, what he said must have seemed insanely irrelevant to Anderton, and maybe to Cheyney too. And perhaps it meant nothing more to Joan than the final clinical note in a case history. "It's funny," he said, "I was thinking of running for Congress next year from my district. But maybe this is more important." It was, I believe, the sigh of a man at peace with himself. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction August 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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The gadget was strictly, beyond any question, a toy. Not a real, workable device. Except for the way it could work under a man's mental skin.... BY HARRY HARRISON Because there were few adults in the crowd, and Colonel "Biff" Hawton stood over six feet tall, he could see every detail of the demonstration. The children—and most of the parents—gaped in wide-eyed wonder. Biff Hawton was too sophisticated to be awed. He stayed on because he wanted to find out what the trick was that made the gadget work. "It's all explained right here in your instruction book," the demonstrator said, holding up a garishly printed booklet opened to a four-color diagram. "You all know how magnets pick up things and I bet you even know that the earth itself is one great big magnet—that's why compasses always point north. Well ... the Atomic Wonder Space Wave Tapper hangs onto those space waves. Invisibly all about us, and even going right through us, are the magnetic waves of the earth. The Atomic Wonder rides these waves just the way a ship rides the waves in the ocean. Now watch...." Every eye was on him as he put the gaudy model rocketship on top of the table and stepped back. It was made of stamped metal and seemed as incapable of flying as a can of ham—which it very much resembled. Neither wings, propellors, nor jets broke through the painted surface. It rested on three rubber wheels and coming out through the bottom was a double strand of thin insulated wire. This white wire ran across the top of the black table and terminated in a control box in the demonstrator's hand. An indicator light, a switch and a knob appeared to be the only controls. "I turn on the Power Switch, sending a surge of current to the Wave Receptors," he said. The switch clicked and the light blinked on and off with a steady pulse. Then the man began to slowly turn the knob. "A careful touch on the Wave Generator is necessary as we are dealing with the powers of the whole world here...." A concerted ahhhh swept through the crowd as the Space Wave Tapper shivered a bit, then rose slowly into the air. The demonstrator stepped back and the toy rose higher and higher, bobbing gently on the invisible waves of magnetic force that supported it. Ever so slowly the power was reduced and it settled back to the table. "Only $17.95," the young man said, putting a large price sign on the table. "For the complete set of the Atomic Wonder, the Space Tapper control box, battery and instruction book ..." At the appearance of the price card the crowd broke up noisily and the children rushed away towards the operating model trains. The demonstrator's words were lost in their noisy passage, and after a moment he sank into a gloomy silence. He put the control box down, yawned and sat on the edge of the table. Colonel Hawton was the only one left after the crowd had moved on. "Could you tell me how this thing works?" the colonel asked, coming forward. The demonstrator brightened up and picked up one of the toys. "Well, if you will look here, sir...." He opened the hinged top. "You will see the Space Wave coils at each end of the ship." With a pencil he pointed out the odd shaped plastic forms about an inch in diameter that had been wound—apparently at random—with a few turns of copper wire. Except for these coils the interior of the model was empty. The coils were wired together and other wires ran out through the hole in the bottom of the control box. Biff Hawton turned a very quizzical eye on the gadget and upon the demonstrator who completely ignored this sign of disbelief. "Inside the control box is the battery," the young man said, snapping it open and pointing to an ordinary flashlight battery. "The current goes through the Power Switch and Power Light to the Wave Generator ..." "What you mean to say," Biff broke in, "is that the juice from this fifteen cent battery goes through this cheap rheostat to those meaningless coils in the model and absolutely nothing happens. Now tell me what really flies the thing. If I'm going to drop eighteen bucks for six-bits worth of tin, I want to know what I'm getting." The demonstrator flushed. "I'm sorry, sir," he stammered. "I wasn't trying to hide anything. Like any magic trick this one can't be really demonstrated until it has been purchased." He leaned forward and whispered confidentially. "I'll tell you what I'll do though. This thing is way overpriced and hasn't been moving at all. The manager said I could let them go at three dollars if I could find any takers. If you want to buy it for that price...." "Sold, my boy!" the colonel said, slamming three bills down on the table. "I'll give that much for it no matter how it works. The boys in the shop will get a kick out of it," he tapped the winged rocket on his chest. "Now really —what holds it up?" The demonstrator looked around carefully, then pointed. "Strings!" he said. "Or rather a black thread. It runs from the top of the model, through a tiny loop in the ceiling, and back down to my hand—tied to this ring on my finger. When I back up—the model rises. It's as simple as that." "All good illusions are simple," the colonel grunted, tracing the black thread with his eye. "As long as there is plenty of flimflam to distract the viewer." "If you don't have a black table, a black cloth will do," the young man said. "And the arch of a doorway is a good site, just see that the room in back is dark." "Wrap it up, my boy, I wasn't born yesterday. I'm an old hand at this kind of thing." Biff Hawton sprang it at the next Thursday-night poker party. The gang were all missile men and they cheered and jeered as he hammed up the introduction. "Let me copy the diagram, Biff, I could use some of those magnetic waves in the new bird!" "Those flashlight batteries are cheaper than lox, this is the thing of the future!" Only Teddy Kaner caught wise as the flight began. He was an amateur magician and spotted the gimmick at once. He kept silent with professional courtesy, and smiled ironically as the rest of the bunch grew silent one by one. The colonel was a good showman and he had set the scene well. He almost had them believing in the Space Wave Tapper before he was through. When the model had landed and he had switched it off he couldn't stop them from crowding around the table. "A thread!" one of the engineers shouted, almost with relief, and they all laughed along with him. "Too bad," the head project physicist said, "I was hoping that a little Space Wave Tapping could help us out. Let me try a flight with it." "Teddy Kaner first," Biff announced. "He spotted it while you were all watching the flashing lights, only he didn't say anything." Kaner slipped the ring with the black thread over his finger and started to step back. "You have to turn the switch on first," Biff said. "I know," Kaner smiled. "But that's part of illusion—the spiel and the misdirection. I'm going to try this cold first, so I can get it moving up and down smoothly, then go through it with the whole works." ILLUSTRATED BY BREY He moved his hand back smoothly, in a professional manner that drew no attention to it. The model lifted from the table—then crashed back down. "The thread broke," Kaner said. "You jerked it, instead of pulling smoothly," Biff said and knotted the broken thread. "Here let me show you how to do it." The thread broke again when Biff tried it, which got a good laugh that made his collar a little warm. Someone mentioned the poker game. This was the only time that poker was mentioned or even remembered that night. Because very soon after this they found that the thread would lift the model only when the switch was on and two and a half volts flowing through the joke coils. With the current turned off the model was too heavy to lift. The thread broke every time. "I still think it's a screwy idea," the young man said. "One week getting fallen arches, demonstrating those toy ships for every brat within a thousand miles. Then selling the things for three bucks when they must have cost at least a hundred dollars apiece to make." "But you did sell the ten of them to people who would be interested?" the older man asked. "I think so, I caught a few Air Force officers and a colonel in missiles one day. Then there was one official I remembered from the Bureau of Standards. Luckily he didn't recognize me. Then those two professors you spotted from the university." "Then the problem is out of our hands and into theirs. All we have to do now is sit back and wait for results." " What results?! These people weren't interested when we were hammering on their doors with the proof. We've patented the coils and can prove to anyone that there is a reduction in weight around them when they are operating...." "But a small reduction. And we don't know what is causing it. No one can be interested in a thing like that—a fractional weight decrease in a clumsy model, certainly not enough to lift the weight of the generator. No one wrapped up in massive fuel consumption, tons of lift and such is going to have time to worry about a crackpot who thinks he has found a minor slip in Newton's laws." "You think they will now?" the young man asked, cracking his knuckles impatiently. "I know they will. The tensile strength of that thread is correctly adjusted to the weight of the model. The thread will break if you try to lift the model with it. Yet you can lift the model—after a small increment of its weight has been removed by the coils. This is going to bug these men. Nobody is going to ask them to solve the problem or concern themselves with it. But it will nag at them because they know this effect can't possibly exist. They'll see at once that the magnetic-wave theory is nonsense. Or perhaps true? We don't know. But they will all be thinking about it and worrying about it. Someone is going to experiment in his basement—just as a hobby of course—to find the cause of the error. And he or someone else is going to find out what makes those coils work, or maybe a way to improve them!" "And we have the patents...." "Correct. They will be doing the research that will take them out of the massive-lift-propulsion business and into the field of pure space flight." "And in doing so they will be making us rich—whenever the time comes to manufacture," the young man said cynically. "We'll all be rich, son," the older man said, patting him on the shoulder. "Believe me, you're not going to recognize this old world ten years from now." Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog April 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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THE STOKER AND THE STARS BY JOHN A. SENTRY When you've had your ears pinned back in a bowknot, it's sometimes hard to remember that an intelligent people has no respect for a whipped enemy ... but does for a fairly beaten enemy. Illustrated by van Dongen Know him? Yes, I know him— knew him. That was twenty years ago. Everybody knows him now. Everybody who passed him on the street knows him. Everybody who went to the same schools, or even to different schools in different towns, knows him now. Ask them. But I knew him. I lived three feet away from him for a month and a half. I shipped with him and called him by his first name. What was he like? What was he thinking, sitting on the edge of his bunk with his jaw in his palm and his eyes on the stars? What did he think he was after? Well ... Well, I think he— You know, I think I never did know him, after all. Not well. Not as well as some of those people who're writing the books about him seem to. I couldn't really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship's air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man. It was after the war, and we were beaten. There used to be a school of thought among us that deplored our combativeness; before we had ever met any people from off Earth, even, you could hear people saying we were toughest, cruelest life-form in the Universe, unfit to mingle with the gentler wiser races in the stars, and a sure bet to steal their galaxy and corrupt it forever. Where these people got their information, I don't know. We were beaten. We moved out beyond Centaurus, and Sirius, and then we met the Jeks, the Nosurwey, the Lud. We tried Terrestrial know-how, we tried Production Miracles, we tried patriotism, we tried damning the torpedoes and full speed ahead ... and we were smashed back like mayflies in the wind. We died in droves, and we retreated from the guttering fires of a dozen planets, we dug in, we fought through the last ditch, and we were dying on Earth itself before Baker mutinied, shot Cope, and surrendered the remainder of the human race to the wiser, gentler races in the stars. That way, we lived. That way, we were permitted to carry on our little concerns, and mind our manners. The Jeks and the Lud and the Nosurwey returned to their own affairs, and we knew they would leave us alone so long as we didn't bother them. We liked it that way. Understand me—we didn't accept it, we didn't knuckle under with waiting murder in our hearts—we liked it. We were grateful just to be left alone again. We were happy we hadn't been wiped out like the upstarts the rest of the Universe thought us to be. When they let us keep our own solar system and carry on a trickle of trade with the outside, we accepted it for the fantastically generous gift it was. Too many of our best men were dead for us to have any remaining claim on these things in our own right. I know how it was. I was there, twenty years ago. I was a little, pudgy man with short breath and a high-pitched voice. I was a typical Earthman. We were out on a God-forsaken landing field on Mars, MacReidie and I, loading cargo aboard the Serenus . MacReidie was First Officer. I was Second. The stranger came walking up to us. "Got a job?" he asked, looking at MacReidie. Mac looked him over. He saw the same things I'd seen. He shook his head. "Not for you. The only thing we're short on is stokers." You wouldn't know. There's no such thing as a stoker any more, with automatic ships. But the stranger knew what Mac meant. Serenus had what they called an electronic drive. She had to run with an evacuated engine room. The leaking electricity would have broken any stray air down to ozone, which eats metal and rots lungs. So the engine room had the air pumped out of her, and the stokers who tended the dials and set the cathode attitudes had to wear suits, smelling themselves for twelve hours at a time and standing a good chance of cooking where they sat when the drive arced. Serenus was an ugly old tub. At that, we were the better of the two interstellar freighters the human race had left. "You're bound over the border, aren't you?" MacReidie nodded. "That's right. But—" "I'll stoke." MacReidie looked over toward me and frowned. I shrugged my shoulders helplessly. I was a little afraid of the stranger, too. The trouble was the look of him. It was the look you saw in the bars back on Earth, where the veterans of the war sat and stared down into their glasses, waiting for night to fall so they could go out into the alleys and have drunken fights among themselves. But he had brought that look to Mars, to the landing field, and out here there was something disquieting about it. He'd caught Mac's look and turned his head to me. "I'll stoke," he repeated. I didn't know what to say. MacReidie and I—almost all of the men in the Merchant Marine—hadn't served in the combat arms. We had freighted supplies, and we had seen ships dying on the runs—we'd had our own brushes with commerce raiders, and we'd known enough men who joined the combat forces. But very few of the men came back, and the war this man had fought hadn't been the same as ours. He'd commanded a fighting ship, somewhere, and come to grips with things we simply didn't know about. The mark was on him, but not on us. I couldn't meet his eyes. "O.K. by me," I mumbled at last. I saw MacReidie's mouth turn down at the corners. But he couldn't gainsay the man any more than I could. MacReidie wasn't a mumbling man, so he said angrily: "O.K., bucko, you'll stoke. Go and sign on." "Thanks." The stranger walked quietly away. He wrapped a hand around the cable on a cargo hook and rode into the hold on top of some freight. Mac spat on the ground and went back to supervising his end of the loading. I was busy with mine, and it wasn't until we'd gotten the Serenus loaded and buttoned up that Mac and I even spoke to each other again. Then we talked about the trip. We didn't talk about the stranger. Daniels, the Third, had signed him on and had moved him into the empty bunk above mine. We slept all in a bunch on the Serenus —officers and crew. Even so, we had to sleep in shifts, with the ship's designers giving ninety per cent of her space to cargo, and eight per cent to power and control. That left very little for the people, who were crammed in any way they could be. I said empty bunk. What I meant was, empty during my sleep shift. That meant he and I'd be sharing work shifts—me up in the control blister, parked in a soft chair, and him down in the engine room, broiling in a suit for twelve hours. But I ate with him, used the head with him; you can call that rubbing elbows with greatness, if you want to. He was a very quiet man. Quiet in the way he moved and talked. When we were both climbing into our bunks, that first night, I introduced myself and he introduced himself. Then he heaved himself into his bunk, rolled over on his side, fixed his straps, and fell asleep. He was always friendly toward me, but he must have been very tired that first night. I often wondered what kind of a life he'd lived after the war—what he'd done that made him different from the men who simply grew older in the bars. I wonder, now, if he really did do anything different. In an odd way, I like to think that one day, in a bar, on a day that seemed like all the rest to him when it began, he suddenly looked up with some new thought, put down his glass, and walked straight to the Earth-Mars shuttle field. He might have come from any town on Earth. Don't believe the historians too much. Don't pay too much attention to the Chamber of Commerce plaques. When a man's name becomes public property, strange things happen to the facts. It was MacReidie who first found out what he'd done during the war. I've got to explain about MacReidie. He takes his opinions fast and strong. He's a good man—is, or was; I haven't seen him for a long while—but he liked things simple. MacReidie said the duffelbag broke loose and floated into the middle of the bunkroom during acceleration. He opened it to see whose it was. When he found out, he closed it up and strapped it back in its place at the foot of the stoker's bunk. MacReidie was my relief on the bridge. When he came up, he didn't relieve me right away. He stood next to my chair and looked out through the ports. "Captain leave any special instructions in the Order Book?" he asked. "Just the usual. Keep a tight watch and proceed cautiously." "That new stoker," Mac said. "Yeah?" "I knew there was something wrong with him. He's got an old Marine uniform in his duffel." I didn't say anything. Mac glanced over at me. "Well?" "I don't know." I didn't. I couldn't say I was surprised. It had to be something like that, about the stoker. The mark was on him, as I've said. It was the Marines that did Earth's best dying. It had to be. They were trained to be the best we had, and they believed in their training. They were the ones who slashed back the deepest when the other side hit us. They were the ones who sallied out into the doomed spaces between the stars and took the war to the other side as well as any human force could ever hope to. They were always the last to leave an abandoned position. If Earth had been giving medals to members of her forces in the war, every man in the Corps would have had the Medal of Honor two and three times over. Posthumously. I don't believe there were ten of them left alive when Cope was shot. Cope was one of them. They were a kind of human being neither MacReidie nor I could hope to understand. "You don't know," Mac said. "It's there. In his duffel. Damn it, we're going out to trade with his sworn enemies! Why do you suppose he wanted to sign on? Why do you suppose he's so eager to go!" "You think he's going to try to start something?" "Think! That's exactly what he's going for. One last big alley fight. One last brawl. When they cut him down—do you suppose they'll stop with him? They'll kill us, and then they'll go in and stamp Earth flat! You know it as well as I do." "I don't know, Mac," I said. "Go easy." I could feel the knots in my stomach. I didn't want any trouble. Not from the stoker, not from Mac. None of us wanted trouble—not even Mac, but he'd cause it to get rid of it, if you follow what I mean about his kind of man. Mac hit the viewport with his fist. "Easy! Easy—nothing's easy. I hate this life," he said in a murderous voice. "I don't know why I keep signing on. Mars to Centaurus and back, back and forth, in an old rust tub that's going to blow herself up one of these—" Daniels called me on the phone from Communications. "Turn up your Intercom volume," he said. "The stoker's jamming the circuit." I kicked the selector switch over, and this is what I got: " —so there we were at a million per, and the air was gettin' thick. The Skipper says 'Cheer up, brave boys, we'll—' " He was singing. He had a terrible voice, but he could carry a tune, and he was hammering it out at the top of his lungs. " Twas the last cruise of the Venus, by God you should of seen us! The pipes were full of whisky, and just to make things risky, the jets were ... " The crew were chuckling into their own chest phones. I could hear Daniels trying to cut him off. But he kept going. I started laughing myself. No one's supposed to jam an intercom, but it made the crew feel good. When the crew feels good, the ship runs right, and it had been a long time since they'd been happy. He went on for another twenty minutes. Then his voice thinned out, and I heard him cough a little. "Daniels," he said, "get a relief down here for me. Jump to it! " He said the last part in a Master's voice. Daniels didn't ask questions. He sent a man on his way down. He'd been singing, the stoker had. He'd been singing while he worked with one arm dead, one sleeve ripped open and badly patched because the fabric was slippery with blood. There'd been a flashover in the drivers. By the time his relief got down there, he had the insulation back on, and the drive was purring along the way it should have been. It hadn't even missed a beat. He went down to sick bay, got the arm wrapped, and would have gone back on shift if Daniels'd let him. Those of us who were going off shift found him toying with the theremin in the mess compartment. He didn't know how to play it, and it sounded like a dog howling. "Sing, will you!" somebody yelled. He grinned and went back to the "Good Ship Venus ." It wasn't good, but it was loud. From that, we went to "Starways, Farways, and Barways," and "The Freefall Song." Somebody started "I Left Her Behind For You," and that got us off into sentimental things, the way these sessions would sometimes wind up when spacemen were far from home. But not since the war, we all seemed to realize together. We stopped, and looked at each other, and we all began drifting out of the mess compartment. And maybe it got to him, too. It may explain something. He and I were the last to leave. We went to the bunkroom, and he stopped in the middle of taking off his shirt. He stood there, looking out the porthole, and forgot I was there. I heard him reciting something, softly, under his breath, and I stepped a little closer. This is what it was: " The rockets rise against the skies, Slowly; in sunlight gleaming With silver hue upon the blue. And the universe waits, dreaming. " For men must go where the flame-winds blow, The gas clouds softly plaiting; Where stars are spun and worlds begun, And men will find them waiting. " The song that roars where the rocket soars Is the song of the stellar flame; The dreams of Man and galactic span Are equal and much the same. " What was he thinking of? Make your own choice. I think I came close to knowing him, at that moment, but until human beings turn telepath, no man can be sure of another. He shook himself like a dog out of cold water, and got into his bunk. I got into mine, and after a while I fell asleep. I don't know what MacReidie may have told the skipper about the stoker, or if he tried to tell him anything. The captain was the senior ticket holder in the Merchant Service, and a good man, in his day. He kept mostly to his cabin. And there was nothing MacReidie could do on his own authority—nothing simple, that is. And the stoker had saved the ship, and ... I think what kept anything from happening between MacReidie and the stoker, or anyone else and the stoker, was that it would have meant trouble in the ship. Trouble, confined to our little percentage of the ship's volume, could seem like something much more important than the fate of the human race. It may not seem that way to you. But as long as no one began anything, we could all get along. We could have a good trip. MacReidie worried, I'm sure. I worried, sometimes. But nothing happened. When we reached Alpha Centaurus, and set down at the trading field on the second planet, it was the same as the other trips we'd made, and the same kind of landfall. The Lud factor came out of his post after we'd waited for a while, and gave us our permit to disembark. There was a Jek ship at the other end of the field, loaded with the cargo we would get in exchange for our holdful of goods. We had the usual things; wine, music tapes, furs, and the like. The Jeks had been giving us light machinery lately—probably we'd get two or three more loads, and then they'd begin giving us something else. But I found that this trip wasn't quite the same. I found myself looking at the factor's post, and I realized for the first time that the Lud hadn't built it. It was a leftover from the old colonial human government. And the city on the horizon—men had built it; the touch of our architecture was on every building. I wondered why it had never occurred to me that this was so. It made the landfall different from all the others, somehow. It gave a new face to the entire planet. Mac and I and some of the other crewmen went down on the field to handle the unloading. Jeks on self-propelled cargo lifts jockeyed among us, scooping up the loads as we unhooked the slings, bringing cases of machinery from their own ship. They sat atop their vehicles, lean and aloof, dashing in, whirling, shooting across the field to their ship and back like wild horsemen on the plains of Earth, paying us no notice. We were almost through when Mac suddenly grabbed my arm. "Look!" The stoker was coming down on one of the cargo slings. He stood upright, his booted feet planted wide, one arm curled up over his head and around the hoist cable. He was in his dusty brown Marine uniform, the scarlet collar tabs bright as blood at his throat, his major's insignia glittering at his shoulders, the battle stripes on his sleeves. The Jeks stopped their lifts. They knew that uniform. They sat up in their saddles and watched him come down. When the sling touched the ground, he jumped off quietly and walked toward the nearest Jek. They all followed him with their eyes. "We've got to stop him," Mac said, and both of us started toward him. His hands were both in plain sight, one holding his duffelbag, which was swelled out with the bulk of his airsuit. He wasn't carrying a weapon of any kind. He was walking casually, taking his time. Mac and I had almost reached him when a Jek with insignia on his coveralls suddenly jumped down from his lift and came forward to meet him. It was an odd thing to see—the stoker, and the Jek, who did not stand as tall. MacReidie and I stepped back. The Jek was coal black, his scales glittering in the cold sunlight, his hatchet-face inscrutable. He stopped when the stoker was a few paces away. The stoker stopped, too. All the Jeks were watching him and paying no attention to anything else. The field might as well have been empty except for those two. "They'll kill him. They'll kill him right now," MacReidie whispered. They ought to have. If I'd been a Jek, I would have thought that uniform was a death warrant. But the Jek spoke to him: "Are you entitled to wear that?" "I was at this planet in '39. I was closer to your home world the year before that," the stoker said. "I was captain of a destroyer. If I'd had a cruiser's range, I would have reached it." He looked at the Jek. "Where were you?" "I was here when you were." "I want to speak to your ship's captain." "All right. I'll drive you over." The stoker nodded, and they walked over to his vehicle together. They drove away, toward the Jek ship. "All right, let's get back to work," another Jek said to MacReidie and myself, and we went back to unloading cargo. The stoker came back to our ship that night, without his duffelbag. He found me and said: "I'm signing off the ship. Going with the Jeks." MacReidie was with me. He said loudly: "What do you mean, you're going with the Jeks?" "I signed on their ship," the stoker said. "Stoking. They've got a micro-nuclear drive. It's been a while since I worked with one, but I think I'll make out all right, even with the screwball way they've got it set up." "Huh?" The stoker shrugged. "Ships are ships, and physics is physics, no matter where you go. I'll make out." "What kind of a deal did you make with them? What do you think you're up to?" The stoker shook his head. "No deal. I signed on as a crewman. I'll do a crewman's work for a crewman's wages. I thought I'd wander around a while. It ought to be interesting," he said. "On a Jek ship." "Anybody's ship. When I get to their home world, I'll probably ship out with some people from farther on. Why not? It's honest work." MacReidie had no answer to that. "But—" I said. "What?" He looked at me as if he couldn't understand what might be bothering me, but I think perhaps he could. "Nothing," I said, and that was that, except MacReidie was always a sourer man from that time up to as long as I knew him afterwards. We took off in the morning. The stoker had already left on the Jek ship, and it turned out he'd trained an apprentice boy to take his place. It was strange how things became different for us, little by little after that. It was never anything you could put your finger on, but the Jeks began taking more goods, and giving us things we needed when we told them we wanted them. After a while, Serenus was going a little deeper into Jek territory, and when she wore out, the two replacements let us trade with the Lud, too. Then it was the Nosurwey, and other people beyond them, and things just got better for us, somehow. We heard about our stoker, occasionally. He shipped with the Lud, and the Nosurwey, and some people beyond them, getting along, going to all kinds of places. Pay no attention to the precise red lines you see on the star maps; nobody knows exactly what path he wandered from people to people. Nobody could. He just kept signing on with whatever ship was going deeper into the galaxy, going farther and farther. He messed with green shipmates and blue ones. One and two and three heads, tails, six legs—after all, ships are ships and they've all got to have something to push them along. If a man knows his business, why not? A man can live on all kinds of food, if he wants to get used to it. And any nontoxic atmosphere will do, as long as there's enough oxygen in it. I don't know what he did, to make things so much better for us. I don't know if he did anything, but stoke their ships and, I suppose, fix them when they were in trouble. I wonder if he sang dirty songs in that bad voice of his, to people who couldn't possibly understand what the songs were about. All I know is, for some reason those people slowly began treating us with respect. We changed, too, I think—I'm not the same man I was ... I think—not altogether the same; I'm a captain now, with master's papers, and you won't find me in my cabin very often ... there's a kind of joy in standing on a bridge, looking out at the stars you're moving toward. I wonder if it mightn't have kept my old captain out of that place he died in, finally, if he'd tried it. So, I don't know. The older I get, the less I know. The thing people remember the stoker for—the thing that makes him famous, and, I think, annoys him—I'm fairly sure is only incidental to what he really did. If he did anything. If he meant to. I wish I could be sure of the exact answer he found in the bottom of that last glass at the bar before he worked his passage to Mars and the Serenus , and began it all. So, I can't say what he ought to be famous for. But I suppose it's enough to know for sure that he was the first living being ever to travel all the way around the galaxy. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction February 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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THE BLUE TOWER By EVELYN E. SMITH As the vastly advanced guardians of mankind, the Belphins knew how to make a lesson stick—but whom? Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy, February, 1958. Extensive research did not reveal any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Ludovick Eversole sat in the golden sunshine outside his house, writing a poem as he watched the street flow gently past him. There were very few people on it, for he lived in a slow part of town, and those who went in for travel generally preferred streets where the pace was quicker. Moreover, on a sultry spring afternoon like this one, there would be few people wandering abroad. Most would be lying on sun-kissed white beaches or in sun-drenched parks, or, for those who did not fancy being either kissed or drenched by the sun, basking in the comfort of their own air-conditioned villas. Some would, like Ludovick, be writing poems; others composing symphonies; still others painting pictures. Those who were without creative talent or the inclination to indulge it would be relaxing their well-kept golden bodies in whatever surroundings they had chosen to spend this particular one of the perfect days that stretched in an unbroken line before every member of the human race from the cradle to the crematorium. Only the Belphins were much in evidence. Only the Belphins had duties to perform. Only the Belphins worked. Ludovick stretched his own well-kept golden body and rejoiced in the knowing that he was a man and not a Belphin. Immediately afterward, he was sorry for the heartless thought. Didn't the Belphins work only to serve humanity? How ungrateful, then, it was to gloat over them! Besides, he comforted himself, probably, if the truth were known, the Belphins liked to work. He hailed a passing Belphin for assurance on this point. Courteous, like all members of his species, the creature leaped from the street and listened attentively to the young man's question. "We Belphins have but one like and one dislike," he replied. "We like what is right and we dislike what is wrong." "But how can you tell what is right and what is wrong?" Ludovick persisted. "We know ," the Belphin said, gazing reverently across the city to the blue spire of the tower where The Belphin of Belphins dwelt, in constant communication with every member of his race at all times, or so they said. "That is why we were placed in charge of humanity. Someday you, too, may advance to the point where you know , and we shall return whence we came." "But who placed you in charge," Ludovick asked, "and whence did you come?" Fearing he might seem motivated by vulgar curiosity, he explained, "I am doing research for an epic poem." A lifetime spent under their gentle guardianship had made Ludovick able to interpret the expression that flitted across this Belphin's frontispiece as a sad, sweet smile. "We come from beyond the stars," he said. Ludovick already knew that; he had hoped for something a little more specific. "We were placed in power by those who had the right. And the power through which we rule is the power of love! Be happy!" And with that conventional farewell (which also served as a greeting), he stepped onto the sidewalk and was borne off. Ludovick looked after him pensively for a moment, then shrugged. Why should the Belphins surrender their secrets to gratify the idle curiosity of a poet? Ludovick packed his portable scriptwriter in its case and went to call on the girl next door, whom he loved with a deep and intermittently requited passion. As he passed between the tall columns leading into the Flockhart courtyard, he noted with regret that there were quite a number of Corisande's relatives present, lying about sunning themselves and sipping beverages which probably touched the legal limit of intoxicatability. Much as he hated to think harshly of anyone, he did not like Corisande Flockhart's relatives. He had never known anybody who had as many relatives as she did, and sometimes he suspected they were not all related to her. Then he would dismiss the thought as unworthy of him or any right-thinking human being. He loved Corisande for herself alone and not for her family. Whether they were actually her family or not was none of his business. "Be happy!" he greeted the assemblage cordially, sitting down beside Corisande on the tessellated pavement. "Bah!" said old Osmond Flockhart, Corisande's grandfather. Ludovick was sure that, underneath his crustiness, the gnarled patriarch hid a heart of gold. Although he had been mining assiduously, the young man had not yet been able to strike that vein; however, he did not give up hope, for not giving up hope was one of the principles that his wise old Belphin teacher had inculcated in him. Other principles were to lead the good life and keep healthy. "Now, Grandfather," Corisande said, "no matter what your politics, that does not excuse impoliteness." Ludovick wished she would not allude so blatantly to politics, because he had a lurking notion that Corisande's "family" was, in fact, a band of conspirators ... such as still dotted the green and pleasant planet and proved by their existence that Man was not advancing anywhere within measurable distance of that totality of knowledge implied by the Belphin. You could tell malcontents, even if they did not voice their dissatisfactions, by their faces. The vast majority of the human race, living good and happy lives, had smooth and pleasant faces. Malcontents' faces were lined and sometimes, in extreme cases, furrowed. Everyone could easily tell who they were by looking at them, and most people avoided them. It was not that griping was illegal, for the Belphins permitted free speech and reasonable conspiracy; it was that such behavior was considered ungenteel. Ludovick would never have dreamed of associating with this set of neighbors, once he had discovered their tendencies, had he not lost his heart to the purple-eyed Corisande at their first meeting. "Politeness, bah!" old Osmond said. "To see a healthy young man simply—simply accepting the status quo!" "If the status quo is a good status quo," Ludovick said uneasily, for he did not like to discuss such subjects, "why should I not accept it? We have everything we could possibly want. What do we lack?" "Our freedom," Osmond retorted. "But we are free," Ludovick said, perplexed. "We can say what we like, do what we like, so long as it is consonant with the public good." "Ah, but who determines what is consonant with the public good?" Ludovick could no longer temporize with truth, even for Corisande's sake. "Look here, old man, I have read books. I know about the old days before the Belphins came from the stars. Men were destroying themselves quickly through wars, or slowly through want. There is none of that any more." "All lies and exaggeration," old Osmond said. " My grandfather told me that, when the Belphins took over Earth, they rewrote all the textbooks to suit their own purposes. Now nothing but Belphin propaganda is taught in the schools." "But surely some of what they teach about the past must be true," Ludovick insisted. "And today every one of us has enough to eat and drink, a place to live, beautiful garments to wear, and all the time in the world to utilize as he chooses in all sorts of pleasant activities. What is missing?" "They've taken away our frontiers!" Behind his back, Corisande made a little filial face at Ludovick. Ludovick tried to make the old man see reason. "But I'm happy. And everybody is happy, except—except a few killjoys like you." "They certainly did a good job of brainwashing you, boy," Osmond sighed. "And of most of the young ones," he added mournfully. "With each succeeding generation, more of our heritage is lost." He patted the girl's hand. "You're a good girl, Corrie. You don't hold with this being cared for like some damn pet poodle." "Never mind Osmond, Eversole," one of Corisande's alleged uncles grinned. "He talks a lot, but of course he doesn't mean a quarter of what he says. Come, have some wine." He handed a glass to Ludovick. Ludovick sipped and coughed. It tasted as if it were well above the legal alcohol limit, but he didn't like to say anything. They were taking an awful risk, though, doing a thing like that. If they got caught, they might receive a public scolding—which was, of course, no more than they deserved—but he could not bear to think of Corisande exposed to such an ordeal. "It's only reasonable," the uncle went on, "that older people should have a—a thing about being governed by foreigners." Ludovick smiled and set his nearly full glass down on a plinth. "You could hardly call the Belphins foreigners; they've been on Earth longer than even the oldest of us." "You seem to be pretty chummy with 'em," the uncle said, looking narrow-eyed at Ludovick. "No more so than any other loyal citizen," Ludovick replied. The uncle sat up and wrapped his arms around his thick bare legs. He was a powerful, hairy brute of a creature who had not taken advantage of the numerous cosmetic techniques offered by the benevolent Belphins. "Don't you think it's funny they can breathe our air so easily?" "Why shouldn't they?" Ludovick bit into an apple that Corisande handed him from one of the dishes of fruit and other delicacies strewn about the courtyard. "It's excellent air," he continued through a full mouth, "especially now that it's all purified. I understand that in the old days——" "Yes," the uncle said, "but don't you think it's a coincidence they breathe exactly the same kind of air we do, considering they claim to come from another solar system?" "No coincidence at all," said Ludovick shortly, no longer able to pretend he didn't know what the other was getting at. He had heard the ugly rumor before. Of course sacrilege was not illegal, but it was in bad taste. "Only one combination of elements spawns intelligent life." "They say," the uncle continued, impervious to Ludovick's unconcealed dislike for the subject, "that there's really only one Belphin, who lives in the Blue Tower—in a tank or something, because he can't breathe our atmosphere—and that the others are a sort of robot he sends out to do his work for him." "Nonsense!" Ludovick was goaded to irritation at last. "How could a robot have that delicate play of expression, that subtle economy of movement?" Corisande and the uncle exchanged glances. "But they are absolutely blank," the uncle began hesitantly. "Perhaps, with your rich poetic imagination...." "See?" old Osmond remarked with satisfaction. "The kid's brain-washed. I told you so." "Even if The Belphin is a single entity," Ludovick went on, "that doesn't necessarily make him less benevolent——" He was again interrupted by the grandfather. "I won't listen to any more of this twaddle. Benevolent, bah! He or she or it or them is or are just plain exploiting us! Taking our mineral resources away—I've seen 'em loading ore on the spaceships—and——" "—and exchanging it for other resources from the stars," Ludovick said tightly, "without which we could not have the perfectly balanced society we have today. Without which we would be, technologically, back in the dark ages from which they rescued us." "It's not the stuff they bring in from outside that runs this technology," the uncle said. "It's some power they've got that we can't seem to figure out. Though Lord knows we've tried," he added musingly. "Of course they have their own source of power," Ludovick informed them, smiling to himself, for his old Belphin teacher had taken great care to instill a sense of humor into him. "A Belphin was explaining that to me only today." Twenty heads swiveled toward him. He felt uncomfortable, for he was a modest young man and did not like to be the cynosure of all eyes. "Tell us, dear boy," the uncle said, grabbing Ludovick's glass from the plinth and filling it, "what exactly did he say?" "He said the Belphins rule through the power of love." The glass crashed to the tesserae as the uncle uttered a very unworthy word. "And I suppose it was love that killed Mieczyslaw and George when they tried to storm the Blue Tower——" old Osmond began, then halted at the looks he was getting from everybody. Ludovick could no longer pretend his neighbors were a group of eccentrics whom he himself was eccentric enough to regard as charming. "So!" He stood up and wrapped his mantle about him. "I knew you were against the government, and, of course, you have a legal right to disagree with its policies, but I didn't think you were actual—actual—" he dredged a word up out of his schooldays—" anarchists ." He turned to the girl, who was looking thoughtful as she stroked the glittering jewel that always hung at her neck. "Corisande, how can you stay with these—" he found another word—"these subversives ?" She smiled sadly. "Don't forget: they're my family, Ludovick, and I owe them dutiful respect, no matter how pig-headed they are." She pressed his hand. "But don't give up hope." That rang a bell inside his brain. "I won't," he vowed, giving her hand a return squeeze. "I promise I won't." Outside the Flockhart villa, he paused, struggling with his inner self. It was an unworthy thing to inform upon one's neighbors; on the other hand, could he stand idly by and let those neighbors attempt to destroy the social order? Deciding that the greater good was the more important—and that, moreover, it was the only way of taking Corisande away from all this—he went in search of a Belphin. That is, he waited until one glided past and called to him to leave the walk. "I wish to report a conspiracy at No. 7 Mimosa Lane," he said. "The girl is innocent, but the others are in it to the hilt." The Belphin appeared to think for a minute. Then he gave off a smile. "Oh, them," he said. "We know. They are harmless." "Harmless!" Ludovick repeated. "Why, I understand they've already tried to—to attack the Blue Tower by force !" "Quite. And failed. For we are protected from hostile forces, as you were told earlier, by the power of love." Ludovick knew, of course, that the Belphin used the word love metaphorically, that the Tower was protected by a series of highly efficient barriers of force to repel attackers—barriers which, he realized now, from the sad fate of Mieczyslaw and George, were potentially lethal. However, he did not blame the Belphin for being so cagy about his race's source of power, not with people like the Flockharts running about subverting and whatnot. "You certainly do have a wonderful intercommunication system," he murmured. "Everything about us is wonderful," the Belphin said noncommittally. "That's why we're so good to you people. Be happy!" And he was off. But Ludovick could not be happy. He wasn't precisely sad yet, but he was thoughtful. Of course the Belphins knew better than he did, but still.... Perhaps they underestimated the seriousness of the Flockhart conspiracy. On the other hand, perhaps it was he who was taking the Flockharts too seriously. Maybe he should investigate further before doing anything rash. Later that night, he slipped over to the Flockhart villa and nosed about in the courtyard until he found the window behind which the family was conspiring. He peered through a chink in the curtains, so he could both see and hear. Corisande was saying, "And so I think there is a lot in what Ludovick said...." Bless her, he thought emotionally. Even in the midst of her plotting, she had time to spare a kind word for him. And then it hit him: she, too, was a plotter . "You suggest that we try to turn the power of love against the Belphins?" the uncle asked ironically. Corisande gave a rippling laugh as she twirled her glittering pendant. "In a manner of speaking," she said. "I have an idea for a secret weapon which might do the trick——" At that moment, Ludovick stumbled over a jug which some careless relative had apparently left lying about the courtyard. It crashed to the tesserae, spattering Ludovick's legs and sandals with a liquid which later proved to be extremely red wine. "There's someone outside!" the uncle declared, half-rising. "Nonsense!" Corisande said, putting her hand on his shoulder. "I didn't hear anything." The uncle looked dubious, and Ludovick thought it prudent to withdraw at this point. Besides, he had heard enough. Corisande—his Corisande—was an integral part of the conspiracy. He lay down to sleep that night beset by doubts. If he told the Belphins about the conspiracy, he would be betraying Corisande. As a matter of fact, he now remembered, he had already told them about the conspiracy and they hadn't believed him. But supposing he could convince them, how could he give Corisande up to them? True, it was the right thing to do—but, for the first time in his life, he could not bring himself to do what he knew to be right. He was weak, weak—and weakness was sinful. His old Belphin teacher had taught him that, too. As Ludovick writhed restlessly upon his bed, he became aware that someone had come into his chamber. "Ludovick," a soft, beloved voice whispered, "I have come to ask your help...." It was so dark, he could not see her; he knew where she was only by the glitter of the jewel on her neck-chain as it arced through the blackness. "Corisande...." he breathed. "Ludovick...." she sighed. Now that the amenities were over, she resumed, "Against my will, I have been involved in the family plot. My uncle has invented a secret weapon which he believes will counteract the power of the barriers." "But I thought you devised it!" "So it was you in the courtyard. Well, what happened was I wanted to gain time, so I said I had a secret weapon of my own invention which I had not perfected, but which would cost considerably less than my uncle's model. We have to watch the budget, you know, because we can hardly expect the Belphins to supply the components for this job. Anyhow, I thought that, while my folks were waiting for me to finish it, you would have a chance to warn the Belphins." "Corisande," he murmured, "you are as noble and clever as you are beautiful." Then he caught the full import of her remarks. " Me! But they won't pay any attention to me!" "How do you know?" When he remained silent, she said, "I suppose you've already tried to warn them about us." "I—I said you had nothing to do with the plot." "That was good of you." She continued in a warmer tone: "How many Belphins did you warn, then?" "Just one. When you tell one something, you tell them all. You know that. Everyone knows that." "That's just theory," she said. "It's never been proven. All we do know is that they have some sort of central clearing house of information, presumably The Belphin of Belphins. But we don't know that they are incapable of thinking or acting individually. We don't really know much about them at all; they're very secretive." "Aloof," he corrected her, "as befits a ruling race. But always affable." "You must warn as many Belphins as you can." "And if none listens to me?" "Then," she said dramatically, "you must approach The Belphin of Belphins himself." "But no human being has ever come near him!" he said plaintively. "You know that all those who have tried perished. And that can't be a rumor, because your grandfather said——" "But they came to attack The Belphin. You're coming to warn him! That makes a big difference. Ludovick...." She took his hands in hers; in the darkness, the jewel swung madly on her presumably heaving bosom. "This is bigger than both of us. It's for Earth." He knew it was his patriotic duty to do as she said; still, he had enjoyed life so much. "Corisande, wouldn't it be much simpler if we just destroyed your uncle's secret weapon?" "He'd only make another. Don't you see, Ludovick, this is our only chance to save the Belphins, to save humanity.... But, of course, I don't have the right to send you. I'll go myself." "No, Corisande," he sighed. "I can't let you go. I'll do it." Next morning, he set out to warn Belphins. He knew it wasn't much use, but it was all he could do. The first half dozen responded in much the same way the Belphin he had warned the previous day had done, by courteously acknowledging his solicitude and assuring him there was no need for alarm; they knew all about the Flockharts and everything would be all right. After that, they started to get increasingly huffy—which would, he thought, substantiate the theory that they were all part of one vast coordinate network of identity. Especially since each Belphin behaved as if Ludovick had been repeatedly annoying him . Finally, they refused to get off the walks when he hailed them—which was unheard of, for no Belphin had ever before failed to respond to an Earthman's call—and when he started running along the walks after them, they ran much faster than he could. At last he gave up and wandered about the city for hours, speaking to neither human nor Belphin, wondering what to do. That is, he knew what he had to do; he was wondering how to do it. He would never be able to reach The Belphin of Belphins. No human being had ever done it. Mieczyslaw and George had died trying to reach him (or it). Even though their intentions had been hostile and Ludovick's would be helpful, there was little chance he would be allowed to reach The Belphin with all the other Belphins against him. What guarantee was there that The Belphin would not be against him, too? And yet he knew that he would have to risk his life; there was no help for it. He had never wanted to be a hero, and here he had heroism thrust upon him. He knew he could not succeed; equally well, he knew he could not turn back, for his Belphin teacher had instructed him in the meaning of duty. It was twilight when he approached the Blue Tower. Commending himself to the Infinite Virtue, he entered. The Belphin at the reception desk did not give off the customary smiling expression. In fact, he seemed to radiate a curiously apprehensive aura. "Go back, young man," he said. "You're not wanted here." "I must see The Belphin of Belphins. I must warn him against the Flockharts." "He has been warned," the receptionist told him. "Go home and be happy!" "I don't trust you or your brothers. I must see The Belphin himself." Suddenly this particular Belphin lost his commanding manners. He began to wilt, insofar as so rigidly constructed a creature could go limp. "Please, we've done so much for you. Do this for us." "The Belphin of Belphins did things for us," Ludovick countered. "You are all only his followers. How do I know you are really following him? How do I know you haven't turned against him?" Without giving the creature a chance to answer, he strode forward. The Belphin attempted to bar his way. Ludovick knew one Belphin was a myriad times as strong as a human, so it was out of utter futility that he struck. The Belphin collapsed completely, flying apart in a welter of fragile springs and gears. The fact was of some deeper significance, Ludovick knew, but he was too numbed by his incredible success to be able to think clearly. All he knew was that The Belphin would be able to explain things to him. Bells began to clash and clang. That meant the force barriers had gone up. He could see the shimmering insubstance of the first one before him. Squaring his shoulders, he charged it ... and walked right through. He looked himself up and down. He was alive and entire. Then the whole thing was a fraud; the barriers were not lethal—or perhaps even actual. But what of Mieczyslaw? And George? And countless rumored others? He would not let himself even try to think of them. He would not let himself even try to think of anything save his duty. A staircase spiraled up ahead of him. A Belphin was at its foot. Behind him, a barrier iridesced. "Please, young man——" the Belphin began. "You don't understand. Let me explain." But Ludovick destroyed the thing before it could say anything further, and he passed right through the barrier. He had to get to the top and warn The Belphin of Belphins, whoever or whatever he (or it) was, that the Flockharts had a secret weapon which might be able to annihilate it (or him). Belphin after Belphin Ludovick destroyed, and barrier after barrier he penetrated until he reached the top. At the head of the stairs was a vast golden door. "Go no further, Ludovick Eversole!" a mighty voice roared from within. "To open that door is to bring disaster upon your race." But all Ludovick knew was that he had to get to The Belphin within and warn him. He battered down the door; that is, he would have battered down the door if it had not turned out to be unlocked. A stream of noxious vapor rushed out of the opening, causing him to black out. When he came to, most of the vapor had dissipated. The Belphin of Belphins was already dying of asphyxiation, since it was, in fact, a single alien entity who breathed another combination of elements. The room at the head of the stairs had been its tank. "You fool...." it gasped. "Through your muddle-headed integrity ... you have destroyed not only me ... but Earth's future. I tried to make ... this planet a better place for humanity ... and this is my reward...." "But I don't understand!" Ludovick wept. " Why did you let me do it? Why were Mieczyslaw and George and all the others killed? Why was it that I could pass the barriers and they could not?" "The barriers were triggered ... to respond to hostility.... You meant well ... so our defenses ... could not work." Ludovick had to bend low to hear the creature's last words: "There is ... Earth proverb ... should have warned me ... 'I can protect myself ... against my enemies ... but who will protect me ... from my friends'...?" The Belphin of Belphins died in Ludovick's arms. He was the last of his race, so far as Earth was concerned, for no more came. If, as they had said themselves, some outside power had sent them to take care of the human race, then that power had given up the race as a bad job. If they were merely exploiting Earth, as the malcontents had kept suggesting, apparently it had proven too dangerous or too costly a venture. Shortly after The Belphin's demise, the Flockharts arrived en masse. "We won't need your secret weapons now," Ludovick told them dully. "The Belphin of Belphins is dead." Corisande gave one of the rippling laughs he was to grow to hate so much. "Darling, you were my secret weapon all along!" She beamed at her "relatives," and it was then he noticed the faint lines of her forehead. "I told you I could use the power of love to destroy the Belphins!" And then she added gently: "I think there is no doubt who is head of 'this family' now." The uncle gave a strained laugh. "You're going to have a great little first lady there, boy," he said to Ludovick. "First lady?" Ludovick repeated, still absorbed in his grief. "Yes, I imagine the people will want to make you our first President by popular acclaim." Ludovick looked at him through a haze of tears. "But I killed The Belphin. I didn't mean to, but ... they must hate me!" "Nonsense, my boy; they'll adore you. You'll be a hero!" Events proved him right. Even those people who had lived in apparent content under the Belphins, accepting what they were given and seemingly enjoying their carefree lives, now declared themselves to have been suffering in silent resentment all along. They hurled flowers and adulatory speeches at Ludovick and composed extremely flattering songs about him. Shortly after he was universally acclaimed President, he married Corisande. He couldn't escape. "Why doesn't she become President herself?" he wailed, when the relatives came and found him hiding in the ruins of the Blue Tower. The people had torn the Tower down as soon as they were sure The Belphin was dead and the others thereby rendered inoperant. "It would spare her a lot of bother." "Because she is not The Belphin-slayer," the uncle said, dragging him out. "Besides, she loves you. Come on, Ludovick, be a man." So they hauled him off to the wedding and, amid much feasting, he was married to Corisande. He never drew another happy breath. In the first place, now that The Belphin was dead, all the machinery that had been operated by him stopped and no one knew how to fix it. The sidewalks stopped moving, the air conditioners stopped conditioning, the food synthesizers stopped synthesizing, and so on. And, of course, everybody blamed it all on Ludovick—even that year's run of bad weather. There were famines, riots, plagues, and, after the waves of mob hostility had coalesced into national groupings, wars. It was like the old days again, precisely as described in the textbooks. In the second place, Ludovick could never forget that, when Corisande had sent him to the Blue Tower, she could not have been sure that her secret weapon would work. Love might not have conquered all—in fact, it was the more likely hypothesis that it wouldn't—and he would have been killed by the first barrier. And no husband likes to think that his wife thinks he's expendable; it makes him feel she doesn't really love him. So, in thirtieth year of his reign as Dictator of Earth, Ludovick poisoned Corisande—that is, had her poisoned, for by now he had a Minister of Assassination to handle such little matters—and married a very pretty, very young, very affectionate blonde. He wasn't particularly happy with her, either, but at least it was a change. —EVELYN E. SMITH

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Solomon's Orbit There will, sooner or later, be problems of "space junk," and the right to dump in space. But not like this...! by William Carroll Illustrated by Schoenherr "Comrades," said the senior technician, "notice the clear view of North America. From here we watch everything; rivers, towns, almost the people. And see, our upper lens shows the dark spot of a meteor in space. Comrades, the meteor gets larger. It is going to pass close to our wondrous machine. Comrades ... Comrades ... turn to my channel. It is no meteor—it is square. The accursed Americans have sent up a house. Comrades ... an ancient automobile is flying toward our space machine. Comrades ... it is going to—Ah ... the picture is gone." Moscow reported the conversation, verbatim, to prove their space vehicle was knocked from the sky by a capitalistic plot. Motion pictures clearly showed an American automobile coming toward the Russian satellite. Russian astronomers ordered to seek other strange orbiting devices reported: "We've observed cars for weeks. Have been exiling technicians and photographers to Siberia for making jokes of Soviet science. If television proves ancient automobiles are orbiting the world, Americans are caught in obvious attempt to ridicule our efforts to probe mysteries of space." Confusion was also undermining American scientific study of the heavens. At Mount Palomar the busy 200-inch telescope was photographing a strange new object, but plates returned from the laboratory caused astronomers to explode angrily. In full glory, the photograph showed a tiny image of an ancient car. This first development only affected two photographers at Mount Palomar. They were fired for playing practical jokes on the astronomers. Additional exposures of other newfound objects were made. Again the plates were returned; this time with three little old cars parading proudly across the heavens as though they truly belonged among the stars. The night the Russian protest crossed trails with the Palomar report, Washington looked like a kid with chicken pox, as dozens of spotty yellow windows marked midnight meetings of the nation's greatest minds. The military denied responsibility for cars older than 1942. Civil aviation proved they had no projects involving motor vehicles. Central Intelligence swore on their classification manual they were not dropping junk over Cuba in an attempt to hit Castro. Disgusted, the President established a civilian commission which soon located three more reports. Two were from fliers. The pilot of Flight 26, New York to Los Angeles, had two weeks before reported a strange object rising over Southern California about ten the evening of April 3rd. A week after this report, a private pilot on his way from Las Vegas claimed seeing an old car flying over Los Angeles. His statement was ignored, as he was arrested later while trying to drink himself silly because no one believed his story. Fortunately, at the approximate times both pilots claimed sighting unknown objects, radar at Los Angeles International recorded something rising from earth's surface into the stratosphere. Within hours after the three reports met, in the President's commission's office, mobile radar was spotted on Southern California hilltops in twenty-four-hour watches for unscheduled flights not involving aircraft. Number Seven, stationed in the Mount Wilson television tower parking lot, caught one first. "Hey fellows," came his excited voice, "check 124 degrees, vector 62 now ... rising ... 124 degrees ... vector 66 ... rising—" Nine and Four caught it moments later. Then Three , Army long-range radar, picked it up. "O.K., we're on. It's still rising ... leaving the atmosphere ... gone. Anyone else catch it?" Negative responses came from all but Seven , Nine and Four . So well spread were they, that within minutes headquarters had laid four lines over Southern California. They crossed where the unsuspecting community of Fullerton was more or less sound asleep, totally unaware of the making of history in its back yard. The history of what astronomers call Solomon's Orbit had its beginning about three months ago. Solomon, who couldn't remember his first name, was warming tired bones in the sun, in front of his auto-wrecking yard a mile south of Fullerton. Though sitting, he was propped against the office; a tin shed decorated like a Christmas tree with hundreds of hub caps dangling from sagging wooden rafters. The back door opened on two acres of what Solomon happily agreed was the finest junk in all California. Fords on the left, Chevys on the right, and across the sagging back fence, a collection of honorable sedans whose makers left the business world years ago. They were known as Solomon's "Classics." The bright sun had Solomon's tiny eyes burrowed under a shaggy brow which, added to an Einstein-like shock of white hair, gave him the appearance of a professor on sabbatical. Eyes closed, Solomon was fondling favorite memories, when as a lad he repaired steam tractors and followed wheat across central plains of the United States. Happiness faded as the reverie was broken by spraying gravel signaling arrival of a customer's car. "There's Uncle Solomon, Dad," a boy's voice was saying. "He gives us kids good deals on hot-rod parts. You've just gotta take a look at his old cars, 'cause if you want a classic Uncle Solomon would make you a good deal, too. I just know he would." "Sure, Son, let's go in and see what he's got," replied a man's voice. As Solomon opened his eyes, the two popped into reality. Heaving himself out of the sports car bucket seat that was his office chair, Solomon stood awaiting approach of the pair. "Mr Solomon, Georgie here tells me you have some fine old cars for sale?" "Sure have. Sure have. They're in back. Come along. I'll show you the short cuts." Without waiting for a reply, Solomon started, head bent, white hair blowing; through the office, out the back door and down passages hardly wide enough for a boy, let alone a man. He disappeared around a hearse, and surfaced on the other side of a convertible, leading the boy and his father a chase that was more a guided tour of Solomon's yard than a short cut. "Yes, sir, here they are," announced Solomon over his shoulder. Stepping aside he made room for the boy and his father to pass, between a couple of Ford Tudors. Three pair of eyes, one young, one old, the other tired, were faced by two rows of hulks, proud in the silent agony of their fate. Sold, resold and sold again, used until exhaustion set in, they reached Solomon's for a last brave stand. No matter what beauties they were to Solomon's prejudiced eyes; missing fenders, rusted body panels, broken wheels and rotted woodwork bespoke the utter impossibility of restoration. "See, Dad, aren't they great?" Georgie gleefully asked. He could just imagine shaking the guys at school with the old Packard, after Dad restored it. "Are you kidding?" Georgie's Dad exploded, "Those wrecks aren't good for anything but shooting at the moon. Let's go." Not another word did he say. Heading back to the car parked outside Solomon's office, his footsteps were echoed by those of a crestfallen boy. Solomon, a figure of lonely dejection in the gloom overshadowing his unloved old cars, was troubled with smog causing his eyes to water as tired feet aimlessly found their way back to his seat in the sun. That night, to take his mind off worrisome old cars, Solomon began reading the previous Sunday's newspaper. There were pictures of moon shots, rockets and astronauts, which started Solomon to thinking; "So, my classics are good only for shooting at the moon. This thing called an ion engine, which creates a force field to move satellites, seems like a lot of equipment. Could do it easier with one of my old engines, I bet." As Solomon told the people in Washington several months later, he was only resting his eyes, thinking about shop manuals and parts in the back yard. When suddenly he figured there was an easier way to build a satellite power plant. But, as it was past his bedtime, he'd put one together tomorrow. It was late the next afternoon before Solomon had a chance to try his satellite power plant idea. Customers were gone and he was free of interruption. The engine of his elderly Moreland tow-truck was brought to life by Solomon almost hidden behind the huge wooden steering wheel. The truck lumbered carefully down rows of cars to an almost completely stripped wreck holding only a broken engine. In a few minutes, Solomon had the engine waving behind the truck while he reversed to a clear space near the center of his yard. Once the broken engine was blocked upright on the ground, Solomon backed his Moreland out of the way, carried a tray of tools to the engine and squatted in the dirt to work. First, the intake manifold came off and was bolted to the clutch housing so the carburetor mounting flange faced skyward. Solomon stopped for a minute to worry. "If it works," he thought, "when I get them nearer each other, it'll go up in my face." Scanning the yard he thought of fenders, doors, wheels, hub caps and ... that was it. A hub cap would do the trick. At his age, running was a senseless activity, but walking faster than usual, Solomon took a direct route to his office. From the ceiling of hub caps, he selected a small cap from an old Chevy truck. Back at the engine, he punched a hole in the cap, through which he tied a length of strong twine. The cap was laid on the carburetor flange and stuck in place with painter's masking tape. He then bolted the exhaust manifold over the intake so the muffler connection barely touched the hub cap. Solomon stood up, kicked the manifolds with his heavy boots to make sure they were solid and grunted with satisfaction of a job well done. He moved his tray of tools away and trailed the hub cap twine behind the solid body of a big old Ford station wagon. He'd read of scientists in block houses when they shot rockets and was taking no chances. Excitement glistened Solomon's old eyes as what blood pressure there was rose a point or two with happy thoughts. If his idea worked, he would be free of the old cars, yet not destroy a single one. Squatting behind the station wagon, to watch the engine, Solomon gingerly pulled the twine to eliminate slack. As it tightened, he tensed, braced himself with a free hand on the wagon's bumper, and taking a deep breath, jerked the cord. Tired legs failed and Solomon slipped backward when the hub cap broke free of the tape and sailed through the air to clang against the wagon's fender. Lying on his back, struggling to rise, Solomon heard a slight swish as though a whirlwind had come through the yard. The scent of air-borne dust bit his nostrils as he struggled to his feet. Deep in the woods behind Solomon's yard two boys were hunting crows. Eyes high, they scanned branches and horizons for game. "Look, there goes one," the younger cried as a large dark object majestically rose into the sky and rapidly disappeared into high clouds. "Yup, maybe so," said the other. "But it's flying too high for us." "I must be a silly old man," Solomon thought, scanning the cleared space behind his tow truck where he remembered an engine. There was nothing there, and as Solomon now figured it, never had been. Heart heavy with belief in the temporary foolishness of age, Solomon went to the hub cap, glittering the sun where it lit after bouncing off the fender. It was untied from the string, and in the tool tray, before Solomon realized he'd not been daydreaming. In the cleared area, were two old manifold gaskets, several rusty nuts, and dirt blown smooth in a wide circle around greasy blocks on which he'd propped the now missing engine. That night was a whirlwind of excitement for Solomon. He had steak for dinner, then sat back to consider future success. Once the classic cars were gone, he could use the space for more profitable Fords and Chevys. All he'd have to do would be bolt manifolds from spare engines on a different car every night, and he'd be rid of it. All he used was vacuum in the intake manifold, drawing pressure from the outlet side of the exhaust. The resulting automatic power flow raised anything they were attached to. Solomon couldn't help but think, "The newspapers said scientists were losing rockets and space capsules, so a few old cars could get lost in the clouds without hurting anything." Early the next morning, he towed the oldest hulk, an Essex, to the cleared space. Manifolds from junk engines were bolted to the wheels but this time carburetor flanges were covered by wooden shingles because Solomon figured he couldn't afford to ruin four salable hub caps just to get rid of his old sedans. Each shingle was taped in place so they could be pulled off in unison with a strong pull on the twine. The tired Essex was pretty big, so Solomon waited until bedtime before stumbling through the dark to the launching pad in his yard. Light from kitchen matches helped collect the shingle cords as he crouched behind the Ford wagon. He held the cords in one calloused hand, a burning match in the other so he could watch the Essex. Solomon tightened his fist, gave a quick tug to jerk all shingles at the same time, and watched in excited satisfaction as the old sedan rose in a soft swish of midsummer air flowing through ancient curves of four rusty manifold assemblies. Day after day, only a mile from Fullerton, Solomon busied himself buying wrecked cars and selling usable parts. Each weekday night—Solomon never worked on Sunday—another old car from his back lot went silently heavenward with the aid of Solomon's unique combination of engine vacuum and exhaust pressure. His footsteps were light with accomplishment as he thought, "In four more days, they'll all be gone." While the Fullerton radar net smoked innumerable cigarettes and cursed luck ruining the evening, Solomon scrambled two eggs, enjoyed his coffee and relaxed with a newly found set of old 1954 Buick shop manuals. As usual, when the clock neared ten, he closed his manuals and let himself out the back door. City lights, reflected in low clouds, brightened the way Solomon knew well. He was soon kneeling behind the Ford wagon without having stumbled once. Only two kitchen matches were needed to collect the cords from a big Packard, handsome in the warmth of a moonless summer night. With a faint "God Bless You," Solomon pulled the shingles and watched its massive hulk rise and disappear into orbit with his other orphans. If you'd been able to see it all, you'd have worried. The full circle of radar and communications crews around Fullerton had acted as though the whole town were going to pussyfoot away at sundown. Nine was hidden in a curious farmer's orange grove. Seven was tucked between station wagons in the back row of a used car lot. Four was assigned the loading dock of a meat-packing plant, but the night watchman wouldn't allow them to stay. They moved across the street behind a fire station. Three was too big to hide, so it opened for business inside the National Guard Armory. They all caught the Packard's takeoff. Degree lines from the four stations around Fullerton were crossed on the map long before Solomon reached his back door. By the time bedroom lights were out and covers under his bristly chin, a task force of quiet men was speeding on its way to surround four blocks of country land; including a chicken ranch, Solomon's junk yard and a small frame house. Dogs stirred, yapping at sudden activity they alone knew of, then nose to tail, returned to sleep when threats of intrusion failed to materialize. The sun was barely up when the chicken farmer was stopped a block from his house, Highway patrolmen slowly inspected his truck from front to back, while three cars full of civilians, by the side of the road, watched every move. Finding nothing unusual, a patrolman reported to the first civilian car then returned to wave the farmer on his way. When the widow teacher from the frame house, started for school, she too, was stopped. After a cursory inspection the patrolman passed her on. Two of the three accounted for. What of the third? Quietly a cavalcade formed, converged in Solomon's front yard and parked facing the road ready for quick departure. Some dozen civilians muddied shoes and trousers circling the junk yard, taking stations so they could watch all approaches. Once they were in position, a Highway patrolman and two civilians went to Solomon's door. His last cup of coffee was almost gone as Solomon heard the noise of their shoes, followed by knuckles thumping his front door. Wondering who could be in such a hurry, so early in the morning, he pulled on boots and buttoned a denim jacket as he went to answer. "Hello," said Solomon to the patrolman, while opening the door. "Why you bother me so early? You know I only buy cars from owners." "No, Mr. Solomon, we're not worried about your car buying. This man, from Washington, wants to ask you a few questions." "Sure, come in," Solomon replied. The questions were odd: Do you have explosives here? Can you weld metal tanks? What is your education? Were you ever an engineer? What were you doing last night? To these, and bewildering others, Solomon told the truth. He had no explosives, couldn't weld, didn't finish school and was here, in bed, all night. Then they wanted to see his cars. Through the back door, so he'd not have to open the office, Solomon led the three men into his yard. Once inside, and without asking permission, they began searching like a hungry hound trailing a fat rabbit. Solomon's eyes, blinking in the glare of early morning sun, watched invasion of his privacy. "What they want?" he wondered. He'd broken no laws in all the years he'd been in the United States. "For what do they bother a wrecking yard?" he asked himself. His depressing thoughts were rudely shattered by a hail from the larger civilian, standing at the back of Solomon's yard. There, three old cars stood in an isolated row. "Solomon, come here a moment," he shouted. Solomon trudged back, followed by the short civilian and patrolman who left their curious searching to follow Solomon's lead. When he neared, the tall stranger asked, "I see where weeds grew under other cars which, from the tracks, have been moved out in the past few weeks. How many did you have?" "Twenty; but these are all I have left," Solomon eagerly replied, hoping at last he'd a customer for the best of his old cars. "They make classic cars, if you'd take the time to fix them up. That one, the Hupmobile, is the last—" "Who bought the others?" the big man interrupted. "No one," quavered Solomon, terror gripping his throat with a nervous hand. Had he done wrong to send cars into the sky? Everyone else was sending things up. Newspapers said Russians and Americans were racing to send things into the air. What had he done that was wrong? Surely there was no law he'd broken. Wasn't the air free, like the seas? People dumped things into the ocean. "Then where did they go?" snapped his questioner. "Up there," pointed Solomon. "I needed the space. They were too good to cut up. No one would buy them. So I sent them up. The newspapers—" "You did what?" "I sent them into the sky," quavered Solomon. So this is what he did wrong. Would they lock him up? What would happen to his cars? And his business? "How did you ... no! Wait a minute. Don't say a word. Officer, go and tell my men to prevent anyone from approaching or leaving this place." The patrolman almost saluted, thought better of it, and left grumbling about being left out of what must be something big. Solomon told the civilians of matching vacuum in intake manifolds to pressure from exhaust manifolds. A logical way to make an engine that would run on pressure, like satellite engines he'd read about in newspapers. It worked on a cracked engine block, so he'd used scrap manifolds to get rid of old cars no one would buy. It hadn't hurt anything, had it? Well, no, it hadn't. But as you can imagine, things happened rather fast. They let Solomon get clean denims and his razor. Then without a bye-your-leave, hustled him to the Ontario airport where an unmarked jet flew him to Washington and a hurriedly arranged meeting with the President. They left guards posted inside the fence of Solomon's yard, so they'll cause no attention while protecting his property. A rugged individual sits in the office and tells buyers and sellers alike, that he is Solomon's nephew. "The old man had to take a trip in a hurry." Because he knows nothing of the business, they'll have to wait until Solomon returns. Where's Solomon now? Newspaper stories have him in Nevada showing the Air Force how to build gigantic intake and exhaust manifolds, which the Strategic Air Command is planning to attach to a stratospheric decompression test chamber. They figure if they can throw it into the sky, they can move anything up to what astronomers now call Solomon's Orbit, where at last count, sixteen of the seventeen cars are still merrily circling the earth. As you know, one recently hit the Russian television satellite. The Russians? We're told they're still burning their fingers trying to orbit a car. They can't figure how to control vacuum and pressure from the manifolds. Solomon didn't tell many people about the shingles he uses for control panels, and the Russians think control is somehow related to kitchen matches a newspaper reporter found scattered behind a station wagon in Solomon's junk yard. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact Science Fiction November 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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VIEWPOINT. BY RANDALL GARRETT Illustrated by Bernklau [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction January 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] A fearsome thing is a thing you're afraid of—and it has nothing whatever to do with whether others are afraid, nor with whether it is in fact dangerous. It's your view of the matter that counts! There was a dizzy, sickening whirl of mental blackness—not true blackness, but a mind-enveloping darkness that was filled with the multi-colored little sparks of thoughts and memories that scattered through the darkness like tiny glowing mice, fleeing from something unknown, fleeing outwards and away toward a somewhere that was equally unknown; scurrying, moving, changing—each half recognizable as it passed, but leaving only a vague impression behind. Memories were shattered into their component data bits in that maelstrom of not-quite-darkness, and scattered throughout infinity and eternity. Then the pseudo-dark stopped its violent motion and became still, no longer scattering the fleeing memories, but merely blanketing them. And slowly—ever so slowly—the powerful cohesive forces that existed between the data-bits began pulling them back together again as the not-blackness faded. The associative powers of the mind began putting the frightened little things together as they drifted back in from vast distances, trying to fit them together again in an ordered whole. Like a vast jigsaw puzzle in five dimensions, little clots and patches formed as the bits were snuggled into place here and there. The process was far from complete when Broom regained consciousness. Broom sat up abruptly and looked around him. The room was totally unfamiliar. For a moment, that seemed perfectly understandable. Why shouldn't the room look odd, after he had gone through— What? He rubbed his head and looked around more carefully. It was not just that the room itself was unfamiliar as a whole; the effect was greater than that. It was not the first time in his life he had regained consciousness in unfamiliar surroundings, but always before he had been aware that only the pattern was different, not the details. He sat there on the floor and took stock of himself and his surroundings. He was a big man—six feet tall when he stood up, and proportionately heavy, a big-boned frame covered with hard, well-trained muscles. His hair and beard were a dark blond, and rather shaggy because of the time he'd spent in prison. Prison! Yes, he'd been in prison. The rough clothing he was wearing was certainly nothing like the type of dress he was used to. He tried to force his memory to give him the information he was looking for, but it wouldn't come. A face flickered in his mind for a moment, and a name. Contarini. He seemed to remember a startled look on the Italian's face, but he could neither remember the reason for it nor when it had been. But it would come back; he was sure of that. Meanwhile, where the devil was he? From where he was sitting, he could see that the room was fairly large, but not extraordinarily so. A door in one wall led into another room of about the same size. But they were like no other rooms he had ever seen before. He looked down at the floor. It was soft, almost as soft as a bed, covered with a thick, even, resilient layer of fine material of some kind. It was some sort of carpeting that covered the floor from wall to wall, but no carpet had ever felt like this. He lifted himself gingerly to his feet. He wasn't hurt, at least. He felt fine, except for the gaps in his memory. The room was well lit. The illumination came from the ceiling, which seemed to be made of some glowing, semitranslucent metal that cast a shadowless glow over everything. There was a large, bulky table near the wall away from the door; it looked almost normal, except that the objects on it were like nothing that had ever existed. Their purposes were unknown, and their shapes meaningless. He jerked his head away, not wanting to look at the things on the table. The walls, at least, looked familiar. They seemed to be paneled in some fine wood. He walked over and touched it. And knew immediately that, no matter what it looked like, it wasn't wood. The illusion was there to the eye, but no wood ever had such a hard, smooth, glasslike surface as this. He jerked his fingertips away. He recognized, then, the emotion that had made him turn away from the objects on the table and pull his hand away from the unnatural wall. It was fear. Fear? Nonsense! He put his hand out suddenly and slapped the wall with his palm and held it there. There was nothing to be afraid of! He laughed at himself softly. He'd faced death a hundred times during the war without showing fear; this was no time to start. What would his men think of him if they saw him getting shaky over the mere touch of a woodlike wall? The memories were coming back. This time, he didn't try to probe for them; he just let them flow. He turned around again and looked deliberately at the big, bulky table. There was a faint humming noise coming from it which had escaped his notice before. He walked over to it and looked at the queerly-shaped things that lay on its shining surface. He had already decided that the table was no more wood than the wall, and a touch of a finger to the surface verified the decision. The only thing that looked at all familiar on the table was a sheaf of written material. He picked it up and glanced over the pages, noticing the neat characters, so unlike any that he knew. He couldn't read a word of it. He grinned and put the sheets back down on the smooth table top. The humming appeared to be coming from a metal box on the other side of the table. He circled around and took a look at the thing. It had levers and knobs and other projections, but their functions were not immediately discernible. There were several rows of studs with various unrecognizable symbols on them. This would certainly be something to tell in London—when and if he ever got back. He reached out a tentative finger and touched one of the symbol-marked studs. There was a loud click! in the stillness of the room, and he leaped back from the device. He watched it warily for a moment, but nothing more seemed to be forthcoming. Still, he decided it might be best to let things alone. There was no point in messing with things that undoubtedly controlled forces beyond his ability to cope with, or understand. After all, such a long time— He stopped, Time? Time? What had Contarini said about time? Something about its being like a river that flowed rapidly—that much he remembered. Oh, yes—and that it was almost impossible to try to swim backwards against the current or ... something else. What? He shook his head. The more he tried to remember what his fellow prisoner had told him, the more elusive it became. He had traveled in time, that much was certain, but how far, and in which direction? Toward the future, obviously; Contarini had made it plain that going into the past was impossible. Then could he, Broom, get back to his own time, or was he destined to stay in this—place? Wherever and whenever it was. Evidently movement through the time-river had a tendency to disorganize a man's memories. Well, wasn't that obvious anyway? Even normal movement through time, at the rate of a day per day, made some memories fade. And some were lost entirely, while others remained clear and bright. What would a sudden jump of centuries do? His memory was improving, though. If he just let it alone, most of it would come back, and he could orient himself. Meanwhile, he might as well explore his surroundings a little more. He resolved to keep his hands off anything that wasn't readily identifiable. There was a single oddly-shaped chair by the bulky table, and behind the chair was a heavy curtain which apparently covered a window. He could see a gleam of light coming through the division in the curtains. Broom decided he might as well get a good look at whatever was outside the building he was in. He stepped over, parted the curtains, and— —And gasped! It was night time outside, and the sky was clear. He recognized the familiar constellations up there. But they were dimmed by the light from the city that stretched below him. And what a city! At first, it was difficult for his eyes to convey their impressions intelligently to his brain. What they were recording was so unfamiliar that his brain could not decode the messages they sent. There were broad, well-lit streets that stretched on and on, as far as he could see, and beyond them, flittering fairy bridges rose into the air and arched into the distance. And the buildings towered over everything. He forced himself to look down, and it made him dizzy. The building he was in was so high that it would have projected through the clouds if there had been any clouds. Broom backed away from the window and let the curtain close. He'd had all of that he could take for right now. The inside of the building, his immediate surroundings, looked almost homey after seeing that monstrous, endless city outside. He skirted the table with its still-humming machine and walked toward the door that led to the other room. A picture hanging on a nearby wall caught his eye, and he stopped. It was a portrait of a man in unfamiliar, outlandish clothing, but Broom had seen odder clothing in his travels. But the thing that had stopped him was the amazing reality of the picture. It was almost as if there were a mirror there, reflecting the face of a man who stood invisibly before it. It wasn't, of course; it was only a painting. But the lifelike, somber eyes of the man were focused directly on him. Broom decided he didn't like the effect at all, and hurried into the next room. There were several rows of the bulky tables in here, each with its own chair. Broom's footsteps sounded loud in the room, the echoes rebounding from the walls. He stopped and looked down. This floor wasn't covered with the soft carpeting; it had a square, mosaic pattern, as though it might be composed of tile of some kind. And yet, though it was harder than the carpet it had a kind of queer resiliency of its own. The room itself was larger than the one he had just quitted, and not as well lit. For the first time, he thought of the possibility that there might be someone else here besides himself. He looked around, wishing that he had a weapon of some kind. Even a knife would have made him feel better. But there had been no chance of that, of course. Prisoners of war are hardly allowed to carry weapons with them, so none had been available. He wondered what sort of men lived in this fantastic city. So far, he had seen no one. The streets below had been filled with moving vehicles of some kind, but it had been difficult to tell whether there had been anyone walking down there from this height. Contarini had said that it would be ... how had he said it? "Like sleeping for hundreds of years and waking up in a strange world." Well, it was that, all right. Did anyone know he was here? He had the uneasy feeling that hidden, unseen eyes were watching his every move, and yet he could detect nothing. There was no sound except the faint humming from the device in the room behind him, and a deeper, almost inaudible, rushing, rumbling sound that seemed to come from far below. His wish for a weapon came back, stronger than before. The very fact that he had seen no one set his nerves on edge even more than the sight of a known enemy would have done. He was suddenly no longer interested in his surroundings. He felt trapped in this strange, silent room. He could see a light shining through a door at the far end of the room—perhaps it was a way out. He walked toward it, trying to keep his footsteps as silent as possible as he moved. The door had a pane of translucent glass in it, and there were more of the unreadable characters on it. He wished fervently that he could decipher them; they might tell him where he was. Carefully, he grasped the handle of the door, twisted it, and pulled. And, careful as he had been, the door swung inward with surprising rapidity. It was a great deal thinner and lighter than he had supposed. He looked down at it, wondering if there were any way the door could be locked. There was a tiny vertical slit set in a small metal panel in the door, but it was much too tiny to be a keyhole. Still— It didn't matter. If necessary, he could smash the glass to get through the door. He stepped out into what was obviously a hallway beyond the door. The hallway stretched away to either side, lined with doors similar to the one he had just come through. How did a man get out of this place, anyway? The door behind him was pressing against his hand with a patient insistence, as though it wanted to close itself. He almost let it close, but, at the last second, he changed his mind. Better the devil we know than the devil we don't , he thought to himself. He went back into the office and looked around for something to prop the door open. He found a small, beautifully formed porcelain dish on one of the desks, picked it up, and went back to the door. The dish held the door open an inch or so. That was good enough. If someone locked the door, he could still smash in the glass if he wanted to, but the absence of the dish when he returned would tell him that he was not alone in this mysterious place. He started down the hallway to his right, checking the doors as he went. They were all locked. He knew that he could break into any of them, but he had a feeling that he would find no exit through any of them. They all looked as though they concealed more of the big rooms. None of them had any lights behind them. Only the one door that he had come through showed the telltale glow from the other side. Why? He had the terrible feeling that he had been drawn across time to this place for a purpose, and yet he could think of no rational reason for believing so. He stopped as another memory came back. He remembered being in the stone-walled dungeon, with its smelly straw beds, lit only by the faint shaft of sunlight that came from the barred window high overhead. Contarini, the short, wiry little Italian who was in the next cell, looked at him through the narrow opening. "I still think it can be done, my friend. It is the mind and the mind alone that sees the flow of time. The body experiences, but does not see. Only the soul is capable of knowing eternity." Broom outranked the little Italian, but prison can make brothers of all men. "You think it's possible then, to get out of a place like this, simply by thinking about it?" Contarini nodded. "Why not? Did not the saints do so? And what was that? Contemplation of the Eternal, my comrade; contemplation of the Eternal." Broom held back a grin. "Then why, my Venetian friend, have you not left this place long since?" "I try," Contarini had said simply, "but I cannot do it. You wish to know why? It is because I am afraid." "Afraid?" Broom raised an eyebrow. He had seen Contarini on the battlefield, dealing death in hand-to-hand combat, and the Italian hadn't impressed him as a coward. "Yes," said the Venetian. "Afraid. Oh, I am not afraid of men. I fight. Some day, I may die— will die. This does not frighten me, death. I am not afraid of what men may do to me." He stopped and frowned. "But, of this, I have a great fear. Only a saint can handle such things, and I am no saint." "I hope, my dear Contarini," Broom said dryly, "that you are not under the impression that I am a saint." "No, perhaps not," Contarini said. "Perhaps not. But you are braver than I. I am not afraid of any man living. But you are afraid of neither the living nor the dead, nor of man nor devil—which is a great deal more than I can say for myself. Besides, there is the blood of kings in your veins. And has not a king protection that even a man of noble blood such as myself does not have? I think so. "Oh, I have no doubt that you could do it, if you but would. And then, perhaps, when you are free, you would free me—for teaching you all I know to accomplish this. My fear holds me chained here, but you have no chains of fear." Broom had thought that over for a moment, then grinned. "All right, my friend; I'll try it. What's your first lesson?" The memory faded from Broom's mind. Had he really moved through some segment of Eternity to reach this ... this place? Had he— He felt a chill run through him. What was he doing here? How could he have taken it all so calmly. Afraid of man or devil, no—but this was neither. He had to get back. The utter alienness of this bright, shining, lifeless wonderland was too much for him. Instinctively, he turned and ran back toward the room he had left. If he got back to the place where he had appeared in this world, perhaps—somehow—some force would return him to where he belonged. The door was as he had left it, the porcelain dish still in place. He scooped up the dish in one big hand and ran on into the room, letting the door shut itself behind him. He ran on, through the large room with its many tables, into the brightly lighted room beyond. He stopped. What could he do now? He tried to remember the things that the Italian had told him to do, and he could not for the life of him remember them. His memory still had gaps in it—gaps he did not know were there because he had not yet probed for them. He closed his eyes in concentration, trying to bring back a memory that would not come. He did not hear the intruder until the man's voice echoed in the room. Broom's eyes opened, and instantly every muscle and nerve in his hard-trained body tensed for action. There was a man standing in the doorway of the office. He was not a particularly impressive man, in spite of the queer cut of his clothes. He was not as tall as Broom, and he looked soft and overfed. His paunch protruded roundly from the open front of the short coat, and there was a fleshiness about his face that betrayed too much good living. And he looked even more frightened than Broom had been a few minutes before. He was saying something in a language that Broom did not understand, and the tenseness in his voice betrayed his fear. Broom relaxed. He had nothing to fear from this little man. "I won't hurt you," Broom said. "I had no intention of intruding on your property, but all I ask is help." The little man was blinking and backing away, as though he were going to turn and bolt at any moment. Broom laughed. "You have nothing to fear from me, little man. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Richard Broom, known as—" He stopped, and his eyes widened. Total memory flooded over him as he realized fully who he was and where he belonged. And the fear hit him again in a raging flood, sweeping over his mind and blotting it out. Again, the darkness came. This time, the blackness faded quickly. There was a face, a worried face, looking at him through an aperture in the stone wall. The surroundings were so familiar, that the bits of memory which had been scattered again during the passage through centuries of time came back more quickly and settled back into their accustomed pattern more easily. The face was that of the Italian, Contarini. He was looking both worried and disappointed. "You were not gone long, my lord king," he said. "But you were gone. Of that there can be no doubt. Why did you return?" Richard Broom sat up on his palette of straw. The scene in the strange building already seemed dreamlike, but the fear was still there. "I couldn't remember," he said softly. "I couldn't remember who I was nor why I had gone to that ... that place. And when I remembered, I came back." Contarini nodded sadly. "It is as I have heard. The memory ties one too strongly to the past—to one's own time. One must return as soon as the mind had adjusted. I am sorry, my friend; I had hoped we could escape. But now it appears that we must wait until our ransoms are paid. And I much fear that mine will never be paid." "Nor mine," said the big man dully. "My faithful Blondin found me, but he may not have returned to London. And even if he has, my brother John may be reluctant to raise the money." "What? Would England hesitate to ransom the brave king who has fought so gallantly in the Holy Crusades? Never! You will be free, my friend." But Richard Plantagenet just stared at the little dish that he still held in his hand, the fear still in his heart. Men would still call him "Lion-hearted," but he knew that he would never again deserve the title. And, nearly eight centuries away in time and thousands of miles away in space, a Mr. Edward Jasperson was speaking hurriedly into the telephone that stood by the electric typewriter on his desk. "That's right, Officer; Suite 8601, Empire State Building. I was working late, and I left the lights on in my office when I went out to get a cup of coffee. When I came back, he was here—a big, bearded man, wearing a thing that looked like a monk's robe made out of gunny sack. What? No, I locked the door when I left. What? Well, the only thing that's missing as far as I can tell is a ceramic ash tray from one of the desks; he was holding that in his hand when I saw him. What? Oh. Where did he go?" Mr. Jasperson paused in his rush of words. "Well, I must have gotten a little dizzy—I was pretty shocked, you know. To be honest, I didn't see where he went. I must have fainted. "But I think you can pick him up if you hurry. With that getup on, he can't get very far away. All right. Thank you, Officer." He cradled the phone, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and dabbed at his damp forehead. He was a very frightened little man, but he knew he'd get over it by morning. THE END

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WIND By CHARLES L. FONTENAY When you have an engine with no fuel, and fuel without an engine, and a life-and-death deadline to meet, you have a problem indeed. Unless you are a stubborn Dutchman—and Jan Van Artevelde was the stubbornest Dutchman on Venus. JAN WILLEM van Artevelde claimed descent from William of Orange. He had no genealogy to prove it, but on Venus there was no one who could disprove it, either. Jan Willem van Artevelde smoked a clay pipe, which only a Dutchman can do properly, because the clay bit grates on less stubborn teeth. Jan needed all his Dutch stubbornness, and a good deal of pure physical strength besides, to maneuver the roach-flat groundcar across the tumbled terrain of Den Hoorn into the teeth of the howling gale that swept from the west. The huge wheels twisted and jolted against the rocks outside, and Jan bounced against his seat belt, wrestled the steering wheel and puffed at his pijp . The mild aroma of Heerenbaai-Tabak filled the airtight groundcar. There came a new swaying that was not the roughness of the terrain. Through the thick windshield Jan saw all the ground about him buckle and heave for a second or two before it settled to rugged quiescence again. This time he was really heaved about. Jan mentioned this to the groundcar radio. "That's the third time in half an hour," he commented. "The place tosses like the IJsselmeer on a rough day." "You just don't forget it isn't the Zuider Zee," retorted Heemskerk from the other end. "You sink there and you don't come up three times." "Don't worry," said Jan. "I'll be back on time, with a broom at the masthead." "This I shall want to see," chuckled Heemskerk; a logical reaction, considering the scarcity of brooms on Venus. Two hours earlier the two men had sat across a small table playing chess, with little indication there would be anything else to occupy their time before blastoff of the stubby gravity-boat. It would be their last chess game for many months, for Jan was a member of the Dutch colony at Oostpoort in the northern hemisphere of Venus, while Heemskerk was pilot of the G-boat from the Dutch spaceship Vanderdecken , scheduled to begin an Earthward orbit in a few hours. It was near the dusk of the 485-hour Venerian day, and the Twilight Gale already had arisen, sweeping from the comparatively chill Venerian nightside into the superheated dayside. Oostpoort, established near some outcroppings that contained uranium ore, was protected from both the Dawn Gale and the Twilight Gale, for it was in a valley in the midst of a small range of mountains. Jan had just figured out a combination by which he hoped to cheat Heemskerk out of one of his knights, when Dekker, the burgemeester of Oostpoort, entered the spaceport ready room. "There's been an emergency radio message," said Dekker. "They've got a passenger for the Earthship over at Rathole." "Rathole?" repeated Heemskerk. "What's that? I didn't know there was another colony within two thousand kilometers." "It isn't a colony, in the sense Oostpoort is," explained Dekker. "The people are the families of a bunch of laborers left behind when the colony folded several years ago. It's about eighty kilometers away, right across the Hoorn, but they don't have any vehicles that can navigate when the wind's up." Heemskerk pushed his short-billed cap back on his close-cropped head, leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his comfortable stomach. "Then the passenger will have to wait for the next ship," he pronounced. "The Vanderdecken has to blast off in thirty hours to catch Earth at the right orbital spot, and the G-boat has to blast off in ten hours to catch the Vanderdecken ." "This passenger can't wait," said Dekker. "He needs to be evacuated to Earth immediately. He's suffering from the Venus Shadow." Jan whistled softly. He had seen the effects of that disease. Dekker was right. "Jan, you're the best driver in Oostpoort," said Dekker. "You will have to take a groundcar to Rathole and bring the fellow back." So now Jan gripped his clay pipe between his teeth and piloted the groundcar into the teeth of the Twilight Gale. Den Hoorn was a comparatively flat desert sweep that ran along the western side of the Oost Mountains, just over the mountain from Oostpoort. It was a thin fault area of a planet whose crust was peculiarly subject to earthquakes, particularly at the beginning and end of each long day when temperatures of the surface rocks changed. On the other side of it lay Rathole, a little settlement that eked a precarious living from the Venerian vegetation. Jan never had seen it. He had little difficulty driving up and over the mountain, for the Dutch settlers had carved a rough road through the ravines. But even the 2½-meter wheels of the groundcar had trouble amid the tumbled rocks of Den Hoorn. The wind hit the car in full strength here and, though the body of the groundcar was suspended from the axles, there was constant danger of its being flipped over by a gust if not handled just right. The three earthshocks that had shaken Den Hoorn since he had been driving made his task no easier, but he was obviously lucky, at that. Often he had to detour far from his course to skirt long, deep cracks in the surface, or steep breaks where the crust had been raised or dropped several meters by past quakes. The groundcar zig-zagged slowly westward. The tattered violet-and-indigo clouds boiled low above it, but the wind was as dry as the breath of an oven. Despite the heavy cloud cover, the afternoon was as bright as an Earth-day. The thermometer showed the outside temperature to have dropped to 40 degrees Centigrade in the west wind, and it was still going down. Jan reached the edge of a crack that made further progress seem impossible. A hundred meters wide, of unknown depth, it stretched out of sight in both directions. For the first time he entertained serious doubts that Den Hoorn could be crossed by land. After a moment's hesitation, he swung the groundcar northward and raced along the edge of the chasm as fast as the car would negotiate the terrain. He looked anxiously at his watch. Nearly three hours had passed since he left Oostpoort. He had seven hours to go and he was still at least 16 kilometers from Rathole. His pipe was out, but he could not take his hands from the wheel to refill it. He had driven at least eight kilometers before he realized that the crack was narrowing. At least as far again, the two edges came together, but not at the same level. A sheer cliff three meters high now barred his passage. He drove on. Apparently it was the result of an old quake. He found a spot where rocks had tumbled down, making a steep, rough ramp up the break. He drove up it and turned back southwestward. He made it just in time. He had driven less than three hundred meters when a quake more severe than any of the others struck. Suddenly behind him the break reversed itself, so that where he had climbed up coming westward he would now have to climb a cliff of equal height returning eastward. The ground heaved and buckled like a tempestuous sea. Rocks rolled and leaped through the air, several large ones striking the groundcar with ominous force. The car staggered forward on its giant wheels like a drunken man. The quake was so violent that at one time the vehicle was hurled several meters sideways, and almost overturned. And the wind smashed down on it unrelentingly. The quake lasted for several minutes, during which Jan was able to make no progress at all and struggled only to keep the groundcar upright. Then, in unison, both earthquake and wind died to absolute quiescence. Jan made use of this calm to step down on the accelerator and send the groundcar speeding forward. The terrain was easier here, nearing the western edge of Den Hoorn, and he covered several kilometers before the wind struck again, cutting his speed down considerably. He judged he must be nearing Rathole. Not long thereafter, he rounded an outcropping of rock and it lay before him. A wave of nostalgia swept over him. Back at Oostpoort, the power was nuclear, but this little settlement made use of the cheapest, most obviously available power source. It was dotted with more than a dozen windmills. Windmills! Tears came to Jan's eyes. For a moment, he was carried back to the flat lands around 's Gravenhage. For a moment he was a tow-headed, round-eyed boy again, clumping in wooden shoes along the edge of the tulip fields. But there were no canals here. The flat land, stretching into the darkening west, was spotted with patches of cactus and leather-leaved Venerian plants. Amid the windmills, low domes protruded from the earth, indicating that the dwellings of Rathole were, appropriately, partly underground. He drove into the place. There were no streets, as such, but there were avenues between lines of heavy chains strung to short iron posts, evidently as handholds against the wind. The savage gale piled dust and sand in drifts against the domes, then, shifting slightly, swept them clean again. There was no one moving abroad, but just inside the community Jan found half a dozen men in a group, clinging to one of the chains and waving to him. He pulled the groundcar to a stop beside them, stuck his pipe in a pocket of his plastic venusuit, donned his helmet and got out. The wind almost took him away before one of them grabbed him and he was able to grasp the chain himself. They gathered around him. They were swarthy, black-eyed men, with curly hair. One of them grasped his hand. " Bienvenido, señor ," said the man. Jan recoiled and dropped the man's hand. All the Orangeman blood he claimed protested in outrage. Spaniards! All these men were Spaniards! Jan recovered himself at once. He had been reading too much ancient history during his leisure hours. The hot monotony of Venus was beginning to affect his brain. It had been 500 years since the Netherlands revolted against Spanish rule. A lot of water over the dam since then. A look at the men around him, the sound of their chatter, convinced him that he need not try German or Hollandsch here. He fell back on the international language. "Do you speak English?" he asked. The man brightened but shook his head. " No hablo inglés ," he said, " pero el médico lo habla. Venga conmigo. " He gestured for Jan to follow him and started off, pulling his way against the wind along the chain. Jan followed, and the other men fell in behind in single file. A hundred meters farther on, they turned, descended some steps and entered one of the half-buried domes. A gray-haired, bearded man was in the well-lighted room, apparently the living room of a home, with a young woman. " Él médico ," said the man who had greeted Jan, gesturing. " Él habla inglés. " He went out, shutting the airlock door behind him. "You must be the man from Oostpoort," said the bearded man, holding out his hand. "I am Doctor Sanchez. We are very grateful you have come." "I thought for a while I wouldn't make it," said Jan ruefully, removing his venushelmet. "This is Mrs. Murillo," said Sanchez. The woman was a Spanish blonde, full-lipped and beautiful, with golden hair and dark, liquid eyes. She smiled at Jan. " Encantada de conocerlo, señor ," she greeted him. "Is this the patient, Doctor?" asked Jan, astonished. She looked in the best of health. "No, the patient is in the next room," answered Sanchez. "Well, as much as I'd like to stop for a pipe, we'd better start at once," said Jan. "It's a hard drive back, and blastoff can't be delayed." The woman seemed to sense his meaning. She turned and called: " Diego! " A boy appeared in the door, a dark-skinned, sleepy-eyed boy of about eight. He yawned. Then, catching sight of the big Dutchman, he opened his eyes wide and smiled. The boy was healthy-looking, alert, but the mark of the Venus Shadow was on his face. There was a faint mottling, a criss-cross of dead-white lines. Mrs. Murillo spoke to him rapidly in Spanish and he nodded. She zipped him into a venusuit and fitted a small helmet on his head. "Good luck, amigo ," said Sanchez, shaking Jan's hand again. "Thanks," replied Jan. He donned his own helmet. "I'll need it, if the trip over was any indication." Jan and Diego made their way back down the chain to the groundcar. There was a score of men there now, and a few women. They let the pair go through, and waved farewell as Jan swung the groundcar around and headed back eastward. It was easier driving with the wind behind him, and Jan hit a hundred kilometers an hour several times before striking the rougher ground of Den Hoorn. Now, if he could only find a way over the bluff raised by that last quake.... The ground of Den Hoorn was still shivering. Jan did not realize this until he had to brake the groundcar almost to a stop at one point, because it was not shaking in severe, periodic shocks as it had earlier. It quivered constantly, like the surface of quicksand. The ground far ahead of him had a strange color to it. Jan, watching for the cliff he had to skirt and scale, had picked up speed over some fairly even terrain, but now he slowed again, puzzled. There was something wrong ahead. He couldn't quite figure it out. Diego, beside him, had sat quietly so far, peering eagerly through the windshield, not saying a word. Now suddenly he cried in a high thin tenor: " Cuidado! Cuidado! Un abismo! " Jim saw it at the same time and hit the brakes so hard the groundcar would have stood on its nose had its wheels been smaller. They skidded to a stop. The chasm that had caused him such a long detour before had widened, evidently in the big quake that had hit earlier. Now it was a canyon, half a kilometer wide. Five meters from the edge he looked out over blank space at the far wall, and could not see the bottom. Cursing choice Dutch profanity, Jan wheeled the groundcar northward and drove along the edge of the abyss as fast as he could. He wasted half an hour before realizing that it was getting no narrower. There was no point in going back southward. It might be a hundred kilometers long or a thousand, but he never could reach the end of it and thread the tumbled rocks of Den Hoorn to Oostpoort before the G-boat blastoff. There was nothing to do but turn back to Rathole and see if some other way could not be found. Jan sat in the half-buried room and enjoyed the luxury of a pipe filled with some of Theodorus Neimeijer's mild tobacco. Before him, Dr. Sanchez sat with crossed legs, cleaning his fingernails with a scalpel. Diego's mother talked to the boy in low, liquid tones in a corner of the room. Jan was at a loss to know how people whose technical knowledge was as skimpy as it obviously was in Rathole were able to build these semi-underground domes to resist the earth shocks that came from Den Hoorn. But this one showed no signs of stress. A religious print and a small pencil sketch of Señora Murillo, probably done by the boy, were awry on the inward-curving walls, but that was all. Jan felt justifiably exasperated at these Spanish-speaking people. "If some effort had been made to take the boy to Oostpoort from here, instead of calling on us to send a car, Den Hoorn could have been crossed before the crack opened," he pointed out. "An effort was made," replied Sanchez quietly. "Perhaps you do not fully realize our position here. We have no engines except the stationary generators that give us current for our air-conditioning and our utilities. They are powered by the windmills. We do not have gasoline engines for vehicles, so our vehicles are operated by hand." "You push them?" demanded Jan incredulously. "No. You've seen pictures of the pump-cars that once were used on terrestrial railroads? Ours are powered like that, but we cannot operate them when the Venerian wind is blowing. By the time I diagnosed the Venus Shadow in Diego, the wind was coming up, and we had no way to get him to Oostpoort." "Mmm," grunted Jan. He shifted uncomfortably and looked at the pair in the corner. The blonde head was bent over the boy protectingly, and over his mother's shoulder Diego's black eyes returned Jan's glance. "If the disease has just started, the boy could wait for the next Earth ship, couldn't he?" asked Jan. "I said I had just diagnosed it, not that it had just started, señor ," corrected Sanchez. "As you know, the trip to Earth takes 145 days and it can be started only when the two planets are at the right position in their orbits. Have you ever seen anyone die of the Venus Shadow?" "Yes, I have," replied Jan in a low voice. He had seen two people die of it, and it had not been pleasant. Medical men thought it was a deficiency disease, but they had not traced down the deficiency responsible. Treatment by vitamins, diet, antibiotics, infrared and ultraviolet rays, all were useless. The only thing that could arrest and cure the disease was removal from the dry, cloud-hung surface of Venus and return to a moist, sunny climate on Earth. Without that treatment, once the typical mottled texture of the skin appeared, the flesh rapidly deteriorated and fell away in chunks. The victim remained unfevered and agonizingly conscious until the degeneration reached a vital spot. "If you have," said Sanchez, "you must realize that Diego cannot wait for a later ship, if his life is to be saved. He must get to Earth at once." Jan puffed at the Heerenbaai-Tabak and cogitated. The place was aptly named. It was a ratty community. The boy was a dark-skinned little Spaniard—of Mexican origin, perhaps. But he was a boy, and a human being. A thought occurred to him. From what he had seen and heard, the entire economy of Rathole could not support the tremendous expense of sending the boy across the millions of miles to Earth by spaceship. "Who's paying his passage?" he asked. "The Dutch Central Venus Company isn't exactly a charitable institution." "Your Señor Dekker said that would be taken care of," replied Sanchez. Jan relit his pipe silently, making a mental resolution that Dekker wouldn't take care of it alone. Salaries for Venerian service were high, and many of the men at Oostpoort would contribute readily to such a cause. "Who is Diego's father?" he asked. "He was Ramón Murillo, a very good mechanic," answered Sanchez, with a sliding sidelong glance at Jan's face. "He has been dead for three years." Jan grunted. "The copters at Oostpoort can't buck this wind," he said thoughtfully, "or I'd have come in one of those in the first place instead of trying to cross Den Hoorn by land. But if you have any sort of aircraft here, it might make it downwind—if it isn't wrecked on takeoff." "I'm afraid not," said Sanchez. "Too bad. There's nothing we can do, then. The nearest settlement west of here is more than a thousand kilometers away, and I happen to know they have no planes, either. Just copters. So that's no help." "Wait," said Sanchez, lifting the scalpel and tilting his head. "I believe there is something, though we cannot use it. This was once an American naval base, and the people here were civilian employes who refused to move north with it. There was a flying machine they used for short-range work, and one was left behind—probably with a little help from the people of the settlement. But...." "What kind of machine? Copter or plane?" "They call it a flying platform. It carries two men, I believe. But, señor ...." "I know them. I've operated them, before I left Earth. Man, you don't expect me to try to fly one of those little things in this wind? They're tricky as they can be, and the passengers are absolutely unprotected!" " Señor , I have asked you to do nothing." "No, you haven't," muttered Jan. "But you know I'll do it." Sanchez looked into his face, smiling faintly and a little sadly. "I was sure you would be willing," he said. He turned and spoke in Spanish to Mrs. Murillo. The woman rose to her feet and came to them. As Jan arose, she looked up at him, tears in her eyes. " Gracias ," she murmured. " Un millón de gracias. " She lifted his hands in hers and kissed them. Jan disengaged himself gently, embarrassed. But it occurred to him, looking down on the bowed head of the beautiful young widow, that he might make some flying trips back over here in his leisure time. Language barriers were not impassable, and feminine companionship might cure his neurotic, history-born distaste for Spaniards, for more than one reason. Sanchez was tugging at his elbow. " Señor , I have been trying to tell you," he said. "It is generous and good of you, and I wanted Señora Murillo to know what a brave man you are. But have you forgotten that we have no gasoline engines here? There is no fuel for the flying platform." The platform was in a warehouse which, like the rest of the structures in Rathole, was a half-buried dome. The platform's ring-shaped base was less than a meter thick, standing on four metal legs. On top of it, in the center, was a railed circle that would hold two men, but would crowd them. Two small gasoline engines sat on each side of this railed circle and between them on a third side was the fuel tank. The passengers entered it on the fourth side. The machine was dusty and spotted with rust, Jan, surrounded by Sanchez, Diego and a dozen men, inspected it thoughtfully. The letters USN*SES were painted in white on the platform itself, and each engine bore the label "Hiller." Jan peered over the edge of the platform at the twin-ducted fans in their plastic shrouds. They appeared in good shape. Each was powered by one of the engines, transmitted to it by heavy rubber belts. Jan sighed. It was an unhappy situation. As far as he could determine, without making tests, the engines were in perfect condition. Two perfectly good engines, and no fuel for them. "You're sure there's no gasoline, anywhere in Rathole?" he asked Sanchez. Sanchez smiled ruefully, as he had once before, at Jan's appellation for the community. The inhabitants' term for it was simply " La Ciudad Nuestra "—"Our Town." But he made no protest. He turned to one of the other men and talked rapidly for a few moments in Spanish. "None, señor ," he said, turning back to Jan. "The Americans, of course, kept much of it when they were here, but the few things we take to Oostpoort to trade could not buy precious gasoline. We have electricity in plenty if you can power the platform with it." Jan thought that over, trying to find a way. "No, it wouldn't work," he said. "We could rig batteries on the platform and electric motors to turn the propellers. But batteries big enough to power it all the way to Oostpoort would be so heavy the machine couldn't lift them off the ground. If there were some way to carry a power line all the way to Oostpoort, or to broadcast the power to it.... But it's a light-load machine, and must have an engine that gives it the necessary power from very little weight." Wild schemes ran through his head. If they were on water, instead of land, he could rig up a sail. He could still rig up a sail, for a groundcar, except for the chasm out on Den Hoorn. The groundcar! Jan straightened and snapped his fingers. "Doctor!" he explained. "Send a couple of men to drain the rest of the fuel from my groundcar. And let's get this platform above ground and tie it down until we can get it started." Sanchez gave rapid orders in Spanish. Two of the men left at a run, carrying five-gallon cans with them. Three others picked up the platform and carried it up a ramp and outside. As soon as they reached ground level, the wind hit them. They dropped the platform to the ground, where it shuddered and swayed momentarily, and two of the men fell successfully on their stomachs. The wind caught the third and somersaulted him half a dozen times before he skidded to a stop on his back with outstretched arms and legs. He turned over cautiously and crawled back to them. Jan, his head just above ground level, surveyed the terrain. There was flat ground to the east, clear in a fairly broad alley for at least half a kilometer before any of the domes protruded up into it. "This is as good a spot for takeoff as we'll find," he said to Sanchez. The men put three heavy ropes on the platform's windward rail and secured it by them to the heavy chain that ran by the dome. The platform quivered and shuddered in the heavy wind, but its base was too low for it to overturn. Shortly the two men returned with the fuel from the groundcar, struggling along the chain. Jan got above ground in a crouch, clinging to the rail of the platform, and helped them fill the fuel tank with it. He primed the carburetors and spun the engines. Nothing happened. He turned the engines over again. One of them coughed, and a cloud of blue smoke burst from its exhaust, but they did not catch. "What is the matter, señor ?" asked Sanchez from the dome entrance. "I don't know," replied Jan. "Maybe it's that the engines haven't been used in so long. I'm afraid I'm not a good enough mechanic to tell." "Some of these men were good mechanics when the navy was here," said Sanchez. "Wait." He turned and spoke to someone in the dome. One of the men of Rathole came to Jan's side and tried the engines. They refused to catch. The man made carburetor adjustments and tried again. No success. He sniffed, took the cap from the fuel tank and stuck a finger inside. He withdrew it, wet and oily, and examined it. He turned and spoke to Sanchez. "He says that your groundcar must have a diesel engine," Sanchez interpreted to Jan. "Is that correct?" "Why, yes, that's true." "He says the fuel will not work then, señor . He says it is low-grade fuel and the platform must have high octane gasoline." Jan threw up his hands and went back into the dome. "I should have known that," he said unhappily. "I would have known if I had thought of it." "What is to be done, then?" asked Sanchez. "There's nothing that can be done," answered Jan. "They may as well put the fuel back in my groundcar." Sanchez called orders to the men at the platform. While they worked, Jan stared out at the furiously spinning windmills that dotted Rathole. "There's nothing that can be done," he repeated. "We can't make the trip overland because of the chasm out there in Den Hoorn, and we can't fly the platform because we have no power for it." Windmills. Again Jan could imagine the flat land around them as his native Holland, with the Zuider Zee sparkling to the west where here the desert stretched under darkling clouds. Jan looked at his watch. A little more than two hours before the G-boat's blastoff time, and it couldn't wait for them. It was nearly eight hours since he had left Oostpoort, and the afternoon was getting noticeably darker. Jan was sorry. He had done his best, but Venus had beaten him. He looked around for Diego. The boy was not in the dome. He was outside, crouched in the lee of the dome, playing with some sticks. Diego must know of his ailment, and why he had to go to Oostpoort. If Jan was any judge of character, Sanchez would have told him that. Whether Diego knew it was a life-or-death matter for him to be aboard the Vanderdecken when it blasted off for Earth, Jan did not know. But the boy was around eight years old and he was bright, and he must realize the seriousness involved in a decision to send him all the way to Earth. Jan felt ashamed of the exuberant foolishness which had led him to spout ancient history and claim descent from William of Orange. It had been a hobby, and artificial topic for conversation that amused him and his companions, a defense against the monotony of Venus that had begun to affect his personality perhaps a bit more than he realized. He did not dislike Spaniards; he had no reason to dislike them. They were all humans—the Spanish, the Dutch, the Germans, the Americans, even the Russians—fighting a hostile planet together. He could not understand a word Diego said when the boy spoke to him, but he liked Diego and wished desperately he could do something. Outside, the windmills of Rathole spun merrily. There was power, the power that lighted and air-conditioned Rathole, power in the air all around them. If he could only use it! But to turn the platform on its side and let the wind spin the propellers was pointless. He turned to Sanchez. "Ask the men if there are any spare parts for the platform," he said. "Some of those legs it stands on, transmission belts, spare propellers." Sanchez asked. "Yes," he said. "Many spare parts, but no fuel." Jan smiled a tight smile. "Tell them to take the engines out," he said. "Since we have no fuel, we may as well have no engines." Pieter Heemskerk stood by the ramp to the stubby G-boat and checked his watch. It was X minus fifteen—fifteen minutes before blastoff time. Heemskerk wore a spacesuit. Everything was ready, except climbing aboard, closing the airlock and pressing the firing pin. What on Venus could have happened to Van Artevelde? The last radio message they had received, more than an hour ago, had said he and the patient took off successfully in an aircraft. What sort of aircraft could he be flying that would require an hour to cover eighty kilometers, with the wind? Heemskerk could only draw the conclusion that the aircraft had been wrecked somewhere in Den Hoorn. As a matter of fact, he knew that preparations were being made now to send a couple of groundcars out to search for it. This, of course, would be too late to help the patient Van Artevelde was bringing, but Heemskerk had no personal interest in the patient. His worry was all for his friend. The two of them had enjoyed chess and good beer together on his last three trips to Venus, and Heemskerk hoped very sincerely that the big blond man wasn't hurt. He glanced at his watch again. X minus twelve. In two minutes, it would be time for him to walk up the ramp into the G-boat. In seven minutes the backward count before blastoff would start over the area loudspeakers. Heemskerk shook his head sadly. And Van Artevelde had promised to come back triumphant, with a broom at his masthead! It was a high thin whine borne on the wind, carrying even through the walls of his spacehelmet, that attracted Heemskerk's attention and caused him to pause with his foot on the ramp. Around him, the rocket mechanics were staring up at the sky, trying to pinpoint the noise. Heemskerk looked westward. At first he could see nothing, then there was a moving dot above the mountain, against the indigo umbrella of clouds. It grew, it swooped, it approached and became a strange little flying disc with two people standing on it and something sticking up from its deck in front of them. A broom? No. The platform hovered and began to settle nearby, and there was Van Artevelde leaning over its rail and fiddling frantically with whatever it was that stuck up on it—a weird, angled contraption of pipes and belts topped by a whirring blade. A boy stood at his shoulder and tried to help him. As the platform descended to a few meters above ground, the Dutchman slashed at the contraption, the cut ends of belts whipped out wildly and the platform slid to the ground with a rush. It hit with a clatter and its two passengers tumbled prone to the ground. "Jan!" boomed Heemskerk, forcing his voice through the helmet diaphragm and rushing over to his friend. "I was afraid you were lost!" Jan struggled to his feet and leaned down to help the boy up. "Here's your patient, Pieter," he said. "Hope you have a spacesuit in his size." "I can find one. And we'll have to hurry for blastoff. But, first, what happened? Even that damned thing ought to get here from Rathole faster than that." "Had no fuel," replied Jan briefly. "My engines were all right, but I had no power to run them. So I had to pull the engines and rig up a power source." Heemskerk stared at the platform. On its railing was rigged a tripod of battered metal pipes, atop which a big four-blade propeller spun slowly in what wind was left after it came over the western mountain. Over the edges of the platform, running from the two propellers in its base, hung a series of tattered transmission belts. "Power source?" repeated Heemskerk. "That?" "Certainly," replied Jan with dignity. "The power source any good Dutchman turns to in an emergency: a windmill!" THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories April 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from The Counterfeit Man More Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse published in 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. Meeting of the Board It was going to be a bad day. As he pushed his way nervously through the crowds toward the Exit Strip, Walter Towne turned the dismal prospect over and over in his mind. The potential gloominess of this particular day had descended upon him the instant the morning buzzer had gone off, making it even more tempting than usual just to roll over and forget about it all. Twenty minutes later, the water-douse came to drag him, drenched and gurgling, back to the cruel cold world. He had wolfed down his morning Koffee-Kup with one eye on the clock and one eye on his growing sense of impending crisis. And now, to make things just a trifle worse, he was going to be late again. He struggled doggedly across the rumbling Exit strip toward the plant entrance. After all, he told himself, why should he be so upset? He was Vice President-in-Charge-of-Production of the Robling Titanium Corporation. What could they do to him, really? He had rehearsed his part many times, squaring his thin shoulders, looking the union boss straight in the eye and saying, "Now, see here, Torkleson—" But he knew, when the showdown came, that he wouldn't say any such thing. And this was the morning that the showdown would come. Oh, not because of the lateness . Of course Bailey, the shop steward, would take his usual delight in bringing that up. But this seemed hardly worthy of concern this morning. The reports waiting on his desk were what worried him. The sales reports. The promotion-draw reports. The royalty reports. The anticipated dividend reports. Walter shook his head wearily. The shop steward was a goad, annoying, perhaps even infuriating, but tolerable. Torkleson was a different matter. He pulled his worn overcoat down over frayed shirt sleeves, and tried vainly to straighten the celluloid collar that kept scooting his tie up under his ear. Once off the moving strip, he started up the Robling corridor toward the plant gate. Perhaps he would be fortunate. Maybe the reports would be late. Maybe his secretary's two neurones would fail to synapse this morning, and she'd lose them altogether. And, as long as he was dreaming, maybe Bailey would break his neck on the way to work. He walked quickly past the workers' lounge, glancing in at the groups of men, arguing politics and checking the stock market reports before they changed from their neat gray business suits to their welding dungarees. Running up the stairs to the administrative wing, he paused outside the door to punch the time clock. 8:04. Damn. If only Bailey could be sick— Bailey was not sick. The administrative offices were humming with frantic activity as Walter glanced down the rows of cubbyholes. In the middle of it all sat Bailey, in his black-and-yellow checkered tattersall, smoking a large cigar. His feet were planted on his desk top, but he hadn't started on his morning Western yet. He was busy glaring, first at the clock, then at Walter. "Late again, I see," the shop steward growled. Walter gulped. "Yes, sir. Just four minutes, this time, sir. You know those crowded strips—" "So it's just four minutes now, eh?" Bailey's feet came down with a crash. "After last month's fine production record, you think four minutes doesn't matter, eh? Think just because you're a vice president it's all right to mosey in here whenever you feel like it." He glowered. "Well, this is three times this month you've been late, Towne. That's a demerit for each time, and you know what that means." "You wouldn't count four minutes as a whole demerit!" Bailey grinned. "Wouldn't I, now! You just add up your pay envelope on Friday. Ten cents an hour off for each demerit." Walter sighed and shuffled back to his desk. Oh, well. It could have been worse. They might have fired him like poor Cartwright last month. He'd just have to listen to that morning buzzer. The reports were on his desk. He picked them up warily. Maybe they wouldn't be so bad. He'd had more freedom this last month than before, maybe there'd been a policy change. Maybe Torkleson was gaining confidence in him. Maybe— The reports were worse than he had ever dreamed. " Towne! " Walter jumped a foot. Bailey was putting down the visiphone receiver. His grin spread unpleasantly from ear to ear. "What have you been doing lately? Sabotaging the production line?" "What's the trouble now?" Bailey jerked a thumb significantly at the ceiling. "The boss wants to see you. And you'd better have the right answers, too. The boss seems to have a lot of questions." Walter rose slowly from his seat. This was it, then. Torkleson had already seen the reports. He started for the door, his knees shaking. It hadn't always been like this, he reflected miserably. Time was when things had been very different. It had meant something to be vice president of a huge industrial firm like Robling Titanium. A man could have had a fine house of his own, and a 'copter-car, and belong to the Country Club; maybe even have a cottage on a lake somewhere. Walter could almost remember those days with Robling, before the switchover, before that black day when the exchange of ten little shares of stock had thrown the Robling Titanium Corporation into the hands of strange and unnatural owners. The door was of heavy stained oak, with bold letters edged in gold: TITANIUM WORKERS OF AMERICA Amalgamated Locals Daniel P. Torkleson, Secretary The secretary flipped down the desk switch and eyed Walter with pity. "Mr. Torkleson will see you." Walter pushed through the door into the long, handsome office. For an instant he felt a pang of nostalgia—the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the long buildings of the Robling plant, the pine paneling, the broad expanse of desk— "Well? Don't just stand there. Shut the door and come over here." The man behind the desk hoisted his three hundred well-dressed pounds and glared at Walter from under flagrant eyebrows. Torkleson's whole body quivered as he slammed a sheaf of papers down on the desk. "Just what do you think you're doing with this company, Towne?" Walter swallowed. "I'm production manager of the corporation." "And just what does the production manager do all day?" Walter reddened. "He organizes the work of the plant, establishes production lines, works with Promotion and Sales, integrates Research and Development, operates the planning machines." "And you think you do a pretty good job of it, eh? Even asked for a raise last year!" Torkleson's voice was dangerous. Walter spread his hands. "I do my best. I've been doing it for thirty years. I should know what I'm doing." " Then how do you explain these reports? " Torkleson threw the heap of papers into Walter's arms, and paced up and down behind the desk. " Look at them! Sales at rock bottom. Receipts impossible. Big orders canceled. The worst reports in seven years, and you say you know your job!" "I've been doing everything I could," Walter snapped. "Of course the reports are bad, they couldn't help but be. We haven't met a production schedule in over two years. No plant can keep up production the way the men are working." Torkleson's face darkened. He leaned forward slowly. "So it's the men now, is it? Go ahead. Tell me what's wrong with the men." "Nothing's wrong with the men—if they'd only work. But they come in when they please, and leave when they please, and spend half their time changing and the other half on Koffee-Kup. No company could survive this. But that's only half of it—" Walter searched through the reports frantically. "This International Jet Transport account—they dropped us because we haven't had a new engine in six years. Why? Because Research and Development hasn't had any money for six years. What can two starved engineers and a second rate chemist drag out of an attic laboratory for competition in the titanium market?" Walter took a deep breath. "I've warned you time and again. Robling had built up accounts over the years with fine products and new models. But since the switchover seven years ago, you and your board have forced me to play the cheap products for the quick profit in order to give your men their dividends. Now the bottom's dropped out. We couldn't turn a quick profit on the big, important accounts, so we had to cancel them. If you had let me manage the company the way it should have been run—" Torkleson had been slowly turning purple. Now he slammed his fist down on the desk. "We should just turn the company back to Management again, eh? Just let you have a free hand to rob us blind again. Well, it won't work, Towne. Not while I'm secretary of this union. We fought long and hard for control of this corporation, just the way all the other unions did. I know. I was through it all." He sat back smugly, his cheeks quivering with emotion. "You might say that I was a national leader in the movement. But I did it only for the men. The men want their dividends. They own the stock, stock is supposed to pay dividends." "But they're cutting their own throats," Walter wailed. "You can't build a company and make it grow the way I've been forced to run it." "Details!" Torkleson snorted. "I don't care how the dividends come in. That's your job. My job is to report a dividend every six months to the men who own the stock, the men working on the production lines." Walter nodded bitterly. "And every year the dividend has to be higher than the last, or you and your fat friends are likely to be thrown out of your jobs—right? No more steaks every night. No more private gold-plated Buicks for you boys. No more twenty-room mansions in Westchester. No more big game hunting in the Rockies. No, you don't have to know anything but how to whip a board meeting into a frenzy so they'll vote you into office again each year." Torkleson's eyes glittered. His voice was very soft. "I've always liked you, Walter. So I'm going to pretend I didn't hear you." He paused, then continued. "But here on my desk is a small bit of white paper. Unless you have my signature on that paper on the first of next month, you are out of a job, on grounds of incompetence. And I will personally see that you go on every White list in the country." Walter felt the fight go out of him like a dying wind. He knew what the White list meant. No job, anywhere, ever, in management. No chance, ever, to join a union. No more house, no more weekly pay envelope. He spread his hands weakly. "What do you want?" he asked. "I want a production plan on my desk within twenty-four hours. A plan that will guarantee me a five per cent increase in dividends in the next six months. And you'd better move fast, because I'm not fooling." Back in his cubbyhole downstairs, Walter stared hopelessly at the reports. He had known it would come to this sooner or later. They all knew it—Hendricks of Promotion, Pendleton of Sales, the whole managerial staff. It was wrong, all the way down the line. Walter had fought it tooth and nail since the day Torkleson had installed the moose heads in Walter's old office, and moved him down to the cubbyhole, under Bailey's watchful eye. He had argued, and battled, and pleaded, and lost. He had watched the company deteriorate day by day. Now they blamed him, and threatened his job, and he was helpless to do anything about it. He stared at the machines, clicking busily against the wall. An idea began to form in his head. Helpless? Not quite. Not if the others could see it, go along with it. It was a repugnant idea. But there was one thing they could do that even Torkleson and his fat-jowled crew would understand. They could go on strike. "It's ridiculous," the lawyer spluttered, staring at the circle of men in the room. "How can I give you an opinion on the legality of the thing? There isn't any legal precedent that I know of." He mopped his bald head with a large white handkerchief. "There just hasn't been a case of a company's management striking against its own labor. It—it isn't done. Oh, there have been lockouts, but this isn't the same thing at all." Walter nodded. "Well, we couldn't very well lock the men out, they own the plant. We were thinking more of a lock- in sort of thing." He turned to Paul Hendricks and the others. "We know how the machines operate. They don't. We also know that the data we keep in the machines is essential to running the business; the machines figure production quotas, organize blueprints, prepare distribution lists, test promotion schemes. It would take an office full of managerial experts to handle even a single phase of the work without the machines." The man at the window hissed, and Pendleton quickly snapped out the lights. They sat in darkness, hardly daring to breathe. Then: "Okay. Just the man next door coming home." Pendleton sighed. "You're sure you didn't let them suspect anything, Walter? They wouldn't be watching the house?" "I don't think so. And you all came alone, at different times." He nodded to the window guard, and turned back to the lawyer. "So we can't be sure of the legal end. You'd have to be on your toes." "I still don't see how we could work it," Hendricks objected. His heavy face was wrinkled with worry. "Torkleson is no fool, and he has a lot of power in the National Association of Union Stockholders. All he'd need to do is ask for managers, and a dozen companies would throw them to him on loan. They'd be able to figure out the machine system and take over without losing a day." "Not quite." Walter was grinning. "That's why I spoke of a lock-in. Before we leave, we throw the machines into feedback, every one of them. Lock them into reverberating circuits with a code sequence key. Then all they'll do is buzz and sputter until the feedback is broken with the key. And the key is our secret. It'll tie the Robling office into granny knots, and scabs won't be able to get any more data out of the machines than Torkleson could. With a lawyer to handle injunctions, we've got them strapped." "For what?" asked the lawyer. Walter turned on him sharply. "For new contracts. Contracts to let us manage the company the way it should be managed. If they won't do it, they won't get another Titanium product off their production lines for the rest of the year, and their dividends will really take a nosedive." "That means you'll have to beat Torkleson," said Bates. "He'll never go along." "Then he'll be left behind." Hendricks stood up, brushing off his dungarees. "I'm with you, Walter. I've taken all of Torkleson that I want to. And I'm sick of the junk we've been trying to sell people." The others nodded. Walter rubbed his hands together. "All right. Tomorrow we work as usual, until the noon whistle. When we go off for lunch, we throw the machines into lock-step. Then we just don't come back. But the big thing is to keep it quiet until the noon whistle." He turned to the lawyer. "Are you with us, Jeff?" Jeff Bates shook his head sadly. "I'm with you. I don't know why, you haven't got a leg to stand on. But if you want to commit suicide, that's all right with me." He picked up his briefcase, and started for the door. "I'll have your contract demands by tomorrow," he grinned. "See you at the lynching." They got down to the details of planning. The news hit the afternoon telecasts the following day. Headlines screamed: MANAGEMENT SABOTAGES ROBLING MACHINES OFFICE STRIKERS THREATEN LABOR ECONOMY ROBLING LOCK-IN CREATES PANDEMONIUM There was a long, indignant statement from Daniel P. Torkleson, condemning Towne and his followers for "flagrant violation of management contracts and illegal fouling of managerial processes." Ben Starkey, President of the Board of American Steel, expressed "shock and regret"; the Amalgamated Buttonhole Makers held a mass meeting in protest, demanding that "the instigators of this unprecedented crime be permanently barred from positions in American Industry." In Washington, the nation's economists were more cautious in their views. Yes, it was an unprecedented action. Yes, there would undoubtedly be repercussions—many industries were having managerial troubles; but as for long term effects, it was difficult to say just at present. On the Robling production lines the workmen blinked at each other, and at their machines, and wondered vaguely what it was all about. Yet in all the upheaval, there was very little expression of surprise. Step by step, through the years, economists had been watching with wary eyes the growing movement toward union, control of industry. Even as far back as the '40's and '50's unions, finding themselves oppressed with the administration of growing sums of money—pension funds, welfare funds, medical insurance funds, accruing union dues—had begun investing in corporate stock. It was no news to them that money could make money. And what stock more logical to buy than stock in their own companies? At first it had been a quiet movement. One by one the smaller firms had tottered, bled drier and drier by increasing production costs, increasing labor demands, and an ever-dwindling margin of profit. One by one they had seen their stocks tottering as they faced bankruptcy, only to be gobbled up by the one ready buyer with plenty of funds to buy with. At first, changes had been small and insignificant: boards of directors shifted; the men were paid higher wages and worked shorter hours; there were tighter management policies; and a little less money was spent on extras like Research and Development. At first—until that fateful night when Daniel P. Torkleson of TWA and Jake Squill of Amalgamated Buttonhole Makers spent a long evening with beer and cigars in a hotel room, and floated the loan that threw steel to the unions. Oil had followed with hardly a fight, and as the unions began to feel their oats, the changes grew more radical. Walter Towne remembered those stormy days well. The gradual undercutting of the managerial salaries, the tightening up of inter-union collusion to establish the infamous White list of Recalcitrant Managers. The shift from hourly wage to annual salary for the factory workers, and the change to the other pole for the managerial staff. And then, with creeping malignancy, the hungry howling of the union bosses for more and higher dividends, year after year, moving steadily toward the inevitable crisis. Until Shop Steward Bailey suddenly found himself in charge of a dozen sputtering machines and an empty office. Torkleson was waiting to see the shop steward when he came in next morning. The union boss's office was crowded with TV cameras, newsmen, and puzzled workmen. The floor was littered with piles of ominous-looking paper. Torkleson was shouting into a telephone, and three lawyers were shouting into Torkleson's ear. He spotted Bailey and waved him through the crowd into an inner office room. "Well? Did they get them fixed?" Bailey spread his hands nervously. "The electronics boys have been at it since yesterday afternoon. Practically had the machines apart on the floor." "I know that, stupid," Torkleson roared. "I ordered them there. Did they get the machines fixed ?" "Uh—well, no, as a matter of fact—" "Well, what's holding them up ?" Bailey's face was a study in misery. "The machines just go in circles. The circuits are locked. They just reverberate." "Then call American Electronics. Have them send down an expert crew." Bailey shook his head. "They won't come." "They what ?" "They said thanks, but no thanks. They don't want their fingers in this pie at all." "Wait until I get O'Gilvy on the phone." "It won't do any good, sir. They've got their own management troubles. They're scared silly of a sympathy strike." The door burst open, and a lawyer stuck his head in. "What about those injunctions, Dan?" "Get them moving," Torkleson howled. "They'll start those machines again, or I'll have them in jail so fast—" He turned back to Bailey. "What about the production lines?" The shop steward's face lighted. "They slipped up, there. There was one program that hadn't been coded into the machines yet. Just a minor item, but it's a starter. We found it in Towne's desk, blueprints all ready, promotion all planned." "Good, good," Torkleson breathed. "I have a directors' meeting right now, have to get the workers quieted down a bit. You put the program through, and give those electronics men three more hours to unsnarl this knot, or we throw them out of the union." He started for the door. "What were the blueprints for?" "Trash cans," said Bailey. "Pure titanium-steel trash cans." It took Robling Titanium approximately two days to convert its entire production line to titanium-steel trash cans. With the total resources of the giant plant behind the effort, production was phenomenal. In two more days the available markets were glutted. Within two weeks, at a conservative estimate, there would be a titanium-steel trash can for every man, woman, child, and hound dog on the North American continent. The jet engines, structural steels, tubing, and other pre-strike products piled up in the freight yards, their routing slips and order requisitions tied up in the reverberating machines. But the machines continued to buzz and sputter. The workers grew restive. From the first day, Towne and Hendricks and all the others had been picketing the plant, until angry crowds of workers had driven them off with shotguns. Then they came back in an old, weatherbeaten 'copter which hovered over the plant entrance carrying a banner with a plaintive message: robling titanium unfair to management . Tomatoes were hurled, fists were shaken, but the 'copter remained. The third day, Jeff Bates was served with an injunction ordering Towne to return to work. It was duly appealed, legal machinery began tying itself in knots, and the strikers still struck. By the fifth day there was a more serious note. "You're going to have to appear, Walter. We can't dodge this one." "When?" "Tomorrow morning. And before a labor-rigged judge, too." The little lawyer paced his office nervously. "I don't like it. Torkleson's getting desperate. The workers are putting pressure on him." Walter grinned. "Then Pendleton is doing a good job of selling." "But you haven't got time ," the lawyer wailed. "They'll have you in jail if you don't start the machines again. They may have you in jail if you do start them, too, but that's another bridge. Right now they want those machines going again." "We'll see," said Walter. "What time tomorrow?" "Ten o'clock." Bates looked up. "And don't try to skip. You be there, because I don't know what to tell them." Walter was there a half hour early. Torkleson's legal staff glowered from across the room. The judge glowered from the bench. Walter closed his eyes with a little smile as the charges were read: "—breach of contract, malicious mischief, sabotage of the company's machines, conspiring to destroy the livelihood of ten thousand workers. Your Honor, we are preparing briefs to prove further that these men have formed a conspiracy to undermine the economy of the entire nation. We appeal to the spirit of orderly justice—" Walter yawned as the words went on. "Of course, if the defendant will waive his appeals against the previous injunctions, and will release the machines that were sabotaged, we will be happy to formally withdraw these charges." There was a rustle of sound through the courtroom. His Honor turned to Jeff Bates. "Are you counsel for the defendant?" "Yes, sir." Bates mopped his bald scalp. "The defendant pleads guilty to all counts." The union lawyer dropped his glasses on the table with a crash. The judge stared. "Mr. Bates, if you plead guilty, you leave me no alternative—" "—but to send me to jail," said Walter Towne. "Go ahead. Send me to jail. In fact, I insist upon going to jail." The union lawyer's jaw sagged. There was a hurried conference. A recess was pleaded. Telephones buzzed. Then: "Your Honor, the plaintiff desires to withdraw all charges at this time." "Objection," Bates exclaimed. "We've already pleaded." "—feel sure that a settlement can be effected out of court—" The case was thrown out on its ear. And still the machines sputtered. Back at the plant rumor had it that the machines were permanently gutted, and that the plant could never go back into production. Conflicting scuttlebutt suggested that persons high in uniondom had perpetrated the crisis deliberately, bullying Management into the strike for the sole purpose of cutting current dividends and selling stock to themselves cheaply. The rumors grew easier and easier to believe. The workers came to the plants in business suits, it was true, and lounged in the finest of lounges, and read the Wall Street Journal , and felt like stockholders. But to face facts, their salaries were not the highest. Deduct union dues, pension fees, medical insurance fees, and sundry other little items which had formerly been paid by well-to-do managements, and very little was left but the semi-annual dividend checks. And now the dividends were tottering. Production lines slowed. There were daily brawls on the plant floor, in the lounge and locker rooms. Workers began joking about the trash cans; then the humor grew more and more remote. Finally, late in the afternoon of the eighth day, Bailey was once again in Torkleson's office. "Well? Speak up! What's the beef this time?" "Sir—the men—I mean, there's been some nasty talk. They're tired of making trash cans. No challenge in it. Anyway, the stock room is full, and the freight yard is full, and the last run of orders we sent out came back because nobody wants any more trash cans." Bailey shook his head. "The men won't swallow it any more. There's—well, there's been talk about having a board meeting." Torkleson's ruddy cheeks paled. "Board meeting, huh?" He licked his heavy lips. "Now look, Bailey, we've always worked well together. I consider you a good friend of mine. You've got to get things under control. Tell the men we're making progress. Tell them Management is beginning to weaken from its original stand. Tell them we expect to have the strike broken in another few hours. Tell them anything." He waited until Bailey was gone. Then, with a trembling hand he lifted the visiphone receiver. "Get me Walter Towne," he said. "I'm not an unreasonable man," Torkleson was saying miserably, waving his fat paws in the air as he paced back and forth in front of the spokesmen for the striking managers. "Perhaps we were a little demanding, I concede it! Overenthusiastic with our ownership, and all that. But I'm sure we can come to some agreement. A hike in wage scale is certainly within reason. Perhaps we can even arrange for better company houses." Walter Towne stifled a yawn. "Perhaps you didn't understand us. The men are agitating for a meeting of the board of directors. We want to be at that meeting. That's the only thing we're interested in right now." "But there wasn't anything about a board meeting in the contract your lawyer presented." "I know, but you rejected that contract. So we tore it up. Anyway, we've changed our minds." Torkleson sat down, his heavy cheeks quivering. "Gentlemen, be reasonable! I can guarantee you your jobs, even give you a free hand with the management. So the dividends won't be so large—the men will have to get used to that. That's it, we'll put it through at the next executive conference, give you—" "The board meeting," Walter said gently. "That'll be enough for us." The union boss swore and slammed his fist on the desk. "Walk out in front of those men after what you've done? You're fools! Well, I've given you your chance. You'll get your board meeting. But you'd better come armed. Because I know how to handle this kind of board meeting, and if I have anything to say about it, this one will end with a massacre." The meeting was held in a huge auditorium in the Robling administration building. Since every member of the union owned stock in the company, every member had the right to vote for members of the board of directors. But in the early days of the switchover, the idea of a board of directors smacked too strongly of the old system of corporate organization to suit the men. The solution had been simple, if a trifle ungainly. Everyone who owned stock in Robling Titanium was automatically a member of the board of directors, with Torkleson as chairman of the board. The stockholders numbered over ten thousand. They were all present. They were packed in from the wall to the stage, and hanging from the rafters. They overflowed into the corridors. They jammed the lobby. Ten thousand men rose with a howl of anger when Walter Towne walked out on the stage. But they quieted down again as Dan Torkleson started to speak. It was a masterful display of rabble-rousing. Torkleson paced the stage, his fat body shaking with agitation, pointing a chubby finger again and again at Walter Towne. He pranced and he ranted. He paused at just the right times for thunderous peals of applause. "This morning in my office we offered to compromise with these jackals," he cried, "and they rejected compromise. Even at the cost of lowering dividends, of taking food from the mouths of your wives and children, we made our generous offers. They were rejected with scorn. These thieves have one desire in mind, my friends, to starve you all, and to destroy your company and your jobs. To every appeal they heartlessly refused to divulge the key to the lock-in. And now this man—the ringleader who keeps the key word buried in secrecy—has the temerity to ask an audience with you. You're angry men; you want to know the man to blame for our hardship." He pointed to Towne with a flourish. "I give you your man. Do what you want with him." The hall exploded in angry thunder. The first wave of men rushed onto the stage as Walter stood up. A tomato whizzed past his ear and splattered against the wall. More men clambered up on the stage, shouting and shaking their fists. Then somebody appeared with a rope. Walter gave a sharp nod to the side of the stage. Abruptly the roar of the men was drowned in another sound—a soul-rending, teeth-grating, bone-rattling screech. The men froze, jaws sagging, eyes wide, hardly believing their ears. In the instant of silence as the factory whistle died away, Walter grabbed the microphone. "You want the code word to start the machines again? I'll give it to you before I sit down!" The men stared at him, shuffling, a murmur rising. Torkleson burst to his feet. "It's a trick!" he howled. "Wait 'til you hear their price." "We have no price, and no demands," said Walter Towne. "We will give you the code word, and we ask nothing in return but that you listen for sixty seconds." He glanced back at Torkleson, and then out to the crowd. "You men here are an electing body—right? You own this great plant and company, top to bottom—right? You should all be rich , because Robling could make you rich. But not one of you out there is rich. Only the fat ones on this stage are. But I'll tell you how you can be rich." They listened. Not a peep came from the huge hall. Suddenly, Walter Towne was talking their language. "You think that since you own the company, times have changed. Well, have they? Are you any better off than you were? Of course not. Because you haven't learned yet that oppression by either side leads to misery for both. You haven't learned moderation. And you never will, until you throw out the ones who have fought moderation right down to the last ditch. You know whom I mean. You know who's grown richer and richer since the switchover. Throw him out, and you too can be rich." He paused for a deep breath. "You want the code word to unlock the machines? All right, I'll give it to you." He swung around to point a long finger at the fat man sitting there. "The code word is TORKLESON!" Much later, Walter Towne and Jeff Bates pried the trophies off the wall of the big office. The lawyer shook his head sadly. "Pity about Dan Torkleson. Gruesome affair." Walter nodded as he struggled down with a moose head. "Yes, a pity, but you know the boys when they get upset." "I suppose so." The lawyer stopped to rest, panting. "Anyway, with the newly elected board of directors, things will be different for everybody. You took a long gamble." "Not so long. Not when you knew what they wanted to hear. It just took a little timing." "Still, I didn't think they'd elect you secretary of the union. It just doesn't figure." Walter Towne chuckled. "Doesn't it? I don't know. Everything's been a little screwy since the switchover. And in a screwy world like this—" He shrugged, and tossed down the moose head. " Anything figures."

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from The Counterfeit Man More Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse published in 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. Circus "Just suppose," said Morgan, "that I did believe you. Just for argument." He glanced up at the man across the restaurant table. "Where would we go from here?" The man shifted uneasily in his seat. He was silent, staring down at his plate. Not a strange-looking man, Morgan thought. Rather ordinary, in fact. A plain face, nose a little too long, fingers a little too dainty, a suit that doesn't quite seem to fit, but all in all, a perfectly ordinary looking man. Maybe too ordinary, Morgan thought. Finally the man looked up. His eyes were dark, with a hunted look in their depths that chilled Morgan a little. "Where do we go? I don't know. I've tried to think it out, and I get nowhere. But you've got to believe me, Morgan. I'm lost, I mean it. If I can't get help, I don't know where it's going to end." "I'll tell you where it's going to end," said Morgan. "It's going to end in a hospital. A mental hospital. They'll lock you up and they'll lose the key somewhere." He poured himself another cup of coffee and sipped it, scalding hot. "And that," he added, "will be that." The place was dark and almost empty. Overhead, a rotary fan swished patiently. The man across from Morgan ran a hand through his dark hair. "There must be some other way," he said. "There has to be." "All right, let's start from the beginning again," Morgan said. "Maybe we can pin something down a little better. You say your name is Parks—right?" The man nodded. "Jefferson Haldeman Parks, if that helps any. Haldeman was my mother's maiden name." "All right. And you got into town on Friday—right?" Parks nodded. "Fine. Now go through the whole story again. What happened first?" The man thought for a minute. "As I said, first there was a fall. About twenty feet. I didn't break any bones, but I was shaken up and limping. The fall was near the highway going to the George Washington Bridge. I got over to the highway and tried to flag down a ride." "How did you feel? I mean, was there anything strange that you noticed?" " Strange! " Parks' eyes widened. "I—I was speechless. At first I hadn't noticed too much—I was concerned with the fall, and whether I was hurt or not. I didn't really think about much else until I hobbled up to that highway and saw those cars coming. Then I could hardly believe my eyes. I thought I was crazy. But a car stopped and asked me if I was going into the city, and I knew I wasn't crazy." Morgan's mouth took a grim line. "You understood the language?" "Oh, yes. I don't see how I could have, but I did. We talked all the way into New York—nothing very important, but we understood each other. His speech had an odd sound, but—" Morgan nodded. "I know, I noticed. What did you do when you got to New York?" "Well, obviously, I needed money. I had gold coin. There had been no way of knowing if it would be useful, but I'd taken it on chance. I tried to use it at a newsstand first, and the man wouldn't touch it. Asked me if I thought I was the U.S. Treasury or something. When he saw that I was serious, he sent me to a money lender, a hock shop, I think he called it. So I found a place—" "Let me see the coins." Parks dropped two small gold discs on the table. They were perfectly smooth and perfectly round, tapered by wear to a thin blunt edge. There was no design on them, and no printing. Morgan looked up at the man sharply. "What did you get for these?" Parks shrugged. "Too little, I suspect. Two dollars for the small one, five for the larger." "You should have gone to a bank." "I know that now. I didn't then. Naturally, I assumed that with everything else so similar, principles of business would also be similar." Morgan sighed and leaned back in his chair. "Well, then what?" Parks poured some more coffee. His face was very pale, Morgan thought, and his hands trembled as he raised the cup to his lips. Fright? Maybe. Hard to tell. The man put down the cup and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. "First, I went to the mayor's office," he said. "I kept trying to think what anyone at home would do in my place. That seemed a good bet. I asked a policeman where it was, and then I went there." "But you didn't get to see him." "No. I saw a secretary. She said the mayor was in conference, and that I would have to have an appointment. She let me speak to another man, one of the mayor's assistants." "And you told him?" "No. I wanted to see the mayor himself. I thought that was the best thing to do. I waited for a couple of hours, until another assistant came along and told me flatly that the mayor wouldn't see me unless I stated my business first." He drew in a deep breath. "So I stated it. And then I was gently but firmly ushered back into the street again." "They didn't believe you," said Morgan. "Not for a minute. They laughed in my face." Morgan nodded. "I'm beginning to get the pattern. So what did you do next?" "Next I tried the police. I got the same treatment there, only they weren't so gentle. They wouldn't listen either. They muttered something about cranks and their crazy notions, and when they asked me where I lived, they thought I was—what did they call it?—a wise guy! Told me to get out and not come back with any more wild stories." "I see," said Morgan. Jefferson Parks finished his last bite of pie and pushed the plate away. "By then I didn't know quite what to do. I'd been prepared for almost anything excepting this. It was frightening. I tried to rationalize it, and then I quit trying. It wasn't that I attracted attention, or anything like that, quite the contrary. Nobody even looked at me, unless I said something to them. I began to look for things that were different , things that I could show them, and say, see, this proves that I'm telling the truth, look at it—" He looked up helplessly. "And what did you find?" "Nothing. Oh, little things, insignificant little things. Your calendars, for instance. Naturally, I couldn't understand your frame of reference. And the coinage, you stamp your coins; we don't. And cigarettes. We don't have any such thing as tobacco." The man gave a short laugh. "And your house dogs! We have little animals that look more like rabbits than poodles. But there was nothing any more significant than that. Absolutely nothing." "Except yourself," Morgan said. "Ah, yes. I thought that over carefully. I looked for differences, obvious ones. I couldn't find any. You can see that, just looking at me. So I searched for more subtle things. Skin texture, fingerprints, bone structure, body proportion. I still couldn't find anything. Then I went to a doctor." Morgan's eyebrows lifted. "Good," he said. Parks shrugged tiredly. "Not really. He examined me. He practically took me apart. I carefully refrained from saying anything about who I was or where I came from; just said I wanted a complete physical examination, and let him go to it. He was thorough, and when he finished he patted me on the back and said, 'Parks, you've got nothing to worry about. You're as fine, strapping a specimen of a healthy human being as I've ever seen.' And that was that." Parks laughed bitterly. "I guess I was supposed to be happy with the verdict, and instead I was ready to knock him down. It was idiotic, it defied reason, it was infuriating." Morgan nodded sourly. "Because you're not a human being," he said. "That's right. I'm not a human being at all." "How did you happen to pick this planet, or this sun?" Morgan asked curiously. "There must have been a million others to choose from." Parks unbuttoned his collar and rubbed his stubbled chin unhappily. "I didn't make the choice. Neither did anyone else. Travel by warp is a little different from travel by the rocket you fiction writers make so much of. With a rocket vehicle you pick your destination, make your calculations, and off you go. The warp is blind flying, strictly blind. We send an unmanned scanner ahead. It probes around more or less hit-or-miss until it locates something, somewhere, that looks habitable. When it spots a likely looking place, we keep a tight beam on it and send through a manned scout." He grinned sourly. "Like me. If it looks good to the scout, he signals back, and they leave the warp anchored for a sort of permanent gateway until we can get a transport beam built. But we can't control the directional and dimensional scope of the warp. There are an infinity of ways it can go, until we have a guide beam transmitting from the other side. Then we can just scan a segment of space with the warp, and the scanner picks up the beam." He shook his head wearily. "We're new at it, Morgan. We've only tried a few dozen runs. We're not too far ahead of you in technology. We've been using rocket vehicles just like yours for over a century. That's fine for a solar system, but it's not much good for the stars. When the warp principle was discovered, it looked like the answer. But something went wrong, the scanner picked up this planet, and I was coming through, and then something blew. Next thing I knew I was falling. When I tried to make contact again, the scanner was gone!" "And you found things here the same as back home," said Morgan. "The same! Your planet and mine are practically twins. Similar cities, similar technology, everything. The people are the same, with precisely the same anatomy and physiology, the same sort of laws, the same institutions, even compatible languages. Can't you see the importance of it? This planet is on the other side of the universe from mine, with the first intelligent life we've yet encountered anywhere. But when I try to tell your people that I'm a native of another star system, they won't believe me !" "Why should they?" asked Morgan. "You look like a human being. You talk like one. You eat like one. You act like one. What you're asking them to believe is utterly incredible." " But it's true. " Morgan shrugged. "So it's true. I won't argue with you. But as I asked before, even if I did believe you, what do you expect me to do about it? Why pick me , of all the people you've seen?" There was a desperate light in Parks' eyes. "I was tired, tired of being laughed at, tired of having people looking at me as though I'd lost my wits when I tried to tell them the truth. You were here, you were alone, so I started talking. And then I found out you wrote stories." He looked up eagerly. "I've got to get back, Morgan, somehow. My life is there, my family. And think what it would mean to both of our worlds—contact with another intelligent race! Combine our knowledges, our technologies, and we could explore the galaxy!" He leaned forward, his thin face intense. "I need money and I need help. I know some of the mathematics of the warp principle, know some of the design, some of the power and wiring principles. You have engineers here, technologists, physicists. They could fill in what I don't know and build a guide beam. But they won't do it if they don't believe me. Your government won't listen to me, they won't appropriate any money." "Of course they won't. They've got a war or two on their hands, they have public welfare, and atomic bombs, and rockets to the moon to sink their money into." Morgan stared at the man. "But what can I do?" "You can write ! That's what you can do. You can tell the world about me, you can tell exactly what has happened. I know how public interest can be aroused in my world. It must be the same in yours." Morgan didn't move. He just stared. "How many people have you talked to?" he asked. "A dozen, a hundred, maybe a thousand." "And how many believed you?" "None." "You mean nobody would believe you?" " Not one soul. Until I talked to you." And then Morgan was laughing, laughing bitterly, tears rolling down his cheeks. "And I'm the one man who couldn't help you if my life depended on it," he gasped. "You believe me?" Morgan nodded sadly. "I believe you. Yes. I think your warp brought you through to a parallel universe of your own planet, not to another star, but I think you're telling the truth." "Then you can help me." "I'm afraid not." "Why not?" "Because I'd be worse than no help at all." Jefferson Parks gripped the table, his knuckles white. "Why?" he cried hoarsely. "If you believe me, why can't you help me?" Morgan pointed to the magazine lying on the table. "I write, yes," he said sadly. "Ever read stories like this before?" Parks picked up the magazine, glanced at the bright cover. "I barely looked at it." "You should look more closely. I have a story in this issue. The readers thought it was very interesting," Morgan grinned. "Go ahead, look at it." The stranger from the stars leafed through the magazine, stopped at a page that carried Roger Morgan's name. His eyes caught the first paragraph and he turned white. He set the magazine down with a trembling hand. "I see," he said, and the life was gone out of his voice. He spread the pages viciously, read the lines again. The paragraph said: "Just suppose," said Martin, "that I did believe you. Just for argument." He glanced up at the man across the table. "Where do we go from here?"

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from The Counterfeit Man More Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse published in 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. The Link It was nearly sundown when Ravdin eased the ship down into the last slow arc toward the Earth's surface. Stretching his arms and legs, he tried to relax and ease the tension in his tired muscles. Carefully, he tightened the seat belt for landing; below him he could see the vast, tangled expanse of Jungle-land spreading out to the horizon. Miles ahead was the bright circle of the landing field and the sparkling glow of the city beyond. Ravdin peered to the north of the city, hoping to catch a glimpse of the concert before his ship was swallowed by the brilliant landing lights. A bell chimed softly in his ear. Ravdin forced his attention back to the landing operation. He was still numb and shaken from the Warp-passage, his mind still muddled by the abrupt and incredible change. Moments before, the sky had been a vast, starry blanket of black velvet; then, abruptly, he had been hovering over the city, sliding down toward warm friendly lights and music. He checked the proper switches, and felt the throbbing purr of the anti-grav motors as the ship slid in toward the landing slot. Tall spires of other ships rose to meet him, circle upon circle of silver needles pointing skyward. A little later they were blotted out as the ship was grappled into the berth from which it had risen days before. With a sigh, Ravdin eased himself out of the seat, his heart pounding with excitement. Perhaps, he thought, he was too excited, too eager to be home, for his mind was still reeling from the fearful discovery of his journey. The station was completely empty as Ravdin walked down the ramp to the shuttles. At the desk he checked in with the shiny punch-card robot, and walked swiftly across the polished floor. The wall panels pulsed a somber blue-green, broken sharply by brilliant flashes and overtones of scarlet, reflecting with subtle accuracy the tumult in his own mind. Not a sound was in the air, not a whisper nor sign of human habitation. Vaguely, uneasiness grew in his mind as he entered the shuttle station. Suddenly, the music caught him, a long, low chord of indescribable beauty, rising and falling in the wind, a distant whisper of life.... The concert, of course. Everyone would be at the concert tonight, and even from two miles away, the beauty of four hundred perfectly harmonized voices was carried on the breeze. Ravdin's uneasiness disappeared; he was eager to discharge his horrible news, get it off his mind and join the others in the great amphitheater set deep in the hillside outside the city. But he knew instinctively that Lord Nehmon, anticipating his return, would not be at the concert. Riding the shuttle over the edges of Jungle-land toward the shining bright beauty of the city, Ravdin settled back, trying to clear his mind of the shock and horror he had encountered on his journey. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed him, lighted with a million hues. He realized that his whole life was entangled in the very beauty of this wonderful city. Everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered here in the ever-changing rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds. And now, he knew, he would soon see his beloved city burning once again, turning to flames and ashes in a heart-breaking memorial to the age-old fear of his people. The little shuttle-car settled down softly on the green terrace near the center of the city. The building was a masterpiece of smoothly curving walls and tasteful lines, opening a full side to the south to catch the soft sunlight and warm breezes. Ravdin strode across the deep carpeting of the terrace. There was other music here, different music, a wilder, more intimate fantasy of whirling sound. An oval door opened for him, and he stopped short, staggered for a moment by the overpowering beauty in the vaulted room. A girl with red hair the color of new flame was dancing with enthralling beauty and abandon, her body moving like ripples of wind to the music which filled the room with its throbbing cry. Her beauty was exquisite, every motion, every flowing turn a symphony of flawless perfection as she danced to the wild music. "Lord Nehmon!" The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her body frozen in mid-air, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the old man waiting in the room. Nehmon rose, his gaunt face and graying hair belying the youthful movement of his body. Smiling, he came forward, clapped Ravdin on the shoulder, and took his hand warmly. "You're too late for the concert—it's a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city is there." Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile. "I had to let you know," he said. " They're coming , Nehmon! I saw them, hours ago." The last overtones of the music broke abruptly, like a glass shattered on stone. The room was deathly still. Lord Nehmon searched the young man's face. Then he turned away, not quite concealing the sadness and pain in his eyes. "You're certain? You couldn't be mistaken?" "No chance. I found signs of their passing in a dozen places. Then I saw them , their whole fleet. There were hundreds. They're coming, I saw them." "Did they see you?" Nehmon's voice was sharp. "No, no. The Warp is a wonderful thing. With it I could come and go in the twinkling of an eye. But I could see them in the twinkling of an eye." "And it couldn't have been anyone else?" "Could anyone else build ships like the Hunters?" Nehmon sighed wearily. "No one that we know." He glanced up at the young man. "Sit down, son, sit down. I—I'll just have to rearrange my thinking a little. Where were they? How far?" "Seven light years," Ravdin said. "Can you imagine it? Just seven, and moving straight this way. They know where we are , and they are coming quickly." His eyes filled with fear. "They couldn't have found us so soon, unless they too have discovered the Warp and how to use it to travel." The older man's breath cut off sharply, and there was real alarm in his eyes. "You're right," he said softly. "Six months ago it was eight hundred light years away, in an area completely remote from us. Now just seven . In six months they have come so close." The scout looked up at Nehmon in desperation. "But what can we do? We have only weeks, maybe days, before they're here. We have no time to plan, no time to prepare for them. What can we do?" The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up, wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing in his face for the first time in centuries. "We can do once again what we always have done before when the Hunters came," he said sadly. "We can run away." The bright street below the oval window was empty and quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out in bitter silence. "Yes, we can run away. Just as we always have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so much here, we must burn the city and flee again." His voice trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no answer there, only sadness. "Think of the concerts. It's taken so long, but at last we've come so close to the ultimate goal." He gestured toward the thought-sensitive sounding boards lining the walls, the panels which had made the dancer-illusion possible. "Think of the beauty and peace we've found here." "I know. How well I know." "Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run away." Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright. "Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking." "I've spent many years thinking, my son." "Not what I've been thinking." Ravdin sat down, clasping his hands in excitement. "The Hunters come and we run away, Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run, and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're hunting us , these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate, and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they have come close to finding us, we have run." Nehmon nodded slowly. "For thousands of years." Ravdin's eyes were bright. "Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families, running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and secrecy." He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's angrily. " Why do we run, my lord? " Nehmon's eyes widened. "Because we have no choice," he said. "We must run or be killed. You know that. You've seen the records, you've been taught." "Oh, yes, I know what I've been taught. I've been taught that eons ago our remote ancestors fought the Hunters, and lost, and fled, and were pursued. But why do we keep running? Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and fled. Why? Even animals know that when they're cornered they must turn and fight." "We are not animals." Nehmon's voice cut the air like a whiplash. "But we could fight." "Animals fight. We do not. We fought once, like animals, and now we must run from the Hunters who continue to fight like animals. So be it. Let the Hunters fight." Ravdin shook his head. "Do you mean that the Hunters are not men like us?" he said. "That's what you're saying, that they are animals. All right. We kill animals for our food, isn't that true? We kill the tiger-beasts in the Jungle to protect ourselves, why not kill the Hunters to protect ourselves?" Nehmon sighed, and reached out a hand to the young man. "I'm sorry," he said gently. "It seems logical, but it's false logic. The Hunters are men just like you and me. Their lives are different, their culture is different, but they are men. And human life is sacred, to us, above all else. This is the fundamental basis of our very existence. Without it we would be Hunters, too. If we fight, we are dead even if we live. That's why we must run away now, and always. Because we know that we must not kill men." On the street below, the night air was suddenly full of voices, chattering, intermingled with whispers of song and occasional brief harmonic flutterings. The footfalls were muted on the polished pavement as the people passed slowly, their voices carrying a hint of puzzled uneasiness. "The concert's over!" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling a chill pass through him. "So soon, I wonder why?" Eagerly he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face, sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin. "You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!" She turned to the old man. "Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt it. For some reason the people seemed afraid ." Ravdin turned away from his bride. "Tell her," he said to the old man. Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror. "The Hunters! They've found us?" Ravdin nodded wordlessly. Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears in her eyes. "We came so close tonight, so very close. I felt the music before it was sung, do you realize that? I felt the fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't vague or fuzzy, it was clear ! The transference was perfect." She turned to face the old man. "It's taken so long to come this far, Nehmon. So much work, so much training to reach a perfect communal concert. We've had only two hundred years here, only two hundred ! I was just a little girl when we came, I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four thousand. But two hundred —we can't leave now. Not when we've come so far." Ravdin nodded. "That's the trouble. They come closer every time. This time they will catch us. Or the next time, or the next. And that will be the end of everything for us, unless we fight them." He paused, watching the last groups dispersing on the street below. "If we only knew, for certain, what we were running from." There was a startled silence. The girl's breath came in a gasp and her eyes widened as his words sank home. "Ravdin," she said softly, " have you ever seen a Hunter ?" Ravdin stared at her, and felt a chill of excitement. Music burst from the sounding-board, odd, wild music, suddenly hopeful. "No," he said, "no, of course not. You know that." The girl rose from her seat. "Nor have I. Never, not once." She turned to Lord Nehmon. "Have you ?" "Never." The old man's voice was harsh. "Has anyone ever seen a Hunter?" Ravdin's hand trembled. "I—I don't know. None of us living now, no. It's been too long since they last actually found us. I've read—oh, I can't remember. I think my grandfather saw them, or my great-grandfather, somewhere back there. It's been thousands of years." "Yet we've been tearing ourselves up by the roots, fleeing from planet to planet, running and dying and still running. But suppose we don't need to run anymore?" He stared at her. "They keep coming. They keep searching for us. What more proof do you need?" Dana's face glowed with excitement, alive with new vitality, new hope. "Ravdin, can't you see? They might have changed. They might not be the same. Things can happen. Look at us, how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you were to be master at a concert next month. Think how the concerts have changed! Even my grandmother can remember when the concerts were just a few performers playing, and everyone else just sitting and listening ! Can you imagine anything more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference then, they never dreamed what a real concert could be! Why, those people had never begun to understand music until they themselves became a part of it. Even we can see these changes, why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as we have?" Nehmon's voice broke in, almost harshly, as he faced the excited pair. "The Hunters don't have concerts," he said grimly. "You're deluding yourself, Dana. They laugh at our music, they scoff at our arts and twist them into obscene mockeries. They have no concept of beauty in their language. The Hunters are incapable of change." "And you can be certain of that when nobody has seen them for thousands of years ?" Nehmon met her steady eyes, read the strength and determination there. He knew, despairingly, what she was thinking—that he was old, that he couldn't understand, that his mind was channeled now beyond the approach of wisdom. "You mustn't think what you're thinking," he said weakly. "You'd be blind. You wouldn't know, you couldn't have any idea what you would find. If you tried to contact them, you could be lost completely, tortured, killed. If they haven't changed, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd never come back, Dana." "But she's right all the same," Ravdin said softly. "You're wrong, my lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive. Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do it, Dana and I." "I could forbid you to go." Dana looked at her husband, and her eyes were proud. "You could forbid us," she said, facing the old man. "But you could never stop us." At the edge of the Jungle-land a great beast stood with green-gleaming eyes, licking his fanged jaws as he watched the glowing city, sensing somehow that the mystifying circle of light and motion was soon to become his Jungle-land again. In the city the turmoil bubbled over, as wave after wave of the people made the short safari across the intervening jungle to the circles of their ships. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers—all carried their small, frail remembrances out to the ships. There was music among them still, but it was a different sort of music, now, an eerie, hopeless music that drifted out of the city in the wind. It caused all but the bravest of the beasts, their hair prickling on their backs, to run in panic through the jungle darkness. It was a melancholy music, carried from thought to thought, from voice to voice as the people of the city wearily prepared themselves once again for the long journey. To run away. In the darkness of secrecy, to be gone, without a trace, without symbol or vestige of their presence, leaving only the scorched circle of land for the jungle to reclaim, so that no eyes, not even the sharpest, would ever know how long they had stayed, nor where they might have gone. In the rounded room of his house, Lord Nehmon dispatched the last of his belongings, a few remembrances, nothing more, because the space on the ships must take people, not remembrances, and he knew that the remembrances would bring only pain. All day Nehmon had supervised the loading, the intricate preparation, following plans laid down millennia before. He saw the libraries and records transported, mile upon endless mile of microfilm, carted to the ships prepared to carry them, stored until a new resting place was found. The history of a people was recorded on that film, a people once proud and strong, now equally proud, but dwindling in numbers as toll for the constant roving. A proud people, yet a people who would turn and run without thought, in a panic of age-old fear. They had to run, Nehmon knew, if they were to survive. And with a blaze of anger in his heart, he almost hated the two young people waiting here with him for the last ship to be filled. For these two would not go. It had been a long and painful night. He had pleaded and begged, tried to persuade them that there was no hope, that the very idea of remaining behind or trying to contact the Hunters was insane. Yet he knew they were sane, perhaps unwise, naive, but their decision had been reached, and they would not be shaken. The day was almost gone as the last ships began to fill. Nehmon turned to Ravdin and Dana, his face lined and tired. "You'll have to go soon," he said. "The city will be burned, of course, as always. You'll be left with food, and with weapons against the jungle. The Hunters will know that we've been here, but they'll not know when, nor where we have gone." He paused. "It will be up to you to see that they don't learn." Dana shook her head. "We'll tell them nothing, unless it's safe for them to know." "They'll question you, even torture you." She smiled calmly. "Perhaps they won't. But as a last resort, we can blank out." Nehmon's face went white. "You know there is no coming back, once you do that. You would never regain your memory. You must save it for a last resort." Down below on the street the last groups of people were passing; the last sweet, eerie tones of the concert were rising in the gathering twilight. Soon the last families would have taken their refuge in the ships, waiting for Nehmon to trigger the fire bombs to ignite the beautiful city after the ships started on their voyage. The concerts were over; there would be long years of aimless wandering before another home could be found, another planet safe from the Hunters and their ships. Even then it would be more years before the concerts could again rise from their hearts and throats and minds, generations before they could begin work again toward the climactic expression of their heritage. Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before. They had risen together, a common people, their home a single planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of government for the perpetuation of government, split farther and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the Hunters sneered and ridiculed, and then grew to hate Ravdin's people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love, happiness. Ravdin knew of his people's slowly dawning awareness of the sanctity of life, shattered abruptly by the horrible wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much in those long years. They had conquered disease. They had grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. But now the end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a ghastly grave. Nehmon's voice broke the silence. "If you must stay behind, then go now. The city will burn an hour after the count-down." "We will be safe, outside the city." Dana gripped her husband's hand, trying to transmit to him some part of her strength and confidence. "Wish us the best, Nehmon. If a link can be forged, we will forge it." "I wish you the best in everything." There were tears in the old man's eyes as he turned and left the room. They stood in the Jungle-land, listening to the scurry of frightened animals, and shivering in the cool night air as the bright sparks of the ships' exhausts faded into the black starry sky. A man and a woman alone, speechless, watching, staring with awful longing into the skies as the bright rocket jets dwindled to specks and flickered out. The city burned. Purple spumes of flame shot high into the air, throwing a ghastly light on the frightened Jungle-land. Spires of flame seemed to be seeking the stars with their fingers as the plastic walls and streets of the city hissed and shriveled, blackening, bubbling into a vanishing memory before their eyes. The flames shot high, carrying with them the last remnants of the city which had stood proud and tall an hour before. Then a silence fell, deathly, like the lifeless silence of a grave. Out of the silence, little whispering sounds of the Jungle-land crept to their ears, first frightened, then curious, then bolder and bolder as the wisps of grass and little animals ventured out and out toward the clearing where the city had stood. Bit by bit the Jungle-land gathered courage, and the clearing slowly, silently, began to disappear. Days later new sparks of light appeared in the black sky. They grew to larger specks, then to flares, and finally settled to the earth as powerful, flaming jets. They were squat, misshapen vessels, circling down like vultures, hissing, screeching, landing with a grinding crash in the tall thicket near the place where the city had stood. Ravdin's signal had guided them in, and the Hunters had seen them, standing on a hilltop above the demolished amphitheater. Men had come out of the ships, large men with cold faces and dull eyes, weapons strapped to their trim uniforms. The Hunters had blinked at them, unbelieving, with their weapons held at ready. Ravdin and Dana were seized and led to the flagship. As they approached it, their hearts sank and they clasped hands to bolster their failing hope. The leader of the Hunters looked up from his desk as they were thrust into his cabin. Frankle's face was a graven mask as he searched their faces dispassionately. The captives were pale and seemed to cringe from the pale interrogation light. "Chickens!" the Hunter snorted. "We have been hunting down chickens." His eyes turned to one of the guards. "They have been searched?" "Of course, master." "And questioned?" The guard frowned. "Yes, sir. But their language is almost unintelligible." "You've studied the basic tongues, haven't you?" Frankle's voice was as cold as his eyes. "Of course, sir, but this is so different." Frankle stared in contempt at the fair-skinned captives, fixing his eyes on them for a long moment. Finally he said, "Well?" Ravdin glanced briefly at Dana's white face. His voice seemed weak and high-pitched in comparison to the Hunter's baritone. "You are the leader of the Hunters?" Frankle regarded him sourly, without replying. His thin face was swarthy, his short-cut gray hair matching the cold gray of his eyes. It was an odd face, completely blank of any thought or emotion, yet capable of shifting to a strange biting slyness in the briefest instant. It was a rich face, a face of inscrutable depth. He pushed his chair back, his eyes watchful. "We know your people were here," he said suddenly. "Now they've gone, and yet you remain behind. There must be a reason for such rashness. Are you sick? Crippled?" Ravdin shook his head. "We are not sick." "Then criminals, perhaps? Being punished for rebellious plots?" "We are not criminals." The Hunter's fist crashed on the desk. "Then why are you here? Why? Are you going to tell me now, or do you propose to waste a few hours of my time first?" "There is no mystery," Ravdin said softly. "We stayed behind to plead for peace." "For peace?" Frankle stared in disbelief. Then he shrugged, his face tired. "I might have known. Peace! Where have your people gone?" Ravdin met him eye for eye. "I can't say." The Hunter laughed. "Let's be precise, you don't choose to say, just now. But perhaps very soon you will wish with all your heart to tell me." Dana's voice was sharp. "We're telling you the truth. We want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace with you, to bring our people together again." Frankle snorted. "You came to us in war, once, long ago. Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on to greater things?" Ravdin's face flushed hotly. "Much greater things," he snapped. Frankle sat down slowly. "No doubt," he said. "Now understand me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers. That is my definition of a civil tongue." He sat back coldly. "Now, shall we commence asking questions?" Dana stepped forward suddenly, her cheeks flushed. "We don't have the words to express ourselves," she said softly. "We can't tell you in words what we have to say, but music is a language even you can understand. We can tell you what we want in music." Frankle scowled. He knew about the magic of this music, he had heard of the witchcraft these weak chicken-people could weave, of their strange, magic power to steal strong men's minds from them and make them like children before wolves. But he had never heard this music with his own ears. He looked at them, his eyes strangely bright. "You know I cannot listen to your music. It is forbidden, even you should know that. How dare you propose—" "But this is different music." Dana's eyes widened, and she threw an excited glance at her husband. "Our music is beautiful, wonderful to hear. If you could only hear it—" "Never." The man hesitated. "Your music is forbidden, poisonous." Her smile was like sweet wine, a smile that worked into the Hunter's mind like a gentle, lazy drug. "But who is to permit or forbid? After all, you are the leader here, and forbidden pleasures are all the sweeter." Frankle's eyes were on hers, fascinated. Slowly, with a graceful movement, she drew the gleaming thought-sensitive stone from her clothing. It glowed in the room with a pearly luminescence, and she saw the man's eyes turning to it, drawn as if by magic. Then he looked away, and a cruel smile curled his lips. He motioned toward the stone. "All right," he said mockingly. "Do your worst. Show me your precious music." Like a tinkle of glass breaking in a well, the stone flashed its fiery light in the room. Little swirls of music seemed to swell from it, blossoming in the silence. Frankle tensed, a chill running up his spine, his eyes drawn back to the gleaming jewel. Suddenly, the music filled the room, rising sweetly like an overpowering wave, filling his mind with strange and wonderful images. The stone shimmered and changed, taking the form of dancing clouds of light, swirling with the music as it rose. Frankle felt his mind groping toward the music, trying desperately to reach into the heart of it, to become part of it. Ravdin and Dana stood there, trancelike, staring transfixed at the gleaming center of light, forcing their joined minds to create the crashing, majestic chords as the song lifted from the depths of oblivion to the heights of glory in the old, old song of their people. A song of majesty, and strength, and dignity. A song of love, of aspiration, a song of achievement. A song of peoples driven by ancient fears across the eons of space, seeking only peace, even peace with those who drove them. Frankle heard the music, and could not comprehend, for his mind could not grasp the meaning, the true overtones of those glorious chords, but he felt the strangeness in the pangs of fear which groped through his mind, cringing from the wonderful strains, dazzled by the dancing light. He stared wide-eyed and trembling at the couple across the room, and for an instant it seemed that he was stripped naked. For a fleeting moment the authority was gone from his face; gone too was the cruelty, the avarice, the sardonic mockery. For the briefest moment his cold gray eyes grew incredibly tender with a sudden ancient, long-forgotten longing, crying at last to be heard. And then, with a scream of rage he was stumbling into the midst of the light, lashing out wildly at the heart of its shimmering brilliance. His huge hand caught the hypnotic stone and swept it into crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the cold steel bulkhead. He stood rigid, his whole body shaking, eyes blazing with fear and anger and hatred as he turned on Ravdin and Dana. His voice was a raging storm of bitterness drowning out the dying strains of the music. "Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make me forget my duty and listen to your rotten, poisonous noise! Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen, I didn't ! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down, I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and your foul music will be dead!" He turned to the guards, wildly, his hands still trembling. "Take them out! Whip them, burn them, do anything! But find out where their people have gone. Find out! Music! We'll take the music out of them, once and for all." The inquisition had been horrible. Their minds had had no concept of such horror, such relentless, racking pain. The blazing lights, the questions screaming in their ears, Frankle's vicious eyes burning in frustration, and their own screams, rising with each question they would not answer until their throats were scorched and they could no longer scream. Finally they reached the limit they could endure, and muttered together the hoarse words that could deliver them. Not words that Frankle could hear, but words to bring deliverance, to blank out their minds like a wet sponge over slate. The hypnotic key clicked into the lock of their minds; their screams died in their brains. Frankle stared at them, and knew instantly what they had done, a technique of memory obliteration known and dreaded for so many thousands of years that history could not remember. As his captives stood mindless before him, he let out one hoarse, agonized scream of frustration and defeat. But strangely enough he did not kill them. He left them on a cold stone ledge, blinking dumbly at each other as the ships of his fleet rose one by one and vanished like fireflies in the dark night sky. Naked, they sat alone on the planet of the Jungle-land. They knew no words, no music, nothing. And they did not even know that in the departing ships a seed had been planted. For Frankle had heard the music. He had grasped the beauty of his enemies for that brief instant, and in that instant they had become less his enemies. A tiny seed of doubt had been planted. The seed would grow. The two sat dumbly, shivering. Far in the distance, a beast roared against the heavy night, and a light rain began to fall. They sat naked, the rain soaking their skin and hair. Then one of them grunted, and moved into the dry darkness of the cave. Deep within him some instinct spoke, warning him to fear the roar of the animal. Blinking dully, the woman crept into the cave after him. Three thoughts alone filled their empty minds. Not thoughts of Nehmon and his people; to them, Nehmon had never existed, forgotten as completely as if he had never been. No thoughts of the Hunters, either, nor of their unheard-of mercy in leaving them their lives—lives of memoryless oblivion, like animals in this green Jungle-land, but lives nonetheless. Only three thoughts filled their minds: It was raining. They were hungry. The Saber-tooth was prowling tonight. They never knew that the link had been forged.

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22073

The Repairman By Harry Harrison Illustrated by Kramer Being an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn’t be so bad … if I could shoot the trouble! The Old Man had that look of intense glee on his face that meant someone was in for a very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no great feat of intelligence to figure it would be me. I talked first, bold attack being the best defense and so forth. “I quit. Don’t bother telling me what dirty job you have cooked up, because I have already quit and you do not want to reveal company secrets to me.” The grin was even wider now and he actually chortled as he thumbed a button on his console. A thick legal document slid out of the delivery slot onto his desk. “This is your contract,” he said. “It tells how and when you will work. A steel-and-vanadium-bound contract that you couldn’t crack with a molecular disruptor.” I leaned out quickly, grabbed it and threw it into the air with a single motion. Before it could fall, I had my Solar out and, with a wide-angle shot, burned the contract to ashes. The Old Man pressed the button again and another contract slid out on his desk. If possible, the smile was still wider now. “I should have said a duplicate of your contract—like this one here.” He made a quick note on his secretary plate. “I have deducted 13 credits from your salary for the cost of the duplicate—as well as a 100-credit fine for firing a Solar inside a building.” I slumped, defeated, waiting for the blow to land. The Old Man fondled my contract. “According to this document, you can’t quit. Ever. Therefore I have a little job I know you’ll enjoy. Repair job. The Centauri beacon has shut down. It’s a Mark III beacon.…” “ What kind of beacon?” I asked him. I have repaired hyperspace beacons from one arm of the Galaxy to the other and was sure I had worked on every type or model made. But I had never heard of this kind. “Mark III,” the Old Man repeated, practically chortling. “I never heard of it either until Records dug up the specs. They found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the earliest type of beacon ever built—by Earth, no less. Considering its location on one of the Proxima Centauri planets, it might very well be the first beacon.” I looked at the blueprints he handed me and felt my eyes glaze with horror. “It’s a monstrosity! It looks more like a distillery than a beacon—must be at least a few hundred meters high. I’m a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over 2000 years old. Just forget about it and build a new one.” The Old Man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. “It would take a year to install a new beacon—besides being too expensive—and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have ships making fifteen-light-year detours now.” He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles. “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down, it is never an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of just plugging in a new part.” He was telling me —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office. He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like you .” I nodded moodily at his pointing finger. “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys, mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must operate!” I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on his finger again. “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract. We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you could draw the money out.” I smiled, a little weakly, I’m afraid, as if I had never meant to keep that account a secret. His spies were getting more efficient every day. Walking down the hall, I tried to figure a way to transfer the money without his catching on—and knew at the same time he was figuring a way to outfigure me. It was all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink, then went on to the spaceport. By the time the ship was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest beacon to the broken-down Proxima Centauri Beacon was on one of the planets of Beta Circinus and I headed there first, a short trip of only about nine days in hyperspace. To understand the importance of the beacons, you have to understand hyperspace. Not that many people do, but it is easy enough to understand that in this non -space the regular rules don’t apply. Speed and measurements are a matter of relationship, not constant facts like the fixed universe. The first ships to enter hyperspace had no place to go—and no way to even tell if they had moved. The beacons solved that problem and opened the entire universe. They are built on planets and generate tremendous amounts of power. This power is turned into radiation that is punched through into hyperspace. Every beacon has a code signal as part of its radiation and represents a measurable point in hyperspace. Triangulation and quadrature of the beacons works for navigation—only it follows its own rules. The rules are complex and variable, but they are still rules that a navigator can follow. For a hyperspace jump, you need at least four beacons for an accurate fix. For long jumps, navigators use as many as seven or eight. So every beacon is important and every one has to keep operating. That is where I and the other trouble-shooters came in. We travel in well-stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything; only one man to a ship because that is all it takes to operate the overly efficient repair machinery. Due to the very nature of our job, we spend most of our time just rocketing through normal space. After all, when a beacon breaks down, how do you find it? Not through hyperspace. All you can do is approach as close as you can by using other beacons, then finish the trip in normal space. This can take months, and often does. This job didn’t turn out to be quite that bad. I zeroed on the Beta Circinus beacon and ran a complicated eight-point problem through the navigator, using every beacon I could get an accurate fix on. The computer gave me a course with an estimated point-of-arrival as well as a built-in safety factor I never could eliminate from the machine. I would much rather take a chance of breaking through near some star than spend time just barreling through normal space, but apparently Tech knows this, too. They had a safety factor built into the computer so you couldn’t end up inside a star no matter how hard you tried. I’m sure there was no humaneness in this decision. They just didn’t want to lose the ship. It was a twenty-hour jump, ship’s time, and I came through in the middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled to itself and scanned all the stars, comparing them to the spectra of Proxima Centauri. It finally rang a bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece. A fast reading with the photocell gave me the apparent magnitude and a comparison with its absolute magnitude showed its distance. Not as bad as I had thought—a six-week run, give or take a few days. After feeding a course tape into the robot pilot, I strapped into the acceleration tank and went to sleep. The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary distance. Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts, was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey. The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the eye controls and dived the thing down. I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch the beacon appear on the screen. The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely wasn’t my beacon. Or wasn’t it? I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something clicked in my mind. Locking the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course, weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing, had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon. I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks flying in every direction. I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit that would return it automatically to the ship. Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the bottle. Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison. Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon has to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some inaccessible place. Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language. And, for that , I had long before worked out a system that was fool-proof. I had a pryeye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though it was a little disconcerting to see it float by. I located a lizard town about a thousand kilometers from the pyramid and dropped the eye. It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow. This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder. After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, “Hey, George!” and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I caught one of them alone and shouted “Hey, George!” at him. It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned around. When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I figured it was time to make a contact. I found him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in an outcropping of rock and wait for him. When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local religion. Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells, rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet. “Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to notice that he took the cash before taking off. After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily filled him in. I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it wasn’t nice. In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice little religious war going on around the pyramid. It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach this continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of course, what happened. A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true. A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife, murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of priests guarded the sacred fount. And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing. It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would cheerfully rat on me when I got back. Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh equipment. Working from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t have to look exactly like them, just something close, to soothe the native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the Centaurians. When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment I would need and began to wire the suit. When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance. That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it was light, then dropped straight down. It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived. I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud, just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my jaws. The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed. Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp. The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive again. “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed the control in my palm at the same time. It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I walked through the temple doors. “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said. Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside. The temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something. The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?” I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to restore the Holy Waters.” This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead. Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me. “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We will—” “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.” When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke. The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and settled all the major points. I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this, tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to me. “Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an old suitcase can be called smiling. He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain got back in gear. “Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in my case you will have to blind me before I leave the Holy of Holies, not now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning iron.” He took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me. The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to behind me and I was alone in the dark. But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led the way without a word. A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal doorway labeled in archaic script MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon. I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright from constant polishing. I checked the readings carefully and found just what I had suspected. One of the eager lizards had managed to open a circuit box and had polished the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one of the switches and that had caused the trouble. Rather , that had started the trouble. It wasn’t going to be ended by just reversing the water-valve switch. This valve was supposed to be used only for repairs, after the pile was damped. When the water was cut off with the pile in operation, it had started to overheat and the automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit. I could start the water again easily enough, but there was no fuel left in the reactor. I wasn’t going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be far easier to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was about a tenth the size of the ancient bucket of bolts and produced at least four times the power. Before I sent for it, I checked over the rest of the beacon. In 2000 years, there should be some sign of wear. The old boys had built well, I’ll give them credit for that. Ninety per cent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no wear whatever. Other parts they had beefed up, figuring they would wear, but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe walls were at least three meters thick—and the pipe opening itself no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I made a list of parts. The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away without being seen. I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it. When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside the beacon door when I woke up. The repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job they were waiting for. I threw the switch that started the water flowing again. There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down for the eye-burning ceremony. The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it was bolted and barred from the other side. “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and serve your every need.” A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept. “What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration almost shook my head off. The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open. Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it. The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath the surface. “What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness, they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the ceremony!” The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes, under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor. A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well. Before they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it, of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders. I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute. Then I was out in the fresh air and away. When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything. One: The beacon was repaired. Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage, accidental or deliberate. Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which added up to— Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers. I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that it would be some other repairman who’d get the job. — Harry Harrison Transcriber’s Note This etext was produced from Galaxy February 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

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[115] THE HILLS OF HOME by Alfred Coppel “Normality” is a myth; we're all a little neurotic, and the study of neurosis has been able to classify the general types of disturbance which are most common. And some types (providing the subject is not suffering so extreme a case as to have crossed the border into psychosis) can be not only useful, but perhaps necessary for certain kinds of work.... The river ran still and deep, green and gray in the eddies with the warm smell of late summer rising out of the slow water. Madrone and birch and willow, limp in the evening quiet, and the taste of smouldering leaves.... It wasn’t the Russian River. It was the Sacred Iss. The sun had touched the gem-encrusted cliffs by the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus and had vanished, leaving only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry of shore birds. From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of victims borne into [116] this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss. Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along the base of the Golden Cliffs— The sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.” Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said. “Coming up.” He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured taste of the cigaret on his tongue. Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So long a road, he thought, from then to now. Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their Rorschach blots. “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——” “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.” How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer? Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress. The water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk and the grasping, blood-sucking arms—— The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it tightly, knowing that he [117] could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to attack the white Therns and their Plant Men. For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let it be the color of an emerald. He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet. Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter, the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people. The phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——” Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river. That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had brought to this cursed valley. “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining through. There wasn’t much time left. Kimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket. They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one? The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and without expression. [118] Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how I feel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go. On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking: They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being fair. Steinhart was only doing his job. The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes. Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What have I to do with you now, he thought? Outside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of ferroconcrete. As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone. “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart observed in a quiet voice. Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on their forehead? “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said. Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught the movement and half-smiled. “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the psych said. “It doesn’t matter now.” “No, I suppose not.” “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.” “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart [119] said. “It’s just some of the things——” Kimball said: “I talked too much.” “You had to.” “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would you,” the Colonel said smiling. “You were married, Kim. What happened?” “More therapy?” “I’d like to know. This is for me.” Kimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the way she put it.” “She knew you were a career officer; what did she expect——?” “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.” “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.” They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky. Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched them wheel across the clear, deep night. “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean that.” “Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening gulf. “What will you do?” “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it comes.” “In two years.” “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that it didn’t matter? He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes. “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.” “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up already? “Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of course. You know there’s no such thing as a normal human being. We all have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.” Kimball turned to regard the psych coolly . “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do you know?” The analyst flushed. “No.” “I didn’t think so.” “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,” Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely child.” [120] Kimball was watching the sky again. Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——” Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal. “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the planets——” Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon. They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn. Kimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the pebbled shore of the River Iss. They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze came up. “Kimm-eeeee—” They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—” He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror. He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor. “Where is that little brat, anyway?” “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find him——” “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My rad-ium pis-tol——’” “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you AN-swer!” Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the shifting light of the two moons. [121] “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!” If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords clashing—— “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!” “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!” The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He shivered, not with horror now. With cold. He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks. He lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball slept insulated and complete. And he dreamed. He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old—— And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented cottage and saying exasperatedly: “ Why do you run off by yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so—— ” And his sisters: “ Playing with his wooden swords and his radium pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful books—— ” He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of Mars. And Steinhart: “ What is reality, Kimmy? ” The hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams. He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of the world. He dreamed of his wife. “ You don’t live here, Kim. ” She was right, of course. He [122] wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction. And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night. He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness. “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger; I feel different.” The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals. There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the internal fires died. Kimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep, burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation. What is reality, Kimmy? Steinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He had never been so alone. And then he imagined he saw something moving on the great plain. He scrambled down through the ship, past the empty fuel tanks and the lashed supplies. His hands were clawing desperately at the dogs of the outer valve. Suddenly the pressure jerked the hatch from his hands and he gasped at the icy air, his lungs laboring to breathe. He dropped to one knee and sucked at the thin, frigid air. His vision was cloudy and his head felt light. But there was something moving on the plain. A shadowy cavalcade. Strange monstrous men on fantastic war-mounts, long spears and fluttering pennons. Huge golden chariots with scythes flashing on the circling hubs and armored giants, the figments of a long remembered dream—— He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse. Kimmm-eee! [123] A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him. Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon. Kimmmm-eeeee! The voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice. He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep—— He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice, he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now, or die. They were the hills of home. Transcriber’s Note and Errata This etext was produced from “Future Science Fiction” No. 30 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. The original page numbers from the magazine have been preserved. The following errors have been corrected:

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Comet, July 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. The Street That Wasn't There by CLIFFORD D. SIMAK and CARL JACOBI Mr. Jonathon Chambers left his house on Maple Street at exactly seven o'clock in the evening and set out on the daily walk he had taken, at the same time, come rain or snow, for twenty solid years. The walk never varied. He paced two blocks down Maple Street, stopped at the Red Star confectionery to buy a Rose Trofero perfecto, then walked to the end of the fourth block on Maple. There he turned right on Lexington, followed Lexington to Oak, down Oak and so by way of Lincoln back to Maple again and to his home. He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr. Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr. Chambers took his cigar. That was all. For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once had been a professor at State University. A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university. A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers started out at seven o'clock. It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke. He walked unhurriedly, swinging his cane a bit less jauntily than twenty years ago. He tucked the muffler more securely under the rusty old topcoat and pulled his bowler hat more firmly on his head. He noticed that the street light at the corner of Maple and Jefferson was out and he grumbled a little to himself when he was forced to step off the walk to circle a boarded-off section of newly-laid concrete work before the driveway of 816. It seemed that he reached the corner of Lexington and Maple just a bit too quickly, but he told himself that this couldn't be. For he never did that. For twenty years, since the year following his expulsion from the university, he had lived by the clock. The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed existence had grown on him gradually. So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase. A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers. "... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ... thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt...." The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas, probably. He remembered one from many years before, something about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book Mr. Chambers had written. But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again, looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ... absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him. That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago. There was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers caught some excited words: "It's happening everywhere.... What do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain...." But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not wish to talk. One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk. Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his pocket. He started violently. It was only 7:30! For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked audibly. But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight. Now.... It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong. He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase his evening smoke. Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his house and locked the door behind him. He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he shook his head in bewilderment. Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece. But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash. He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter, unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went. But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see him coming. And so he knew that this was the year 1960 and that the wars in Europe and Asia had flamed to an end to be followed by a terrible plague, a plague that even now was sweeping through country after country like wild fire, decimating populations. A plague undoubtedly induced by hunger and privation and the miseries of war. But those things he put away as items far removed from his own small world. He disregarded them. He pretended he had never heard of them. Others might discuss and worry over them if they wished. To him they simply did not matter. But there were two things tonight that did matter. Two curious, incredible events. He had arrived home fifteen minutes early. He had forgotten his cigar. Huddled in the chair, he frowned slowly. It was disquieting to have something like that happen. There must be something wrong. Had his long exile finally turned his mind ... perhaps just a very little ... enough to make him queer? Had he lost his sense of proportion, of perspective? No, he hadn't. Take this room, for example. After twenty years it had come to be as much a part of him as the clothes he wore. Every detail of the room was engraved in his mind with ... clarity; the old center leg table with its green covering and stained glass lamp; the mantelpiece with the dusty bric-a-brac; the pendulum clock that told the time of day as well as the day of the week and month; the elephant ash tray on the tabaret and, most important of all, the marine print. Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague outline of a larger vessel. There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head. He had put it there because he liked it best. Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither define nor understand. When finally he dozed off it was to lose himself in a series of horrific dreams. He dreamed first that he was a castaway on a tiny islet in mid-ocean, that the waters around the island teemed with huge poisonous sea snakes ... hydrophinnae ... and that steadily those serpents were devouring the island. In another dream he was pursued by a horror which he could neither see nor hear, but only could imagine. And as he sought to flee he stayed in the one place. His legs worked frantically, pumping like pistons, but he could make no progress. It was as if he ran upon a treadway. Then again the terror descended on him, a black, unimagined thing and he tried to scream and couldn't. He opened his mouth and strained his vocal cords and filled his lungs to bursting with the urge to shriek ... but not a sound came from his lips. All next day he was uneasy and as he left the house that evening, at precisely seven o'clock, he kept saying to himself: "You must not forget tonight! You must remember to stop and get your cigar!" The street light at the corner of Jefferson was still out and in front of 816 the cemented driveway was still boarded off. Everything was the same as the night before. And now, he told himself, the Red Star confectionery is in the next block. I must not forget tonight. To forget twice in a row would be just too much. He grasped that thought firmly in his mind, strode just a bit more rapidly down the street. But at the corner he stopped in consternation. Bewildered, he stared down the next block. There was no neon sign, no splash of friendly light upon the sidewalk to mark the little store tucked away in this residential section. He stared at the street marker and read the word slowly: GRANT. He read it again, unbelieving, for this shouldn't be Grant Street, but Marshall. He had walked two blocks and the confectionery was between Marshall and Grant. He hadn't come to Marshall yet ... and here was Grant. Or had he, absent-mindedly, come one block farther than he thought, passed the store as on the night before? For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact grew slowly in his brain: There wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant had disappeared! Now he understood why he had missed the store on the night before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early. On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way unsteadily to his chair in the corner. What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up? Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded life, knew nothing about? Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat, then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ... somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half whispered thought. A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness. There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself. Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself. He brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues. Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America, of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread into that nation's boundaries. Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South America. Billions, perhaps. And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life, seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled brain failed to find the answer. The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood upon the mantel. Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and looked out. Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the chimneys and trees against a silvered sky. But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a house that suddenly had gone mad. He stared at it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong with it. He recalled how it had always stood, foursquare, a solid piece of mid-Victorian architecture. Then, before his eyes, the house righted itself again. Slowly it drew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted its dimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it had to be. With a sigh of relief, Mr. Chambers turned back into the hall. But before he closed the door, he looked again. The house was lop-sided ... as bad, perhaps worse than before! Gulping in fright, Mr. Chambers slammed the door shut, locked it and double bolted it. Then he went to his bedroom and took two sleeping powders. His dreams that night were the same as on the night before. Again there was the islet in mid-ocean. Again he was alone upon it. Again the squirming hydrophinnae were eating his foothold piece by piece. He awoke, body drenched with perspiration. Vague light of early dawn filtered through the window. The clock on the bedside table showed 7:30. For a long time he lay there motionless. Again the fantastic happenings of the night before came back to haunt him and as he lay there, staring at the windows, he remembered them, one by one. But his mind, still fogged by sleep and astonishment, took the happenings in its stride, mulled over them, lost the keen edge of fantastic terror that lurked around them. The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out. There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple tree that grew close against the house. But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch. The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that. And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ... they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself when he thought of how it should look. Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too weary to think about the house. He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think. And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany bookcase that stood against the wall. There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered. Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the school. It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind. Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of happier days swept over him. Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written so long ago the very words seemed strange and unreal: Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical fate of this earth ... yes, even the universe. Billions of minds seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets ... and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were.... Destroy those minds and the entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power, will crumple and slip away like a column of sand.... His eyes followed down the page: Yet this would have nothing to do with matter itself ... but only with matter's form. For while the mind of man through long ages may have moulded an imagery of that space in which he lives, mind would have little conceivable influence upon the existence of that matter. What exists in our known universe shall exist always and can never be destroyed, only altered or transformed. But in modern astrophysics and mathematics we gain an insight into the possibility ... yes probability ... that there are other dimensions, other brackets of time and space impinging on the one we occupy. If a pin is thrust into a shadow, would that shadow have any knowledge of the pin? It would not, for in this case the shadow is two dimensional, the pin three dimensional. Yet both occupy the same space. Granting then that the power of men's minds alone holds this universe, or at least this world in its present form, may we not go farther and envision other minds in some other plane watching us, waiting, waiting craftily for the time they can take over the domination of matter? Such a concept is not impossible. It is a natural conclusion if we accept the double hypothesis: that mind does control the formation of all matter; and that other worlds lie in juxtaposition with ours. Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own. He stood astounded beside the bookcase, his eyes staring unseeing into the fire upon the hearth. He had written that. And because of those words he had been called a heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at the university, had been forced into this hermit life. A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions all over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds there now were one or two. A feeble force to hold the form of matter intact. The plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life, had blighted Africa, had reached South America ... might even have come to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had heard, the words of the men at the drugstore corner, the buildings disappearing. Something scientists could not explain. But those were merely scraps of information. He did not know the whole story ... he could not know. He never listened to the radio, never read a newspaper. But abruptly the whole thing fitted together in his brain like the missing piece of a puzzle into its slot. The significance of it all gripped him with damning clarity. There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another dimension was fighting to supersede man's control and take his universe into its own plane! Abruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case and picked up his hat and coat. He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him. He moved through the hall to the door, emerged into the street. On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But there wasn't any sun ... only an all pervading grayness that shrouded everything ... not a gray fog, but a gray emptiness that seemed devoid of life, of any movement. The walk led to his gate and there it ended, but as he moved forward the sidewalk came into view and the house ahead loomed out of the gray, but a house with differences. He moved forward rapidly. Visibility extended only a few feet and as he approached them the houses materialized like two dimensional pictures without perspective, like twisted cardboard soldiers lining up for review on a misty morning. Once he stopped and looked back and saw that the grayness had closed in behind him. The houses were wiped out, the sidewalk faded into nothing. He shouted, hoping to attract attention. But his voice frightened him. It seemed to ricochet up and into the higher levels of the sky, as if a giant door had been opened to a mighty room high above him. He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and Lexington. With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat bouncing on his head. Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful that it still was there. On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he saw.... Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge streamers and ellipses above the higher levels. And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him. Thousands of eyes glaring down with but a single purpose. And as he continued to look, something else seemed to take form above that wall. A design this time, that swirled and writhed in the ribbons of radiance and rapidly coalesced into strange geometric features, without definite line or detail. A colossal face, a face of indescribable power and evil, it was, staring down with malevolent composure. Then the city and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded like a darkened magic-lantern, and the grayness moved in again. Mr. Chambers pushed open the door of his house. But he did not lock it. There was no need of locks ... not any more. A few coals of fire still smouldered in the grate and going there, he stirred them up, raked away the ash, piled on more wood. The flames leaped merrily, dancing in the chimney's throat. Without removing his hat and coat, he sank exhausted in his favorite chair, closed his eyes then opened them again. He sighed with relief as he saw the room was unchanged. Everything in its accustomed place: the clock, the lamp, the elephant ash tray, the marine print on the wall. Everything was as it should be. The clock measured the silence with its measured ticking; it chimed abruptly and the vase sent up its usual sympathetic vibration. This was his room, he thought. Rooms acquire the personality of the person who lives in them, become a part of him. This was his world, his own private world, and as such it would be the last to go. But how long could he ... his brain ... maintain its existence? Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little breath of reassurance returned to him. They couldn't take this away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form. But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since he had first planned the house's building, had lived here. This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must.... He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume. His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him. For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there! Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones. So the change already had started here! The unfamiliar books were gone and that fitted in the pattern ... for it would be the least familiar things that would go first. Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or did the lamp on the table blur and begin to fade away? But as he stared at it, it became clear again, a solid, substantial thing. For a moment real fear reached out and touched him with chilly fingers. For he knew that this room no longer was proof against the thing that had happened out there on the street. Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his own mind? Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing children and barking dogs? Might not the Red Star confectionery still exist, splashing the street with the red of its neon sign? Could it be that he was going mad? He had heard whispers when he had passed, whispers the gossiping housewives had not intended him to hear. And he had heard the shouting of boys when he walked by. They thought him mad. Could he be really mad? But he knew he wasn't mad. He knew that he perhaps was the sanest of all men who walked the earth. For he, and he alone, had foreseen this very thing. And the others had scoffed at him for it. Somewhere else the children might be playing on a street. But it would be a different street. And the children undoubtedly would be different too. For the matter of which the street and everything upon it had been formed would now be cast in a different mold, stolen by different minds in a different dimension. Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own. But there had been no need to wait for that distant day. Scant years after he had written those prophetic words the thing was happening. Man had played unwittingly into the hands of those other minds in the other dimension. Man had waged a war and war had bred a pestilence. And the whole vast cycle of events was but a detail of a cyclopean plan. He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic premeditation. On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a sob forced its way to his lips. There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser had been there was greyish nothingness. Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door. Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no familiar hat rack and umbrella stand. Nothing.... Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner. "So here I am," he said, half aloud. So there he was. Embattled in the last corner of the world that was left to him. Perhaps there were other men like him, he thought. Men who stood at bay against the emptiness that marked the transition from one dimension to another. Men who had lived close to the things they loved, who had endowed those things with such substantial form by power of mind alone that they now stood out alone against the power of some greater mind. The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This room still retained its form. This room, he knew, would stay the longest. And when the rest of the room was gone, this corner with his favorite chair would remain. For this was the spot where he had lived for twenty years. The bedroom was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. This room was for living. This was his last stand. These were the walls and floors and prints and lamps that had soaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps. He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors' houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he had lived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinly spread; their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon an area four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve. Staring through the window, he saw it again. The same vision he had looked upon before and yet different in an indescribable way. There was the city illumined in the sky. There were the elliptical towers and turrets, the cube-shaped domes and battlements. He could see with stereoscopic clarity the aerial bridges, the gleaming avenues sweeping on into infinitude. The vision was nearer this time, but the depth and proportion had changed ... as if he were viewing it from two concentric angles at the same time. And the face ... the face of magnitude ... of power of cosmic craft and evil.... Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the room. The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away and with them went one corner of the room. And then the elephant ash tray. "Oh, well," said Mr. Chambers, "I never did like that very well." Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal. Something one could expect to happen. Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back. But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone, simply couldn't do it. He wondered what the elephant ash tray looked like in that other dimension. It certainly wouldn't be an elephant ash tray nor would the radio be a radio, for perhaps they didn't have ash trays or radios or elephants in the invading dimension. He wondered, as a matter of fact, what he himself would look like when he finally slipped into the unknown. For he was matter, too, just as the ash tray and radio were matter. He wondered if he would retain his individuality ... if he still would be a person. Or would he merely be a thing? There was one answer to all of that. He simply didn't know. Nothingness advanced upon him, ate its way across the room, stalking him as he sat in the chair underneath the lamp. And he waited for it. The room, or what was left of it, plunged into dreadful silence. Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first time in twenty years. He leaped from his chair and then sat down again. The clock hadn't stopped. It wasn't there. There was a tingling sensation in his feet.

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[101] EXILE BY H. B. FYFE ILLUSTRATED BY EMSH The Dome of Eyes made it almost impossible for Terrans to reach the world of Tepokt. For those who did land there, there was no returning—only the bitterness of respect—and justice! The Tepoktan student, whose blue robe in George Kinton's opinion clashed with the dull purple of his scales, twiddled a three-clawed hand for attention. Kinton nodded to him from his place on the dais before the group. "Then you can give us no precise count of the stars in the galaxy, George?" Kinton smiled wrily, and ran a wrinkled hand through his graying hair. In the clicking Tepoktan speech, his name came out more like "Chortch." Questions like this had been put to him often during the ten years since his rocket had hurtled through the meteorite belt and down to the surface of Tepokt, leaving him the only survivor. Barred off as they were from venturing into space, the highly civilized Tepoktans constantly displayed the curiosity of dreamers in matters related to the universe. Because of the veil of meteorites and satellite fragments whirling about their planet, their astronomers had acquired torturous skills but only scraps of real knowledge. "As I believe I mentioned in some of my recorded lectures," Kinton answered in their language, [103] "the number is actually as vast as it seems to those of you peering through the Dome of Eyes. The scientists of my race have not yet encountered any beings capable of estimating the total." He leaned back and scanned the faces of his interviewers, faces that would have been oddly humanoid were it not for the elongated snouts and pointed, sharp-toothed jaws. The average Tepoktan was slightly under Kinton's height of five-feet-ten, with a long, supple trunk. Under the robes their scholars affected, the shortness of their two bowed legs was not obvious; but the sight of the short, thick arms carried high before their chests still left Kinton with a feeling of misproportion. He should be used to it after ten years, he thought, but even the reds or purples of the scales or the big teeth seemed more natural. "I sympathize with your curiosity," he added. "It is a marvel that your scientists have managed to measure the distances of so many stars." He could tell that they were pleased by his admiration, and wondered yet again why any little show of approval by him was so eagerly received. Even though he was the first stellar visitor in their recorded history, Kinton remained conscious of the fact that in many fields he was unable to offer the Tepoktans any new ideas. In one or two ways, he believed, no Terran could teach their experts anything. "Then will you tell us, George, more about the problems of your first space explorers?" came another question. Before Kinton had formed his answer, the golden curtains at the rear of the austerely simple chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan serving the current year as Kinton's chief aide, hurried toward the dais. The twenty-odd members of the group fell silent on their polished stone benches, turning their pointed visages to follow Klaft's progress. The aide reached Kinton and bent to hiss and cluck into the latter's ear in what he presumably considered an undertone. The Terran laboriously spelled out the message inscribed on the limp, satiny paper held before his eyes. Then he rose and took one step toward the waiting group. "I regret I shall have to conclude this discussion," he announced. "I am informed that another ship from space has reached the surface of Tepokt. My presence is requested in case the crew are of my own planet." [104] Klaft excitedly skipped down to lead the way up the aisle, but Kinton hesitated. Those in the audience were scholars or officials to whom attendance at one of Kinton's limited number of personal lectures was awarded as an honor. They would hardly learn anything from him directly that was not available in recordings made over the course of years. The Tepoktan scientists, historians, and philosophers had respectfully but eagerly gathered every crumb of information Kinton knowingly had to offer—and some he thought he had forgotten. Still ... he sensed the disappointment at his announcement. "I shall arrange for you to await my return here in town," Kinton said, and there were murmurs of pleasure. Later, aboard the jet helicopter that was basically like those Kinton remembered using on Terra twenty light years away, he shook his head at Klaft's respectful protest. "But George! It was enough that they were present when you received the news. They can talk about that the rest of their lives! You must not waste your strength on these people who come out of curiosity." Kinton smiled at his aide's earnest concern. Then he turned to look out the window as he recalled the shadow that underlay such remonstrances. He estimated that he was about forty-eight now, as nearly as he could tell from the somewhat longer revolutions of Tepokt. The time would come when he would age and die. Whose wishes would then prevail? Maybe he was wrong, he thought. Maybe he shouldn't stand in the way of their biologists and surgeons. But he'd rather be buried, even if that left them with only what he could tell them about the human body. To help himself forget the rather preoccupied manner in which some of the Tepoktan scientists occasionally eyed him, he peered down at the big dam of the hydro-electric project being completed to Kinton's design. Power from this would soon light the town built to house the staff of scientists, students, and workers assigned to the institute organized about the person of Kinton. Now, there was an example of their willingness to repay him for whatever help he had been, he reflected. They hadn't needed that for themselves. In some ways, compared to [105] those of Terra, the industries of Tepokt were underdeveloped. In the first place, the population was smaller and had different standards of luxury. In the second, a certain lack of drive resulted from the inability to break out into interplanetary space. Kinton had been inexplicably lucky to have reached the surface even in a battered hulk. The shell of meteorites was at least a hundred miles thick and constantly shifting. "We do not know if they have always been meteorites," the Tepoktans had told Kinton, "or whether part of them come from a destroyed satellite; but our observers have proved mathematically that no direct path through them may be predicted more than a very short while in advance." Kinton turned away from the window as he caught the glint of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of the spaceship they had also built for him. Perhaps ... would it be fair to encourage the newcomer to attempt the barrier? For ten years, Kinton had failed to work up any strong desire to try it. The Tepoktans called the ever-shifting lights the Dome of Eyes, after a myth in which each tiny satellite bright enough to be visible was supposed to watch over a single individual on the surface. Like their brothers on Terra, the native astronomers could trace their science back to a form of astrology; and Kinton often told them jokingly that he felt no urge to risk a physical encounter with his own personal Eye. The helicopter started to descend, and Kinton remembered that the city named in his message was only about twenty miles from his home. The brief twilight of Tepokt was passing by the time he set foot on the landing field, and he paused to look up. The brighter stars visible from this part of the planet twinkled back at him, and he knew that each was being scrutinized by some amateur or professional astronomer. Before an hour had elapsed, most of them would be obscured by the tiny moonlets, some of which could already be seen. These could easily be mistaken for stars or the other five planets of the system, but in a short while the tinier ones in groups would cause a celestial haze resembling a miniature Milky Way. Klaft, who had descended first, leaving the pilot to bring up the rear, noticed Kinton's pause. "Glory glitters till it is known for a curse," he remarked, quoting a Tepoktan proverb often applied [106] by the disgruntled scientists to the Dome of Eyes. Kinton observed, however, that his aide also stared upward for a long moment. The Tepoktans loved speculating about the unsolvable. They had even founded clubs to argue whether two satellites had been destroyed or only one. Half a dozen officials hastened up to escort the party to the vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft succeeded in quieting the lesser members of the delegation so that Kinton was able to learn a few facts about the new arrival. The crash had been several hundred miles away, but someone had thought of the hospital in this city which was known to have a doctor rating as an expert in human physiology. The survivor—only one occupant of the wreck, alive or dead, had been discovered—had accordingly been flown here. With a clanging of bells, the little convoy of ground cars drew up in front of the hospital. A way was made through the chittering crowd around the entrance. Within a few minutes, Kinton found himself looking down at a pallet upon which lay another Terran. A man! he thought, then curled a lip wrily at the sudden, unexpected pang of disappointment. Well, he hadn't realized until then what he was really hoping for! The spaceman had been cleaned up and bandaged by the native medicos. Kinton saw that his left thigh was probably broken. Other dressings suggested cracked ribs and lacerations on the head and shoulders. The man was dark-haired but pale of skin, with a jutting chin and a nose that had been flattened in some earlier mishap. The flaring set of his ears somehow emphasized an overall leanness. Even in sleep, his mouth was thin and hard. "Thrown across the controls after his belt broke loose?" Kinton guessed. "I bow to your wisdom, George," said the plump Tepoktan doctor who appeared to be in charge. Kinton could not remember him, but everyone on the planet addressed the Terran by the sound they fondly thought to be his first name. "This is Doctor Chuxolkhee," murmured Klaft. Kinton made the accepted gesture of greeting with one hand and said, "You seem to have treated him very expertly." Chuxolkhee ruffled the scales around his neck with pleasure. [107] "I have studied Terran physiology," he admitted complacently. "From your records and drawings, of course, George, for I have not yet had the good fortune to visit you." "We must arrange a visit soon," said Kinton. "Klaft will—" He broke off at the sound from the patient. "A Terran!" mumbled the injured man. He shook his head dazedly, tried to sit up, and subsided with a groan. Why, he looked scared when he saw me , thought Kinton. "You're all right now," he said soothingly. "It's all over and you're in good hands. I gather there were no other survivors of the crash?" The man stared curiously. Kinton realized that his own language sputtered clumsily from his lips after ten years. He tried again. "My name is George Kinton. I don't blame you if I'm hard to understand. You see, I've been here ten years without ever having another Terran to speak to." The spaceman considered that for a few breaths, then seemed to relax. "Al Birken," he introduced himself laconically. "Ten years?" "A little over," confirmed Kinton. "It's extremely unusual that anything gets through to the surface, let alone a spaceship. What happened to you?" Birken's stare was suspicious. "Then you ain't heard about the new colonies? Naw—you musta come here when all the planets were open." "We had a small settlement on the second planet," Kinton told him. "You mean there are new Terran colonies?" "Yeah. Jet-hoppers spreadin' all over the other five. None of the land-hungry poops figured a way to set down here, though, or they'd be creepin' around this planet too." "How did you happen to do it? Run out of fuel?" The other eyed him for a few seconds before dropping his gaze. Kinton was struck with sudden doubt. The outposts of civilization were followed by less desirable developments as a general rule—prisons, for instance. He resolved to be wary of the visitor. "Ya might say I was explorin'," Birken replied at last. "That's why I come alone. Didn't want nobody else hurt if I didn't make it. Say, how bad am I banged up?" Kinton realized guiltily that the man should be resting. He [108] had lost track of the moments he had wasted in talk while the others with him stood attentively about. He questioned the doctor briefly and relayed the information that Birken's leg was broken but that the other injuries were not serious. "They'll fix you up," he assured the spaceman. "They're quite good at it, even if the sight of one does make you think a little of an iguana. Rest up, now; and I'll come back again when you're feeling better." For the next three weeks, Kinton flew back and forth from his own town nearly every day. He felt that he should not neglect the few meetings which were the only way he could repay the Tepoktans for all they did for him. On the other hand, the chance to see and talk with one of his own kind drew him like a magnet to the hospital. The doctors operated upon Birken's leg, inserting a metal rod inside the bone by a method they had known before Kinton described it. The new arrival expected to be able to walk, with care, almost any day; although the pin would have to be removed after the bone had healed. Meanwhile, Birken seemed eager to learn all Kinton could tell him about the planet, Tepokt. About himself, he was remarkably reticent. Kinton worried about this. "I think we should not expect too much of this Terran," he warned Klaft uneasily. "You, too, have citizens who do not always obey, your laws, who sometimes ... that is—" "Who are born to die under the axe, as we say," interrupted Klaft, as if to ease the concern plain on Kinton's face. "In other words, criminals. You suspect this Albirken is such a one, George?" "It is not impossible," admitted Kinton unhappily. "He will tell me little about himself. It may be that he was caught in Tepokt's gravity while fleeing from justice." To himself, he wished he had not told Birken about the spaceship. He didn't think the man exactly believed his explanation of why there was no use taking off in it. Yet he continued to spend as much time as he could visiting the other man. Then, as his helicopter landed at the city airport one gray dawn, the news reached him. "The other Terran has gone," Klaft reported, turning from the breathless messenger as Kinton followed him from the machine. [109] "Gone? Where did they take him?" Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed. Kinton repeated his question, wondering about the group of armed police on hand. "In the night," Klaft hissed and clucked, "when none would think to watch him, they tell me ... and quite rightly, I think—" "Get on with it, Klaft! Please!" "In the night, then, Albirken left the chamber in which he lay. He can walk some now, you know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's metal pin. He—he stole a ground car and is gone." "He did?" Kinton had an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Is it known where he went? I mean ... he has been curious to see some of Tepokt. Perhaps—" He stopped, his own words braying in his ears. Klaft was clicking two claws together, a sign of emphatic disagreement. "Albirken," he said, "was soon followed by three police constables in another vehicle. They found him heading in the direction of our town." "Why did he say he was traveling that way?" asked Kinton, thinking to himself of the spaceship! Was the man crazy? "He did not say," answered Klaft expressionlessly. "Taking them by surprise, he killed two of the constables and injured the third before fleeing with one of their spears." " What? " Kinton felt his eyes bulging with dismay. "Yes, for they carried only the short spears of their authority, not expecting to need fire weapons." Kinton looked from him to the messenger, noticing for the first time that the latter was an under-officer of police. He shook his head distractedly. It appeared that his suspicions concerning Birken had been only too accurate. Why was it one like him who got through? he asked himself in silent anguish. After ten years. The Tepoktans had been thinking well of Terrans, but now— He did not worry about his own position. That was well enough established, whether or not he could again hold up his head before the purple-scaled people who had been so generous to him. Even if they had been aroused to a rage by the killing, Kinton told himself, he would not have been concerned about himself. He had reached a fairly ripe age for a spaceman. In fact, he had already [110] enjoyed a decade of borrowed time. But they were more civilized than that wanton murderer, he realized. He straightened up, forcing back his early-morning weariness. "We must get into the air immediately," he told Klaft. "Perhaps we may see him before he reaches—" He broke off at the word "spaceship" but he noticed a reserved expression on Klaft's pointed face. His aide had probably reached a conclusion similar to his own. They climbed back into the cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders to the lean young pilot. A moment later, Kinton saw the ground outside drop away. Only upon turning around did he realize that two armed Tepoktans had materialized in time to follow Klaft inside. One was a constable but the other he recognized for an officer of some rank. Both wore slung across their chests weapons resembling long-barreled pistols with large, oddly indented butts to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable, in addition, carried a contraption with a quadruple tube for launching tiny rockets no thicker than Kinton's thumb. These, he knew, were loaded with an explosive worthy of respect on any planet he had heard of. To protect him, he wondered. Or to get Birken? The pilot headed the craft back toward Kinton's town in the brightening sky of early day. Long before the buildings of Kinton's institute came into view, they received a radio message about Birken. "He has been seen on the road passing the dam," Klaft reported soberly after having been called to the pilot's compartment. "He stopped to demand fuel from some maintenance workers, but they had been warned and fled." "Couldn't they have seized him?" demanded Kinton, his tone sharp with the worry he endeavored to control. "He has that spear, I suppose; but he is only one and injured." Klaft hesitated. "Well, couldn't they?" The aide looked away, out one of the windows at some sun-dyed clouds ranging from pink to orange. He grimaced and clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably. "Perhaps they thought you might be offended, George," he answered at last. Kinton settled back in the seat especially padded to fit the contours of his Terran body, and [111] stared silently at the partition behind the pilot. In other words, he thought, he was responsible for Birken, who was a Terran, one of his own kind. Maybe they really didn't want to risk hurting his feelings, but that was only part of it. They were leaving it up to him to handle what they considered his private affair. He wondered what to do. He had no actual faith in the idea that Birken was delirious, or acting under any influence but that of a criminally self-centered nature. "I shouldn't have told him about the ship!" Kinton muttered, gnawing the knuckle of his left thumb. "He's on the run, all right. Probably scared the colonial authorities will trail him right down through the Dome of Eyes. Wonder what he did?" He caught himself and looked around to see if he had been overheard. Klaft and the police officers peered from their respective windows, in calculated withdrawal. Kinton, disturbed, tried to remember whether he had spoken in Terran or Tepoktan. Would Birken listen if he tried reasoning, he asked himself. Maybe if he showed the man how they had proved the unpredictability of openings through the shifting Dome of Eyes— An exclamation from the constable drew his attention. He rose, and room was made for him at the opposite window. In the distance, beyond the town landing field they were now approaching, Kinton saw a halted ground car. Across the plain which was colored a yellowish tan by a short, grass-like growth, a lone figure plodded toward the upthrust bulk of the spaceship that had never flown. "Never mind landing at the town!" snapped Kinton. "Go directly out to the ship!" Klaft relayed the command to the pilot. The helicopter swept in a descending curve across the plain toward the gleaming hull. As they passed the man below, Birken looked up. He continued to limp along at a brisk pace with the aid of what looked like a short spear. "Go down!" Kinton ordered. The pilot landed about a hundred yards from the spaceship. By the time his passengers had alighted, however, Birken had drawn level with them, about fifty feet away. "Birken!" shouted Kinton. "Where do you think you're going?" Seeing that no one ran after him, Birken slowed his pace, but kept walking toward the ship. [112] He watched them over his shoulder. "Sorry, Kinton," he shouted with no noticeable tone of regret. "I figure I better travel on for my health." "It's not so damn healthy up there!" called Kinton. "I told you how there's no clear path—" "Yeah, yeah, you told me. That don't mean I gotta believe it." "Wait! Don't you think they tried sending unmanned rockets up? Every one was struck and exploded." Birken showed no more change of expression than if the other had commented on the weather. Kinton had stepped forward six or eight paces, irritated despite his anxiety at the way Birken persisted in drifting before him. Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad leg or not, he could probably break the older man in two. He glanced back at the Tepoktans beside the helicopter, Klaft, the pilot, the officer, the constable with the rocket weapon. They stood quietly, looking back at him. The call for help that had risen to his lips died there. "Not their party," he muttered. He turned again to Birken, who still retreated toward the ship. "But he'll only get himself killed and destroy the ship! Or if some miracle gets him through, that's worse! He's nothing to turn loose on a civilized colony again." A twinge of shame tugged down the corners of his mouth as he realized that keeping Birken here would also expose a highly cultured people to an unscrupulous criminal who had already committed murder the very first time he had been crossed. "Birken!" he shouted. "For the last time! Do you want me to send them to drag you back here?" Birken stopped at that. He regarded the motionless Tepoktans with a derisive sneer. "They don't look too eager to me," he taunted. Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression the meaning of which he had deduced after hearing it used by the dam workers. He whirled to run toward the helicopter. Hardly had he taken two steps, however, when he saw startled changes in the carefully blank looks of his escort. The constable half raised his heavy weapon, and Klaft sprang forward with a hissing cry. By the time Kinton's aging muscles obeyed his impulse to sidestep, the spear had already hurtled past. It had missed him by an error of over six feet. [113] He felt his face flushing with sudden anger. Birken was running as best he could toward the spaceship, and had covered nearly half the distance. Kinton ran at the Tepoktans, brushing aside the concerned Klaft. He snatched the heavy weapon from the surprised constable. He turned and raised it to his chest. Because of the shortness of Tepoktan arms, the launcher was constructed so that the butt rested against the chest with the sighting loops before the eyes. The little rocket tubes were above head height, to prevent the handler's catching the blast. The circles of the sights weaved and danced about the running figure. Kinton realized to his surprise that the effort of seizing the weapon had him panting. Or was it the fright at having a spear thrown at him? He decided that Birken had not come close enough for that, and wondered if he was afraid of his own impending action. It wasn't fair, he complained to himself. The poor slob only had a spear, and a man couldn't blame him for wanting to get back to his own sort. He was limping ... hurt ... how could they expect him to realize—? Then, abruptly, his lips tightened to a thin line. The sights steadied on Birken as the latter approached the foot of the ladder leading to the entrance port of the spaceship. Kinton pressed the firing stud. Across the hundred-yard space streaked four flaring little projectiles. Kinton, without exactly seeing each, was aware of the general lines of flight diverging gradually to bracket the figure of Birken. One struck the ground beside the man just as he set one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, and skittered away past one fin of the ship before exploding. Two others burst against the hull, scattering metal fragments, and another puffed on the upright of the ladder just above Birken's head. The spaceman was blown back from the ladder. He balanced on his heels for a moment with outstretched fingers reaching toward the grips from which they had been torn. Then he crumpled into a limp huddle on the yellowing turf. Kinton sighed. The constable took the weapon from him, reloaded deftly, and proffered it again. When the Terran did not reach for it, the officer held out a clawed hand to receive it. He gestured silently, and the constable trotted across [114] the intervening ground to bend over Birken. "He is dead," said Klaft when the constable straightened up with a curt wave. "Will ... will you have someone see to him, please?" Kinton requested, turning toward the helicopter. "Yes, George," said Klaft. "George...?" "Well?" "It would be very instructive—that is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee would like to—" "All right!" yielded Kinton, surprised at the harshness of his own voice. "Just tell him not to bring around any sketches of the various organs for a few months!" He climbed into the helicopter and slumped into his seat. Presently, he was aware of Klaft edging into the seat across the aisle. He looked up. "The police will stay until cars from town arrive. They are coming now," said his aide. Kinton stared at his hands, wondering at the fact that they were not shaking. He felt dejected, empty, not like a man who had just been at a high pitch of excitement. "Why did you not let him go, George?" "What? Why ... why ... he would have destroyed the ship you worked so hard to build. There is no safe path through the Dome of Eyes." "No predictable path," Klaft corrected. "But what then? We would have built you another ship, George, for it was you who showed us how." Kinton flexed his fingers slowly. "He was just no good. You know the murder he did here; we can only guess what he did among my own ... among Terrans. Should he have a chance to go back and commit more crimes?" "I understand, George, the logic of it," said Klaft. "I meant ... it is not my place to say this ... but you seem unhappy." "Possibly," grunted Kinton wrily. "We, too, have criminals," said the aide, as gently as was possible in his clicking language. "We do not think it necessary to grieve for the pain they bring upon themselves." "No, I suppose not," sighed Kinton. "I ... it's just—" He looked up at the pointed visage, at the strange eyes regarding him sympathetically from beneath the sloping, purple-scaled forehead. "It's just that now I'm lonely ... again," he said. Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Space Science Fiction February 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

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SLINGSHOT BY IRVING W. LANDE Illustrated by Emsh The slingshot was, I believe, one of the few weapons of history that wasn't used in the last war. That doesn't mean it won't be used in the next! "Got a bogey at three o'clock high. Range about six hundred miles." Johnson spoke casually, but his voice in the intercom was thin with tension. Captain Paul Coulter, commanding Space Fighter 308, 58th Squadron, 33rd Fighter Wing, glanced up out of his canopy in the direction indicated, and smiled to himself at the instinctive reaction. Nothing there but the familiar starry backdrop, the moon far down to the left. If the light wasn't right, a ship might be invisible at half a mile. He squeezed the throttle mike button. "Any IFF?" "No IFF." "O.K., let me know as soon as you have his course." Coulter squashed out his cigar and began his cockpit check, grinning without humor as he noticed that his breathing had deepened and his palms were moist on the controls. He looked down to make sure his radio was snug in its pocket on his leg; checked the thigh harness of his emergency rocket, wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked the paired tanks of oxygen behind him, hanging level from his shoulders into their niche in the "cradle." He flipped his helmet closed, locked it, and opened it again. He tossed a sardonic salute at the photograph of a young lady who graced the side of the cockpit. "Wish us luck, sugar." He pressed the mike button again. "You got anything yet, Johnny?" "He's going our way, Paul. Have it exact in a minute." Coulter scanned the full arch of sky visible through the curving panels of the dome, thinking the turgid thoughts that always came when action was near. His chest was full of the familiar weakness—not fear exactly, but a tight, helpless feeling that grew and grew with the waiting. His eyes and hands were busy in the familiar procedure, readying the ship for combat, checking and re-checking the details that could mean life and death, but his mind watched disembodied, yearning back to earth. Sylvia always came back first. Inviting smile and outstretched hands. Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and that clinging, clinging white silk skirt. A whirling montage of laughing, challenging eyes and tossing sky-black hair and soft arms tightening around his neck. Then Jean, cool and self-possessed and slightly disapproving, with warmth and humor peeping through from underneath when she smiled. A lazy, crinkly kind of smile, like Christmas lights going on one by one. He wished he'd acted more grown up that night they watched the rain dance at the pueblo. For the hundredth time, he went over what he remembered of their last date, seeing the gleam of her shoulder, and the angry disappointment in her eyes; hearing again his awkward apologies. She was a nice kid. Silently his mouth formed the words. "You're a nice kid." I think she loves me. She was just mad because I got drunk. The tension of approaching combat suddenly blended with the memory, welling up into a rush of tenderness and affection. He whispered her name, and suddenly he knew that if he got back he was going to ask her to marry him. He thought of his father, rocking on the porch of the Pennsylvania farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered old face serene, as he puffed and listened to the radio beside him. He wished he'd written him last night, instead of joining the usual beer and bull session in the wardroom. He wished—. He wished. "I've got him, Paul. He's got two point seven miles of RV on us. Take thirty degrees high on two point one o'clock for course to IP." Automatically he turned the control wheel to the right and eased it back. The gyros recorded the turn to course. "Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds, then coast two minutes for initial point five hundred miles on his tail." "Right, Johnny. One sixty-five, then two minutes." He set the timer, advanced the throttle to 4 G's, and stepped back an inch as the acceleration took him snugly into the cradle. The Return-To-Station-Fuel and Relative-Velocity-To-Station gauges did their usual double takes on a change of course, as the ship computer recorded the new information. He liked those two gauges—the two old ladies. Mrs. RSF kept track of how much more fuel they had than they needed to get home. When they were moving away from station, she dropped in alarmed little jumps, but when they were headed home, she inched along in serene contentment, or if they were coasting, sneaked triumphantly back up the dial. Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at about ten mps away from home, and above fifteen, she was trembling steadily. He didn't blame the old ladies for worrying. With one hour of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a single squirt unless there was a good reason for it. Most of their time on a mission was spent free wheeling, in the anxiety-laden boredom that fighting men have always known. Wish the Red was coming in across our course. It would have taken less fuel, and the chase wouldn't have taken them so far out. But then they'd probably have been spotted, and lost the precious element of surprise. He blessed the advantage of better radar. In this crazy "war," so like the dogfights of the first world war, the better than two hundred mile edge of American radar was more often than not the margin of victory. The American crews were a little sharper, a little better trained, but with their stripped down ships, and midget crewmen, with no personal safety equipment, the Reds could accelerate longer and faster, and go farther out. You had to get the jump on them, or it was just too bad. The second hand hit forty-five in its third cycle, and he stood loose in the cradle as the power died. Sixty-two combat missions but the government says there's no war. His mind wandered back over eight years in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical tests. Psychological tests. Six months of emotional adjustment in the screep. Primary training. Basic and advanced training. The pride and excitement of being chosen for space fighters. By the time he graduated, the United States and Russia each had several satellite stations operating, but in 1979, the United States had won the race for a permanent station on the Moon. What a grind it had been, bringing in the supplies. A year later the Moon station had "blown up." No warning. No survivors. Just a brand-new medium-sized crater. And six months later, the new station, almost completed, went up again. The diplomats had buzzed like hornets, with accusations and threats, but nothing could be proven—there were bombs stored at the station. The implication was clear enough. There wasn't going to be any Moon station until one government ruled Earth. Or until the United States and Russia figured out a way to get along with each other. And so far, getting along with Russia was like trying to get along with an octopus. Of course there were rumors that the psych warfare boys had some gimmick cooked up, to turn the U. S. S. R. upside down in a revolution, the next time power changed hands, but he'd been hearing that one for years. Still, with four new dictators over there in the last eleven years, there was always a chance. Anyway, he was just a space jockey, doing his job in this screwball fight out here in the empty reaches. Back on Earth, there was no war. The statesmen talked, held conferences, played international chess as ever. Neither side bothered the other's satellites, though naturally they were on permanent alert. There just wasn't going to be any Moon station for a while. Nobody knew what there might be on the Moon, but if one side couldn't have it, then the other side wasn't going to have it either. And meanwhile, the struggle was growing deadlier, month by month, each side groping for the stranglehold, looking for the edge that would give domination of space, or make all-out war a good risk. They hadn't found it yet, but it was getting bloodier out here all the time. For a while, it had been a supreme achievement just to get a ship out and back, but gradually, as the ships improved, there was a little margin left over for weapons. Back a year ago, the average patrol was nothing but a sightseeing tour. Not that there was much to see, when you'd been out a few times. Now, there were Reds around practically every mission. Thirteen missions to go, after today. He wondered if he'd quit at seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old pride and excitement were still strong. He still got a kick out of the way the girls looked at the silver rocket on his chest. But he didn't feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine years old, and he was starting to feel like an old man. He pictured himself lecturing to a group of eager kids. Had a couple of close calls, those last two missions. That Red had looked easy, the way he was wandering around. He hadn't spotted them until they were well into their run, but when he got started he'd made them look like slow motion, just the same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained sudden deceleration.... Coulter shook his head at the memory. And on the last mission they'd been lucky to get a draw. Those boys were good shots. "We're crossing his track, Paul. Turn to nine point five o'clock and hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds, starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!" He completed the operation in silence, remarking to himself how lucky he was to have Johnson. The boy loved a chase. He navigated like a hungry hawk, though you had to admit his techniques were a bit irregular. Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way they operated, remembering the courses, the tests, the procedures practiced until they could do them backwards blindfolded. When they tangled with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates went out the hatch. They navigated by the enemy. There were times during a fight when he had no more idea of his position than what the old ladies told him, and what he could see of the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon. And using "right side up" as a basis for navigation. He chuckled again. Still, the service had had to concede on "right side up," in designing the ships, so there was something to be said for it. They hadn't been able to simulate gravity without fouling up the ships so they had to call the pilot's head "up." There was something comforting about it. He'd driven a couple of the experimental jobs, one with the cockpit set on gimbals, and one where the whole ship rotated, and he hadn't cared for them at all. Felt disoriented, with something nagging at his mind all the time, as though the ships had been sabotaged. A couple of pilots had gone nuts in the "spindizzy," and remembering his own feelings as he watched the sky go by, it was easy to understand. Anyway, "right side up" tied in perfectly with the old "clock" system Garrity had dug out of those magazines he was always reading. Once they got used to it, it had turned out really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his astrogation prof, would have turned purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd use such a conglomeration. But it worked. And when you were in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and that was good enough for Coulter. He'd submitted a report on it to Colonel Silton. "You've got him, Paul. We're dead on his tail, five hundred miles back, and matching velocity. Turn forty-two degrees right, and you're lined up right on him." Johnson was pleased with the job he'd done. Coulter watched the pip move into his sightscreen. It settled less than a degree off dead center. He made the final corrections in course, set the air pressure control to eight pounds, and locked his helmet. "Nice job, Johnny. Let's button up. You with us, Guns?" Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed tiger. "Ah'm with yew, cap'n." Coulter advanced the throttle to 5 G's. And with the hiss of power, SF 308 began the deadly, intricate, precarious maneuver called a combat pass—a maneuver inherited from the aerial dogfight—though it often turned into something more like the broadside duels of the old sailing ships—as the best and least suicidal method of killing a spaceship. To start on the enemy's tail, just out of his radar range. To come up his track at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six .30 caliber machine guns from fifty miles out. In the last three or four seconds, to break out just enough to clear him, praying that he won't break in the same direction. And to keep on going. Four minutes and thirty-four seconds to the break. Sixty seconds at 5 G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds of free wheeling; and then, if they were lucky, the twenty-two frantic seconds they were out here for—throwing a few pounds of steel slugs out before them in one unbroken burst, groping out fifty miles into the darkness with steel and radar fingers to kill a duplicate of themselves. This is the worst. These three minutes are the worst. One hundred ninety-two eternal seconds of waiting, of deathly silence and deathly calm, feeling and hearing nothing but the slow pounding of their own heartbeats. Each time he got back, it faded away, and all he remembered was the excitement. But each time he went through it, it was worse. Just standing and waiting in the silence, praying they weren't spotted—staring at the unmoving firmament and knowing he was a projectile hurtling two miles each second straight at a clump of metal and flesh that was the enemy. Knowing the odds were twenty to one against their scoring a kill ... unless they ran into him. At eighty-five seconds, he corrected slightly to center the pip. The momentary hiss of the rockets was a relief. He heard the muffled yammering as Guns fired a short burst from the .30's standing out of their compartments around the sides of the ship. They were practically recoilless, but the burst drifted him forward against the cradle harness. And suddenly the waiting was over. The ship filled with vibration as Guns opened up. Twenty-five seconds to target. His eyes flicked from the sightscreen to the sky ahead, looking for the telltale flare of rockets—ready to follow like a ferret. There he is! At eighteen miles from target, a tiny blue light flickered ahead. He forgot everything but the sightscreen, concentrating on keeping the pip dead center. The guns hammered on. It seemed they'd been firing for centuries. At ten-mile range, the combat radar kicked the automatics in, turning the ship ninety degrees to her course in one and a half seconds. He heard the lee side firing cut out, as Garrity hung on with two, then three guns. He held it as long as he could. Closer than he ever had before. At four miles he poured 12 G's for two seconds. They missed ramming by something around a hundred yards. The enemy ship flashed across his tail in a fraction of a second, already turned around and heading up its own track, yet it seemed to Paul he could make out every detail—the bright red star, even the tortured face of the pilot. Was there something lopsided in the shape of that rocket plume, or was he just imagining it in the blur of their passing? And did he hear a ping just at that instant, feel the ship vibrate for a second? He continued the turn in the direction the automatics had started, bringing his nose around to watch the enemy's track. And as the shape of the plume told him the other ship was still heading back toward Earth, he brought the throttle back up to 12 G's, trying to overcome the lead his pass had given away. Guns spoke quietly to Johnson. "Let me know when we kill his RV. Ah may get another shot at him." And Johnny answered, hurt, "What do you think I'm doing down here—reading one of your magazines?" Paul was struggling with hundred-pound arms, trying to focus the telescope that swiveled over the panel. As the field cleared, he could see that the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering red and orange along one side. Quietly and viciously, he was talking to himself. "Blow! Blow!" And she blew. Like a dirty ragged bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls of sparks into the blackness. Something glowed red for a while, and slowly faded. There, but for the grace of God.... Paul shuddered in a confused mixture of relief and revulsion. He cut back to 4 G's, noting that RVS registered about a mile per second away from station, and suddenly became aware that the red light was on for loss of air. The cabin pressure gauge read zero, and his heart throbbed into his throat as he remembered that pinging sound, just as they passed the enemy ship. He told Garrity to see if he could locate the loss, and any other damage, and was shortly startled by a low amazed whistle in his earphones. "If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah wouldn't believe it. Musta been one of his shells went right around the fuel tank and out again, without hittin' it. There's at least three inches of tank on a line between the holes! He musta been throwin' curves at us. Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!" Paul felt no surprise, only relief at having the trouble located. The reaction to the close call might not come till hours later. "This kind of luck we can do without. Can you patch the holes?" "Ah can patch the one where it came in, but it musta been explodin' on the way out. There's a hole Ah could stick mah head through." "That's a good idea." Johnson was not usually very witty, but this was one he couldn't resist. "Never mind, Guns. A patch that big wouldn't be safe to hold air." They were about eighty thousand miles out. He set course for Earth at about five and a half mps, which Johnson calculated to bring them in on the station on the "going away" side of its orbit, and settled back for the tedious two hours of free wheeling. For ten or fifteen minutes, the interphone crackled with the gregariousness born of recent peril, and gradually the ship fell silent as each man returned to his own private thoughts. Paul was wondering about the men on the other ship—whether any of them were still alive. Eighty thousand miles to fall. That was a little beyond the capacity of an emergency rocket—about 2 G's for sixty seconds—even if they had them. What a way to go home! He wondered what he'd do if it happened to him. Would he wait out his time, or just unlock his helmet. Guns' drawl broke into his reverie. "Say, cap'n, Ah've been readin' in this magazine about a trick they used to use, called skip bombin'. They'd hang a bomb on the bottom of one of these airplanes, and fly along the ground, right at what they wanted to hit. Then they'd let the bomb go and get out of there, and the bomb would sail right on into the target. You s'pose we could fix this buggy up with an A bomb or an H bomb we could let go a few hundred miles out? Stick a proximity fuse on it, and a time fuse, too, in case we missed. Just sittin' half a mile apart and tradin' shots like we did on that last mission is kinda hard on mah nerves, and it's startin' to happen too often." "Nice work if we could get it. I'm not crazy about those broadside battles myself. You'd think they'd have found something better than these thirty caliber popguns by now, but the odds say we've got to throw as many different chunks of iron as we can, to have a chance of hitting anything, and even then it's twenty to one against us. You wouldn't have one chance in a thousand of scoring a hit with a bomb at that distance, even if they didn't spot it and take off. What you'd need would be a rocket that could chase them, with the bomb for a head. And there's no way we could carry that size rocket, or fire it if we could. Some day these crates will come with men's rooms, and we'll have a place to carry something like that." "How big would a rocket like that be?" "Five, six feet, by maybe a foot. Weigh at least three hundred pounds." It was five minutes before Guns spoke again. "Ah been thinkin', cap'n. With a little redecoratin', Ah think Ah could get a rocket that size in here with me. We could weld a rail to one of the gun mounts that would hold it up to five or six G's. Then after we got away from station, Ah could take it outside and mount it on the rail." "Forget it, lad. If they ever caught us pulling a trick like that, they'd have us on hydroponic duty for the next five years. They just don't want us playing around with bombs, till the experts get all the angles figured out, and build ships to handle them. And besides, who do you think will rig a bomb like that, without anybody finding out? And where do you think we'd get a bomb in the first place? They don't leave those things lying around. Kovacs watches them like a mother hen. I think he counts them twice a day." "Sorry, cap'n. Ah just figured if you could get hold of a bomb, Ah know a few of the boys who could rig the thing up for us and keep their mouths shut." "Well, forget about it. It's not a bad idea, but we haven't any bomb." "Right, cap'n." But it was Paul who couldn't forget about it. All the rest of the way back to station, he kept seeing visions of a panel sliding aside in the nose of a sleek and gleaming ship, while a small rocket pushed its deadly snout forward, and then streaked off at tremendous acceleration. Interrogation was brief. The mission had turned up nothing new. Their kill made eight against seven for Doc Miller's crew, and they made sure Miller and the boys heard about it. They were lightheaded with the elation that followed a successful mission, swapping insults with the rest of the squadron, and reveling in the sheer contentment of being back safe. It wasn't until he got back to his stall, and started to write his father a long overdue letter, that he remembered he had heard Kovacs say he was going on leave. When he finished the letter, he opened the copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" he had borrowed from Rodriguez's limited but colorful library. He couldn't keep his mind on it. He kept thinking of the armament officer. Kovacs was a quiet, intelligent kid, devoted to his work. Coulter wasn't too intimate with him. He wasn't a spaceman, for one thing. One of those illogical but powerful distinctions that sub-divided the men of the station. And he was a little too polite to be easy company. Paul remembered the time he had walked into the Muroc Base Officer's Club with Marge Halpern on his arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised on Kovacs' face the moment he first saw them. Marge was a striking blonde with a direct manner, who liked men, especially orbit station men. He hadn't thought about the incident since then, but the look in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to him as he tried to read. He wasn't sure how he got there, or why, when he found himself walking into Colonel Silton's office to ask for the leave he'd passed up at his fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking it several times, but the thought of leaving the squadron, even for a couple of weeks, had made him feel guilty, as though he were quitting. Once he had his papers, he started to get excited about it. As he cleaned up his paper work and packed his musette, his hands were fumbling, and his mind was full of Sylvia. The vastness of Muroc Base was as incredible as ever. Row on uncounted row of neat buildings, each resting at the top of its own hundred-yard deep elevator shaft. A pulsing, throbbing city, dedicated to the long slow struggle to get into space and stay there. The service crew eyed them with studied indifference, as they writhed out of the small hatch and stepped to the ground. They drew a helijet at operations, and headed immediately for Los Angeles. Kovacs had been impressed when Paul asked if he'd care to room together while they were on leave. He was quiet on the flight, as he had been on the way down, listening contentedly, while Paul talked combat and women with Bob Parandes, another pilot going on leave. They parked the helijet at Municipal Field and headed for the public PV booths, picking up a coterie of two dogs and five assorted children on the way. The kids followed quietly in their wake, ecstatic at the sight of their uniforms. Paul squared his shoulders, as befitted a hero, and tousled a couple of uncombed heads as they walked. The kids clustered around the booths, as Kovacs entered one to locate a hotel room, and Paul another, to call Sylvia. "Honey, I've been so scared you weren't coming back. Where are you? When will I see you? Why didn't you write?..." She sputtered to a stop as he held up both hands in defense. "Whoa, baby. One thing at a time. I'm at the airport. You'll see me tonight, and I'll tell you the rest then. That is, if you're free tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after that. Are you free?" Her hesitation was only momentary. "Well, I was going out—with a girl friend. But she'll understand. What's up?" He took a deep breath. "I'd like to get out of the city for a few days, where we can take things easy and be away from the crowds. And there is another guy I'd like to bring along." "We could take my helijet out to my dad's cottage at— What did you say? " It was a ticklish job explaining about Kovacs, but when she understood that he just wanted to do a friend a favor, and she'd still have Paul all to herself, she calmed down. They made their arrangements quickly, and switched off. He hesitated a minute before he called Marge. She was quite a dish to give up. Once she'd seen him with Sylvia, he'd be strictly persona non grata —that was for sure. It was an unhappy thought. Well, maybe it was in a good cause. He shrugged and called her. She nearly cut him off when she first heard his request, but he did some fast talking. The idea of several days at the cottage intrigued her, and when he described how smitten Kovacs had been, she brightened up and agreed to come. He switched off, adjusted the drape of his genuine silk scarf, and stepped out of the booth. Kovacs and the kids were waiting. The armament officer had apparently been telling them of Paul's exploits. They glowed with admiration. The oldest boy, about eleven, had true worship in his eyes. He hesitated a moment, then asked gravely: "Would you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?" Paul eyed the time-honored weapon that dangled from the youngster's hand. He bent over and tapped it with his finger. His voice was warm and confiding, but his eyes were far away. "I think next we're going to try a slingshot," he said. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. ***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SLINGSHOT*** ******* This file should be named 22462-h.txt or 22462-h.zip ******* This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/2/2/4/6/22462 Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. 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22524

THE HUNTERS BY WILLIAM MORRISON ILLUSTRATED BY VAN DONGEN To all who didn't know him, Curt George was a mighty hunter and actor. But this time he was up against others who could really act, and whose business was the hunting of whole worlds. There were thirty or more of the little girls, their ages ranging apparently from nine to eleven, all of them chirping away like a flock of chicks as they followed the old mother hen past the line of cages. "Now, now, girls," called Miss Burton cheerily. "Don't scatter. I can't keep my eye on you if you get too far away from me. You, Hilda, give me that water pistol. No, don't fill it up first at that fountain. And Frances, stop bouncing your ball. You'll lose it through the bars, and a polar bear may get it and not want to give it back." Frances giggled. "Oh, Miss Burton, do you think the polar bear would want to play catch?" The two men who were looking on wore pleased smiles. "Charming," said Manto. "But somewhat unpredictable, despite all our experiences, muy amigo ." "No attempts at Spanish, Manto, not here. It calls attention to us. And you are not sure of the grammar anyway. You may find yourself saying things you do not intend." "Sorry, Palit. It wasn't an attempt to show my skill, I assure you. It's that by now I have a tendency to confuse one language with another." "I know. You were never a linguist. But about these interesting creatures—" "I suggest that they could stand investigation. It would be good to know how they think." "Whatever you say, Manto. If you wish, we shall join the little ladies." "We must have our story prepared first." Palit nodded, and the two men stepped under the shade of a tree whose long, drooping, leaf-covered branches formed a convenient screen. For a moment, the tree hid silence. Then there came from beneath the branches the chatter of girlish voices, and two little girls skipped merrily away. Miss Burton did not at first notice that now she had an additional two children in her charge. "Do you think you will be able to keep your English straight?" asked one of the new little girls. The other one smiled with amusement and at first did not answer. Then she began to skip around her companion and chant, "I know a secret, I know a secret." There was no better way to make herself inconspicuous. For some time, Miss Burton did not notice her. The polar bears, the grizzlies, the penguins, the reptiles, all were left behind. At times the children scattered, but Miss Burton knew how to get them together again, and not one was lost. "Here, children, is the building where the kangaroos live. Who knows where kangaroos come from?" "Australia!" clanged the shrill chorus. "That's right. And what other animals come from Australia?" "I know, Miss Burton!" cried Frances, a dark-haired nine-year-old with a pair of glittering eyes that stared like a pair of critics from a small heart-shaped face. "I've been here before. Wallabies and wombats!" "Very good, Frances." Frances smirked at the approbation. "I've been to the zoo lots of times," she said to the girl next to her. "My father takes me." "I wish my father would take me too," replied the other little girl, with an air of wistfulness. "Why don't you ask him to?" Before the other little girl could answer, Frances paused, cocked her head slightly, and demanded, "Who are you? You aren't in our class." "I'm in Miss Hassel's class." "Miss Hassel? Who is she? Is she in our school?" "I don't know," said the other little girl uncertainly. "I go to P. S. 77—" "Oh, Miss Burton," screamed Frances. "Here's a girl who isn't in our class! She got lost from her own class!" "Really?" Miss Burton seemed rather pleased at the idea that some other teacher had been so careless as to lose one of her charges. "What's your name, child?" "I'm Carolyn." "Carolyn what?" "Carolyn Manto. Please, Miss Burton, I had to go to the bathroom, and then when I came out—" "Yes, yes, I know." A shrill cry came from another section of her class. "Oh, Miss Burton, here's another one who's lost!" The other little girl was pushed forward. "Now, who are you ?" Miss Burton asked. "I'm Doris Palit. I went with Carolyn to the bathroom—" Miss Burton made a sound of annoyance. Imagine losing two children and not noticing it right away. The other teacher must be frantic by now, and serve her right for being so careless. "All right, you may stay with us until we find a policeman—" She interrupted herself. "Frances, what are you giggling at now?" "It's Carolyn. She's making faces just like you!" "Really, Carolyn, that isn't at all nice!" Carolyn's face altered itself in a hurry, so as to lose any resemblance to Miss Burton's. "I'm sorry, Miss Burton, I didn't really mean to do anything wrong." "Well, I'd like to know how you were brought up, if you don't know that it's wrong to mimic people to their faces. A big girl like you, too. How old are you, Carolyn?" Carolyn shrank, she hoped imperceptibly, by an inch. "I'm two—" An outburst of shrill laughter. "She's two years old, she's two years old!" "I was going to say, I'm to welve . Almost, anyway." "Eleven years old," said Miss Burton. "Old enough to know better." "I'm sorry, Miss Burton. And honest, Miss Burton, I didn't mean anything, but I'm studying to be an actress, and I imitate people, like the actors you see on television—" "Oh, Miss Burton, please don't make her go home with a policeman. If she's going to be an actress, I'll bet she'd love to see Curt George!" "Well, after the way she's behaved, I don't know whether I should let her. I really don't." "Please, Miss Burton, it was an accident. I won't do it again." "All right, if you're good, and cause no trouble. But we still have plenty of time before seeing Mr. George. It's only two now, and we're not supposed to go to the lecture hall until four." "Miss Burton," called Barbara Willman, "do you think he'd give us his autograph?" "Now, children, I've warned you about that. You mustn't annoy him. Mr. George is a famous movie actor, and his time is valuable. It's very kind of him to offer to speak to us, especially when so many grown-up people are anxious to hear him, but we mustn't take advantage of his kindness." "But he likes children, Miss Burton! My big sister read in a movie magazine where it said he's just crazy about them." "I know, but—he's not in good health, children. They say he got jungle fever in Africa, where he was shooting all those lions, and rhinoceroses, and elephants for his new picture. That's why you mustn't bother him too much." "But he looks so big and strong, Miss Burton. It wouldn't hurt him to sign an autograph!" "Oh, yes, it would," asserted one little girl. "He shakes. When he has an attack of fever, his hand shakes." "Yes, Africa is a dangerous continent, and one never knows how the dangers will strike one," said Miss Burton complacently. "So we must all remember how bravely Mr. George is fighting his misfortune, and do our best not to tire him out." In the bright light that flooded the afternoon breakfast table, Curt George's handsome, manly face wore an expression of distress. He groaned dismally, and muttered, "What a head I've got, what a head. How do you expect me to face that gang of kids without a drink to pick me up?" "You've had your drink," said Carol. She was slim, attractive, and efficient. At the moment she was being more efficient than attractive, and she could sense his resentment. "That's all you get. Now, lay off, and try to be reasonably sober, for a change." "But those kids! They'll squeal and giggle—" "They're about the only audience in the world that won't spot you as a drunk. God knows where I could find any one else who'd believe that your hand shakes because of fever." "I know that you're looking out for my best interests, Carol. But one more drink wouldn't hurt me." She said wearily, but firmly, "I don't argue with drunks, Curt. I just go ahead and protect them from themselves. No drinks." "Afterwards?" "I can't watch you the way a mother watches a child." The contemptuous reply sent his mind off on a new tack. "You could if we were married." "I've never believed in marrying weak characters to reform them." "But if I proved to you that I could change—" "Prove it first, and I'll consider your proposal afterwards." "You certainly are a cold-blooded creature, Carol. But I suppose that in your profession you have to be." "Cold, suspicious, nasty—and reliable. It's inevitable when I must deal with such warm-hearted, trusting, and unreliable clients." He watched her move about the room, clearing away the dishes from his meager breakfast. "What are you humming, Carol?" "Was I humming?" "I thought I recognized it— All of Me, Why Not Take All of Me ? That's it! Your subconscious gives you away. You really want to marry me!" "A mistake," she said coolly. "My subconscious doesn't know what it's talking about. All I want of you is the usual ten per cent." "Can't you forget for a moment that you're an agent, and remember that you're a woman, too?" "No. Not unless you forget that you're a drunk, and remember that you're a man. Not unless you make me forget that you drank your way through Africa—" "Because you weren't there with me!" "—with hardly enough energy to let them dress you in that hunter's outfit and photograph you as if you were shooting lions." "You're so unforgiving, Carol. You don't have much use for me, do you—consciously, that is?" "Frankly, Curt, no. I don't have much use for useless people." "I'm not entirely useless. I earn you that ten per cent—" "I'd gladly forego that to see you sober." "But it's your contempt for me that drives me to drink. And when I think of having to face those dear little kiddies with nothing inside me—" "There should be happiness inside you at the thought of your doing a good deed. Not a drop, George, not a drop." The two little girls drew apart from the others and began to whisper into each other's ears. The whispers were punctuated by giggles which made the entire childish conversation seem quite normal. But Palit was in no laughing mood. He said, in his own language, "You're getting careless, Manto. You had no business imitating her expression." "I'm sorry, Palit, but it was so suggestive. And I'm a very suggestible person." "So am I. But I control myself." "Still, if the temptation were great enough, I don't think you'd be able to resist either." "The issues are important enough to make me resist." "Still, I thought I saw your own face taking on a bit of her expression too." "You are imagining things, Manto. Another thing, that mistake in starting to say you were two hundred years old—" "They would have thought it a joke. And I think I got out of that rather neatly." "You like to skate on thin ice, don't you, Manto? Just as you did when you changed your height. You had no business shrinking right out in public like that." "I did it skillfully. Not a single person noticed." " I noticed." "Don't quibble." "I don't intend to. Some of these children have very sharp eyes. You'd be surprised at what they see." Manto said tolerantly, "You're getting jittery, Palit. We've been away from home too long." "I am not jittery in the least. But I believe in taking due care." "What could possibly happen to us? If we were to announce to the children and the teacher, and to every one in this zoo, for that matter, exactly who and what we were, they wouldn't believe us. And even if they did, they wouldn't be able to act rapidly enough to harm us." "You never can tell about such things. Wise—people—simply don't take unnecessary chances." "I'll grant that you're my superior in such wisdom." "You needn't be sarcastic, Manto, I know I'm superior. I realize what a godsend this planet is—you don't. It has the right gravity, a suitable atmosphere, the proper chemical composition—everything." "Including a population that will be helpless before us." "And you would take chances of losing all this." "Don't be silly, Palit. What chances am I taking?" "The chance of being discovered. Here we stumble on this place quite by accident. No one at home knows about it, no one so much as suspects that it exists. We must get back and report—and you do all sorts of silly things which may reveal what we are, and lead these people to suspect their danger." This time, Manto's giggle was no longer mere camouflage, but expressed to a certain degree how he felt. "They cannot possibly suspect. We have been all over the world, we have taken many forms and adapted ourselves to many customs, and no one has suspected. And even if danger really threatened, it would be easy to escape. I could take the form of the school teacher herself, of a policeman, of any one in authority. However, at present there is not the slightest shadow of danger. So, Palit, you had better stop being fearful." Palit said firmly, "Be careful, and I won't be fearful. That's all there is to it." "I'll be careful. After all, I shouldn't want us to lose these children. They're so exactly the kind we need. Look how inquiring they are, how unafraid, how quick to adapt to any circumstances—" Miss Burton's voice said, "Good gracious, children, what language are you using? Greek?" They had been speaking too loud, they had been overheard. Palit and Manto stared at each other, and giggled coyly. Then, after a second to think, Palit said, "Onay, Issmay Urtonbay!" "What?" Frances shrilled triumphantly, "It isn't Greek, Miss Burton, it's Latin—Pig-Latin. She said, 'No, Miss Burton.'" "Good heavens, what is Pig-Latin?" "It's a kind of way of talking where you talk kind of backwards. Like, you don't say, Me , you say, Emay ." "You don't say, Yes , you say Esyay ," added another little girl. "You don't say, You , you say, Ouyay . You don't say—" "All right, all right, I get the idea." "You don't say—" "That'll do," said Miss Burton firmly. "Now, let's get along to the lion house. And please, children, do not make faces at the lions. How would you like to be in a cage and have people make faces at you? Always remember to be considerate to others." "Even lions, Miss Burton?" "Even lions." "But Mr. George shot lots of lions. Was he considerate of them too?" "There is no time for silly questions," said Miss Burton, with the same firmness. "Come along." They all trouped after her, Palit and Manto bringing up the rear. Manto giggled, and whispered with amusement, "That Pig-Latin business was quick thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite unnecessary. The things that you do to avoid being suspected!" "It never hurts to take precautions. And I think that now it is time to leave." "No, not yet. You are always anxious to learn details before reporting. Why not learn a few more details now?" "Because they are not necessary. We already have a good understanding of human customs and psychology." "But not of the psychology of children. And they, if you remember, are the ones who will have to adapt. We shall be asked about them. It would be nice if we could report that they are fit for all-purpose service, on a wide range of planets. Let us stay awhile longer." "All right," conceded Palit, grudgingly. So they stayed, and out of some twigs and leaves they shaped the necessary coins with which to buy peanuts, and popcorn, and ice cream, and other delicacies favored by the young. Manto wanted to win easy popularity by treating a few of the other children, but Palit put his girlish foot down. No use arousing suspicion. Even as it was— "Gee, your father gives you an awful lot of spending money," said Frances enviously. "Is he rich?" "We get as much as we want," replied Manto carelessly. "Gosh, I wish I did." Miss Burton collected her brood. "Come together, children, I have something to say to you. Soon it will be time to go in and hear Mr. George. Now, if Mr. George is so kind as to entertain us, don't you think that it's only proper for us to entertain him?" "We could put on our class play!" yelled Barbara. "Barbara's a fine one to talk," said Frances. "She doesn't even remember her lines." "No, children, we mustn't do anything we can't do well. That wouldn't make a good impression. And besides, there is no time for a play. Perhaps Barbara will sing—" "I can sing a 'Thank You' song," interrupted Frances. "That would be nice." "I can recite," added another little girl. "Fine. How about you, Carolyn? You and your little friend, Doris. Can she act too?" Carolyn giggled. "Oh, yes, she can act very well. I can act like people. She can act like animals." The laughing, girlish eyes evaded a dirty look from the little friend. "She can act like any kind of animal." "She's certainly a talented child. But she seems so shy!" "Oh, no," said Carolyn. "She likes to be coaxed." "She shouldn't be like that. Perhaps, Carolyn, you and Doris can do something together. And perhaps, too, Mr. George will be pleased to see that your teacher also has talent." "You, Miss Burton?" Miss Burton coughed modestly. "Yes, children, I never told you, but I was once ambitious to be an actress too. I studied dramatics, and really, I was quite good at it. I was told that if I persevered I might actually be famous. Just think, your teacher might actually have been a famous actress! However, in my day, there were many coarse people on the stage, and the life of the theater was not attractive—but perhaps we'd better not speak of that. At any rate, I know the principles of the dramatic art very well." "God knows what I'll have to go through," said Curt. "And I don't see how I can take it sober." "I don't see how they can take you drunk," replied Carol. "Why go through with it at all? Why not call the whole thing quits?" "Because people are depending on you. You always want to call quits whenever you run into something you don't like. You may as well call quits to your contract if that's the way you feel." "And to your ten per cent, darling." "You think I'd mind that. I work for my ten per cent, Curt, sweetheart. I work too damn hard for that ten per cent." "You can marry me and take it easy. Honest, Carol, if you treated me better, if you showed me I meant something to you, I'd give up drinking." She made a face. "Don't talk nonsense. Take your outfit, and let's get ready to go. Unless you want to change here, and walk around dressed as a lion hunter." "Why not? I've walked around dressed as worse. A drunk." "Drunks don't attract attention. They're too ordinary." "But a drunken lion hunter—that's something special." He went into the next room and began to change. "Carol," he called. "Do you like me?" "At times." "Would you say that you liked me very much?" "When you're sober. Rarely." "Love me?" "Once in a blue moon." "What would I have to do for you to want to marry me?" "Amount to something." "I like that. Don't you think I amount to something now? Women swoon at the sight of my face on the screen, and come to life again at the sound of my voice." "The women who swoon at you will swoon at anybody. Besides, I don't consider that making nitwits swoon is a useful occupation for a real man." "How can I be useful, Carol? No one ever taught me how." "Some people manage without being taught." "I suppose I could think how if I had a drink inside me." "Then you'll have to do without thinking." He came into the room again, powerful, manly, determined-looking. There was an expression in his eye which indicated courage without end, a courage that would enable him to brave the wrath of man, beast, or devil. "How do I look?" "Your noble self, of course. A poor woman's edition of Rudolph Valentino." "I feel terrified. I don't know how I'm going to face those kids. If they were boys it wouldn't be so bad, but a bunch of little girls!" "They'll grow up to be your fans, if you're still alive five years from now. Meanwhile, into each life some rain must fall." "You would talk of water, when you know how I feel." "Sorry. Come on, let's go." The lecture hall resounded with giggles. And beneath the giggles was a steady undercurrent of whispers, of girlish confidences exchanged, of girlish hopes that would now be fulfilled. Miss Burton's class was not the only one which had come to hear the famous actor-hunter describe his brave exploits. There were at least five others like it, and by some mistake, a class of boys, who also whispered to each other, in manly superiority, and pretended to find amusement in the presence of so many of the fairer sex. In this atmosphere of giggles and whispers, Manto and Palit could exchange confidences without being noticed. Palit said savagely, "Why did you tell her that I could act too?" "Why, because it's the truth. You're a very good animal performer. You make a wonderful dragon, for instance. Go on, Palit, show her what a fine dragon you can—" "Stop it, you fool, before you cause trouble!" "Very well, Palit. Did I tempt you?" "Did you tempt me! You and your sense of humor!" "You and your lack of it! But let's not argue now, Palit. Here, I think, comes the lion-hunter. Let's scream, and be as properly excited as every one else is." My God, he thought, how can they keep their voices so high so long? My eardrums hurt already. How do they stand a lifetime of it? Even an hour? "Go ahead," whispered Carol. "You've seen the script—go into your act. Tell them what a hero you are. You have the odds in your favor to start with." "My lovely looks," he said, with some bitterness. "Lovely is the word for you. But forget that. If you're good—you'll get a drink afterwards." "Will it be one of those occasions when you love me?" "If the moon turns blue." He strode to the front of the platform, an elephant gun swinging easily at his side, an easy grin radiating from his confident, rugged face. The cheers rose to a shrill fortissimo, but the grin did not vanish. What a great actor he really was, he told himself, to be able to pretend he liked this. An assistant curator of some collection in the zoo, a flustered old woman, was introducing him. There were a few laudatory references to his great talents as an actor, and he managed to look properly modest as he listened. The remarks about his knowledge of wild and ferocious beasts were a little harder to take, but he took them. Then the old woman stepped back, and he was facing his fate alone. "Children," he began. A pause, a bashful grin. "Perhaps I should rather say, my friends. I'm not one to think of you as children. Some people think of me as a child myself, because I like to hunt, and have adventures. They think that such things are childish. But if they are, I'm glad to be a child. I'm glad to be one of you. Yes, I think I will call you my friends. "Perhaps you regard me, my friends, as a very lucky person. But when I recall some of the narrow escapes I have had, I don't agree with you. I remember once, when we were on the trail of a rogue elephant—" He told the story of the rogue elephant, modestly granting a co-hero's role to his guide. Then another story illustrating the strange ways of lions. The elephant gun figured in still another tale, this time of a vicious rhinoceros. His audience was quiet now, breathless with interest, and he welcomed the respite from shrillness he had won for his ears. "And now, my friends, it is time to say farewell." He actually looked sad and regretful. "But it is my hope that I shall be able to see you again—" Screams of exultation, shrill as ever, small hands beating enthusiastically to indicate joy. Thank God that's over with, he thought. Now for those drinks—and he didn't mean drink, singular. Talk of being useful, he'd certainly been useful now. He'd made those kids happy. What more can any reasonable person want? But it wasn't over with. Another old lady had stepped up on the platform. "Mr. George," she said, in a strangely affected voice, like that of the first dramatic teacher he had ever had, the one who had almost ruined his acting career. "Mr. George, I can't tell you how happy you have made us all, young and old. Hasn't Mr. George made us happy, children?" "Yes, Miss Burton!" came the shrill scream. "And we feel that it would be no more than fair to repay you in some small measure for the pleasure you have given us. First, a 'Thank You' song by Frances Heller—" He hadn't expected this, and he repressed a groan. Mercifully, the first song was short. He grinned the thanks he didn't feel. To think that he could take this, while sober as a judge! What strength of character, what will-power! Next, Miss Burton introduced another kid, who recited. And then, Miss Burton stood upright and recited herself. That was the worst of all. He winced once, then bore up. You can get used even to torture, he told himself. An adult making a fool of herself is always more painful than a kid. And that affected elocutionist's voice gave him the horrors. But he thanked her too. His good deed for the day. Maybe Carol would have him now, he thought. A voice shrilled, "Miss Burton?" "Yes, dear?" "Aren't you going to call on Carolyn to act?" "Oh, yes, I was forgetting. Come up here, Carolyn, come up, Doris. Carolyn and Doris, Mr. George, are studying how to act. They act people and animals. Who knows? Some day they, too, may be in the movies, just as you are, Mr. George. Wouldn't that be nice, children?" What the devil do you do in a case like that? You grin, of course—but what do you say, without handing over your soul to the devil? Agree how nice it would be to have those sly little brats with faces magnified on every screen all over the country? Like hell you do. "Now, what are we going to act, children?" "Please, Miss Burton," said Doris. "I don't know how to act. I can't even imitate a puppy. Really I can't, Miss Burton—" "Come, come, mustn't be shy. Your friend says that you act very nicely indeed. Can't want to go on the stage and still be shy. Now, do you know any movie scenes? Shirley Temple used to be a good little actress, I remember. Can you do any scenes that she does?" The silence was getting to be embarrassing. And Carol said he didn't amount to anything, he never did anything useful. Why, if thanks to his being here this afternoon, those kids lost the ambition to go on the stage, the whole human race would have cause to be grateful to him. To him, and to Miss Burton. She'd kill ambition in anybody. Miss Burton had an idea. "I know what to do, children. If you can act animals—Mr. George has shown you what the hunter does; you show him what the lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris, you're going to be lions. You are waiting in your lairs, ready to pounce on the unwary hunter. Crouch now, behind that chair. Closer and closer he comes—you act it out, Mr. George, please, that's the way—ever closer, and now your muscles tighten for the spring, and you open your great, wide, red mouths in a great, great big roar—" A deep and tremendous roar, as of thunder, crashed through the auditorium. A roar—and then, from the audience, an outburst of terrified screaming such as he had never heard. The bristles rose at the back of his neck, and his heart froze. Facing him across the platform were two lions, tensed as if to leap. Where they had come from he didn't know, but there they were, eyes glaring, manes ruffled, more terrifying than any he had seen in Africa. There they were, with the threat of death and destruction in their fierce eyes, and here he was, terror and helplessness on his handsome, manly, and bloodless face, heart unfrozen now and pounding fiercely, knees melting, hands— Hands clutching an elephant gun. The thought was like a director's command. With calm efficiency, with all the precision of an actor playing a scene rehearsed a thousand times, the gun leaped to his shoulder, and now its own roar thundered out a challenge to the roaring of the wild beasts, shouted at them in its own accents of barking thunder. The shrill screaming continued long after the echoes of the gun's speech had died away. Across the platform from him were two great bodies, the bodies of lions, and yet curiously unlike the beasts in some ways, now that they were dead and dissolving as if corroded by some invisible acid. Carol's hand was on his arm, Carol's thin and breathless voice shook as she said, "A drink—all the drinks you want." "One will do. And you." "And me. I guess you're kind of—kind of useful after all." Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Space Science Fiction February 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

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Bread Overhead By FRITZ LEIBER The Staff of Life suddenly and disconcertingly sprouted wings —and mankind had to eat crow! Illustrated by WOOD AS a blisteringly hot but guaranteed weather-controlled future summer day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of Puffy Products ("Spike to Loaf in One Operation!") began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas. The walking mills resembled fat metal serpents, rather larger than those Chinese paper dragons animated by files of men in procession. Sensory robot devices in their noses informed them that the waiting wheat had reached ripe perfection. As they advanced, their heads swung lazily from side to side, very much like snakes, gobbling the yellow grain. In their throats, it was threshed, the chaff bundled and burped aside for pickup by the crawl trucks of a chemical corporation, the kernels quick-dried and blown along into the mighty chests of the machines. There the tireless mills ground the kernels to flour, which was instantly sifted, the bran being packaged and dropped like the chaff for pickup. A cluster of tanks which gave the metal serpents a decidedly humpbacked appearance added water, shortening, salt and other ingredients, some named and some not. The dough was at the same time infused with gas from a tank conspicuously labeled "Carbon Dioxide" ("No Yeast Creatures in Your Bread!"). Thus instantly risen, the dough was clipped into loaves and shot into radionic ovens forming the midsections of the metal serpents. There the bread was baked in a matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front browning the crusts, and the piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent plastic bearing the proud Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs circling a floating loaf) and ejected onto the delivery platform at each serpent's rear end, where a cluster of pickup machines, like hungry piglets, snatched at the loaves with hygienic claws. A few loaves would be hurried off for the day's consumption, the majority stored for winter in strategically located mammoth deep freezes. But now, behold a wonder! As loaves began to appear on the delivery platform of the first walking mill to get into action, they did not linger on the conveyor belt, but rose gently into the air and slowly traveled off down-wind across the hot rippling fields. THE robot claws of the pickup machines clutched in vain, and, not noticing the difference, proceeded carefully to stack emptiness, tier by tier. One errant loaf, rising more sluggishly than its fellows, was snagged by a thrusting claw. The machine paused, clumsily wiped off the injured loaf, set it aside—where it bobbed on one corner, unable to take off again—and went back to the work of storing nothingness. A flock of crows rose from the trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the flight of loaves approached. The crows swooped to investigate and then suddenly scattered, screeching in panic. The helicopter of a hangoverish Sunday traveler bound for Wichita shied very similarly from the brown fliers and did not return for a second look. A black-haired housewife spied them over her back fence, crossed herself and grabbed her walkie-talkie from the laundry basket. Seconds later, the yawning correspondent of a regional newspaper was jotting down the lead of a humorous news story which, recalling the old flying-saucer scares, stated that now apparently bread was to be included in the mad aerial tea party. The congregation of an open-walled country church, standing up to recite the most familiar of Christian prayers, had just reached the petition for daily sustenance, when a sub-flight of the loaves, either forced down by a vagrant wind or lacking the natural buoyancy of the rest, came coasting silently as the sunbeams between the graceful pillars at the altar end of the building. Meanwhile, the main flight, now augmented by other bread flocks from scores and hundreds of walking mills that had started work a little later, mounted slowly and majestically into the cirrus-flecked upper air, where a steady wind was blowing strongly toward the east. About one thousand miles farther on in that direction, where a cluster of stratosphere-tickling towers marked the location of the metropolis of NewNew York, a tender scene was being enacted in the pressurized penthouse managerial suite of Puffy Products. Megera Winterly, Secretary in Chief to the Managerial Board and referred to by her underlings as the Blonde Icicle, was dealing with the advances of Roger ("Racehorse") Snedden, Assistant Secretary to the Board and often indistinguishable from any passing office boy. "Why don't you jump out the window, Roger, remembering to shut the airlock after you?" the Golden Glacier said in tones not unkind. "When are your high-strung, thoroughbred nerves going to accept the fact that I would never consider marriage with a business inferior? You have about as much chance as a starving Ukrainian kulak now that Moscow's clapped on the interdict." ROGER'S voice was calm, although his eyes were feverishly bright, as he replied, "A lot of things are going to be different around here, Meg, as soon as the Board is forced to admit that only my quick thinking made it possible to bring the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world." "Puffyloaf could do with a little of that," the business girl observed judiciously. "The way sales have been plummeting, it won't be long before the Government deeds our desks to the managers of Fairy Bread and asks us to take the Big Jump. But just where does your quick thinking come into this, Mr. Snedden? You can't be referring to the helium—that was Rose Thinker's brainwave." She studied him suspiciously. "You've birthed another promotional bumble, Roger. I can see it in your eyes. I only hope it's not as big a one as when you put the Martian ambassador on 3D and he thanked you profusely for the gross of Puffyloaves, assuring you that he'd never slept on a softer mattress in all his life on two planets." "Listen to me, Meg. Today—yes, today!—you're going to see the Board eating out of my hand." "Hah! I guarantee you won't have any fingers left. You're bold enough now, but when Mr. Gryce and those two big machines come through that door—" "Now wait a minute, Meg—" "Hush! They're coming now!" Roger leaped three feet in the air, but managed to land without a sound and edged toward his stool. Through the dilating iris of the door strode Phineas T. Gryce, flanked by Rose Thinker and Tin Philosopher. The man approached the conference table in the center of the room with measured pace and gravely expressionless face. The rose-tinted machine on his left did a couple of impulsive pirouettes on the way and twittered a greeting to Meg and Roger. The other machine quietly took the third of the high seats and lifted a claw at Meg, who now occupied a stool twice the height of Roger's. "Miss Winterly, please—our theme." The Blonde Icicle's face thawed into a little-girl smile as she chanted bubblingly: " Made up of tiny wheaten motes And reinforced with sturdy oats, It rises through the air and floats— The bread on which all Terra dotes! " "THANK YOU, Miss Winterly," said Tin Philosopher. "Though a purely figurative statement, that bit about rising through the air always gets me—here." He rapped his midsection, which gave off a high musical clang . "Ladies—" he inclined his photocells toward Rose Thinker and Meg—"and gentlemen. This is a historic occasion in Old Puffy's long history, the inauguration of the helium-filled loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats Away!') in which that inert and heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-fashioned carbon dioxide. Later, there will be kudos for Rose Thinker, whose bright relays genius-sparked the idea, and also for Roger Snedden, who took care of the details. "By the by, Racehorse, that was a brilliant piece of work getting the helium out of the government—they've been pretty stuffy lately about their monopoly. But first I want to throw wide the casement in your minds that opens on the Long View of Things." Rose Thinker spun twice on her chair and opened her photocells wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to limber up the diaphragm of his speaker and continued: "Ever since the first cave wife boasted to her next-den neighbor about the superior paleness and fluffiness of her tortillas, mankind has sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed, thinkers wiser than myself have equated the whole upward course of culture with this poignant quest. Yeast was a wonderful discovery—for its primitive day. Sifting the bran and wheat germ from the flour was an even more important advance. Early bleaching and preserving chemicals played their humble parts. "For a while, barbarous faddists—blind to the deeply spiritual nature of bread, which is recognized by all great religions—held back our march toward perfection with their hair-splitting insistence on the vitamin content of the wheat germ, but their case collapsed when tasteless colorless substitutes were triumphantly synthesized and introduced into the loaf, which for flawless purity, unequaled airiness and sheer intangible goodness was rapidly becoming mankind's supreme gustatory experience." "I wonder what the stuff tastes like," Rose Thinker said out of a clear sky. "I wonder what taste tastes like," Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily. Recovering himself, he continued: "Then, early in the twenty-first century, came the epochal researches of Everett Whitehead, Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in his paper 'The Structural Bubble in Cereal Masses' and making possible the baking of airtight bread twenty times stronger (for its weight) than steel and of a lightness that would have been incredible even to the advanced chemist-bakers of the twentieth century—a lightness so great that, besides forming the backbone of our own promotion, it has forever since been capitalized on by our conscienceless competitors of Fairy Bread with their enduring slogan: 'It Makes Ghost Toast'." "That's a beaut, all right, that ecto-dough blurb," Rose Thinker admitted, bugging her photocells sadly. "Wait a sec. How about?— " There'll be bread Overhead When you're dead— It is said. " PHINEAS T. GRYCE wrinkled his nostrils at the pink machine as if he smelled her insulation smoldering. He said mildly, "A somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose, referring as it does to the end of the customer as consumer. Moreover, we shouldn't overplay the figurative 'rises through the air' angle. What inspired you?" She shrugged. "I don't know—oh, yes, I do. I was remembering one of the workers' songs we machines used to chant during the Big Strike— " Work and pray, Live on hay. You'll get pie In the sky When you die— It's a lie! "I don't know why we chanted it," she added. "We didn't want pie—or hay, for that matter. And machines don't pray, except Tibetan prayer wheels." Phineas T. Gryce shook his head. "Labor relations are another topic we should stay far away from. However, dear Rose, I'm glad you keep trying to outjingle those dirty crooks at Fairy Bread." He scowled, turning back his attention to Tin Philosopher. "I get whopping mad, Old Machine, whenever I hear that other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory one—'Untouched by Robot Claws.' Just because they employ a few filthy androids in their factories!" Tin Philosopher lifted one of his own sets of bright talons. "Thanks, P.T. But to continue my historical resume, the next great advance in the baking art was the substitution of purified carbon dioxide, recovered from coal smoke, for the gas generated by yeast organisms indwelling in the dough and later killed by the heat of baking, their corpses remaining in situ . But even purified carbon dioxide is itself a rather repugnant gas, a product of metabolism whether fast or slow, and forever associated with those life processes which are obnoxious to the fastidious." Here the machine shuddered with delicate clinkings. "Therefore, we of Puffyloaf are taking today what may be the ultimate step toward purity: we are aerating our loaves with the noble gas helium, an element which remains virginal in the face of all chemical temptations and whose slim molecules are eleven times lighter than obese carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable helium, which, if it be a kind of ash, is yet the ash only of radioactive burning, accomplished or initiated entirely on the Sun, a safe 93 million miles from this planet. Let's have a cheer for the helium loaf!" WITHOUT changing expression, Phineas T. Gryce rapped the table thrice in solemn applause, while the others bowed their heads. "Thanks, T.P.," P.T. then said. "And now for the Moment of Truth. Miss Winterly, how is the helium loaf selling?" The business girl clapped on a pair of earphones and whispered into a lapel mike. Her gaze grew abstracted as she mentally translated flurries of brief squawks into coherent messages. Suddenly a single vertical furrow creased her matchlessly smooth brow. "It isn't, Mr. Gryce!" she gasped in horror. "Fairy Bread is outselling Puffyloaves by an infinity factor. So far this morning, there has not been one single delivery of Puffyloaves to any sales spot ! Complaints about non-delivery are pouring in from both walking stores and sessile shops." "Mr. Snedden!" Gryce barked. "What bug in the new helium process might account for this delay?" Roger was on his feet, looking bewildered. "I can't imagine, sir, unless—just possibly—there's been some unforeseeable difficulty involving the new metal-foil wrappers." "Metal-foil wrappers? Were you responsible for those?" "Yes, sir. Last-minute recalculations showed that the extra lightness of the new loaf might be great enough to cause drift during stackage. Drafts in stores might topple sales pyramids. Metal-foil wrappers, by their added weight, took care of the difficulty." "And you ordered them without consulting the Board?" "Yes, sir. There was hardly time and—" "Why, you fool! I noticed that order for metal-foil wrappers, assumed it was some sub-secretary's mistake, and canceled it last night!" Roger Snedden turned pale. "You canceled it?" he quavered. "And told them to go back to the lighter plastic wrappers?" "Of course! Just what is behind all this, Mr. Snedden? What recalculations were you trusting, when our physicists had demonstrated months ago that the helium loaf was safely stackable in light airs and gentle breezes—winds up to Beaufort's scale 3. Why should a change from heavier to lighter wrappers result in complete non-delivery?" ROGER Snedden's paleness became tinged with an interesting green. He cleared his throat and made strange gulping noises. Tin Philosopher's photocells focused on him calmly, Rose Thinker's with unfeigned excitement. P.T. Gryce's frown grew blacker by the moment, while Megera Winterly's Venus-mask showed an odd dawning of dismay and awe. She was getting new squawks in her earphones. "Er ... ah ... er...." Roger said in winning tones. "Well, you see, the fact is that I...." "Hold it," Meg interrupted crisply. "Triple-urgent from Public Relations, Safety Division. Tulsa-Topeka aero-express makes emergency landing after being buffeted in encounter with vast flight of objects first described as brown birds, although no failures reported in airway's electronic anti-bird fences. After grounding safely near Emporia—no fatalities—pilot's windshield found thinly plastered with soft white-and-brown material. Emblems on plastic wrappers embedded in material identify it incontrovertibly as an undetermined number of Puffyloaves cruising at three thousand feet!" Eyes and photocells turned inquisitorially upon Roger Snedden. He went from green to Puffyloaf white and blurted: "All right, I did it, but it was the only way out! Yesterday morning, due to the Ukrainian crisis, the government stopped sales and deliveries of all strategic stockpiled materials, including helium gas. Puffy's new program of advertising and promotion, based on the lighter loaf, was already rolling. There was only one thing to do, there being only one other gas comparable in lightness to helium. I diverted the necessary quantity of hydrogen gas from the Hydrogenated Oils Section of our Magna-Margarine Division and substituted it for the helium." "You substituted ... hydrogen ... for the ... helium?" Phineas T. Gryce faltered in low mechanical tones, taking four steps backward. "Hydrogen is twice as light as helium," Tin Philosopher remarked judiciously. "And many times cheaper—did you know that?" Roger countered feebly. "Yes, I substituted hydrogen. The metal-foil wrapping would have added just enough weight to counteract the greater buoyancy of the hydrogen loaf. But—" "So, when this morning's loaves began to arrive on the delivery platforms of the walking mills...." Tin Philosopher left the remark unfinished. "Exactly," Roger agreed dismally. "Let me ask you, Mr. Snedden," Gryce interjected, still in low tones, "if you expected people to jump to the kitchen ceiling for their Puffybread after taking off the metal wrapper, or reach for the sky if they happened to unwrap the stuff outdoors?" "Mr. Gryce," Roger said reproachfully, "you have often assured me that what people do with Puffybread after they buy it is no concern of ours." "I seem to recall," Rose Thinker chirped somewhat unkindly, "that dictum was created to answer inquiries after Roger put the famous sculptures-in-miniature artist on 3D and he testified that he always molded his first attempts from Puffybread, one jumbo loaf squeezing down to approximately the size of a peanut." HER photocells dimmed and brightened. "Oh, boy—hydrogen! The loaf's unwrapped. After a while, in spite of the crust-seal, a little oxygen diffuses in. An explosive mixture. Housewife in curlers and kimono pops a couple slices in the toaster. Boom!" The three human beings in the room winced. Tin Philosopher kicked her under the table, while observing, "So you see, Roger, that the non-delivery of the hydrogen loaf carries some consolations. And I must confess that one aspect of the affair gives me great satisfaction, not as a Board Member but as a private machine. You have at last made a reality of the 'rises through the air' part of Puffybread's theme. They can't ever take that away from you. By now, half the inhabitants of the Great Plains must have observed our flying loaves rising high." Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened look at the west windows and found his full voice. "Stop the mills!" he roared at Meg Winterly, who nodded and whispered urgently into her mike. "A sensible suggestion," Tin Philosopher said. "But it comes a trifle late in the day. If the mills are still walking and grinding, approximately seven billion Puffyloaves are at this moment cruising eastward over Middle America. Remember that a six-month supply for deep-freeze is involved and that the current consumption of bread, due to its matchless airiness, is eight and one-half loaves per person per day." Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted both hands into his scanty hair, feeling for a good grip. He leaned menacingly toward Roger who, chin resting on the table, regarded him apathetically. "Hold it!" Meg called sharply. "Flock of multiple-urgents coming in. News Liaison: information bureaus swamped with flying-bread inquiries. Aero-expresslines: Clear our airways or face law suit. U. S. Army: Why do loaves flame when hit by incendiary bullets? U. S. Customs: If bread intended for export, get export license or face prosecution. Russian Consulate in Chicago: Advise on destination of bread-lift. And some Kansas church is accusing us of a hoax inciting to blasphemy, of faking miracles—I don't know why ." The business girl tore off her headphones. "Roger Snedden," she cried with a hysteria that would have dumfounded her underlings, "you've brought the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world, all right! Now do something about the situation!" Roger nodded obediently. But his pallor increased a shade, the pupils of his eyes disappeared under the upper lids, and his head burrowed beneath his forearms. "Oh, boy," Rose Thinker called gayly to Tin Philosopher, "this looks like the start of a real crisis session! Did you remember to bring spare batteries?" MEANWHILE, the monstrous flight of Puffyloaves, filling midwestern skies as no small fliers had since the days of the passenger pigeon, soared steadily onward. Private fliers approached the brown and glistening bread-front in curiosity and dipped back in awe. Aero-expresslines organized sightseeing flights along the flanks. Planes of the government forestry and agricultural services and 'copters bearing the Puffyloaf emblem hovered on the fringes, watching developments and waiting for orders. A squadron of supersonic fighters hung menacingly above. The behavior of birds varied considerably. Most fled or gave the loaves a wide berth, but some bolder species, discovering the minimal nutritive nature of the translucent brown objects, attacked them furiously with beaks and claws. Hydrogen diffusing slowly through the crusts had now distended most of the sealed plastic wrappers into little balloons, which ruptured, when pierced, with disconcerting pops . Below, neck-craning citizens crowded streets and back yards, cranks and cultists had a field day, while local and national governments raged indiscriminately at Puffyloaf and at each other. Rumors that a fusion weapon would be exploded in the midst of the flying bread drew angry protests from conservationists and a flood of telefax pamphlets titled "H-Loaf or H-bomb?" Stockholm sent a mystifying note of praise to the United Nations Food Organization. Delhi issued nervous denials of a millet blight that no one had heard of until that moment and reaffirmed India's ability to feed her population with no outside help except the usual. Radio Moscow asserted that the Kremlin would brook no interference in its treatment of the Ukrainians, jokingly referred to the flying bread as a farce perpetrated by mad internationalists inhabiting Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contradictory references to airborne bread booby-trapped by Capitalist gangsters, and then fell moodily silent on the whole topic. Radio Venus reported to its winged audience that Earth's inhabitants were establishing food depots in the upper air, preparatory to taking up permanent aerial residence "such as we have always enjoyed on Venus." NEWNEW YORK made feverish preparations for the passage of the flying bread. Tickets for sightseeing space in skyscrapers were sold at high prices; cold meats and potted spreads were hawked to viewers with the assurance that they would be able to snag the bread out of the air and enjoy a historic sandwich. Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from his own managerial suite, raged about the city, demanding general cooperation in the stretching of great nets between the skyscrapers to trap the errant loaves. He was captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped again, and was found posted with oxygen mask and submachine gun on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf Tower, apparently determined to shoot down the loaves as they appeared and before they involved his company in more trouble with Customs and the State Department. Recaptured by Tin Philosopher, who suffered only minor bullet holes, he was given a series of mild electroshocks and returned to the conference table, calm and clear-headed as ever. But the bread flight, swinging away from a hurricane moving up the Atlantic coast, crossed a clouded-in Boston by night and disappeared into a high Atlantic overcast, also thereby evading a local storm generated by the Weather Department in a last-minute effort to bring down or at least disperse the H-loaves. Warnings and counterwarnings by Communist and Capitalist governments seriously interfered with military trailing of the flight during this period and it was actually lost in touch with for several days. At scattered points, seagulls were observed fighting over individual loaves floating down from the gray roof—that was all. A mood of spirituality strongly tinged with humor seized the people of the world. Ministers sermonized about the bread, variously interpreting it as a call to charity, a warning against gluttony, a parable of the evanescence of all earthly things, and a divine joke. Husbands and wives, facing each other across their walls of breakfast toast, burst into laughter. The mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere was enough to evoke guffaws. An obscure sect, having as part of its creed the injunction "Don't take yourself so damn seriously," won new adherents. The bread flight, rising above an Atlantic storm widely reported to have destroyed it, passed unobserved across a foggy England and rose out of the overcast only over Mittel-europa. The loaves had at last reached their maximum altitude. The Sun's rays beat through the rarified air on the distended plastic wrappers, increasing still further the pressure of the confined hydrogen. They burst by the millions and tens of millions. A high-flying Bulgarian evangelist, who had happened to mistake the up-lever for the east-lever in the cockpit of his flier and who was the sole witness of the event, afterward described it as "the foaming of a sea of diamonds, the crackle of God's knuckles." BY THE millions and tens of millions, the loaves coasted down into the starving Ukraine. Shaken by a week of humor that threatened to invade even its own grim precincts, the Kremlin made a sudden about-face. A new policy was instituted of communal ownership of the produce of communal farms, and teams of hunger-fighters and caravans of trucks loaded with pumpernickel were dispatched into the Ukraine. World distribution was given to a series of photographs showing peasants queueing up to trade scavenged Puffyloaves for traditional black bread, recently aerated itself but still extra solid by comparison, the rate of exchange demanded by the Moscow teams being twenty Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel. Another series of photographs, picturing chubby workers' children being blown to bits by booby-trapped bread, was quietly destroyed. Congratulatory notes were exchanged by various national governments and world organizations, including the Brotherhood of Free Business Machines. The great bread flight was over, though for several weeks afterward scattered falls of loaves occurred, giving rise to a new folklore of manna among lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in one well-authenticated instance in Tibet, sustaining life in a party of mountaineers cut off by a snow slide. Back in NewNew York, the managerial board of Puffy Products slumped in utter collapse around the conference table, the long crisis session at last ended. Empty coffee cartons were scattered around the chairs of the three humans, dead batteries around those of the two machines. For a while, there was no movement whatsoever. Then Roger Snedden reached out wearily for the earphones where Megera Winterly had hurled them down, adjusted them to his head, pushed a button and listened apathetically. After a bit, his gaze brightened. He pushed more buttons and listened more eagerly. Soon he was sitting tensely upright on his stool, eyes bright and lower face all a-smile, muttering terse comments and questions into the lapel mike torn from Meg's fair neck. The others, reviving, watched him, at first dully, then with quickening interest, especially when he jerked off the earphones with a happy shout and sprang to his feet. "LISTEN to this!" he cried in a ringing voice. "As a result of the worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves are outselling Fairy Bread three to one—and that's just the old carbon-dioxide stock from our freezers! It's almost exhausted, but the government, now that the Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken the ban off helium and will also sell us stockpiled wheat if we need it. We can have our walking mills burrowing into the wheat caves in a matter of hours! "But that isn't all! The far greater demand everywhere is for Puffyloaves that will actually float. Public Relations, Child Liaison Division, reports that the kiddies are making their mothers' lives miserable about it. If only we can figure out some way to make hydrogen non-explosive or the helium loaf float just a little—" "I'm sure we can take care of that quite handily," Tin Philosopher interrupted briskly. "Puffyloaf has kept it a corporation secret—even you've never been told about it—but just before he went crazy, Everett Whitehead discovered a way to make bread using only half as much flour as we do in the present loaf. Using this secret technique, which we've been saving for just such an emergency, it will be possible to bake a helium loaf as buoyant in every respect as the hydrogen loaf." "Good!" Roger cried. "We'll tether 'em on strings and sell 'em like balloons. No mother-child shopping team will leave the store without a cluster. Buying bread balloons will be the big event of the day for kiddies. It'll make the carry-home shopping load lighter too! I'll issue orders at once—" HE broke off, looking at Phineas T. Gryce, said with quiet assurance, "Excuse me, sir, if I seem to be taking too much upon myself." "Not at all, son; go straight ahead," the great manager said approvingly. "You're"—he laughed in anticipation of getting off a memorable remark—"rising to the challenging situation like a genuine Puffyloaf." Megera Winterly looked from the older man to the younger. Then in a single leap she was upon Roger, her arms wrapped tightly around him. "My sweet little ever-victorious, self-propelled monkey wrench!" she crooned in his ear. Roger looked fatuously over her soft shoulder at Tin Philosopher who, as if moved by some similar feeling, reached over and touched claws with Rose Thinker. This, however, was what he telegraphed silently to his fellow machine across the circuit so completed: "Good-o, Rosie! That makes another victory for robot-engineered world unity, though you almost gave us away at the start with that 'bread overhead' jingle. We've struck another blow against the next world war, in which—as we know only too well!—we machines would suffer the most. Now if we can only arrange, say, a fur-famine in Alaska and a migration of long-haired Siberian lemmings across Behring Straits ... we'd have to swing the Japanese Current up there so it'd be warm enough for the little fellows.... Anyhow, Rosie, with a spot of help from the Brotherhood, those humans will paint themselves into the peace corner yet." Meanwhile, he and Rose Thinker quietly watched the Blonde Icicle melt. —FRITZ LEIBER Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy February 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

valid

22958

ONE-SHOT You can do a great deal if you have enough data, and enough time to compute on it, by logical methods. But given the situation that neither data nor time is adequate, and an answer must be produced ... what do you do? BY JAMES BLISH Illustrated by van Dongen On the day that the Polish freighter Ludmilla laid an egg in New York harbor, Abner Longmans ("One-Shot") Braun was in the city going about his normal business, which was making another million dollars. As we found out later, almost nothing else was normal about that particular week end for Braun. For one thing, he had brought his family with him—a complete departure from routine—reflecting the unprecedentedly legitimate nature of the deals he was trying to make. From every point of view it was a bad week end for the CIA to mix into his affairs, but nobody had explained that to the master of the Ludmilla . I had better add here that we knew nothing about this until afterward; from the point of view of the storyteller, an organization like Civilian Intelligence Associates gets to all its facts backwards, entering the tale at the pay-off, working back to the hook, and winding up with a sheaf of background facts to feed into the computer for Next Time. It's rough on the various people who've tried to fictionalize what we do—particularly for the lazy examples of the breed, who come to us expecting that their plotting has already been done for them—but it's inherent in the way we operate, and there it is. Certainly nobody at CIA so much as thought of Braun when the news first came through. Harry Anderton, the Harbor Defense chief, called us at 0830 Friday to take on the job of identifying the egg; this was when our records show us officially entering the affair, but, of course, Anderton had been keeping the wires to Washington steaming for an hour before that, getting authorization to spend some of his money on us (our clearance status was then and is now C&R—clean and routine). I was in the central office when the call came through, and had some difficulty in making out precisely what Anderton wanted of us. "Slow down, Colonel Anderton, please," I begged him. "Two or three seconds won't make that much difference. How did you find out about this egg in the first place?" "The automatic compartment bulkheads on the Ludmilla were defective," he said. "It seems that this egg was buried among a lot of other crates in the dump-cell of the hold—" "What's a dump cell?" "It's a sea lock for getting rid of dangerous cargo. The bottom of it opens right to Davy Jones. Standard fitting for ships carrying explosives, radioactives, anything that might act up unexpectedly." "All right," I said. "Go ahead." "Well, there was a timer on the dump-cell floor, set to drop the egg when the ship came up the river. That worked fine, but the automatic bulkheads that are supposed to keep the rest of the ship from being flooded while the cell's open, didn't. At least they didn't do a thorough job. The Ludmilla began to list and the captain yelled for help. When the Harbor Patrol found the dump-cell open, they called us in." "I see." I thought about it a moment. "In other words, you don't know whether the Ludmilla really laid an egg or not." "That's what I keep trying to explain to you, Dr. Harris. We don't know what she dropped and we haven't any way of finding out. It could be a bomb—it could be anything. We're sweating everybody on board the ship now, but it's my guess that none of them know anything; the whole procedure was designed to be automatic." "All right, we'll take it," I said. "You've got divers down?" "Sure, but—" "We'll worry about the buts from here on. Get us a direct line from your barge to the big board here so we can direct the work. Better get on over here yourself." "Right." He sounded relieved. Official people have a lot of confidence in CIA; too much, in my estimation. Some day the job will come along that we can't handle, and then Washington will be kicking itself—or, more likely, some scapegoat—for having failed to develop a comparable government department. Not that there was much prospect of Washington's doing that. Official thinking had been running in the other direction for years. The precedent was the Associated Universities organization which ran Brookhaven; CIA had been started the same way, by a loose corporation of universities and industries all of which had wanted to own an ULTIMAC and no one of which had had the money to buy one for itself. The Eisenhower administration, with its emphasis on private enterprise and concomitant reluctance to sink federal funds into projects of such size, had turned the two examples into a nice fat trend, which ULTIMAC herself said wasn't going to be reversed within the practicable lifetime of CIA. I buzzed for two staffers, and in five minutes got Clark Cheyney and Joan Hadamard, CIA's business manager and social science division chief respectively. The titles were almost solely for the benefit of the T/O—that is, Clark and Joan do serve in those capacities, but said service takes about two per cent of their capacities and their time. I shot them a couple of sentences of explanation, trusting them to pick up whatever else they needed from the tape, and checked the line to the divers' barge. It was already open; Anderton had gone to work quickly and with decision once he was sure we were taking on the major question. The television screen lit, but nothing showed on it but murky light, striped with streamers of darkness slowly rising and falling. The audio went cloonck ... oing , oing ... bonk ... oing ... Underwater noises, shapeless and characterless. "Hello, out there in the harbor. This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in, please." "Monig here," the audio said. Boink ... oing , oing ... "Got anything yet?" "Not a thing, Dr. Harris," Monig said. "You can't see three inches in front of your face down here—it's too silty. We've bumped into a couple of crates, but so far, no egg." "Keep trying." Cheyney, looking even more like a bulldog than usual, was setting his stopwatch by one of the eight clocks on ULTIMAC's face. "Want me to take the divers?" he said. "No, Clark, not yet. I'd rather have Joan do it for the moment." I passed the mike to her. "You'd better run a probability series first." "Check." He began feeding tape into the integrator's mouth. "What's your angle, Peter?" "The ship. I want to see how heavily shielded that dump-cell is." "It isn't shielded at all," Anderton's voice said behind me. I hadn't heard him come in. "But that doesn't prove anything. The egg might have carried sufficient shielding in itself. Or maybe the Commies didn't care whether the crew was exposed or not. Or maybe there isn't any egg." "All that's possible," I admitted. "But I want to see it, anyhow." "Have you taken blood tests?" Joan asked Anderton. "Yes." "Get the reports through to me, then. I want white-cell counts, differentials, platelet counts, hematocrit and sed rates on every man." Anderton picked up the phone and I took a firm hold on the doorknob. "Hey," Anderton said, putting the phone down again. "Are you going to duck out just like that? Remember, Dr. Harris, we've got to evacuate the city first of all! No matter whether it's a real egg or not—we can't take the chance on it's not being an egg!" "Don't move a man until you get a go-ahead from CIA," I said. "For all we know now, evacuating the city may be just what the enemy wants us to do—so they can grab it unharmed. Or they may want to start a panic for some other reason, any one of fifty possible reasons." "You can't take such a gamble," he said grimly. "There are eight and a half million lives riding on it. I can't let you do it." "You passed your authority to us when you hired us," I pointed out. "If you want to evacuate without our O.K., you'll have to fire us first. It'll take another hour to get that cleared from Washington—so you might as well give us the hour." He stared at me for a moment, his lips thinned. Then he picked up the phone again to order Joan's blood count, and I got out the door, fast. A reasonable man would have said that I found nothing useful on the Ludmilla , except negative information. But the fact is that anything I found would have been a surprise to me; I went down looking for surprises. I found nothing but a faint trail to Abner Longmans Braun, most of which was fifteen years cold. There'd been a time when I'd known Braun, briefly and to no profit to either of us. As an undergraduate majoring in social sciences, I'd taken on a term paper on the old International Longshoreman's Association, a racket-ridden union now formally extinct—although anyone who knew the signs could still pick up some traces on the docks. In those days, Braun had been the business manager of an insurance firm, the sole visible function of which had been to write policies for the ILA and its individual dock-wallopers. For some reason, he had been amused by the brash youngster who'd barged in on him and demanded the lowdown, and had shown me considerable lengths of ropes not normally in view of the public—nothing incriminating, but enough to give me a better insight into how the union operated than I had had any right to expect—or even suspect. Hence I was surprised to hear somebody on the docks remark that Braun was in the city over the week end. It would never have occurred to me that he still interested himself in the waterfront, for he'd gone respectable with a vengeance. He was still a professional gambler, and according to what he had told the Congressional Investigating Committee last year, took in thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year at it, but his gambles were no longer concentrated on horses, the numbers, or shady insurance deals. Nowadays what he did was called investment—mostly in real estate; realtors knew him well as the man who had almost bought the Empire State Building. (The almost in the equation stands for the moment when the shoestring broke.) Joan had been following his career, too, not because she had ever met him, but because for her he was a type study in the evolution of what she called "the extra-legal ego." "With personalities like that, respectability is a disease," she told me. "There's always an almost-open conflict between the desire to be powerful and the desire to be accepted; your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile, but people like Braun are damned with a conscience, and sooner or later they crack trying to appease it." "I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin bearing," I said. "Braun's ten-point steel all the way through." "Don't you believe it. The symptoms are showing all over him. Now he's backing Broadway plays, sponsoring beginning actresses, joining playwrights' groups—he's the only member of Buskin and Brush who's never written a play, acted in one, or so much as pulled the rope to raise the curtain." "That's investment," I said. "That's his business." "Peter, you're only looking at the surface. His real investments almost never fail. But the plays he backs always do. They have to; he's sinking money in them to appease his conscience, and if they were to succeed it would double his guilt instead of salving it. It's the same way with the young actresses. He's not sexually interested in them—his type never is, because living a rigidly orthodox family life is part of the effort towards respectability. He's backing them to 'pay his debt to society'—in other words, they're talismans to keep him out of jail." "It doesn't seem like a very satisfactory substitute." "Of course it isn't," Joan had said. "The next thing he'll do is go in for direct public service—giving money to hospitals or something like that. You watch." She had been right; within the year, Braun had announced the founding of an association for clearing the Detroit slum area where he had been born—the plainest kind of symbolic suicide: Let's not have any more Abner Longmans Brauns born down here . It depressed me to see it happen, for next on Joan's agenda for Braun was an entry into politics as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly liberal myself when I'm off duty, I hated to think what Braun's career might tell me about my own motives, if I'd let it. All of which had nothing to do with why I was prowling around the Ludmilla —or did it? I kept remembering Anderton's challenge: "You can't take such a gamble. There are eight and a half million lives riding on it—" That put it up into Braun's normal operating area, all right. The connection was still hazy, but on the grounds that any link might be useful, I phoned him. He remembered me instantly; like most uneducated, power-driven men, he had a memory as good as any machine's. "You never did send me that paper you was going to write," he said. His voice seemed absolutely unchanged, although he was in his seventies now. "You promised you would." "Kids don't keep their promises as well as they should," I said. "But I've still got copies and I'll see to it that you get one, this time. Right now I need another favor—something right up your alley." "CIA business?" "Yes. I didn't know you knew I was with CIA." Braun chuckled. "I still know a thing or two," he said. "What's the angle?" "That I can't tell you over the phone. But it's the biggest gamble there ever was, and I think we need an expert. Can you come down to CIA's central headquarters right away?" "Yeah, if it's that big. If it ain't, I got lots of business here, Andy. And I ain't going to be in town long. You're sure it's top stuff?" "My word on it." He was silent a moment. Then he said, "Andy, send me your paper." "The paper? Sure, but—" Then I got it. I'd given him my word. "You'll get it," I said. "Thanks, Mr. Braun." I called headquarters and sent a messenger to my apartment to look for one of those long-dusty blue folders with the legal-length sheets inside them, with orders to scorch it over to Braun without stopping to breathe more than once. Then I went back myself. The atmosphere had changed. Anderton was sitting by the big desk, clenching his fists and sweating; his whole posture telegraphed his controlled helplessness. Cheyney was bent over a seismograph, echo-sounding for the egg through the river bottom. If that even had a prayer of working, I knew, he'd have had the trains of the Hudson & Manhattan stopped; their rumbling course through their tubes would have blanked out any possible echo-pip from the egg. "Wild goose chase?" Joan said, scanning my face. "Not quite. I've got something, if I can just figure out what it is. Remember One-Shot Braun?" "Yes. What's he got to do with it?" "Nothing," I said. "But I want to bring him in. I don't think we'll lick this project before deadline without him." "What good is a professional gambler on a job like this? He'll just get in the way." I looked toward the television screen, which now showed an amorphous black mass, jutting up from a foundation of even deeper black. "Is that operation getting you anywhere?" "Nothing's gotten us anywhere," Anderton interjected harshly. "We don't even know if that's the egg—the whole area is littered with crates. Harris, you've got to let me get that alert out!" "Clark, how's the time going?" Cheyney consulted the stopwatch. "Deadline in twenty-nine minutes," he said. "All right, let's use those minutes. I'm beginning to see this thing a little clearer. Joan, what we've got here is a one-shot gamble; right?" "In effect," she said cautiously. "And it's my guess that we're never going to get the answer by diving for it—not in time, anyhow. Remember when the Navy lost a barge-load of shells in the harbor, back in '52? They scrabbled for them for a year and never pulled up a one; they finally had to warn the public that if it found anything funny-looking along the shore it shouldn't bang said object, or shake it either. We're better equipped than the Navy was then—but we're working against a deadline." "If you'd admitted that earlier," Anderton said hoarsely, "we'd have half a million people out of the city by now. Maybe even a million." "We haven't given up yet, colonel. The point is this, Joan: what we need is an inspired guess. Get anything from the prob series, Clark? I thought not. On a one-shot gamble of this kind, the 'laws' of chance are no good at all. For that matter, the so-called ESP experiments showed us long ago that even the way we construct random tables is full of holes—and that a man with a feeling for the essence of a gamble can make a monkey out of chance almost at will. "And if there ever was such a man, Braun is it. That's why I asked him to come down here. I want him to look at that lump on the screen and—play a hunch." "You're out of your mind," Anderton said. A decorous knock spared me the trouble of having to deny, affirm or ignore the judgment. It was Braun; the messenger had been fast, and the gambler hadn't bothered to read what a college student had thought of him fifteen years ago. He came forward and held out his hand, while the others looked him over frankly. He was impressive, all right. It would have been hard for a stranger to believe that he was aiming at respectability; to the eye, he was already there. He was tall and spare, and walked perfectly erect, not without spring despite his age. His clothing was as far from that of a gambler as you could have taken it by design: a black double-breasted suit with a thin vertical stripe, a gray silk tie with a pearl stickpin just barely large enough to be visible at all, a black Homburg; all perfectly fitted, all worn with proper casualness—one might almost say a formal casualness. It was only when he opened his mouth that One-Shot Braun was in the suit with him. "I come over as soon as your runner got to me," he said. "What's the pitch, Andy?" "Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard, Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton. I'll be quick because we need speed now. A Polish ship has dropped something out in the harbor. We don't know what it is. It may be a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's old laundry. Obviously we've got to find out which—and we want you to tell us." Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went up. "Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know nothing about things like that. I'm surprised with you. I thought CIA had all the brains it needed—ain't you got machines to tell you answers like that?" I pointed silently to Joan, who had gone back to work the moment the introductions were over. She was still on the mike to the divers. She was saying: "What does it look like?" "It's just a lump of something, Dr. Hadamard. Can't even tell its shape—it's buried too deeply in the mud." Cloonk ... Oing , oing ... "Try the Geiger." "We did. Nothing but background." "Scintillation counter?" "Nothing, Dr. Hadamard. Could be it's shielded." "Let us do the guessing, Monig. All right, maybe it's got a clockwork fuse that didn't break with the impact. Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a stethoscope on it and see if you pick up a ticking or anything that sounds like a motor running." There was a lag and I turned back to Braun. "As you can see, we're stymied. This is a long shot, Mr. Braun. One throw of the dice—one show-down hand. We've got to have an expert call it for us—somebody with a record of hits on long shots. That's why I called you." "It's no good," he said. He took off the Homburg, took his handkerchief from his breast pocket, and wiped the hatband. "I can't do it." "Why not?" "It ain't my kind of thing," he said. "Look, I never in my life run odds on anything that made any difference. But this makes a difference. If I guess wrong—" "Then we're all dead ducks. But why should you guess wrong? Your hunches have been working for sixty years now." Braun wiped his face. "No. You don't get it. I wish you'd listen to me. Look, my wife and my kids are in the city. It ain't only my life, it's theirs, too. That's what I care about. That's why it's no good. On things that matter to me, my hunches don't work ." I was stunned, and so, I could see, were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I should have guessed it, but it had never occurred to me. "Ten minutes," Cheyney said. I looked up at Braun. He was frightened, and again I was surprised without having any right to be. I tried to keep at least my voice calm. "Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as a favor. It's already too late to do it any other way. And if you guess wrong, the outcome won't be any worse than if you don't try at all." "My kids," he whispered. I don't think he knew that he was speaking aloud. I waited. Then his eyes seemed to come back to the present. "All right," he said. "I told you the truth, Andy. Remember that. So—is it a bomb or ain't it? That's what's up for grabs, right?" I nodded. He closed his eyes. An unexpected stab of pure fright went down my back. Without the eyes, Braun's face was a death mask. The water sounds and the irregular ticking of a Geiger counter seemed to spring out from the audio speaker, four times as loud as before. I could even hear the pen of the seismograph scribbling away, until I looked at the instrument and saw that Clark had stopped it, probably long ago. Droplets of sweat began to form along Braun's forehead and his upper lip. The handkerchief remained crushed in his hand. Anderton said, "Of all the fool—" "Hush!" Joan said quietly. Slowly, Braun opened his eyes. "All right," he said. "You guys wanted it this way. I say it's a bomb. " He stared at us for a moment more—and then, all at once, the Timkin bearing burst. Words poured out of it. "Now you guys do something, do your job like I did mine—get my wife and kids out of there—empty the city—do something, do something !" Anderton was already grabbing for the phone. "You're right, Mr. Braun. If it isn't already too late—" Cheyney shot out a hand and caught Anderton's telephone arm by the wrist. "Wait a minute," he said. "What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'? Haven't you already shot enough time?" Cheyney did not let go; instead, he looked inquiringly at Joan and said, "One minute, Joan. You might as well go ahead." She nodded and spoke into the mike. "Monig, unscrew the cap." "Unscrew the cap?" the audio squawked. "But Dr. Hadamard, if that sets it off—" "It won't go off. That's the one thing you can be sure it won't do." "What is this?" Anderton demanded. "And what's this deadline stuff, anyhow?" "The cap's off," Monig reported. "We're getting plenty of radiation now. Just a minute— Yeah. Dr. Hadamard, it's a bomb, all right. But it hasn't got a fuse. Now how could they have made a fool mistake like that?" "In other words, it's a dud," Joan said. "That's right, a dud." Now, at last, Braun wiped his face, which was quite gray. "I told you the truth," he said grimly. "My hunches don't work on stuff like this." "But they do," I said. "I'm sorry we put you through the wringer—and you too, colonel—but we couldn't let an opportunity like this slip. It was too good a chance for us to test how our facilities would stand up in a real bomb-drop." "A real drop?" Anderton said. "Are you trying to say that CIA staged this? You ought to be shot, the whole pack of you!" "No, not exactly," I said. "The enemy's responsible for the drop, all right. We got word last month from our man in Gdynia that they were going to do it, and that the bomb would be on board the Ludmilla . As I say, it was too good an opportunity to miss. We wanted to find out just how long it would take us to figure out the nature of the bomb—which we didn't know in detail—after it was dropped here. So we had our people in Gdynia defuse the thing after it was put on board the ship, but otherwise leave it entirely alone. "Actually, you see, your hunch was right on the button as far as it went. We didn't ask you whether or not that object was a live bomb. We asked whether it was a bomb or not. You said it was, and you were right." The expression on Braun's face was exactly like the one he had worn while he had been searching for his decision—except that, since his eyes were open, I could see that it was directed at me. "If this was the old days," he said in an ice-cold voice, "I might of made the colonel's idea come true. I don't go for tricks like this, Andy." "It was more than a trick," Clark put in. "You'll remember we had a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun. Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't have all the time in the world to figure out what kind of a thing had been dropped. If we had still failed to establish that when the deadline ran out, we would have had to allow evacuation of the city, with all the attendant risk that that was exactly what the enemy wanted us to do." "So?" "So we failed the test," I said. "At one minute short of the deadline, Joan had the divers unscrew the cap. In a real drop that would have resulted in a detonation, if the bomb was real; we'd never risk it. That we did do it in the test was a concession of failure—an admission that our usual methods didn't come through for us in time. "And that means that you were the only person who did come through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop ever comes, we're going to have to have you here, as an active part of our investigation. Your intuition for the one-shot gamble was the one thing that bailed us out this time. Next time it may save eight million lives." There was quite a long silence. All of us, Anderton included, watched Braun intently, but his impassive face failed to show any trace of how his thoughts were running. When he did speak at last, what he said must have seemed insanely irrelevant to Anderton, and maybe to Cheyney too. And perhaps it meant nothing more to Joan than the final clinical note in a case history. "It's funny," he said, "I was thinking of running for Congress next year from my district. But maybe this is more important." It was, I believe, the sigh of a man at peace with himself. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction August 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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The gadget was strictly, beyond any question, a toy. Not a real, workable device. Except for the way it could work under a man's mental skin.... BY HARRY HARRISON Because there were few adults in the crowd, and Colonel "Biff" Hawton stood over six feet tall, he could see every detail of the demonstration. The children—and most of the parents—gaped in wide-eyed wonder. Biff Hawton was too sophisticated to be awed. He stayed on because he wanted to find out what the trick was that made the gadget work. "It's all explained right here in your instruction book," the demonstrator said, holding up a garishly printed booklet opened to a four-color diagram. "You all know how magnets pick up things and I bet you even know that the earth itself is one great big magnet—that's why compasses always point north. Well ... the Atomic Wonder Space Wave Tapper hangs onto those space waves. Invisibly all about us, and even going right through us, are the magnetic waves of the earth. The Atomic Wonder rides these waves just the way a ship rides the waves in the ocean. Now watch...." Every eye was on him as he put the gaudy model rocketship on top of the table and stepped back. It was made of stamped metal and seemed as incapable of flying as a can of ham—which it very much resembled. Neither wings, propellors, nor jets broke through the painted surface. It rested on three rubber wheels and coming out through the bottom was a double strand of thin insulated wire. This white wire ran across the top of the black table and terminated in a control box in the demonstrator's hand. An indicator light, a switch and a knob appeared to be the only controls. "I turn on the Power Switch, sending a surge of current to the Wave Receptors," he said. The switch clicked and the light blinked on and off with a steady pulse. Then the man began to slowly turn the knob. "A careful touch on the Wave Generator is necessary as we are dealing with the powers of the whole world here...." A concerted ahhhh swept through the crowd as the Space Wave Tapper shivered a bit, then rose slowly into the air. The demonstrator stepped back and the toy rose higher and higher, bobbing gently on the invisible waves of magnetic force that supported it. Ever so slowly the power was reduced and it settled back to the table. "Only $17.95," the young man said, putting a large price sign on the table. "For the complete set of the Atomic Wonder, the Space Tapper control box, battery and instruction book ..." At the appearance of the price card the crowd broke up noisily and the children rushed away towards the operating model trains. The demonstrator's words were lost in their noisy passage, and after a moment he sank into a gloomy silence. He put the control box down, yawned and sat on the edge of the table. Colonel Hawton was the only one left after the crowd had moved on. "Could you tell me how this thing works?" the colonel asked, coming forward. The demonstrator brightened up and picked up one of the toys. "Well, if you will look here, sir...." He opened the hinged top. "You will see the Space Wave coils at each end of the ship." With a pencil he pointed out the odd shaped plastic forms about an inch in diameter that had been wound—apparently at random—with a few turns of copper wire. Except for these coils the interior of the model was empty. The coils were wired together and other wires ran out through the hole in the bottom of the control box. Biff Hawton turned a very quizzical eye on the gadget and upon the demonstrator who completely ignored this sign of disbelief. "Inside the control box is the battery," the young man said, snapping it open and pointing to an ordinary flashlight battery. "The current goes through the Power Switch and Power Light to the Wave Generator ..." "What you mean to say," Biff broke in, "is that the juice from this fifteen cent battery goes through this cheap rheostat to those meaningless coils in the model and absolutely nothing happens. Now tell me what really flies the thing. If I'm going to drop eighteen bucks for six-bits worth of tin, I want to know what I'm getting." The demonstrator flushed. "I'm sorry, sir," he stammered. "I wasn't trying to hide anything. Like any magic trick this one can't be really demonstrated until it has been purchased." He leaned forward and whispered confidentially. "I'll tell you what I'll do though. This thing is way overpriced and hasn't been moving at all. The manager said I could let them go at three dollars if I could find any takers. If you want to buy it for that price...." "Sold, my boy!" the colonel said, slamming three bills down on the table. "I'll give that much for it no matter how it works. The boys in the shop will get a kick out of it," he tapped the winged rocket on his chest. "Now really —what holds it up?" The demonstrator looked around carefully, then pointed. "Strings!" he said. "Or rather a black thread. It runs from the top of the model, through a tiny loop in the ceiling, and back down to my hand—tied to this ring on my finger. When I back up—the model rises. It's as simple as that." "All good illusions are simple," the colonel grunted, tracing the black thread with his eye. "As long as there is plenty of flimflam to distract the viewer." "If you don't have a black table, a black cloth will do," the young man said. "And the arch of a doorway is a good site, just see that the room in back is dark." "Wrap it up, my boy, I wasn't born yesterday. I'm an old hand at this kind of thing." Biff Hawton sprang it at the next Thursday-night poker party. The gang were all missile men and they cheered and jeered as he hammed up the introduction. "Let me copy the diagram, Biff, I could use some of those magnetic waves in the new bird!" "Those flashlight batteries are cheaper than lox, this is the thing of the future!" Only Teddy Kaner caught wise as the flight began. He was an amateur magician and spotted the gimmick at once. He kept silent with professional courtesy, and smiled ironically as the rest of the bunch grew silent one by one. The colonel was a good showman and he had set the scene well. He almost had them believing in the Space Wave Tapper before he was through. When the model had landed and he had switched it off he couldn't stop them from crowding around the table. "A thread!" one of the engineers shouted, almost with relief, and they all laughed along with him. "Too bad," the head project physicist said, "I was hoping that a little Space Wave Tapping could help us out. Let me try a flight with it." "Teddy Kaner first," Biff announced. "He spotted it while you were all watching the flashing lights, only he didn't say anything." Kaner slipped the ring with the black thread over his finger and started to step back. "You have to turn the switch on first," Biff said. "I know," Kaner smiled. "But that's part of illusion—the spiel and the misdirection. I'm going to try this cold first, so I can get it moving up and down smoothly, then go through it with the whole works." ILLUSTRATED BY BREY He moved his hand back smoothly, in a professional manner that drew no attention to it. The model lifted from the table—then crashed back down. "The thread broke," Kaner said. "You jerked it, instead of pulling smoothly," Biff said and knotted the broken thread. "Here let me show you how to do it." The thread broke again when Biff tried it, which got a good laugh that made his collar a little warm. Someone mentioned the poker game. This was the only time that poker was mentioned or even remembered that night. Because very soon after this they found that the thread would lift the model only when the switch was on and two and a half volts flowing through the joke coils. With the current turned off the model was too heavy to lift. The thread broke every time. "I still think it's a screwy idea," the young man said. "One week getting fallen arches, demonstrating those toy ships for every brat within a thousand miles. Then selling the things for three bucks when they must have cost at least a hundred dollars apiece to make." "But you did sell the ten of them to people who would be interested?" the older man asked. "I think so, I caught a few Air Force officers and a colonel in missiles one day. Then there was one official I remembered from the Bureau of Standards. Luckily he didn't recognize me. Then those two professors you spotted from the university." "Then the problem is out of our hands and into theirs. All we have to do now is sit back and wait for results." " What results?! These people weren't interested when we were hammering on their doors with the proof. We've patented the coils and can prove to anyone that there is a reduction in weight around them when they are operating...." "But a small reduction. And we don't know what is causing it. No one can be interested in a thing like that—a fractional weight decrease in a clumsy model, certainly not enough to lift the weight of the generator. No one wrapped up in massive fuel consumption, tons of lift and such is going to have time to worry about a crackpot who thinks he has found a minor slip in Newton's laws." "You think they will now?" the young man asked, cracking his knuckles impatiently. "I know they will. The tensile strength of that thread is correctly adjusted to the weight of the model. The thread will break if you try to lift the model with it. Yet you can lift the model—after a small increment of its weight has been removed by the coils. This is going to bug these men. Nobody is going to ask them to solve the problem or concern themselves with it. But it will nag at them because they know this effect can't possibly exist. They'll see at once that the magnetic-wave theory is nonsense. Or perhaps true? We don't know. But they will all be thinking about it and worrying about it. Someone is going to experiment in his basement—just as a hobby of course—to find the cause of the error. And he or someone else is going to find out what makes those coils work, or maybe a way to improve them!" "And we have the patents...." "Correct. They will be doing the research that will take them out of the massive-lift-propulsion business and into the field of pure space flight." "And in doing so they will be making us rich—whenever the time comes to manufacture," the young man said cynically. "We'll all be rich, son," the older man said, patting him on the shoulder. "Believe me, you're not going to recognize this old world ten years from now." Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog April 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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THE STOKER AND THE STARS BY JOHN A. SENTRY When you've had your ears pinned back in a bowknot, it's sometimes hard to remember that an intelligent people has no respect for a whipped enemy ... but does for a fairly beaten enemy. Illustrated by van Dongen Know him? Yes, I know him— knew him. That was twenty years ago. Everybody knows him now. Everybody who passed him on the street knows him. Everybody who went to the same schools, or even to different schools in different towns, knows him now. Ask them. But I knew him. I lived three feet away from him for a month and a half. I shipped with him and called him by his first name. What was he like? What was he thinking, sitting on the edge of his bunk with his jaw in his palm and his eyes on the stars? What did he think he was after? Well ... Well, I think he— You know, I think I never did know him, after all. Not well. Not as well as some of those people who're writing the books about him seem to. I couldn't really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship's air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man. It was after the war, and we were beaten. There used to be a school of thought among us that deplored our combativeness; before we had ever met any people from off Earth, even, you could hear people saying we were toughest, cruelest life-form in the Universe, unfit to mingle with the gentler wiser races in the stars, and a sure bet to steal their galaxy and corrupt it forever. Where these people got their information, I don't know. We were beaten. We moved out beyond Centaurus, and Sirius, and then we met the Jeks, the Nosurwey, the Lud. We tried Terrestrial know-how, we tried Production Miracles, we tried patriotism, we tried damning the torpedoes and full speed ahead ... and we were smashed back like mayflies in the wind. We died in droves, and we retreated from the guttering fires of a dozen planets, we dug in, we fought through the last ditch, and we were dying on Earth itself before Baker mutinied, shot Cope, and surrendered the remainder of the human race to the wiser, gentler races in the stars. That way, we lived. That way, we were permitted to carry on our little concerns, and mind our manners. The Jeks and the Lud and the Nosurwey returned to their own affairs, and we knew they would leave us alone so long as we didn't bother them. We liked it that way. Understand me—we didn't accept it, we didn't knuckle under with waiting murder in our hearts—we liked it. We were grateful just to be left alone again. We were happy we hadn't been wiped out like the upstarts the rest of the Universe thought us to be. When they let us keep our own solar system and carry on a trickle of trade with the outside, we accepted it for the fantastically generous gift it was. Too many of our best men were dead for us to have any remaining claim on these things in our own right. I know how it was. I was there, twenty years ago. I was a little, pudgy man with short breath and a high-pitched voice. I was a typical Earthman. We were out on a God-forsaken landing field on Mars, MacReidie and I, loading cargo aboard the Serenus . MacReidie was First Officer. I was Second. The stranger came walking up to us. "Got a job?" he asked, looking at MacReidie. Mac looked him over. He saw the same things I'd seen. He shook his head. "Not for you. The only thing we're short on is stokers." You wouldn't know. There's no such thing as a stoker any more, with automatic ships. But the stranger knew what Mac meant. Serenus had what they called an electronic drive. She had to run with an evacuated engine room. The leaking electricity would have broken any stray air down to ozone, which eats metal and rots lungs. So the engine room had the air pumped out of her, and the stokers who tended the dials and set the cathode attitudes had to wear suits, smelling themselves for twelve hours at a time and standing a good chance of cooking where they sat when the drive arced. Serenus was an ugly old tub. At that, we were the better of the two interstellar freighters the human race had left. "You're bound over the border, aren't you?" MacReidie nodded. "That's right. But—" "I'll stoke." MacReidie looked over toward me and frowned. I shrugged my shoulders helplessly. I was a little afraid of the stranger, too. The trouble was the look of him. It was the look you saw in the bars back on Earth, where the veterans of the war sat and stared down into their glasses, waiting for night to fall so they could go out into the alleys and have drunken fights among themselves. But he had brought that look to Mars, to the landing field, and out here there was something disquieting about it. He'd caught Mac's look and turned his head to me. "I'll stoke," he repeated. I didn't know what to say. MacReidie and I—almost all of the men in the Merchant Marine—hadn't served in the combat arms. We had freighted supplies, and we had seen ships dying on the runs—we'd had our own brushes with commerce raiders, and we'd known enough men who joined the combat forces. But very few of the men came back, and the war this man had fought hadn't been the same as ours. He'd commanded a fighting ship, somewhere, and come to grips with things we simply didn't know about. The mark was on him, but not on us. I couldn't meet his eyes. "O.K. by me," I mumbled at last. I saw MacReidie's mouth turn down at the corners. But he couldn't gainsay the man any more than I could. MacReidie wasn't a mumbling man, so he said angrily: "O.K., bucko, you'll stoke. Go and sign on." "Thanks." The stranger walked quietly away. He wrapped a hand around the cable on a cargo hook and rode into the hold on top of some freight. Mac spat on the ground and went back to supervising his end of the loading. I was busy with mine, and it wasn't until we'd gotten the Serenus loaded and buttoned up that Mac and I even spoke to each other again. Then we talked about the trip. We didn't talk about the stranger. Daniels, the Third, had signed him on and had moved him into the empty bunk above mine. We slept all in a bunch on the Serenus —officers and crew. Even so, we had to sleep in shifts, with the ship's designers giving ninety per cent of her space to cargo, and eight per cent to power and control. That left very little for the people, who were crammed in any way they could be. I said empty bunk. What I meant was, empty during my sleep shift. That meant he and I'd be sharing work shifts—me up in the control blister, parked in a soft chair, and him down in the engine room, broiling in a suit for twelve hours. But I ate with him, used the head with him; you can call that rubbing elbows with greatness, if you want to. He was a very quiet man. Quiet in the way he moved and talked. When we were both climbing into our bunks, that first night, I introduced myself and he introduced himself. Then he heaved himself into his bunk, rolled over on his side, fixed his straps, and fell asleep. He was always friendly toward me, but he must have been very tired that first night. I often wondered what kind of a life he'd lived after the war—what he'd done that made him different from the men who simply grew older in the bars. I wonder, now, if he really did do anything different. In an odd way, I like to think that one day, in a bar, on a day that seemed like all the rest to him when it began, he suddenly looked up with some new thought, put down his glass, and walked straight to the Earth-Mars shuttle field. He might have come from any town on Earth. Don't believe the historians too much. Don't pay too much attention to the Chamber of Commerce plaques. When a man's name becomes public property, strange things happen to the facts. It was MacReidie who first found out what he'd done during the war. I've got to explain about MacReidie. He takes his opinions fast and strong. He's a good man—is, or was; I haven't seen him for a long while—but he liked things simple. MacReidie said the duffelbag broke loose and floated into the middle of the bunkroom during acceleration. He opened it to see whose it was. When he found out, he closed it up and strapped it back in its place at the foot of the stoker's bunk. MacReidie was my relief on the bridge. When he came up, he didn't relieve me right away. He stood next to my chair and looked out through the ports. "Captain leave any special instructions in the Order Book?" he asked. "Just the usual. Keep a tight watch and proceed cautiously." "That new stoker," Mac said. "Yeah?" "I knew there was something wrong with him. He's got an old Marine uniform in his duffel." I didn't say anything. Mac glanced over at me. "Well?" "I don't know." I didn't. I couldn't say I was surprised. It had to be something like that, about the stoker. The mark was on him, as I've said. It was the Marines that did Earth's best dying. It had to be. They were trained to be the best we had, and they believed in their training. They were the ones who slashed back the deepest when the other side hit us. They were the ones who sallied out into the doomed spaces between the stars and took the war to the other side as well as any human force could ever hope to. They were always the last to leave an abandoned position. If Earth had been giving medals to members of her forces in the war, every man in the Corps would have had the Medal of Honor two and three times over. Posthumously. I don't believe there were ten of them left alive when Cope was shot. Cope was one of them. They were a kind of human being neither MacReidie nor I could hope to understand. "You don't know," Mac said. "It's there. In his duffel. Damn it, we're going out to trade with his sworn enemies! Why do you suppose he wanted to sign on? Why do you suppose he's so eager to go!" "You think he's going to try to start something?" "Think! That's exactly what he's going for. One last big alley fight. One last brawl. When they cut him down—do you suppose they'll stop with him? They'll kill us, and then they'll go in and stamp Earth flat! You know it as well as I do." "I don't know, Mac," I said. "Go easy." I could feel the knots in my stomach. I didn't want any trouble. Not from the stoker, not from Mac. None of us wanted trouble—not even Mac, but he'd cause it to get rid of it, if you follow what I mean about his kind of man. Mac hit the viewport with his fist. "Easy! Easy—nothing's easy. I hate this life," he said in a murderous voice. "I don't know why I keep signing on. Mars to Centaurus and back, back and forth, in an old rust tub that's going to blow herself up one of these—" Daniels called me on the phone from Communications. "Turn up your Intercom volume," he said. "The stoker's jamming the circuit." I kicked the selector switch over, and this is what I got: " —so there we were at a million per, and the air was gettin' thick. The Skipper says 'Cheer up, brave boys, we'll—' " He was singing. He had a terrible voice, but he could carry a tune, and he was hammering it out at the top of his lungs. " Twas the last cruise of the Venus, by God you should of seen us! The pipes were full of whisky, and just to make things risky, the jets were ... " The crew were chuckling into their own chest phones. I could hear Daniels trying to cut him off. But he kept going. I started laughing myself. No one's supposed to jam an intercom, but it made the crew feel good. When the crew feels good, the ship runs right, and it had been a long time since they'd been happy. He went on for another twenty minutes. Then his voice thinned out, and I heard him cough a little. "Daniels," he said, "get a relief down here for me. Jump to it! " He said the last part in a Master's voice. Daniels didn't ask questions. He sent a man on his way down. He'd been singing, the stoker had. He'd been singing while he worked with one arm dead, one sleeve ripped open and badly patched because the fabric was slippery with blood. There'd been a flashover in the drivers. By the time his relief got down there, he had the insulation back on, and the drive was purring along the way it should have been. It hadn't even missed a beat. He went down to sick bay, got the arm wrapped, and would have gone back on shift if Daniels'd let him. Those of us who were going off shift found him toying with the theremin in the mess compartment. He didn't know how to play it, and it sounded like a dog howling. "Sing, will you!" somebody yelled. He grinned and went back to the "Good Ship Venus ." It wasn't good, but it was loud. From that, we went to "Starways, Farways, and Barways," and "The Freefall Song." Somebody started "I Left Her Behind For You," and that got us off into sentimental things, the way these sessions would sometimes wind up when spacemen were far from home. But not since the war, we all seemed to realize together. We stopped, and looked at each other, and we all began drifting out of the mess compartment. And maybe it got to him, too. It may explain something. He and I were the last to leave. We went to the bunkroom, and he stopped in the middle of taking off his shirt. He stood there, looking out the porthole, and forgot I was there. I heard him reciting something, softly, under his breath, and I stepped a little closer. This is what it was: " The rockets rise against the skies, Slowly; in sunlight gleaming With silver hue upon the blue. And the universe waits, dreaming. " For men must go where the flame-winds blow, The gas clouds softly plaiting; Where stars are spun and worlds begun, And men will find them waiting. " The song that roars where the rocket soars Is the song of the stellar flame; The dreams of Man and galactic span Are equal and much the same. " What was he thinking of? Make your own choice. I think I came close to knowing him, at that moment, but until human beings turn telepath, no man can be sure of another. He shook himself like a dog out of cold water, and got into his bunk. I got into mine, and after a while I fell asleep. I don't know what MacReidie may have told the skipper about the stoker, or if he tried to tell him anything. The captain was the senior ticket holder in the Merchant Service, and a good man, in his day. He kept mostly to his cabin. And there was nothing MacReidie could do on his own authority—nothing simple, that is. And the stoker had saved the ship, and ... I think what kept anything from happening between MacReidie and the stoker, or anyone else and the stoker, was that it would have meant trouble in the ship. Trouble, confined to our little percentage of the ship's volume, could seem like something much more important than the fate of the human race. It may not seem that way to you. But as long as no one began anything, we could all get along. We could have a good trip. MacReidie worried, I'm sure. I worried, sometimes. But nothing happened. When we reached Alpha Centaurus, and set down at the trading field on the second planet, it was the same as the other trips we'd made, and the same kind of landfall. The Lud factor came out of his post after we'd waited for a while, and gave us our permit to disembark. There was a Jek ship at the other end of the field, loaded with the cargo we would get in exchange for our holdful of goods. We had the usual things; wine, music tapes, furs, and the like. The Jeks had been giving us light machinery lately—probably we'd get two or three more loads, and then they'd begin giving us something else. But I found that this trip wasn't quite the same. I found myself looking at the factor's post, and I realized for the first time that the Lud hadn't built it. It was a leftover from the old colonial human government. And the city on the horizon—men had built it; the touch of our architecture was on every building. I wondered why it had never occurred to me that this was so. It made the landfall different from all the others, somehow. It gave a new face to the entire planet. Mac and I and some of the other crewmen went down on the field to handle the unloading. Jeks on self-propelled cargo lifts jockeyed among us, scooping up the loads as we unhooked the slings, bringing cases of machinery from their own ship. They sat atop their vehicles, lean and aloof, dashing in, whirling, shooting across the field to their ship and back like wild horsemen on the plains of Earth, paying us no notice. We were almost through when Mac suddenly grabbed my arm. "Look!" The stoker was coming down on one of the cargo slings. He stood upright, his booted feet planted wide, one arm curled up over his head and around the hoist cable. He was in his dusty brown Marine uniform, the scarlet collar tabs bright as blood at his throat, his major's insignia glittering at his shoulders, the battle stripes on his sleeves. The Jeks stopped their lifts. They knew that uniform. They sat up in their saddles and watched him come down. When the sling touched the ground, he jumped off quietly and walked toward the nearest Jek. They all followed him with their eyes. "We've got to stop him," Mac said, and both of us started toward him. His hands were both in plain sight, one holding his duffelbag, which was swelled out with the bulk of his airsuit. He wasn't carrying a weapon of any kind. He was walking casually, taking his time. Mac and I had almost reached him when a Jek with insignia on his coveralls suddenly jumped down from his lift and came forward to meet him. It was an odd thing to see—the stoker, and the Jek, who did not stand as tall. MacReidie and I stepped back. The Jek was coal black, his scales glittering in the cold sunlight, his hatchet-face inscrutable. He stopped when the stoker was a few paces away. The stoker stopped, too. All the Jeks were watching him and paying no attention to anything else. The field might as well have been empty except for those two. "They'll kill him. They'll kill him right now," MacReidie whispered. They ought to have. If I'd been a Jek, I would have thought that uniform was a death warrant. But the Jek spoke to him: "Are you entitled to wear that?" "I was at this planet in '39. I was closer to your home world the year before that," the stoker said. "I was captain of a destroyer. If I'd had a cruiser's range, I would have reached it." He looked at the Jek. "Where were you?" "I was here when you were." "I want to speak to your ship's captain." "All right. I'll drive you over." The stoker nodded, and they walked over to his vehicle together. They drove away, toward the Jek ship. "All right, let's get back to work," another Jek said to MacReidie and myself, and we went back to unloading cargo. The stoker came back to our ship that night, without his duffelbag. He found me and said: "I'm signing off the ship. Going with the Jeks." MacReidie was with me. He said loudly: "What do you mean, you're going with the Jeks?" "I signed on their ship," the stoker said. "Stoking. They've got a micro-nuclear drive. It's been a while since I worked with one, but I think I'll make out all right, even with the screwball way they've got it set up." "Huh?" The stoker shrugged. "Ships are ships, and physics is physics, no matter where you go. I'll make out." "What kind of a deal did you make with them? What do you think you're up to?" The stoker shook his head. "No deal. I signed on as a crewman. I'll do a crewman's work for a crewman's wages. I thought I'd wander around a while. It ought to be interesting," he said. "On a Jek ship." "Anybody's ship. When I get to their home world, I'll probably ship out with some people from farther on. Why not? It's honest work." MacReidie had no answer to that. "But—" I said. "What?" He looked at me as if he couldn't understand what might be bothering me, but I think perhaps he could. "Nothing," I said, and that was that, except MacReidie was always a sourer man from that time up to as long as I knew him afterwards. We took off in the morning. The stoker had already left on the Jek ship, and it turned out he'd trained an apprentice boy to take his place. It was strange how things became different for us, little by little after that. It was never anything you could put your finger on, but the Jeks began taking more goods, and giving us things we needed when we told them we wanted them. After a while, Serenus was going a little deeper into Jek territory, and when she wore out, the two replacements let us trade with the Lud, too. Then it was the Nosurwey, and other people beyond them, and things just got better for us, somehow. We heard about our stoker, occasionally. He shipped with the Lud, and the Nosurwey, and some people beyond them, getting along, going to all kinds of places. Pay no attention to the precise red lines you see on the star maps; nobody knows exactly what path he wandered from people to people. Nobody could. He just kept signing on with whatever ship was going deeper into the galaxy, going farther and farther. He messed with green shipmates and blue ones. One and two and three heads, tails, six legs—after all, ships are ships and they've all got to have something to push them along. If a man knows his business, why not? A man can live on all kinds of food, if he wants to get used to it. And any nontoxic atmosphere will do, as long as there's enough oxygen in it. I don't know what he did, to make things so much better for us. I don't know if he did anything, but stoke their ships and, I suppose, fix them when they were in trouble. I wonder if he sang dirty songs in that bad voice of his, to people who couldn't possibly understand what the songs were about. All I know is, for some reason those people slowly began treating us with respect. We changed, too, I think—I'm not the same man I was ... I think—not altogether the same; I'm a captain now, with master's papers, and you won't find me in my cabin very often ... there's a kind of joy in standing on a bridge, looking out at the stars you're moving toward. I wonder if it mightn't have kept my old captain out of that place he died in, finally, if he'd tried it. So, I don't know. The older I get, the less I know. The thing people remember the stoker for—the thing that makes him famous, and, I think, annoys him—I'm fairly sure is only incidental to what he really did. If he did anything. If he meant to. I wish I could be sure of the exact answer he found in the bottom of that last glass at the bar before he worked his passage to Mars and the Serenus , and began it all. So, I can't say what he ought to be famous for. But I suppose it's enough to know for sure that he was the first living being ever to travel all the way around the galaxy. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction February 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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THE BLUE TOWER By EVELYN E. SMITH As the vastly advanced guardians of mankind, the Belphins knew how to make a lesson stick—but whom? Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy, February, 1958. Extensive research did not reveal any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Ludovick Eversole sat in the golden sunshine outside his house, writing a poem as he watched the street flow gently past him. There were very few people on it, for he lived in a slow part of town, and those who went in for travel generally preferred streets where the pace was quicker. Moreover, on a sultry spring afternoon like this one, there would be few people wandering abroad. Most would be lying on sun-kissed white beaches or in sun-drenched parks, or, for those who did not fancy being either kissed or drenched by the sun, basking in the comfort of their own air-conditioned villas. Some would, like Ludovick, be writing poems; others composing symphonies; still others painting pictures. Those who were without creative talent or the inclination to indulge it would be relaxing their well-kept golden bodies in whatever surroundings they had chosen to spend this particular one of the perfect days that stretched in an unbroken line before every member of the human race from the cradle to the crematorium. Only the Belphins were much in evidence. Only the Belphins had duties to perform. Only the Belphins worked. Ludovick stretched his own well-kept golden body and rejoiced in the knowing that he was a man and not a Belphin. Immediately afterward, he was sorry for the heartless thought. Didn't the Belphins work only to serve humanity? How ungrateful, then, it was to gloat over them! Besides, he comforted himself, probably, if the truth were known, the Belphins liked to work. He hailed a passing Belphin for assurance on this point. Courteous, like all members of his species, the creature leaped from the street and listened attentively to the young man's question. "We Belphins have but one like and one dislike," he replied. "We like what is right and we dislike what is wrong." "But how can you tell what is right and what is wrong?" Ludovick persisted. "We know ," the Belphin said, gazing reverently across the city to the blue spire of the tower where The Belphin of Belphins dwelt, in constant communication with every member of his race at all times, or so they said. "That is why we were placed in charge of humanity. Someday you, too, may advance to the point where you know , and we shall return whence we came." "But who placed you in charge," Ludovick asked, "and whence did you come?" Fearing he might seem motivated by vulgar curiosity, he explained, "I am doing research for an epic poem." A lifetime spent under their gentle guardianship had made Ludovick able to interpret the expression that flitted across this Belphin's frontispiece as a sad, sweet smile. "We come from beyond the stars," he said. Ludovick already knew that; he had hoped for something a little more specific. "We were placed in power by those who had the right. And the power through which we rule is the power of love! Be happy!" And with that conventional farewell (which also served as a greeting), he stepped onto the sidewalk and was borne off. Ludovick looked after him pensively for a moment, then shrugged. Why should the Belphins surrender their secrets to gratify the idle curiosity of a poet? Ludovick packed his portable scriptwriter in its case and went to call on the girl next door, whom he loved with a deep and intermittently requited passion. As he passed between the tall columns leading into the Flockhart courtyard, he noted with regret that there were quite a number of Corisande's relatives present, lying about sunning themselves and sipping beverages which probably touched the legal limit of intoxicatability. Much as he hated to think harshly of anyone, he did not like Corisande Flockhart's relatives. He had never known anybody who had as many relatives as she did, and sometimes he suspected they were not all related to her. Then he would dismiss the thought as unworthy of him or any right-thinking human being. He loved Corisande for herself alone and not for her family. Whether they were actually her family or not was none of his business. "Be happy!" he greeted the assemblage cordially, sitting down beside Corisande on the tessellated pavement. "Bah!" said old Osmond Flockhart, Corisande's grandfather. Ludovick was sure that, underneath his crustiness, the gnarled patriarch hid a heart of gold. Although he had been mining assiduously, the young man had not yet been able to strike that vein; however, he did not give up hope, for not giving up hope was one of the principles that his wise old Belphin teacher had inculcated in him. Other principles were to lead the good life and keep healthy. "Now, Grandfather," Corisande said, "no matter what your politics, that does not excuse impoliteness." Ludovick wished she would not allude so blatantly to politics, because he had a lurking notion that Corisande's "family" was, in fact, a band of conspirators ... such as still dotted the green and pleasant planet and proved by their existence that Man was not advancing anywhere within measurable distance of that totality of knowledge implied by the Belphin. You could tell malcontents, even if they did not voice their dissatisfactions, by their faces. The vast majority of the human race, living good and happy lives, had smooth and pleasant faces. Malcontents' faces were lined and sometimes, in extreme cases, furrowed. Everyone could easily tell who they were by looking at them, and most people avoided them. It was not that griping was illegal, for the Belphins permitted free speech and reasonable conspiracy; it was that such behavior was considered ungenteel. Ludovick would never have dreamed of associating with this set of neighbors, once he had discovered their tendencies, had he not lost his heart to the purple-eyed Corisande at their first meeting. "Politeness, bah!" old Osmond said. "To see a healthy young man simply—simply accepting the status quo!" "If the status quo is a good status quo," Ludovick said uneasily, for he did not like to discuss such subjects, "why should I not accept it? We have everything we could possibly want. What do we lack?" "Our freedom," Osmond retorted. "But we are free," Ludovick said, perplexed. "We can say what we like, do what we like, so long as it is consonant with the public good." "Ah, but who determines what is consonant with the public good?" Ludovick could no longer temporize with truth, even for Corisande's sake. "Look here, old man, I have read books. I know about the old days before the Belphins came from the stars. Men were destroying themselves quickly through wars, or slowly through want. There is none of that any more." "All lies and exaggeration," old Osmond said. " My grandfather told me that, when the Belphins took over Earth, they rewrote all the textbooks to suit their own purposes. Now nothing but Belphin propaganda is taught in the schools." "But surely some of what they teach about the past must be true," Ludovick insisted. "And today every one of us has enough to eat and drink, a place to live, beautiful garments to wear, and all the time in the world to utilize as he chooses in all sorts of pleasant activities. What is missing?" "They've taken away our frontiers!" Behind his back, Corisande made a little filial face at Ludovick. Ludovick tried to make the old man see reason. "But I'm happy. And everybody is happy, except—except a few killjoys like you." "They certainly did a good job of brainwashing you, boy," Osmond sighed. "And of most of the young ones," he added mournfully. "With each succeeding generation, more of our heritage is lost." He patted the girl's hand. "You're a good girl, Corrie. You don't hold with this being cared for like some damn pet poodle." "Never mind Osmond, Eversole," one of Corisande's alleged uncles grinned. "He talks a lot, but of course he doesn't mean a quarter of what he says. Come, have some wine." He handed a glass to Ludovick. Ludovick sipped and coughed. It tasted as if it were well above the legal alcohol limit, but he didn't like to say anything. They were taking an awful risk, though, doing a thing like that. If they got caught, they might receive a public scolding—which was, of course, no more than they deserved—but he could not bear to think of Corisande exposed to such an ordeal. "It's only reasonable," the uncle went on, "that older people should have a—a thing about being governed by foreigners." Ludovick smiled and set his nearly full glass down on a plinth. "You could hardly call the Belphins foreigners; they've been on Earth longer than even the oldest of us." "You seem to be pretty chummy with 'em," the uncle said, looking narrow-eyed at Ludovick. "No more so than any other loyal citizen," Ludovick replied. The uncle sat up and wrapped his arms around his thick bare legs. He was a powerful, hairy brute of a creature who had not taken advantage of the numerous cosmetic techniques offered by the benevolent Belphins. "Don't you think it's funny they can breathe our air so easily?" "Why shouldn't they?" Ludovick bit into an apple that Corisande handed him from one of the dishes of fruit and other delicacies strewn about the courtyard. "It's excellent air," he continued through a full mouth, "especially now that it's all purified. I understand that in the old days——" "Yes," the uncle said, "but don't you think it's a coincidence they breathe exactly the same kind of air we do, considering they claim to come from another solar system?" "No coincidence at all," said Ludovick shortly, no longer able to pretend he didn't know what the other was getting at. He had heard the ugly rumor before. Of course sacrilege was not illegal, but it was in bad taste. "Only one combination of elements spawns intelligent life." "They say," the uncle continued, impervious to Ludovick's unconcealed dislike for the subject, "that there's really only one Belphin, who lives in the Blue Tower—in a tank or something, because he can't breathe our atmosphere—and that the others are a sort of robot he sends out to do his work for him." "Nonsense!" Ludovick was goaded to irritation at last. "How could a robot have that delicate play of expression, that subtle economy of movement?" Corisande and the uncle exchanged glances. "But they are absolutely blank," the uncle began hesitantly. "Perhaps, with your rich poetic imagination...." "See?" old Osmond remarked with satisfaction. "The kid's brain-washed. I told you so." "Even if The Belphin is a single entity," Ludovick went on, "that doesn't necessarily make him less benevolent——" He was again interrupted by the grandfather. "I won't listen to any more of this twaddle. Benevolent, bah! He or she or it or them is or are just plain exploiting us! Taking our mineral resources away—I've seen 'em loading ore on the spaceships—and——" "—and exchanging it for other resources from the stars," Ludovick said tightly, "without which we could not have the perfectly balanced society we have today. Without which we would be, technologically, back in the dark ages from which they rescued us." "It's not the stuff they bring in from outside that runs this technology," the uncle said. "It's some power they've got that we can't seem to figure out. Though Lord knows we've tried," he added musingly. "Of course they have their own source of power," Ludovick informed them, smiling to himself, for his old Belphin teacher had taken great care to instill a sense of humor into him. "A Belphin was explaining that to me only today." Twenty heads swiveled toward him. He felt uncomfortable, for he was a modest young man and did not like to be the cynosure of all eyes. "Tell us, dear boy," the uncle said, grabbing Ludovick's glass from the plinth and filling it, "what exactly did he say?" "He said the Belphins rule through the power of love." The glass crashed to the tesserae as the uncle uttered a very unworthy word. "And I suppose it was love that killed Mieczyslaw and George when they tried to storm the Blue Tower——" old Osmond began, then halted at the looks he was getting from everybody. Ludovick could no longer pretend his neighbors were a group of eccentrics whom he himself was eccentric enough to regard as charming. "So!" He stood up and wrapped his mantle about him. "I knew you were against the government, and, of course, you have a legal right to disagree with its policies, but I didn't think you were actual—actual—" he dredged a word up out of his schooldays—" anarchists ." He turned to the girl, who was looking thoughtful as she stroked the glittering jewel that always hung at her neck. "Corisande, how can you stay with these—" he found another word—"these subversives ?" She smiled sadly. "Don't forget: they're my family, Ludovick, and I owe them dutiful respect, no matter how pig-headed they are." She pressed his hand. "But don't give up hope." That rang a bell inside his brain. "I won't," he vowed, giving her hand a return squeeze. "I promise I won't." Outside the Flockhart villa, he paused, struggling with his inner self. It was an unworthy thing to inform upon one's neighbors; on the other hand, could he stand idly by and let those neighbors attempt to destroy the social order? Deciding that the greater good was the more important—and that, moreover, it was the only way of taking Corisande away from all this—he went in search of a Belphin. That is, he waited until one glided past and called to him to leave the walk. "I wish to report a conspiracy at No. 7 Mimosa Lane," he said. "The girl is innocent, but the others are in it to the hilt." The Belphin appeared to think for a minute. Then he gave off a smile. "Oh, them," he said. "We know. They are harmless." "Harmless!" Ludovick repeated. "Why, I understand they've already tried to—to attack the Blue Tower by force !" "Quite. And failed. For we are protected from hostile forces, as you were told earlier, by the power of love." Ludovick knew, of course, that the Belphin used the word love metaphorically, that the Tower was protected by a series of highly efficient barriers of force to repel attackers—barriers which, he realized now, from the sad fate of Mieczyslaw and George, were potentially lethal. However, he did not blame the Belphin for being so cagy about his race's source of power, not with people like the Flockharts running about subverting and whatnot. "You certainly do have a wonderful intercommunication system," he murmured. "Everything about us is wonderful," the Belphin said noncommittally. "That's why we're so good to you people. Be happy!" And he was off. But Ludovick could not be happy. He wasn't precisely sad yet, but he was thoughtful. Of course the Belphins knew better than he did, but still.... Perhaps they underestimated the seriousness of the Flockhart conspiracy. On the other hand, perhaps it was he who was taking the Flockharts too seriously. Maybe he should investigate further before doing anything rash. Later that night, he slipped over to the Flockhart villa and nosed about in the courtyard until he found the window behind which the family was conspiring. He peered through a chink in the curtains, so he could both see and hear. Corisande was saying, "And so I think there is a lot in what Ludovick said...." Bless her, he thought emotionally. Even in the midst of her plotting, she had time to spare a kind word for him. And then it hit him: she, too, was a plotter . "You suggest that we try to turn the power of love against the Belphins?" the uncle asked ironically. Corisande gave a rippling laugh as she twirled her glittering pendant. "In a manner of speaking," she said. "I have an idea for a secret weapon which might do the trick——" At that moment, Ludovick stumbled over a jug which some careless relative had apparently left lying about the courtyard. It crashed to the tesserae, spattering Ludovick's legs and sandals with a liquid which later proved to be extremely red wine. "There's someone outside!" the uncle declared, half-rising. "Nonsense!" Corisande said, putting her hand on his shoulder. "I didn't hear anything." The uncle looked dubious, and Ludovick thought it prudent to withdraw at this point. Besides, he had heard enough. Corisande—his Corisande—was an integral part of the conspiracy. He lay down to sleep that night beset by doubts. If he told the Belphins about the conspiracy, he would be betraying Corisande. As a matter of fact, he now remembered, he had already told them about the conspiracy and they hadn't believed him. But supposing he could convince them, how could he give Corisande up to them? True, it was the right thing to do—but, for the first time in his life, he could not bring himself to do what he knew to be right. He was weak, weak—and weakness was sinful. His old Belphin teacher had taught him that, too. As Ludovick writhed restlessly upon his bed, he became aware that someone had come into his chamber. "Ludovick," a soft, beloved voice whispered, "I have come to ask your help...." It was so dark, he could not see her; he knew where she was only by the glitter of the jewel on her neck-chain as it arced through the blackness. "Corisande...." he breathed. "Ludovick...." she sighed. Now that the amenities were over, she resumed, "Against my will, I have been involved in the family plot. My uncle has invented a secret weapon which he believes will counteract the power of the barriers." "But I thought you devised it!" "So it was you in the courtyard. Well, what happened was I wanted to gain time, so I said I had a secret weapon of my own invention which I had not perfected, but which would cost considerably less than my uncle's model. We have to watch the budget, you know, because we can hardly expect the Belphins to supply the components for this job. Anyhow, I thought that, while my folks were waiting for me to finish it, you would have a chance to warn the Belphins." "Corisande," he murmured, "you are as noble and clever as you are beautiful." Then he caught the full import of her remarks. " Me! But they won't pay any attention to me!" "How do you know?" When he remained silent, she said, "I suppose you've already tried to warn them about us." "I—I said you had nothing to do with the plot." "That was good of you." She continued in a warmer tone: "How many Belphins did you warn, then?" "Just one. When you tell one something, you tell them all. You know that. Everyone knows that." "That's just theory," she said. "It's never been proven. All we do know is that they have some sort of central clearing house of information, presumably The Belphin of Belphins. But we don't know that they are incapable of thinking or acting individually. We don't really know much about them at all; they're very secretive." "Aloof," he corrected her, "as befits a ruling race. But always affable." "You must warn as many Belphins as you can." "And if none listens to me?" "Then," she said dramatically, "you must approach The Belphin of Belphins himself." "But no human being has ever come near him!" he said plaintively. "You know that all those who have tried perished. And that can't be a rumor, because your grandfather said——" "But they came to attack The Belphin. You're coming to warn him! That makes a big difference. Ludovick...." She took his hands in hers; in the darkness, the jewel swung madly on her presumably heaving bosom. "This is bigger than both of us. It's for Earth." He knew it was his patriotic duty to do as she said; still, he had enjoyed life so much. "Corisande, wouldn't it be much simpler if we just destroyed your uncle's secret weapon?" "He'd only make another. Don't you see, Ludovick, this is our only chance to save the Belphins, to save humanity.... But, of course, I don't have the right to send you. I'll go myself." "No, Corisande," he sighed. "I can't let you go. I'll do it." Next morning, he set out to warn Belphins. He knew it wasn't much use, but it was all he could do. The first half dozen responded in much the same way the Belphin he had warned the previous day had done, by courteously acknowledging his solicitude and assuring him there was no need for alarm; they knew all about the Flockharts and everything would be all right. After that, they started to get increasingly huffy—which would, he thought, substantiate the theory that they were all part of one vast coordinate network of identity. Especially since each Belphin behaved as if Ludovick had been repeatedly annoying him . Finally, they refused to get off the walks when he hailed them—which was unheard of, for no Belphin had ever before failed to respond to an Earthman's call—and when he started running along the walks after them, they ran much faster than he could. At last he gave up and wandered about the city for hours, speaking to neither human nor Belphin, wondering what to do. That is, he knew what he had to do; he was wondering how to do it. He would never be able to reach The Belphin of Belphins. No human being had ever done it. Mieczyslaw and George had died trying to reach him (or it). Even though their intentions had been hostile and Ludovick's would be helpful, there was little chance he would be allowed to reach The Belphin with all the other Belphins against him. What guarantee was there that The Belphin would not be against him, too? And yet he knew that he would have to risk his life; there was no help for it. He had never wanted to be a hero, and here he had heroism thrust upon him. He knew he could not succeed; equally well, he knew he could not turn back, for his Belphin teacher had instructed him in the meaning of duty. It was twilight when he approached the Blue Tower. Commending himself to the Infinite Virtue, he entered. The Belphin at the reception desk did not give off the customary smiling expression. In fact, he seemed to radiate a curiously apprehensive aura. "Go back, young man," he said. "You're not wanted here." "I must see The Belphin of Belphins. I must warn him against the Flockharts." "He has been warned," the receptionist told him. "Go home and be happy!" "I don't trust you or your brothers. I must see The Belphin himself." Suddenly this particular Belphin lost his commanding manners. He began to wilt, insofar as so rigidly constructed a creature could go limp. "Please, we've done so much for you. Do this for us." "The Belphin of Belphins did things for us," Ludovick countered. "You are all only his followers. How do I know you are really following him? How do I know you haven't turned against him?" Without giving the creature a chance to answer, he strode forward. The Belphin attempted to bar his way. Ludovick knew one Belphin was a myriad times as strong as a human, so it was out of utter futility that he struck. The Belphin collapsed completely, flying apart in a welter of fragile springs and gears. The fact was of some deeper significance, Ludovick knew, but he was too numbed by his incredible success to be able to think clearly. All he knew was that The Belphin would be able to explain things to him. Bells began to clash and clang. That meant the force barriers had gone up. He could see the shimmering insubstance of the first one before him. Squaring his shoulders, he charged it ... and walked right through. He looked himself up and down. He was alive and entire. Then the whole thing was a fraud; the barriers were not lethal—or perhaps even actual. But what of Mieczyslaw? And George? And countless rumored others? He would not let himself even try to think of them. He would not let himself even try to think of anything save his duty. A staircase spiraled up ahead of him. A Belphin was at its foot. Behind him, a barrier iridesced. "Please, young man——" the Belphin began. "You don't understand. Let me explain." But Ludovick destroyed the thing before it could say anything further, and he passed right through the barrier. He had to get to the top and warn The Belphin of Belphins, whoever or whatever he (or it) was, that the Flockharts had a secret weapon which might be able to annihilate it (or him). Belphin after Belphin Ludovick destroyed, and barrier after barrier he penetrated until he reached the top. At the head of the stairs was a vast golden door. "Go no further, Ludovick Eversole!" a mighty voice roared from within. "To open that door is to bring disaster upon your race." But all Ludovick knew was that he had to get to The Belphin within and warn him. He battered down the door; that is, he would have battered down the door if it had not turned out to be unlocked. A stream of noxious vapor rushed out of the opening, causing him to black out. When he came to, most of the vapor had dissipated. The Belphin of Belphins was already dying of asphyxiation, since it was, in fact, a single alien entity who breathed another combination of elements. The room at the head of the stairs had been its tank. "You fool...." it gasped. "Through your muddle-headed integrity ... you have destroyed not only me ... but Earth's future. I tried to make ... this planet a better place for humanity ... and this is my reward...." "But I don't understand!" Ludovick wept. " Why did you let me do it? Why were Mieczyslaw and George and all the others killed? Why was it that I could pass the barriers and they could not?" "The barriers were triggered ... to respond to hostility.... You meant well ... so our defenses ... could not work." Ludovick had to bend low to hear the creature's last words: "There is ... Earth proverb ... should have warned me ... 'I can protect myself ... against my enemies ... but who will protect me ... from my friends'...?" The Belphin of Belphins died in Ludovick's arms. He was the last of his race, so far as Earth was concerned, for no more came. If, as they had said themselves, some outside power had sent them to take care of the human race, then that power had given up the race as a bad job. If they were merely exploiting Earth, as the malcontents had kept suggesting, apparently it had proven too dangerous or too costly a venture. Shortly after The Belphin's demise, the Flockharts arrived en masse. "We won't need your secret weapons now," Ludovick told them dully. "The Belphin of Belphins is dead." Corisande gave one of the rippling laughs he was to grow to hate so much. "Darling, you were my secret weapon all along!" She beamed at her "relatives," and it was then he noticed the faint lines of her forehead. "I told you I could use the power of love to destroy the Belphins!" And then she added gently: "I think there is no doubt who is head of 'this family' now." The uncle gave a strained laugh. "You're going to have a great little first lady there, boy," he said to Ludovick. "First lady?" Ludovick repeated, still absorbed in his grief. "Yes, I imagine the people will want to make you our first President by popular acclaim." Ludovick looked at him through a haze of tears. "But I killed The Belphin. I didn't mean to, but ... they must hate me!" "Nonsense, my boy; they'll adore you. You'll be a hero!" Events proved him right. Even those people who had lived in apparent content under the Belphins, accepting what they were given and seemingly enjoying their carefree lives, now declared themselves to have been suffering in silent resentment all along. They hurled flowers and adulatory speeches at Ludovick and composed extremely flattering songs about him. Shortly after he was universally acclaimed President, he married Corisande. He couldn't escape. "Why doesn't she become President herself?" he wailed, when the relatives came and found him hiding in the ruins of the Blue Tower. The people had torn the Tower down as soon as they were sure The Belphin was dead and the others thereby rendered inoperant. "It would spare her a lot of bother." "Because she is not The Belphin-slayer," the uncle said, dragging him out. "Besides, she loves you. Come on, Ludovick, be a man." So they hauled him off to the wedding and, amid much feasting, he was married to Corisande. He never drew another happy breath. In the first place, now that The Belphin was dead, all the machinery that had been operated by him stopped and no one knew how to fix it. The sidewalks stopped moving, the air conditioners stopped conditioning, the food synthesizers stopped synthesizing, and so on. And, of course, everybody blamed it all on Ludovick—even that year's run of bad weather. There were famines, riots, plagues, and, after the waves of mob hostility had coalesced into national groupings, wars. It was like the old days again, precisely as described in the textbooks. In the second place, Ludovick could never forget that, when Corisande had sent him to the Blue Tower, she could not have been sure that her secret weapon would work. Love might not have conquered all—in fact, it was the more likely hypothesis that it wouldn't—and he would have been killed by the first barrier. And no husband likes to think that his wife thinks he's expendable; it makes him feel she doesn't really love him. So, in thirtieth year of his reign as Dictator of Earth, Ludovick poisoned Corisande—that is, had her poisoned, for by now he had a Minister of Assassination to handle such little matters—and married a very pretty, very young, very affectionate blonde. He wasn't particularly happy with her, either, but at least it was a change. —EVELYN E. SMITH

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Solomon's Orbit There will, sooner or later, be problems of "space junk," and the right to dump in space. But not like this...! by William Carroll Illustrated by Schoenherr "Comrades," said the senior technician, "notice the clear view of North America. From here we watch everything; rivers, towns, almost the people. And see, our upper lens shows the dark spot of a meteor in space. Comrades, the meteor gets larger. It is going to pass close to our wondrous machine. Comrades ... Comrades ... turn to my channel. It is no meteor—it is square. The accursed Americans have sent up a house. Comrades ... an ancient automobile is flying toward our space machine. Comrades ... it is going to—Ah ... the picture is gone." Moscow reported the conversation, verbatim, to prove their space vehicle was knocked from the sky by a capitalistic plot. Motion pictures clearly showed an American automobile coming toward the Russian satellite. Russian astronomers ordered to seek other strange orbiting devices reported: "We've observed cars for weeks. Have been exiling technicians and photographers to Siberia for making jokes of Soviet science. If television proves ancient automobiles are orbiting the world, Americans are caught in obvious attempt to ridicule our efforts to probe mysteries of space." Confusion was also undermining American scientific study of the heavens. At Mount Palomar the busy 200-inch telescope was photographing a strange new object, but plates returned from the laboratory caused astronomers to explode angrily. In full glory, the photograph showed a tiny image of an ancient car. This first development only affected two photographers at Mount Palomar. They were fired for playing practical jokes on the astronomers. Additional exposures of other newfound objects were made. Again the plates were returned; this time with three little old cars parading proudly across the heavens as though they truly belonged among the stars. The night the Russian protest crossed trails with the Palomar report, Washington looked like a kid with chicken pox, as dozens of spotty yellow windows marked midnight meetings of the nation's greatest minds. The military denied responsibility for cars older than 1942. Civil aviation proved they had no projects involving motor vehicles. Central Intelligence swore on their classification manual they were not dropping junk over Cuba in an attempt to hit Castro. Disgusted, the President established a civilian commission which soon located three more reports. Two were from fliers. The pilot of Flight 26, New York to Los Angeles, had two weeks before reported a strange object rising over Southern California about ten the evening of April 3rd. A week after this report, a private pilot on his way from Las Vegas claimed seeing an old car flying over Los Angeles. His statement was ignored, as he was arrested later while trying to drink himself silly because no one believed his story. Fortunately, at the approximate times both pilots claimed sighting unknown objects, radar at Los Angeles International recorded something rising from earth's surface into the stratosphere. Within hours after the three reports met, in the President's commission's office, mobile radar was spotted on Southern California hilltops in twenty-four-hour watches for unscheduled flights not involving aircraft. Number Seven, stationed in the Mount Wilson television tower parking lot, caught one first. "Hey fellows," came his excited voice, "check 124 degrees, vector 62 now ... rising ... 124 degrees ... vector 66 ... rising—" Nine and Four caught it moments later. Then Three , Army long-range radar, picked it up. "O.K., we're on. It's still rising ... leaving the atmosphere ... gone. Anyone else catch it?" Negative responses came from all but Seven , Nine and Four . So well spread were they, that within minutes headquarters had laid four lines over Southern California. They crossed where the unsuspecting community of Fullerton was more or less sound asleep, totally unaware of the making of history in its back yard. The history of what astronomers call Solomon's Orbit had its beginning about three months ago. Solomon, who couldn't remember his first name, was warming tired bones in the sun, in front of his auto-wrecking yard a mile south of Fullerton. Though sitting, he was propped against the office; a tin shed decorated like a Christmas tree with hundreds of hub caps dangling from sagging wooden rafters. The back door opened on two acres of what Solomon happily agreed was the finest junk in all California. Fords on the left, Chevys on the right, and across the sagging back fence, a collection of honorable sedans whose makers left the business world years ago. They were known as Solomon's "Classics." The bright sun had Solomon's tiny eyes burrowed under a shaggy brow which, added to an Einstein-like shock of white hair, gave him the appearance of a professor on sabbatical. Eyes closed, Solomon was fondling favorite memories, when as a lad he repaired steam tractors and followed wheat across central plains of the United States. Happiness faded as the reverie was broken by spraying gravel signaling arrival of a customer's car. "There's Uncle Solomon, Dad," a boy's voice was saying. "He gives us kids good deals on hot-rod parts. You've just gotta take a look at his old cars, 'cause if you want a classic Uncle Solomon would make you a good deal, too. I just know he would." "Sure, Son, let's go in and see what he's got," replied a man's voice. As Solomon opened his eyes, the two popped into reality. Heaving himself out of the sports car bucket seat that was his office chair, Solomon stood awaiting approach of the pair. "Mr Solomon, Georgie here tells me you have some fine old cars for sale?" "Sure have. Sure have. They're in back. Come along. I'll show you the short cuts." Without waiting for a reply, Solomon started, head bent, white hair blowing; through the office, out the back door and down passages hardly wide enough for a boy, let alone a man. He disappeared around a hearse, and surfaced on the other side of a convertible, leading the boy and his father a chase that was more a guided tour of Solomon's yard than a short cut. "Yes, sir, here they are," announced Solomon over his shoulder. Stepping aside he made room for the boy and his father to pass, between a couple of Ford Tudors. Three pair of eyes, one young, one old, the other tired, were faced by two rows of hulks, proud in the silent agony of their fate. Sold, resold and sold again, used until exhaustion set in, they reached Solomon's for a last brave stand. No matter what beauties they were to Solomon's prejudiced eyes; missing fenders, rusted body panels, broken wheels and rotted woodwork bespoke the utter impossibility of restoration. "See, Dad, aren't they great?" Georgie gleefully asked. He could just imagine shaking the guys at school with the old Packard, after Dad restored it. "Are you kidding?" Georgie's Dad exploded, "Those wrecks aren't good for anything but shooting at the moon. Let's go." Not another word did he say. Heading back to the car parked outside Solomon's office, his footsteps were echoed by those of a crestfallen boy. Solomon, a figure of lonely dejection in the gloom overshadowing his unloved old cars, was troubled with smog causing his eyes to water as tired feet aimlessly found their way back to his seat in the sun. That night, to take his mind off worrisome old cars, Solomon began reading the previous Sunday's newspaper. There were pictures of moon shots, rockets and astronauts, which started Solomon to thinking; "So, my classics are good only for shooting at the moon. This thing called an ion engine, which creates a force field to move satellites, seems like a lot of equipment. Could do it easier with one of my old engines, I bet." As Solomon told the people in Washington several months later, he was only resting his eyes, thinking about shop manuals and parts in the back yard. When suddenly he figured there was an easier way to build a satellite power plant. But, as it was past his bedtime, he'd put one together tomorrow. It was late the next afternoon before Solomon had a chance to try his satellite power plant idea. Customers were gone and he was free of interruption. The engine of his elderly Moreland tow-truck was brought to life by Solomon almost hidden behind the huge wooden steering wheel. The truck lumbered carefully down rows of cars to an almost completely stripped wreck holding only a broken engine. In a few minutes, Solomon had the engine waving behind the truck while he reversed to a clear space near the center of his yard. Once the broken engine was blocked upright on the ground, Solomon backed his Moreland out of the way, carried a tray of tools to the engine and squatted in the dirt to work. First, the intake manifold came off and was bolted to the clutch housing so the carburetor mounting flange faced skyward. Solomon stopped for a minute to worry. "If it works," he thought, "when I get them nearer each other, it'll go up in my face." Scanning the yard he thought of fenders, doors, wheels, hub caps and ... that was it. A hub cap would do the trick. At his age, running was a senseless activity, but walking faster than usual, Solomon took a direct route to his office. From the ceiling of hub caps, he selected a small cap from an old Chevy truck. Back at the engine, he punched a hole in the cap, through which he tied a length of strong twine. The cap was laid on the carburetor flange and stuck in place with painter's masking tape. He then bolted the exhaust manifold over the intake so the muffler connection barely touched the hub cap. Solomon stood up, kicked the manifolds with his heavy boots to make sure they were solid and grunted with satisfaction of a job well done. He moved his tray of tools away and trailed the hub cap twine behind the solid body of a big old Ford station wagon. He'd read of scientists in block houses when they shot rockets and was taking no chances. Excitement glistened Solomon's old eyes as what blood pressure there was rose a point or two with happy thoughts. If his idea worked, he would be free of the old cars, yet not destroy a single one. Squatting behind the station wagon, to watch the engine, Solomon gingerly pulled the twine to eliminate slack. As it tightened, he tensed, braced himself with a free hand on the wagon's bumper, and taking a deep breath, jerked the cord. Tired legs failed and Solomon slipped backward when the hub cap broke free of the tape and sailed through the air to clang against the wagon's fender. Lying on his back, struggling to rise, Solomon heard a slight swish as though a whirlwind had come through the yard. The scent of air-borne dust bit his nostrils as he struggled to his feet. Deep in the woods behind Solomon's yard two boys were hunting crows. Eyes high, they scanned branches and horizons for game. "Look, there goes one," the younger cried as a large dark object majestically rose into the sky and rapidly disappeared into high clouds. "Yup, maybe so," said the other. "But it's flying too high for us." "I must be a silly old man," Solomon thought, scanning the cleared space behind his tow truck where he remembered an engine. There was nothing there, and as Solomon now figured it, never had been. Heart heavy with belief in the temporary foolishness of age, Solomon went to the hub cap, glittering the sun where it lit after bouncing off the fender. It was untied from the string, and in the tool tray, before Solomon realized he'd not been daydreaming. In the cleared area, were two old manifold gaskets, several rusty nuts, and dirt blown smooth in a wide circle around greasy blocks on which he'd propped the now missing engine. That night was a whirlwind of excitement for Solomon. He had steak for dinner, then sat back to consider future success. Once the classic cars were gone, he could use the space for more profitable Fords and Chevys. All he'd have to do would be bolt manifolds from spare engines on a different car every night, and he'd be rid of it. All he used was vacuum in the intake manifold, drawing pressure from the outlet side of the exhaust. The resulting automatic power flow raised anything they were attached to. Solomon couldn't help but think, "The newspapers said scientists were losing rockets and space capsules, so a few old cars could get lost in the clouds without hurting anything." Early the next morning, he towed the oldest hulk, an Essex, to the cleared space. Manifolds from junk engines were bolted to the wheels but this time carburetor flanges were covered by wooden shingles because Solomon figured he couldn't afford to ruin four salable hub caps just to get rid of his old sedans. Each shingle was taped in place so they could be pulled off in unison with a strong pull on the twine. The tired Essex was pretty big, so Solomon waited until bedtime before stumbling through the dark to the launching pad in his yard. Light from kitchen matches helped collect the shingle cords as he crouched behind the Ford wagon. He held the cords in one calloused hand, a burning match in the other so he could watch the Essex. Solomon tightened his fist, gave a quick tug to jerk all shingles at the same time, and watched in excited satisfaction as the old sedan rose in a soft swish of midsummer air flowing through ancient curves of four rusty manifold assemblies. Day after day, only a mile from Fullerton, Solomon busied himself buying wrecked cars and selling usable parts. Each weekday night—Solomon never worked on Sunday—another old car from his back lot went silently heavenward with the aid of Solomon's unique combination of engine vacuum and exhaust pressure. His footsteps were light with accomplishment as he thought, "In four more days, they'll all be gone." While the Fullerton radar net smoked innumerable cigarettes and cursed luck ruining the evening, Solomon scrambled two eggs, enjoyed his coffee and relaxed with a newly found set of old 1954 Buick shop manuals. As usual, when the clock neared ten, he closed his manuals and let himself out the back door. City lights, reflected in low clouds, brightened the way Solomon knew well. He was soon kneeling behind the Ford wagon without having stumbled once. Only two kitchen matches were needed to collect the cords from a big Packard, handsome in the warmth of a moonless summer night. With a faint "God Bless You," Solomon pulled the shingles and watched its massive hulk rise and disappear into orbit with his other orphans. If you'd been able to see it all, you'd have worried. The full circle of radar and communications crews around Fullerton had acted as though the whole town were going to pussyfoot away at sundown. Nine was hidden in a curious farmer's orange grove. Seven was tucked between station wagons in the back row of a used car lot. Four was assigned the loading dock of a meat-packing plant, but the night watchman wouldn't allow them to stay. They moved across the street behind a fire station. Three was too big to hide, so it opened for business inside the National Guard Armory. They all caught the Packard's takeoff. Degree lines from the four stations around Fullerton were crossed on the map long before Solomon reached his back door. By the time bedroom lights were out and covers under his bristly chin, a task force of quiet men was speeding on its way to surround four blocks of country land; including a chicken ranch, Solomon's junk yard and a small frame house. Dogs stirred, yapping at sudden activity they alone knew of, then nose to tail, returned to sleep when threats of intrusion failed to materialize. The sun was barely up when the chicken farmer was stopped a block from his house, Highway patrolmen slowly inspected his truck from front to back, while three cars full of civilians, by the side of the road, watched every move. Finding nothing unusual, a patrolman reported to the first civilian car then returned to wave the farmer on his way. When the widow teacher from the frame house, started for school, she too, was stopped. After a cursory inspection the patrolman passed her on. Two of the three accounted for. What of the third? Quietly a cavalcade formed, converged in Solomon's front yard and parked facing the road ready for quick departure. Some dozen civilians muddied shoes and trousers circling the junk yard, taking stations so they could watch all approaches. Once they were in position, a Highway patrolman and two civilians went to Solomon's door. His last cup of coffee was almost gone as Solomon heard the noise of their shoes, followed by knuckles thumping his front door. Wondering who could be in such a hurry, so early in the morning, he pulled on boots and buttoned a denim jacket as he went to answer. "Hello," said Solomon to the patrolman, while opening the door. "Why you bother me so early? You know I only buy cars from owners." "No, Mr. Solomon, we're not worried about your car buying. This man, from Washington, wants to ask you a few questions." "Sure, come in," Solomon replied. The questions were odd: Do you have explosives here? Can you weld metal tanks? What is your education? Were you ever an engineer? What were you doing last night? To these, and bewildering others, Solomon told the truth. He had no explosives, couldn't weld, didn't finish school and was here, in bed, all night. Then they wanted to see his cars. Through the back door, so he'd not have to open the office, Solomon led the three men into his yard. Once inside, and without asking permission, they began searching like a hungry hound trailing a fat rabbit. Solomon's eyes, blinking in the glare of early morning sun, watched invasion of his privacy. "What they want?" he wondered. He'd broken no laws in all the years he'd been in the United States. "For what do they bother a wrecking yard?" he asked himself. His depressing thoughts were rudely shattered by a hail from the larger civilian, standing at the back of Solomon's yard. There, three old cars stood in an isolated row. "Solomon, come here a moment," he shouted. Solomon trudged back, followed by the short civilian and patrolman who left their curious searching to follow Solomon's lead. When he neared, the tall stranger asked, "I see where weeds grew under other cars which, from the tracks, have been moved out in the past few weeks. How many did you have?" "Twenty; but these are all I have left," Solomon eagerly replied, hoping at last he'd a customer for the best of his old cars. "They make classic cars, if you'd take the time to fix them up. That one, the Hupmobile, is the last—" "Who bought the others?" the big man interrupted. "No one," quavered Solomon, terror gripping his throat with a nervous hand. Had he done wrong to send cars into the sky? Everyone else was sending things up. Newspapers said Russians and Americans were racing to send things into the air. What had he done that was wrong? Surely there was no law he'd broken. Wasn't the air free, like the seas? People dumped things into the ocean. "Then where did they go?" snapped his questioner. "Up there," pointed Solomon. "I needed the space. They were too good to cut up. No one would buy them. So I sent them up. The newspapers—" "You did what?" "I sent them into the sky," quavered Solomon. So this is what he did wrong. Would they lock him up? What would happen to his cars? And his business? "How did you ... no! Wait a minute. Don't say a word. Officer, go and tell my men to prevent anyone from approaching or leaving this place." The patrolman almost saluted, thought better of it, and left grumbling about being left out of what must be something big. Solomon told the civilians of matching vacuum in intake manifolds to pressure from exhaust manifolds. A logical way to make an engine that would run on pressure, like satellite engines he'd read about in newspapers. It worked on a cracked engine block, so he'd used scrap manifolds to get rid of old cars no one would buy. It hadn't hurt anything, had it? Well, no, it hadn't. But as you can imagine, things happened rather fast. They let Solomon get clean denims and his razor. Then without a bye-your-leave, hustled him to the Ontario airport where an unmarked jet flew him to Washington and a hurriedly arranged meeting with the President. They left guards posted inside the fence of Solomon's yard, so they'll cause no attention while protecting his property. A rugged individual sits in the office and tells buyers and sellers alike, that he is Solomon's nephew. "The old man had to take a trip in a hurry." Because he knows nothing of the business, they'll have to wait until Solomon returns. Where's Solomon now? Newspaper stories have him in Nevada showing the Air Force how to build gigantic intake and exhaust manifolds, which the Strategic Air Command is planning to attach to a stratospheric decompression test chamber. They figure if they can throw it into the sky, they can move anything up to what astronomers now call Solomon's Orbit, where at last count, sixteen of the seventeen cars are still merrily circling the earth. As you know, one recently hit the Russian television satellite. The Russians? We're told they're still burning their fingers trying to orbit a car. They can't figure how to control vacuum and pressure from the manifolds. Solomon didn't tell many people about the shingles he uses for control panels, and the Russians think control is somehow related to kitchen matches a newspaper reporter found scattered behind a station wagon in Solomon's junk yard. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact Science Fiction November 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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VIEWPOINT. BY RANDALL GARRETT Illustrated by Bernklau [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction January 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] A fearsome thing is a thing you're afraid of—and it has nothing whatever to do with whether others are afraid, nor with whether it is in fact dangerous. It's your view of the matter that counts! There was a dizzy, sickening whirl of mental blackness—not true blackness, but a mind-enveloping darkness that was filled with the multi-colored little sparks of thoughts and memories that scattered through the darkness like tiny glowing mice, fleeing from something unknown, fleeing outwards and away toward a somewhere that was equally unknown; scurrying, moving, changing—each half recognizable as it passed, but leaving only a vague impression behind. Memories were shattered into their component data bits in that maelstrom of not-quite-darkness, and scattered throughout infinity and eternity. Then the pseudo-dark stopped its violent motion and became still, no longer scattering the fleeing memories, but merely blanketing them. And slowly—ever so slowly—the powerful cohesive forces that existed between the data-bits began pulling them back together again as the not-blackness faded. The associative powers of the mind began putting the frightened little things together as they drifted back in from vast distances, trying to fit them together again in an ordered whole. Like a vast jigsaw puzzle in five dimensions, little clots and patches formed as the bits were snuggled into place here and there. The process was far from complete when Broom regained consciousness. Broom sat up abruptly and looked around him. The room was totally unfamiliar. For a moment, that seemed perfectly understandable. Why shouldn't the room look odd, after he had gone through— What? He rubbed his head and looked around more carefully. It was not just that the room itself was unfamiliar as a whole; the effect was greater than that. It was not the first time in his life he had regained consciousness in unfamiliar surroundings, but always before he had been aware that only the pattern was different, not the details. He sat there on the floor and took stock of himself and his surroundings. He was a big man—six feet tall when he stood up, and proportionately heavy, a big-boned frame covered with hard, well-trained muscles. His hair and beard were a dark blond, and rather shaggy because of the time he'd spent in prison. Prison! Yes, he'd been in prison. The rough clothing he was wearing was certainly nothing like the type of dress he was used to. He tried to force his memory to give him the information he was looking for, but it wouldn't come. A face flickered in his mind for a moment, and a name. Contarini. He seemed to remember a startled look on the Italian's face, but he could neither remember the reason for it nor when it had been. But it would come back; he was sure of that. Meanwhile, where the devil was he? From where he was sitting, he could see that the room was fairly large, but not extraordinarily so. A door in one wall led into another room of about the same size. But they were like no other rooms he had ever seen before. He looked down at the floor. It was soft, almost as soft as a bed, covered with a thick, even, resilient layer of fine material of some kind. It was some sort of carpeting that covered the floor from wall to wall, but no carpet had ever felt like this. He lifted himself gingerly to his feet. He wasn't hurt, at least. He felt fine, except for the gaps in his memory. The room was well lit. The illumination came from the ceiling, which seemed to be made of some glowing, semitranslucent metal that cast a shadowless glow over everything. There was a large, bulky table near the wall away from the door; it looked almost normal, except that the objects on it were like nothing that had ever existed. Their purposes were unknown, and their shapes meaningless. He jerked his head away, not wanting to look at the things on the table. The walls, at least, looked familiar. They seemed to be paneled in some fine wood. He walked over and touched it. And knew immediately that, no matter what it looked like, it wasn't wood. The illusion was there to the eye, but no wood ever had such a hard, smooth, glasslike surface as this. He jerked his fingertips away. He recognized, then, the emotion that had made him turn away from the objects on the table and pull his hand away from the unnatural wall. It was fear. Fear? Nonsense! He put his hand out suddenly and slapped the wall with his palm and held it there. There was nothing to be afraid of! He laughed at himself softly. He'd faced death a hundred times during the war without showing fear; this was no time to start. What would his men think of him if they saw him getting shaky over the mere touch of a woodlike wall? The memories were coming back. This time, he didn't try to probe for them; he just let them flow. He turned around again and looked deliberately at the big, bulky table. There was a faint humming noise coming from it which had escaped his notice before. He walked over to it and looked at the queerly-shaped things that lay on its shining surface. He had already decided that the table was no more wood than the wall, and a touch of a finger to the surface verified the decision. The only thing that looked at all familiar on the table was a sheaf of written material. He picked it up and glanced over the pages, noticing the neat characters, so unlike any that he knew. He couldn't read a word of it. He grinned and put the sheets back down on the smooth table top. The humming appeared to be coming from a metal box on the other side of the table. He circled around and took a look at the thing. It had levers and knobs and other projections, but their functions were not immediately discernible. There were several rows of studs with various unrecognizable symbols on them. This would certainly be something to tell in London—when and if he ever got back. He reached out a tentative finger and touched one of the symbol-marked studs. There was a loud click! in the stillness of the room, and he leaped back from the device. He watched it warily for a moment, but nothing more seemed to be forthcoming. Still, he decided it might be best to let things alone. There was no point in messing with things that undoubtedly controlled forces beyond his ability to cope with, or understand. After all, such a long time— He stopped, Time? Time? What had Contarini said about time? Something about its being like a river that flowed rapidly—that much he remembered. Oh, yes—and that it was almost impossible to try to swim backwards against the current or ... something else. What? He shook his head. The more he tried to remember what his fellow prisoner had told him, the more elusive it became. He had traveled in time, that much was certain, but how far, and in which direction? Toward the future, obviously; Contarini had made it plain that going into the past was impossible. Then could he, Broom, get back to his own time, or was he destined to stay in this—place? Wherever and whenever it was. Evidently movement through the time-river had a tendency to disorganize a man's memories. Well, wasn't that obvious anyway? Even normal movement through time, at the rate of a day per day, made some memories fade. And some were lost entirely, while others remained clear and bright. What would a sudden jump of centuries do? His memory was improving, though. If he just let it alone, most of it would come back, and he could orient himself. Meanwhile, he might as well explore his surroundings a little more. He resolved to keep his hands off anything that wasn't readily identifiable. There was a single oddly-shaped chair by the bulky table, and behind the chair was a heavy curtain which apparently covered a window. He could see a gleam of light coming through the division in the curtains. Broom decided he might as well get a good look at whatever was outside the building he was in. He stepped over, parted the curtains, and— —And gasped! It was night time outside, and the sky was clear. He recognized the familiar constellations up there. But they were dimmed by the light from the city that stretched below him. And what a city! At first, it was difficult for his eyes to convey their impressions intelligently to his brain. What they were recording was so unfamiliar that his brain could not decode the messages they sent. There were broad, well-lit streets that stretched on and on, as far as he could see, and beyond them, flittering fairy bridges rose into the air and arched into the distance. And the buildings towered over everything. He forced himself to look down, and it made him dizzy. The building he was in was so high that it would have projected through the clouds if there had been any clouds. Broom backed away from the window and let the curtain close. He'd had all of that he could take for right now. The inside of the building, his immediate surroundings, looked almost homey after seeing that monstrous, endless city outside. He skirted the table with its still-humming machine and walked toward the door that led to the other room. A picture hanging on a nearby wall caught his eye, and he stopped. It was a portrait of a man in unfamiliar, outlandish clothing, but Broom had seen odder clothing in his travels. But the thing that had stopped him was the amazing reality of the picture. It was almost as if there were a mirror there, reflecting the face of a man who stood invisibly before it. It wasn't, of course; it was only a painting. But the lifelike, somber eyes of the man were focused directly on him. Broom decided he didn't like the effect at all, and hurried into the next room. There were several rows of the bulky tables in here, each with its own chair. Broom's footsteps sounded loud in the room, the echoes rebounding from the walls. He stopped and looked down. This floor wasn't covered with the soft carpeting; it had a square, mosaic pattern, as though it might be composed of tile of some kind. And yet, though it was harder than the carpet it had a kind of queer resiliency of its own. The room itself was larger than the one he had just quitted, and not as well lit. For the first time, he thought of the possibility that there might be someone else here besides himself. He looked around, wishing that he had a weapon of some kind. Even a knife would have made him feel better. But there had been no chance of that, of course. Prisoners of war are hardly allowed to carry weapons with them, so none had been available. He wondered what sort of men lived in this fantastic city. So far, he had seen no one. The streets below had been filled with moving vehicles of some kind, but it had been difficult to tell whether there had been anyone walking down there from this height. Contarini had said that it would be ... how had he said it? "Like sleeping for hundreds of years and waking up in a strange world." Well, it was that, all right. Did anyone know he was here? He had the uneasy feeling that hidden, unseen eyes were watching his every move, and yet he could detect nothing. There was no sound except the faint humming from the device in the room behind him, and a deeper, almost inaudible, rushing, rumbling sound that seemed to come from far below. His wish for a weapon came back, stronger than before. The very fact that he had seen no one set his nerves on edge even more than the sight of a known enemy would have done. He was suddenly no longer interested in his surroundings. He felt trapped in this strange, silent room. He could see a light shining through a door at the far end of the room—perhaps it was a way out. He walked toward it, trying to keep his footsteps as silent as possible as he moved. The door had a pane of translucent glass in it, and there were more of the unreadable characters on it. He wished fervently that he could decipher them; they might tell him where he was. Carefully, he grasped the handle of the door, twisted it, and pulled. And, careful as he had been, the door swung inward with surprising rapidity. It was a great deal thinner and lighter than he had supposed. He looked down at it, wondering if there were any way the door could be locked. There was a tiny vertical slit set in a small metal panel in the door, but it was much too tiny to be a keyhole. Still— It didn't matter. If necessary, he could smash the glass to get through the door. He stepped out into what was obviously a hallway beyond the door. The hallway stretched away to either side, lined with doors similar to the one he had just come through. How did a man get out of this place, anyway? The door behind him was pressing against his hand with a patient insistence, as though it wanted to close itself. He almost let it close, but, at the last second, he changed his mind. Better the devil we know than the devil we don't , he thought to himself. He went back into the office and looked around for something to prop the door open. He found a small, beautifully formed porcelain dish on one of the desks, picked it up, and went back to the door. The dish held the door open an inch or so. That was good enough. If someone locked the door, he could still smash in the glass if he wanted to, but the absence of the dish when he returned would tell him that he was not alone in this mysterious place. He started down the hallway to his right, checking the doors as he went. They were all locked. He knew that he could break into any of them, but he had a feeling that he would find no exit through any of them. They all looked as though they concealed more of the big rooms. None of them had any lights behind them. Only the one door that he had come through showed the telltale glow from the other side. Why? He had the terrible feeling that he had been drawn across time to this place for a purpose, and yet he could think of no rational reason for believing so. He stopped as another memory came back. He remembered being in the stone-walled dungeon, with its smelly straw beds, lit only by the faint shaft of sunlight that came from the barred window high overhead. Contarini, the short, wiry little Italian who was in the next cell, looked at him through the narrow opening. "I still think it can be done, my friend. It is the mind and the mind alone that sees the flow of time. The body experiences, but does not see. Only the soul is capable of knowing eternity." Broom outranked the little Italian, but prison can make brothers of all men. "You think it's possible then, to get out of a place like this, simply by thinking about it?" Contarini nodded. "Why not? Did not the saints do so? And what was that? Contemplation of the Eternal, my comrade; contemplation of the Eternal." Broom held back a grin. "Then why, my Venetian friend, have you not left this place long since?" "I try," Contarini had said simply, "but I cannot do it. You wish to know why? It is because I am afraid." "Afraid?" Broom raised an eyebrow. He had seen Contarini on the battlefield, dealing death in hand-to-hand combat, and the Italian hadn't impressed him as a coward. "Yes," said the Venetian. "Afraid. Oh, I am not afraid of men. I fight. Some day, I may die— will die. This does not frighten me, death. I am not afraid of what men may do to me." He stopped and frowned. "But, of this, I have a great fear. Only a saint can handle such things, and I am no saint." "I hope, my dear Contarini," Broom said dryly, "that you are not under the impression that I am a saint." "No, perhaps not," Contarini said. "Perhaps not. But you are braver than I. I am not afraid of any man living. But you are afraid of neither the living nor the dead, nor of man nor devil—which is a great deal more than I can say for myself. Besides, there is the blood of kings in your veins. And has not a king protection that even a man of noble blood such as myself does not have? I think so. "Oh, I have no doubt that you could do it, if you but would. And then, perhaps, when you are free, you would free me—for teaching you all I know to accomplish this. My fear holds me chained here, but you have no chains of fear." Broom had thought that over for a moment, then grinned. "All right, my friend; I'll try it. What's your first lesson?" The memory faded from Broom's mind. Had he really moved through some segment of Eternity to reach this ... this place? Had he— He felt a chill run through him. What was he doing here? How could he have taken it all so calmly. Afraid of man or devil, no—but this was neither. He had to get back. The utter alienness of this bright, shining, lifeless wonderland was too much for him. Instinctively, he turned and ran back toward the room he had left. If he got back to the place where he had appeared in this world, perhaps—somehow—some force would return him to where he belonged. The door was as he had left it, the porcelain dish still in place. He scooped up the dish in one big hand and ran on into the room, letting the door shut itself behind him. He ran on, through the large room with its many tables, into the brightly lighted room beyond. He stopped. What could he do now? He tried to remember the things that the Italian had told him to do, and he could not for the life of him remember them. His memory still had gaps in it—gaps he did not know were there because he had not yet probed for them. He closed his eyes in concentration, trying to bring back a memory that would not come. He did not hear the intruder until the man's voice echoed in the room. Broom's eyes opened, and instantly every muscle and nerve in his hard-trained body tensed for action. There was a man standing in the doorway of the office. He was not a particularly impressive man, in spite of the queer cut of his clothes. He was not as tall as Broom, and he looked soft and overfed. His paunch protruded roundly from the open front of the short coat, and there was a fleshiness about his face that betrayed too much good living. And he looked even more frightened than Broom had been a few minutes before. He was saying something in a language that Broom did not understand, and the tenseness in his voice betrayed his fear. Broom relaxed. He had nothing to fear from this little man. "I won't hurt you," Broom said. "I had no intention of intruding on your property, but all I ask is help." The little man was blinking and backing away, as though he were going to turn and bolt at any moment. Broom laughed. "You have nothing to fear from me, little man. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Richard Broom, known as—" He stopped, and his eyes widened. Total memory flooded over him as he realized fully who he was and where he belonged. And the fear hit him again in a raging flood, sweeping over his mind and blotting it out. Again, the darkness came. This time, the blackness faded quickly. There was a face, a worried face, looking at him through an aperture in the stone wall. The surroundings were so familiar, that the bits of memory which had been scattered again during the passage through centuries of time came back more quickly and settled back into their accustomed pattern more easily. The face was that of the Italian, Contarini. He was looking both worried and disappointed. "You were not gone long, my lord king," he said. "But you were gone. Of that there can be no doubt. Why did you return?" Richard Broom sat up on his palette of straw. The scene in the strange building already seemed dreamlike, but the fear was still there. "I couldn't remember," he said softly. "I couldn't remember who I was nor why I had gone to that ... that place. And when I remembered, I came back." Contarini nodded sadly. "It is as I have heard. The memory ties one too strongly to the past—to one's own time. One must return as soon as the mind had adjusted. I am sorry, my friend; I had hoped we could escape. But now it appears that we must wait until our ransoms are paid. And I much fear that mine will never be paid." "Nor mine," said the big man dully. "My faithful Blondin found me, but he may not have returned to London. And even if he has, my brother John may be reluctant to raise the money." "What? Would England hesitate to ransom the brave king who has fought so gallantly in the Holy Crusades? Never! You will be free, my friend." But Richard Plantagenet just stared at the little dish that he still held in his hand, the fear still in his heart. Men would still call him "Lion-hearted," but he knew that he would never again deserve the title. And, nearly eight centuries away in time and thousands of miles away in space, a Mr. Edward Jasperson was speaking hurriedly into the telephone that stood by the electric typewriter on his desk. "That's right, Officer; Suite 8601, Empire State Building. I was working late, and I left the lights on in my office when I went out to get a cup of coffee. When I came back, he was here—a big, bearded man, wearing a thing that looked like a monk's robe made out of gunny sack. What? No, I locked the door when I left. What? Well, the only thing that's missing as far as I can tell is a ceramic ash tray from one of the desks; he was holding that in his hand when I saw him. What? Oh. Where did he go?" Mr. Jasperson paused in his rush of words. "Well, I must have gotten a little dizzy—I was pretty shocked, you know. To be honest, I didn't see where he went. I must have fainted. "But I think you can pick him up if you hurry. With that getup on, he can't get very far away. All right. Thank you, Officer." He cradled the phone, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and dabbed at his damp forehead. He was a very frightened little man, but he knew he'd get over it by morning. THE END

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PRoblem by Alan E. Nourse The letter came down the slot too early that morning to be the regular mail run. Pete Greenwood eyed the New Philly photocancel with a dreadful premonition. The letter said: Peter: Can you come East chop-chop, urgent? Grdznth problem getting to be a PRoblem, need expert icebox salesman to get gators out of hair fast. Yes? Math boys hot on this, citizens not so hot. Please come. Tommy Pete tossed the letter down the gulper with a sigh. He had lost a bet to himself because it had come three days later than he expected, but it had come all the same, just as it always did when Tommy Heinz got himself into a hole. Not that he didn't like Tommy. Tommy was a good PR-man, as PR-men go. He just didn't know his own depth. PRoblem in a beady Grdznth eye! What Tommy needed right now was a Bazooka Battalion, not a PR-man. Pete settled back in the Eastbound Rocketjet with a sigh of resignation. He was just dozing off when the fat lady up the aisle let out a scream. A huge reptilian head had materialized out of nowhere and was hanging in air, peering about uncertainly. A scaly green body followed, four feet away, complete with long razor talons, heavy hind legs, and a whiplash tail with a needle at the end. For a moment the creature floated upside down, legs thrashing. Then the head and body joined, executed a horizontal pirouette, and settled gently to the floor like an eight-foot circus balloon. Two rows down a small boy let out a muffled howl and tried to bury himself in his mother's coat collar. An indignant wail arose from the fat lady. Someone behind Pete groaned aloud and quickly retired behind a newspaper. The creature coughed apologetically. "Terribly sorry," he said in a coarse rumble. "So difficult to control, you know. Terribly sorry...." His voice trailed off as he lumbered down the aisle toward the empty seat next to Pete. The fat lady gasped, and an angry murmur ran up and down the cabin. "Sit down," Pete said to the creature. "Relax. Cheerful reception these days, eh?" "You don't mind?" said the creature. "Not at all." Pete tossed his briefcase on the floor. At a distance the huge beast had looked like a nightmare combination of large alligator and small tyrannosaurus. Now, at close range Pete could see that the "scales" were actually tiny wrinkles of satiny green fur. He knew, of course, that the Grdznth were mammals—"docile, peace-loving mammals," Tommy's PR-blasts had declared emphatically—but with one of them sitting about a foot away Pete had to fight down a wave of horror and revulsion. The creature was most incredibly ugly. Great yellow pouches hung down below flat reptilian eyes, and a double row of long curved teeth glittered sharply. In spite of himself Pete gripped the seat as the Grdznth breathed at him wetly through damp nostrils. "Misgauged?" said Pete. The Grdznth nodded sadly. "It's horrible of me, but I just can't help it. I always misgauge. Last time it was the chancel of St. John's Cathedral. I nearly stampeded morning prayer—" He paused to catch his breath. "What an effort. The energy barrier, you know. Frightfully hard to make the jump." He broke off sharply, staring out the window. "Dear me! Are we going east ?" "I'm afraid so, friend." "Oh, dear. I wanted Florida ." "Well, you seem to have drifted through into the wrong airplane," said Pete. "Why Florida?" The Grdznth looked at him reproachfully. "The Wives, of course. The climate is so much better, and they mustn't be disturbed, you know." "Of course," said Pete. "In their condition. I'd forgotten." "And I'm told that things have been somewhat unpleasant in the East just now," said the Grdznth. Pete thought of Tommy, red-faced and frantic, beating off hordes of indignant citizens. "So I hear," he said. "How many more of you are coming through?" "Oh, not many, not many at all. Only the Wives—half a million or so—and their spouses, of course." The creature clicked his talons nervously. "We haven't much more time, you know. Only a few more weeks, a few months at the most. If we couldn't have stopped over here, I just don't know what we'd have done." "Think nothing of it," said Pete indulgently. "It's been great having you." The passengers within earshot stiffened, glaring at Pete. The fat lady was whispering indignantly to her seat companion. Junior had half emerged from his mother's collar; he was busy sticking out his tongue at the Grdznth. The creature shifted uneasily. "Really, I think—perhaps Florida would be better." "Going to try it again right now? Don't rush off," said Pete. "Oh, I don't mean to rush. It's been lovely, but—" Already the Grdznth was beginning to fade out. "Try four miles down and a thousand miles southeast," said Pete. The creature gave him a toothy smile, nodded once, and grew more indistinct. In another five seconds the seat was quite empty. Pete leaned back, grinning to himself as the angry rumble rose around him like a wave. He was a Public Relations man to the core—but right now he was off duty. He chuckled to himself, and the passengers avoided him like the plague all the way to New Philly. But as he walked down the gangway to hail a cab, he wasn't smiling so much. He was wondering just how high Tommy was hanging him, this time. The lobby of the Public Relations Bureau was swarming like an upturned anthill when Pete disembarked from the taxi. He could almost smell the desperate tension of the place. He fought his way past scurrying clerks and preoccupied poll-takers toward the executive elevators in the rear. On the newly finished seventeenth floor, he found Tommy Heinz pacing the corridor like an expectant young father. Tommy had lost weight since Pete had last seen him. His ruddy face was paler, his hair thin and ragged as though chunks had been torn out from time to time. He saw Pete step off the elevator, and ran forward with open arms. "I thought you'd never get here!" he groaned. "When you didn't call, I was afraid you'd let me down." "Me?" said Pete. "I'd never let down a pal." The sarcasm didn't dent Tommy. He led Pete through the ante-room into the plush director's office, bouncing about excitedly, his words tumbling out like a waterfall. He looked as though one gentle shove might send him yodeling down Market Street in his underdrawers. "Hold it," said Pete. "Relax, I'm not going to leave for a while yet. Your girl screamed something about a senator as we came in. Did you hear her?" Tommy gave a violent start. "Senator! Oh, dear." He flipped a desk switch. "What senator is that?" "Senator Stokes," the girl said wearily. "He had an appointment. He's ready to have you fired." "All I need now is a senator," Tommy said. "What does he want?" "Guess," said the girl. "Oh. That's what I was afraid of. Can you keep him there?" "Don't worry about that," said the girl. "He's growing roots. They swept around him last night, and dusted him off this morning. His appointment was for yesterday , remember?" "Remember! Of course I remember. Senator Stokes—something about a riot in Boston." He started to flip the switch, then added, "See if you can get Charlie down here with his giz." He turned back to Pete with a frantic light in his eye. "Good old Pete. Just in time. Just. Eleventh-hour reprieve. Have a drink, have a cigar—do you want my job? It's yours. Just speak up." "I fail to see," said Pete, "just why you had to drag me all the way from L.A. to have a cigar. I've got work to do." "Selling movies, right?" said Tommy. "Check." "To people who don't want to buy them, right?" "In a manner of speaking," said Pete testily. "Exactly," said Tommy. "Considering some of the movies you've been selling, you should be able to sell anything to anybody, any time, at any price." "Please. Movies are getting Better by the Day." "Yes, I know. And the Grdznth are getting worse by the hour. They're coming through in battalions—a thousand a day! The more Grdznth come through, the more they act as though they own the place. Not nasty or anything—it's that infernal politeness that people hate most, I think. Can't get them mad, can't get them into a fight, but they do anything they please, and go anywhere they please, and if the people don't like it, the Grdznth just go right ahead anyway." Pete pulled at his lip. "Any violence?" Tommy gave him a long look. "So far we've kept it out of the papers, but there have been some incidents. Didn't hurt the Grdznth a bit—they have personal protective force fields around them, a little point they didn't bother to tell us about. Anybody who tries anything fancy gets thrown like a bolt of lightning hit him. Rumors are getting wild—people saying they can't be killed, that they're just moving in to stay." Pete nodded slowly. "Are they?" "I wish I knew. I mean, for sure. The psych-docs say no. The Grdznth agreed to leave at a specified time, and something in their cultural background makes them stick strictly to their agreements. But that's just what the psych-docs think, and they've been known to be wrong." "And the appointed time?" Tommy spread his hands helplessly. "If we knew, you'd still be in L.A. Roughly six months and four days, plus or minus a month for the time differential. That's strictly tentative, according to the math boys. It's a parallel universe, one of several thousand already explored, according to the Grdznth scientists working with Charlie Karns. Most of the parallels are analogous, and we happen to be analogous to the Grdznth, a point we've omitted from our PR-blasts. They have an eight-planet system around a hot sun, and it's going to get lots hotter any day now." Pete's eyes widened. "Nova?" "Apparently. Nobody knows how they predicted it, but they did. Spotted it coming several years ago, so they've been romping through parallel after parallel trying to find one they can migrate to. They found one, sort of a desperation choice. It's cold and arid and full of impassable mountain chains. With an uphill fight they can make it support a fraction of their population." Tommy shook his head helplessly. "They picked a very sensible system for getting a good strong Grdznth population on the new parallel as fast as possible. The males were picked for brains, education, ability and adaptability; the females were chosen largely according to how pregnant they were." Pete grinned. "Grdznth in utero. There's something poetic about it." "Just one hitch," said Tommy. "The girls can't gestate in that climate, at least not until they've been there long enough to get their glands adjusted. Seems we have just the right climate here for gestating Grdznth, even better than at home. So they came begging for permission to stop here, on the way through, to rest and parturiate." "So Earth becomes a glorified incubator." Pete got to his feet thoughtfully. "This is all very touching," he said, "but it just doesn't wash. If the Grdznth are so unpopular with the masses, why did we let them in here in the first place?" He looked narrowly at Tommy. "To be very blunt, what's the parking fee?" "Plenty," said Tommy heavily. "That's the trouble, you see. The fee is so high, Earth just can't afford to lose it. Charlie Karns'll tell you why." Charlie Karns from Math Section was an intense skeleton of a man with a long jaw and a long white coat drooping over his shoulders like a shroud. In his arms he clutched a small black box. "It's the parallel universe business, of course," he said to Pete, with Tommy beaming over his shoulder. "The Grdznth can cross through. They've been able to do it for a long time. According to our figuring, this must involve complete control of mass, space and dimension, all three. And time comes into one of the three—we aren't sure which." The mathematician set the black box on the desk top and released the lid. Like a jack-in-the-box, two small white plastic spheres popped out and began chasing each other about in the air six inches above the box. Presently a third sphere rose up from the box and joined the fun. Pete watched it with his jaw sagging until his head began to spin. "No wires?" " Strictly no wires," said Charlie glumly. "No nothing." He closed the box with a click. "This is one of their children's toys, and theoretically, it can't work. Among other things, it takes null-gravity to operate." Pete sat down, rubbing his chin. "Yes," he said. "I'm beginning to see. They're teaching you this?" Tommy said, "They're trying to. He's been working for weeks with their top mathematicians, him and a dozen others. How many computers have you burned out, Charlie?" "Four. There's a differential factor, and we can't spot it. They have the equations, all right. It's a matter of translating them into constants that make sense. But we haven't cracked the differential." "And if you do, then what?" Charlie took a deep breath. "We'll have inter-dimensional control, a practical, utilizable transmatter. We'll have null-gravity, which means the greatest advance in power utilization since fire was discovered. It might give us the opening to a concept of time travel that makes some kind of sense. And power! If there's an energy differential of any magnitude—" He shook his head sadly. "We'll also know the time-differential," said Tommy hopefully, "and how long the Grdznth gestation period will be." "It's a fair exchange," said Charlie. "We keep them until the girls have their babies. They teach us the ABC's of space, mass and dimension." Pete nodded. "That is, if you can make the people put up with them for another six months or so." Tommy sighed. "In a word—yes. So far we've gotten nowhere at a thousand miles an hour." "I can't do it!" the cosmetician wailed, hurling himself down on a chair and burying his face in his hands. "I've failed. Failed!" The Grdznth sitting on the stool looked regretfully from the cosmetician to the Public Relations men. "I say—I am sorry...." His coarse voice trailed off as he peeled a long strip of cake makeup off his satiny green face. Pete Greenwood stared at the cosmetician sobbing in the chair. "What's eating him ?" "Professional pride," said Tommy. "He can take twenty years off the face of any woman in Hollywood. But he's not getting to first base with Gorgeous over there. This is only one thing we've tried," he added as they moved on down the corridor. "You should see the field reports. We've tried selling the advances Earth will have, the wealth, the power. No dice. The man on the street reads our PR-blasts, and then looks up to see one of the nasty things staring over his shoulder at the newspaper." "So you can't make them beautiful," said Pete. "Can't you make them cute?" "With those teeth? Those eyes? Ugh." "How about the 'jolly company' approach?" "Tried it. There's nothing jolly about them. They pop out of nowhere, anywhere. In church, in bedrooms, in rush-hour traffic through Lincoln Tunnel—look!" Pete peered out the window at the traffic jam below. Cars were snarled up for blocks on either side of the intersection. A squad of traffic cops were converging angrily on the center of the mess, where a stream of green reptilian figures seemed to be popping out of the street and lumbering through the jammed autos like General Sherman tanks. "Ulcers," said Tommy. "City traffic isn't enough of a mess as it is. And they don't do anything about it. They apologize profusely, but they keep coming through." The two started on for the office. "Things are getting to the breaking point. The people are wearing thin from sheer annoyance—to say nothing of the nightmares the kids are having, and the trouble with women fainting." The signal light on Tommy's desk was flashing scarlet. He dropped into a chair with a sigh and flipped a switch. "Okay, what is it now?" "Just another senator," said a furious male voice. "Mr. Heinz, my arthritis is beginning to win this fight. Are you going to see me now, or aren't you?" "Yes, yes, come right in!" Tommy turned white. "Senator Stokes," he muttered. "I'd completely forgotten—" The senator didn't seem to like being forgotten. He walked into the office, looked disdainfully at the PR-men, and sank to the edge of a chair, leaning on his umbrella. "You have just lost your job," he said to Tommy, with an icy edge to his voice. "You may not have heard about it yet, but you can take my word for it. I personally will be delighted to make the necessary arrangements, but I doubt if I'll need to. There are at least a hundred senators in Washington who are ready to press for your dismissal, Mr. Heinz—and there's been some off-the-record talk about a lynching. Nothing official, of course." "Senator—" "Senator be hanged! We want somebody in this office who can manage to do something." "Do something! You think I'm a magician? I can just make them vanish? What do you want me to do?" The senator raised his eyebrows. "You needn't shout, Mr. Heinz. I'm not the least interested in what you do. My interest is focused completely on a collection of five thousand letters, telegrams, and visiphone calls I've received in the past three days alone. My constituents, Mr. Heinz, are making themselves clear. If the Grdznth do not go, I go." "That would never do, of course," murmured Pete. The senator gave Pete a cold, clinical look. "Who is this person?" he asked Tommy. "An assistant on the job," Tommy said quickly. "A very excellent PR-man." The senator sniffed audibly. "Full of ideas, no doubt." "Brimming," said Pete. "Enough ideas to get your constituents off your neck for a while, at least." "Indeed." "Indeed," said Pete. "Tommy, how fast can you get a PR-blast to penetrate? How much medium do you control?" "Plenty," Tommy gulped. "And how fast can you sample response and analyze it?" "We can have prelims six hours after the PR-blast. Pete, if you have an idea, tell us!" Pete stood up, facing the senator. "Everything else has been tried, but it seems to me one important factor has been missed. One that will take your constituents by the ears." He looked at Tommy pityingly. "You've tried to make them lovable, but they aren't lovable. They aren't even passably attractive. There's one thing they are though, at least half of them." Tommy's jaw sagged. "Pregnant," he said. "Now see here," said the senator. "If you're trying to make a fool out of me to my face—" "Sit down and shut up," said Pete. "If there's one thing the man in the street reveres, my friend, it's motherhood. We've got several hundred thousand pregnant Grdznth just waiting for all the little Grdznth to arrive, and nobody's given them a side glance." He turned to Tommy. "Get some copywriters down here. Get a Grdznth obstetrician or two. We're going to put together a PR-blast that will twang the people's heart-strings like a billion harps." The color was back in Tommy's cheeks, and the senator was forgotten as a dozen intercom switches began snapping. "We'll need TV hookups, and plenty of newscast space," he said eagerly. "Maybe a few photographs—do you suppose maybe baby Grdznth are lovable?" "They probably look like salamanders," said Pete. "But tell the people anything you want. If we're going to get across the sanctity of Grdznth motherhood, my friend, anything goes." "It's genius," chortled Tommy. "Sheer genius." "If it sells," the senator added, dubiously. "It'll sell," Pete said. "The question is: for how long?" The planning revealed the mark of genius. Nothing sudden, harsh, or crude—but slowly, in a radio comment here or a newspaper story there, the emphasis began to shift from Grdznth in general to Grdznth as mothers. A Rutgers professor found his TV discussion on "Motherhood as an Experience" suddenly shifted from 6:30 Monday evening to 10:30 Saturday night. Copy rolled by the ream from Tommy's office, refined copy, hypersensitively edited copy, finding its way into the light of day through devious channels. Three days later a Grdznth miscarriage threatened, and was averted. It was only a page 4 item, but it was a beginning. Determined movements to expel the Grdznth faltered, trembled with indecision. The Grdznth were ugly, they frightened little children, they were a trifle overbearing in their insufferable stubborn politeness—but in a civilized world you just couldn't turn expectant mothers out in the rain. Not even expectant Grdznth mothers. By the second week the blast was going at full tilt. In the Public Relations Bureau building, machines worked on into the night. As questionnaires came back, spot candid films and street-corner interview tapes ran through the projectors on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Tommy Heinz grew thinner and thinner, while Pete nursed sharp post-prandial stomach pains. "Why don't people respond ?" Tommy asked plaintively on the morning the third week started. "Haven't they got any feelings? The blast is washing over them like a wave and there they sit!" He punched the private wire to Analysis for the fourth time that morning. He got a man with a hag-ridden look in his eye. "How soon?" "You want yesterday's rushes?" "What do you think I want? Any sign of a lag?" "Not a hint. Last night's panel drew like a magnet. The D-Date tag you suggested has them by the nose." "How about the President's talk?" The man from Analysis grinned. "He should be campaigning." Tommy mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. "Okay. Now listen: we need a special run on all response data we have for tolerance levels. Got that? How soon can we have it?" Analysis shook his head. "We could only make a guess with the data so far." "Fine," said Tommy. "Make a guess." "Give us three hours," said Analysis. "You've got thirty minutes. Get going." Turning back to Pete, Tommy rubbed his hands eagerly. "It's starting to sell, boy. I don't know how strong or how good, but it's starting to sell! With the tolerance levels to tell us how long we can expect this program to quiet things down, we can give Charlie a deadline to crack his differential factor, or it's the ax for Charlie." He chuckled to himself, and paced the room in an overflow of nervous energy. "I can see it now. Open shafts instead of elevators. A quick hop to Honolulu for an afternoon on the beach, and back in time for supper. A hundred miles to the gallon for the Sunday driver. When people begin seeing what the Grdznth are giving us, they'll welcome them with open arms." "Hmmm," said Pete. "Well, why won't they? The people just didn't trust us, that was all. What does the man in the street know about transmatters? Nothing. But give him one, and then try to take it away." "Sure, sure," said Pete. "It sounds great. Just a little bit too great." Tommy blinked at him. "Too great? Are you crazy?" "Not crazy. Just getting nervous." Pete jammed his hands into his pockets. "Do you realize where we're standing in this thing? We're out on a limb—way out. We're fighting for time—time for Charlie and his gang to crack the puzzle, time for the Grdznth girls to gestate. But what are we hearing from Charlie?" "Pete, Charlie can't just—" "That's right," said Pete. " Nothing is what we're hearing from Charlie. We've got no transmatter, no null-G, no power, nothing except a whole lot of Grdznth and more coming through just as fast as they can. I'm beginning to wonder what the Grdznth are giving us." "Well, they can't gestate forever." "Maybe not, but I still have a burning desire to talk to Charlie. Something tells me they're going to be gestating a little too long." They put through the call, but Charlie wasn't answering. "Sorry," the operator said. "Nobody's gotten through there for three days." "Three days?" cried Tommy. "What's wrong? Is he dead?" "Couldn't be. They burned out two more machines yesterday," said the operator. "Killed the switchboard for twenty minutes." "Get him on the wire," Tommy said. "That's orders." "Yes, sir. But first they want you in Analysis." Analysis was a shambles. Paper and tape piled knee-deep on the floor. The machines clattered wildly, coughing out reams of paper to be gulped up by other machines. In a corner office they found the Analysis man, pale but jubilant. "The Program," Tommy said. "How's it going?" "You can count on the people staying happy for at least another five months." Analysis hesitated an instant. "If they see some baby Grdznth at the end of it all." There was dead silence in the room. "Baby Grdznth," Tommy said finally. "That's what I said. That's what the people are buying. That's what they'd better get." Tommy swallowed hard. "And if it happens to be six months?" Analysis drew a finger across his throat. Tommy and Pete looked at each other, and Tommy's hands were shaking. "I think," he said, "we'd better find Charlie Karns right now." Math Section was like a tomb. The machines were silent. In the office at the end of the room they found an unshaven Charlie gulping a cup of coffee with a very smug-looking Grdznth. The coffee pot was floating gently about six feet above the desk. So were the Grdznth and Charlie. "Charlie!" Tommy howled. "We've been trying to get you for hours! The operator—" "I know, I know." Charlie waved a hand disjointedly. "I told her to go away. I told the rest of the crew to go away, too." "Then you cracked the differential?" Charlie tipped an imaginary hat toward the Grdznth. "Spike cracked it," he said. "Spike is a sort of Grdznth genius." He tossed the coffee cup over his shoulder and it ricochetted in graceful slow motion against the far wall. "Now why don't you go away, too?" Tommy turned purple. "We've got five months," he said hoarsely. "Do you hear me? If they aren't going to have their babies in five months, we're dead men." Charlie chuckled. "Five months, he says. We figured the babies to come in about three months—right, Spike? Not that it'll make much difference to us." Charlie sank slowly down to the desk. He wasn't laughing any more. "We're never going to see any Grdznth babies. It's going to be a little too cold for that. The energy factor," he mumbled. "Nobody thought of that except in passing. Should have, though, long ago. Two completely independent universes, obviously two energy systems. Incompatible. We were dealing with mass, space and dimension—but the energy differential was the important one." "What about the energy?" "We're loaded with it. Super-charged. Packed to the breaking point and way beyond." Charlie scribbled frantically on the desk pad. "Look, it took energy for them to come through—immense quantities of energy. Every one that came through upset the balance, distorted our whole energy pattern. And they knew from the start that the differential was all on their side—a million of them unbalances four billion of us. All they needed to overload us completely was time for enough crossings." "And we gave it to them." Pete sat down slowly, his face green. "Like a rubber ball with a dent in the side. Push in one side, the other side pops out. And we're the other side. When?" "Any day now. Maybe any minute." Charlie spread his hands helplessly. "Oh, it won't be bad at all. Spike here was telling me. Mean temperature in only 39 below zero, lots of good clean snow, thousands of nice jagged mountain peaks. A lovely place, really. Just a little too cold for Grdznth. They thought Earth was much nicer." "For them," whispered Tommy. "For them," Charlie said. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from "Tiger by the Tail and Other Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse" and was first published in Galaxy October 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from the September 1960 issue of If. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Star Performer By ROBERT J. SHEA Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS Blue Boy's rating was high and his fans were loyal to the death—anyone's death! Gavir gingerly fitted the round opening in the bottom of the silvery globe over the top of his hairless blue skull. He pulled the globe down until he felt tiny filaments touching his scalp. The tips of the wires were cold. The moderator then said, " Dreaming Through the Universe tonight brings you the first native Martian to appear on the dreamwaves—Gavir of the Desert Men. With him is his guardian, Dr. Malcomb Rice, the noted anthropologist." Then the moderator questioned Malcomb, while Gavir nervously awaited the moment when his thoughts would be transmitted to millions of Earthmen. Malcomb told how he had been struck by Gavir's intelligence and missionary-taught ability to speak Earth's language, and had decided to bring Gavir to Earth. The moderator turned to Gavir. "Are you anxious to get back to Mars?" No! Gavir thought. Back behind the Preserve Barrier that killed you instantly if you stepped too close to it? Back to the constant fear of being seized by MDC guards for a labor pool, to wind up in the MDC mines? Mars was where Gavir's father had been pinned, bayonets through his hands and feet, to the wall of a shack just the other side of the Barrier, to die slowly, out of Gavir's reach. Father James told Gavir that the head of MDC himself had ordered the killing, because Gavir's father had tried to organize resistance to the Corporation. Mars was where the magic powers of the Earthmen and the helplessness of the Martian tribes would always protect the head of MDC from Gavir's vengeance. Back to that world of hopeless fear and hatred? I never want to go back to Mars! I want to stay here! But that wasn't what he was supposed to think. Quickly he said, "I will be happy to return to my people." A movement caught his eye. The producer, reclining on a divan in a far corner of the small studio, was making some kind of signal by beating his fist against his forehead. "Well, enough of that!" the moderator said briskly. "How about singing one of your tribal songs for us?" Gavir said, "I will sing the Song of Going to Hunt ." He heaved himself up from the divan, and, feet planted wide apart, threw back his head and began to howl. He was considered a poor singer in his tribe, and he was not surprised that Malcomb and the moderator winced. But Malcomb had told him that it wouldn't matter. The dreamees receiving the dreamcast would hear the song as it should sound, as Gavir heard it in his mind. Everything that Gavir saw and heard and felt in his mind, the dreamees could see and hear and feel.... I t was cold, bitter cold, on the plain. The hunter stood at the edge of the camp as the shriveled Martian sun struck the tops of the Shakam hills. The hunter hefted the long, balanced narvoon, the throwing knife, in his hand. He had faith in the knife, and in his skill with it. The hunter filled his lungs, the cold air reaching deep into his chest. He shouted out his throat-bursting hunting cry. He began to run across the plain. Crouching behind crumbling red rocks, racing over flat expanses of orange sand, the hunter sought traces of the seegee, the great slow desert beast whose body provided his tribe with all the essentials of existence. At last he saw tracks. He mounted a dune. Out on the plain before him a great brown seegee lumbered patiently, unaware of its danger. The hunter was about to strike out after it, when a dark form leaped at him. The hunter saw it out of the corner of his eye at the last moment. His startled sidestep saved him from the neck-breaking snap of the great jaws. The drock's long body was armored with black scales. Curving fangs protruded from its upper jaw. Its hand-like forepaws ended in hooked claws, to grasp and tear its prey. It was larger, stronger, faster than the hunter. The thin Martian air carried weirdly high-pitched cries which proclaimed its craving to sink its fangs into the hunter's body. The drock's huge hind legs coiled back on their triple joints, and it sprang. The hunter thrust the gleaming knife out before him, so that the dark body would land on its gleaming blade. The drock twisted in mid-air and landed to one side of the hunter. Now, before it could gather itself for another spring, there was time for one cast of the blade. It had to be done at once. It had to be perfect. If it failed, the knife would be lost and the drock would have its kill. The hunter grasped the weapon by the blade, drew his arm back, and snapped it forward. The blade struck deep into the throat of the drock. The drock screamed eerily and jumped clumsily. The hunter threw himself at the great, dark body and retrieved the knife. He struck with it again and again into the gray twitching belly. Colorless blood ran out over the hard, tightly-stretched skin. The drock fell, gave a last convulsion, and lay still. The hunter plunged the blade into the red sand to clean it. He threw back his head and bellowed his hunting cry. There was great glory in killing the drock, for it showed that the Desert Man and not the drock, was lord of the red waste.... Gavir sat down on the divan, exhausted, his song finished. He didn't hear the moderator winding up the dreamcast. Then the producer of the program was upon him. He began shouting even before Gavir removed his headset. "What kind of a fool are you? Before you started that song, you dreamed things about the Martian Development Corporation that were libelous! I got the whole thing—the Barrier, the guards, the labor pools and mines, the father crucified. It was awful! MDC is one of our biggest sponsors." Malcomb said, "You can't expect an untrained young Martian to control his very thoughts. And may I point out that your tone is hostile?" At this a sudden change came over the producer. The standard Earth expression—invincible benignity—took control of his face. "I apologize for having spoken sharply, but dreamcasting is a nerve-wracking business. If it weren't for Ethical Conditioning, I don't know how I'd control my aggressive impulses. The Suppression of Aggression is the Foundation of Civilization, eh?" Malcomb smiled. "Ethical Conditioning Keeps Society from Fissioning." He shook hands with the producer. "Come around tomorrow at 1300 and collect your fee," said the producer. "Good night, gentlemen." As they left the Global Dreamcasting System building, Gavir said to Malcomb, "Can we go to a bookstore tonight?" "Tomorrow. I'm taking you to your hotel and then I'm going back to my apartment. We both need sleep. And don't forget, you've been warned not to go prowling around the city by yourself...." As soon as Gavir was sure that Malcomb was out of the hotel and well on his way home, he left his room and went out into the city. In a pitifully few days he would be back in the Preserve, back with the fear of MDC, with hunger and the hopeless desire to find and kill the man who had ordered his father's death. Now he had an opportunity to learn more about the universe of the Earthmen. Despite Malcomb's orders, he was going to find a seller of books. During a reading class at the mission school, Father James had said, "In books there is power. All that you call magic in our Earth civilization is explained in books." Gavir wanted to learn. It was his only hope to find an alternative to the short, fear-ridden, impoverished life he foresaw for himself. A river of force carried him, along with thousands of Earthmen—godlike beings in their perfect health and their impregnable benignity—through the streets of the city. Platforms of force raised and lowered him through the city's multiple levels.... And, as has always happened to outlanders in cities, he became lost. He was in a quarter where furtive red and violet lights danced in the shadows of hunched buildings. A half-dozen Earthmen approached him, stopped and stared. Gavir stared back. The Earthmen wore black garments and furs and metal ornaments. The biggest of them wore a black suit, a long black cape, and a broad-brimmed black hat. He carried a coiled whip in one hand. The Earthmen turned to one another. "A Martian." "Let's give pain and death to the Martian! It will be a new experience—one to savor." "Take pain, Martian!" The Earthman with the black hat raised his arm, and the long heavy lash fell on Gavir. He felt a savage sting in the arm he had thrown up to protect his eyes. Gavir leaped at the Earthmen. He clubbed the man with the whip across the face. As the others rushed in, Gavir flailed about him with long arms and heavy fists. He began to enjoy it. It was rare that a Martian had an opportunity to knock Earthmen down. The mood of the Song of Going to Hunt came over him. He sprang free of his attackers and drew his glittering narvoon. The man with the whip yelled. They looked at his knife, and then all at once turned and ran. Gavir drew back his arm and threw the knife with a practiced catapult-snap of shoulder, elbow, and wrist. To his surprise, the blade clattered to the street far short of his retreating enemies. Then he remembered: you couldn't throw far in the gravity of Earth. The Earthmen disappeared into a lift-force field. Gavir decided not to pursue them. He walked forward and picked up his narvoon, and saw that the street on which it lay was solid black pavement, not a force-field. He must be in the lowest level of the city. He didn't know his way around; he might meet more enemies. He forgot about the books he'd wanted, and began to search for his hotel. When he got back to his room, he went immediately to bed. He slept late. Malcomb woke him at 1100. Gavir told Malcomb about the strangely-dressed men who had tried to kill him. "I told you not to wander around alone." "But you did not tell me that Earthmen might try to kill me. You have told me that Earthmen are good and peace-loving, that there have been no acts of violence on Earth for many decades. You have told me that only the MDC men are exceptions, because they are living off Earth, and this somehow makes them different." "Well, those people you ran into are another exception." "Why?" "You know about the Regeneration and Rejuvenation treatment we have here on Earth. A variation of it was given you to acclimate you to Earth's gravity and atmosphere. Well, since the R&R treatment was developed, we Earthmen have a life-expectancy of about one hundred fifty years. Those people who attacked you were Century-Plus. They are over a hundred years old, but as healthy, physically, as ever." "What is wrong with them?" "They seem to have outgrown their Ethical Conditioning. They live wildly. Violently. It's a problem without precedent, and we don't know what to do with them. The fact is, Senile Delinquency is our number one problem." "Why not punish them?" said Gavir. "They're too powerful. They are often people who've pursued successful careers and acquired a good deal of property and position. And there are getting to be more of them all the time. But come on. You and I have to go over to Global Dreamcasting and collect our fee." The impeccably affable producer of Dreaming Through the Universe gave Malcomb a check and then asked them to follow him. "Mr. Davery wants to see you. Mr. Hoppy Davery, executive vice-president in charge of production. Scion of one of Earth's oldest communications media families!" They went with the producer to the upper reaches of the Global Dreamcasting building. There they were ushered into a huge office. They found Mr. Hoppy Davery lounging on a divan the size of a space-port. He was youthful in appearance, as were all Earthmen, but a soft plumpness and a receding hairline made him look slightly older than average. He pointed a rigid finger at Malcomb and Gavir. "I want you two to hear a condensed recording of statements taken from calls we received last night." Gavir stiffened. They had gotten into trouble because of his thoughts about MDC. A voice boomed out of the ceiling. "That Martian boy has power. That song was a fist in the jaw. More!" A woman's voice followed: "If you let that boy go back to Mars I'll never dream a Global program again." More voices: "Enormous!" "Potent!" "That hunting song drove me mad. I like being mad!" "Keep him on Earth." Hoppy Davery pressed a button in the control panel on his divan, and the voices fell silent. "Those callers that admitted their age were all Century-Plus. The boy appeals to the Century-Plus mentality. I want to try him again. This time on a really big dream-show, not just an educational 'cast. Got a spot on next week's Farfel Flisket Show. If he gets the right response, we talk about a contract. Okay?" Malcomb said, "His visa expires—" "We'll take care of his visa." Gavir trembled with joy. Hoppy Davery pressed another button and a secretary entered with papers. She was followed by another woman. The second woman was dark-haired and slender. She wore leather boots and tight brown breeches. She was bare from the waist up and her breasts were young and full. A jewelled clip fastened a scarlet cape at her neck. Her lips were a disconcertingly vivid red, apparently an artificial color. She kissed Hoppy Davery on the forehead, leaving red blotches on his pink dome. He wiped his forehead and looked at his hand. "Do you have to wear that barbaric face-paint?" Hoppy turned sad eyes on Gavir and Malcomb. "Gentlemen, my mother, Sylvie Davery." A Senile Delinquent! thought Gavir. She looked like Davery's younger sister. Malcomb stared at her apprehensively, and Gavir wondered if she were somehow going to attack them. She looked at Gavir. "Mmm. What a body, what gorgeous blue skin. How tall are you, Blue Boy?" "He's approximately seven feet tall, Sylvie," said Hoppy, "and what do you want here, anyway?" "Just came up to see Blue Boy. One of the crowd dreamed him last night. Positively manic about him. I found out he'd be with you." "See?" said Hoppy to Gavir. "The Century-Plus mentality. You've got something they go for. Undoubtedly because you're—forgive me—such a complete barbarian. That's what they're all trying to be." "Spare me another lecture on Senile Delinquency, Our Number One Problem." She walked to the door and Gavir watched her all the way. She turned with a swirl of scarlet and a dramatic display of healthy young flesh. "See you again, Blue Boy." After Sylvie left, Hoppy Davery said, "That might be a good professional name—Blue Boy. Gavir doesn't mean anything. Now what kind of a song could you do for the Farfel Flisket show?" Gavir thought. "Perhaps you would like the Song of Creation ." "It's part of a fertility rite," Malcomb explained. "Great! Give the Senile Delinquents another workout. It's not quite ethical, but its good for us. But for heaven's sake, Blue Boy, keep your mind off MDC!" The following week, Gavir sang the Song of Creation on the Farfel Flisket show, and transmitted the images which it brought up in his mind to his audience. A jubilant Hoppy Davery called him at his hotel next morning. "Best response I've ever seen! The Century-Plussers have been rioting and throwing mass orgies ever since you sang. But they take time out to call us up and beg for more. I've got a sponsor and a two-year contract lined up for you." The sponsor was pacing back and forth in Hoppy Davery's office when Malcomb and Gavir arrived. Hoppy introduced him proudly. "Mr. Jarvis Spurling, president of the Martian Development Corporation." Gavir's hand leaped at the narvoon under his doublet. Then he stopped himself. He turned the gesture into the proffer of a handshake. "How do you do?" he said quietly. In his mind he congratulated himself. He had learned emotional control from the Earthmen. Here was the man who had ordered his father crucified! Yet he had managed to hide his instant desire to strike, to kill, to carry out the oath of the blood feud then and there. Jarvis Spurling ignored Gavir's hand and stared coldly at him. There was not a trace of the usual Earthman's kindliness in his square, battered face. "I'm told you got talent. Okay, but a Bluie is a Bluie. I'll pay you because a Bluie on Dreamvision is good publicity for MDC products. But one slip like on your first 'cast and you go back to the Preserve." "Mr. Spurling!" said Malcomb. "Your tone is hostile!" "Damn right. That Ethical Conditioning slop doesn't work on me. I've lived too long on the frontier. And I know Bluies." Iwill sign the contract," said Gavir. As he drew his signature pictograph on the contract, Sylvie Davery sauntered in. She held a white tube between her painted lips. The end of the tube was glowing and giving off clouds of smoke. Hoppy Davery coughed and Sylvie winked at Gavir. Gavir straightened up, and she took a long look at his seven feet. "All finished, Blue Boy? Come on, let's go have a drink at Lucifer Grotto." Caution told Gavir to refuse. But before he could speak Spurling snapped, "Disgusting! An Earth woman and a Bluie! If you were on Mars, lady, we'd deport you so fast your tail would burn. And God help the Bluie!" Sylvie blew a cloud of smoke at Spurling. "You're not on Mars, Jack. You're back in civilization where we do what we damned well please." Spurling laughed. "I've heard about you Century-Plussers. You're all sick." "You can't claim any monopoly on mental health. Not with that concentration camp you run on Mars. Coming, Gavir?" Gavir grinned at Spurling. "The contract, I believe, does not cover my private life." Hoppy Davery said, "Sylvie, I don't think this is wise." Sylvie uttered a short, sharp obscenity, linked arms with Gavir, and strolled out. "You screwball Senile Delinquent," Spurling yelled after Sylvie, "you oughtta be locked up!" Lucifer Grotto was in that same quarter in which Gavir had been attacked. Sylvie told him it was the hangout for wealthier New York Century-Plussers. Gavir told her about the attack, and she laughed. "It won't happen again. You're a hero to the Senile Delinquents now. By the way, the big fellow with the broad-brimmed hat, he's one of the most prominent Senile Delinquents of our day. He's president of the biggest privately-owned space line, but he likes to call himself the Hat Rat. You must be one of the few people who ever got away from him alive." "He seemed happy to get away from me," said Gavir. An arrangement of force-planes and 3V projections made the front of Lucifer Grotto appear to be a curtain of flames. Gavir hung back, but Sylvie inserted a tiny gold pitchfork into a small aperture in the glowing, rippling surface. The flames swept aside, revealing a doorway. A bearded man in black tights escorted them through a luridly-lit bar to a private room. When they were alone, Sylvie dropped her cape to the floor, sat on the edge of a huge, pink divan, and smiled at Gavir. Gavir contemplated her. That she was over a hundred years old was a little frightening. But the skin of her face and her bare upper body was a warm color, and tautly filled. She had lashed out at Spurling, and he liked her for that. But in one way she was like Spurling. She didn't fit into the bland, non-violent world of Malcomb and Hoppy. He shook his head. He said, "Sylvie, why—well, why are you the way you are? Why—and how—have you broken away from Ethical Conditioning?" Sylvie frowned. She spoke a few words into the air, ordering drinks. She said, "I didn't do it deliberately. When I reached the age of about a hundred it stopped working for me. I suddenly wanted to do what I wanted to do. And then I found out that I didn't know what I wanted to do. It was Ethical Conditioning or nothing, so I picked nothing. And here I am, chasing nothing." "How do you chase nothing?" She set fire to a white tube. "This, for instance. They used to do it before they found out it caused cancer. Now there's no more cancer, but even if there were, I'd still smoke. That's the attitude I have. You try things. You live in the past, if you're inclined, adopt the costumes and manners of some more colorful time. You try ridiculous things, disgusting things, vicious things. You know they're all nothing, but you have to do something, so you go on doing nothing, elaborately and violently." A tray of drinks rose through the floor. Sylvie frowned as she noticed a folded paper tucked between the glasses. She picked it up and read it, chuckled, and read it again, aloud. "Sir: I beg you to forgive the presumption of my recent attack on you. Since then you have captured my imagination. I now hold you to be the noblest savage of them all. Henceforward please consider me, Your obedient servant, Hat Rat." "You've impressed him," said Sylvie. "But you impress me even more. Come here." She held out slim arms to him. He had no wish to refuse her. She was not like a Martian woman, but he found the differences exciting and attractive. He went to her, and he forgot entirely that she was over a hundred years old. In the months that followed, Gavir's fame spread over Earth. By spring, the rating computers credited him with an audience of eight hundred million—ninety-five percent of whom were Century-Plussers. Davery doubled Gavir's salary. Gavir toured the world with Sylvie, mobbed everywhere by worshipful Century-Plussers. Male Century-Plussers by the millions adopted blue doublets and blue kilts in honor of their hero. Blue-dyed hair was now de rigueur among the ladies of Lucifer Grotto. The Hat Rat himself, who often appeared at a respectful distance in crowds around Gavir, now wore a wide-brimmed hat of brightest blue. Then there came the dreamcast on which Gavir sang the Song of Complaint . It was an ancient song, a Desert Man's outcry against injustice, enemies, false friends and callous leaders. It was a protest against sufferings that could neither be borne nor prevented. At the climax of the song Gavir pictured a tribal chief who refused to make fair division of the spoils of a hunt with his warriors. Gradually he allowed this image to turn into a picture of Hoppy Davery withholding bundles of money from a starving Gavir. Then he ended the song. Hoppy sent for him next morning. "Why did you do that?" he said. "Listen to this." A recorded voice boomed: "This is Hat Rat. Pay the Blue Boy what he deserves, or I will give you death. It will be a personal thing between you and me. I will besprinkle you with corrosive acids; I will burn out your eyes; I will—" Hoppy cut the voice off. Gavir saw that he was sweating. "There were dozens like that. If you want more money, I'll give you more money. Say something nice about me on your next dreamcast, for heaven's sake!" Gavir spread his big blue hands. "I am sorry. I don't want more money. I cannot always control the pictures I make. These images come into my mind even though they have nothing to do with me." Hoppy shook his head. "That's because you haven't had Ethical Conditioning. We don't have this trouble with our other performers. You just must remember that dreamvision is the most potent communications medium ever devised. Be careful ." "I will," said Gavir. On his next dreamcast Gavir sang the Song of the Blood Feud . He pictured a Desert Man whose father had been killed by a drock. The Desert Man ran over the red sand, and he found the drock. He did not throw his knife. That would not have satisfied his hatred. He fell upon the drock and stabbed and stabbed. The Desert Man howled his hunting-cry over the body of his enemy, and spat into its face. And the fanged face of the drock turned into the square, battered face of Jarvis Spurling. Gavir held the image in his mind for a long moment. When the dreamcast was over, a studio page ran up to Gavir. "Mr. Spurling wants to see you at once, at his office." "Let him come and find me," said Gavir. "Let us go, Sylvie." They went to Lucifer Grotto, where Gavir's wealthiest admirers among the Senile Delinquents were giving a party for him in the Pandemonium Room. The only prominent person missing, as Sylvie remarked after surveying the crowd, was the Hat Rat. They wondered about it, but no one knew where he was. Sheets of flame illuminated the wild features and strange garments of over a hundred Century-Plus ladies and gentlemen. Gouts of flame leaped from the walls to light antique-style cigarettes. Drinks were refilled from nozzles of molded fire. An hour passed from the time of Gavir's arrival. Then Jarvis Spurling joined the party. There was a heavy frontier sonic pistol strapped at his waist. A protesting Malcomb was behind him. Jarvis Spurling's square face was dark with anger. "You deliberately put my face on that animal! You want to make the public hate me. I pay your salary and keep you here on Earth, and this is what I get for it. All right. A Bluie is a Bluie, and I'll treat you like a Bluie should be treated." He unsnapped his holster and drew the square, heavy pistol out and pointed it at Gavir. Gavir stood up. His right hand plucked at his doublet. "You're itching to go for that throwing knife," said Spurling. "Go on! Take it out and get ready to throw it. I'll give you that much chance. Let's make a game out of this. We'll make like we're back on Mars, Bluie, and you're out hunting a drock. And you find one, only this drock has a gun. How about that, Bluie?" Gavir took out the narvoon, grasped the blade, and drew his arm back. "Gavir!" It was the Hat Rat. He stood between pillars of flame in the doorway of the Pandemonium Room of Lucifer Grotto, and there was a peculiar contrivance of dark brown wood and black metal tubing cradled in his arm. "This ancient shotgun I dedicate to your blood feud. I shall hunt down your enemy, Gavir!" Spurling turned. The Hat Rat saw him. "The enemy!" the Hat Rat shouted. The shotgun exploded. Spurling's body was thrown back against Gavir. Gavir saw a huge ragged red caved-in place in Spurling's chest. Spurling's body sagged to the floor and lay there face up, eyes open. The Senile Delinquents of Lucifer Grotto leaned forward to grin at the tattered body. Still holding the narvoon, Gavir stood over his dead enemy. He threw back his head and howled out the hunting cry of the Desert Men. Then he looked down and spat in Jarvis Spurling's dead face. END

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juvenile delinquent BY EDWARD W. LUDWIG When everything is either restricted, confidential or top-secret, a Reader is a very bad security risk. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Tick-de-tock, tick-de-tock , whispered the antique clock on the first floor of the house. There was no sound save for the ticking—and for the pounding of Ronnie's heart. He stood alone in his upstairs bedroom. His slender-boned, eight-year-old body trembling, perspiration glittering on his white forehead. To Ronnie, the clock seemed to be saying: Daddy's coming, Daddy's coming. The soft shadows of September twilight in this year of 2056 were seeping into the bedroom. Ronnie welcomed the fall of darkness. He wanted to sink into its deep silence, to become one with it, to escape forever from savage tongues and angry eyes. A burst of hope entered Ronnie's fear-filled eyes. Maybe something would happen. Maybe Dad would have an accident. Maybe— He bit his lip hard, shook his head. No. No matter what Dad might do, it wasn't right to wish— The whirling whine of a gyro-car mushroomed up from the landing platform outside. Ronnie shivered, his pulse quickening. The muscles in his small body were like a web of taut-drawn wires. Sound and movement below. Mom flicking off the controls of the kitchen's Auto-Chef. The slow stride of her high heels through the living room. The slamming of a gyro-car door. The opening of the front door of the house. Dad's deep, happy voice echoed up the stairway: "Hi, beautiful!" Ronnie huddled in the darkness by the half-open bedroom door. Please, Mama , his mind cried, please don't tell Daddy what I did. There was a droning, indistinct murmur. Dad burst, "He was doing what ?" More murmuring. "I can't believe it. You really saw him?... I'll be damned." Ronnie silently closed the bedroom door. Why did you tell him, Mama? Why did you have to tell him? "Ronnie!" Dad called. Ronnie held his breath. His legs seemed as numb and nerveless as the stumps of dead trees. " Ronnie! Come down here! " Like an automaton, Ronnie shuffled out of his bedroom. He stepped on the big silver disk on the landing. The auto-stairs clicked into humming movement under his weight. To his left, on the wall, he caught kaleidoscopic glimpses of Mom's old pictures, copies of paintings by medieval artists like Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Dali. The faces seemed to be mocking him. Ronnie felt like a wounded bird falling out of the sky. He saw that Dad and Mom were waiting for him. Mom's round blue eyes were full of mist and sadness. She hadn't bothered to smooth her clipped, creamy-brown hair as she always did when Dad was coming home. And Dad, handsome in his night-black, skin-tight Pentagon uniform, had become a hostile stranger with narrowed eyes of black fire. "Is it true, Ronnie?" asked Dad. "Were you really—really reading a book?" Ronnie gulped. He nodded. "Good Lord," Dad murmured. He took a deep breath and squatted down, held Ronnie's arms and looked hard into his eyes. For an instant he became the kind, understanding father that Ronnie knew. "Tell me all about it, son. Where did you get the book? Who taught you to read?" Ronnie tried to keep his legs from shaking. "It was—Daddy, you won't make trouble, will you?" "This is between you and me, son. We don't care about anyone else." "Well, it was Kenny Davis. He—" Dad's fingers tightened on Ronnie's arms. "Kenny Davis!" he spat. "The boy's no good. His father never had a job in his life. Nobody'd even offer him a job. Why, the whole town knows he's a Reader!" Mom stepped forward. "David, you promised you'd be sensible about this. You promised you wouldn't get angry." Dad grunted. "All right, son. Go ahead." "Well, one day after school Kenny said he'd show me something. He took me to his house—" "You went to that shack ? You actually—" "Dear," said Mom. "You promised." A moment of silence. Ronnie said, "He took me to his house. I met his dad. Mr. Davis is lots of fun. He has a beard and he paints pictures and he's collected almost five hundred books." Ronnie's voice quavered. "Go on," said Dad sternly. "And I—and Mr. Davis said he'd teach me to read them if I promised not to tell anybody. So he taught me a little every day after school—oh, Dad, books are fun to read. They tell you things you can't see on the video or hear on the tapes." "How long ago did all this start? "T—two years ago." Dad rose, fists clenched, staring strangely at nothing. "Two years," he breathed. "I thought I had a good son, and yet for two years—" He shook his head unbelievingly. "Maybe it's my own fault. Maybe I shouldn't have come to this small town. I should have taken a house in Washington instead of trying to commute." "David," said Mom, very seriously, almost as if she were praying, "it won't be necessary to have him memory-washed, will it?" Dad looked at Mom, frowning. Then he gazed at Ronnie. His soft-spoken words were as ominous as the low growl of thunder: "I don't know, Edith. I don't know." Dad strode to his easy chair by the fireplace. He sank into its foam-rubber softness, sighing. He murmured a syllable into a tiny ball-mike on the side of the chair. A metallic hand raised a lighted cigarette to his lips. "Come here, son." Ronnie followed and sat on the hassock by Dad's feet. "Maybe I've never really explained things to you, Ronnie. You see, you won't always be a boy. Someday you'll have to find a way of making a living. You've only two choices: You work for the government, like I do, or for a corporation." Ronnie blinked. "Mr. Davis doesn't work for the gover'ment or for a corpor-ation." "Mr. Davis isn't normal," Dad snapped. "He's a hermit. No decent family would let him in their house. He grows his own food and sometimes he takes care of gardens for people. I want you to have more than that. I want you to have a nice home and be respected by people." Dad puffed furiously on his cigarette. "And you can't get ahead if people know you've been a Reader. That's something you can't live down. No matter how hard you try, people always stumble upon the truth." Dad cleared his throat. "You see, when you get a job, all the information you handle will have a classification. It'll be Restricted, Low-Confidential, Confidential, High-Confidential, Secret, Top-Secret. And all this information will be in writing. No matter what you do, you'll have access to some of this information at one time or another." "B—but why do these things have to be so secret?" Ronnie asked. "Because of competitors, in the case of corporations—or because of enemy nations in the case of government work. The written material you might have access to could describe secret weapons and new processes or plans for next year's advertising—maybe even a scheme for, er, liquidation of a rival. If all facts and policies were made public, there might be criticism, controversy, opposition by certain groups. The less people know about things, the better. So we have to keep all these things secret." Ronnie scowled. "But if things are written down, someone has to read them, don't they?" "Sure, son. One person in ten thousand might reach the point where his corporation or bureau will teach him to read. But you prove your ability and loyalty first. By the time you're 35 or 40, they might want you to learn to read. But for young people and children—well, it just isn't done. Why, the President himself wasn't trusted to learn till he was nearly fifty!" Dad straightened his shoulders. "Look at me. I'm only 30, but I've been a messenger for Secret material already. In a few years, if things go well, I should be handling Top -Secret stuff. And who knows? Maybe by the time I'm 50 I'll be giving orders instead of carrying them. Then I'll learn to read, too. That's the right way to do it." Ronnie shifted uncomfortably on the hassock. "But can't a Reader get a job that's not so important. Like a barber or a plumber or—" "Don't you understand? The barber and plumbing equipment corporations set up their stores and hire men to work for them. You think they'd hire a Reader? People'd say you were a spy or a subversive or that you're crazy like old man Davis." "Mr. Davis isn't crazy. And he isn't old. He's young, just like you, and—" "Ronnie!" Dad's voice was knife-sharp and December-cold. Ronnie slipped off the hassock as if struck physically by the fury of the voice. He sat sprawled on his small posterior, fresh fear etched on his thin features. "Damn it, son, how could you even think of being a Reader? You've got a life-sized, 3-D video here, and we put on the smell and touch and heat attachments just for you. You can listen to any tape in the world at school. Ronnie, don't you realize I'd lose my job if people knew I had a Reader for a son?" "B—but, Daddy—" Dad jumped to his feet. "I hate to say it, Edith, but we've got to put this boy in a reformatory. Maybe a good memory-wash will take some of the nonsense out of him!" Ronnie suppressed a sob. "No, Daddy, don't let them take away my brain. Please—" Dad stood very tall and very stiff, not even looking at him. "They won't take your brain, just your memory for the past two years." A corner of Mom's mouth twitched. "David, I didn't want anything like this. I thought maybe Ronnie could have a few private psychiatric treatments. They can do wonderful things now—permi-hypnosis, creations of artificial psychic blocks. A memory-wash would mean that Ronnie'd have the mind of a six-year-old child again. He'd have to start to school all over again." Dad returned to his chair. He buried his face in trembling hands, and some of his anger seemed replaced by despair. "Lord, Edith, I don't know what to do." He looked up abruptly, as if struck by a chilling new thought. "You can't keep a two-year memory-wash a secret. I never thought of that before. Why, that alone would mean the end of my promotions." Silence settled over the room, punctuated only by the ticking of the antique clock. All movement seemed frozen, as if the room lay at the bottom of a cold, thick sea. "David," Mom finally said. "Yes?" "There's only one solution. We can't destroy two years of Ronnie's memory—you said that yourself. So we'll have to take him to a psychiatrist or maybe a psychoneurologist. A few short treatments—" Dad interrupted: "But he'd still remember how to read, unconsciously anyway. Even permi-hypnosis would wear off in time. The boy can't keep going to psychiatrists for the rest of his life." Thoughtfully he laced his fingers together. "Edith, what kind of a book was he reading?" A tremor passed through Mom's slender body. "There were three books on his bed. I'm not sure which one he was actually reading." Dad groaned. " Three of them. Did you burn them?" "No, dear, not yet." "Why not?" "I don't know. Ronnie seemed to like them so much. I thought that maybe tonight, after you d seen them—" "Get them, damn it. Let's burn the filthy things." Mom went to a mahogany chest in the dining room, produced three faded volumes. She put them on the hassock at Dad's feet. Dad gingerly turned a cover. His lips curled in disgust as if he were touching a rotting corpse. "Old," he mused, "—so very old. Ironic, isn't it? Our lives are being wrecked by things that should have been destroyed and forgotten a hundred years ago." A sudden frown contorted his dark features. Tick-de-tock, tick-de-tock , said the antique clock. "A hundred years old," he repeated. His mouth became a hard, thin line. "Edith, I think I know why Ronnie wanted to read, why he fell into the trap so easily." "What do you mean, David?" Dad nodded at the clock, and the slow, smouldering anger returned to his face. "It's your fault, Edith. You've always liked old things. That clock of your great-great-grandmother's. Those old prints on the wall. That stamp collection you started for Ronnie—stamps dated way back to the 1940's." Mom's face paled. "I don't understand." "You've interested Ronnie in old things. To a child in its formative years, in a pleasant house, these things symbolize peace and security. Ronnie's been conditioned from the very time of his birth to like old things. It was natural for him to be attracted by books. And we were just too stupid to realize it." Mom whispered hoarsely, "I'm sorry, David." Hot anger flashed in Dad's eyes. "It isn't enough to be sorry. Don't you see what this means? Ronnie'll have to be memory-washed back to the time of birth. He'll have to start life all over again." "No, David, no!" "And in my position I can't afford to have an eight-year-old son with the mind of a new-born baby. It's got to be Abandonment, Edith, there's no other way. The boy can start life over in a reformatory, with a complete memory-wash. He'll never know we existed, and he'll never bother us again." Mom ran up to Dad. She put her hands on his shoulders. Great sobs burst from her shaking body. "You can't, David! I won't let—" He slapped her then with the palm of his hand. The sound was like a pistol shot in the hot, tight air. Dad stood now like a colossus carved of black ice. His right hand was still upraised, ready to strike again. Then his hand fell. His mind seemed to be toying with a new thought, a new concept. He seized one of the books on the hassock. "Edith," he said crisply, "just what was Ronnie reading? What's the name of this book?" " The—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ," said Mom through her sobs. He grabbed the second book, held it before her shimmering vision. "And the name of this?" " Tarzan of The Apes. " Mom's voice was a barely audible croak. "Who's the author?" "Edgar Rice Burroughs." "And this one?" " The Wizard of Oz. " "Who wrote it?" "L. Frank Baum." He threw the books to the floor. He stepped backward. His face was a mask of combined sorrow, disbelief, and rage. " Edith. " He spat the name as if it were acid on his tongue. "Edith, you can read !" Mom sucked in her sobs. Her chalk-white cheeks were still streaked with rivulets of tears. "I'm sorry, David. I've never told anyone—not even Ronnie. I haven't read a book, haven't even looked at one since we were married. I've tried to be a good wife—" "A good wife." Dad sneered. His face was so ugly that Ronnie looked away. Mom continued, "I—I learned when I was just a girl. I was young like Ronnie. You know how young people are—reckless, eager to do forbidden things." "You lied to me," Dad snapped. "For ten years you've lied to me. Why did you want to read, Edith? Why? " Mom was silent for a few seconds. She was breathing heavily, but no longer crying. A calmness entered her features, and for the first time tonight Ronnie saw no fear in her eyes. "I wanted to read," she said, her voice firm and proud, "because, as Ronnie said, it's fun. The video's nice, with its dancers and lovers and Indians and spacemen—but sometimes you want more than that. Sometimes you want to know how people feel deep inside and how they think. And there are beautiful words and beautiful thoughts, just like there are beautiful paintings. It isn't enough just to hear them and then forget them. Sometimes you want to keep the words and thoughts before you because in that way you feel that they belong to you." Her words echoed in the room until absorbed by the ceaseless, ticking clock. Mom stood straight and unashamed. Dad's gaze traveled slowly to Ronnie, to Mom, to the clock, back and forth. At last he said, "Get out." Mom stared blankly. "Get out. Both of you. You can send for your things later. I never want to see either of you again." "David—" "I said get out !" Ronnie and Mom left the house. Outside, the night was dark and a wind was rising. Mom shivered in her thin house cloak. "Where will we go, Ronnie? Where, where—" "I know a place. Maybe we can stay there—for a little while." "A little while?" Mom echoed. Her mind seemed frozen by the cold wind. Ronnie led her through the cold, windy streets. They left the lights of the town behind them. They stumbled over a rough, dirt country road. They came to a small, rough-boarded house in the deep shadow of an eucalyptus grove. The windows of the house were like friendly eyes of warm golden light. An instant later a door opened and a small boy ran out to meet them. "Hi, Kenny." "Hi. Who's that? Your mom?" "Yep. Mr. Davis in?" "Sure." And a kindly-faced, bearded young man appeared in the golden doorway, smiling. Ronnie and Mom stepped inside.

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THE RUMBLE AND THE ROAR BY STEPHEN BARTHOLOMEW The noise was too much for him. He wanted quiet—at any price. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] When Joseph got to the office his ears were aching from the noise of the copter and from his earplugs. Lately, every little thing seemed to make him irritable. He supposed it was because his drafting department was behind schedule on the latest Defense contract. His ears were sore and his stomach writhed with dyspepsia, and his feet hurt. Walking through the clerical office usually made him feel better. The constant clatter of typewriters and office machines gave him a sense of efficiency, of stability, an all-is-well-with-the-world feeling. He waved to a few of the more familiar employees and smiled, but of course you couldn't say hello with the continual racket. This morning, somehow, it didn't make him feel better. He supposed it was because of the song they were playing over the speakers, "Slam Bang Boom," the latest Top Hit. He hated that song. Of course the National Mental Health people said constant music had a beneficial effect on office workers, so Joseph was no one to object, even though he did wonder if anyone could ever actually listen to it over the other noise. In his own office the steady din was hardly diminished despite soundproofing, and since he was next to an outside wall he was subjected also to the noises of the city. He stood staring out of the huge window for awhile, watching the cars on the freeway and listening to the homogeneous rumble and scream of turbines. Something's wrong with me , he thought. I shouldn't be feeling this way. Nerves. Nerves. He turned around and got his private secretary on the viewer. She simpered at him, trying to be friendly with her dull, sunken eyes. "Betty," he told her, "I want you to make an appointment with my therapist for me this afternoon. Tell him it's just a case of nerves, though." "Yes sir. Anything else?" Her voice, like every one's, was a high pitched screech trying to be heard above the noise. Joseph winced. "Anybody want to see me this morning?" "Well, Mr. Wills says he has the first model of his invention ready to show you." "Let him in whenever he's ready. Otherwise, if nothing important comes up, I want you to leave me alone." "Yes, sir, certainly." She smiled again, a mechanical, automatic smile that seemed to want to be something more. Joseph switched off. That was a damn funny way of saying it , he thought. "I want you to leave me alone." As if somebody were after me. He spent about an hour on routine paperwork and then Bob Wills showed up so Joseph switched off his dictograph and let him in. "I'm afraid you'll have to make it brief, Bob," he grinned. "I've a whale of a lot of work to do, and I seem to be developing a splitting headache. Nerves, you know." "Sure, Mister Partch. I won't take a minute; I just thought you'd like to have a look at the first model of our widget and get clued in on our progress so far...." "Yes, yes, just go ahead. How does the thing work?" Bob smiled and set the grey steel chassis on Partch's desk, sat down in front of it, and began tracing the wiring for Joseph. It was an interesting problem, or at any rate should have been. It was one that had been harassing cities, industry, and particularly air-fields, for many years. Of course, every one wore earplugs—and that helped a little. And some firms had partially solved the problem by using personnel that were totally deaf, because such persons were the only ones who could stand the terrific noise levels that a technological civilization forced everyone to endure. The noise from a commercial rocket motor on the ground had been known to drive men mad, and sometimes kill them. There had never seemed to be any wholly satisfactory solution. But now Bob Wills apparently had the beginnings of a real answer. A device that would use the principle of interference to cancel out sound waves, leaving behind only heat. It should have been fascinating to Partch, but somehow he couldn't make himself get interested in it. "The really big problem is the power requirement," Wills was saying. "We've got to use a lot of energy to cancel out big sound waves, but we've got several possible answers in mind and we're working on all of them." He caressed the crackle-finish box fondly. "The basic gimmick works fine, though. Yesterday I took it down to a static test stand over in building 90 and had them turn on a pretty fair-sized steering rocket for one of the big moon-ships. Reduced the noise-level by about 25 per cent, it did. Of course, I still needed my plugs." Joseph nodded approvingly and stared vacantly into the maze of transistors and tubes. "I've built it to work on ordinary 60 cycle house current," Wills told him. "In case you should want to demonstrate it to anybody." Partch became brusque. He liked Bob, but he had work to do. "Yes, I probably shall, Bob. I tell you what, why don't you just leave it here in my office and I'll look it over later, hm?" "Okay, Mr. Partch." Joseph ushered him out of the office, complimenting him profusely on the good work he was doing. Only after he was gone and Joseph was alone again behind the closed door, did he realize that he had a sudden yearning for company, for someone to talk to. Partch had Betty send him in a light lunch and he sat behind his desk nibbling the tasteless stuff without much enthusiasm. He wondered if he was getting an ulcer. Yes, he decided, he was going to have to have a long talk with Dr. Coles that afternoon. Be a pleasure to get it all off his chest, his feeling of melancholia, his latent sense of doom. Be good just to talk about it. Oh, everything was getting to him these days. He was in a rut, that was it. A rut. He spat a sesame seed against the far wall and the low whir of the automatic vacuum cleaner rose and fell briefly. Joseph winced. The speakers were playing "Slam Bang Boom" again. His mind turned away from the grating melody in self defense, to look inward on himself. Of what, after all, did Joseph Partch's life consist? He licked his fingers and thought about it. What would he do this evening after work, for instance? Why, he'd stuff his earplugs back in his inflamed ears and board the commuter's copter and ride for half an hour listening to the drumming of the rotors and the pleading of the various canned commercials played on the copter's speakers loud enough to be heard over the engine noise and through the plugs. And then when he got home, there would be the continuous yammer of his wife added to the Tri-Di set going full blast and the dull food from the automatic kitchen. And synthetic coffee and one stale cigaret. Perhaps a glass of brandy to steady his nerves if Dr. Coles approved. Partch brooded. The sense of foreboding had been submerged in the day's work, but it was still there. It was as if, any moment, a hydrogen bomb were going to be dropped down the chimney, and you had no way of knowing when. And what would there be to do after he had finished dinner that night? Why, the same things he had been doing every night for the past fifteen years. There would be Tri-Di first of all. The loud comedians, and the musical commercials, and the loud bands, and the commercials, and the loud songs.... And every twenty minutes or so, the viewer would jangle with one of Felicia's friends calling up, and more yammering from Felicia. Perhaps there would be company that night, to play cards and sip drinks and talk and talk and talk, and never say a thing at all. There would be aircraft shaking the house now and then, and the cry of the monorail horn at intervals. And then, at last, it would be time to go to bed, and the murmur of the somnolearner orating him on the Theory of Groups all through the long night. And in the morning, he would be shocked into awareness with the clangor of the alarm clock and whatever disc jockey the clock radio happened to tune in on. Joseph Partch's world was made up of sounds and noises, he decided. Dimly, he wondered of what civilization itself would be constructed if all the sounds were once taken away. Why , after all, was the world of Man so noisy? It was almost as if—as if everybody were making as much noise as they could to conceal the fact that there was something lacking. Or something they were afraid of. Like a little boy whistling loudly as he walks by a cemetery at night. Partch got out of his chair and stared out the window again. There was a fire over on the East Side, a bad one by the smoke. The fire engines went screaming through the streets like wounded dragons. Sirens, bells. Police whistles. All at once, Partch realized that never in his life had he experienced real quiet or solitude. That actually, he had no conception of what an absence of thunder and wailing would be like. A total absence of sound and noise. Almost, it was like trying to imagine what a negation of space would be like. And then he turned, and his eyes fell on Bob Wills' machine. It could reduce the noise level of a rocket motor by 25 per cent, Wills had said. Here in the office, the sound level was less than that of a rocket motor. And the machine worked on ordinary house current, Bob had said. Partch had an almost horrifying idea. Suppose.... But what would Dr. Coles say about this, Partch wondered. Oh, he had to get a grip on himself. This was silly, childish.... But looking down, he found that he had already plugged in the line cord. An almost erotic excitement began to shake Joseph's body. The sense of disaster had surged up anew, but he didn't recognize it yet. An absence of sound ? No! Silly! Then a fire engine came tearing around the corner just below the window, filling the office with an ocean of noise. Joseph's hand jerked and flicked the switch. And then the dream came back to him, the nightmare of the night before that had precipitated, unknown to him, his mood of foreboding. It came back to him with stark realism and flooded him with unadorned fear. In the dream, he had been in a forest. Not just the city park, but a real forest, one thousands of miles and centuries away from human civilization. A wood in which the foot of Man had never trod. It was dark there, and the trees were thick and tall. There was no wind, the leaves were soft underfoot. And Joseph Partch was all alone, completely alone. And it was—quiet. Doctor Coles looked at the patient on the white cot sadly. "I've only seen a case like it once before in my entire career, Dr. Leeds." Leeds nodded. "It is rather rare. Look at him—total catatonia. He's curled into a perfect foetal position. Never be the same again, I'm afraid." "The shock must have been tremendous. An awful psychic blow, especially to a person as emotionally disturbed as Mr. Partch was." "Yes, that machine of Mr. Wills' is extremely dangerous. What amazes me is that it didn't kill Partch altogether. Good thing we got to him when we did." Dr. Coles rubbed his jaw. "Yes, you know it is incredible how much the human mind can sometimes take, actually. As you say, it's a wonder it didn't kill him." He shook his head. "Perfectly horrible. How could any modern human stand it? Two hours, he was alone with that machine. Imagine— two hours of total silence!"

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories April-May 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. MARS CONFIDENTIAL! Jack Lait & Lee Mortimer Illustrator : L. R. Summers Here is history's biggest news scoop! Those intrepid reporters Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, whose best-selling exposes of life's seamy side from New York to Medicine Hat have made them famous, here strip away the veil of millions of miles to bring you the lowdown on our sister planet. It is an amazing account of vice and violence, of virtues and victims, told in vivid, jet-speed style. Here you'll learn why Mars is called the Red Planet, the part the Mafia plays in her undoing, the rape and rapine that has made this heavenly body the cesspool of the Universe. In other words, this is Mars—Confidential! P-s-s-s-s-t! HERE WE GO AGAIN—Confidential. We turned New York inside out. We turned Chicago upside down. In Washington we turned the insiders out and the outsiders in. The howls can still be heard since we dissected the U.S.A. But Mars was our toughest task of spectroscoping. The cab drivers spoke a different language and the bell-hops couldn't read our currency. Yet, we think we have X-rayed the dizziest—and this may amaze you—the dirtiest planet in the solar system. Beside it, the Earth is as white as the Moon, and Chicago is as peaceful as the Milky Way. By the time we went through Mars—its canals, its caves, its satellites and its catacombs—we knew more about it than anyone who lives there. We make no attempt to be comprehensive. We have no hope or aim to make Mars a better place in which to live; in fact, we don't give a damn what kind of a place it is to live in. This will be the story of a planet that could have been another proud and majestic sun with a solar system of its own; it ended up, instead, in the comic books and the pulp magazines. We give you MARS CONFIDENTIAL! I THE LOWDOWN CONFIDENTIAL Before the space ship which brings the arriving traveler lands at the Martian National Airport, it swoops gracefully over the nearby city in a salute. The narrow ribbons, laid out in geometric order, gradually grow wider until the water in these man-made rivers becomes crystal clear and sparkles in the reflection of the sun. As Mars comes closer, the visitor from Earth quickly realizes it has a manner and a glamor of its own; it is unworldy, it is out of this world. It is not the air of distinction one finds in New York or London or Paris. The Martian feeling is dreamlike; it comes from being close to the stuff dreams are made of. However, after the sojourner lands, he discovers that Mars is not much different than the planet he left; indeed, men are pretty much the same all over the universe, whether they carry their plumbing inside or outside their bodies. As we unfold the rates of crime, vice, sex irregularities, graft, cheap gambling, drunkenness, rowdyism and rackets, you will get, thrown on a large screen, a peep show you never saw on your TV during the science-fiction hour. Each day the Earth man spends on Mars makes him feel more at home; thus, it comes as no surprise to the initiated that even here, at least 35,000,000 miles away from Times Square, there are hoodlums who talk out of the sides of their mouths and drive expensive convertibles with white-walled tires and yellow-haired frails. For the Mafia, the dread Black Hand, is in business here—tied up with the subversives—and neither the Martian Committee for the Investigation of Crime and Vice, nor the Un-Martian Activities Committee, can dent it more than the Kefauver Committee did on Earth, which is practically less than nothing. This is the first time this story has been printed. We were offered four trillion dollars in bribes to hold it up; our lives were threatened and we were shot at with death ray guns. We got this one night on the fourth bench in Central Park, where we met by appointment a man who phoned us earlier but refused to tell his name. When we took one look at him we did not ask for his credentials, we just knew he came from Mars. This is what he told us: Shortly after the end of World War II, a syndicate composed of underworld big-shots from Chicago, Detroit and Greenpoint planned to build a new Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. This was to be a plush project for big spenders, with Vegas and Reno reserved for the hoi-polloi. There was to be service by a private airline. It would be so ultra-ultra that suckers with only a million would be thumbed away and guys with two million would have to come in through the back door. The Mafia sent a couple of front men to explore the desert. Somewhere out beyond the atom project they stumbled on what seemed to be the answer to their prayer. It was a huge, mausoleum-like structure, standing alone in the desert hundreds of miles from nowhere, unique, exclusive and mysterious. The prospectors assumed it was the last remnant of some fabulous and long-dead ghost-mining town. The entire population consisted of one, a little duffer with a white goatee and thick lensed spectacles, wearing boots, chaps and a silk hat. "This your place, bud?" one of the hoods asked. When he signified it was, the boys bought it. The price was agreeable—after they pulled a wicked-looking rod. Then the money guys came to look over their purchase. They couldn't make head or tail of it, and you can hardly blame them, because inside the great structure they found a huge contraption that looked like a cigar (Havana Perfecto) standing on end. "What the hell is this," they asked the character in the opera hat, in what is known as a menacing attitude. The old pappy guy offered to show them. He escorted them into the cigar, pressed a button here and there, and before you could say "Al Capone" the roof of the shed slid back and they began to move upward at a terrific rate of speed. Three or four of the Mafia chieftains were old hop-heads and felt at home. In fact, one of them remarked, "Boy, are we gone." And he was right. The soberer Mafistas, after recovering from their first shock, laid ungentle fists on their conductor. "What goes on?" he was asked. "This is a space ship and we are headed for Mars." "What's Mars?" "A planet up in space, loaded with gold and diamonds." "Any bims there?" "I beg your pardon, sir. What are bims?" "Get a load of this dope. He never heard of bims. Babes, broads, frails, pigeons, ribs—catch on?" "Oh, I assume you mean girls. There must be, otherwise what are the diamonds for?" The outward trip took a week, but it was spent pleasantly. During that time, the Miami delegation cleaned out Chicago, New York and Pittsburgh in a klabiash game. The hop back, for various reasons, took a little longer. One reason may have been the condition of the crew. On the return the boys from Brooklyn were primed to the ears with zorkle . Zorkle is a Martian medicinal distillation, made from the milk of the schznoogle —a six-legged cow, seldom milked because few Martians can run fast enough to catch one. Zorkle is strong enough to rip steel plates out of battleships, but to stomachs accustomed to the stuff sold in Flatbush, it acted like a gentle stimulant. Upon their safe landing in Nevada, the Columbuses of this first flight to Mars put in long-distance calls to all the other important hoods in the country. The Crime Cartel met in Cleveland—in the third floor front of a tenement on Mayfield Road. The purpose of the meeting was to "cut up" Mars. Considerable dissension arose over the bookmaking facilities, when it was learned that the radioactive surface of the planet made it unnecessary to send scratches and results by wire. On the contrary, the steel-shod hooves of the animals set up a current which carried into every pool room, without a pay-off to the wire service. The final division found the apportionment as follows: New York mob : Real estate and investments (if any) Chicago mob : Bookmaking and liquor (if any) Brooklyn mob : Protection and assassinations Jersey mob : Numbers (if any) and craps (if any) Los Angeles mob : Girls (if any) Galveston and New Orleans mobs : Dope (if any) Cleveland mob : Casinos (if any) Detroit mob : Summer resorts (if any) The Detroit boys, incidentally, burned up when they learned the Martian year is twice as long as ours, consequently it takes two years for one summer to roll around. After the summary demise of three Grand Councilors whose deaths were recorded by the press as occurring from "natural causes," the other major and minor mobs were declared in as partners. The first problem to be ironed out was how to speed up transportation; and failing that, to construct spacious space ships which would attract pleasure-bent trade from Terra —Earth to you—with such innovations as roulette wheels, steam rooms, cocktail lounges, double rooms with hot and cold babes, and other such inducements. II THE INSIDE STUFF CONFIDENTIAL Remember, you got this first from Lait and Mortimer. And we defy anyone to call us liars—and prove it! Only chumps bring babes with them to Mars. The temperature is a little colder there than on Earth and the air a little thinner. So Terra dames complain one mink coat doesn't keep them warm; they need two. On the other hand, the gravity is considerably less than on Earth. Therefore, even the heaviest bim weighs less and can be pushed over with the greatest of ease. However, the boys soon discovered that the lighter gravity played havoc with the marijuana trade. With a slight tensing of the muscles you can jump 20 feet, so why smoke "tea" when you can fly like crazy for nothing? Martian women are bags, so perhaps you had better disregard the injunction above and bring your own, even if it means two furs. Did you ever see an Alaska klutch (pronounced klootch)? Probably not. Well, these Arctic horrors are Ziegfeld beauts compared to the Martian fair sex. They slouch with knees bent and knuckles brushing the ground, and if Ringling Bros, is looking for a mate for Gargantua, here is where to find her. Yet, their manner is habitually timid, as though they've been given a hard time. From the look in their deep-set eyes they seem to fear abduction or rape; but not even the zoot-suited goons from Greenpernt gave them a second tumble. The visiting Mafia delegation was naturally disappointed at this state of affairs. They had been led to believe by the little guy who escorted them that all Martian dames resembled Marilyn Monroe, only more so, and the men were Adonises (and not Joe). Seems they once were, at that. This was a couple of aeons ago when Earthmen looked like Martians do now, which seems to indicate that Martians, as well as Men, have their ups and downs. The citizens of the planet are apparently about halfway down the toboggan. They wear clothes, but they're not handstitched. Their neckties don't come from Sulka. No self-respecting goon from Gowanus would care to be seen in their company. The females always appear in public fully clothed, which doesn't help them either. But covering their faces would. They buy their dresses at a place called Kress-Worth and look like Paris nouveau riche . There are four separate nations there, though nation is hardly the word. It is more accurate to say there are four separate clans that don't like each other, though how they can tell the difference is beyond us. They are known as the East Side, West Side, North Side and Gas House gangs. Each stays in its own back-yard. Periodic wars are fought, a few thousand of the enemy are dissolved with ray guns, after which the factions retire by common consent and throw a banquet at which the losing country is forced to take the wives of the visitors, which is a twist not yet thought of on Earth. Martian language is unlike anything ever heard below. It would baffle the keenest linguist, if the keenest linguist ever gets to Mars. However, the Mafia, which is a world-wide blood brotherhood with colonies in every land and clime, has a universal language. Knives and brass knucks are understood everywhere. The Martian lingo seems to be somewhat similar to Chinese. It's not what they say, but how they say it. For instance, psonqule may mean "I love you" or "you dirty son-of-a-bitch." The Mafistas soon learned to translate what the natives were saying by watching the squint in their eyes. When they spoke with a certain expression, the mobsters let go with 45s, which, however, merely have a stunning effect on the gent on the receiving end because of the lesser gravity. On the other hand, the Martian death ray guns were not fatal to the toughs from Earth; anyone who can live through St. Valentine's Day in Chicago can live through anything. So it came out a dead heat. Thereupon the boys from the Syndicate sat down and declared the Martians in for a fifty-fifty partnership, which means they actually gave them one per cent, which is generous at that. Never having had the great advantages of a New Deal, the Martians are still backward and use gold as a means of exchange. With no Harvard bigdomes to tell them gold is a thing of the past, the yellow metal circulates there as freely and easily as we once kicked pennies around before they became extinct here. The Mafistas quickly set the Martians right about the futility of gold. They eagerly turned it over to the Earthmen in exchange for green certificates with pretty pictures engraved thereon. III RACKETS VIA ROCKETS Gold, platinum, diamonds and other precious stuff are as plentiful on Mars as hayfever is on Earth in August. When the gangsters lamped the loot, their greedy eyes and greasy fingers twitched, and when a hood's eyes and fingers twitch, watch out; something is twitching. The locals were completely honest. They were too dumb to be thieves. The natives were not acquisitive. Why should they be when gold was so common it had no value, and a neighbor's wife so ugly no one would covet her? This was a desperate situation, indeed, until one of the boys from East St. Louis uttered the eternal truth: "There ain't no honest man who ain't a crook, and why should Mars be any different?" The difficulty was finding the means and method of corruption. All the cash in Jake Guzik's strong box meant nothing to a race of characters whose brats made mudpies of gold dust. The discovery came as an accident. The first Earthman to be eliminated on Mars was a two-bit hood from North Clark Street who sold a five-cent Hershey bar with almonds to a Martian for a gold piece worth 94 bucks. The man from Mars bit the candy bar. The hood bit the gold piece. Then the Martian picked up a rock and beaned the lad from the Windy City. After which the Martian's eyes dilated and he let out a scream. Then he attacked the first Martian female who passed by. Never before had such a thing happened on Mars, and to say she was surprised is putting it lightly. Thereupon, half the female population ran after the berserk Martian. When the organization heard about this, an investigation was ordered. That is how the crime trust found out that there is no sugar on Mars; that this was the first time it had ever been tasted by a Martian; that it acts on them like junk does on an Earthman. They further discovered that the chief source of Martian diet is—believe it or not—poppy seed, hemp and coca leaf, and that the alkaloids thereof: opium, hasheesh and cocaine have not the slightest visible effect on them. Poppies grow everywhere, huge russet poppies, ten times as large as those on Earth and 100 times as deadly. It is these poppies which have colored the planet red. Martians are strictly vegetarian: they bake, fry and stew these flowers and weeds and eat them raw with a goo made from fungus and called szchmortz which passes for a salad dressing. Though the Martians were absolutely impervious to the narcotic qualities of the aforementioned flora, they got higher than Mars on small doses of sugar. So the Mafia was in business. The Martians sniffed granulated sugar, which they called snow. They ate cube sugar, which they called "hard stuff", and they injected molasses syrup into their veins with hypos and called this "mainliners." There was nothing they would not do for a pinch of sugar. Gold, platinum and diamonds, narcotics by the acre—these were to be had in generous exchange for sugar—which was selling on Earth at a nickel or so a pound wholesale. The space ship went into shuttle service. A load of diamonds and dope coming back, a load of sugar and blondes going up. Blondes made Martians higher even than sugar, and brought larger and quicker returns. This is a confidential tip to the South African diamond trust: ten space ship loads of precious stones are now being cut in a cellar on Bleecker Street in New York. The mob plans to retail them for $25 a carat! Though the gangsters are buying sugar at a few cents a pound here and selling it for its weight in rubies on Mars, a hood is always a hood. They've been cutting dope with sugar for years on Earth, so they didn't know how to do it any different on Mars. What to cut the sugar with on Mars? Simple. With heroin, of course, which is worthless there. This is a brief rundown on the racket situation as it currently exists on our sister planet. FAKED PASSPORTS : When the boys first landed they found only vague boundaries between the nations, and Martians could roam as they pleased. Maybe this is why they stayed close to home. Though anyway why should they travel? There was nothing to see. The boys quickly took care of this. First, in order to make travel alluring, they brought 20 strippers from Calumet City and set them peeling just beyond the border lines. Then they went to the chieftains and sold them a bill of goods (with a generous bribe of sugar) to close the borders. The next step was to corrupt the border guards, which was easy with Annie Oakleys to do the burlesque shows. The selling price for faked passports fluctuates between a ton and three tons of platinum. VICE : Until the arrival of the Earthmen, there were no illicit sexual relations on the planet. In fact, no Martian in his right mind would have relations with the native crop of females, and they in turn felt the same way about the males. Laws had to be passed requiring all able-bodied citizens to marry and propagate. Thus, the first load of bims from South Akard Street in Dallas found eager customers. But these babes, who romanced anything in pants on earth, went on a stand-up strike when they saw and smelled the Martians. Especially smelled. They smelled worse than Texas yahoos just off a cow farm. This proved embarrassing, to say the least, to the procurers. Considerable sums of money were invested in this human cargo, and the boys feared dire consequences from their shylocks, should they return empty-handed. In our other Confidential essays we told you how the Mafia employs some of the best brains on Earth to direct and manage its far-flung properties, including high-priced attorneys, accountants, real-estate experts, engineers and scientists. A hurried meeting of the Grand Council was called and held in a bungalow on the shores of one of Minneapolis' beautiful lakes. The decision reached there was to corner chlorophyll (which accounts in part for the delay in putting it on the market down here) and ship it to Mars to deodorize the populace there. After which the ladies of the evening got off their feet and went back to work. GAMBLING : Until the arrival of the Mafia, gambling on Mars was confined to a simple game played with children's jacks. The loser had to relieve the winner of his wife. The Mafia brought up some fine gambling equipment, including the layouts from the Colonial Inn in Florida, and the Beverly in New Orleans, both of which were closed, and taught the residents how to shoot craps and play the wheel, with the house putting up sugar against precious stones and metals. With such odds, it was not necessary to fake the games more than is customary on Earth. IV LITTLE NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL Despite what Earth-bound professors tell you about the Martian atmosphere, we know better. They weren't there. It is a dogma that Mars has no oxygen. Baloney. While it is true that there is considerably less than on Earth in the surface atmosphere, the air underground, in caves, valleys and tunnels, has plenty to support life lavishly, though why Martians want to live after they look at each other we cannot tell you, even confidential. For this reason Martian cities are built underground, and travel between them is carried on through a complicated system of subways predating the New York IRT line by several thousand centuries, though to the naked eye there is little difference between a Brooklyn express and a Mars express, yet the latter were built before the Pyramids. When the first load of Black Handers arrived, they naturally balked against living underground. It reminded them too much of the days before they went "legitimate" and were constantly on the lam and hiding out. So the Mafia put the Martians to work building a town. There are no building materials on the planet, but the Martians are adept at making gold dust hold together with diamond rivets. The result of their effort—for which they were paid in peppermint sticks and lump sugar—is named Little New York, with hotels, nightclubs, bars, haberdashers, Turkish baths and horse rooms. Instead of air-conditioning, it had oxygen-conditioning. But the town had no police station. There were no cops! Finally, a meeting was held at which one punk asked another, "What the hell kind of town is it with no cops? Who we going to bribe?" After some discussion they cut cards. One of the Bergen County boys drew the black ace. "What do I know about being a cop?" he squawked. "You can take graft, can't you? You been shook down, ain't you?" The boys also imported a couple of smart mouthpieces and a ship of blank habeas corpus forms, together with a judge who was the brother of one of the lawyers, so there was no need to build a jail in this model city. The only ones who ever get arrested, anyway, are the Martians, and they soon discovered that the coppers from Terra would look the other way for a bucket full of gold. Until the arrival of the Earthmen, the Martians were, as stated, peaceful, and even now crime is practically unknown among them. The chief problem, however, is to keep them in line on pay nights, when they go on sugar binges. Chocolate bars are as common on Mars as saloons are on Broadway, and it is not unusual to see "gone" Martians getting heaved out of these bars right into the gutter. One nostalgic hood from Seattle said it reminded him of Skid Row there. V THE RED RED PLANET The gangsters had not been on Mars long before they heard rumors about other outsiders who were supposed to have landed on the other side of Mt. Sirehum . The boys got together in a cocktail lounge to talk this over, and they decided they weren't going to stand for any other mobs muscling in. Thereupon, they despatched four torpedoes with Tommy guns in a big black limousine to see what was going. We tell you this Confidential. What they found was a Communist apparatus sent to Mars from Soviet Russia. This cell was so active that Commies had taken over almost half the planet before the arrival of the Mafia, with their domain extending from the Deucalionis Region all the way over to Phaethontis and down to Titania . Furthermore, through propaganda and infiltration, there were Communist cells in every quarter of the planet, and many of the top officials of the four Martian governments were either secretly party members or openly in fronts. The Communist battle cry was: "Men of Mars unite; you have nothing to lose but your wives." Comes the revolution, they were told, and all Martians could remain bachelors. It is no wonder the Communists made such inroads. The planet became known as "The Red Red Planet." In their confidential books about the cities of Earth, Lait and Mortimer explored the community of interest between the organized underworld and the Soviet. Communists are in favor of anything that causes civil disorder and unrest; gangsters have no conscience and will do business with anyone who pays. On Earth, Russia floods the Western powers, and especially the United States, with narcotics, first to weaken them and provide easy prey, and second, for dollar exchange. And on Earth, the Mafia, which is another international conspiracy like the Communists, sells the narcotics. And so when the gangsters heard there were Communist cells on Mars, they quickly made a contact. For most of the world's cheap sugar comes from Russia! The Mafia inroad on the American sugar market had already driven cane up more than 300 per cent. But the Russians were anxious, able and willing to provide all the beets they wanted at half the competitive price. VI THE HONEST HOODS As we pointed out in previous works, the crime syndicate now owns so much money, its chief problem is to find ways in which to invest it. As a result, the Mafia and its allies control thousands of legitimate enterprises ranging from hotel chains to railroads and from laundries to distilleries. And so it was on Mars. With all the rackets cornered, the gangsters decided it was time to go into some straight businesses. At the next get-together of the Grand Council, the following conversation was heard: "What do these mopes need that they ain't getting?" "A big fat hole in the head." "Cut it out. This is serious." "A hole in the head ain't serious?" "There's no profit in them one-shot deals." "It's the repeat business you make the dough on." "Maybe you got something there. You can kill a jerk only once." "But a jerk can have relatives." "We're talking about legit stuff. All the rest has been taken care of." "With the Martians I've seen, a bar of soap could be a big thing." From this random suggestion, there sprang up a major interplanetary project. If the big soap companies are wondering where all that soap went a few years ago, we can tell them. It went to Mars. Soap caught on immediately. It was snapped up as fast as it arrived. But several questions popped into the minds of the Mafia soap salesman. Where was it all going? A Martian, in line for a bar in the evening, was back again the following morning for another one. And why did the Martians stay just as dirty as ever? The answer was, the Martians stayed as dirty as ever because they weren't using the soap to wash with. They were eating it! It cured the hangover from sugar. Another group cornered the undertaking business, adding a twist that made for more activity. They added a Department of Elimination. The men in charge of this end of the business circulate through the chocolate and soap bars, politely inquiring, "Who would you like killed?" Struck with the novelty of the thing, quite a few Martians remember other Martians they are mad at. The going price is one hundred carats of diamonds to kill; which is cheap considering the average laborer earns 10,000 carats a week. Then the boys from the more dignified end of the business drop in at the home of the victim and offer to bury him cheap. Two hundred and fifty carats gets a Martian planted in style. Inasmuch as Martians live underground, burying is done in reverse, by tying a rocket to the tail of the deceased and shooting him out into the stratosphere. VII ONE UNIVERSE CONFIDENTIAL Mars is presently no problem to Earth, and will not be until we have all its gold and the Martians begin asking us for loans. Meanwhile, Lait and Mortimer say let the gangsters and communists have it. We don't want it. We believe Earth would weaken itself if it dissipated its assets on foreign planets. Instead, we should heavily arm our own satellites, which will make us secure from attack by an alien planet or constellation. At the same time, we should build an overwhelming force of space ships capable of delivering lethal blows to the outermost corners of the universe and return without refueling. We have seen the futility of meddling in everyone's business on Earth. Let's not make that mistake in space. We are unalterably opposed to the UP (United Planets) and call upon the governments of Earth not to join that Inter-Solar System boondoggle. We have enough trouble right here. THE APPENDIX CONFIDENTIAL: Blast-off : The equivalent of the take-off of Terran aviation. Space ships blast-off into space. Not to be confused with the report of a sawed-off shot gun. Blasting pit : Place from which a space ship blasts off. Guarded area where the intense heat from the jets melts the ground. Also used for cock-fights. Spacemen : Those who man the space ships. See any comic strip. Hairoscope : A very sensitive instrument for space navigation. The sighting plate thereon is centered around two crossed hairs. Because of the vastness of space, very fine hairs are used. These hairs are obtained from the Glomph-Frog, found only in the heart of the dense Venusian swamps. The hairoscope is a must in space navigation. Then how did they get to Venus to get the hair from the Glomph-Frog? Read Venus Confidential. Multiplanetary agitation : The inter-spacial methods by which the Russians compete for the minds of the Neptunians and the Plutonians and the Gowaniuns. Space suit : The clothing worn by those who go into space. The men are put into modernistic diving suits. The dames wear bras and panties. Grav-plates : A form of magnetic shoe worn by spacemen while standing on the outer hull of a space ship halfway to Mars. Why a spaceman wants to stand on the outer hull of a ship halfway to Mars is not clear. Possibly to win a bet. Space platform : A man-made satellite rotating around Earth between here and the Moon. Scientists say this is a necessary first step to interplanetary travel. Mars Confidential proves the fallacy of this theory. Space Academy : A college where young men are trained to be spacemen. The student body consists mainly of cadets who served apprenticeships as elevator jockeys. Asteroids : Tiny worlds floating around in space, put there no doubt to annoy unwary space ships. Extrapolation : The process by which a science-fiction writer takes an established scientific fact and builds thereon a story that couldn't happen in a million years, but maybe 2,000,000. Science fiction : A genre of escape literature which takes the reader to far-away planets—and usually neglects to bring him back. S.F. : An abbreviation for science fiction. Bem : A word derived by using the first letters of the three words: Bug Eyed Monster. Bems are ghastly looking creatures in general. In science-fiction yarns written by Terrans, bems are natives of Mars. In science-fiction yarns written by Martians, bems are natives of Terra. The pile : The source from which power is derived to carry men to the stars. Optional on the more expensive space ships, at extra cost. Atom blaster : A gun carried by spacemen which will melt people down to a cinder. A .45 would do just as well, but then there's the Sullivan Act. Orbit : The path of any heavenly body. The bodies are held in these orbits by natural laws the Republicans are thinking of repealing. Nova : The explosive stage into which planets may pass. According to the finest scientific thinking, a planet will either nova, or it won't. Galaxy : A term used to confuse people who have always called it The Milky Way. Sun spots : Vast electrical storms on the sun which interfere with radio reception, said interference being advantageous during political campaigns. Atomic cannons : Things that go zap . Audio screen : Television without Milton Berle or wrestling. Disintegrating ray : Something you can't see that turns something you can see into something you can't see. Geiger counter : Something used to count Geigers. Interstellar space : Too much nothing at all, filled with rockets, flying saucers, advanced civilizations, and discarded copies of Amazing Stories . Mars : A candy bar. Pluto : A kind of water. Ray guns : Small things that go zap . Time machine : A machine that carries you back to yesterday and into next year. Also, an alarm clock. Time warp : The hole in time the time machine goes through to reach another time. A hole in nothing. Terra : Another name for Earth. It comes from terra firma or something like that. Hyperdrive : The motor that is used to drive a space ship faster than the speed of light. Invented by science-fiction writers but not yet patented. Ether : The upper reaches of space and whatever fills them. Also, an anaesthetic. Luna : Another name for the Moon. Formerly a park in Coney Island.

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THE NON-ELECTRONIC BUG By E. MITTLEMAN There couldn't be a better tip-off system than mine—it wasn't possible—but he had one! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I wouldn't take five cents off a legitimate man, but if they want to gamble that's another story. What I am is a genius, and I give you a piece of advice: Do not ever play cards with a stranger. The stranger might be me. Where there are degenerate card players around, I sometimes get a call. Not dice—I don't have a machine to handle them. But with cards I have a machine to force the advantage. The first thing is a little radio receiver, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. You don't hear any music. You feel it on your skin. The next thing is two dimes. You stick them onto you, anywhere you like. Some like to put them on their legs, some on their belly. Makes no difference, just so they're out of sight. Each dime has a wire soldered to it, and the wires are attached to the little receiver that goes in your pocket. The other thing is the transmitter I carry around. My partner was a fellow named Henry. He had an electronic surplus hardware business, but business wasn't good and he was looking for a little extra cash on the side. It turns out that the other little wholesalers in the loft building where he has his business are all card players, and no pikers, either. So Henry spread the word that he was available for a gin game—any time at all, but he would only play in his own place—he was expecting an important phone call and he didn't want to be away and maybe miss it.... It never came; but the card players did. I was supposed to be his stock clerk. While Henry and the other fellow were working on the cards at one end of the room, I would be moving around the other—checking the stock, packing the stuff for shipment, arranging it on the shelves, sweeping the floor. I was a regular model worker, busy every second. I had to be. In order to see the man's hand I had to be nearby, but I had to keep moving so he wouldn't pay attention to me. And every time I got a look at his hand, I pushed the little button on the transmitter in my pocket. Every push on the button was a shock on Henry's leg. One for spades, two for hearts, three for diamonds, four for clubs. Then I would tip the card: a short shock for an ace, two for a king, three for a queen, and so on down to the ten. A long and a short for nine, a long and two shorts for an eight ... it took a little memorizing, but it was worth it. Henry knew every card the other man held every time. And I got fifty per cent. We didn't annihilate the fish. They hardly felt they were being hurt, but we got a steady advantage, day after day. We did so well we took on another man—I can take physical labor or leave it alone, and I leave it alone every chance I get. That was where we first felt the trouble. Our new boy was around twenty. He had a swept-wing haircut, complete with tail fins. Also he had a silly laugh. Now, there are jokes in a card game—somebody taking a beating will sound off, to take away some of the sting, but nobody laughs because the cracks are never funny. But they were to our new boy. He laughed. He laughed not only when the mark made some crack, but a lot of the time when he didn't. It got so the customers were looking at him with a lot of dislike, and that was bad for business. So I called him out into the hall. "Skippy," I said—that's what we called him, "lay off. Never rub it in to a sucker. It's enough to take his money." He ran his fingers back along his hair. "Can't a fellow express himself?" I gave him a long, hard unhealthy look. Express himself? He wouldn't have to. I'd express him myself—express him right out of our setup. But before I got a chance, this fellow from Chicago came in, a big manufacturer named Chapo; a wheel, and he looked it. He was red-faced, with hanging jowls and a big dollar cigar; he announced that he only played for big stakes ... and, nodding toward the kid and me, that he didn't like an audience. Henry looked at us miserably. But what was he going to do? If he didn't go along, the word could spread that maybe there was something wrong going on. He had to play. "Take the day off, you two," he said, but he wasn't happy. I thought fast. There was still one chance. I got behind Chapo long enough to give Henry a wink and a nod toward the window. Then I took Skippy by the elbow and steered him out of there. Down in the street I said, fast: "You want to earn your pay? You have to give me a hand—an eye is really what I mean. Don't argue—just say yes or no." He didn't stop to think. "Sure," he said. "Why not?" "All right." I took him down the street to where they had genuine imported Japanese field glasses and laid out twenty bucks for a pair. The man was a thief, but I didn't have time to argue. Right across the street from Henry's place was a rundown hotel. That was our next stop. The desk man in the scratch house looked up from his comic book. "A room," I said. "Me and my nephew want a room facing the street." And I pointed to the window of Henry's place, where I wanted it to face. Because we still had a chance. With the field glasses and Skippy's young, good eyes to look through them, with the transmitter that would carry an extra hundred yards easy enough—with everything going for us, we had a chance. Provided Henry had been able to maneuver Chapo so his back was to the window. The bed merchant gave us a long stall about how the only room we wanted belonged to a sweet old lady that was sick and couldn't be moved. But for ten bucks she could be. All the time I was wondering how many hands were being played, if we were stuck money and how much—all kinds of things. But finally we got into the room and I laid it out for Skippy. "You aim those field glasses out the window," I told him. "Read Chapo's cards and let me know; that's all. I'll take care of the rest." I'll say this for him, duck-tail haircut and all, he settled right down to business. I made myself comfortable on the bed and rattled them off on the transmitter as he read the cards to me. I couldn't see the players, didn't know the score; but if he was giving the cards to me right, I was getting them out to Henry. I felt pretty good. I even began to feel kindly toward the kid. At my age, bifocals are standard equipment, but to judge from Skippy's fast, sure call of the cards, his eyesight was twenty-twenty or better. After about an hour, Skippy put down the glasses and broke the news: the game was over. We took our time getting back to Henry's place, so Chapo would have time to clear out. Henry greeted us with eight fingers in the air. Eight hundred? But before I could ask him, he was already talking: "Eight big ones! Eight thousand bucks! And how you did it, I'll never know!" Well, eight thousand was good news, no doubt of that. I said, "That's the old system, Henry. But we couldn't have done it if you hadn't steered the fish up to the window." And I showed him the Japanese field glasses, grinning. But he didn't grin back. He looked puzzled. He glanced toward the window. I looked too, and then I saw what he was puzzled about. It was pretty obvious that Henry had missed my signal. He and the fish had played by the window, all right. But the shade was down. When I turned around to look for Skippy, to ask him some questions, he was gone. Evidently he didn't want to answer. I beat up and down every block in the neighborhood until I spotted him in a beanery, drinking a cup of coffee and looking worried. I sat down beside him, quiet. He didn't look around. The counterman opened his mouth to say hello. I shook my head, but Skippy said, "That's all right. I know you're there." I blinked. This was a creep! But I had to find out what was going on. I said, "You made a mistake, kid." "Running out?" He shrugged. "It's not the first mistake I made," he said bitterly. "Getting into your little setup with the bugged game came before that." I said, "You can always quit," but then stopped. Because it was a lie. He couldn't quit—not until I found out how he read Chapo's cards through a drawn shade. He said drearily, "You've all got me marked lousy, haven't you? Don't kid me about Henry—I know. I'm not so sure about you, but it wouldn't surprise me." "What are you talking about?" "I can hear every word that's on Henry's mind," he said somberly. "You, no. Some people I can hear, some I can't; you're one I can't." "What kind of goofy talk is that?" I demanded. But, to tell you the truth, I didn't think it was so goofy. The window shade was a lot goofier. "All my life," said Skippy, "I've been hearing the voices. It doesn't matter if they talk out loud or not. Most people I can hear, even when they don't want me to. Field glasses? I didn't need field glasses. I could hear every thought that went through Chapo's mind, clear across the street. Henry too. That's how I know." He hesitated, looking at me. "You think Henry took eight thousand off Chapo, don't you? It was ten." I said, "Prove it." The kid finished his coffee. "Well," he said, "you want to know what the counterman's got on his mind?" He leaned over and whispered to me. I yelled, "That's a lousy thing to say!" Everybody was looking at us. He said softly, "You see what it's like? I don't want to hear all this stuff! You think the counterman's got a bad mind, you ought to listen in on Henry's." He looked along the stools. "See that fat little woman down at the end? She's going to order another cheese Danish." He hadn't even finished talking when the woman was calling the counterman, and she got another cheese Danish. I thought it over. What he said about Henry holding out on me made it real serious. I had to have more proof. But I didn't like Skippy's idea of proof. He offered to call off what everybody in the beanery was going to do next, barring three or four he said were silent, like me. That wasn't good enough. "Come along with me," I told him, and we took off for Jake's spot. That's a twenty-four-hour place and the doorman knows me. I knew Jake and I knew his roulette wheel was gaffed. I walked right up to the wheel, and whispered to the kid, "Can you read the dealer?" He smiled and nodded. "All right. Call black or red." The wheel spun, but that didn't stop the betting. Jake's hungry. In his place you can still bet for a few seconds after the wheel starts turning. "Black," Skippy said. I threw down fifty bucks. Black it was. That rattled me. "Call again," I said. When Skippy said black, I put the fifty on red. Black won it. "Let's go," I said, and led the kid out of there. He was looking puzzled. "How come—" "How come I played to lose?" I patted his shoulder. "Sonny, you got a lot to learn. Jake's is no fair game. This was only a dry run." Then I got rid of him, because I had something to do. Henry came across. He even looked embarrassed. "I figured," he said, "uh, I figured that the expenses—" "Save it," I told him. "All I want is my split." He handed it over, but I kept my hand out, waiting. After a minute he got the idea. He reached down inside the waistband of his pants, pulled loose the tape that held the dimes to his skin and handed over the radio receiver. "That's it, huh?" he said. "That's it." "Take your best shot," he said glumly. "But mark my words. You're not going to make out on your own." "I won't be on my own," I told him, and left him then. By myself? Not a chance! It was going to be Skippy and me, all the way. Not only could he read minds, but the capper was that he couldn't read mine! Otherwise, you can understand, I might not want him around all the time. But this way I had my own personal bug in every game in town, and I didn't even have to spend for batteries. Card games, gaffed wheels, everything. Down at the track he could follow the smart-money guys around and let me know what they knew, which was plenty. We could even go up against the legit games in Nevada, with no worry about bluffs. And think of the fringe benefits! With Skippy giving the women a preliminary screening, I could save a lot of wasted time. At my age, time is nothing to be wasted. I could understand a lot about Skippy now—why he didn't like most people, why he laughed at jokes nobody else thought were funny, or even could hear. But everybody has got to like somebody, and I had the edge over most of the human race. He didn't know what I was thinking. And then, take away the voices in his head, and Skippy didn't have much left. He wasn't very smart. If he had half as much in the way of brains as he did in the way of private radar, he would have figured all these angles out for himself long ago. No, he needed me. And I needed him. We were all set to make a big score together, so I went back to his rooming house where I'd told him to wait, to get going on the big time. However, Henry had more brains than Skippy. I hadn't told Henry who tipped me off, but it didn't take him long to work out. After all, I had told him I was going out to look for Skippy, and I came right back and called him for holding out. No, it didn't take much brains. All he had to do was come around to Skippy's place and give him a little lesson about talking. So when I walked in the door, Skippy was there, but he was out cold, with lumps on his forehead and a stupid grin on his face. I woke him up and he recognized me. But you don't make your TV set play better by kicking it. You don't help a fine Swiss watch by pounding it on an anvil. Skippy could walk and talk all right, but something was missing. "The voices!" he yelled, sitting up on the edge of the bed. I got a quick attack of cold fear. "Skippy! What's the matter? Don't you hear them any more?" He looked at me in a panic. "Oh, I hear them all right. But they're all different now. I mean—it isn't English any more. In fact, it isn't any language at all!" Like I say, I'm a genius. Skippy wouldn't lie to me; he's not smart enough. If he says he hears voices, he hears voices. Being a genius, my theory is that when Henry worked Skippy over, he jarred his tuning strips, or whatever it is, so now Skippy's receiving on another frequency. Make sense? I'm positive about it. He sticks to the same story, telling me about what he's hearing inside his head, and he's too stupid to make it all up. There are some parts of it I don't have all figured out yet, but I'll get them. Like what he tells me about the people—I guess they're people—whose voices he hears. They're skinny and furry and very religious. He can't understand their language, but he gets pictures from them, and he told me what he saw. They worship the Moon, he says. Only that's wrong too, because he says they worship two moons, and everybody knows there's only one. But I'll figure it out; I have to, because I have to get Skippy back in business. Meanwhile it's pretty lonesome. I spend a lot of time down around the old neighborhood, but I haven't set up another partner for taking the card players. That seems like pretty small stuff now. And I don't talk to Henry when I see him. And I never go in the beanery when that counterman is on duty. I've got enough troubles in the world; I don't have to add to them by associating with his kind.